Go Leo Gao and Cara Young!
A modern story of hope:
Police hunting for a New Zealand couple who allegedly fled the country after a bank mistakenly paid them $NZ10 million ($6 million) believe they traveled to Hong Kong.
New Zealand authorities have sought help from Interpol in locating the couple who disappeared May 7, two days after an employee error at Westpac bank paid them 1,000 times the amount they asked for.
Vaporware of Terror
A startup that should have stayed in stealth mode but didn’t. (Amplified their product too early in the cycle, couldn’t deliver.) The age of inept terrorists continues.
Good police work paid off – and treating terrorism as an intense type of criminality is likely the best long term approach. There’s plenty of people thinking about how to fight off these guys. Rule of thumb: Radicals are easy, it’s the non-ideological you have to worry about.
Note: The amping up of successful counterterror op helps drive guerrilla innovation – they learn what doesn’t work and innovate accordingly. So far, these high profile plots (Pacific airline bombers etc) have fit into the ‘inept’ category and innovation generated from not making the same mistakes has been minimal. The rest is a function of luck.
Idea: Criminal-Processing Corporate Micro-States
Here‘s a 2007 post brought back to life on how to solve Gitmo (making it cheaper, more useful, and ideally less ‘politiked’).
Note, this was put together back when I was briefing academic audiences and private military corporations on the future of the private military market. Needs some fleshing out and touch up, but too busy right now, so this will have to do. It’s fun thinking if nothing else.
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Sparked by the smart folks over at Coming Anarchy:
While a dangerously stupid policy of rewards led many to
turn in tribal enemies to the Americans as “terrorists,” the
controversy masks a more important reality, what to do with those from
country A, caught fighting in country B and detained by country C.
Until this issue is discussed in earnest by Europe and the United
States minus the protests, holier-than-thou attitudes and other
silliness, Guantanamo will continue to fill a “market gap.” Perhaps
the real way forward is maintaining US control but with foreign liasons
on site and using Guantanmo as a processing center through which
terrorists are sent back home to face trial.
Or let the “processing center” be the service provided by a private
firm. Think about the potential of a corporate terrorist processing
micro-state in the context of distributed small teams of bounty hunters
paying for intel from private firms to hunt down and take out/down bad
guys for a “keystoning” market-state that provides bounty-incentives.
Trance Scene
Turns out I ‘knew’ a surprising amount of the artists that are big in that scene back when they were getting started at Mp3.com in the late 90’s.
Secure Cities
Very cool research on the militarization of cities post 9/11:
Utilizing an innovative method developed by our interdisciplinary team,
we find that over 17% of total space within our three study sites is
closed entirely or severely limits public access. The ubiquity of these
security zones encourages us to consider them a new land use type.
There’s lots more work to be done in this particular realm. So far, this project covers NYC, SF, and LA. Click through the map on the left, the data gets pretty granular. Overall results: 