Why don’t we trust the Russians? For those of us who lived through the greater part of the Cold War, it is ingrained. For the rest of us, it is a question. All of of us must avoid the trap of believing without examining. So let’s reopen the question.

In what follows, I’ll take a deliberately provocative-to-us line, challenging the assumption that our moral superiority makes specific requirements of U.S. foreign policy. The distinction to be explored is whether a moral mandate has any chance of improving the state of the world, as opposed to a mere matter of principle.

In notable exception, the defense of Eastern Europe is not just for principle. It is real and  effective, protecting  our closest cultural relations, from Russia, as they aspire to the lofty values of our common cradle.  Russia is a threat to Eastern Europe because those countries have  greater levels of  human development than Russia. But in most other spheres, conflict with Russia has little rationale.

Russia has greater human development than several of the countries in the Arab world where Russia has intervened.   In Libya,  Russia has recently aligned with Khalifa Haftar. If, hypothetically, Haftar were to become the strongman of Libya, would this represent a tragic loss for potential democracy? It is doubtful. In  the state of social development of Libya, a Russian model “Potemkin democracy” would be a way out of chaos, a great improvement on the current situation. And unlike a real democracy, which has not been achieved by any Arab state except, possibly, Lebanon, it is within the realm of possibility.

In Syria, the real problem is not the impress of Russian values. It’s that Assad is hanging about 11,000 Syrians a month in his prisons and commits war  crimes against the Syrian population at large. But Russia’s representations to the West about their intentions in Syria serve as the most recent benchmark for the saying, “You can’t trust the Russians.”

The Yalta Conference is often cited as the start of distrust. In the years that followed, Russian promises of free determination for the nations of Eastern Europe were replaced by imposed satellite regimes. The list of military occupations by the Soviet Union is long, but Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 stand out, as advanced societies whose aspirations were crushed by the armies of the Warsaw Pact.

This is why, if Vladimir Putin’s accusations of NATO’s broken promises have any validity, we excuse ourselves.  And the Russian intervention in Ukraine implies a continuity of thought, from the old Soviet Union to modern Russia.

Perhaps George F. Kennan was right in his warning about the expansion of NATO. But history cannot be reversed. The way out is not backwards. The question of the day is, under what circumstances can Russia be trusted? This is pertinent not just to the rare treaty, but in every interaction.  Russia successfully paralyzed a Western response to the Ukraine conflict with a fog of misinformation. A similar approach in Syria has been partly confounded by the Syria Observatory for Human Rights, and independent observers. With the new porosity of Western media to “fake news”, misinformation has become an important Russian surrogate for actual military power.

Presidents are politicians with the personal touch.  A good politician has a  manner of dealing with people that increases his success in building his personal network and his power base.  It’s natural to try these domestic tools with foreign policy. This is why most presidents attempt what  Barack Obama called a “reset” with Russia. It’s a computer term. When you push the reset button, the computer forgets it’s current frame of mind, and gives you a fresh new screen.

The “reset” idea reoccurs with each administration. It is a reliable failure. Russian institutional memory is too long for the mere push of a button, There was a time, post Glasnost, when it could have worked, but we ignored, or bungled, or misused the opportunity. What went wrong would take volumes. In result, the old institutional memory of Soviet Russia, absent the ideology, resumed.

Fiona Hill, Trump’s Putin specialist, wrote Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, in which she asserts that, in time, Putin can slowly develop trust. I disagree with Ms. Hill in two seemingly opposite ways. Her detailed psychoanalysis  damning Putin is simply implausible at the distance of her observation. I would not go so far. Russia was failing as a state when Putin came on the scene. The legitimate doubts  are the classic ones: whether he has become as much part of the problem as the solution. Domestically, Russians don’t think so. They enjoy their abridged liberties with a diet rich in potatoes and poor in everything else. Who are we to second guess them?

But Russia’s foreign policy is relevant to us.  In common with the advocates of the “reset”, Hill invokes the abstraction of building “trust”, abstract as separate from real foreign policy, realpolitik.  This, in my opinion, is a big error.

Next: If not trust in the abstract, what is the way forward?

In (Vox) Trump and Putin meet next week. Guess which one has an agenda?, writer Yochi Dreazen quotes a senior member of George Bush’s cabinet:

A senior member of George W. Bush’s Cabinet once told me a revealing story about Vladimir Putin. Each meeting, the official said, began the same way: Putin would reach into his suit jacket pocket, remove notecards listing perceived American sins against Russia, and read them one by one. Only then would the substantive discussions begin.

If you have a warped sense of humor,  this is really funny. Before the breakup of the Soviet Union, activities which in the West enjoy some delegated authority, such as those of high level diplomats, were rigidly scripted.  Since Vladimir Putin is not so constrained , the notecards are just an affectation. In the Paris peace negotiations, a similar litany of condemnation was Lê Đức Thọ’s opener for the North Vietnamese delegation at every meeting.

We might think that the purpose of this canned spiel is to wear us down. Did Lê Đức Thọ and does Putin understand it is pure irritation? It could actually be for the benefit of Putin or the North Vietnamese. By acting out the litany in speech, it reinforces the belief of the actor.

The Vox article continues with

Put a different way, an experienced and ruthless Russian leader is coming to a pivotal meeting with a clear plan and a clear agenda. An inexperienced and autocrat-loving American president isn’t planning to bring one of his own. That’s a recipe for serious trouble.

In other words, we are afraid that our president may not have understood the lesson of the Yalta Conference, in which an ailing F.D.R. thought he could make Uncle Joe his friend. Vladimir Putin is in no way comparable to Uncle Joe. But Putin has expressed a desire for a new Yalta, which in the West is synonymous with “duped” and “giveaway”. Trump campaigned for better relations with Russia with a seeming lack of awareness of a deeply adversarial relationship. All this drives our fears, even though Trump now seems more willing to respect the cornerstones of U.S. policy. To his credit, he has risked confrontation with Russia  to discourage CW use in Syria.

I don’t think that Trump’s lack of preparedness is a risk factor. It inhibits a  premature jump to specifics. Contrasting with generalities. specifics relate strongly to trust, cheating, and the spirit of the thing. But are we blameless? The Russians blame us for cheating on the promise not to expand NATO eastward. The LA TImes tells the story.

Brookings Institute contradicts this in Did NATO Promise Not to Enlarge?:

Gorbachev replied: “The topic of ‘NATO expansion’ was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years. … Another issue we brought up was discussed: making sure that NATO’s military structures would not advance and that additional armed forces would not be deployed on the territory of the then-GDR after German reunification. Baker’s statement was made in that context… Everything that could have been and needed to be done to solidify that political obligation was done. And fulfilled.”

Let’s continue with the assumption that the transcript of of James Baker’s Moscow meeting referred to in the LA Times article, in which he proposed that NATO should /would not expand eastward was not identically reflected in the treaty commitments of German reunification, where it is replaced by  a no-new-military-facilities clause. This would give some rational, though not factual, basis to Putin’s assertion that we cheated.

We give ourselves a pass by virtue of moral superiority. The countries behind the Iron Curtain suffered  during the Cold War. The incorporation of these former vassal states into NATO began in 1997. Quoting (Wikipedia) George F. Kennan et al.,

At that time the decision was criticized in the US by many military, political and academic leaders as a “a policy error of historic proportions.”^[59] According to George F. Kennan, an American diplomat and an advocate of the containment policy, this decision “may be expected to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”^[60]

Kennan correctly predicted the effect. Why did we cheat? The reasoning may have been unconsciously rooted in the heritage of the French Revolution. Part of classic liberal democracy is the idea that the government interferes minimally with the rights of the citizen. In the recent past, this has been challenged by other ideas, such as community welfare, or that the citizen is in some spiritual sense subsumed by the interests of the state.  Fascism, during the 30’s exemplifies the idea of subsuming the individual to the “national will.”

All of these sentiments are present in modern societies. But the proportions vary. In theory, a U.S. election is a legally sanctioned and sanctified revolution, signifying the right of the body politic to change their government.

By implication, illiberalism is the opposite. Hungary Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who many regard as a proto-fascist, has put into words what Vladimir Putin has not bothered to do. Some excerpts of his July 26, 2014 speech (full text at The Budapest Beacon):

...What all this exactly means, Honorable Ladies and Gentlemen, is that we have to abandon liberal methods and principles of organizing a society, as well as the liberal way to look at the world. ...When it comes to a relationship between two human beings, the fundamental view of the liberal way of organizing a society holds that we are free to do anything that does not violate another person’s freedom. ...

Consequently, what is happening today in Hungary can be interpreted as an attempt of the respective political leadership to harmonize relationship between the interests and achievement of individuals – that needs to be acknowledged – with interests and achievements of the community, and the nation. Meaning, that Hungarian nation is not a simple sum of individuals, but a community that needs to be organized, strengthened and developed, and in this sense, the new state that we are building is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state. It does not deny foundational values of liberalism, as freedom, etc.. But it does not make this ideology a central element of state organization, but applies a specific, national, particular approach in its stead.

The above approximates very well the unstated, or nonexistent ideology of Putin’s party, United Russia. Critics of both Putin and Orban are usually distracted by allegations or facts of what we in the West define as corruption. But if there is to be any possibility of engagement, the precedence of concerns must be reversed. Regardless of the personal behavior of the person on the other side, he is committed to ideas, ideas clearly opposite our own.

We can recognize, in Orban’s elevation of the state, the germ of Russian fear of “color revolutions.” The individual, who is the subject of the state, must not overthrow the state, which has the same philosophical inviolability as monarchs once enjoyed. To overthrow would sacrifice what is to us a highly mystical idea of community, for example, the diaspora of Hungary or Russia. Ethnocentric nationalism sanctifies the state at the expense of the individual.

So what does this have to do with foreign policy? While Putin’s primary objects of concern are Russia and cultural Russians, ours are people in general. We identified with the formerly oppressed peoples of Eastern Europe, and their fears. They tugged at our human hearts, so we threw them a rope and pulled them in (to NATO.)

So Putin thinks that we cheated Russia, if not literally, then in spirit.

But how do we talk with a Vladimir Putin who thinks we swindled Russia?

To be continued shortly.

Following the (Aviation Week) shoot-down of a Syrian SU-22,  Russia now warns (CNBC) that U.S. aircraft west of the Euphrates are targets.

There has been plenty of discussion as to why the Russians might not want to follow through with the threat. There is one reason in the plus column, comparatively weak but worth noting nevertheless. Modern air warfare has an informational component, of data acquired by activating the weapons systems of the enemy, and recording the signals and behaviors that result. There is strong incentive for the U.S. not to exhibit advanced technology, and the corresponding Russian desire to force the exhibition. By such means, valuable engineering data is acquired by each side. More advantage accrues to the side with less advanced technology, in this case, the Russians.

This means that  the U.S. does not want advanced warplanes “painted”, that is, illuminated, by Russian radar. The Russian threat gives a plausible explanation as to why they would paint U.S. planes any time a U.S. plane operates west of the Euphrates. The  recorded radar echoes of U.S. planes  would be used to improve  Russian weapons.

Now, the important stuff.  It seems beyond prediction how the Syria conflict will turn out.  Possibly providing a rare glimpse of intentions, the  Russians have drawn a line in the sand, the Euphrates River.  The line has some sense. It conforms to previous Russian intimations that they don’t care who runs eastern Syria. It could be taken as a definition of the region.  Historically, rivers have served as natural barriers to conflict.

We can’t ignore the line, though neither should we over read.  Russian intentions and goals have not remained constant over time.  Hints of this were discussed in Defacto Partition in Syria?,  which quickly became irrelevant with Russian targeting of all anti-Assad forces without discrimination. Whether the Euphrates as a line becomes significant depends upon Assad’s capability to control territory, at what point he would become overextended. His grasp is enhanced by  removal of pressure from ISIS, and  weakened by Coalition support for the SDF.

The east  side of the Euphrates does not have enough carrying capacity for all the Syrians who would want to live free of Assad. In terms of immediately arable land, the carrying capacity would be doubled by the west bank. This is one obvious conflict, if the river-as-a-line were to be taken seriously.

In   Replacing Assad, Part 3,   I wrote,

This is a balance-of-power solution to the statecraft problem. In isolation, it has an immoral sense about it. But in implementation, it would be just a piece of a solution. It corresponds to a geographic partition constrained by economic and defensive viability. There might be little to distinguish from more conventional solutions that partition, except for one thing. Each of the new states must be a client to one of the traditional patrons, the U.S. and Russia. And contrary to the former middle east rivalry, those patrons must work for the mutual benefit of the clients, rather than use them as proxies for their own conflict.

The above comes about with a sandwich arrangement. From the Mediterranean to some line in the Syrian Desert, perhaps the Euphrates, the Alawites rule. East of the line, and continuing without interruption into western Iraq, a Sunni heartland, hostile to Iran’s advances. Further east,  an Iraq co-opted by Iran. The sandwich is perhaps viewed by the Russians as a durable fracture of the Middle East, politically cohesive yet impotent of national aggression, dependent on three patrons for their uncertain existence. A practitioner of European balance of power politics could not hope for more.

If we take the Russian mention of the  Euphrates as a hint of their strategy, it shines more light on the chronic disability of Coalition Strategy in Syria:  uncertainty of goals. No  political entity in Syria evokes much sympathy.  In the last administration, military support to the opposition was gauged to a level as ineffective as our sympathies. The new goal, “defeat ISIS”, has at least the clarity required to motivate effective military support.

Let’s make a wargame, the kind that Avalon Hill is so good at, called “Conflict in Syria”. The game must have “conditions of victory”, different for each side. By convention, the U.S./SDF is “Blue”, and Russia/Assad is “Red.” In this Blue-versus-Red conflict the conditions of victory could be:

• Blue: Defeat ISIS, and establish conditions for negotiations between the SDF and Red.
• Red: Destroy or force the removal of all  Blue forces to east of the Euphrates River.

Even if you have never played a wargame, the asymmetry of the conditions is obvious. When Red has expunged all the blue “counters”, the little cardboard gamepieces, from the area west of the Euphrates, they’ve won. The conditions for Blue are indecipherable, undecidable, and unenforceable. The game would not sell well. Unfortunately, we bought it and we have to play it.

What are the actual Blue conditions of victory in Syria/Iraq?  General H.R. McMaster is currently the primary  Blue strategist,  but is  subject to the political will.  McMaster has extensively studied and written on a previous trap, the Vietnam War. In the case of Vietnam, U.S. extrication involved eventual acceptance (1975), of defeat on all levels.

It  appears that one declared goal, the defeat of ISIS, will be achieved. But in the above, Blue’s conditions are  tied to a political process that is probably impossible.

It has been observed that Red’s forces are much weaker than those of Blue. But the game is evened up by some geography — a line in the sand, the Euphrates River.

We continue from Russia-Gate; Robert Mueller’s Role Part 1, with the question,

• Is Putin’s Russia good/bad for Russians?
• Is it good/bad for everybody else?

For Russia itself,  Neutral: Vladimir Putin resurrected a failed nation-state that had attempted to reconstitute itself along the lines of western democracy. His solution,  part of Putin’s Apology, was to co-opt every element of Russian society, including large parts of the criminal class, into a new oligarchic power structure with himself as the ultimate arbiter. He would probably argue that there was no alternative to the extinction of democracy. Since then, the elite have become obsessed, perhaps justifiably, with the threat of Islamic fundamentalism. The obsession has resulted in the reestablishment of a the security apparatus of a police state.

The extinction of democracy, the use of Russian nationalism to destabilize neighboring states, the reestablishment of a pervasive security apparatus, Syria and all the rest, are repetitions of historical themes. Most of us wished for a better history than is being currently written. Russia has not mounted an effective response to social decay. Of late, Putin’s presidency has   been mired in circumstances which are largely of Russian creation. One does not lightly redraw the map of Europe.   Ukraine could have been bought back into the Russian orbit, instead of making it a perpetual enemy.

But Putin rescued a state in extremis. Barely latent, potent centrifugal forces remain a severe threat. Even with considerable mistakes, the strategy of co-opting all classes and interests may have saved Russia from disintegration.  To argue further would require counterfactual histories that, while extremely interesting, would convince no one. On balance, with Russia alive-but-sickly, and in one piece, Putin may have been good for Russia. At least, this is not provably wrong. Hence the verdict: For Russia, neutral, and possibly good.

Effect on other countries, bad: The conglomerate of private commercial and state interests that is today’s Russia, acting in foreign relations as an agent of the Russian state, is subversive and corrosive to foreign states. Resembling la Cosa Nostra’s  buying  politicians and judges, the Russian state goal is to subvert and replace the governments and business interests of foreign countries with power structures answerable to Russia.

Simply  extending the domestic system of the Russian state-business relationship comes as naturally as breathing for the modern Russian businessman. His goals, on behalf of the state, have no name in ideology. He wears no badge. Putin’s political party, United Russia, in the face of no identifiable ideology, has been dubbed “The Party of Power.”

Because Americans are by nature pragmatic, it’s hard for us to see the danger of something as practical as United Russia, which is popular. It’s mildly oppressive. It’s mediocre, uninspiring, but  it genuinely tries to deliver social services, and it grinds up only small numbers of people.

If today’s Russia were a better example, like Scandinavian social services, we might welcome  the import of values. But the Russian level was surpassed by Roosevelt’s New Deal. The Robber Baron period of the 1890’s, Big City politics lingering into the 70’s, and, of course, la Cosa Nostra, are our versions of the modern Russian experience.

Against the backdrop of Russian history, the domestic performance of modern Russian government isn’t too shabby. But the U.S., and all of the West, have better systems, with the E.U. as the absolute pinnacle. The novelty of Russia’s  non ideological subversion is a  particular danger. Because the shape and scope of it is so strange, it has already been encountered without recognition by members of both political parties.

The smallest part of the danger relates to foreign policy, such as whether we should cooperate in Syria,  change sanctions, or defend the borderlands of  Europe.  In the context of a well structured foreign policy, it should concern us no more than than during the rest of the post World War II period. But the greater part, the hidden nine tenths of the iceberg, Valachi’s “second government” awaits the society that embraces Russia without the honed acuity that will take time to develop. It’s hard because the hazard has no name.

The name will come after the history has been written. With it will come awareness and caution. With adequate societal defenses, the Kremlin may eventually reconsider this form of conflict.

Thanks in advance, Mr. Mueller.

In CNN Video,  Erin Burnett Grills  Rep. Dana Rohrabacher about Trump campaign contacts with Russians. Rohrabacher ridicules the concerns, while making counter allegations about Hillary Clinton. Burnett inserts a video clip of John McCain, who calls Vladimir Putin a greater threat than ISIS.

It’s natural that RussiaGate, defined in narrow terms of legal culpability,  has become a political football. Did traitors walk the halls of the executive branch? Who is gonna take the fall? Who is going to the slammer?  The eventual outcome promises Greek or Shakespearean tragedy. The guilty must be punished.

But if we allow ourselves to be captivated by theater, we could miss the keeper, the lesson of all this. It will come out as a history, carefully written by Robert Mueller & associates. The history and anatomy are what everyone needs going forwards to guard ourselves from the strange new hazard of modern Russia.

Though Khrushchev infamously did not say “We will bury you”, it’s a great line. Instead, we buried Cold War Russia. But it is back from the grave, tinged in the eerie phosphorescent glow of the unfamiliar. Back in the day, Russians wore badly fitting suits, ran mostly ineffective networks of “illegals”, and ran proxy wars all over the place. Occasionally, those fortunate enough for a U.S. posting were booted for trading vodka for stereos, which were in short supply in the U.S.S.R. The threat of Soviet Russia was appreciated as a monolith of ponderous mediocrity.

We were supremely conscious of of Russia-the-threat, because, in addition to their badly tailored suits, Russians were, by mutual agreement of us and them, communists. There was virtually 100% agreement that we didn’t want communism in this country. There was virtual 100% agreement in Russia, at least till the Brezhnev era, that eventually, there would be. Fear of Russia was fear of the Fifth Column, of subversion, of the takeover, of spies, of missiles, A-bombs, submarines, and poisons. It was so easy to understand.

The Russian of today is entirely different from the party automaton of Soviet Russia. The new Russian wants to give you money and presents. He wants to be your friend. He wants you to understand how certain things you might consider doing would be bad for Russia, meaning, no more money for you. But if you make decisions, legislative, composition of the board, shelf offerings, etc., that are good for Russia (and him), he will give you more money. This is the way our national interests, and moral ones also, corrode at the touch of Russia-the-state, acting through their agent, who happens to be your friend.

This has crept up on us with the same shock of discovery of the Italian Mafia as a “second government”, with the raid of Apalachin Meeting of the capos in1957.  In the 1963 congressional hearings, Joe Valachi said,

Nobody will listen. Nobody will believe. You know what I mean? This Cosa Nostra, it’s like a second government. It’s too big.

Is the Russian system, the new nation-state-business-mafia conglomerate, good or bad? There are two answers for two questions:

• Is it good/bad for Russians?
• Is it good/bad for everybody else?

Western imperialism makes the need for distinction obvious. European nations pursued domestic prosperity at the expense of other areas of the globe. The Russian motive is completely different: to obtain security by fracturing and subverting perceived rivals. The methods overlap; the British conquest of India was more by adroit politics of subversion than military means.

To be continued shortly.

The article NBC: U.S. May Launch Strike on North Korea Nuke Test, uses Franklin’s decision making method, in which the elements of a list of pros and cons are given equal weight. Although Franklin’s method was devised as a personal tool, it can also be used to analyze the decision making of others.

It’s been reported that the C.I.A. is working on prediction computers. Unless the developers rely entirely on unfathomable neural networks,  they must grapple with choosing the right method for the problem, and when to switch.  It is a fascinating problem, because, unlike Bayesian probability theory , the sample space — what you might call the “possible outcomes”, is not rigorously defined. Whether the sample space itself is correct becomes a random variable.

What does this mean to somebody who is nosy about the future? It means that you better not stick to your guns too long. As new information comes along, you should revise your prediction without embarrassment. This is why Franklin’s method is so acceptable here.  If new information morphs the problem, switch without embarrassment to another method. But for now,  Franklin’s method remains the choice, with several changes to the lists:

The Pros

• Trump’s vow to solve the problem of North Korea.
• His recent use of force in Syria.
• The enthusiasm of China state media with the Xi-Trump meeting, in spite of China’s awareness of the above. Hence, the “trading material” reference.
• Shared dislike of “Fatty Kim.”
• Possible awareness by South Korea of a grim future with the North.
• The conventional wisdom that force is off the table. Conventional wisdom is always vulnerable.
• Two more THAAD batteries ( Reuters: four more launchers) have been deployed, at the very substantial cost of U.S. $1BN each, footed entirely by the U.S.
• Stalled delivery of the promises of the Trump presidency, with a search for “fungible” alternative achievements.

The Cons

• A possible attack by the North on the South, with all the ramifications. Countered  by the addition of THAAD batteries.
  
• Refusal by the South to face up to the growing threat.

In the mind of the decision maker, the con, “A possible attack…”  is weakened  by the pro, additional THAAD batteries. Since we are trying to fathom a mind, this is entirely subjective. The list modification has nothing to do with actual cost reduction. But neither does it go against actual cost reduction. The domain of prediction is entirely mind.

In Xi-Trump meeting; Long Range; North Korea, it’s suggested that Trump’s concept of achievements is that they are fungible — replacement of unachievable objectives by others that are:

Since Trump’s concept of achievements is that they are fungible, he reconsiders the South China Sea.  There are things you want to keep, and things you want to trade. It’s key to streamlining a business.

In NBC: U.S. May Launch Strike on North Korea Nuke Test, I concluded,

Since the pros have it, 6 to 2, the estimate is that an attack has significant chance. It may have strange aspects.

I did not assign a probability, an “XX percent.” As a member of the Forecasting World Events team, my numbers were weighted with many others — a “transverse ensemble”, so it made sense to do so. But Franklin’s score, formerly 6 pro/ 2 con, is now 8 pro / 2 con.

Hence the chance of a strike on North Korea has increased.

The cheapest secret of prediction is to set aside all the discursive thoughts and discussion that might appear in a news-with-story article. Should the gamble be taken? Is it worth the price and the danger? Would it buy us security? Important as these issues are, they are needless distractions to the predictor.

I have a problem with the New York Times “customer service.” My tablets and phone cannot access the electronic edition. They have dropped, one by one, over the past six months. I have tried to interface (!) with their phone representatives, but to no avail. What follows could sound trivial and mean spirited. So I dedicate it to the memory of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. Diminished by the times, the Gray Lady is still worth saving.

Customer service is outsourced to “EGS Customer Care Incorporated”, who have the helpfully unavailable website, egscorp.com (click to enlarge):

That it is unavailable may be no accident, as their phone number, (563) 285-2753, does not accept incoming calls. It actually has a voicemail that explains this, and helpfully asks the caller to “Please hang up.” My phone number received two calls from this number.  I was not there to answer the phone. The caller promised to call later, but she did not.

This was preceded by two calls by me, one in the daytime and one at night, when I patiently tried to explain the problem. The first representative had the demeanor of a traffic court clerk. When, with icy tones, she asked me if “there is anything else I can do for you today?”, I was tempted to reply, “Please don’t bang the cell door when you lock it.” It seemed as if she had successfully dealt with the first problem:

Password cannot be changed.

But rather than allow me to change it, she went away and did something on my behalf, or so I thought. Had I known the perfidy of her solution, I might have gone (verbally) postal then and there. She “solved” the problem, without telling me, by appending the digit string “1234” to my existing email address. Now it was an email for nobody. But it took me several days to discover the deed.

Edit (5/31/17):  With the apparent interest in this post, I’m adding some detail. On closing, the dialog with the above lady went like this:

Me: What about the tablets? They have me stuck on trial. After my 10 free articles...  Her: Are you talking about the app or the browser?  Me: The app.  Her: You have to log into the browser first. Then you can log into the app.

Perhaps, in her Lewis Carroll world, the above is correct. It isn’t in mine. But she wore me down and disposed of me. Success! Time for a smoke.

The following evening, the rep was more down-home and more responsive. He instructed me to send a screenshot to customercare@nytimes.com, assuring me that, even without reference, they would know what it was for. So I did (click to enlarge):

The actual screen at the time said, “Unknown error.” So there is slight progress. We have an identifiable error. But NY TImes Customer Care does not assign case numbers. The following day, I received an email from Customer Care asking (paraphrased) “Why did you send this? What is your problem?” They had no way to reference it to the conversation of the previous evening.

Now “Carolyn” kicked in, calling from the EGS Corp. number that does not accept return calls:

Good morning. This is Carolyn with the New York times, and I was given your name and some information that you're having some problems with your replica addition and that you haven't been able to log into the new York times. I'd like to talk to you and walk you through and make sure we could get you going on this. I apologize. I'm not able to reach you this morning. I will keep trying through the day as I get some time because I would like to help you get this resolved. I will like I said call you. I'm trying to think maybe a couple hours are try again. I don't know if you work outside your home or are out doing errands, but I will try again a little bit later. I only work til 2 o'clock. As again I said I apologize for reaching you please have a great rest of the day, and thanks for using york times. Bye. Bye.

Replica Edition? That is way down on the list. If only I could get my tablets to work!  Caroline did not try again that day. Her standards are a little loose. Instead, she called the morning of the following day:

Good morning. This is Carolyn with the New York times. I'm calling you again and leaving a message this time. I apologize. I have missed you. I'm trying to help you get. Your replica addition first of all not all the information you've received is correct. if you use your home delivery dot nytimes.com and log in and select replica addition in the lower two thirds of the page you can you don't have to do anything special, but if you're trying to use the device which is what I've read from several of the emails. You need to make sure you have the login from press reader and the information that on press reader can provide you and you talked about having an exit in executable file for that. You can contact newspapers direct by emailing them at New York times at support dot newspaper direct.com. They do only answer emails. They are in Canada, but they do respond very well we've had several subscriptions within our group that we use just to check that out and they do respond as well again. I apologize it was not able to reach you today. I am still going to try to reach you so I can talk to you, but I wanted to give you this information so we can get you started. I also reset your password so that I could make sure that you were able to use the website to get to your replica Dishan, and so your password is now 1 2 3 4 5 6. but you can login with that and change it at my account. Please have a great rest of the day, and thanks for using your time. Bye. Bye.

More yada yada about Replica, a latter part of my wish list. She reset my password. With anticipatory sadness, I accessed my profile to see if magic had occurred (click to enlarge):

I now have two conflicting accounts. Nothing works. I had actually received a customer survey, which I answered like a sympathetic sap, because I didn’t want another job to go to Mumbai. I gave it damnation with faint praise. Now I would go with straight damnation.

I feel sorry for an American institution which is trying so hard to fill its quintessential role, sabotaged by an “EGS Corp.” whose principal talent is disposing of loyal customers. Objectively,

• Without case numbers, it is impossible to follow up.
• Customers are never escalated to second level support. Maybe there isn’t any.
• EGS Corp. hides from contact by phone or website.
• The system they have devised gives the appearance of diligence, but is actually a fraud.

But the New York Times is not innocent. That one of the greats of investigative journalism could miss this issue suggests internal decay.  Nobody is asking the right questions of the right people. The Gray Lady is getting old.

This experience goes with the  zeitgeist  exemplified by U.S. Airways, Wells Fargo, VW Emissions, GM ignition switches, “let-em-die” healthcare, meaningless slogans like “customer support your way“, clip-art representing nonexistent people, and so forth. The collective “We” matters little. But perhaps it’s always been a fiction. The question deserves debate.

I’ll wait another week till I the end the subscription. I’ve subscribed since 1996.

CNN: Inside the US effort to keep laptop bomb intel secret.

The secret has to do with one of the two cities under ISIS control. Following custom, I will not name the city(s). You can look at a map.

CNN has behaved with admirable restraint, far more than Seymour Hersh, when he blew billions by revealing the mission of the Glomar Explorer. But the current situation involves lives, not money.

Since the executions of the Atomic Spy Case, the U.S. has dealt leniently with spies and traitors. A sharp distinction is made between compromise of secret information such as the adversary would want to know, and the lives of our agents. Although capital punishment is no longer the norm,  Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, whose actions caused the deaths of many U.S. agents, are spending the rest of their lives in Supermax.

Information that would enable an adversary to roll up a spy network, and in this case, lead to the deaths of Israeli spies, is the most secret information there is. This is why the disclosed intelligence is kept in a special White House compartment, a kind of vault. This is why (Jerusalem Post) Israel is furious. The Trump Administration holds the lives of Israeli spies  in their hands, and they fumbled.

If ISIS has the time to act on the disclosure, they are busy killing everybody who lives in, next door, or is remotely connected with who they think the spies are. The victims may not be the actual spies. The carnage could be terrible — except, perhaps, in comparison to the norm under ISIS, which is already unimaginable.

It is customary in the U.S. to elect chief executives who come into office with little or no knowledge of what the job entails. This is the case in other Western democracies as well, but elsewhere, there is a closer proximity of career civil servants. In France, civil service is literally a class of people with a lifelong vocation. This class distinction retards innovation, but it might have prevented the initial error, on March 31, five weeks prior to Trump’s  disclosure-to-Russia. Quoting CNN,

The intelligence behind the US ban on laptops and other electronics is considered so highly classified that CNN, at the request of US government officials, withheld key details from a March 31 story on the travel restrictions.

 CNN has behaved with admirable restraint. But the source for the story made a serious error. The information CNN was requested to withhold never should have been provided to CNN in the first place. Information about friendly human sources should never be compromised for any reason, regardless of whether they belong to us (C.I.A.) or Mossad.

The key information is not the name of the city in which the bombs are manufactured. Nor is it the involvement of Israel. It is that the intelligence was collected in a city under ISIS control. It tips off ISIS that there are spies in “their” city, of which there are  two choices. More experienced official(s) would have cloaked the information source with a fictitious story: that it was provided by a refugee,   a defector, or a wiretap. That it wasn’t cloaked is an astonishing lapse. They should have hired a used car dealer, who would have the necessary skill set.

 Why did administration source(s) reveal this information to CNN?

• The Trump Administration  has some awareness of the widespread perception of  xenophobia-focused-on Islam, amplified by successful court challenges to the travel ban.
• The laptop ban particularly impacts users and creators of media, whose cooperation is required to sell the ban to the public.
• Airplane travel has become hell. The effect of the ban is amplified by the stressful environment.
• Source(s) in the administration, with the crucial need to sell the ban to the public, felt pushed against the wall. With strained credibility, particularly among the kind of people who use laptops on planes, they reached for a credibility enhancer.
• The enhancer was the information, leaked to CNN, and five weeks later, disclosed by Trump to the Russians.

Trump probably knew what CNN had been told. Not familiar himself with classification schemes, he may have felt empowered to follow the example of the March 31 disclosure. While CNN is an American news organization, and exemplifies the defense of the Republic, there is little technical distinction in risk between a leak to CNN, and a leak to the Russians. CNN is not a high security organization. It cannot be presupposed that the communications of CNN, and even the staff, are secure from Russian penetration.

Predating Trump’s error, some administration officials terribly miscalculated. What they do not know, Mossad  will now teach.

It has been suggested that Israel will shrug off the lapse, because “they need us more than we need them.” This just isn’t possible. Their  agents are precious patriots, who gave up every semblance of a normal life as an Israeli for an alien, dangerous, fictitious existence. Only in old age can they reap the rewards of self respect for their sacrifice.

Now they may not grow old.

Baby steps…we conclude.

Let’s address the other big reason why electronic devices are such a security pita.  We can thank Steven Jobs for a major part of this. Super salesman that he was, he invented needs that people never had, touted in his bio, The Journey is the Reward. The idea that we need a battery that doesn’t come out is  a really nefarious concept. The sealed laptop, tablet, and phone make reliable inspection impossible with current technology.

It is impossible because the battery is a big gob of organic chemicals markedly different from the other materials of the device, but not so different from a bomb. If the battery were separately presented to the scanner, there would be little trouble verifying that it is a battery. Recall the Mogadishu case: (CNN) the laptop bomb that passed x-ray inspection in Mogadishu, exploding on a Somali airliner on 2/2/2016. Quoting,

McGann told CNN that when modern multiview X-ray systems are used alone there is a chance the clutter in the X-ray image caused by the laptop could lead operators to overlook anomalies flagged by the technology. “Single view X-rays, on the other hand, would be totally reliant on a very vigilant screened at best — and TNT concealed in a laptop could be easily missed,” he added.

McGann is paraphrasing “Detection of organic materials by…” It’s a hard problem.

By one report, the Somali laptop bomb was concealed in a DVD drive from which parts had been removed. Scanner operators are ordinary people, challenged by very clever terrorists. Batteries and explosives are large, low density objects containing organic materials. They are not chemically similar. But when both are embedded in a gadget, discrimination beyond simple density is required. Battery or bomb?  The quoted sources suggest it cannot be done reliably. This is because the “signatures” provided by conventional x-ray augmented by an extra detector, and even a CAT scanner with spectroscopic detector, are confused by the superposition of  the large variety of materials  in electronic gadgets.

Removing the battery simplifies inspection, because then, inside the gadget, something that looks like a battery, isn’t. What about the battery pack itself? If  inspected separately, could it still conceal a bomb?The battery by itself is a smaller, less complex unit, easier to visualize for inspection. Additional certainty would be offered by a removable inspection cover.

A basic principle: The smaller the volume that is sequestered by a “closed”, non accessible design, the greater is the mitigation of the threat.

We’ve been relying entirely on high-tech, indirect inspection. But to make a gun “safe”, you open the breech, remove the magazine, and visually inspect. With some redesign, our gadgets can be made amenable to a combination of indirect and direct modes inspection, providing a degree of security not provided by either mode by itself. Consumer product life cycles are brutally short. The changes could be implemented in less than two years.

It’s time to stop hugging our gadgets like bling. The alternative is terrifying. At least you don’t have to fly naked.

This documentary is relevant to the current threat climate.

The scanner for carry-on luggage is a sophisticated shadow box. An X-ray tube,not dissimilar to the one in a dental office, throws a “spotlight” on the gadget as it travels the belt. Opposite the tube are two sheets of material that glow when exposed to x-rays. The sheets show shadows, like a finger puppet show from a bedroom lamp.

The two sheets are separated by a slab of metal that acts like a “color filter”. This provides the equivalent of two-color vision. One color is for dense objects, made of metal or ceramics. The other color is for low density: plastics, liquids, organics. The intensity of each color corresponds to how much X-ray is blocked by each item. To help things stand out, the operator has an enhanced, “false color” view.

The above scheme can’t say specifically what carry-on luggage contains. Some carry-on scanners have an additional detector that is sensitive to more “colors”, enough to identify a material.  But it is imprecise.  Checked luggage is examined with the much more sophisticated CAT scanner.  Theoretically, a CAT scanner can perform material identification of the entire contents of a bag.

In theory! , which was worked out by Arthur Compton in 1923. For material identification, a CAT scanner has two detectors. But quoting from  (pdf) Detection of Organic Materials by Spectrometric Radiography Method,

...the specified design of the dual-energy detector array do not allow detection of all potentially dangerous substances with sufficiently low error probability.

(Note: The “dual energy detector” is actually a “full color” spectrometer. Even with “full color vision”, it has a problem.)

A checked bag is a blizzard of items that camouflage each other. How well a checked baggage CAT scanner works against current and future threats is a closely held secret. With all due respect for the political process, this should be the inquiry, not the really lousy experience of modern airplane travel. How good can it be when you’re thankful just to get there?

The political drama distracts. And the above might have put you into overload. So we’ll take “baby steps.”  After you’ve absorbed the above, refreshed yourself, had a cocktail,..the Solution.

Baby steps…