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The Top Cop: Interview With Sir Hugh Orde

Wed, 16 May 2012 11:07:00 +0100

Originally written for the Huffington Post UK.

The most radical changes to the police service in 200 years, combined with massive budget cuts, have left officers “frustrated” - and could soon have a knock-on effect on crime, according to one of the UK’s most senior policemen.

The election of police and crime commissioners in November will alone represent “the biggest change in policing since 1829 without question”, Sir Hugh Orde, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), told the Huffington Post UK.

And with 20% budget cuts also looming, it now seems”probable” that crime will rise as a result, Orde said.

The prospect of forced redundancies may even put the right to strike ‘back on the agenda’ for rank and file officers, Orde warned.

Meanwhile, police have come under renewed pressure over racism and corruption, particularly in relation to the media - but Orde insisted the service was not corrupt.

“For the first time officers suddenly feel vulnerable,” he said. “They’ve been doing a good, excellent - outstanding - job, but for no other reason than finance they can suddenly find themselves out of work.

“That’s different, and culturally that’s a huge challenge.”

While arguing that many of the reforms affecting police are still subject to negotiation - and praising the work of officers - Orde said it was now inevitable that profound changes would leave the service vulnerable to future cuts.

Orde spoke to the Huffington Post UK in the week that 30,000 police officers took to the streets to protest against “criminal” budget restrictions, the prospect of forced redundancies and what they see as the “privatisation” of the service.

In an interview on Thursday at Acpo’s offices in Westminster - within earshot of the mass of protesting officers outside - Orde said while crime was down 3% overall nationally it was now possible that reductions in police numbers - thought to be at least 16,000 lost posts by 2015 - would lead to a rise in crime.

“Is it foreseeable that crime will increase if the cuts continue to bite? Answer, yes it probably is,” Orde said. “Or will crime start to increase - yes that is a real possibility. Our job is to keep that to an absolute minimum.

He added: “That gets tougher and tougher.”

Orde said he “fully understands” why officers are worried - but as the president of Acpo, which is made up of 334 officers of the rank of Assistant Chief Constable or above, but not rank and file officers, he admits he may be “increasingly out of touch” with their concerns.

He also said that officers were “equally concerned” with their “personal circumstances” - meaning their own pay and pensions.

Chief officers have been asked to cut 20% from their budgets and are currently preparing to start negotiations with the government over the second part of the Winsor Review of pay and conditions.

Among his recommendations, Winsor concluded that policing needed to attract higher-quality graduates, with a minimum requirement of three A-levels to join the service.

But his report also recommended savings in pay which would cost 40% of officers up to £4,000 per year, cutting starting salaries to £19,000, as well as annual fitness tests and an end to the ban on compulsory redundancies.

Orde said that of all the many changes currently affecting the police, the prospect of forced redundancies was the “most radical”.

He said: “These officers you saw exercising their right to protest - they can’t strike, and they could all have been ordered to work today by their chief and they would have had to have worked - part of the balancing act was because they held an office, they’re not employed, and they have a job for 30 or now 35 years, provided they don’t misbehave or are not performing.

“What Winsor’s recommendation does is change that contract on one end, because it would allow us as chiefs, in extremis, to make people redundant.

“No chief, in my judgement, wants to make anyone redundant. But if one looks at the next CSR period - is it going to be better? Answer, no. If we get hit with 20% cuts again the only way you’ll be able to achieve that is by cutting numbers. “

Does that not put the right to strike back on the agenda?

“I think it does. … But I still firmly believe the last thing they want to do is strike. It just goes against everything they joined for. You cannot stand up and say I want to protect people but I’m not going to come into work.”

Regardless, Orde said, there is still “a greater noise around the right to strike, if not to exercise it”.

A spokesperson for the Police Federation said that it was currently looking at methods for balloting its members on the right to strike.

It is now likely such a ballot will not be held before the autumn, PolFed said — and added any decision not be made “on a whim”.

“The reality is it’s not an easy path, and probably quite a long path,” a PolFed spokesperson said, while adddingthat officers — including some at Thursday’s protests — were openly discussing it, and that reflected the depth of anger at budget cuts.

By the autumn elections will be held to select elected Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs), whose job it will be to oversee 41 forces in England and Wales, replacing Police Authorities.

Orde has previously said he could foresee police chiefs resigning if PCCs affected their “operational independence” - and he stands by that line.

Also concerning, he says, is the quality of candidates that have come forward.

“We’re really waiting now for the parties to nominate [their candidates],” he said. But of the list of current candidates, Orde admitted “I don’t recognise a lot of the names”.

“My sense was the government were looking for some pretty high-profile, qualified individuals who would deliver a completely different style of governance. I’m not sure how happy they will be with some of the lists.”

“For one thing there are a number of police officers on it. I have a big problem with police officers being police and crime commissioners.”

Orde also believes elections will be decided on local issues, leading to a potential conflict at times when forces have to send officers elsewhere in the country - as seen in the riots of summer 2011.

Despite protocols put in place by the government, at Acpo and the Association of Police Authorities’ insistence, the ability to nationally coordinate a response when forces are overseen by locally elected commissioners is still “potentially a tension”, Orde said.

“It’s only as good if people choose - if the PCC says for example I have no confidence in the chief, well you can have all the protocols in the world the relationship’s destroyed.”

In recent weeks police forces across the UK - and the Metropolitan Police in particular - have come under pressure over racism. More than a dozen Met officers are currently suspended facing investigations over allegations of racial abuse, and several are facing charges.

“It’s something you can never take your eye off,” Orde said. “But confidence in the police is rising - look at the evidence, look at the polls. Crime is dropping and confidence is rising.”

“The best indicator of corrupt cops for me - do we prosecute police officers for speeding? All the time. You ask cops in other countries if they’d prosecute another cop for speeding they’d look at you in abject horror.

“Is this an endemically racist police service - no it isn’t. Will you get individuals who behave way outside the bounds of respectability, yes you will.

“You have to do deal with it very robustly, very quickly and very effectively, and my sense is that is what the Met commissioner is doing. … I don’t think there is endemic or institutional racism in policing.”

Orde has recently been the subject of speculation that he may put himself forward for the role of chief constable in Scotland when a reorganisation of its eight current forces into a single command is complete.

Given Orde’s enthusiasm for a similar reforming mindset when it comes to policing in England and Wales, it is perhaps natural that his name has been linked to the role.

Recently Orde gave evidence at a Holyrood committee in which he praised their reforms, and told the Huffington Post that it’s a model he hopes “we learn from that down here and that government look at it very seriously.”

Despite cheekily referring to the speculation (“there’s a good job going there you know…”) Orde insists that he has a job and is “very happy doing it”.

“There’s no advert yet!” he said, of the Scottish role. “I don’t know where my name appeared from, someone is being mischievous I think.

“I’ve never finished a job early… This is a four year post and I’ve done two and a half. There is so much in the national policing agenda where it is essential that a coordinated response from chiefs is clearly and unambiguously delivered to government. And that’s my current job.”

It’s quite some job - and has not come without criticism.

Recently Acpo came under pressure after it was revealed it paid large consultancy fees, some up to £1,100 per day, to former police chiefs.

Acpo has since launched a review of how the amounts were reached and how the consultants were selected - though Orde rejects the claim of “corruption” made by a backbench MP.

“Our expenditure on consultants is peanuts,” he said. “If you look at what government spends on consultants, we hardly spend anything on consultancy, it’s not a big story, it’s a mischievous story.”

Despite those issues, next week Orde - as well as Home Secretary Theresa May - will speak to the Police Federation’s annual conference.

So what can he tell those officers who he said have never felt as vulnerable as they do now?

“[Officers] see the government as overly critical… they sense their work is not acknowledged,” he said.

“There is a sense they feel let down. But our job as leaders is to lead them through it.

“And I’ll be absolutely straight with them and tell them we have to get on with delivering regardless of our personal circumstances because that’s what we’re paid to do.”

The Terror Drug?

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 17:38:00 +0100

Originally written for The Huffington Post.

A legal - and potentially lethal - Somalian drug and cafe culture taking root in British cities may may be the next battleground in Britain’s fight against terrorism, experts have claimed.

Khat is a green-leafed shrub which when chewed and mixed with saliva produces a mild amphetamine high. It has long been used in Yemen, Somalia and other African countries but is now widely banned in the West, including the Netherlands, generally known for its liberal drugs policy.

In the UK, however, khat is legal, and it is widely available. It costs about £4 to buy a bundle of the stringy green plant wrapped in banana leaves, and is available from supermarkets located in the Somalian communities found in London, Bristol, Birmingham and other cities.

More than 100,000 people of Somali origin live in the UK, according to most estimates. A 2005 Home Office report found more than half of Somali men in the UK used khat, and that almost 80% used more than they did in Somalia.

According to people who use it, khat makes users feel energetic, chatty and confident. In 2008 a (predictably effusive) reporter for Vice magazine took khat and wrote later that after about 10 hours of constant chewing he “felt certain that I could chat up any chick and win any argument. Instead of pretending to throw a punch as a joke, I got all hyper and threw a chair”.

Like most drugs khat has significant medical side effects. According to drugs advice website Frank,its use can cause insomnia, delusions, high blood pressure, anxiety and even mouth cancer. Most studies say that khat is also addictive, and can produce withdrawal symptoms.

But in the context of the Somalian civil war, critics say, khat isn’t just harmful - it’s deadly.

Every aspect of the drug, from its production and export to the cafes where it is sold and chewed, has been linked to the al-Shabaab terrorist group which on Wednesday carried out another deadly suicide bombing in Somalia.

The khat cafes (‘mafrishes’) where the drug is usually taken are often almost impossible to find unless you know where to look, and are hidden behind locked shop shutters or unmarked doors.

Critics say they are increasingly acting as recruiting stations for the al-Shabaab terrorist network, and many mafrishes are reportedly hostile to outsiders. The Huffington Post UK was advised not to even attempt to enter.

Abukar Awale, a Somalian in the UK who is campaigning to ban khat, says that the cafes snare young, vulnerable and usually unemployed Somali men, for whom the legal high leads to a circle of “pain and suffering”. And as the most prominent Somalian critic of khat publicly calling for it to be banned in Britain, Awale says he has been threatened by those involved in its sale.

A former addict himself, he told the Huffington Post that as a user “you wake up at 3 in the afternoon, you’re awake all night chewing it, and you go back to bed in the morning and in order for you to function, to feel that your confidence is up, you have to chew again.”

Young users at the mafrishes can fall into a life of crime, Awale argues (“soon enough they’re selling minor drugs just to support the habit”) and while on khat are more vulnerable to radicalisation. He points to two British citizens who were recently arrested in Kenya suspected of working for the terrorist groupas an example of the type of people being targeted by fundamentalists. Two other British Somalis, 18 and 20 years old, have also been reported missing in recent weeks and are suspected to be in Somalia fighting for al-Shabaab.

“There is paranoia that grows inside them,” Awale said. “They think everyone is out to get them… They develop a lot of anger and hate towards police and the British public”

“That’s exactly the people that al-Shabaab are targeting now.”

Even outside the mafrish the wider social consequences of khat are hugely damaging says Dalmar Osman, who is the director of the Somali Development Group, which works with young Somalis in Bristol.

“The majority of the Somali male figures who chew it don’t have a lot to say in the family household [because they become disengaged] which then for the young people makes a real impact,” he said. “They are losing their male role model, and that plays a role in radicalisation and extremism, especially in Somalia itself.”

Osman is holding a four-day event in London this Aprilto educate young Somalis on the dangers of khat, and to inspire them to break the deadly cycle of unemployment and depression.

“It’s not a cultural issue,” he said, of the prospect of khat being banned. “If a young person starts chewing, which is not uncommon, it puts you a position where anything wrong becomes right in your eyes and it becomes easy for them to go in a bad direction, or a criminal direction.”

The production and sale of khat is also thought to fund the terrorist networks attempting to prey on British youth.

The plant is imported, usually from Kenya, four times a week via Heathrow, with less frequent imports from Ethiopia and Yemen. In 2010 HMRC said that more than 57 tonnes of khat was imported- on which it collected £2.9m in VAT.

Sources also told the Huffington Post UK that senior al-Shabaab leaders were formerly involved in illegally exporting khat from the UK to the countries where it is banned and were running some of the cafes themselves. The HMRC also admits that a “small percentage” of the khat imported legally is later exported to countries where it is banned - making huge profits for the criminals linked to terrorist networks who sell it.

A report by the Royal United Services Institute said western security and intelligence agencies face new challenges“as jihadism evolves and disperses into territories of ungoverned, or loosely governed, space across large stretches of the African continent”.

“Most significant is the potential for radicalisation and then mobilisation of a new subset of British youths,” wrote the author of the report, Tina Soria.

She told the Huffington Post UK that British Somali extremists can be more valuable to al-Shabaab than locals because they are more likely to agree to carry out suicide bombings. Several British and American citizens have been killed in Somali attempting to carry out suicide bombings.

“The issue of that community not being integrated or alienated in some way is the perfect profile of a possible terrorist or extremist. But economic and social factors play a major role too,” she said.

The threat of a British individual inspired by al-Shabaab committing an attack in the UK is real, she added, even if it doesn’t come as a direct order from the group’s leaders in Africa.

Amid all of this criticism there are increasing calls from politicians and campaigners to ban the drug for good. A previous government study in 2005 said that the drug should not be controlled, but following further research in 2011 it decided to take another look. The Advisory Council for the Misuse of Drugs is currently conducting a studybased on which the government will decide if it should be taken off the shelves.

But some argue that banning khat would just embolden the same terrorist networks currently suspected of benefiting from its legalsale.

Axel Klein, an expert witness for the ACMD’s 2005 report, recently told the BBCthat banning khat could create “an organised crime syndicate to start-up from nowhere”.

And in the opinion of many Somalis, khat cafe culture is just a healthy part of a normal social life. Khat may be addictive, but among those who use it many live otherwise normal lives.

When a group of councillors from Brent went to visit a local mafrishearlier this year they described a friendly and positive atmosphere, where “the communal nature of chewing khat was obvious – unlike in a pub, where people tend to talk to their friends, everyone in the room was sitting in a circle talking”. Most of the men there visited after work, they said, and mainly chatted about sports, Somali politics and their everyday lives.

Despite this experience Brent council decided to impose a “voluntary agreement” with retailers to restrict its sale to under-18s and to increase awareness about its health risks.

Somalis in the UK remain divided on the issue - and on whether adding yet another substance to the growing list of illegal highswill make the difference to a community blighted by unemployment, poverty and violence.

“I think no need to intervene,” one Somali khat user said in a recent study on attitudes to its use. “The government is not banning alcohol which is more harmful. Khat users are not intoxicated and can work and drive a car without a problem. So why not ban alcohol first?”

And as a recent Middlesex University study pointed out, when dealing with Somalia and its brutal recent history of violence, civil war, forced migration and poverty, isolating khat as the cause of all its ills is likely to prove shortsighted.

Apple Is Doomed. You Know, Like The Solar System. And Economists.

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 19:22:39 +0000

[Cross-posted with The Huffington Post UK.]

Apple is doomed. So writes Paul Turner, author of a new book, Insanely Doomed: Why Apple Will Crash Without Steve Jobs, and a recent article for The Huffington Post UK. Doomed?

Well, yes. Probably. But so is the United Kingdom, the English language and the species Homo Sapiens.

Eventually all winning streaks end. All empires crumble. All balloons pop. Except the ones that slowly leak air and get all wrinkly.

Anyway, the point is that I could predict the sun will stop shining one day and eventually I’ll be correct. But that doesn’t make me a genius, it makes me a patient troll with a stopwatch.

Making these kind of predictions is a clever strategy, though - if you’re right you’re a genius. If you’re wrong, you’re just not right yet. Economists use this trick very often. Tech writers even more so.

Because yes, in a finite universe it is basically inevitable Apple will run into trouble. But it is a mistake to see in Apple’s enormous recent success, or even in Steve Jobs’ death, a set-up for its eventual total failure.

Turner’s argument is that Apple depended on Steve Jobs - his innovation, insight and sales ability - and that without him it fell apart once, and will fall apart again. His larger idea is that there are “two types of entrepreneur”.

On one side of the divide - the good side - is automobile innovator Henry Ford, who created “an entirely new system for making things” and thus enduring success. (Tell that to the US car industry.)

On the other side he puts Dr An Wang, founder of Wang Labs, who made some nice products including calculators and later word processors and computers, but whose company spontaneously evaporated-ish without his leadership.

Into this category, Turner places Jobs. “Jobs was brilliant, no one questions that,” says Turner. “But, unlike Ford, he didn’t create a new system.”

Now whether or not Steve Jobs fulfils Turner’s criteria for, you know, whatever, I’m not sure. But that’s not really the issue - the issue is whether Apple as a company is still set up for success without him there.

What that basically comes down to is can it (a) withstand setbacks and (b) come up with new ideas that will sell. On both counts, it’s hard to argue it can’t.

First let’s take resilience. In terms of share price Apple may well be nearing a peak. Companies that cross the $500bn market cap threshold don’t generally stay there for long, and as the New York Times pointed out recently, at some point Apple will confront the law of large numbers.

But Apple isn’t dependent on its share price. It’s dependent on revenue and profit. And by that measure, Apple is about as far from collapse as the new iPad is from a Wang calculator.

Apple made $13bn in profit last quarter - on revenues of around $45bn. 45 Billion. In a quarter. That’s lots. And lots.

And with a war chest of $100bn in cash, which should grow even after the company announced $45bn of buybacks and dividends, Apple is well set to absorb a few setbacks that would sink other companies - just as Microsoft has done over the last decade or so with Zune, Vista, and other middling-successes and middling-failures. Now with Windows 8, Microsoft is innovating again. Groovy.

So even if Apple starts to falter, it’s got time to figure it out. Unlike last time Jobs left Apple, in 1985, and the company dwindled to the point of bankruptcy while Jobs made cool stuff nobody used, Apple is larger, stronger and smarter, with a corporate structure in place that - while it can’t replace Steve Jobs’ individual talent - can certainly capitalise on the culture he instilled and the money he made.

Turner is right on one thing, though. What will determine Apple’s long-term future is its ability to make products that people want. But it is a mistake to assume, as Turner seems to, that this ability depends on the perception of its products being “cool”. It doesn’t. Apple is critically dependent on only one thing - it’s products being good.

Apple sold 3m new iPads over three days recently - again, lots - not because people were tricked into thinking they wanted them, or even because they were the most radically innovative product on the market, but because people like them, enjoy using them, and want to own them.

Delight your consumers. That lesson is Jobs’ true legacy. It’s hard to see that changing anytime soon.

But what about the long game? If not in 10 years, what about 20 or 50? Let’s imagine the Must-Have Device of 2057. For the sake of argument it’s like a phone, but it floats, is transparent, and makes you sandwiches. Which company around today would you expect to come up with it first? Or, rather, to come up with the first one that makes the first really tasty sandwiches?

Well, let’s be honest. Who really knows? As I explained at the start of the post, anyone making long-term predictions is usually just trying to make themselves sound clever, get lucky, or annoy people enough to force them to publish a long-form response on The Huffington Post UK. (Damn.)

But at a guess? I’d say Apple’s recent transition to being a mobile-first company, its clear integration strategy for iOS and OS X, its continuing hardware innovation and its huge investment in R&D all suggest it will continue to innovate for some time to come - and will be able to tear up its old business models when it needs to adapt and figure out the FloatPhone conundrum once and for all.

So while Turner is probably right - at some point in the next 30, 50 or 100 years Apple will probably face tough times, it’s perhaps a little premature to put the administrators on standby. Apple isn’t doomed.

Trust me about the sun, though. That thing is screwed.

The Pirate Fleet: Scenes From The Copyright Battle For The Skies

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 21:04:22 +0000

On Sunday 18 March the controversial file sharing website The Pirate Bay announced it was starting work on a fleet of unmanned airborne drones. The aim, TPB said, is to suspend the drones in the sky, kilometres above international waters, in order to prevent its servers being shut down by copyright lawyers and national enforcement agencies. ”This way our machines will have to be shut down with aeroplanes in order to shut down the system,” the group said. “A real act of war.”

***

Sat at a desk in his dark, small bedroom, surrounded by monitors, Weiver sipped his Coke, scanned the list of files and found the one he wanted.

’Season one. Finally.’

He clicked the magnet link and eventually the path wormed it way into his Torrent client, connected with some peers and started slowly to download.

But when Weiver glanced back up at the screen the green progress bar had barely moved. The download was slow.

Too slow.

Spinning his chair around, knocking over a stack of yogurt pots and a dead pot plant, Weiver found the screen he was looking for. It was like a tablet but it was embedded in the desk.

He watched the pixels dance. And then the green arrow representing Drone.41 exploded.

‘Shit.’

Now 53 green arrows blipped across the screen in listless little spirals. There *had* been 54.

The dirigible’s engines were roaring.

There were 23 others like him on board, monitoring the network. Pirates playing defence.

It hurt when one of the drones failed. It happened occasionally, though. Bad batteries. Solar panel problems. A hundred things could go wrong. Luckily the drones were cheap to replace. It probably didn’t mean anything.

On the other hand, it had happened twice this afternoon already.

Weiver span back to his download. It had stopped completely. Something was definitely wrong. But maybe it was him, and not the network. As a support crew they had to keep up high, above the drones, and that meant the engines never got a break. Neither did he. He was tired.

But the download still wasn’t working, and hurrying back to the readout display Weiver watched as the cycle played out again: a dotted line appeared on the top right of the screen. It locked on to a drone and mirrored its course, and soon it intersected with the green arrow and the drone rezzed-out in pixelated dust.

52.

All of the drones were all going to get hit. Weiver was sure of it this time. And that meant only one thing. They were under attack. And if he knew it, the captain would know it by now too.

Just then he heard the captain rise from his chair in the centre of the cigar-shaped galley, and sweep towards him with the steady tap-tap of his metal leg on the aluminium floor.

‘This better be fucking spec’tacular’ the captain boomed at Weiver in his half-Irish, half-Danish bark.

It took ten seconds for Weiver to break the captain’s gaze.

‘It’s, it’s the drones sir, they’re going down again, I think they’re… under…’

‘Spit’t out, lad! Or may no’obs feast on ‘yer timbers.’

‘Attack!’

Weiver turned just enough to see the captain’s huge red face swoop in towards him like a strong, proud bear, and peer under the low doorway with his scarlet nose pulsating with booze and blood and the effects of dry air.

‘If you’re lyin’, lad…’

‘I’m not captain’

‘We’ve ‘ad this before. I can see it in ya eyes. Your jus’ an’ther cooped-up, miserable two-bi’ hacker who’s scrambled up here to the cloud ships looking for adventure and a free copy of Modern Warfare…’

‘Not me captain’

‘… and now yur havin’ second thoughts. Ya’ want off, eh? You had e’nough? And now you’ll sell us out, get us to swoop down and attack and get blown out of the sky by Copyright Enforcers to claim your loot, you miserly, law-abidin’…’

The sound of another drone rezzing out popped on the screen but the captain couldn’t hear it above the crunch of his own breathing.

‘What was it that turned ya, ‘eh? Just tell me what it they offered you… A legal box set of the Walkin’ Dead? A Netflix pass fer life? No… It’d have to be more. A full workin’ copy of Photoshop CS5 - an without any of that rollickin’ about in the registry to get it working. They gave you a working serial, didn’t they? Oh yer! We’ve seen your like before!’

Furious, the captain squezed his massive bulk through the door.

‘Please sir!’

‘Mateys! Gather my forceps, four packets of Min’os and a bottle of Coke -‘

He squinted at the tiny jailbroken screen installed on the desk under metal pins. As he stared another dotted line appeared and blew apart one of the precious green drones.

‘Well look at that,’ the captain said, lifting his enormous eyebrows and softening the skin around his cheeks.

Somewhere below the airship a war was going on.

According the ship-wide readouts the servers were still connecting music downloads and pornography to teenagers from Japan to Clerkenwell. But only *just*.

That was something worth defending.

At that the Captain swept around in a circle and pulled Weiver with him.

‘Battle stations! Come on you wast’rs, you lay’bouts, you cop’right dogs, this is it - battle stations!’

As he crossed the centre of the ship the captain pushed a button on his obsidian phone and the metal clad exterior of the craft clanked open to reveal the bright blue skies outside. The wind tore over the deck and the captain hauled his great bulk up the steps to the controls. Behind him, Weiver cowered and read the heads-up.

‘Balloon pressure?’

‘190 over 9, captain!’

‘Rigidity?’

‘80’

And speed?

‘Increasing to 100 knots, captain.’

‘Very good, lad. Then arm the missles and set them to swarm. We’re going down.’

The ship swept down through the clouds.

Weiver drew his cutlass and tried to focus. He wondered about his download.

No, not now, he thought. It probably isn’t all that important.

'If They Want To Win They Will Have To Kill Every Single One Of Us'

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 20:36:00 +0000

Originally appeared on The Huffington Post.

In January 2011 Rami Jarrah, 28, was living in Damascus with his wife and young daughter, working a good job in the import business.

Eight months later he was fleeing Syria in a taxi, an undercover activist escaping for his life from President Assad’s secret police.

An online alias, ‘Alexander Page’, was Jarrah’s way to fight the regime - the means with which he anonymously released videos, organised protests and talked to the international media.

It was 4am when a friend called him at home to tell him the Twitter account had been compromised, and that the country’s most notorious government agents were coming.

“There is a report out for you,” said his friend, informed by an insider in the government. “You’re wanted. And they’re going to come to your house today.”

Jarrah told The Huffington Post UK: “I thought about being smuggled out, but what about my wife and daughter? I thought about going into hiding, but again what about them? … The only thing I could think about was all of us going together.”

Jarrah doesn’t know who gave up his identity. He suspects someone may have told the husband of his aunt, who he said works for the government intelligence services.

What mattered was that the Air Force Military Intelligence (AMI) knew his name.

And as someone who had already been hunted, detained, interrogated and beaten, Jarrah wasn’t going to wait to test his luck.

Above: Amateur video of demonstration against the Syrian regime in the southern city of Deraa, Syria on March 19 and 20, 2011. Photo by ABACAPRESS.COM

‘I Never Thought This Was Going To Happen’

Born in Cyprus to exiled Syrian activists, Jarrah grew up in the UK and moved to the United Arab Emirates before going to Syria in his early 20s.

Syria under Assad “was brainwashed with schizophrenia”, he says. “You would say something in the street and say something totally different at home.”

When the Arab Spring exploded in Tunisia, Egypt and across the Middle East, it gave expression to long-held frustrations with the Syrian regime, Jarrah said. And it set his mind running with ideas.

But at first actually following through with a real-life protest seemed risky at best, and insane at worst.

Jarrah said: “I was working at this company, in charge of a department, and I was fairly free to do what I want. So I stopped working and I started going on Facebook, on Twitter and on Skype talking to people and trying to organise demonstrations. But I never actually sat down with myself and thought ‘this is actually going to happen’.

“The first sign that we were actually going to do it was on 5 February, when we organised a demo that was going to happen in central Damascus. But before going I sat there and thought ‘what the hell are we doing?’ And when we went to the Friday market there were three or four secret police at every single shop,” he said. “I ended up just buying groceries and coming back.”

A spontaneous protest on 17 February and the first organised demonstrations on 15 March proved that the uprising was more than hopeful talk online, however.

“Anyone who saw it on TV was gob-smacked. They didn’t believe it was true,” he said. “They were chanting ‘peaceful, peaceful, peaceful’ and that was an inspiration and a role model”.

Within hours Jarrah was filming a protest in Damascus.

But within a week he was caught and tortured.

“I spent three days in a security branch in central Damascus,” he said. “It’s considered torture but it was relatively mild. I wasn’t allowed to sleep or drink, or eat, I was kept standing for the entire three days, I was beaten in my stomach and the upper part of my legs. When I passed out they would throw bleach on me, mixed with water, and then suffocation and psychological torture.”

After that experience, Jarrah spent three days thinking he was going to quit.

“But then, seeing that so many people had been detained, and that I wasn’t the only person, I thought, okay it’s an uprising, it’s not happening to me it’s happening to the whole country.”

‘Every Single One Was Hunted Down’

Like many movements across the Arab world, the Syrian uprising seemed to catch the regime totally off-guard.

“There were points at the beginning where we thought ‘this week the regime is going to fall’,” Jarrah said.

“That atmosphere was there. ‘We’re going to get to Damascus’. It was on fire. Everyone was thinking it’s going to happen.

“The regime seemed like it was messy, they didn’t know what they were doing, they couldn’t control it like they do now.”

Everything changed during Ramadan, Jarrah said, when the protesters thought they could throw the knockout blow but the regime had other ideas.

“The government had plans for Ramadan,” he said. “They knew what they were going to do. They isolated people in mosques; they didn’t let them leave and started opening fire. They used so much force and then the attacks that happening in Homs especially repressed the movement. And when Ramadan was over there was a sort of hopelessness.”

Jarrah quit his job to focus on his double life as Alexander Page. He filmed and publicised protests, worked on Twitter and Facebook to organise the opposition, and built up a following in the West through appearances in the international media.

Even as his profile grew his friends were starting to disappear.

“Of the committee I was in every single one was hunted down, two were killed, some were arrested, some fled the country,” he said.

Eventually he decided to check if his identity, which the regime had denounced in regional media as a creation of the Israeli government, was as watertight as it seemed.

When the call telling him otherwise came, he was shocked, but not surprised.

Three hours later, he was at the border.

There, waiting at the side of the road, was an AMI agent - the same force that was hunting him down.

“I grabbed my daughter from my wife and started playing with her, pretending it was fine,” he said.

“The guy holding our passports calls the AMI officer and asks, ‘do you want these?’

“The officer takes a look at us. Then he says ‘no they can go’. He didn’t even look at the passports. That was the peak for me. That was where I was going to have a heart attack.”

ABOVE: Supporters of the Free Syrian Army ride a motorcycle with a rocket-propelled grenade in Kafar Taharim, Syria, 24 February, 2012.

‘I Would Gladly Do It Again, And Again, And Again’

Jarrah now lives in Cairo, where he co-produces the Activists News Associationthat seeks to support citizen journalism and get videos out to publications including the New York Times, Sky News and The Huffington Post UK.

Several times a week he hears about a friend or colleague in Syria who has been detained or killed.

“I don’t want to sound heartless, but it’s become very normal,” he said.

“A friend of mine was taken from his house the other day in Damascus and is still missing. I was sat by myself the day before yesterday thinking, ‘why am I not annoyed by this? Why am I not weeping?’ Because he’s probably dead. But we’re hearing this happening every day.

“And then every two or three weeks you sit there and you break down. And it just topples.”

Some think that Syria is now heading for a civil war.

With the UN Security Council unable to decide on a resolution condemning the violence, and with direct intervention off the table, the Free Syrian Army is taking responsibility for arming itself even as the regime, emboldened, steps up its fight.

Despite this, Jarrah still believes there is more the outside world could do.

“Why are Syrian ambassadors still in Europe?” he asked. “Why have they not been kicked out? Why are international ambassadors from all over the world still in Syria? Why has there not been a Security Council resolution that condemns the government? Why, why why?

“If these were there they would contribute to isolating the Syrian regime financially, politically and even morally.”

But despite all the death, the uncertainty and the chaos it brought to his own life, Jarrah is adamant he would do it all again.

“In a moment’s notice,” he said. “I would gladly do it again and again and again. And I’m not saying that because I’m supposed to say it. The first moment that I was allowed to chant was a drug. It was a rush. It was something that I looked for again and again, and the reason I kept going.”

“We had no dignity. None whatsoever. We walked in the streets with our heads down.

“And if you ask any other Syrian, I think they would say the only way Assad could stop this is if they kill every single one of us.”

Read Rami Jarrah’s blog for The Huffington Post UK

Sex, La Petite Mort, and the Apple Product Announcement

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 11:20:00 +0000

[Cross posted at the Huffington Post]

It is a sad truism that after the warm, slow-burning anticipation, and the rush of noise and fury of the climax, there comes a silence.

A hollow introspection, and a saturated feeling of bloated decadence mixed with mild disgust.

A powerful sense that the only thing you to do is sit in a dark place, drink some tea and try to recover from your sordid indiscretion.

To purify. To be better than you were.

The French call it The Little Death. Scientists explain it as a release of oxytocin in the brain, and literary critic Roland Barthe claimed its effects for works of great literature.

But while it was once the sole preserve of post-coital couples and drug addicts, there is now another place where the Sad Hammer has made its lair: the Apple announcement.

It may seem a strange comparison, but then Apple keynotes aren’t entirely dissimilar to sex. Statistically they’re most often experienced alone on the Internet, for instance. They’re also both more fun naked.

And both are also a way to cheat death.

Because no one wants to die, and we live now in an a world where changes in personal technology have marked the passing of our lives far more obviously and regularly than shifts in politics, art or the occurrence natural disasters.

So without any equivalent to the rise of Communism, the birth of cinema or the Spanish Influenza with which to make sense of our lives, we chalk up our years by the phones in our pocket, the TV on our table and the number of retinas in our display.

People used to wonder what the world would be like after the nuclear holocaust. Now we speculate on what the world will be like after the iPad 6 comes out. And so, over the last 10 years or so, Apple have allowed us to cheat death at regular, four month intervals.

Hence the Apple Product Announcement; the Super Bowl of the disenchanted dweeb.

We wait for the day, speculate pointlessly over haptic display technology and new form factors, and when Steve Jobs, and latterly Tim Cook, finally steps up on stage we hope to watch the Future unfold, one piece at a time.

When the promise delivers, as it sometimes does, it’s briefly glorious. A shining moment of purity. A transcendence of the self, that delivers us to a new world of expanded possibilities.

But when it doesn’t quite match up to expectations, the pain is overwhelming. ‘Is this it?’, we ask. ‘Is this the last iPad I will ever see? Is this as good as it gets?’

And then we remember we are going to die. And we weep.

Either way, whether exhilarated by the new or crushed by the familiar, the rush of the One More Thing is always followed by pain. This is the little death; the realisation of mortality.

So if you’re an Apple fan pleased by the recent promise of a new iPad with a better screen and you see someone moaning on Twitter that it doesn’t have a magic display that shoots lasers at your enemies, let it go.

Make them some tea. Give them a cuddle. And suggest they take a shower.

The little death is part of life, as is anticipation and disappointment. We’re all only human. And we’re all going to die.

Enjoy your new iPad.

Their Most Effective Weapon

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 22:53:00 +0000

First appeared in the Huffington Post UK in February 2012

When a war reporter is killed, it is possible to feel as if their work has been silenced. Last reports are left unwritten, or un-broadcast. Stories are lost.

But when veteran war correspondent Marie Colvin and photographer Remi Ochlik and 20 others were killed in the Syrian city of Homs on Wednesday, what took place afterward amid the rubble and death reflected the best aims of their profession, as well as its dangers.

Dozens of videos and reports, each telling one part of the true horror of their final moments, were released minutes after 11 government rockets slammed into the building.

Those videos were sent out by email, streamed online and broadcast on the world’s mainstream media ensuring it was impossible for the regime to deny what had happened - try as they might.

The footage of the attack was visceral, and at times unbearably gruesome. It depicted everything - from the shelling itself and the whine of rockets fired from government batteries, to the <a=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64jqXk1MA5I”>wounded trapped under the rubble.The footage also showed the lifeless bodies of the fallen reporters and their badly injured colleagues.

On Thursday even those wounded in the attack themselves were posting videos, including Sunday Times journalist Paul Conroy.

But this stream of media is nothing new in Syria. For at least 11 months since the start of the first protests in March 2011, activists in the country, helped by foreign networks, have produced a constant torrent of video and photography depicting the horror unfolding under President Bashar al-Assad’s rule, as similar movements also took root across the Arab world in Egypt, Libya, Bahrain and other nations.

The videos have chronicled every stage of the Syrian uprising. From the the first six months of almost exclusively peaceful protest to the eventual shootings of demonstrators and government attacks on Hama, and now the tank assaults and crimes against humanity being broadcast around the world. All of it has been captured in sometimes overwhelming volume, detail and horror.

Some of the activists capturing the footage have also broadcast live pictures. In recent weeks The Huffington Post UK and many other media outlets including Sky, Al Jazeera and the BBC, used Bambuser streams published by Rami Ahmad Alsayeed of rocket attacks, burning oil lines and demolished buildings in Baba Amr, Homs.

Alsayeed was killed with three friends this week by a mortar shell which hit his car on the way to a hospital. Many other such reporters have died, disappeared or been tortured in the line of their work - including several killed alongside Colvin and Ochlik.

“Our citizen journalists’ network at work is as important as ever, if not more important,” said WIll Davies, media campaigner at Avaaz, in an interview conducted with the Huffington Post UK last week.

Avaaz is one group organising a network of these videographers and journalists. They provide equipment, support, basic training and contacts with mainstream media to their volunteers, in return for the international profile boost such material gives to the crisis.

“They’re taking tremendous risks. They may call up on a particular day and say ‘there are tanks outside my house’, or further down the street, and I’ll say ‘do you feel comfortable about going out and filming it’ and they say ‘yes of course’. They come back and the next thing I know they’re sending me a link on YouTube.”

Obviously, technology has had a role to play. Avaaz has sent mobile and satellite phones, laptops, video cameras and latterly even lenses hidden inside spectacles or pens to its network of activists, to help them record footage quickly and upload it safely.

Indeed the network’s entire operation - from the secure Skype connections its members rely on to talk to each other and the media, to the Avaaz website and social networks that connect it together - is all built on a platform of new media.

It is possible, however, to over-estimate the role of technology in this effort. At various points in the last 50 years the revolution - whether in West Germany, Libya, Egypt or now Syria - is said to have been photographed, televised, blogged, YouTubed and then Tweeted, but none of that technology would be of any use without the bravery of the people who use it.

So who are the citizen journalists risking their lives in Homs to tell their story?

“Syrians, mostly people in their teens, 20s or 30s, mostly men. There’re a few women, but it’s mostly young men,” says Davies. “The same demographic that is responsible for this whole revolution.”

“There is tremendous camaraderie between these groups. They band together. They live in safe houses, sharing beds and the little amount of food they have. Living a very basic existence and moving from safe house to safe house.

“There is no competitive edge whatsoever. And they are just so dedicated to the cause.”

In one sense they sound like soldiers more than journalists - and indeed the language Davies uses to describe them is occasionally surprisingly militaristic: citizen journalists aren’t given cameras - they are “armed” with them, for instance.

“[When the regime captures anyone filming] they will torture them in all sorts of ways, from electrocution to pulling their fingernails and toenails out,” he says. “They won’t’ kill them, they’ll detain them, force them to admit to being foreign terrorists, and then they will generally release them after about two months.”

“Initially they’re broken men and you think, ‘how can you carry on’ … But these guys say no, I want to stay, I want to carry on fighting.

“And they pick up their most effective weapon and carry on. Which is their camera.”

Danny Dayem is a British-Syrian activist, who has featured on almost every major news network including the BBC and Sky in the past two weeks for a series of videos he recorded amidst the destruction in Homs.

His clips, which are narrated in English and with Dayem brazenly standing in the street with his face uncovered, are an angry plea for help.

“Are we animals dying here?” he asks in one. “Where’s the UN? Where is America?”

Dayem was shot in Syria in September, but managed to escape from a hospital where he was being hunted by government forces and get away to the UK. And then, earlier this year, he went back again, not only to record videos but also, he says, to help bring in medical supplies and other aid to the stricken city of Homs.

Speaking from Beirut recently, Dayem said he shares Avaaz’s language of the camera as a weapon. But he also goes further.

“If [citizen journalists] knew how to use a weapon, they would join the Free Army,” he said.

“If they knew the tactics and they’d been in the army before, and they knew how to use weapons, they would be in the Free Army and the Free Army would accept them.”

It’s a question of abilities, and willingness to help, he says.

“Anyone does any job they can do. If my job is to clean the street I’ll clean the street. If it’s helping the revolution I’d do anything. Anyone will do anything to help the revolution on the ground. Inside is different from outside. Everyone inside, on the ground, against the government, is different from people outside.

And Dayem is convinced it’s made a difference.

“If it wasn’t for the media, for the videos showing the truth, we’d have over 100,000 or 200,000 people dead now,” he says.

“The strongest weapon right now is not the kalashnikov or the RPGs, or the rockets, the weapon is the camera. If it wasn’t for the camera the regime would be killing hundreds of thousands.”

Why Doesn't The UK Have An Apple Inc?

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 22:05:58 +0000

First published on the Huffington Post UK in July 2011

There is a melancholy familiar to any gadget fan in the UK that occurs when they examine the back of an iPhone.

The cause is a simple, chirpy message, written in tiny font, that reads: “Designed By Apple In California”. Not Barnsley, or Glasgow, or Malvern. Sunny California.

I.E. Elsewhere.

And while most of those fans know the product was actually designed by a man from Chingford, somehow it isn’t enough.

During its recent earnings report for the second quarter of 2011, Apple Inc, which by market cap is now pretty much the world’s largest technology company, announced that it had $76.4bn …. in cash. To put that in perspective, Steve Jobs’ US company could theoretically buy a significant chunk of the UK technology industry with its spare change.

So why then is it that the UK has not produced an Apple Inc, or a iPod, of its own?

Unfortunately for its supporters, the potted history of computer hardware manufacturing in the UK almost writes its own tragic narrative.

Take Acorn. Once known as the “British Apple”, Acorn Computers produced a number of successful computers in the 1970s and 80s, including the BBC Micro, the Acorn Archimedes and the Acorn Electron, a competitor to Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum (another British company, later purchased by Amstrad). But by 1985 Acorn was in dire financial trouble and sold out to Olivetti, an Italian computer company.

Other products followed, but Acorn never rose from the ashes.

Or did it? Because Acorn’s legacy is an interesting case study that helps illustrate why the UK industry is far from dead. For while its core business slowly died, in 1990 Acorn did find time with the help of a little company called Apple and VLSI Technology to found ARM Holdings, a chip manufacturer which today is the dominant designer of mobile phone chips in the world, powering phones for Apple and virtually every other handset manufacturer you can name. ARM Holdings is listed on the FTSE 100, employs around 1,700 people and has a market cap of more than £7bn.

Not bad for the step-child of a company that represents the supposed death of British technology manufacturing.

“ARM chips are in almost everybody’s handsets, they just don’t get the same kind of recognition as the handsets,” said Nick Appleyard, who is head of digital technology for the Technology Strategy Board, a government agency set up to invest in and foster innovation.

“There are a lot of companies like that who are behind those major brands,” he adds. “Maybe what we don’t have is the brand recognition because of the nature of where UK businesses have placed themselves on the market. But that’s not necessarily a capability issue, that’s a case of what you choose to concentrate on.”

Appleyard says that while the age of giant, corporate tech conglomerates might have waned in the UK, those companies have left behind a legacy of skills and technical expertise that has fuelled the industry ever since.

“We’ve managed to retain the high-skill, intellectual property side of the technology business,” he said. “Those skills are traceable back to the more traditional corporate businesses that were UK-based in the past.”

And as to why the UK doesn’t have an Apple - well, perhaps it doesn’t need one. Particularly in the related software and internet services businesses that according to one report on the so-called “vital six per cent” are driving much of the jobs and economic growth in the country.

“Not every idea needs to start as a seed in a start-up company and turn into a multi-national, global-spanning, corporate presence through continuous organic growth,” Appleyard says. “The assumption that you go from four people to 30 people, to 50 people, to 200 people, to 1,000 people, as one continuous evolution - that’s not the only way to do things. You can go from two people to four people and back to two people again. Over and over and over again. ”

TSB will soon be investing £2m of public money into business located around the Old Street ‘Silicon Roundabout’ in East London, precisely to foster those types of low-capital, “fast-turnaround, punchy, quick-moving, agile” businesses.

In fact in many different areas, from chip design (ARM, Imagination, Autonomy), voice and data carriers (Vodafone), internet services and social media (Last.FM, Spotify) and even special effects (Double Negative), the UK boasts a wealth of interesting companies, start-ups and Jobs-ian personalities that leaves many global analysts thinking not “how can we build an Apple?”, but “how can we build a Silicon Roundabout?”.

For Geoff Mulgan, who is chief executive of Nesta, the National Endowment For Science, Technology And The Arts, the tired narrative that the UK tech industry died with the BBC Micro doesn’t fit with the facts.

“There is a traditional media story which says Britain has lost its manufacturing, high tech all moved to California or Taiwan and we were left with just finance in the UK. It just happens to be one of those stories that doesn’t fit the numbers.”

That the UK doesn’t have an Apple of its own, Mulgan says, might simply be that UK start-ups sell too early.

“The lesson of so many technology companies is that they always go through quite a few rocky patches, and growing an Apple has taken 30 years or more. Nearly always along that track a company will have faced near-fatal crisis. Patient capital and founders who don’t see selling out as a top priority are critical.”

However, while organisations like Nesta, the Technology Strategy Board, and others have worked to invest in that new generation of businesses, Mulgan admits there is still work to do.

“I think we’re still lacking a sufficiently comprehensive set of structures and supports,” Mulgan says. “And as a result there are probably lots of great ideas which are going to waste.”

So what hope is there that out of this volatile mixture of innovation and investment product as iconic as the iPod will emerge from the UK in 10 to 20 years?

In part that depends on education, says Eben Upton, a multimedia platform architect at Broadcom, a Director of Studies in Computer Science at St. John’s College, Cambridge and the director of Raspberry Pi, a charity that will soon begin selling a development computer aimed at young people for the princely sum of £15.

“In the first few years of the last decade there was a change in both the number and the quality of the applications we received to the computer science course at Cambridge,” Upton says. Where in the mid-1990s there would be 400-500 applicants competing for 80 places, now there are less than half that number and their experience of programming is lower. Partly that is due to the fact that - thanks in part to companies like Apple - most young people experience computers as a type of magic, not as a functional piece of engineering.

“We talk about young people today being very computer literate, but what they’re literate at is using this thing which is a magic box,” Upton said.

That’s why Upton has, with a team of trustees, put together a project to build and sell cheap development computers to young people and to give them hard cash prizes if they build something useful on top. Upton hopes to begin selling the machines by November, and aims to have between 10,000 and 100,000 out of the door in the first twelve months.

“Back in the 80s there was this idea of computing being a moderately glamourous thing to do because you did have these stories about guys who were able to buy Ferraris before they were old enough to drive,” he said. “We’d like to see ourselves competing with a paper round. We’d like there to be a significant chance that if you get one of these devices and you make something interesting that you’ll see some measure of financial reward.”

Of course, with its utilitarian aesthetic the Raspberry Pi computer might not inspire confidence that the UK will finally produce an iPod-like success to rival the big beast in Cupertino.

On the other hand, those two products are actually more closely related than you think. For as it turns out the chip that powers the Raspberry Pi computer - a BCM 2835 - was born out of the BCM 2722. Which, as you will be aware, was the chip that powered the first-ever video iPod.

“And that is a genuine Made In Britain product,” Upton said.

It would be nice if through the Raspberry Pi the circle was completed and the iPod’s granddaughter inspired the iPod of the future.

But even if it doesn’t happen, let’s try not talk down the UK tech industry. We may not have an Apple, but we might have something even better.

You’ll just have to pull your iPod apart and look under the case to see it.

Occupy Is History

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 12:18:00 +0000

Occupy Is History:

In a literal way. See what I did there?

jenbekmanprojects: Impressive installation by artist Do Ho...

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 16:08:00 +0000

jenbekmanprojects:

Impressive installation by artist Do Ho Suh.

(Image from Colossal via thecreatorsproject.)

The Wisdom Of Woody Allen, Via Ernest Hemingway

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 21:25:53 +0000

The Wisdom Of Woody Allen, Via Ernest Hemingway:

Or is it the other way around?

"Sometimes I think, how is anyone ever gonna come up with a book, or a painting, or a symphony, or a..."

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 23:12:00 +0000

“Sometimes I think, how is anyone ever gonna come up with a book, or a painting, or a symphony, or a sculpture that can compete with a great city - you can’t. Because you look around and every street, every boulevard, is its own special art form and when you think that in the cold, violent, meaningless universe that Paris exists — these lights — I mean come on, there’s nothing happening on Jupiter or Neptune, but from way out in space you can see these lights, the cafés, people drinking and singing. For all we know, Paris is the hottest spot in the universe.”

- Gil (Owen Wilson), Midnight In Paris

“Contrary to almost ubiquitous misuse, to be “nauseous” doesn’t mean you’ve been sickened: it...

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:01:29 +0000

“Contrary to almost ubiquitous misuse, to be “nauseous” doesn’t mean you’ve been sickened: it actually means you possess the ability to produce nausea in others. e.g.,That week-old hot dog is nauseous. When you find yourself disgusted or made ill by a nauseating agent, you are actually “nauseated.” e.g., I was nauseated after falling into that dumpster behind the Planned Parenthood. Stop embarrassing yourself.”

- And 19 Other Grammar Mistakes