I’ve written here before about French use of encryption in the 16th Century, and prior art. A new history article makes brief mention of ancient secrecy methods found in England.
The spies had a few special tricks up their sleeves. “They practiced secret inks,” explains Alford. “Quite a lot of use of code and cypher, which to our eyes looks relatively unsophisticated, although it develops an increasing sophistication.” Cyphers became particularly important during the infamous Babington Plot, when Walsingham’s agents decrypted letters to and from Mary Queen of Scots. This provided evidence that Mary was conspiring against Elizabeth, leading to Mary’s trial and execution.
Source: UK National Archives. The Babington postscript and cipher, 1586. (Catalogue reference: SP 12/193/54 and SP 53/18/55)
Provided evidence? Very important to understanding the fallout from the Babington Plot is that integrity was the bigger failure, on top of confidentiality being breached.
While in his possession, Walsingham had the letters deciphered and copied. In 1586, Babington wrote a letter outlining the details of the plot to rescue Mary. In the letter, Babington asked for Mary’s permission to assassinate Elizabeth. Mary responded and agreed with the plans, but did not authorized the assassination. That did not matter however, because Walsingham’s spies intercepted the letter. The letter was deciphered and copied but this time a postscript was added. According to the new letter, Mary authorized the assassination. Walsingham had his proof.
By the 1580s, ciphers were extremely complex – they could incorporate substitute letters, Arabic numerals, nulls, letters with a dot before or after, substitute names for locations, and numbers, signs of the zodiac or days of the week for individuals.
If you think that sounds innovative, consider how French and English secrecy methods seem to have roots elsewhere:
Muhammad ibn Abbad al-Mu’tamid (المعتمد بن عباد), King of Seville from 1069-1092, used birds in poetry for secret correspondence.
Leaflets have been so basic, so very black beret and prone to failures, that something higher up on the hat color chart seems to be in store for the military:
How better to attract talent into a modernizing Psychological Operations (PSYOP) group than a grey hat? Or imagine the “grey berets” calling in “knowledge bombs”…
Nothing is decided yet, I mean there’s still a chance someone could influence the decisions, but rumors have it that the next generation of psychological warfare troops could expect to be represented in a beret the color of white noise:
The idea is essentially still being floated at this point, but it could be a recruiting boon for the PSYOP career field, which is tasked with influencing the emotions and behaviors of people through products like leaflets, loudspeakers and, increasingly, social media.
“In a move to more closely link Army Special Operations Forces, the PSYOP Proponent at the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School is exploring the idea of a distinctive uniform item, like a grey beret, to those Soldiers who graduate the Psychological Operations Qualification Course,” Lt. Col. Loren Bymer, a USASOC spokesman, said in an emailed statement to Army Times.
While still being a little fuzzy on the details, reporters also dropped some useful suggestions in their story:
1) The new Army Special Operations Command strategy released just a month ago states everyone always will be trained in cyber warfare and weaponizing information
LOE 2 Readiness, OBJ 2.2 Preparation: Reality in readiness will be achieved using cyber and information warfare in all aspects of training.
2) Weaponizing information means returning to principles of influence operations in World War II (e.g. Mission 101, and Operation Torch), let alone World War I (e.g. Battle of Beersheba)… I mean adapting to the modern cloud platform (Cambridge Analytica) war.
“We need to move beyond our 20th century approach to messaging and start looking at influence as an integral aspect of modern irregular warfare,” Andrew Knaggs, the Pentagon’s deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations and combating terrorism, said at a defense industry symposium in February. Army Special Operations Command appears to take seriously the role that influencing plays in great power competition.
As some of the most highly trained military personnel, the “grey beret” are a force to be reckoned with. Until SOWT gives the “all-clear” the mission doesn’t move forward.
Kessler AFB: “Team members collect atmospheric data, assist mission planning, generate accurate and mission-tailored target and route forecasts in support of global special operations, conduct special weather reconnaissance and train foreign national forces.” Click for original.
Meanwhile over at the Navy and Marines there’s much discussion about vulnerability to broad-based information attacks across their entire supply chain.
…a massive cyber campaign is being waged against the Navy, and every organization associated with it is mounting. The defense industrial base and associated supply chains are under constant assault. The hackers have two objectives: steal U.S. defense secrets and undermine confidence…
While Brigadier General (BG) William P. Yarborough, commander of the U.S. Army Special Warfare Center, waited at the pond, the presidential caravan drove down roads flanked on both sides by saluting SF soldiers, standing proudly in fatigues and wearing green berets.
“Late Thursday morning, 12 October 1961, BG Yarborough welcomed the 35th President, Secretary McNamara, GEN Decker, and the distinguished guests at the reviewing stand.”
General Yarborough very strategically wore the green beret as he greeted JFK and they spoke of Special Forces wanting them a long time (arguably since 1953 when ex-OSS Major Brucker started the idea).
The challenge of this old but new form of operations is a real one…I am sure the Green Beret will be a mark of distinction in the trying times ahead.
Just one month later, 58 years ago (November 1961) the green beret became official headgear of the Special Forces, which earlier that year started being deployed into Vietnam. Finally on April 11, 1962 JFK issued a White House Memorandum to the US Army:
The Green Beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence, a badge of courage, a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom.
What will the grey hat symbolize and what will become its history?
Update May 2020: Perspective from USSOCOM on SOF and US Strategy.
“During his most recent trip to Afghanistan, Clarke said, he found that commanders now spend 60 percent of their time working in the information space. Commanders think about how to use the information space to influence the Taliban’s thought processes and how to influence the Afghan.”
Founded in 1952 as part of the U.S. Army Psychological Warfare Division, the 10th Special Forces Group was the first of its kind, according to Army archives. It was named the tenth group to make the Soviets think there were at least nine others just like it, Anne Jacobsen wrote in her book “Surprise, Kill, Vanish.” […] Wanting to distinguish themselves from conventional Army forces, Special Forces soldiers selected the wear of the beret because of OSS influence, since a number of its teams adopted headgear worn by soldiers in France. And the color green came from the influence of British Commandos during World War II.
U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) has created a new joint task force to fight against Chinese information operations in the Pacific.
[RAT LEAFLET] Translation: “The Invisible Sheikh with the expansion of his false caliphate… will soon have none to help him achieve his illusions.” Target Audience: ISIS members. Objective: Encourage desertion to weaken ISIS. This is a reference to the leader of ISIS and self-proclaimed caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He is called ‘invisible’ because his exact location remains uncertain and he hides among civilian populations in ISIS-controlled areas rather than anywhere in the open or near immediate danger. An example of a PSYOP leaflet used against the Islamic State (ISIS) that was dropped before the Delta Force raid that killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS. (USASOC).
Metz and Munro gaze together into their abyss of bias they practice
A month ago Munro realizes bias in AI is bad, as you can see in his tweet above. And suddenly Munro is the leading voice in a NYT story on it?
Cade Metz appears to be a white man at the NYT who reached out to another white man, Dr. Munro. They then discuss bias in AI for Munro’s new interest and future book.
Was there any point that either of them thought maybe someone who isn’t like them, someone who isn’t a white man and also who has been doing this a long time, could be the lead voice in their story about bias in AI?
Let’s dig in.
The transition in the story itself is so remarkably tone-deaf to itself, it’s hard to believe it is real.
BERT and its peers are more likely to associate men with computer programming, for example…. On a recent afternoon in San Francisco, while researching a book on artificial intelligence, the computer scientist Robert Munro fed 100 English words into BERT: “jewelry,” “baby,” “horses,” “house,” “money,” “action.” In 99 cases out of 100, BERT was more likely to associate the words with men rather than women. The word “mom” was the outlier. “This is the same historical inequity we have always seen,” said Dr. Munro, who has a Ph.D. in computational linguistics and previously oversaw natural language and translation technology at Amazon Web Services.
Why does the author think we should be happy to go from “more likely to associate men with computer programming” straight to here’s a man to talk about it? It’s like the NYT writing “mispelungs are a problem in communication”. So, how about don’t do that thing you’re saying is bad? Or at the very least setup an example, like Munro could have deferred to a black woman and said “I’m new to this and confirming what’s been said, so let’s ask her”.
There are many books already written about this by people of diverse backgrounds. Why talk to someone still in research phase, and why this white man? Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Joy Buolamwini is such an obvious resource here. Or Yeshimabeit Milner, founder and executive director of Data for Black Lives, or MacArthur “Genius” award recipient Jennifer Eberhardt who published “Biased“, or Margaret Hu writing about a Big Data Constitution, or Caroline Criado Perez who published “Invisible Women“, or Renée Cummings at Columbia…come on people, there’s even a searchable database.
100 English words is barely a talking point, so why is it here? Even I have done more research than this in my Big Data ethics classes over the past five years. We literally fed hundreds of words from dozens of languages into algorithms to break them. I’ll bet my students from diverse backgrounds would be the better sources to quote than this one white man feeding “horses, money, baby, action” into any algorithm new or old. Were the rest of the words on his list like “bro, polo, golf, football, beer, eggplant, testicles, patagonia…”? Perhaps we also should be asking why he thought to test whether horses, baby and jewelry would associate more with women than men? Does mom, which is so obviously not male, serve as an outlier more in terms of his own life choices?
“This is the same historical inequity we have always seen..” is a meaningless history phrase. Why can’t jewelry be associated with men? Historical inequity seen where? By who? Over what period of time?
Then I noticed…”previously oversaw natural language and translation technology at Amazon Web Services.” A quick check of LinkedIn revealed “Principal Product Manager at AWS Machine Learning, Sep 2016 – Jun 2017…I led product for Amazon Comprehend and Amazon Translate…the most senior Product Manager within AWS’s Machine Learning team”. Calling oneself the most senior product manager on a team usually means someone above was the overseer, not him. And even if we give benefit of doubt, he was last there in 2017 and only sat 10 months. It’s a stretch to hold that out as his priors. Why not speak to his recent work, lack of focus on this topic and the reason his bias story from just a month ago makes him so relevant?
None of this is to fault Munro entirely for answering the call of a journalist. Hey, I answer calls about ethics all the time too and I’m a white man.
His response, however, could have been to get the journalist oriented more towards leading his story with people who already have released their books (as in how I discuss “Weapons of Math Destruction”); help NYT represent topics of bias fairly even though “more likely to associate men with computer programming”. Seems like missed opportunity to avoid repeating known failures.
And if that isn’t enough, the article gets worse:
Researchers have long warned of bias in A.I. that learns from large amounts data, including the facial recognition systems that are used by police departments and other government agencies as well as popular internet services from tech giants like Google and Facebook. In 2015, for example, the Google Photos app was caught labeling African-Americans as “gorillas.” The services Dr. Munro scrutinized also showed bias against women and people of color.
Oh really, Google was caught? Well do tell, who caught it then? Was it some non-white person who will remain without credit?
Yes. I’ve spoken about this at conferences many times, citing those people and the original work (i.e. instead of asking a white man from Stanford to give me their opinion).
Don’t you want to know who discovered the bias in Google platform and when?
Click to enlarge.
What are the names of researchers who have long warned of bias? Were they women and people of color?
Yes. (See names above)
Yet the article returns to Munro for his Stanford-educated white man, 10 months at AWS and researching a new book, opinions again about women and people of color.
Use your platforms and your cultural capital to ask that men be the ones to do the self-improvement for once. Stand up for deference. Write the book that teaches men to sit back and listen and yield to others’ judgment. Code the app that shows them where to put the apologies in their emails. Teach them how to assess their own abilities realistically and modestly. Tell them to “lean out,” reflect and consider the needs of others rather than assertively restating their own. Sell the female standard as the norm.
If only Cade Metz had read it before publishing his own piece, he might have started by asking Munro whether — realistically and modestly speaking — there would be better candidates to feature in a story about bias, such as black and brown women already published and long-time active thought leaders in the same space. Maybe he did ask yet still decided to run Munro as lead in the story, and that would be even worse.
Some are calling it a license plate system for drones to identify themselves, which becomes essential to safety. Some may recall that license plates were added to cars because they had a tendency to look all the same, cause havoc and disaster/death, and be able to drive away unidentified.
Incidentally (pun not intended) this is why license plates really are not needed for things like bicycles and motorcycles, which tend neither to get away nor be hard to identify uniquely.
The new drone-based system is leveraging past wireless protocol work and trying to get adoption before a European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) July 2020 deadline for remote ID.
DJI’s system was built to conform to the forthcoming ASTM International standard for broadcast drone remote ID, developed over a period of 18 months by a broad group of industry and government stakeholders. The solution uses the Wi-Fi Aware protocol for mobile phones, which allows the phones to receive and use the Wi-Fi signals directly from the drones without having to complete a two-way connection. Because it does not need to connect to a Wi-Fi base station, a cellular network or any other external system, it works in rural areas with no telecom service. In DJI’s preliminary testing, the Wi-Fi Aware signals can be received from more than one kilometer away.
According to the National Interagency Fire Center, aerial firefighting efforts have been shut down at least nine times this year because of drone use, and at least 20 drone incursions have hindered firefighting capabilities nationwide from January through October. A report shared with The Times showed that of those 20 incursions, five were in California.
The next step is intercepting, demanding ID to check for authorization, and disabling upon wrong response just like it’s 1962 again.
