Treeatwork

on The Future of Social and New World Order

2014-03-31T23:31:00.001+07:00

Wired Magazine Cover, 02.2014

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."
~Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

NOTE: This post continues from last week piece and past fringe republic historian notes.

As the network expands and adds more nodes it will also evolve in characteristics in response to stimuli and disruption. Naturally, the response will resemble more that of a network and less like an individual in both social as well as technical terms.

Mobile - personal and near real time information - access will mimic its subsequent natural social behavious: connectivity disruption during peak traffic, demonstrable shift in media consumption pattern and most effecient disemination platform.

Social Network and Social usage - YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp - are another obvious indicators. Its direct and immediate impact on causing social change is only getting increasingly felt globally. Where the network were met in direct collision against status quo, autocratic regimes or real world norms, the response are increasingly felt and demonstrably more impactful on social level. The emergence of alternative information infrastructure to complement existing 'interweb' from the last generation is about to enter its next disruptive phase.

From the Wikileaks/Chelsea Manning Collateral Damage Video, to the self burning in Tunisia, Arab Spring in the Middle East and North Africa; from Tahrir Square to US government shutdown; from Julian Assange in his transnational diplomatic exile in London, to Edward Snowden and Sarah Harrison travel from Hong Kong to Moscow, to Glenn Greenwald in Brazil; from the NSA global smackdown of internet infrastructure and Turkey's President most intimate conversation and the shutdown of Youtube and Twitter in the country; from Wikileaks to Firstlook.org...

An accelerated change in the net setup from earlier gen definition of basic principles to adopt new priorities that reflect the future that is already here and inevitable: privacies, transparencies, accountabilities, net neutralities, government oversights, internet control and regulatory structures, top level domains and so forth.

To reflect the period, the world changed much from the moment remote fighting force conducted their military agression using best technology in the War on Terror; reclasification of a whole new set of enemies - insurgence and terrorist alikes - as combatant, clear and immediate danger warranting executive assasination, illegal rendition; from Stuxnet to Tor Project; global surveillance infrastructure and covert network of spy agencies potentially going rogue and other extra curricular exploration of visible boundaries ... and well into the tin foil hat territory.

In real life and for the record statement, Microsoft and other Technology Conglomerates officially declare the US government as adversary and characterize the behaviour as "advanced persistent threat." Internet.org wants to connect the world from the sky.

Networked nodes respond as a network. Scalability and its own natural evolution can significantly alter characteristics in different phases: a network of 10000 nodes behaves differently to a network of 1000000000 nodes. Relative to an individual node or disconnected franchise, they can be totally different creature.

Designing for modular scalability both in process and infrastructure will relieve most of the suspense in dealing with the accelerated change but the element of predictability decreases the further you are from the starting point. Crowd - of people and robots, or combination of both in sizable numbers - do not and will not behave 'rationally' - not the way rational is conceived by mere mortal, single human individual alone.

Being part of the network, the individual nodes also gain by accessing the collective memory of the group, coordinate persistent and more effective threat modelling, systematic wholesale disemination and disruption. Of course, there's always the brute force approach to simply destroy industry standards, technical specification and international legal framework, practically by every other country in the world with an internet connection.

On the potentially more uncomfortable and pointy end of these disruptions are existing status quo and anquated structures. Nation-States as we know it, is just such a thing. Just a few short years ago, when I used the phrase "New World Order" on this blog or elsewhere in conversation, people assume I was referring to the past, more trancendental plane with associations to secret cabal and conspiracy theories, along with the Illuminati, Order of Zion or a Red Pill/Blue Pill - Black Cat moment.

This week, Obama says Putin’s challenging the World Order in Ukraine though I guess they have yet to bother reclarifying what the current prevailing World Order is and what exactly are the challenges to it. Today's Wiki put this in bullet points.

US Sec. Kerry characterized Russia as being "on the wrong side of history." In an exemplary repeat of lessons in history, President John F. Kennedy took on Premier Nikita Kruschev challanges and brought the world to the cuban missile crisis as an existential red line, probably because his father was the American representative to the Munich Pact that permitted German annexation of the Sudetenland in western Czechoslovakia where about three million people in were of German origin.

The whole period during Joseph Kennedy ambassadorship in Britain, his extensive support for Nevile Chamberlain's appeasement policies was seen as a catastrophic diplomatical failure for global status quo at the time, leading directly to a World War and subsequent restructurization of the World Order at the end, nominally drafted in Yalta, on the Crimean Peninsula.

Also far in not-so-distant event horizon were the raving lunatics of a young Austrian corporal in an ideological jihad and systematic dismantling of rational aspirations, comically similar to every other mad men after him that posed with AK47 in retro-romantic nonstalgia in with Warholian tint.

In the eloquent Twitter by Grugq "An analysis of Che vs Mao. Che was a young dumb idiot who ended up dead in a ditch, and Mao was right." The fuller reading from Small Warfare Journal eloborates on what he's referring to. In one last pictorial by @biellacoleman - a #UCMF artwork created to celebrate fresh meme from PDFLeaks on NYU forum.

Ultra Coordinated Mutherfuckery #UCMF

From another perspective and to the defense of American foreign policy, Fareed Zakaria suggests that "It is the way of the future ..."

And therefore its presumed explicit global conduct - will asume a more syncrhonized posture to the the rest of the network of countries?

Like we expect world leaders to be rational only until we discovered what mad man maniacs they were before. From Adolf, to Saddam Husein, Osama bin Laden, Colonel Khaddafi, to Assad in today's Syria, history guarantees us an abundance of stupidity and totally irrational behaviour. Some additional bonus reading for the week are Grounds for War:The Evolution of Territorial Conflict and Democratic Malaise, both published in recent years. Nobel Prize winners and very smart social scientiss have long observed this irrational behaviour in economics - Google it.

From #CD14 the other day, a quote from Bruce Schneier also touched on the theme "... all of our Internet history being stored as long as possible... Everyone but us seems to like this."

Ah well, finally, either the World Order really is changing or conpiracy theorists have simply occupied mainstream and everyone is just as loony as I am. Just as well I don't have to remember much. History is no longer being written, it will be recorded.

on Doing Business Sans Common Sense

2014-03-31T08:43:00.001+07:00

Following my tweets yday, a number of people inquired for more details. There are more than enough details available in circulation among the relevant parties but for the rest of you, I'll try to give the concise version, putting this on record and providing some context.

Part of doing business in Indonesia - and indeed most of the emerging markets - is the (lack of) clarity and specification in the regulatory framework. Often times, bureucratic red tapes and conflicting directives from different agencies simply were designed to prohibit (or manage) direct or substantial foreign investment in select areas.

Mandated government registrations, licensing, auxiliary oversight and ineffecient business practices add to the cost of doing business and Indonesian competitiveness. Figures from the World Bank clearly shows that ID consistently rank near the bottom of the chart. In fast paced industries like information technology where rapid advances bring forth also limited window of opportunities, the impact is felt even more severe.

Even more frequently, this badly designed and ineffectual framework or the relevant enforcement and implementation of these laws (or lack thereof) substantially increase the perceived risk for any exit strategy by international players. An example would be how Intellectual Property and Intangible Assets are appraised and existing capital market requirements are by design beneficial to corporations with very large asset values. Viva Media (TV + Internet), Telkom (Telkom + PlasaMSN), Skybe and other listed combined media companies already report regularly, if not recognizing the full value or reporting independent details from its internet assets. Public information on other transactions - Detik, Kaskus and Rocket Internet properties are not as readily available but knowledgeable resources might be helpful with more, asking colleagues/other industry players for insights and references is always a good idea.

For smaller and younger startups, this restrict the available exit scenarios to acquisition by a larger, local corporation or similar absorption by larger organizations. The structure incentives founders to chase short term objectives and abandon longer term, more ambitious grand plans.

While there are some notable foreign exits, pure internet play exit is almost unheard of yet. Yahoo acquisition of Koprol might be a good reference but these are indeed, rare and also resembles more acqui-hire type deals. The last two years saw a rash of several early professional round announcements but we are yet to see the exit and result from the class of 2012-2013..

For founders and bootstrapping companies trying to raise capital and growing operational capability the lack of exit is probably the single most important factor working against young enterpreneurs in realizing their potential valuation and market realization. For seed stage companies for example, the minimum 250k USD requirement for FDI from BKPM works directly in limiting any smaller capitalization round.

More over, this ineffecient framework also incentivize corrupt and potentially illegal business practices like bribery (eg. to speed up bureucracies, tender process, copyright violation and infringement, etc.), effectively also introducing significant potential liability, even criminal for foreign operating entities (US companies have FCPA, EU have their own), etc. During election year for example, Political Advertising and Marketing services brought force 'unique' market condition that could be quite ambiguous (say, advance payment in media buy).

Over the years in working with different organization and a number of different startups, many of which with direct, institutional foreign investor and sizable capital commitment in different market and legal jurisdiction, I've witnessed personally different situations where things swing wildly from one side to the other extreme in the emerging market. In the select successful foreign exits there were always intricate cash out mechanism with multiple jurisdiction setup and overseas bank account, domestic taxation oversight, multiple appraisal models and so forth. It's not exactly simple, say compared to Singapore, 90 minutes away by a plane (that could potentially go missing, but almost never happened).

After meeting and working with countless number of hopeful startup founders, the question I most often get, by far, is "So, knowing that's how it is with Indonesia, what can founders do to protect themselves and still realize the most potential growth of their ambitious startups?"

This is after all, a market nearing seventy million users and growing in the 40%++ YoY rate. For bootstrapping startups with very limited resources, lawyers and stretched out process for an uncertain outcome or overly lengthy period. Better focus the resources and energy on strategic sales effort and introduce cash flow independence. Fundraising, is ironically becoming a process that is too expensive from the companies that need them the most. Indeed, the risk profile for local founders are different to that of the (often much larger and better capitalized) foreign investors.

My advice are usually pretty simple and quite straight forward Corporate Governance but will require serious and continuing commitment to see in implementation by the original founding shareholders and the startup team. You guys have the most at stake.

Conduct your own due diligence and make sure that your company operates within the existing applicable laws. Start with basic administration of corporate registry for shareholding distribution, seed funding round/angel investments, strategic partnership exploration, and verbal agreement among founders. Keeping an updated shareholders agreement to reflect the changes and making it available and transparent to all parties is another good practice.

Maintain transparent, timely and detailed accounting and financial practices. Bookkeeping and managing the administration requirement, taxation (and all other numbery stuff) is simply mission critical and not worth skipping. Within a small team and limited third party resources, make sure multiple eyes, like two co founders both regularly scrutinize and conduct oversight to spot mistakes and introduce verified corrections.

While these could potentially be tedious and time consuming depending on the space you're in, consistent regulatory compliance will signficantly cut down on the time requirement when it comes to approaching investors or future due diligence. The minimum requirement should be the annual report for financials, once per year for all the routine and regular compliance in company operation.

For other corporate transactions beyond the normal course of operation - eg. funding/capital structuring/substantial asset purchase/third party strategic relationships - additional documentation should be maintained. Seek legal guidance and third party advice. If hiring/retaining lawyers is too expensive, ask your friends, parents, colleagues for special treatment and personal insights, this will be a money worth spending.

Learn as much as possible - many resources are available online for more established market like US and some local ID references are available from the public companies or other websites and industry sources. Often, merely understanding the letter of the law is irrelevant as you need to understand how the enforcement and real world implementation are already common business practices. Still, reading blogs and business class text book are not to be compared with professional, qualified advice.

As your organization grow, more compliance requirement and administrative process can be a factor limiting growth. For content companies for example, recognizing the value of your content library will add to the company valuation as well as shaping out your monetization strategy. Licensing agreements for content development and distribution almost always require even more substantial legal work and can no longer be done annually but a dedicated advisory/in house team.

Likewise, when your team grow in number, managing employment laws, contractual agreements, hiring/termination policies and other multi year, long term third party transactions will require constant oversight. Basic templates and regular updating can help to certain headcount (say, less than 20) but dedicated HR personnel and accounting help usually help a great deal in relieving the operational burden from the company executives. A consistent HR policy will also positively improve recruitment and retaining key hires and building your organizational structure. Bonus and incentive structure for sales org, as another example, can very much help in bringing in fiscal responsibilities while increasing competitiveness. Company turn over in the early period of operation is almost always an indicative measure and easily comparable to industry peers.

Consistently improve and build your organisational capacity and structure to accommodate anticipated growth. This is particularly relevant when you pursue larger valuation, say north of 1m USD, from foreign parties which has a minimum limit in place of 250k USD.

While a small group of young founders might be familiar for angel investors or early seed local investors, more distant parties will be more cautious in trusting inexperienced entrepreneurs with 'millions of dollars.' In addition to the key operational positions above, growing startup should consider expanding the corporate governance structure beyond the original founders and shareholders. Appointing Independent Commissioners for example, is a relatively simple process and goes with the annual requirement but could significantly boost your corporate credibility, resource network, oversight as well as to introduce better insights and expertise into the team.

When setting up executive remuneration/bonus/contracts and other material commercials, independent opinion will almost always add value to decision making and minimize founders drama/deescalating dispute potentials and maintaining team work of key executives. Other key positions might require substantial upgrade to add technical/creative expertise to the original team (I'm assuming 2-4 original founders).

Run your company like you mean it and maintain a transparent, accountable and measurable business process. This reflect directly to your brand and your company's ability to grow and execute in the market. When building your sales team for example, taking shortcuts by committing to systematic under the table transaction and unconventional incentive structure is potentially illegal and will not help in the longer term team capacities (as opposed to proper HR policies as above). The instant gratification might help in solving immediate short term objectives but the market is already much larger and increasingly competitive. Better technology and the market dynamics will drive towards more transparency and accountability, directly resulting in better industry wide business practices.

Upcoming 2014 national election is also likely to bring some policy changes - updated FDI is very likely by 2015 with a very wide ranging proposals from porn filtering to e-commerce taxation that could affect the market. New market might be opened up, others might be restricted and different bureaucratic trappings will inevitably sprung up.

Speeding up official registration and licensing process by undocumented payments, tender/procurement manipulation, conflict of interests, arms length transactions or any such items only adds to your margin layers and increase potential liabilities.

In a thorough trans national due diligence for a larger transaction, say when you want to cash out and buy a Porsche, opaque transactions and non-compliance will add to the process and likely only to delay a time bomb. Bribing your way for marketing services or digital activities in an election year or manipulating your tax report and payment plans are commonly illegal and might well be criminal in many countries. If corporate disputes aren't scary enough, a criminal or law enforcement investigation or extraordinary scrutiny can be totally devastating and potentially ruin whatever exit plans you might've thought you have.

Last, plan your growth carefully and be prepared to manage the growing pains. In the unfortunate events where existing dispute resolution mechanism fails or ineffective enforcement, adjust priorities for the benefit of the company first. Contingency plans are uncomfortable but sometimes necessary.

Copyright infringement is probably the most common and frequently quoted as factor prohibiting growth by creative - music/movie - industries. Pursuing further legal venues when the enforcement is known to be ineffective is simply pointless. Focus your resources in building expertise and familiarity with alternative tech platforms, distribution media and better monetization is a smarter way of doing business. Attempting law suit against employees abuse of executive decisions in small companies fighting over small money is the equivalent of fighting over peanuts.

Conduct your business in good faith and build the trust capital for your company. This grows over time and even more difficult to measure in definitive numbers but the effect will nevertheless be the most important in the long run. In transaction and relationship with overseas parties, this means also to be familiar and compliant with the relevant jurisdiction, for both arbitrage and future cash out, commercial strategy.

Documents and agreements will need to be adjusted to reflect common, wider world practices with multiple applicable jurisdiction for both structure and commercial interest. E-commerce companies operates in Indonesia for example, largely build a structure in between the restrictions for normal retailers, franchise laws, layered corporate vehicles and taxations issues that could potentially significantly increase resource overhead.

Your plans need to take this into account, especially in larger than 250-500k capitalisation round. Explore more creative structure, overseas banking account and corporate registration (in Singapore, you can complete most things in less than a few business days so the advantages are clear, not to mention tax implications, etc.). Just as it is in Indonesia, founders need to understand and get comfortable with the applicable laws and regulation.

Back to the foreigners doing business in the country, the simplest way to sum this whole post is probably by keeping in mind that if it is illegal to do back home wherever you came from, then it is most probably not something you want to do elsewhere.

The company you're invested in and the industry you're supporting require a sustainable ecosystem to function and just as it is everywhere in the world with entrepreneurs, SMEs and tech startups (not to say civilized world), the trust capital is necessary the economy and the market to happen.

The good faith clause is not just a standard template but also a standard business practice worldwide but reflect on your minimum respect of common sense.

Have a blast long weekend, everyone.

Sutinah, Unta dan SBY

2014-03-30T21:32:00.001+07:00

Sebenarnya saya sudah janji tidak mau berkomentar tentang Pak SBY lagi. Bapak Presiden sudah mendekati masa pensiun dan lebih baik berpisah dengan (pura pura) tidak gelisah. Tapi urusan Diyat Satinah ini beneran bikin gerah.

Setelah bertahun tahun tersandera di Arab Saudi, Satinah, seorang TKI akhirnya disiapkan untuk dieksekusi mati. Berdasarkan hukum yang berlaku di negeri padang pasir itu, sang terdakwa pembunuhan hanya bisa dibebaskan kalau keluarganya menerima Diyat, uang pengganti yang diukur dengan satuan unta. Setelah mengalami konversi dari Unta ke Riyal ke Dolar Amerika ke Rupiah, maka harga hutang nyawa Satinah dihitung sekitar 25 Milyar. Menurut Presiden Yudhoyono, harga itu kemahalan. Kalau tidak salah, sekitar 1000 ekor Unta untuk satu Satinah.

Terus terang, mendengar penjelasan Presiden itu rasanya seperti teriris. Bukan cuma banyak rakyatnya yang masih miskin, tapi ternyata pemerintahnya juga punya perhitungan tidak mampu bayar.

Coba hitung, berapa banyak Sutinah yang bisa dibawa pulang dengan selamat kalau uang Hambalang dianggarkan untuk nasib mereka. Untuk Hambalang yang digadang Pak Bendahara Partai harganya 2 Trilyun lebih, tapi toh juga dibayari bertahun tahun. Atau mungkin mau dihitung dari dana kampanye Bapak Presiden dalam rangka pemenangan Partai Demokrat, 25 Milyar itu jadi berapa persen?

Saya nggak terlalu paham, siapa yang sedang diajak bicara Presiden SBY, tapi kok susah sekali percaya bahwa Republik yang Bapak pimpin demikian miskin. Kampanye bapak kemarin tampaknya juga tampil mewah.

Para pejabat dan juru bicara kemudian sibuk tampil dan berjerih payah menjelaskan pada publik, tentang hukum yang berlaku di negeri nun jauh di sana tersebut. Ada dari Kementrian Luar Negeri, ada dari Tenaga Kerja, dari Dirjen InaItu, segala aspek konversi uang dengan unta dan manusia ini dielaborasi sebagai bagian dari sosialisasi kebijakan Pemerintah - dan keterbatasan kemampuan manusiawi Sang Pemimpin.

Di situlah letak kegilaannya. Kalau yang sedang dibicarakan Presiden Yudhoyono itu adalah tentang nasib satu atau dua orang warganya dalam situasi yang luar biasa, maka mungkin komentar tersebut menjadi sedikit lebih bisa diterima. Tapi Sutinah sama sekali tidak luar biasa.

Nasib TKI seperti Sutinah bukan baru. Ratusan warga Indonesia yang terancam hukuman dalam konstruksi pidana Arab Saudi yang berlaku absolut tanpa kerangka akuntabilitas wajar. Ada ratusan ribu yang nafkah dan nasibnya terkatung katung tanpa perlindungan apa apa. Ada jutaan yang status imigrasinya bermasalah dan bertahun sudah menjadi masalah diplomasi. Ini hanya di Arab Saudi.

Setiap tahun, selama sepuluh tahun yang digadang Presiden SBY sebagai pencapaian ekonominya yang terbaik, kontribusi devisa terbesar diluar hasil bumi ya cuma dari TKI yang di Luar Negeri ini. Sejak proses perekrutan, pemeriksaan medis, perizinan dan tata kelola keuangan mereka diatur dan dikendalikan Pemerintah dengan sekian lapis birokrasi lintas departemen yang sibuk mengambil pungutan. Terjadi secara struktural dan institusional, tercatat dan tidak terlalu susah untuk diteliti, tapi ya karena mereka kelas pembantu, semua bisa pura pura buta. Hasilnya, trilyunan Rupiah devisa dan pertumbuhan ekonomi masyarakat rural yang justru ditinggal pembangunannya dalam sepuluh tahun. Tapi 25 Milyar terlalu mahal.

Setiap tahun juga, selama sepuluh tahun masa Pemerintahan Presiden Yudhoyono, selalu ada masalah baru dengan nasib TKI. Gotong royong masyarakat dan mobilisasi media jadi pola mengumpulkan uang, membayar satu demi satu untuk masing masing nyawa dengan kesadaran publik yang tergelitik. Kalau kebetulan musim kampanye, ya rame rame juga jadi kesempatan mencuri citra. Presiden sendiri kemudian bilang bahwa karena Indonesia sering memang cuma bayar Diyat, maka sang orang Arab terus menerus minta lebih. Dulu katanya cuma perlu beberapa ekor unta untuk satu pembantu Indonesia.

Di Arab Saudi berlaku hukum absolut monarki para Raja, legitimasinya hanya datang dari mazhab Wahabbi Islam yang tidak berlaku di Negara lain manapun. Di seluruh Dunia, tinggal mereka kerajaan monarki absolut, yang secara definitif memang eksplisit merasa tidak perlu tertib nalar. Landasan moralnya juga penuh tanya jawab tapi bisa observasi langsung di kawasan Puncak/Cianjur.

Sudah jelas dan tidak perlu lagi kerangka sosialisasi dari pejabat Pemerintah untuk mendidik publik dalam sistem hukum jahiliyah. Energinya bisa lebih baik digunakan para pejabat yang sama untuk menjelaskan sama rinci, apa dan bagaimana proses dan birokrasi yang mereka lakukan di negeri sendiri, di Indonesia, tempat mereka dibayar gajian dari pajak yang dibayar rakyat Indonesia dan bukan arbitrase moral suku padang pasir.

Bahwa kemudian orang Indonesia - dan kelompok imigran lain - diperlakukan jadi budak dan warga kelas dua di Arab Saudi, dunia sudah tahu. Sudah ribuan tahun memang mereka begitu. Bahwa lalu Presiden Republik Indonesia yang tampil dihadapan rakyatnya dan menjelaskan nasib para budak, terlalu mahal untuk dibayar, terlalu moral untuk dilawan karena pentingnya Beliau menghormati tata cara jahiliyah.
...

Ya begitu. Membacanya saja sudah miris.

Melawan dan membenahi problem ini sama sekali tidak susah dan bisa dilakukan dengan tegas dan segera. Pakistan pernah marah besar dan kirim pesawat untuk memulangkan pekerjanya masal. Satu demi satu negara juga menjaga lebih ketat praktek perdagangan manusia dengan negara yang satu ini. Kebutuhan tenaga kerja ada di seluruh dunia, Arab Saudi beda sendiri. Ada jutaan orang Indonesia yang tiap tahun pergi haji dan umrah. Ada bapak bapak pejabat yang tiap tahun Pemilu sibuk pergi minta doa. Ada puluhan trilyun rupiah dalam anggaran birokrasi yang 100% dalam kendali pemerintah, hanya demi untuk berurusan dengan Arab Saudi. Ada ratusan trilyun dana yang berkutat dalam ekonomi Haji dan TKI, yang dibagi antara birokrat dan perangkat kroni mereka, agen travel, catering, klinik, hotel, semua punya margin yang diatur dalam ekonomi yang diciptakan dan dirawat dalam kebijakan rezim SBY selama sepuluh tahun.

Ada janji moratorium - menghentikan mengirim tenaga kerja - yang jadi gertakan rutin setiap kali menjadi masalah. Tapi karena Pemerintah memang mati matian perlu nombok devisa asing saat tekanan domestik muncul, selalu segera dilakukan lagi tanpa pernah berubah banyak saat sudah tidak ada yang memperhatikan. Di Arab Saudi bisa jadi orang Indonesia terlalu mahal untuk diselamatkan, ada jutaan yang masih di Indonesia. Seperti pepatah, ini urusan gajah di depan bola mata.

Mungkin nanti, Presiden baru, Indonesia boleh punya harapan baru. Ah sudahlah.

.....

on World Order

2014-03-30T05:14:00.001+07:00

This is from a post I did a few weeks ago...

Perhaps Mr. Putin isn't going to stop at Crimean Peninsula. North Korea could suddenly claim something and launch missile somewhere. China might decide now that since the World had officially lost its Cold War equilibrium, it needs to do more for Chinese national security. Terrorism isn't such a crazy idea, just a few weeks ago two dozens people were killed with knife in a Chinese train station, now they will need to secure the South China Sea. Israel, well, Israel never really need a reason to hit anyone in what they see as the Sixty Years War of Attrition.

Well, i've been pretty much 20/20 on the items above and then some. China is already demanding a whole lot of stuff from the Malaysian and it will get only more political from this point on so far with MH370. At this point, just about every country - Australia, India, Thailand, China, Japan, US and more - spotted debris in the Indian Ocean. It could be MH370 but it might well be just hubris.

North Korea actually did fired missiles and told the United Nations to "mind your own business." Russia is massing forty thousand troops on Ukraine's border and they think now he will aim next for Moldova. Israel went ballistic on the Palestinian and generally very unhappy with the Americans on just about everything. Funnily enough, so are the Arabs. When President Obama made a speech last week, he said something about the Russia challenging the world order. Right. And there's nothing he could do about it.

on Arcs of Questions

2014-03-26T14:28:00.000+07:00

from TMF Associates

Jeff Weiss at Slate has a nice post on MH370. He asks, How Can Math Decide That Someone Is Dead? Tantalizing question indeed.

As he explains, the announcement yesterday by Malaysian PM Razak about the fate of MH370, was almost entirely based on math, "...the announcement was made even though no bodies or wreckage had been recovered. Instead, the passengers’ fate had been determined by math alone."

I'm sure people have been declared dead after going missing for a while but the case with MH370 is still quite spectacular. Two hundred and thirty nine people, without a body or even a wreckage found, I don't think that ever happened before. Families of the deceased are already filing suit, beginning by demanding for more information from MAS and Boeing.

You could see how this could be potentially be so very messy. The truth is, without a definitive wreckage there is simply no way to be absolutely certain that MH370 had crashed where they think it did. Jeff, like myself, favored the northern route. He thought the plane had gone to Central Asia while I like Myanmar better. Bottom line, we've lost an entire plane full of people in 2014. To be honest, it looks to me more like PM Razak and PM Abbot just wanted to close the matter as quickly as possible (and probably most of everyone else except for family and friends of the deceased and conspiracy reporters).

How the math got there is a story of technology and untested methods. They never done this before and didn't even realize that it's even possible. Jeff has another good post explaining and if you really want to get the gritty details of how these satellite signals work, here's a great backgrounder. I heard some people ask the other day, how the analyst compared the Doppler effect reading from MH370, as those posts explain, they didn't. Not really. Inmarsat compared the reading from other planes flying on similar route and identified the MH370 signals by comparison.

Fascinating stuff but then again, some very troubling questions remain. Like, what happened to the 239 passengers on the plane? They were in the air for over six hours, well away from their destination, and they could've done absolutely nothing at all to stop it? Or broadcast it? Whatever, you know.

They said the autopilot will stabilize the plane and just fly on but does it really do six hours?

If anything, this whole tragedy highlights some glaring vulnerability in international travel, years after the ugly experience in 911 - not to mention several countries air defense and readiness. How could the world simply lose a 777 for days and didn't even know where it was going? How could the plane be out of control and in the air for over six hours?

Well...

UPDATE: Found this post from NZ about ghost flights and hypoxia.

Politik Hitam Putih

2014-03-26T03:34:00.000+07:00

Masuk musim kampanye, belakangan ini ada beberapa wacana menarik dalam pemberitaan domestik, khususnya tentang bagaimana perlunya Indonesia bersiap menghadapi Pemilihan Umum 2014. Menarik, karena memang baru pertama kali ada pemilu langsung nasional tanpa lawan tanding petahana. Plus kepercayaan publik pada institusi demokrasi yang berada pada titik terendah sejak Reformasi 1998.

Tanpa mau terlalu seriusan menanggapi spekulasi politik para pakar yang jauh lebih pintar ada beberapa hal yang tetap menarik untuk dikomentari. Paling kentara mungkin diskusi sore di MetroTV beberapa hari lalu tentang "Politik Hitam."

Sebagai sebuah konsep, Politik Hitam di Indonesia agak lucu karena susah sekali membuktikan keberadaan praktek Politik Putih dalam demokrasi republik sepanjang sejarahnya yang baru satu dekade lebih.

Harapan reformasi - Korupsi, Kolusi dan Nepotisme - yang direduksi jadi slogan demokrasi pada pemilu 2004-2009, tampil telanjang bulat and gagal total meyakinkan nalar wajar tentang hadirnya perubahan. Korupsi tetap merajalela, Kolusi jadi praktek biasa dan Nepotisme justru muncul dengan semangat regenerasi baru yang sama sekali tidak lebih baik dari generasi kleptokrat sebelumnya.

Hasil tangkapan KPK bukan lagi anekdotal, hampir tanpa kecuali semua Partai Politik terlibat secara terkoordinasi dalam setiap kesempatan, seringkali juga berjamaah dan bersama secara kekeluargaan seperti memang tidak banyak yang berubah.

Hasil survey dan polling juga kentara menunjukkan runtuhnya kepercayaan publik pada institusi politik dan wibawa proses demokrasi. Karena semua partai proyeksi perolehan suaranya menurun, kekhawatiran terbesar sebagai penentu nasib lima tahun kepemimpinan bangsa ini bergantung pada Golput - kelompok non-pemilih.

Walaupun politik memang katanya hanya seni manipulasi kepentingan, kebingungan soal menentukan warna hitam putih ini jelas cuma memperkeruh titik jenuh demokrasi. Gonta ganti warna bisa jadi memang biasa, kebutuhan demi kelangsungan, tetapi kegagalan membedakan mana hitam dan mana putih ini bisa jadi juga petunjuk awal gagalnya proses nalar kelompok elit politik yang makin jauh dari realita.

Kalau memang ingin jujur menggagas perubahan, bagaimana mungkin melakukan perbaikan tanpa mau mengakui perlunya pembenahan sekian banyak kebusukan dan kerusakan yang sudah mengakar begini lama? Memang katanya tidak elok membuka bau busuk, tapi seperti berhadapan dengan penyakit yang sudah tinggal tunggu masanya untuk pecah, berpura pura semua baik baik saja juga bukan realita.

Well.. pemilunya masih jauh, jadi masih lama untuk mulai waras.

on Rise of the Fringe Republics

2014-03-25T22:22:00.001+07:00

“Modern generation should not mistake the character of the British expansion in India. The Government was never involved as a principal in the Indian conflict. The East India Company was a trading organization. Its directors were men of business. They wanted dividends, not wars and grudged every penny spent on troops on annexation. But the turmoil in the great sub-continent compelled them against their will and their judgment to take control of more and more territory, till in the end, and almost by accident, they established an empire no less solid and certainly more peaceful than that of their Mogul predecessors. To call this process “Imperialist expansion” is nonsense, if by that is meant the deliberate acquisition of political power. Of India, it has been well said that the British Empire was acquired in a fit of absence of mind.”
~Winston Churchill

I've long argued that nation-state is obsolete. It's not quite as extreme as it sounds, really. Many other finer minds have looked and noticed the same thing, Fukuyama's End of History is probably as good reading as any.

Think of nation-state not as the rock solid foundation of present day historia - but more a rudimentary codification of international conduct hastily put together after half a century's worth of devastating world wars. In the beginning it was setup for the basic minimum of maintaining world peace but later days mission creep goes into universal values and the likes. While one can argue that the United Nations is as ineffective as any other organisations, the UN remains to present the de-facto nation-state framework as pretty much the only venue for regulating present day civilisation.

Again, that this system is failing is no news. Many other better minds point to numerous symptoms and futurists have long predicted some of the outcome. Sovereign border failures and separatist movements lead to 'federalization' of the planet is a popular case. Partly due to the past colonial mistakes but also sovereign failures to maintain their border integrity, Balkanization is inevitable, some say. John Naisbitt calls this, "a world of 1000 countries."

Jared Diamond wrote a great length on why societies collapse. The focus was primarily on climate change and hostile environmental factors but Collapse also discussed on how these changes, geographical and territorial in nature, affect the dynamics between nation state.

While it is indeed fun to wonder and ponder about what the future is like, I'm more interested in the more immediate questions about how it will happen. Natural disasters are by its very nature disruptive and could conceivably alter the planet in significantly (see Noah, in cinema now). Other disruptions are man-made. Or well, state-made.

Countries go to war regularly for different reasons, the outcome varies as wide ranging as history. Savage conflicts like world wars are disruptive but perhaps more critically, present the most urgent and immediate threat to sovereign existence. Supposedly, the UN was setup to stop this happening again after WW II. So far, it's lasting about one hundred years and it's looking very wobbly.

Of course, since the whole concept of nation-state barely allows alternative framework, there isn't much serious discussion about how non-state variables could severely disrupt civilization in a meaningful way to affect the future.

The assumption here being other non-state individuals will always be subject to nation-state powers. The American War on Terror is a good example of non-state threat model but for many different reasons, primarily political, we are keen to declare victory and somewhat biased to consider the whole experiment a failure. Bin Laden succeeded sensationally in delivering his message and directly lead to violent wars in countries half a world away but in the end, he was subdued and reduced to the fringe.

The other assumption models the threat to alter the sovereign itself. An overwhelming separatist movement could force sovereign altercation, violently or otherwise. Again, the success of such movement seems to rely mostly on the international legitimacy of their demands. In East Timor for example, the blood bout lead to an independent referendum recognized by the rest of the world. In Scotland, they want to be free from the United Kingdom. In Syria, despite the extremely violent nature of the force, lacking the world's legitimacy for their demand, the Syrian state continues to survive albeit in skeletal form. In Crimea, Vladimir Putin decides he could do whatever he wants and simply legitimized itself.

What if the threat model come from and desire entirely different framework, pretty much to the exclusion of the nation-state model? We are used to consider non-state threat as either fictional James Bond villain types or mad, a la Bin Laden. What if 911 Al Qaeda model was not the spectacular plot of an insane man but merely the first of his generation?

There is obviously no reason to assume that people will sober up and eventually stop dreaming up paranoid utopias. If anything, they only seem to get crazier. More worrisome is that they will also get better at it. Inevitable, Agent Smith said.

In his book about making predictions, Alan Greenspan discussed how economists plan for this types of severe disruption. Not quite the mad man scenario as above (AG wasn't specifically discussing the why) but essentially recognising the likelihood of such disruption to happen with eventuality. He actually uses the phrase "one hundred years flood." As in, this happens because a 100-year flood does not mean a flood that happens every one hundred years but, instead, a flood that has one-in-100 probability of happening in any given year.

I'd like to go one step forward and propose that the odds are only getting better for the crazy man. The main reason for this is technology. With better instruments, crazy ideas become less crazy, though they will not be any less disruptive. Let me give you several just to get acquainted.

In the past, nation-state have extensively used a non-profileration method to prevent non-state actors from gaining any notable momentum. Back in the days where the proliferation of ideas was the big thing, powers-that-be desperately tried to control the printing press that enabled it.

During the age of exploration was a period of curious experimentation with privateering. Private enterprises were given state-like legitimacy in conducting trade and plunder in faraway lands. In the Caribbean, pirates (essentially, rogue privateers) briefly dreamed up their own pirate-run sovereign from Nassau but this was pretty quickly tamed. More successful was the privateering in Asia, where European colonial rulers delegated their power to private enterprises, leading to the creation of the world's first publicly traded company and truly global VOC and its many European dopplegangers.

While functioning independently of the state, these private enterprises took great advantage from the recognized legitimacy of their sovereign masters and more or less wielded the same instruments. They have access to the same weaponries, knowledge and most importantly, the financial resources of nation-state.

With the discovery of atomic weapons at the end of WW II, the world powers essentially decided to put a stop to this. The big idea was to restrict the use and deployment of the most potentially disruptive weapons to state players only. Again, I'd argue that one hundred years of recent tech advancement have accelerated the discovery process to a point rendering this idea obsolete.

While state-imposed restrictions might work well enough so far to keep people like Bin Laden from acquiring their own suitcase nuke, it is proving to be woefully inadequate to stop the actual use of horrible weapons. Slightly less dramatic but equally disruptive instruments like chemical weapons are favourite for cruel tyrants because they are easy to make and much harder to control and monitor than nuclear centrifuges.

Existing non-profileration controls are primarily designed to keep nuclear, ballistics and space based weapon technologies among the big players. As technology paces forward and all sorts of new things become available, rapid militarization of scientific domains will prove to be much more challenging to contain.

Space based exploration is an obvious place to watch. The first space race to put a man on the moon was a matter of sovereign aspiration as much as it was to test the edge of possibilities. It gave birth to satellites, global connectivity, real time technologies and so forth along with inter continental ballistic missile.

Naturally, progress seemed to stop and the race over for quite a while. As it was, not much more to do in space, the world was happy enough to leave it be.

GPS is a good example of how space based exploration rapidly becomes an everyday issue - and of paramount military importance. It evolved from the ground based global navigation system used in the world war and the need to have a global positioning system. From Wikipedia:

While there were wide needs for accurate navigation in military and civilian sectors, almost none of those was seen as justification for the billions of dollars it would cost in research, development, deployment, and operation for a constellation of navigation satellites. During the Cold War arms race, the nuclear threat to the existence of the United States was the one need that did justify this cost in the view of the United States Congress. This deterrent effect is why GPS was funded. It is also the reason for the ultra secrecy at that time. The nuclear triad consisted of the United States Navy's submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) along with United States Air Force (USAF) strategic bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Considered vital to the nuclear-deterrence posture, accurate determination of the SLBM launch position was a force multiplier.

Even with most of the publicly known space efforts cease in relevance (think NASA unfunded and the ISS neglected) the militarization of space based technology improves only faster and quicker. India, China, Russia all have space based military programs with growing sophistication.

However, as the use of these technologies are also increasingly vital to civilian use (think the search for MH370), so will be the incentive for any commercial enterprise. From Google founders to Jeff Bezos to Elon Musk, a new age of space exploration is already well in motion.

On the ground, companies are already well past their learning curve in going cross jurisdiction. Learning a great deal from the past strategic advantages of being transnational in the East Indies adventures, modern day multi nationals are already too big to fail or to jail. With the financial system in place, private enterprises can now truly evolve to its non-state form and remove its sovereign dependencies.

True to the spirit of privateering, going non-jurisdicitional has always been the leading contender for a cyberpunk wet dream, like Neil Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, or the Principality of Sealand (with some obvious modification).

To take it one step further, instead of liberating an independent node of the network, society itself now responds as a network. If Cryptonomicon was Napster then think of the next generation as TOR and peer to peer network. Not entirely yet independent of the sovereign masters but evidently severe enough to be disruptive.

Under less pressing circumstances, there are many other scenarios on how things will simply go beyond any meaningful sovereign oversight, much less control. In the world of information technology and cyber infrastructure, private enterprises are already as much embedded into the military industrial complex as its generational predecessor was. Except that instead of building overpriced big boy toys like F-22, next generation private contractors are building surveillance and weaponized cyber instruments and making them available to to everyone.

Edward Snowden revelation of the practices of the Five-Eyes intelligence practices only brought this potential flash point to focus. Sure, the NSA said they were not in the business of industrial or economic espionage but who's to say that when they go after private companies, US or Chinese, then they're not actually playing the exact same game?

Rudimentary restriction of technology transfer or propagation of ideas will be rendered ineffective and eventually, futile. Both because the technology will get easier as well as the private enterprises building them removing themselves further from sovereign oversight.

The Chinese already did this wholesale by overriding the entire western copyright regime with their own and building themselves the gigantic industrial scale to shift global balance irrevocably. When it comes to say, biogenetic experiment or advanced energy generation for example, it's not hard to see how the economic incentive will be sufficient to even accommodate the idea of co-opting whole nation-states or at least, a significant chunk of them.

We've seen this with the cartel-rebels in Latin America where the effective role of nation-state itself was reduced secondary to mad priests and death worshipper. The idea is not entirely crazy and well, even likelier to happen in the future. In global marijuana trade for example, American states legalizing the use and Uruguay legalizing trade is already seen as the momentum for the change in the upcoming UN convention.

Sometime within the next generation, one of them will eventually do it properly and the world will have to rework the whole thing about how to make things right. Like functioning and available alternative to nation-state. Until it happens, they will simply just call it a crazy.

on The End

2014-03-25T03:39:00.002+07:00

from WSJ

So they now know the plane 'ended' in south Indian Ocean west of Australia. Apparently, based on a type of analysis never before used on Inmarsat satellite data for an investigation of this sort, said Prime Minister Razak earlier today.

on Barges and SysAdmins

2014-03-23T14:31:00.000+07:00

Some newsflash...

From Iran, American eyes-in-sky picked up a life sized Nimitz aircraft carrier being built in a shipyard by the Persian Gulf. Realistically, the Iranians don't yet know how to build a nuclear carrier so it must've been a mockup barge - perhaps to be used for target shooting in the future. Obviously, these days with so many things to do and crazy ideas yet to be tested, Google isn't the only one building secret barges. I remember reading about an Italian (or European) biogenetic lab installed on a cruise ship awhile ago, they wanted to try clone human and stuff, things that won't otherwise be allowed on land. Anyone knows where it is?

From the Indian Ocean, they still haven't found MH370. Here's a good article from the New York Times with some of the compiled facts and updates. The article also answers my previous questions about the Inmarsat ping sequence (apparently, they did have all of it not just the last one so there was a rough flight trajectory of sort).

From the Snowden files, we read an NSA plan to compile a global list of Sys Admin. Presumably then, whenever they wanna go into a network, they can just pull the list and see who to task and target. Another set of slides show NSA operation against Huawei, the global Chinese telecom.

From NYT: On Saturday, NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines said in a statement that the agency’s activities “are focused and specifically deployed against — and only against — valid foreign intelligence targets in response to intelligence requirements.”

She said that the United States does not “steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of — or give intelligence we collect to — U.S. companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line.”

Really? Why not?

on Black Flags, Yellow Cake and a Green World

2014-03-22T14:13:00.005+07:00

Real talers have the same existence that the imagined gods have. Has a real taler any existence except in the imagination, if only in the general or rather common imagination of man? Bring paper money into a country where this use of paper is unknown, and everyone will laugh at your subjective imagination.
~Karl Marx, 1841

With the plane still missing and no obvious clue, we should go on look at some other things.

Like a probable war in Europe. Well, not quite. President Obama ruled out US military involvement in Ukraine. To be frank, apart from the Ukrainian themselves, nobody else is seriously considering the possibility a military conflict with Russian Federation in the middle of Europe, 2014.

Of course, you can't really blame them Ukrainian. They were once a nuclear power, with the world's third largest nuclear arsenal, forced to give it up at the end of the Cold War. With the Soviet Union crumbling and the ghastly experience of Chernobyl deeply embedded in the national psyche, it must've seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

At the moment, there are several hundred thousands Russian soldiers on the Ukrainian borders with tens of thousands already in taking control in Crimea. On the news, Ukrainian soldiers in Crimean bases disarmed and humiliated, some sent home without their weapons or uniforms. From other parts, there are pictures of young men signing up for a national guard service, making preparation for the worse yet to come. On telly, Ukrainian politicians are openly revisiting the virtues of the decision to remove their nukes. As in, maybe it's idea that a now-vulnerable Ukraine needs to revisit.

It sounds like 1939 all over again when Western Europe simply refused to acknowledge the fact that Hitler was extending the border of his Third Reich further and further away. The rest of the world was happy enough with the false sense of security in the hopeful thinking that nothing too bad will actually happen. Of course, as it turned out, something much worse, indeed, the worst that mankind had ever seen so far, did happen not long after with World War II.

No, not even the stupid would suggest that Ukraine 2014 will lead to a World War III. Probably not, and most definitely, not immediately. Even back then, it took a while for world leaders to realize just how crazy Adolf was and mobilize their military. It wasn't at all a case of not knowing what's going on because everyone knew full well what was happening even then. More like nobody really wanted to do anything, thinking that whatever they could've done would cost too much.

In any event, things are still happening. We don't know yet how this will pan out but Mr. Putin is making several things plenty clear. Like the present state of the world - UN, NATO, etc. - is far from adequate to keep an international order. Bluster and rhetoric aside, Mr. Putin shows the world that when push comes to shove, he could do whatever the hell he wishes and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

Energy dependencies will be critical in shaping the power balance of the world. This thing with Ukraine pokes an embarrassing chink in Europe much glorified defence. Fracking, renewables, smarter distribution and other green planet pitches are now officially in national security territory. Global recession? What about a new global arm race? Not one with nuclear warheads, first strike capabilities or long range bombers, more like drones, electronic intrusion, commoditization of small warfare.

Likewise, I don't believe that Mr. Putin is a singular figure in affecting this change. Other autocrats, other countries have no shortage of crazier ideas. The thing with the plane will bring to focus national defence and territorial sovereign integrity in Southeast Asia. Pragmatic, regional ad hoc blocks fill the gap where the global superpowers were once. Long term vision of universal peace and values will have to be dictated by short term interests. And so forth as history knows.

Me, I'd like to look one step ahead and go beyond the traditional nation-state disruption threat model. The Pope made a speech the other day, telling the mafia they will go to hell if they continue on being bad. Is there a research somewhere that studied the belief system of the bad people?

There is absolutely no reason to assume that the next global villain will be a sovereign leader. After all, sovereigns still have to rely on all those pesky people. A CEO or cartel warlord will know better how to motivate his the subject. You know, like the pirates in Nassau.

Anyhow, well, enjoy your weekend.

on Why Would Anyone Steal MH370

2014-03-20T03:02:00.002+07:00

Why would anyone steal a 777? Well, why not? People have attempted to do the wildest things - like stealing oil tankers and big cargo planes - so stealing a 777 is just the natural progression of things.

Previously, I've posted who, where and how someone would want to to steal a jetliner. Now, let's see why they would want to do it.

Classic 911 Scenario. Steal the plane, crash it into a building and make world headlines. *sigh*

Passengers Ransom. The passengers removed from the plane - separated far enough to avoid a rescue operation - and ransom demanded. Maybe political for the Chinese, maybe for the skills and experience of the engineers on the plane, whatever, still a lot of hostage.

Plane Sold. The plane, dismantled for spare will still get a lot of money. Brand new it costs around 300m USD, so even at 50m USD it will be a bargain. The crazy general might also decide to study the plane in order to further Myanmar jet industry in the future.

Narco-Smugglers Cargo. Selling the plane of course, makes you wonder, who buys unregistered plane? Well, narco cartels do all the time. A plane load of cocaine will be worth north of 1bn USD and the cartels have been looking for an efficient South America - Africa transport for ages. Likewise, in Africa, there are hundreds of unregistered planes, flying arms, minerals and whole load of other things. Coincidentally, from Africa, their primary connect to the rest of the world will be towards Central Asia where apart from arms, there are also a lot of heroin transport orders.

Russia-Crimea-Ukraine. Russian Spec-Op Forces stole the plane, refuelled in Kazakhstan and into void within the Federation to keep US and Chinese surveillance assets busy when Mr. Putin massed his soldiers on the Ukrainian border.

United States-South China Sea. The US steal the plane to show how vulnerable South East Asian countries are and position itself as the counter balance to the Chinese military muscle flexing. They flew it to Diego Garcia.

China-Myanmar. China had always wanted a seaport into the Indian Ocean. The strategic value of acquiring and subduing the Myanmar can not be understated. Hundreds of Chinese citizens dead and hidden in the Burmese jungle will be a pretext for just such a move.

on Why Malaysia is Probably Wrong (again)

2014-03-19T22:12:00.003+07:00

Ok, someone from Prune also noticed the funny Malaysian answer from MH370 press conference today, highlighting precisely my earlier questions about the initial Malaysian (and subsequent Thailand) radar reading. The transcript is pasted below (original here). The path in question is marked in red on the map above.

*** QUOTE BEGIN ***

---------------------------

Journalist: Can you confirm that after the turnback radar data shows the plane passed through at least two waypoints before it headed out into the Bay of Bengal? Do you have evidence to support two waypoints to have passed through that sort of zig zag pattern indicated out in the Bay of Bengal?

Rahman: I think that that was something that we are going to investigate. I think we have passed through that stage now. What we are going to do now is to find the aircraft that is more important than that. Let us investigate on that …(interrupted by Journalist)

Journalist: What evidence do you have? Do you have pictures to show the passing through… (interrupted by Rahman)

Rahman: I think that is something the investigation is doing now and what we are going to concentrate now is to find the aircraft and that is why we have this the Northern and Southern corridors, (Interrupted by the Minister)

Minister: And the reason why we are looking for the aircraft is we hope that by locating the aircraft we are able to find the black box and if we do find the black box then your answer will be categorically answered.

Journalist: If you have the radar data now why can’t you tell us? It’s a very crucial piece of information which can show evidence … (interrupted by Rahman)

Rahman: We have gone beyond that. We have had information from a satellite data that the aircraft have flown up to the time 8:11 in the morning so we are concentrating now our effort now to find the aircraft.

The next question pertained to confirmation whether the plane had diverted course westwards before the co-pilot said, “Goodnight.” Rahman denied the prior course diversion then stated, “We don’t know”

---------------------------
*** QUOTE END ***

There you have it. The Malaysians never knew for certain that it was the same plane they saw. They're gone 'past that' and straight to the Inmarsat signal seven hours later (which is no good for locating a plane). As the transcript above, they're not admitting it out loud, but it very well may have been that the Malaysian - both civilian air traffic and military radar simply lost the plane from the very early on - before the red path on the map above.

The Thais only said they thought they saw something the Malaysian saw, it wasn't even a validation.

The whole decision of moving the search west - all the way to the Maldives (!!!) was based on this very flaky piece of information. This piece from a 777 pilot put to test the 'climb up to 45,000' theory on a proper GE flight sim - you can read the conclusion there - but I will keep in mind that this particular bit of the flight - the erratic patterns, etc. was all based on the above mentioned radar sightings.

I can only imagine the uproar if Malaysia botched out this one and moved back the search area to the Gulf of Thailand. At this point, like the poster above and many others, I'm inclined not to believe the Malaysian too much without at least a secondary validation (or at least the validation methods disclosed).

The Malaysians are not exactly the most forthcoming with these types of information on their citizen, a lot of is about face and looking good for the cameras. One needs only to look at the past 911 investigation (which was planned in Malaysia) to get it.

In any event, I still think they should look for it in Myanmar, if only because nobody seem to look for it there yet.

on Looking for MH370 in Myanmar

2014-03-19T17:57:00.000+07:00

Popa Taungkalat Shrine, Myanmar

Day Twelve. Nothing new today but I've learned more about some questions I had from yesterday.

Myanmar. Most perplexing is the fact that nobody seem to be looking for the plane in Myanmar. Why is that?

Reading the news on MH370, it seems like everyone is willing to look for it everywhere - Kazakhstan, China/Kyrgyzstan, the Andaman Sea, all over Indian Ocean as far as the Maldives as well as west coast of Australia - but not Myanmar.

Maybe people are working under the assumptions for the best case scenario, namely that since this is a commercial, civilian flight, everyone - all nations - will be on their bestest behaviour to look for this plane. The thinking is probably that if the Burmese seen the plane, they would've said something.

Well, I don't think this is the case. Even if we eliminate the fringe of conspiracy theories about extreme rendition programs (that would've used the US base in Diego Garcia, which was used to accommodate just such flights in the past), we know that rogue and unregistered aircrafts do fly around everywhere. Narco traffickers in Latin America for example have used various large body planes, with ad hoc airport setup, refuel and maintenance crew and all, to fly regular smuggling route all over the place.

Myanmar is a blind spot to much of the world, approximately the size of Thailand and it's pretty much right on the corridor when the airliner was last seen. Wouldn't it be logical to look there?

Since now at least some people are seriously considering the possibility about MH370 landing somewhere and either took off again or simply hidden, then they must consider the possibility of this thing being in Myanmar. Check on my crazy general.

I'm choosing the slightly more dramatic scenario, but the plane could've crashed in the jungle just the same, it's still worth looking there, no? It's a very big and dense jungle, entirely conceivable that the Burmese doesn't notice it yet. It took the Thais 10 days to look for it because apparently, Malaysia didn't ask. CAN SOMEONE PLEASE ASK THE BURMESE, LIKE NOW?

Flight Path. The other thing is the ambiguities about where the plane was last read and its last known path. I caught the Malaysian press conference just now (Wed, 19), someone asked this very question: If the official can confirm that the plane had indeed followed several waypoints after leaving its planned route, heading west towards the Andaman Sea?

The answer I heard was surprisingly shallow: Malaysian officials simply insisted that the "have gone beyond that point now" - that since the aircraft was picked up by the Inmarsat satellite ping more than six hours later, then they just want "to find the aircraft."

Hmm... I understand the priority is to look for the plane, but wouldn't it be easier to look for it if we knew where it was last seen?

The reason why I think this question is EXTREMELY important:

The possibility that the Malaysian primary radar reading misidentified MH370 in the first place. They picked up some other plane (SQ68) on a waypoint and later in the confusion for the search, thought that it's MH370. Yes, this is very much possible, almost 'normal' - I elaborated on this here more here. There's a good thread about this theory and the base course of MH370 by much smarter people too, here.

The false conclusion would confirm the theory that the plane was deliberately flown by experienced pilots following known navigational waypoints and not some sort emergency flight path after a catastrophic malfunction onboard.

Since these are practically the only information we had to look for MH370 on the west side of Malaysian Peninsula, then this could be critical for the search effort. If the plane had never gone that far west, maybe they should go back and look for nearer to where it was, in South China Sea/Gulf of Thailand?

The Malaysian officials in the press conference today seemed to pin his hope on the last Inmarsat ping - which placed the aircraft somewhere in the two arcs, extending to the northern and southern hemisphere each, spanning a ridiculously area.

I still don't have definitive answers yet on the questions about the Inmarsat satellite data. Specifically about the ping intervals - if the maintenance pings are regulated in specified intervals (hourly I think) and the last was picked up by satellites some seven hours into the flight, then what happens to the previous pings? Wouldn't there be a history of sort?

So far, my limited understanding suggests that the satellite pings only happen when the plane is in the air or the engine running. Here's a great explainer from an aviation site on how these things work.

This satellite pinging thingymagic was NEVER designed/used for locating planes but more engine maintenance purposes. The signals are picked and processed by the satellite company in London, passed to Rolls Royce who build the engines, compiled in their data with the thousands of their other engines, and only shared with the airline maintenance on limited basis. As far as I know, they had never attempted and succeeded in trying to locate a missing plane just by using this type of satellite signals. The article above from Air Traffic Management explains this some more.

One explainer for the missing ping history from MH370 is the simplest - it's not missing. Inmarsat/Rolls Royce/Boeing as well as the UK/US authorities treat these kind of data as sensitive and afaik, they don't release the raw. Since the plane was on a regular route, then maybe the only thing they have is the reading from that single satellite and say, they were all in the same area, and therefore no more accurate than what we already know. However, common sense would suggest that having two or more pings (even from only the same one satellite) would still give us better understanding on the state of MH370 mid flight, rather than a single ping eight hours after the plane took off. Also, some people suggested that within its original flight route towards Beijing, it would've been picked up by another Pacific satellite (which is why all the arcs at the moment are bending westward).

The other explanation for the missing ping history from MH370 in the earlier part of its flight is maybe - just maybe - the plane had landed somewhere? Again, I'm not an expert in these things but my understanding is that the thingymagic only pings when the plane is airborne?

In any event, I find it startling that the Malaysian authorities could simply brush off the possibility that they had made a mistake in accurately locating the plane within the first five hours using ground based signals - and instead direct the whole search expedition relying solely on an Inmarsat geostationary satellite that picked a ping either on north or south hemisphere hours later.

Again, I think people here are working on the best case assumption. That the plane couldn't have landed and if it had crashed somewhere so close to the original path, debris would've been found (South China Sea is much shallower and easier to search than Indian Ocean). Also in a crash, some emergency locator beacon would've been picked up.

Well then, the simplest deduction then would be, what if the plane had landed somewhere not too far from the flight path? Really, what if the plane landed somewhere in north Myanmar/Thai/Laos, or South/West China?

The Chinese said they've 21 satellites now looking for it in their part, but as anyone could've seen on the map, to get to China, it must've passed across the Burmese airspace. Since even Thailand (right there too next to Burma and Malaysia) had only reported that they might've seen the plane some 10 days ago, seemingly no one could rule out entirely the possibility that the plane was in Myanmar.

So now we're back to my crazy general scenario. Why not even look there? Seriously, someone tell me why not.

PS: Yes, everyone is obsessed with a "911 like" scenario - that the most likely motive to steal a plane is to use it for some later day attack. I don't think so. I think there are many hundreds more useful things you could do with a Boeing 777 than crashing them into buildings.

on The Different Degrees of Not Knowing

2014-03-19T03:49:00.001+07:00

"I really doubt aliens took it. It's got to be somewhere.”
~Courtney Love

Not much about the plane - today's cycle is basically everything I been saying the last few days - with minor development. The whole conversation about what we do know and we don't about MH370 is very Rumsfeld-esque. Ah well...

Where To Look For It. When I first suggested MH370 flew north into Myanmar and landed in a crazy general basement hangar, people thought I was crazy. One guy wrote and told me to get a real job.

Well, seems like now people want to look for the plane in some crazy heroin warlord hangar in the desert in Kazakhstan. Which is presumably less crazier than my crazy general hangar. I only like Myanmar because it's closer and just as blind to the rest of the world as North Korea and Somalia is, the plane could've landed (or crashed) pretty much anywhere in the country and very much conceivable nobody had seen it (and the military wouldn't admit it). If I was planning an operation to steal a jumbo airliner, I wouldn't risk taking it too far - better to land the plane before it goes on international news and everyone started looking for it.

Today the Malaysian held a press conference again, which seem to have less and less informative everyday. Today, they just keep on saying "to put politics aside" and look for the plane. Except that they don't even know where to look for it. They pretty much admitted to it, their official role is now "coordinator" of sort. Come to think of it, they sound like Indonesian officials only slightly better dressed.

Speaking of getting dressed, Courtney Love might've found MH370. Not sure if they've checked the spot she was looking at. I would.

TVOne, the Indonesian numero uno news channel, suggested the plane might've been diverted to Diego Garcia in the middle of Indian Ocean. Apparently they had some Snowden/Wikileaks docs that suggested so. While they were at it, TVOne also had a shrink source and suggested it was the work of a gay pilot. It was on the evening news so it must be true. Someone should look there.

The Flight Path. Obviously nobody knows where the plane is now, ten days or more into the event. Since we don't know where MH370 is maybe we should try going back and find out where (and when) exactly we knew where the plane was. This is when the Malaysians are really clouding the investigation. Without knowing where it was last known, we don't even know where to look for it.

I been asking for days (yes, I think people should take me seriously, I've proven to be less crazy than most people on telly these days) someone should've asked Thailand for their radar information/sightings. For the geographically challenged, it's right next door to Malaysia and right on from where the plane went missing.

The reason why this is important is of course, since the plane was missing right next door, before we look in Kazakhstan, it would've been easier to check first in Thailand. Or yes, Myanmar - but I don't think they have sophisticated manned radar stations in that part or too willing to share. Well, guess what, apparently the Malaysian never asked.

Thailand said they might have seen an unidentified plane that could've been MH370, right where the Malaysian thought they saw the plane. You see why I think this piece of information is extremely flaky.

Now, contrary that what you been told in Hollywood movies, no, nations don't just 'scramble jets' to chase and intercept harmless looking commercial plane in busy flight corridors, even if they were unidentified. Only in America and maybe parts of Europe they do that. In this part of the world the radar stations aren't even always manned.

It is perfectly natural for the Thais to have seen an unidentified blip on their radar and not done anything about it. The Malaysian admitted that their military radar also didn't do anything about the blip, having identified it as MH370 days after the plane had gone missing.

The entire search in the Indian Ocean - and Kazakhstan - is based on this information. We assume that what they thought they saw is correct. One theory flying around the internet is that MH370 could've piggybacked on SQ68, an identical Singapore Airlines going for Barcelona. The theory goes with the plane flying 'dark' (all its transmitter off), SQ68 wouldn't have noticed and the ground radar would've been fooled into thinking it's one plane.

Again, I been told that this near impossible in real world. Military fighters do that - mostly Americans who flew long range flight with online refuels and stuff, maybe - but two airliner so close for so long (presumably they would've gone across the Indian Ocean and enter India/Pakistan radar trapped airspace) - is highly unlikely.

BUT....

What if the Malaysian radar was wrong? Maybe, quite possibly I think, the Malaysian radar misidentified the SQ68 (or some other commercial flight, it is a busy air corridor). My understanding was that this was a "blip" - a reading of unidentified plane, its location, perhaps its relative size and velocity, but not its identification.

If we follow the whole story so far, the transponder (which would self identify itself to a ground query) was already off at this point. The ACARS, they aren't so certain, but likely, also disabled. There are no buttons but there's a panel for it and it might well have been tampered with. There's positively no radio confirmation with the plane for this Malaysian military report. So we don't know if they identified MH370.

What of the Thailand report today that they seen the plane? Well, not necessarily. Imagine that you're a radar guy that deal with blobs of unidentified blips that happens everyday in places where nothing had ever really happened, then asked to recall what might've happened in a non specific time period. I'm not saying the radar dude lied, but I'm questioning how exactly did they identify the blip as MH370?

Obviously the plane diverted from its route just before Vietnam. Most of everyone seem to agree the plane appeared to be heading west, but how far exactly, is entirely reliant on the Malaysian reports on seeing unidentified blip. How do we know the plane gone that far west? How far exactly? How do we know this for certain? Can anyone positively rule out the plane did not immediately head north?

The Thais, for all the good that it do, merely said they saw a blip that could've been the same blip as what they Malaysian thought they had seen.

Well, if the plane didn't get that far west, then they probably should've been looking up north. Back to Myanmar. China said they're now using 21 satellites to look for it in China. Right.

The Satellite Data. I understand that the Inmarsat satellite picked up a live ping from MH370 some seven hours or more into the flight. I understand that it would've been somewhere along the arc. Now the questions to ask here are:

- The maintenance pings are regulated at specified intervals only during flights (or maybe whenever the engine was running?). I understand that we can't tell precisely the altitude of the plane from this ping (or can we?) but is it possible that the plane was stationary at the time of the transmission?

- If the last ping was known to be seven hours well into the flight and it was regulated in specific intervals - wouldn't we have data from the previous pings? If we have more than a single ping, by tracing it on the arc, wouldn't we be able to locate - or at least eliminate half the hemisphere from the search quadrant?

- If Inmarsat do not have this data from the previous pings, why is that? Is there an explanation as to why we do not have the previous pings? Is it possible that the plane landed (and therefore off and the maintenance ping wasn't available) - and only picked up again elsewhere after its 2nd take off?

Note that most of these questions are really, questions that we should've asked early on. Much early on. Someone should find out.

Plane Navigation. Other news today are suggesting the plane was changed due west via the Flight Management System console (as opposed to manual override by a pilot turning the plane). I understand the significance of this to understand if maybe someone else in cockpit was in control, etc. but not entirely sure how that fits to explain things better.

However, I've long maintained that the plane was on navigational waypoints along the way to Andaman Islands (see Flight Path above). Since this was most probably already preloaded (the plane previously served that route), then maybe someone just load up a preexisting route, and switch to it? Again, it's a busy corridor, someone insisted that it would be possible.

That means you need only one person in the cockpit, an experienced pilot that knows his plane. Or maybe like Mr. Goodfellow said, they altered the course due to some emergency. I like his theory, which is very simple indeed. To quote "What I think happened is the flight crew was overcome by smoke and the plane continued on the heading, probably on George (autopilot), until it ran out of fuel or the fire destroyed the control surfaces and it crashed. You will find it along that route–looking elsewhere is pointless."

With the one glaring question - how come we haven't found it yet then? Like he said, it would just fly on - where? Not Europe, I hope...

Meanwhile, there's a war getting ready in Europe and Oscar Pistorius had his crime scene on international telly, very OJ-ish. And yes, Indonesia is ecstatic over the presidential nominee Joko Widodo but I'm ohso bored.

Happy Wednesday, all. I'm gonna go home now. The map on the top I stole from Ogle Earth and this page in Reddit as dynamically crowdsourced comprehensive timeline of sort.

on The Hunt for MH370

2014-03-18T02:47:00.001+07:00

Preliminary Notes

Malaysian authorities have been very unreliable from the start and if that could've been attributed to them being caught very much unprepared for such a large tragedy, like anyone would), they're not really getting better at it. If anything, the Malaysian treatment of this search is consistently going worse. Granted, other people weren't exactly expecting this sort of thing. An Indonesian official in KL was quoted saying they didn't look for it on their side of the strait because the Malaysian didn't ask for it. China, with most passengers onboard now will have to deal with the passengers background and stuff too.

- False Passports. One would argue that this should be - by far and large - a large-ish flag. The Malaysian authority was very quick to dismiss the possibility of human involvement in the incident. Gross negligence, and quite an irresponsible decision. Ground investigation and the multinational coordination could've been initiated from ten days ago but it wasn't.

- The Flight Path. This is the flakiest part of all and the one I'm most shocked with. At the moment, I tend to believe only the first two hours or so of the flight. I think the Malaysian lost the plane pretty much as soon as it took off. It doesn't necessarily mean that it was hijacked. The plane might well have experienced some kind of technical malfunction and flew on and crashed somewhere, but the Malaysian simply have already lost it far before it actually crashed.

The major implication here was the decision not to look overland. That's just silly. I've been arguing for that from day four. Of course then everyone got confused by the news that MH370 might've crossed back to the other side of Malaysian Peninsula, ruled out by the Malaysian, then confirmed again only a few days later.

At this point, I'm not even convinced that the plane ever left Gulf of Thailand/South China Sea. So far, the only thing anyone can be absolutely certain about is the last verifiable comm between the plane and someone on the ground. Someone in the cockpit said "Good night" - then they were never heard from again.

The Malaysian report of radar reading detecting "a blip" that they first denied ever seeing, and later confirmed as MH370 flying "erratically" across Malaysia proper and into the Strait of Malacca, towards the Andaman Sea, I think must be reexamined once again. I wrote about this the other day, I'm saying it again. Military installations aren't always forthcoming about their sigint particularly in scenarios like this where it was (at the time of the event) a civilian, non hostile environment. Malaysian officials were quoted in describing the said "blip" using those precise words.

One alternative is to get secondary confirmation if anyone else saw the same "blip" - again I been prodding Indonesian media to start asking serious questions, there are some major airports in the area. A guy from Slate found out that the Indian operates their Andaman stations on "as needed" basis. So in fact, nobody could be even absolute certain that the plane ever took that path.

One important question will be can Thailand rule out completely the possibility that MH370 have flown across, into Myanmar and further North? (I found the map above from CNBC) It does look like the most obvious, simplest explanation.

- The Timeline. Just about every media outlet in the world is attempting to build a timeline. They can only use the publicly available information, and that is quite limited, since this is an airplane and airspace. Most outlets rely on Malaysian military and corporate technocracts - who owns the plane and is leading the charge and looking convincing enough. Most politicians are more concerned about not losing face.

The announcement that the plane was deliberately rerouted by someone in cockpit and the start of the criminal investigation the other day was announced by Prime Minister Razak. What if the plane really had never gone that far and it was a malfunction afterall? I insist we go back and revalidate the Malaysian electronics reading in the early hours.

As you can easily see above, if you can't reliably validate the route, then the whole timeline falls apart. At best, it still looks very flaky.

- The Electronic Signals. Amplifying the confusion is all the different technical terms, often using respectable sounding avionic or military terms, or exotic instruments - like radars and satellites. Where in most scenarios these things are usually reliable enough but as you can see in the search of MH370, this is not always a case.

I suggested also apart from the ground confusion, the possibility of the transmission being corrupted from the plane - either by the comms being disabled by human person, or maybe technical failure. Is it possible that the information was corrupted in the first place? Like if someone hacked the plane?

Without knowing exactly what happened in the cockpit (this the critical few hours immediately after take off when the plane's reading was presumably all normal and they were still registered and identified by ground signals properly.

I asked multiple friends if it's possible that the satellite reading was corrupted? For example, if satellite read altitude of the plane incorrectly, or maybe timezone confusion, et cetera. What I been told was that generally, this is highly unlikely to happen. Yes, crazy people like in Die Hard movies showed that it was maybe possible but never known to happen. Satellite pings are usually very accurate, quite simply because normally the ping contained very, very limited amount of information (on/off status, hours logged, maybe some critical pressure readings, but very limited).

From what I understand, there has never been any successful attempt to try locating a plane in an area of this size by solely using the satellites data. There are hundreds of satellites out there and just calling them up and asking for it takes sometime. Even if you get multiple readings, due to the different time intervals (hourly pings is normal), you still will not be able to locate it more accurately. This thing wasn't designed to locate a missing plane.

But then again, no plane of this size had ever gone missing for so long before.

on False Flags and Source Verification

2014-03-18T02:23:00.000+07:00

Designing a smart-ish system to help human access and assess large volume of unstructured data in an interesting challenge.

In working on the experiment with my little band of brothers, I've discovered a number of interesting problems. Some of these may well be technical issues that someone will address soon, others are probably design elements that we will need to factor in before coming up with technical solutions. I might also just be sleep deprived and confused.

Below, they are listed in no particular order.

- Confidence Interval. This has always been something we kinda took for granted. When you define a domain for certain task, the assumption always was information within the boundary is almost more likely to be accurate. Beyond the boundary, outside the domain, the data will be discarded and considered noise.

We assume, to a high degree, that the information will be correct and accurate, so the design decision was too focus on figuring out the relevance The assumption is that large media organization diligently observe their journalistic duty on source verification but I don't think this is a useful assumption.

Not like this is really anything new - I've dealt with such problems before and (I think) we've built some of the rules into the system. I will try to explain why I now think it's probably inadequate and we need a different approach. For the case with MH370 I elaborate more on why I think this is so in a separate post here.

Case A - This was the gold trade test we ran last year. The Domain definition works very well to maintain a very high degree of confidence on the data quality. We limit sources to only publicly available gold price data points. When combined with the narrow definition of gold "news and related stuff" (the non numerical, unstructured part), we were able to attribute a sufficiently high degree of confidence that the machine was almost always correct. The gold traders I think felt the same. This is despite the inclusion of many, many random sources in the feed, coming from the near boundary areas of the domain definition. I call this fringe data and we treat them mostly like noise. We weren't attempting to guess gold price, no. We wanted the machine only to find out if today is a good day to trade gold, and if certain trade was executed, how would affect the portfolio value in the following day.

Case B - Media Monitoring. This is not a specific case from this experiment since nobody's overly crazy about developing yet another one but we've certainly learned a number of relevant things in the past. When dealing with certain policy making with great public interest (like major investigation, election, budget announcement, etc.) the amount of noise is ridiculously high. Since some of these were done in Indonesia (with ID based news sources) we can compare some results with those in overseas too and (I think) solved most of the problems.

Domain definition doesn't work so well in this case because these days and age, there are many more online sources out there beyond the traditional definition of sources used in most media monitoring tools. Social activities (Facebook, Twitter) also play great role in disseminating information, as well as forums, blogs etc.

In Indonesia for example, I've long argued that the local media consumption already shifts towards

much higher proportion of digital than other, more established market. However, this is an election year and since all the major media properties are pretty much directly getting involved in politics, the general consensus in the country (I think) is that "the media is owned by capitalist bastards."

One model was to weigh the news sources. It's a tedious job and entirely subjective to the man manning the machine and numerous clickmonkeys. I'm not a big fan of this one.

Another model, very intriguing but most probably not quite practical (yet). A crazy guy some ages ago tried to build a robot crawler to traverse and measure the propagation path of false information. Researchers do this all the time - measuring reach, contamination spread and even an airborne wi-fi virus - but most of these are based on attempting to calculate how the message will spread. I haven't heard much about people trying to monitor false flag and how they spread. We've seen stuff based on billing profiling and usage patterns and the likes, but those are mostly still well structured rows of numbers that could be resolved definitively with a secondary verification.

The reason for this being somewhat important is the simple fact that Politicians lie all the time. Gold traders certainly lie too, but not as much and not as loud. (more later)

In a major criminal investigation or ongoing court battles for example, publicly announced false information or inaccurate claims can greatly affect the court proceedings, maybe affect the witness. In major criminal cases in the US, the jury can be segregated away from the media during case, or maybe the judge can rule gag orders here and there, but in countries like Indonesia where sometimes even the official court papers aren't always available to the public, we could never really be sure that the information is true and occasionally we know for certain that the information is wrong. More on this later in the next Case.

For most practical use however, simple clustering usually works well enough. The thousands of bloggers, web wanderers and forum trolls will be clustered with the larger outlets. Even tho that many independent sites out there have great content, they still won't have the same breadth as professional media organisation and therefore the bigger your collection the better it is. In Indonesia, I've noticed that while many firms do use quite sophisticated Media Monitoring tools. "Social" Media Monitoring tools are also available in many flavors. I stand by the comment that the consumption of new media in Indonesia is probably higher than average but in public policy space, they're still far from accurate.

However, very few actually keep data and use them to make their tools better, which is silly. In some cases, this is extremely useful. In any event, yes, clustering usually works if you know how to do it properly.

Case C. MH370. This experiment is proving to be the very, very challenging. First was the scope of it. The domain of the search for the plane literally grow covering pretty much everything. Most traditional domain definition simply don't work anymore. The only good thing about it was the flight code, since "MH370" is pretty much a distinct signature so in this specific case a single keyword can be very useful for entity recogs and disambiguation.

One problem that immediately arose with this gigantic scope was scaling it properly. This is a design problem that we at least partially understood before - like the computational resource, architecture, hardware - and have stopgaps in place. Since we don't need to do this in real time, the 6-10hrs cycle works well enough.

Another was also much understood before - that we don't have enough bodies. The scriptlets are taking far too much time and far a distraction. There are much better ways to do it and we've done it with smaller domains but in MH370, this simply becomes too large to handle. There are some design scenarios that could probably solve this but it will take much more resources that we can't spare. Just the sheer scope of trying to deal with it practically choke the robots. (Initially we wanted to start with Ukraine but then MH370 is nearer and we abandoned the idea. In hindsight, maybe we should've done Ukraine instead)

Third is also well understood earlier but we ignored it on a design decision: Language. My argument is that so long as this is an international search, then the English language domain will suffice. It'll take a lot of scripting and some more esoteric domain definition but Google can do most of the work of locating them. However as I mentioned before, if the focus shifts to passengers background, where more than half are Chinese and others Malaysian, then we're gonna have to stop. Malay is different to Indonesian and with the scope of this thing that's just another layer of troubles.

Last, and probably most interesting finding so far is the previously mentioned false flags. MH370 spectacularly illustrated how wise the crazy guy really was. Tracking the false flags quickly became an overwhelming challenge. As above, I believe this is a design decision so we're gonna have to do it later. I now think the whole thing will have to be rebuild, but it will be better too.

Build. Rinse. Rebuild.

on Hacking a 777

2014-03-17T14:09:00.000+07:00

Col. Stuart: Windsor Flight 1-1-4, this is Dulles Approach. Do you copy?

Pilot (Windsor Flight 114): Dulles Approach, this is Windsor 1-1-4. Where the devil have you been?

Col. Stuart: Roger, 1-1-4, Dulles Approach. We've been right here all along, old man. Our systems only came back online just this very second. Windsor 1-1-4, you are cleared for ILS approach to Runway Two-Niner. Contact Dulles Tower frequency at the outer marker.

[On the Skywalk, McClane runs over to the windows]

John McClane: Jesus Christ, he's gonna crash the fucking plane!

Pilot (Windsor Flight 114): Roger, Approach, it's about time. I've got 230 people up here flying on petrol fumes.

Col. Stuart: Roger, 1-1-4, understand. Calibrate Dulles Altimeter setting Two-Niner-Niner-Two.

John McClane: Why are they listening to him?

Chief Engineer Leslie Barnes: It's our frequency! Why shouldn't they?

~Die Hard 2

Bonus question of the week is from a midweek chat: Can you hack a 777?

I haven't got around to properly learn about it but the short answer will be yes.

a) The transponders and communication in the cockpit. This is a quite simple 'hack'. In Flight MH370, they appeared to be disabled prior to the plane diverting from its flight plan, within hours after take off, over water en route towards Vietnam, the pilot said good night on the radio and switched everything off.

There is a switch to the transponder next to the pilot (usually OFF, ON and ~~RESET~~ STANDBY). In a 777 sized jet, for redundancies and stuff, there will be multiple transponders in the cockpit, all of them have similar switch.

This device - in its most commonly available form on commercial flights around the world - works on very basic, rudimentary principles. Essentially, it emits electronic signals with current location of the plane and its squawk code. The squawk code - think of it like a call sign - contains the code preloaded onto the transponder to identify the plane and its present flight path. Most scheduled commercial flights follow specific air routes for their destination, known as the navigational waypoints in the parlance. The transponders were preloaded with its waypoints prior to the flights (they might contain multiples preloaded scenario to adjust for weather condition, detour, etc.) and it goes on with the preset depending on the switch. Pilots would know how to insert a flight path and they regularly practice with simulators and stuff to get familiar with certain routes or train for specific condition.

The transponders themselves are truly, shockingly primitive system. In fact, it's not really used during take off or approaching a busy airport because then the plane would be designated a code by the air traffic on the ground, with visual validation to make sure that they weren't mixing up planes.

This critical communication element of the airliner, transmitter-responder, works only in 'interrogatory mode' meaning than upon queries from a ground radar station, the device will respond with a signal identifying itself and the declared destination. The radar - and the people operating them on the ground, if he was awake and happen to be doing his job - will then attempt secondary verification to identify the plane. An air traffic controller will engage in voice comm on the channels designated for the area air traffic. In far flung radar stations however where there are minimum excitement and only the usual traffic passing overhead, most commercial flights will be left alone, so hacking them will probably yield a few hours of air time until anyone noticed.

Flight MH370 last voice contact with ground radar took place almost precisely in a narrow range where the transponder was the primary mode, after the corresponding autopilot took over on the scheduled waypoints heading for Beijing but before the plane was recognized by stations in Vietnam. The last words said was apparently "Good night" then the transponder was switched off.

A single plane will not have multiple transponders on (eliminating the possibility of conflicting self identification) but all of them are can also disabled by an instrument panel somewhere, most likely in and around the cockpit. It may be outside the cockpit, not entirely sure.

The reason for this seemingly stupid design was that because commercial avionics is still a strange business. It costs too much to equip all planes with better features and outside the United States and Western Europe, people run things differently. Radar stations for example, aren't always manned, some of them staffed only in seasonal basis or even pretty much random according to a never published scheduling logic.

Military installations and aerial assets for example used entirely different kind of Friend/Foe identification system and so does most charter/business/diplomatic jets with smaller body flying over unscheduled route.

We never really heard about these potentially very dangerous exploit much because in most previous cases, the perpetrators were not expecting to survive with the plane. In 911, having taken over the cockpit and control of the plane, the hijackers simply redirect the planes towards their intended target using visual navigation and they didn't bother not announcing their intention. (more on this on the GPS section below).

The Malaysian authorities for example, when queried on why they didn't try to get early confirmation upon reading MH370 flying across the Peninsula so far out of their scheduled route responded with a "the plane didn't appear hostile."

It's like letting a bunch of people to get on the plane without double checking their passports and tickets at the airport and commenting "they appear docile" after the airport security videos made their way onto YouTube, which they also did.

b) Hacking its way out. This is the simplest hack on the list and only require a set of navigational waypoints to tell the plane where to fly automatically - also available from the cockpit. This thing can help a great deal to navigate a rogue plane attempting to blend into the regional air traffic.

The autopilot also will require minimum hacking since the waypoints was most likely already preloaded on the plane. It's been serving various destinations in the region for sometime and an additional set of regional waypoints is probably normal. In any event, hacking them will only require understanding which code corresponds to which route and switch the buttons on. In the case of MH370 several people have mentioned that the alleged waypoints follows almost the exact route heading for the Andalas Island. The last Malaysian contact with the plane from the western edge of the peninsula probably had a little more information, like if the plane on their radar screen was ever identified as MH370 and if yes, what was the secondary verification, if maybe the transponder was emitting different squawk code, or if it declared the specific intended waypoint, something. More than a week to the event however, this will not help in locating where the plane is today.

On the top of Sumatera, to the north of Banda Aceh, again, still within regular international air pattern but just skirting the Indonesian outer edge air space and far enough from the Indian installation in Andalas. I mentioned several times that this is an early warning base/restricted military installation but that means more that the Indians wouldn't want people to come to close to the islands but commercial airliners flying high overhead most likely won't attract much attention. Jeff Wise from Slate wrote that the Indian radar is operated on "as needed basis." - which is by the way, pretty much the same answer you gonna get from every other non nuclear country in the world.

Non nuclear powers never considered an airborne threat in their risk assessment. In the unfortunate scenario where an actual nuclear airborne threat is imminent, I guess they simply assume to duck. Or as in Myanmar, you build massive nuclear proof facilities underground, pretty much covering the whole country. The military junta there have been doing this for over a decade.

In a case with anything less than total confidence in Malaysian air readiness and the accuracy of their information, the M370 could've simply taken the more straightforward route, briefly crossing Thailand airspace using the same cloaking method as above, directly into Myanmar and landed the plane much earlier - perhaps even BEFORE its expected arrival time in Beijing. The route would've looked something like on this map drawn out by CNBC. The timeline however, we know even less about considering that we think we know the onboard equipment was expertly tampered with, and probably hacked.

Following my crazy general storyline, the only hacking left to do was to enter the Myanmar airspace which will not be very difficult since what passes there as an air defence is a generic weather prediction. Evading radar is also much less exciting than what the phrase suggests because FIR maps with notation on the regional airspace are regularly made available to pilots and air traffic controller. I posted one that covers this region yesterday.

Locating the airport is probably slightly more challenging because even if the rudimentary transponder cloaking succeeded to confuse local Bumese radar temporarily, it will need to find a place to land soon. Practicing the trip on a simulator would've come in very handy but most likely, the people in control of the plane had some other navigational instrument, most probably a GPS device separate from the plane instruments, maybe even satellite telephones or other navigational aid to help them find its destination.

This article explains a little more about a Myanmar no fly zone procedures from 2011 and it has some pictures. The site is also the source of the picture I use at the top. There isn't much information about Burma, but this site has some geospatial pictures and snapshots of the facilities, including one massive personal paranoid complex with watch tunnels, etc.

c) The passengers cellphones and other onboard electronics. Ground based communication like cell phones need to be close enough to ground to function. Within the normal altitude for a Boeing 777 above Myanmar more than five hours into the flight, even if anyone had their device on, it wouldn't be picking up signals from the ground. Though the junta reportedly also lay down miles of fibre optic cables in their tunnels, coverage in country is patch at best. If the Myanmar telephone towers did pick up any signals from seven days ago briefly pinging random towers they wouldn't know where to start looking for it. If they found it, they wouldn't probably be so willing to share it. If they were threatened with nuclear destruction and give up the information, it would've been like, weeks old and totally useless. This requires no hacking - in itself electronics will not be much useful and most likely will be drained out of battery.

d) GPS tampering a la Die Hard. I'm not entirely sure how hacking a GPS system could bring any advantage to the MH370 scenario. In the film the terrorist hacked the airport and planes GPS - or its movie equivalent positioning system - and recalibrated the ILS (instrument landing system) to crash planes in fiery death. This hack will only work in very, very, very, very bad weather with zero visibility.

The GPS - like other products from the last generation - is also surprisingly susceptible to rudimentary spoofing methods. Hackers been building hack drones for a while like this autonomous hack drone to take control of other drones (wirelessly but not actually dealing with a GPS device). The Iranian notoriously claimed to have hacked an RQ170 Sentinel Drone belonging to the United States, successfully bringing the UAV to land and examine it better.

However, the chances of Myanmar's most adventurous sorcerers could successfully take control and land a Boeing 777 is very remote.

e) Can someone do it from a laptop in the cabin? You know, like maybe access the instrument from the plane's wi-fi or in flight units. The particular 777 on flight MH370 does not have wi-fi in the cabin. Maybe it is possible to pull such a hack in a hurry with the right motivation (perhaps a la Swordfish) via some obscure unpublished access point (maybe Edward Snowden can help?) but I certainly wouldn't know how to do it. Even on a fly by wire plane like the 777, the separate parts would've been airgapped. Plus just knowing some deep backdoor access into the instruments still won't allow for total takeover of the plane's navigational control. I think this must be done manually from the steel reinforced cockpit. From the cabin, it will be easier to find the instrument panel and disable them somehow. Someone told me the other night that the panel will be located outside cockpit in a 777.

f) The different pings, electronic signatures, satellite communication and stuff. Modern planes have various sensors to measure inflight conditions, maintenance logs and hosts of other things. I'm not sure how many such sensors are installed on a normal 777, or the specifics for MH370 plane but most of them will only be relevant if it communicates with any other system in mid flight. Due to bandwidth availability in mid flight, most of these satellite pings are regulated to specific intervals with basic information, most commonly, like the thing with the transponder, except even more primitive. Even in best case scenario, it is well near impossible to put together an accurate map of the route MH370 from a week ago just by collecting this disparate data points.

On an airliner like 777, some of satellite communication will be accessible from the plane's cabin - maybe the cargo hold, the backend of the plane or somewhere else, I'm not sure. By knowing where these panels are physically located on the plane and disabling the right instrumentation you could probably turn the plane mostly dark from the electronic trails.

Other sensor and tracking system could also be located on the parts of the plane not accessible from the inside of the plane - like the engines, or the wingtips, or wherever. Someone asked if the antennas are actually located on the tail top of the plane and I totally have no idea.

e) Hacking the Plane at rest. The assumption here is that you - the aspiring hacker - finally found the airport and a large underground facility to keep the plane out of sight from prying eyes-in-the-sky.

Perhaps with extra help from a crazy general or maybe motivated the right way (a la Swordfish), you could strip away all embedded electronic signals from the plane in a few hours. Any half decent ground maintenance crew will also know how to do this. You might also want to have them paint the plane in your colours and designate a tail number for its future name. In Africa, there are hundreds, if not thousands of aeroplanes in the air every day without proper identification. If you had the extra time and dedication, you could probably reinstall new signals - different airspace identification/navigational tools are available in different system, perhaps even to relay with other satellite based system (not GPS based) or a proprietary system like the US Navy. Other sensors and automated transmitters are available on Alibaba with a little more hack, some of them will fit your newly acquired plane. Having installed your own device building an iPad app for references in future in-cabin use will be a simple matter of accessing the now available wi-fi signal.

Just two weeks ago or so, the aptly named Morning Glory, an oil tanker with North Korean flag pulled over to a rebel port in Sidra, Libya and loaded up with 234,000 barrels of oil or so. The Libyan government threatened to shoot the tanker, an idea that was apparently abandoned quickly for the potentially catastrophic, headache inducing environmental disaster if they actually shot. The next logical step was to mount an naval operation to board the tanker and force it to a Libyan port. The Israelis do regularly with arm cargoes heading for Gaza.

In the case of Morning Glory however, the several thousand tons tanker ship seemed to have simply slipped out into the sea and disappeared. The North Korean disowned the ship and nobody seemed to know where it's gone since now everyone is preoccupied with finding the MH370.

If stealing a fully loaded up oil tanker is possible, I don't understand why people look at me funny when I suggested the plane was probably stolen too?

These things do happen more often than you think.

on MH370, Criminal Investigations and a Crazy General Scenario

2014-03-17T09:52:00.002+07:00

I've a feeling that this will not be the last map of the week but I've another good one here. The map above shows 634 runways in 26 countries that could've accommodated a landing (most probably also refuelling) for a Boeing 777 compiled by WNYC from various sources. You could zoom in and stuff here.

I need to stress again that in all likelihood - like in a probability scale - the plane will be found somewhere in the ocean. But until they actually found the ship, all the other scenarios will remain probable albeit more distant.

It's also useful to remember that the further away we are from the event horizon the more likely we are to be wrong at approximating what could've happened. (more on this in the footnote).

Here's my most recent four items test against the machines:

Regional Diplomatic Relationship is going to get only more and more awkward the longer the plane was not found. The unprecedented scope of this unfolding scenario shifts the notional pivot point from Malaysia (who owns the plane) to United States (who owns the satellites and builds the plane) to China (who has hundreds of citizens onboard and territorial claims over parts of the regional naval and air control) to India (who owns and operates naval and air defence forward warning facilities in the Andamar Islands where MH370 was last spotted) to Indonesia (who is closest to Malaysia and could effectively eliminate half the search quadrant with simple answers).

Now that they already ruled this a deliberate human action, Malaysia officially requested all countries to provide them background of their passenger-citizens. The FBI is also involved in doing this, America has also citizens on MH370. It's unclear how the Chinese will feel about the Americans probing for their people but accurately assessing the background of the two Iranians with fake passports for example, will be extremely complicated. From the earliest moment that we experiment to explore this event, I wondered what happened to the people on the plane.

The Criminal Scenario. Officially a criminal investigation, it opens a whole new different sets of scenario involving motive. The "How (we could lose an airliner)?" from the original event horizon switched with the "Why (would anyone steal a jetliner)?"

I haven't read much but so far the news have already suggested a number of probable nefarious plot that could involve a 250 ton Boeing 777.

Suicide. Pilot suicide or similarly self destructive plot remains the most likely path in this scenario but then again, if the plane crashed in the Ocean. With the presently deployed search assets, they would've found or seen something.

A 911 like terror scenario is being suggested in different places, perhaps targeting places as far away as India (which was for a while a popular target among the worldwide nutcakes) - but I don't think so. If anyone (especially the same people) want to steal a plane to crash it into buildings, they wouldn't be stealing it so far away from their intended target. Also, the politically motivated nutcakes tend to prepare their post-op success. Whatever the scenario was, if the perpetrators considered it successfully executed, they would've bragged about it and we would've heard about it by now. Unless of course, the scenario is just barely the beginning.

The Ransom/Scenario. The plane or the passengers or all of it are going to be traded for ransom. The reason we have not yet hear about this is because they will need time to separate the plane from the passengers. The 777 could easily be seen by eyes-in-the-sky and will not be easy to hide.

My fave scenario remains that some crazy Burmese general stole the plane using special operatives boarding as passengers, taking over control of the plane while everyone was asleep, navigating the plane between the radar blind spots while disabling the comm to confuse the ground monitors, blend with the busy air traffic in the South East Asia air traffic corridor, dodge the Indian forward warning in Andalas, head north for Northern Myanmaar and landing it in an undocumented air strip in the jungle. This could've been done well before Kuala Lumpur or Beijing fully realized that the plane was missing.

The passengers would've been moved to a different facility. The Burmese had metropolis like underground infrastructure and my crazy general could've also hidden the plane in one of them but most probably not. First, an evidence of such jumbo proportion is likely to provoke a retaliatory reaction and I doubt that even my general is quite that crazy.

He would want the plane to disappear and never recovered, most probably by blowing it up in a fiery fireball somewhere to show debris and retire the search effort. The passengers then will be separated according to his crazyness. German anarchists with PFLP hijackers in 1976 separated the Jewish hostages and in Dawson's Field, without the passengers onboard, all four hicjacked planes were blown up for a truly spectacular display of violent rage.

Alive, perhaps the Americans could be traded with heroin overlords in Northern Thailand, the semiconductor engineers could probably build crazy general something useful, and the rest could probably be traded for some political good will with any of the more sober neighboring countries in the region. This is not an original idea really as the Mexican drug cartels have been known to kidnap telco engineers to build them a proprietary telephone network.

The other probability is the crazy general gave away the plane to the subcontractors who stole it in the first place. They needed to get away fast from Myanmaar before anyone started looking overland to give plausible deniability. In that case, the now airliner would be refuelled, the 777 is Boeing's longest ranging jet and without carrying hundreds of people and luggage, they would be ready to go anywhere.

To head further north risk Chinese air warning detection (even though at this point, EVERYBODY was still looking for it in the South China Sea, like thousands of miles away). Northwest above the Himalayans towards Central Asia is the scenic route but again risk India, Pakistan or Chinese detection. The nuclear powers tend to be more sensitive about air intrusion around here but it's certainly possible to navigate within the air traffic route towards Kazakhstan or somewhere there. The news at the moment are reporting satellite ping in the northern arc and so far it cannot be ruled out.

More likely, the operatives (who were skilled enough to dodge the handshake near Vietnam, snaked back around Penang, followed the tip of Sumatera straight up to rest in Burmese jungle den) would plan a scenario where taking off from the Myanmar air space heading south, doubling back towards the Indian Ocean skirting the Indian air space (again, masquerading as commercial airliner to blend with the air traffic, far before anyone began to look for it in the Indian Ocean, this could be possible) and straight down for Southeast African lines. I'm not sure if the extended fuel range would allow for it but once it reached Somalia, Sudan or pretty much anywhere there, it's as good as gone.

The plane could later transported to the other coast of Africa to serve as the new cocaine shuttle serving the range for Latin America. Each load could worth billions of dollars in trade value. The cartels have been long looking for ways to transport their load across the Atlantic and a jetliner will serve this purpose nicely. However, they have not so far tried this idea previously probably knowing full well that flying a rogue 777-sized jet in the continent under the much more watchful eye of NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) will almost certainly resulting to the plane and its load being shot down pretty much immediately. More probably they will be flying it from Columbia or thereabout.

Similarly, if following the northern hemisphere sector, the plane could've been somewhere accessible from the Iran-Afghanistan border areas, waiting to transport a few tons of heroine from the overflowing opium harvest of 2013. Provided that the crazy general in Burma loaded up the plane with chemical precursors to make drugs or bombs or both to trade for the harvest, these pirates coud've reached past the breaking even point on their investment in the operation.

Also plausible is the crazy general continued to hide the plane in his underground hangar, putting the hostage experts as well as his fellow crazy generals to look at it and help him build a future Burmese fleet of Air Force. Perhaps they will decide that building the plane will be overly complicated and it was simply easier to steal one so the generals will probably build more hangars.

I could go on....

Military Involvement. Of all the forks in this peculiar event, I was most worried about this part of the investigation. I did a previous post on this before, the sensitivity of revealing raw signal intelligence like radar information and the likes as well as the logistical complexity to position the assets to the region. Complicating the matter further of course, is the fact that the region moved around by thousands of miles during the last several days. The Chinese was rightly annoyed because they spent days sending their naval boats to look for debris in the South China Sea before told that the plane actually flew to the other side of the Malaysian Peninsula. The Malaysian themselves refused to confirm the radar reading past their airspace for days because they deemed the unidentified blip as "non hostile." Now now they were somewat positive that it was MH370 heading west across the peninsula.

From the countries in the search race,

Malaysia, the unsuspecting lead role in this drama looked and sounded dodgy from the very beginning. In some ways, Malaysian behaviour resembles the Pakistani pathological denial when questions arose about their security reign over the tribal regions in the post-Afghanistan war era. They don't like to be told that they had no idea what's going on and most likely know more than they claimed.
Indonesian diplomat in Kuala Lumpur said that they haven't really been looking for it much because the Malaysian didn't tell them that they ought to look out along the northern most tip of Sumatera and probably on the other side of the Malacca Strait. Again, if Indonesia could rule out the plane going south from its last known position, we could rule out about half of the search quadrant already.
Pakistan (now included in the search arc) said definitively they didn't see any rogue jets in their airspace.
India likewise ruled out the possibility of a rogue 777 entering their air space but they have now deployed serious naval assets to look for the plane in the whereabouts of its last ground radar reading in the Andalas/Nicobar islands. India considers this their eastern most early watch tower - like the American Pearl Harbour in the Pacific - and have always been very sensitive about the islands. Many are restricted to civilian visitors, even Indian nationals, and they will not be very comfortable with the world's largest surveillance party right on their doorstep.
United States, with its big toys and the region's largest naval fleet, already have several boats looking for the plane. USS Kidd, a two billion dollar destroyer with serious naval and aerial hunting firepower, is already part of the search party. With each passing hour, the search areas extended further into the Indian Ocean to account for current, etc. If they need to look so far out into the ocean, only the US has the capability to conduct that kind of sustainable search operation effectively, most probably requiring a sea based platform and one of the carriers might join in. The US also operates a naval support base operation from Diego Garcia, at the moment, approximately the furthest edge of currently valid search quadrant.
Australia, so far quietly sitting on the south east corner of the search quadrant. They have navy boats near the Indian Ocean and probably coordinate with the US teams but had so far not joined the search in force.
Singapore. So far, not clear if they have boats looking anywhere but they had recently banned an Indonesian navy boat from entering Singaporean port at the south entrance to Malacca Strait.
China, already have several boats making its way to the Indian Ocean. These are some of the largest ships in the Chinese navy and they will have the most at stake, 153 of Chinese citizens onboard. Rightly so, they will be the most emotional and likely to be the most misunderstood though if we are dealing with a crazy Burmese general, China might know better what to do with them. Of all the above, this is the one that I'm totally unsure what to do with, except to say that we should be looking out for it.

Regional Security. This is the last and one that I had been totally overweight on from the very first day and beat the computer score each time. With the brutal train station attack in China just weeks prior (yes, by now we extended the event horizon further by about six weeks), the unrest in Thailand, the consistently insane Burmese junta (the Rohingya prosecution already caused refugee problems for years), to Central Asian human trafficking and the recent tension between Australian and Indonesian in the southern waters will come to better focus.

While the immediate impact might be minimal, the mid to long term implication is totally unknown. The Americans invaded two proper nations after 911 and lead the charge with NATO in Kosovo without United Nations approval and now Russian Federation claimed that they were only doing what they needed to do in Ukraine. If the plane was indeed hijacked, how the stakeholders will respond and retaliate will be very difficult to predict but it is certain that they will.

China is a giant variable in this thing (our babybot currently just read English but so these are based mostly on the legible sources). Claims and counterclaims with everyone in ASEAN over patches South China Sea have been ongoing for years and in normal times, serious Chinese naval presence in the region would've caused a ruckus. This crisis also perfectly illustrates the inadequacy of smaller South East Asian nations in protecting their sovereignty, exposes vulnerabilities and potentially embarrassing for any self respecting aspiring tyrants.

One fork would take China to reinforce its territorial control over north Myanmaar borderland regions and maybe even to revive the ancient Imperial dream of building a sea port directly into the Indian Ocean. Who knows, the Chinese have been known to be working on their 1000 year plan and my silly software is not yet regulated to look that far back.

The most immediate and visible aftereffect of this tragedy will be the increased defence spending for all countries and an accelerated militarisation of regional borders. Indonesia - with a 2014 national election - the arguments for upgrading the nation's military readiness is getting more and more prominent. After the election, whoever wins, Indonesia is going to spend a lot of money on tons of hardware. India will play out similarly except with billions of dollar more.

More necessary but less effectively, this defence posture will help build infrastructure in far away places and introduced more common sense to isolated population. Indonesian Gov't should've been building much better infrastructure in Aceh since the devastating tsunami yeas ago and the elevated risk exposure to its citizens living on the Sumatera coastline. There were also supposed to be bustling economy, strategic international trade, early warning system and manned radar stations and all. You would've thought that they noticed rogue plane flying across.

Sumatera has a ridge along the western line and have been fogged out by forest burning for the last several years, flying low to dodge detection across the island would've been hazardous so if the plane was flying that way, most likely it did what it was doing across Malaysia and cloaked in its device to resemble regular traffic. With so many so called airports dotting the island, some air traffic must've noticed the 777, even if they didn't know what it was then.

Naturally, this last item is at the moment still some cycles away. But whatever the actual outcome, maybe the plane simply ran out of fuel and crashed into a particularly deep sea cavern and got dragged off by the current or lost overland somewhere, this last item will remain the most impactful in the longer term.

I've some more interesting maps, but that's for later. Now it's time to go home and get my phones.

PS: Notes about the babybots mentioned in the post above.

For the last few weeks, I been working with a remote team to design a simple model probability tool for real world events. That's a mouthful, I know, we need to come up with a name for this thingy. Really, this software does two things only but we want to be sure that it's doing it very well.

First, the software will want its "event horizon" for input. This is what we know about the event and the outer parameters for the input, like time period, region, specific log patterns, etc. One of us human will have to tell machine what is it that we're looking for. It is has multiple preconfigured data sources "domain" in our lingo, which determines the relevance and proximity of the event we are looking out for relative to all other events happening in the surrounding domains.

Basically, it - the software robot - goes out there with several hundreds automated scriptlets, harvesting all sorts of data points it could gather for the event. Initially we wanted to test on real people - maybe with Nike Fuelband and the likes. We studied some medical data and body diagnostics but lacked a willing human test subject for measurement. The last ten weeks or so, we had it chasing gold price with help of two professionally alcoholic gold traders that paid for some hosting services. According to these two clowns, the machine was doing its job better than half the human in their craft. Still, none of us are actual gold traders so we still weren't quite sure if the damn thing actually worked.

After the plane went missing last week, we reckoned it could be an interesting test scenario. In the first day, I was still certain that the crash site would be found soon enough and it took the Jedis additional two days to setup the event horizon and scripted the domain but we had the thingy running since Wednesday or so.

For this particular event, we configured the software to read up from the moment MH370 disengage from ground air traffic controller in the South China Sea. The software was regulated to process updates every ten hours starting from last Tuesday but it was just re-rigged it to do four hours cycle from this weekend on. I'm not actually sure what was done hardware side but I knew we added a few more boxes.

We weighted sources on regional distribution mimicking the passengers nationality on Flight MH370, territorial maps scaling the search domain, all sorts of other things, plus the Jedis wrote a few more scriplets to subtract results from Google and other search tools.

The software then clusters all the information bits and pieces specified in the event description for each cycle and presents the top four most relevant clusters for the cycle's lifetime, as measured towards the event horizon. The software tells us what is most likely had happened during an event without ever completely knowing exactly everything that happened. If and when we know exactly what happened with a specific event, then the task was closed and we need to define new events for the software to chew on.

Except that of course, machines are not nearly that good yet. Like the gold traders, I test the software every few hours with the most recent four point recommendation and grading them to what I think is closest to a likely outcome.

Again, in this type of scenarios, there could be hundreds - if not thousands - possible outcome to the MH370 going missing and now ten days into the search. I'm still assuming that the simplest explanation for the story is that the plane had crashed into the sea. Even if the blackbox and other instrument registers are later recovered, it's not reasonable to assume that we will ever know everything that happened anyway since they are most likely damaged, or completely lost at the bottom of the ocean.

To test the machine, with each passing cycle of MH370 going missing, I expanded the domain input with what I think is the most outrageous - a low probability event in a highly unlikely scenario, but well within the realm of possibility.

Against the machine's supposedly automated consistency, a fair and balanced approach and unquestionable diligence in massive aggregation of words and alphabets, the assumption was that I would be most likely wrong. Except that so far, I haven't. I been scoring near perfect 20/20 against the machine on our search for MH370. Expanding the search domain overland two days ago, deliberate human intervention and stretching the geopolitic overweight paid over multiple times against egregious odds.

All of them are now front and centre on every news station on the planet and save for a breakout of military conflict in Ukraine, they will remain so until the plane is found.

I don't always enjoy being right and this is one of those rare moment where I want the theory to break and the fate of the people onboard known, if only for the sake of their loved ones.

Now that we're going into the third 24hrs or so in the faster cycle. The search for MH370 is now expanding quicker than the furthest way of my early domain description. Who would've thought we could lose an airliner with hundreds of passengers from the one of the world's busiest traffic area and still not find it more than a week later.

We had this debate for many hours some nights ago. My more sensible friends wanted to reward Malaysian officials for their leading role in the search and rescue operation. Our regional model also pushed out early official statements to the top and robot rightly assumed that these were the more accurate scenario.

Personally, I was specifically bothered about the fake passports used by two passengers which I thought was weird. The suspicion was quickly brushed away however by the Malaysian officials, their claim quickly reinforced by the Iranians, saying that their two smugglers were not tied to terrorism. I failed to see how we could gave any credence to both claims so quickly, considering that they must've had only a few hours themselves to figure out who it was on the plane.

The subsequent flip flop on the radar data again confused our babybot. Given that the news reports already come from everywhere, first with the dude in uniform definitively ruling out the possibility of the plane detoured from its presumed flight route.

In fact, for this particular event, we weren't quite sure where the horizon was. If this was a hijacking event, then the horizon must be pushed much further. As the search and rescue mission now morphs into a massive multinational military operation involving 25 countries and hundreds of assets covering an area approximately four times the size of United States, we had to slow down the cycle to a six hour pace.

Will update later if anything significant happen, but I don't see that happening until the search could eliminate at least one of the north/south search arcs.The event horizon is presently being prepared to cover pretty much everything on the internet and as much as our machines could handle.

Flight MH370 Could Be Anywhere in the World by Now

2014-03-16T13:44:00.000+07:00

Updated search area for #MH370

Since this is Sunday and I've not much else to do, considering that I'm officially back to my recurring status of an unemployed blogger, I will indulge to some of your questions from Twitter.

How could the Plane refuel with thousands of gallons and ground crew and stuff? It will require an airport facility, some said. Err, no. Not entirely true.

Well, as I mentioned in the previous post, this part of Asia has numerous undocumented military facility. The Burmese spend billions of in hard currency and thousand of forced laborers to build and hide these massive infrastructure in the jungle. If the North Korean chose a missile deterrent option in their paranoid wild dreams, Burmese military junta resorted to hiding entire cities underground.

Since great many of these Burmese warlords are still freely operating in their jungle domains with zero oversight (think your own privatized Colonel Kurtz army with rabid, industries socialists whitewash), if any of them decided they want to accept and facilitate a 777 landing for a refuelling pit stop to reconfigure the plane's cloaking instrument and take off without telling anyone, they could.

Would this cost a lot? Hmm, again, no, not really.

The plane itself worth more than 30m USD in estimate black market value. Add on top the lure of 20 select American semiconductor engineers and experts in electronic warfare identification for hostage. A few thousand gallons of aviation fuel would be small favor compared to what the Burmese villain general would've gained in return.

Suggestions that some leftover signals would still be emitting, like maybe an electronic debris by cellphones and other cockpit instruments is another false hope. Deep in Myanmar, the only cellphone capable network with any significant coverage will be run by the junta. While the idea of semi real time access to telecommunication records are now at the forefront of the world's conscious mind (thanks to NSA and Edward Snowden revelations), chances of actually accessing the raw data from Myanmar network operators is probably smaller than actually locating the plane in the Indian Ocean.

Again, keep in mind to the known timeline of flight MH370. It was known to be still airborne well within a seven hour window of the starting fuel range. if they were to land somewhere, it will be done in the immediate hours, probably closely mimicking their scheduled arrival in Beijing.

The Boeing 777 could've been landed somewhere, refuelled, the passengers removed and took off again with fresh identitication and electronic cloaking to take them practically anywhere in the world BEFORE the plane was even reported missing in Beijing. The 777 is Boeing's longest ranging commercial jetliner model.

Without the hundreds of passengers, an experienced crazyass crew, the plane could conceivably be sitting nicely hidden in a hangar somewhere, being refitted for the next leg of its mysterious life.

Again, I said conceivably because this is just one scenario to explain the still missing MH370. It's just as likely or as unlikely as the plane crashing immediately in some deep cavern in the Indian Ocan, or a Jurassic valley in Northern Asia and we just haven't found the debris.

What I'm trying to illustrate here is the realm of possibility presently available with today's existing technology. The 777 is also the first and most sophisticated Boeing jet model with fully electronics, digitally enabled fly by wire system. With prior trainings and tinkering with flight simulation tools, the perpetrators could've developed a fresh hack to speed the process even further, perhaps fixing the potential exposure from their new electronic cloaking to get them out of Asia.

With the right gear and setup, any pilots could've planned and trained for the flight plan and the scenario - first to turn the plane mid way between Vietnam and Malaysia just between the air traffic controller changeover and the navigational flight path that initially set it course well below the Thai radar coverage towards Andaman islands, and disappear from ground electronics reading just before the Indian military installation. We now know that the plane continued on fliying for hours within that time window, we just didn't know exactly where it was going. If you factor in a refuelling stop could well be in Africa, or Columbia by now.

Other popular question was, What kind of people - group - organization - are capable of pulling off such a movie worthy plot?

Well, to take over control of the plane and land it somewhere, they would've need at least two people with the piloting skills and the familiarity with the plane's electronic component. They would've some ways to protect themselves, some weapons, gas canisters or maybe as simple as locking themselves behind the cockpit door.

Locating their refueling pitstop - airport wouldn't be hard - again, at that point, the plane wasn't even recorded missing and no one was looking for it. Except perhaps for the Malaysian. As sophisticated as you might think it sounds, Latin American traffickers regularly conducted such high risk flights in large bodied planes, sometimes even crossing the Mexican - US border. With the exception of Israelis borderlines and Korean DMZ, this is probably the world's most monitored air corridor, and yet it happens on surprisingly regular basis. So it is very possible to do in an Asian remote base.

Radicals and crazies continually discovered new ways to do outlandishly ambitious ideas, some naturally sounding utterly crazy in its earliest moment of conception. Like Alexander looking for the edge of the world, or lesser tyrants' wet dream of total world domination, or the common man's dream of getting to the moon, or to create weapons to obliterate the planet whole.

Again and again, in repeated pages of history, mad men succeeded in beating the unlikely odds and witnessed their progressive ideas materialised. The occasional timestamp of momentous chapters where someone, somewhere tried something for the first time in the history of mankind.

Often times, these crazy ideas brought severe disruptions, affecting decades of men and women, as int he case of Bin Laden who introduced the idea of Non-State Combatant to the mainstream bogey man role model. Bin Laden brought military like precision in multiple coordinated attacks resulting in the biggest damage ever inflicted by a foreign adversary to an American infrastructure ever in North America.

That kinda things just never happened before. Like nobody really suspected that Japan would've destroyed Pearl Harbour in a single, relatively easy strike almost a century earlier.

What was impossible just a few years back could well be highly probable with today's stuff. Criminal groups and terrorist organizations have the expertise and the willingness to upgrade their capabilities. I've mentioned several times my past worries after a Mumbai-styled commando attack. These were conducted by trained and capable individuals with logistical support and international infrastructure to coordinate planning for inflicting the most damage to their enemies.

They've been stealing places for almost fifty years now and I don't think that is really the hard part of such an operation if it were ever to be staged for movies. As in the last post and like the thousands of relatives of the people onboard flight #MH370, the most difficult question to answer will be figuring out what happened to the passengers during the first 24 hours of the plane going missing.

So far, the only thing we know for certain from this mysterious story of MH370 is that nothing is certain about it. This sort of thing simply never happened before. The geopolitical repercussions could be significant, depending on what the search parties found and didn't find and when. Any of the world powers have something to lost or gain from these dynamics. It will just going to play out.

You heard there's a war very nearly happening in Ukraine today too right?

Bonus Question: What about thermal imageries? Satellites, eyes-in-the-sky drones and surveillance planes have thermal vision and would've picked up the pieces of metal object the size of 777.

Well, again, not really. Not after nine days.

on MH370, SIGINT and the Invasion of Naboo

2014-03-15T23:57:00.002+07:00

"A communications disruption can mean only one thing—invasion."
~Sio Bibble

Obviously, someone in the Malaysian government read my blog. Shortly after the earlier post - while I was toothbrushing the two dogs - Malaysian Prime Minister came on telly and told everyone that they now believe the evidence lead to a deliberate human intervention scenario. The flight was diverted somewhere, now they said.

The Malaysian also officially ended the search in the South China Sea, moving the effort to the Indian Ocean instead. The current search plots now extend north, all the way to Pakistan and Kazakhstan, and south, across Indonesia and all the way to the West Australian Ocean.

So now the Malaysians are backtracking the whole way. In the earliest news cycle, the Malaysian were quick to rule out possible human involvement, insisting that security procedures have been followed by Malaysian Airlines and authorities, even denying that there were investigation on the pilots. The Iranians were quick to say that the two Iranians on board with stolen passports were not terrorists. Today, they say they're now looking at all passengers and crew. Really.

I could see why the relatives of the passengers everywhere are getting frustrated by the Malaysian. What was a devastating tragedy sounds more and more like a sinister mystery with all kinds of strange theories being floated around. Of course, nothing like this ever happened before, so maybe it's time for pundits and experts to try some originals.

Some noteworthy items, not yet much discussed on the news:

Indonesian radar coverage. My understanding of the current search area in the Indian Ocean, split so far wide apart was because the information that lead investigator there was the maintenance signal from the Inmarsat satellite positioned in the hemisphere. They could probably narrow down the area with more data points but as the map shows, to get anywhere too far south, MH370 must've flown across, or close to Indonesian air space.

If the Indonesian could definitively rule out the plane going across its territorry, then at the very least, the search effort could be concentrated on the northern part. Now, if the world thought it was frustrating to deal with the Malaysian, wait til you deal with their southern cousins. The Indonesian President just today landed in Sumatera to check the problem with massive forest fire, reducing visibility to few metres, suffocating thousands of people and disrupting flights all over the region.

I will not be surprised if it turned out that Indonesians didn't see anything at all from seven days ago. If they did see something, most likely they would've forgotten the details. But still, Indonesia spends billions in rebuilding infrastructure after the Aceh tsunami, plus several large gas facility as well as navy installation, not to mention the Malacca Strait is the world's busiest traffic route. Some radar or air traffic controllers somewhere would've seen a blip of the 777 flying across.

Of course, while that sounds straight forward, it may not always necessarily be the case.
As you can see in the map above, the known radar coverage in the region varies and is patchy at best. The Malaysian themselves took several days to deny, validate, then reconfirm their radar blip to be from MH370. Keep in mind also that this was seven days ago, in the immediate hours of the flight departure from Kuala Lumpur, most probably they didn't even realize the plane was missing and most certainly, not at all looking for it on the entirely wrong side of the flight plan. There could be a number of conceivable explanation to how the radars could miss a commercial airliner, a thorough New York Times article about Malaysian radar coverage here. There should be at least one more offered by the Indonesian government who controls the other half of the Malacca Strait.

The International Politics. This is where things turn complicated. Radar installations are considered highly sensitive information. Sovereign nations wouldn't want their radar coverage and capability advertised and potentially exposing their weakness. The installations are expensive to maintain, requiring substantial power draw, round the clock manpower and substantial communication infrastructure. In most countries, radar stations are not manned 24/7, with some exceptions on sensitive military installation or air traffic purposes.

Other than Malaysia and and Indonesia, India operates major installation in the Andamar/Nicobar islands, to the top of Sumatera and west of Burma and considers them super sensitive. Much of the islands are actually restricted to even Indian citizens. The Indian navy is now a major player in the search, along with Chinese navy and the US Seventh Fleet.

I've mentioned several times in earlier posts how this particular aviation mystery has the potential to draw in various military and security interests. Maybe I'm not so entirely crazy after all.

Some television pundits (I'm watching bits of Indonesian local channels, as they seem to be leading the charge on the craziest conspiracy theorists worldwide), said matter of factly that if a plane of 777 size was to land somewhere or fly across populated areas, it would've been seen. Some satellites would pick it up.

Well, satellites don't work that way. They don't always look everywhere at all times. There are limited number of eye in the sky satellite and they were tasked by priorities on regular basis. With a Cold War scenario involving the largest military movement in Europe in decades happening in real time in Ukraine and keeping in mind the total denial from Malaysian authorities in the early hours of flight MH370 to even consider human involvement, there was probably no reason at all to task satellites to the region.

Chinese People Liberation Army announced that they tasked as many as 10 satellites to look for the plane by the fourth day. The Chinese military have been pretty aggressive about showing off their latest toys so this is a perfect chance. They already have their largest Navy boats speeding for the Indian ocean.

The US military don't usually advertise the specifics of their assets and capabilities and with 150,000 Russian soldiers facing off a confrontation over Ukraine, so unless they had specific signals prior to the event, it was conceivable that US agencies have missed entirely looking for the plane in the earlier days. Now the US National Geospatial Agency, the one with most of the eye in the sky operation, along with their cousins in the US Intelligence alphabet soup, even NASA are looking for the plane. Maybe if the NSA weren't so busy chasing Anonymous they would've known better. They really should have.

Still, that suggested they didn't pick up any early signal prior to the event. Which means there will be blind spots everywhere, except that nobody would want to say it out loud.

Burma, to the north of Malaysia and Indonesia, is just such a blind spot (see map above - if you have better maps, do send me).

In a scenario where multiple persons with expert skills had taken over the control of the plane, systematically disabling the communication system, the transponder and its satellite comm, while navigating the plane between radars (which is really not that difficult), the path would take them towards Burma. CNN reports now shows the path as far as Kazakhstan to Northern Thailand, assuming the range of the plane.

Again, assuming that some experts were indeed involved in doing all of those, then landing the plane somewhere is not really the hard part. The whole region are full of understaffed airports and undocumented facilities to accommodate landing a jetliner even the size of 777. The Burmese crazy military junta had been building gigantic, city sized infrastructure under the jungle for decades. Some pilots are quoted saying that you could land the jetliner in runway as small as 900m, assuming you know how to find it. If they're good enough to disable the plane's instrument, finding an airport really is not the hard part.

The Passengers. The biggest problem, as many of these experts won't tell you out loud for fear of being politically incorrect in an already emotional situation, is the passengers. Subduing nearly two hundred people in a confined environment will not be easy. In many case of hijacking, like 911, the devious plot was ruined by rebelling passengers.

But that assumes the passengers were aware of whats going on. If the pilots were involved like in the Ethiopian hijacking last month - the co pilot simply locked the pilot out when the latter stepped out of the cockpit for the toilet, and flew the plane to Geneva instead - few realized what was going on and nobody was harmed in the end. The co pilot was promptly arrested, in Geneva.

For security reasons, cockpit doors in big jets like 777 are locked in from the inside. It was designed to resist break in from the outside. If the perpetrators had somehow managed to lock themselves in the cockpit there will be very little anyone on from the cabin can do. However, since they managed to systematically disable the instruments in the cockpit, this seems conclusive for the Malaysian PM to confirm a devious human intervention scenario.

Next, the electronic crumbs of MH370 indicate that at some point, the engine's maintenance signals were also disabled. These instruments - the one that Inmarsat satellites picked up for Rolls Royce/Boeing engineers - are located outside the cockpit. Which would suggest that not only they had control of the cockpit, they also had access to the whole plane. Again, what to do with the passengers.

Considering that flight MH370 was a red eye and most people onboard would be asleep with their windows drawn, the perpetrators could conceivably accomplish the first part of their plan quietly. A floated theory a while ago was a cabin decompression renders the people onboard unconscious. I'm wondering if the cockpit doors are also airtight?

Is it theoretically possible to somehow subdue the whole plane from the cockpit? Perhaps a gas canister, while everyone was asleep, knocked them out just enough to make time to land the plane and do whatever it was they wanted to do with the plane and before anyone noticing?

What kind of weapons could possibly do that? What kind of gas? Would it be in a container, a canister of some sort - perhaps to miss inspection at the airport? The KL airport did miss the two Iranians with fake passports. There are tons of so called non-lethal urban warfare chemicals available in circulation - from anti riot gear to custom kit meth lab mad chemist home made internet bomb - so this is not wholly implausible.

Maybe, with some luck they could've done it with only some luck, the two hours or so time window while passengers were asleep, to access and disable the instruments, then go back to lock themselves in the cockpit. According to reports, the plane was following a set of navigation waypoints on a known route towards the Andaman islands. A two person job, with one person coursing the autopilot and controlling the cockpit while the other go to access the instruments, a one hour window to disable all the comms and transponders.

Unless everyone was totally incapacitated, someone would've been woken up during an attempted landing. Assuming they had accomplices on the ground to handle the passengers, this could've been done anywhere within the first six hours window from when MH370 was first noted to have gone missing.

The Movie Plot Scenario. Now with a plan embedded and methods resolved, they need to figure out where to take the plane.

To the south, Indonesian Sumatera is dotted with major cities and stuffed with people. What Indonesia lacked in military infrastructure the population makes up with rabid network connectivity. It will be highly unlikely for a 777 to land anywhere on Sumatera proper without anyone noticing. Attempting to land, with the forest fire and the early morning time, would also be quite hazardous. To take it south bound, they will need a landing facility somewhere beyond Sumatera.

There are hundreds of small islands in the south Indian Ocean and west Australian Ocean where the plane could be landed. However, investigators aren't too convinced with this south bound scenario. Again, an Indonesian explanation could effectively rule this out but maybe they could also figure it out from the satellites. US military, who were first to deploy assets to the region mentioned AWACS and P8 Orion planes, which are the submarine hunters, suggesting that they're looking for a plane crash site on the ocean floor. The USS Kidd, a two billion dollar state of the art navy hunter ship, is also there.

The Australian military, who were busy patrolling boat people on the south Indian sea didn't say much at all, suggesting they didn't think the plane had gone that way.

The area is also dotted with some seismic readings. Again, after the tsunami, there were many different plans announced, with Japanese grant support and lots of international help, to monitor the south west coast of Sumatera seismic floor better. Could these equipment detect a plane crash or is the water too deep? Do we know anything?

If we assume that they had a place to land the plane and refuel, the passengers taken care off with accomplices on the ground and the plane taken to maximum range, could the 777 hypothetically reach east Africa? We will know about this - if maybe the Indian navy or the US African Command are also getting involved.

From where the plane was last trailed to, the Andamar islands, the Indian navy also advertised their P8 variant. They're also searching the hundreds of islands in their part of the water. The Chinese ships are not yet there but we will have no idea how the Indians will react to Chinese surveillance vessels in the area.

Immediately to the north is Burma. Again, the rest of the world knows very little about what's going on in that part of the world. Northern Thailand and the Golden Triangle areas also will have many facilities available to accommodate landing a Boeing jetliner but highly improbable. Thai border patrol areas are CIA built and US military grade equipment. They would've picked it up if it flew too close to the border. China likewise will detect an incoming 777 coming their way if had veered that close to the border.

Maybe, but maybe not. Again, if this was indeed a air piracy/plane heist in the immediate hours of the flight, then maybe the military were not as readily alerted to a masked commercial airliner. Switching the plane's transponder to recycle corrupt data or replace the squawk code of the flight to temporarily fool ground radars are not entirely complicated procedures. This Stratfor link has outlines on some of these electronic cloaking methods.

You just need to know how. In the hunt for Viktor Bout, the Russian arms dealer who was operating fleet of planes all over Africa, the investigators detailed how the pilots regularly accomplish this to deliver covert packages. He was flying planes as far as Georgia, Iraq, Libya and practically everywhere in Africa. They think he was the man that transported Bin Laden to Afghanistan. Similarly, narco cartels and smuggling operations in the US - Mexican border also operate various large scale air intrusions.

In highly trafficked air routes, unless the plane was deviating too far from a regular air route, there won't be "jets scrambled" as the television pundits are keen to suggest. The militarily more sophisticated nations - US, Russia, China, Israel, maybe India - have areas designated as no fly zones where unannounced visit will be treated as hostile. Most famously, in the US, President Bush authorisation was required to shoot down the hijacked commercial planes in 911. Most of the early detection system - combination of ground radars, satellites - are cold war relics and designed to protect specific sensitive areas, not tracking thousands of flying objects in the sky. The American NORAD have jets to scramble. The Israelis also do that, probably the only country in the world with total air space control and hostile borders. Japan and Korea both had sophisticated air intercept capabilities in their part of the borders but most other countries don't. Not anywhere in the South Asian region anyway. Not unless they already knew specifically that the plane had hostile intent.

The way the drug dealers and international relocation specialists work is they come in uneventful disguised as regular traffic. They would've been thousand of miles away and landed safely somewhere before anyone even noticed the flight had gone rogue.

FLASH NEWS: UN Security Council failed to pass resolution on the Crimean Referendum. US Ambassador Samantha Power on the council is looking rather upset. All members voted for the resolution, China abstained and Russia vetoed it down.

Back to the plot. So now they could've landed the plane, emptied it of passengers, refuelled and reset. What will they do next? What are they going to do with the plane?

To hide the 777 on the ground will only get increasingly difficult. It will require ground camouflage, perhaps semi permanent structure but more likely a hangar sized structure to hide the plane and its passengers. More likely, they would've simply taken off

Further north from the crazy juntas in Myanmar, over the Himalayans towards Kazakhstan and Central Asia are actually even stranger lands. Entire cities could've come and gone in that part of the world and it will take some while for the world to notice.
Another possibility is the plane crashed overland. Some eye in the sky will eventually map it out and locate a crash site. Whatever the crash trajectory was, it will be impossible to hide overland debris from a Boeing 777 violent landing. Also, being overland, most radio and comm equipments like cell phones, black boxes, etc, are somewhat more likely to remain functional, at least for a brief period following such crash. There is a higher chance of picking up SIGINT from an overland crash, anywhere on earth than from one underwater.

To spot such debris visually in a region this size, remote controlled drones will be useful and I suspect we will soon hear about them.In a widely advertised military operation against narco regime in the Golden Triangle, China showed off some drones and suggested the PLA have military drones assets in the region. The US Navy had been shy about their sea borne drones but it's not entirely beyond the realm of possibility that the 7th Fleet might have a few stashed away. How the Burmese and the Indians will react to these potentially combustible mix, is an area where even the stupid wouldn't begin to speculate.

Back to the Passengers. Someone already onboard were part of this wild plan from the beginning. It will take extra careful planning, steel balls and ninja like skill sets. We already know that there are two Iranians on the plane with fake passports. There are also hundreds of passengers from China and Malaysia (here's the full passengers manifest from Malaysian Airlines). Neither countries will like much such deep insight probes into hundreds of their private citizens.

In the aftermath of 911, the super sensitive diplomacy matter of identifying the hijackers between the Saudis, the Pakistanis and later the Malysians lead to various critical decisions shaping foreign policies and the post Iraq/Afghanistan geopolitics.

This time around, the Malaysians didn't appear to modify much of their posturing in not admitting that anything could've gone wrong on their side. A lot of the face saving and flat out wrong denials resulted in the slowed response following the immediate suspicion that the plane had somehow been commandeered and stolen. Seven days into the search, Prime Minister Razak now took the front stage, taking it over from his defence and air space officials. His only good fortune was that Vladimir Putin is now taking the bigger spotlight from his missing plane.

The pilots are now being scrutinised by investigators. One apparently was a geek with flight simulators equipment at home. No doubt his entire electronic signatures will be the focus of forensic investigators. From the earlier days, FBI had a team on the ground in Kuala Lumpur and they will no doubt try to get better of sense from the pilots lives and other passengers but it's not clear how much the Malaysian will be willing to cooperate the need to be accountable to some of their less than conventional practices.

Salt to the wound, pictures are circulating on the internet now of pretty girls posing on different flights with the dude on MH370, so we already can assume that the cockpit integrity was likely breached with little effort. Perhaps a hot chick or two.

There's also the thing with the Freescale Semiconductors, who had 20 employees on board, part of their engineering team who were working between their modern plant based in Petaling Jaya facility that manufactures and tests integrated circuits and the company’s chip facilities in Tianjin, China. These guys build battlefield communication avionics, missile guidance and electronics as well as IFF identification kits. They also build the chips used on the Apollo trip to the moon. Their institutional shareholders are the modern days capitalist warlords from Carlyle group to Blackrock, Blacktone and other black funds. Read here for the full conspiracy rundown.

At this point, Bruce Willis and Double Ohs are being dispatched to look for the plane. HUMINT, they say, is still the most powerful tool.

Sold in the black market, a 777 is prolly worth around 30m USD. More likely, having refuelled and transported elsewhere, it's converted for a cargo smuggling operation. The Central Asian corridor between China, India and Pakistan is the world's largest blind spot for air traffic. A plane load of cocaine, or heroin could be worth several billions. The plane could be anywhere in the world by now, in 2005, the 777 won the world record for distance traveled, 21,601 km, on a route traveling eastbound from Hong Kong to London (Heathrow) a 22 hours and 42 minutes flight. By now, the cargo off loaded and discarded for scraps.

The point being, if you really managed to steal a 777, there is a million ways to do with it. But it is possible.

PS: Here's a link to the hi res version of the map above.

The picture I first noticed on Michael Harvey's twitter timeline. The larger version was available from airinfo.org, here (in French).

on Why They Should Look for MH370 on Land

2014-03-15T07:43:00.002+07:00

Some updates on the missing MH370. It's still missing.

The other night, WSJ and other outlets had information that the Boeing 777 continued to ping Boeing/Rolls Royce engine-control system, indicating that the flight flew for hours to the opposite direction of where it's supposed to go. The search effort then - at this point, already one of the largest search operation in the world - moved to the other side of Malaysian peninsula, into Malaka Strait.

Then the Malaysian minister dude - the one who was holding press conference in KL - came on TV and insisted that the information from Boeing was inaccurate. I think he even went on to say that the last comm from the plane was just shortly before the plane vanished. Another tip, allegedly from Malaysian Air Force officials, that there was a radar blip on the west side of the Peninsula suspected to be MH370, was similarly rebuffed. Both were inaccurate. Yet, the Indonesian search and rescue team from Aceh was deployed to look for it.

Today however, new information came to light, again suggesting the plane had been flying for additional FIVE hours in silent mode, heading for the Indian Ocean. Indian navy is now looking for the 777 on their part of the ocean.

This new information came from Inmarsat, based in London, who operates these types of satellite and communication system. Hard Inmarsat data are classified, but the FAA and NTSB and other agencies are looking into the data, and concluded as much: the plane did go on for hours in silent mode. US Navy sends boats to the Indian Ocean. Actually, the US is now deploying tons of assets from the 7th Fleet - boats, ships, planes, satellites, drones and they only know what else, to look for MH370 in the Indian ocean. A White House spokesperson said as much. NASA joins in the search for the plane.

When that Malaysian Minister Person adamantly insisting that the Boeing information was "inaccurate" exactly what was he saying? How was the Boeing data inaccurate compared to Inmarsat?

In any event, since the whole world seem to be doing the same, I've some questions and theories on the plane. Allow me to indulge:

a) Hijacking Scenario. Everyone - the media and authorities alike - are very cautious about speculating on this scenario. On the surface, it doesn't really fit a hijacking scenario. Not the traditional types anyway where some group jacked a plane for some political cause, took control of the plane, and destroyed everyone on board to get public attention or some twisted mutual destruction logic.

China has no shortage of domestic radical crazies and though not frequently heard, it's plausible that KL-Beijing flight makes a good target. Malaysia is similarly popular with the radicals - the whole 911 was designed and planned in KL. This will explain at least partly why they seem overly sensitive about sharing - or validating - information with other countries.

However, since no group whatsoever are making demands or claims of any sort - NSA/GCHQ would've picked up chatter after a week - a traditional hijacking scenario seems unlikely.

b) Plane Crash. Somewhere en route to Beijing, between Malaysia/Vietnam and Thailand, it crashed. Or it could be well near Laos, or Myanmar. Somewhere there. Except that now this is the world's largest search operation involving 13 countries, hundreds of ships, planes, satellites, submersibles and so forth. If the plane spontaneously combust in midair above water, it would've been found.

Well, except of course if the plane actually exploded - blown up - in a military operation. Any of the dozen countries with imminent strategic interest in South China could've had the asset and hide the remains. But even then, at least some debris would've been found by now.

While this is unlikely, it happened before. In the TV series Scandal, the plot revolves around a civilian jetliner shot down in a US covert operation. US President Fitzgerald Grant was the pilot of the military jet.

c) Someone - or some group - Stole The Plane. Slate has an explainer for this - it is physically possible to steal the plane. Like, one of the pilots incapacitate the other, switched off transponder and comm, made the manouver to turn around and set it on a new navigational waypoints towards the Andaman Islands (which the Inmarsat data seems to indicate). There was a quote somewhere about an Andaman expert who said there was no way the plane could've landed in his territory without anyone noticing (it is a 250 tons plane).

This article from Air & Space, an aviation magazine, tells a story about how a flight crew put together a plan to land the plane in a "Studying maps of the airport environment, we found it sat at 7,000 feet above sea level and was surrounded by mountains topping 18,000 feet. Adding to the challenge, Paro is a daytime-only airport that offers only Visual Flight Rules approaches, landings for aircraft in our category, and takeoffs. The crew would be flying into a granite bowl without a usable instrument approach, and we had no time to create customized procedures"

Except that now according to CNN they're looking at TWO widely separated areas in the Indian Ocean. Basically, extrapolating the extra hours in flight with the fuel range left on the jet, it could be anywhere in the Indian Ocean, all the way up to Pakistan border.

So yes, it is possible that the plane was stolen. The above mentioned article as well as this speculate on a number of various combination of these theories. However, there could be a few more theories we haven't checked. You know, before we start speculating on some UFO abduction or Multidimensional Portal.

While everyone is looking at the ocean, of course. The assumption being, if it went overland, some radars in the region would've picked it up. Again, this will require some country's military implicit acknowledgement but not wholly beyond the realm of possibility. The Malaysian themselves are being extremely vague about what signals they're reading as accurate or inaccurate. The plane could've landed somewhere within the hundreds, if not thousands of square overland (see map above)

To land a plane of that size will need a team, an airport, plans, flight plans, coordination. To switch off all the signals from the plane simultaneously, while eluding radar in the - incidentally - the particular stretch with poor radar coverage, and setting onto a different navigational path, will require multiple people on board. Then they had to land it somewhere and deal with all the passengers before their cellphones beep and register a new location.

Impossible? Certainly not. Nothing is impossible anymore these days. Implausible? Maybe. Who knows. In September 1970, PFLP hijacked four airplanes and took them to Dawson's Field in Jordan. The passengers were ransomed but the planes were blown up. As you could imagine, it will take a lot of coordinating between people in different parts but not entirely crazy. Just last month, an Ethiopian Airlines flight bound for Rome was hijacked and flown to Geneva, Switzerland, looking for asylum by a single copilot. Wired has a good piece here.

They had to deal with the passengers (maybe hide them in the jungle, people are running entire kingdoms of heroin dominions in the jungle of that part of the world), then moved the plane elsewhere to hide them from satellites (also maybe in the jungle), They could simply, ahem, land the plane, swap the transponder, dispose of the passengers, reregister it as something else, fly it elsewhere. After seven days, it could be in many number of places. Maybe to sell it for spare parts, or fly it up again somewhere for some ghastly dark fleet mission. This kinda thing happens all the time in Africa. Like half the planes flying in Africa aren't even registered internationally, so there is a market for it. The whole thing with stolen passports sounds dodgy enough already.

This is going deep beyond the ultra sensitive stuff, particularly in that part of the world, but is there any chance anyone have any eye in the sky over the region around the time? Like a visual confirmation of a suspected flight path?

Maybe, just maybe, they ought to start looking overland. You know, just in case.

PS: If you think this theory is crazy, you know this isn't even the craziest story this week. They're talking nuclear in other parts of the world.

UPDATE: Added several links.

on a Plane and Not Much Else

2014-03-14T02:35:00.003+07:00

They still haven't found the plane. The story's just getting weirder. Some people think it's 'air piracy' (how's that different to hijacking again?). You would've thought that someone - some group - would've claimed it if it was.

This weekend will be a referendum in Crimea. Then Russia will come and eat it. Presently, the Russian Federation already massing soldiers and artillery around the Eastern Ukrainian border, parachuting more than 1000 soldiers just in the last days. That's in addition to the twenty thousand or so already in Crimea. Plus there are talks about nuclear - Ukraine was once the world's third largest nuclear weapons stockpile.

Have a happy week, everyone.

on National Security

2014-03-12T03:16:00.000+07:00

Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking.
~Karl Marx

I went to a dinner the other day, not one I can write much about but the people there were not my usual crowd. A number of them wore uniform and they asked some smart questions. Others wore suit and pretended to ask important questions. One guy sat in the corner and said not a fucking word. Nothing the whole night. They served all sort of food and tons of drinks. The home made feta cheese was particularly awesome.

Someone very persuasively insisted that I put my best behaviour on and came to dinner. In return, she promised to come not wearing any underwear, and sat with me the whole night. I was supposed to answer questions.

Why do you think Indonesia is so blasé about technology and its communication infrastructure? They asked. Because policy for the last few years are being put in place by a blistering idiot. Indonesian spectacular media consumption and mobile adoption explosion happened by merely a coincidence - a cross between sheer incompetence and pure greed.

Indonesians have no shortage of sparks in rhetoric. The country and the parliament - the ever useless DPR - made repeated noise about nationalization of Indosat and Telkom some years ago for example, but this does not translate at all to any coherent strategy in national security. The government continued to exercise quasi regulatory functions via the overpowering role of ISAT/TLKM combo, and yet managed to lose all advantages in national security perspective.

Is there any national debate on the subject of national security for upcoming 2014 election? No. Not really. Again, contrary to the much publicised line from the government, the prospect of any threats to Indonesian territorial or sovereign integrity is simply quite far fetched. Not even Prabowo Subianto, the ex special forces general with multinational military records, multiple counts of crimes against humanity charges and the country's leading Presidential contender - would even go as far to suggest that country is in facing an imminent disintegration. Moral bankruptcy, yes, we all could agree on it and had unfairly blamed it all on current sitting President Yudhoyono, but no more than that. He had election commercials of birds flying overhead cities as if he was the mother of dragons. Think not.

However, part of this is because Indonesia have been estranged by the western powers ever since the East Timor incident. Military cooperation with the US of A had been suspended for years and at this point, the Indonesian military are buying Russian and China military hardware. Prez Obama (a Menteng boy of some fame) of course, promised to visit and fix this, but was one upped by Prez Putin each time. Last time in Bali, during the APEC meeting, Obama failed to turn up entirely cause his government was in shut down and SBY played guitar with Vladimir and drank shots. Whaddaya think?

Indonesian military is not stupid. They realize they need billions to fix the decrepit navy and the fly more planes for the air force - and reign in some of the budgetary element from the corrupt civilian government. This is a time bomb waiting to explode. Whatever happens, expect Indonesia to spend billions and billions of dollar in military hardware - if only because the Chinese feels like financing it is cheaper than losing a proper customer.

Does anyone have any idea on the state of readiness in the nation communication infrastructure? This question nodded me up to my next serving. For no good reason, they had frozen shots of potato juice served in crystal trays. With little small green olives, I feel almost Roman. "Can you repeat the question, I didn't get it the first time..." I responded politely, chewing the olive. It had a little orange Greek chilli slices inserted. "Like if there's a nuclear war?" I wondered out loud.

Like if there's a major natural disaster in part of the country. What would be the state of readiness in communication line - is it a national security debate? I focused my sight on the person fielding the question. He was short, aged and speaking in a language not all understand.

"It depends much of where the said disaster struck and how bad. The further it is from Jakarta, the less anyone care." I reminded the gentleman we lost a Russian plane in West Java for days. Generally speaking, Indonesia as a whole is pretty maladjusted in their sense of numerical accuracy and theoretical risk tolerance.

What about a command and control scenario? Another person asked this question though admittedly my eyes were difficult to focus correctly. A scenario where command and control is necessary is quite different to a natural disaster scenario, where presumably redundancy took precedence. These people were speaking in riddles. I said as much. "You mean like if anyone realize there's a shorter route to Guam, just in case?"

The table fell quiet. Someone poured me more drinks. We talked a few bits more about 2014 but I don't think they're too satisfied with the answer I had to give on the other matters. I don't think anybody even cared. A nation of smugglers, I think much of my countrymen had any idea about half the shit that's going on. It's in their nature not to care.

Forget the Californian flirts and the Reagan age romantics , the Western ideals have lost its charm repeatedly on the Indonesian - from the 1965 Commie Takedown to Soeharto ousting in 1998 - the whole nation was let down by the West long enough. Russians and Chinese and Koreans sell planes and boats and missiles too. They also print their money and care for fewer rules. They also come bearing gift and much less troublesome than the morally conflicted modern Westernman. I asked if anyone knew how to grow salmon in the tropics but nobody knew.

Ah well.

She took me home after. Touched my hand all the way back to the top of the road.

That was fun.

on Little Kind of Magic

2014-03-11T14:26:00.001+07:00

from Russia with love, Ed Snowden on #SXSW

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
~Arthur C. Clarke

As world descends into war and I wait for a couple of guys to install Skype, time for some happier news.

Wearable stuff. This is happening even quicker than anyone thought. Malls everywhere have already used tools to monitor visitors on their phone signals. Disney spends 1bn USD to track their theme park visitors. Slippery slope, indeed.

I've been to one building recently where everyone within are constantly tagged, logged and monitored. Some people say this is militarization of urban space, but it's also the direct consequence of being part of the network. There will be only more building like that.

On the other end of the spectrum, Ed Snowden spoke last night to the audience at #SXSW. The full video is available here.

Top Gear most recent episode had them abusing a Porsche 918 Spyder - a hybrid supercar with smart power train utilizing both electric as well as 'normal' combustion engine for ridiculous numbers. Mercedez showed off its electric SLS a while ago but of course, full electric engine runs full blast on the track for around 7 minutes. Not enough to get around in Nurburgring. Tesla just announced a 5bn USD plan for a battery factory. Time magazine says, "it will change everything" and some people already said that the battery factory alone could worth more than Tesla.

Real time system, energy management and distribution, persistent adaptive network. You've a feeling things are about to change real fast from here.

on Planes, Nukes and Weed

2014-03-11T10:41:00.002+07:00

They still haven't found the plane. Quite strange it seems, as planes don't just vanish from the sky. The multiple stolen passports used to board the plane is also suspicious though apparently, this does happen quite often. There was a plane in India that went down with something like, 10 fake passports.

Meanwhile, things are getting pretty intense in Ukraine. Russian soldiers are now moving by the thousands and openly taking control of military bases in Crimea. A Kiev lawmaker suggested Ukraine may have to go nuclear.

Ukraine once maintained the world's third largest nuclear arsenal, after the US and Russia. In 1994, they promised to give up the warheads, in return for the other two to guarantee its security.The country still operate 15 nuclear plants - also the home of history's worst nuclear accident in Chernobyl.

Russia says Ukraine is hallucinating on the nuclear risk.

Hilarious people.

The US state of Colorado collected $2m (£1.2m) in taxes from newly legalized recreational marijuana businesses in January. Uruguay, now the first country to legalize marijuana trade will have the laws in place by April. The rest of the world will follow.

So much better than going nuclear.