I attended Halvar’s talk in-person. The premise “eventually, navies take over” in order to “perform tight surveillance of sea lanes and ensure safety for commerce” is counter-factual. Given the failures of Spain and Britain the timeline is more of a shift away from central authority and more to nimbler, lighter power/economy models.
Shipping routes protected by a Navy were basically a high tax that did not scale well and became an increasing liability in expanding competitive markets (the same way castles could not scale to protect trade on land) and helped accelerate demise of the Spanish empire. The “flota” model was an expensive disaster (just like the British version that came later). Halvar mentions British could make a large haul without noting that was by design of the Spanish. There was not more than one annual flota to be attacked, because it was literally an entire annual income in a shipment. More to the point, in peacetime a navy simply could not build a large enough military to police the draconian top-down trading rules. People naturally smuggled and expanded routes around the navies. And in wartime privateers were even harder for navies to compete against because the navy itself became a target. Thus the continuum, as with a shift from proprietary to open, is away from navies intended to artificially enforce trade restrictions. They tended to fall behind natural market forces/expansion. Spain’s bankruptcy from war and trying to prevent competition really what “navies take over” could be associated with. That should put in better context why 1856 US refused to ban letters of marque (when European nations did so in the Paris Declaration). US leadership expressly stated it would never want or need a standing militia (believed it needed privateering to compete with European militias). To a young American country the concept of large standing navy appeared a relic of unsustainable and undesirable closed markets; therefore they hoped to avoid the mistake they saw both the Spanish and British make. Things changed dramatically for the US in 1899 but that’s another topic. Halvar also unfortunately uses many patently misleading statements like “pirates that refused to align with a government…eventually executed”. Some, perhaps many, avoided alignment and then simply retired. Peter Easton, a famous example, bought himself land with a Duke’s title in France (http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/easton_peter_1E.html ). There was no alignment for Duke Easton, just success and then done. Describing pirates’ options as binary alignment-or-be-executed is crazy when you also put it in frame of carrying dual or more allegiances. One of the most famous cases in American history involves ships switching flags at sea to whatever side is winning in order to get a piece of the spoils on their return to the appropriate port. Halvar after his talk backed away from defending facts used to generate conclusions. He said he just read lightly and was just throwing out ideas, so I let it drop as he asked. Shame, really, because I’ve been presenting on this topic for a while and it seems like a good foundation for debate. My own talks on piracy and letters of marque in London, Oct 2012, San Francisco, Feb 2013 and also Mexico City, Mar 2013 didn’t get much response so haven’t recently pushed the topic publicly much on my own. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Dave Aitel Sent: Tuesday, December 23, 2014 6:30 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [Dailydave] COUNTDOWN TO ZERO DAY It is a lot of work to take compile times from various Stuxnet, Flame, Duqu, etc. DLL's and correlate them with the list of centrifuge replacements that the IAEA puts out from the Iranian nuclear program. You don't have to do any of that work. Kim Zetter has already done so, and compiled them, with some interesting human interest interviews from AV reverse engineers into her book<http://www.wired.com/2014/11/countdown-to-zero-day-stuxnet/>. It is worth a read, less for the parts about Stuxnet perhaps, than for how Iran operated as it hid its nuclear weapons program from the public with pathetically transparent lies and chicanery. The book falters for predictable reasons: people not in the Paladin-like white-hat world of AV are not going to talk to Kim about Stuxnet. Her access to sources with insight into the world of mirrors is essentially zero so some of the meat of the book is re-processed from the work of Sanger (who had a General leaker to write from). The entire last chapter (incomplete in the Google Play version of the book) reads like a journalist wrote it, without any internal voice. It tries to predict the future using the events of the book by quoting from various "expert sources". It is the weakest chapter in the book. In the same way the book, while balanced, avoids all the hard questions. Did Microsoft have logs of the Flame authors getting their fake certificate? Were they obviously complicit? Is the US behind the assassinations of the Iranian nuclear scientists? Is that going too far? Are cyber-scientists next? All the AV characters seem mystified that nobody in the US establishment seems curious where Stuxnet came from, or wants to put a lot of effort into investigating it, and Kim seems oblivious when her US-CERT sources blatantly lie to her face about it. What does it mean that every AV company seems pretty good at finding every other country's implants, but not their own country's? Mikko Hypponen has commented<http://www.wired.com/2012/06/internet-security-fail/> on the rather emotional state of things when you've sold a product that is supposed to detect malware and it clearly is performing poorly, since Stuxnet and Friends have been around for almost a half-decade? Also missing is the aftermath. It's hard to talk Stuxnet without looking at the Cyber Sword of Justice and the personalities behind the Iranian cyber team - many of whom are public and active on twitter/facebook/DD etc. Without a more global view<http://imgur.com/gallery/E4tFuD6> of the conflict (and listening to Halvar) you miss the signs pointing directly to Sony<https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1pD_BRXg6sgWdNtIEnTpZYXqQ2MEoAGdfrQsvuj9YeDA/edit?pli=1#slide=id.p>. -dave
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