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November 2005 - Posts

No More Enemy Combatant

posted Tuesday, November 22, 2005 9:01 AM by hussain

'Dirty Bomb' Suspect Padilla Indicted, SF Gate/AP, 11/22/2005

Jose "Dirty Bomber" Padilla has been indicted in Miami with criminal charges of being "part of a conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim persons in a foreign country and provide material support to terrorists abroad. " These charges are different from what he's been widely accused of doing ever since being nabbed in O'Hare airport in 2002 returning from Pakistan and held since as an "enemy combatant": planning to blow up hotels and apartment buildings with a radiological device. 

This indictment's a pretty significant since it seeks a ruling against Padilla as something less than testing the edges of the "enemy combatant" designation - there's no push to prove that Padilla was on-ground in Afghanistan/Pakistan fighting against US troops, etc.   The next step for Padilla contesting the ec designation would've been the Supreme Court.  Padilla's no longer an "enemy combatant."

Also, Padilla's lawyers can argue against more "classic" charges such as conspiracy and material support. I'm looking for the text of the indictment (which charges 4 other suspects, too) and will post it when it's unsealed by AG Gonzalez later this morning (now, I think).

Padilla'll probably be transfered from his Navy brig cell in South Carolina where he's sat for 3 years to Miami shortly thereafter.

Edit:  SF Gate updated their AP article, so I'll update this:

"The others indicted are: Adham Amin Hassoun, Mohammed Hesham Youssef, Kifah Wael Jayyousi, and Kassem Daher. Hassoun also was indicted on eight additional charges, including perjury, obstruction of justice and illegal firearm possession. Hassoun, a Palestinian computer programmer who moved to Florida in 1989, was arrested in June 2002 for allegedly overstaying his student visa. Prosecutors previously described him as a former associate of Padilla.

Padilla has been held at a Navy brig in South Carolina. Following the indictment, which was handed up last Thursday, President Bush sent a memo to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordering Padilla transferred to the federal detention facility in Miami."

Also, I just pulled today's indictment, the President's 11/20/2005 memo to the SECDEF releasing Padilla from EC-ness, and the brig transfer memo.  I'll post quotes soonish.

From the President to the SECDEF, in a memo dated 11/20/2005:
"I hearby determine that is in the interest of the United States that Jose Padilla be released from detention by the Secretary of Defense and transferred to the control of the Attorney General for the purpose of criminal proceedings against him...  This memorandum supersedes my directive to you of June 9, 2002 [Ed: When I declared him EC], and, upon such transfer, your authority to detain Mr. Padilla provided in that order shall cease."  EC no more! Turn in your t-shirt.

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Potter4

posted Sunday, November 20, 2005 12:46 PM by hussain
Of course I loved it, duh.  I have to see it again, though - sitting in the first row pretty much sucked.

Here's funny:

Also, if you haven't heard Harry and the Potters, do.

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powerlessness

posted Friday, November 18, 2005 7:23 AM by hussain

Software design and development gives one a nice artificial sandbox to exert power and, might I add, easily lose and find sanity.  That's a topic for another day.  Today, NPR woke me up at 6:20 to tell me 65+ people were blown up in mosques in Iraq.  Shia, near the Iranian border.

Guardian NY Times Al Jazeera

Two suicide bombers blew themselves up at two mosques during Friday prayers in Khanaqin, Iraq, near the Iranian border and about 90 miles NE of Baghdad.  Khanaqin's mostly Kurdish.  The Sheik Murad mosque and the three story Grand Khanaqin Mosque got housed and they're digging people out of the rubble.  About 75 people dead so far, with 75 injured.  A third suicide bomber targetted a bank in town.

I'd make a Google Earth kml, but what's the point? (semi-intentional pun)  I've wanted to make a list of attacks on Shi'a for a while, but I don't have the motivation right now.

Also, in Baghdad, two car bombs (a white van and a white truck) blew up about 30 seconds apart near what was the intended target - al-Hamrah Hotel, where some international reporters live/work (first one to rip the blast barrier to the hotel, second for the hotel - the second one fell into the crater created by the first and never made it to the hotel). Blast barriers stopped the trucks from doing damage to the hotel, but a bunch of residential buildings collapsed with 6 people dead, at last report.  For some reason, all the reports mention how many cars were damaged, too: about 30.  I don't know why I find that odd.  Maybe because I keep hearing Dominque de Villepin saying anything under 100 burned cars a day is normal.

  • Nov. 2, 2005 - A suicide bomber blows up a minibus in an outdoor market packed with shoppers ahead of a Muslim festival, killing about 20 people in Musayyib, a Shiite town south of Baghdad.
  • Oct. 31, 2005: A car bomb explodes on a bustling street in Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, killing 20 people.
  • Oct. 29, 2005: A bomb hidden in a truck loaded with dates explodes in a Shiite farming village northeast of Baghdad, killing 30 people.
  • Sept. 29, 2005: Three suicide attackers detonate car bombs in the mostly Shiite town of Balad, north of Baghdad, killing at least 99 people.
  • Sept. 19, 2005: A car bomb rips through a market in a poor Shiite neighborhood on the eastern outskirts of Baghdad, killing at least 30 people.
  • Sept. 14, 2005: A suicide car bomber strikes as day laborers gather to find work in the heavily Shiite neighborhood of Kazimiyah in northern Baghdad, killing at least 88 people.
  • Aug. 17, 2005: Three car bombs explode near the Nadha bus station in Baghdad and at the nearby Kindi Hospital, killing up to 43 people.
  • July 16, 2005: A suicide bomber detonates explosives strapped to his body at a gas station near a Shiite mosque in Musayyib, blowing up a fuel tanker and killing about 100 people.
  • March 10, 2005: A suicide bomber blows himself up at a Shiite mosque during a funeral in the northern city of Mosul, killing at least 47 people.
  • Feb. 28, 2005: In the deadliest single strike since the fall of Saddam Hussein, a suicide car bomber attacks mostly Shiite police and National Guard recruits in Hillah, killing 125. Some of the dead are at a nearby market.
  • Feb. 18, 2005: Suicide bombers attack two mosques, killing 28 people, while an explosion near a Shiite ceremony kills two other people.
  • Dec. 19, 2004: Car bombs tear through a Najaf funeral procession and Karbala's main bus station, killing at least 60 people in the two Shiite holy cities.
  • Aug. 26, 2004: A mortar barrage slams into a mosque filled with Iraqis preparing to march on Najaf, killing 27 people.
  • March 2, 2004: Coordinated blasts from suicide bombers, mortars and planted explosives strike Shiite shrines in Karbala and in Baghdad, killing at least 181 people.
  • Aug. 29, 2003: A car bomb explodes outside a mosque in Najaf, killing more than 85 people, including Shiite leader Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim. Although officials never gave a final death toll, there were suspicions it may have been higher.
Including today, that's near 700, just this year in Iraq. (From the San Jose Mercury News/AP)

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The News from Tunis

posted Thursday, November 17, 2005 9:31 AM by hussain

Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child- the $100 Laptop project & Internet Governance

Today, Nicholas Negroponte (brother of our very own DNI, and famous for a very long time as the head of the renown MIT Media Lab) announced the hand-crank powered $100 laptop at the World Summit on Information Society in Tunisia as part of his "One Laptop Per Child" effort to give cheap laptop computers to kids in the 3rd world.  Oh yeah, it's got mesh wifi (for local voip potential), loonix os, 500MHz AMD, 1GB flash mem, and get this: development tools like make and a C compiler.  Yeah, that's right, 3rd world flashmob developers: watch out India!  Wired

"This is truly a moving experience," said UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, who showed up at the beginning of the event. "It's also a moving expression of global solidarity and corporate citizenship." - ZDnet

I love Kofi, but that's just the most vague diplomatic back-pattery I've ever read. How about a "That's way cool, what a crazy idea!" or "WiFi? No ***? How many can I pre-order?," Kofi? Google, Rupert Murdoch, Apple and Microsoft have all expressed interest or are contributing to Negroponte's not-for-profit. (What, no Bono?) BBC  Anyone else find it ironic that the pr picture has a white kid's hands, when the deployment'll be going to mostly browntowner kids (those that are trapped, peering out)?

Sad, but $100's like 1/10th of a family's income in Africa. I wonder how soon we'll see Nigerian scammers putting these things up on eBay? Still, I think this is not only a cool technical and organizational experiment, but it's an attempt at doing something good.

My favorite thing about the whole Internet stuff in Tunisia is that they're almost as fascistly restrictful of access to the outside Internet as China. Human Rights Watch published a report "False Freedom: Online Censorship in the Middle East and North Africa" which cites Tunisia as a country which details its citizens for Internet use (a journalist comparing Tunisia's president to Ariel Sharon is serving 3 years in jail on charges of "insulting the judiciary") and blocks websites that talk about Tunisa's human rights abuses. ('That kid was downloading lawyer jokes on his lime green laptop, 15 years in jail!') Good call, UN.

Also, just before the start of the same conference, the UN wasn't able to wrest control of ICANN away from the United States and turn it into a bureaucratic quagmire of rotating boards headed up by Robert Mugabe, as proposed in the UN's Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG). Mugabe, the dictator of Zimbabwe, had the balls to call the existing system of Internet governance a form of neocolonialism. Foreign Policy, 11/2005. I can just imagine the new tld's that'd be created: .mugaberules .ushaters, kofi.kofi.woot.woot.woot (that last one's a newsgroup, not a tld, sorry)

If you're interested in the sweet UN-style resolution that was adopted that basically said "darn, we lost, but we're going to make a non-relevant advisory board anyway," see here.

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Tracking my visitors ... with Maps

posted Monday, November 14, 2005 10:15 AM by hussain

Here's the weekend story, with it's sad ending, too:

"How cool would it be if I could capture visitor IPs for a certain url and plot them on a map, like Google maps?," I thought to myself.  "Very cool," myself responded.  Grab the IP from, say, the IIS logs or whatever and do a lookup.  No problem, right?  Wrong.  Innumerable ips to look up, lots of DNS, stupid IIS permissions.  "How about a javascript that calls a simple page to record the host ip and the datetime?," I said to myself.  Slightly concerned that I was going crazy, I replied tentatively, "Sure, that sounds good."

I grabbed the raw delegation ranges text file that ARIN has mirrored for RIPE, LACNIC, and APNIC (RIPE has AFRINIC's mirrored) and stuck them in a db (there're only about 70,000, a lot less than the max amount of ipv4 ips), made an IP address to IP number conversion utility, a quick lookup utility to get the IP block of a particular IP number and, finally, a little whois'er that queries the block registries (not domain registrars) and grabbed city and country name.  The last little bit was manually adding geocoords (lat,lon) to each city in the city table, but that's easy.  (I'm thinking about how to automate that bit, too.)   Phew!  Technical mumbo-jumbo aside, I get the visitor's city and plot on map.


The final result looks sweet. (Petah Tiqwa, Israel?) For example, this blog's hits come from all over, see here.

This morning, as I'm perusing some news I see that Google's releasing their analytics product for free (Free Web site therapy, Reuters, 11/14/2005; Google Press Release).  Yay!  I like Google.  Then it hits me:  I've just been housed!  Granted, they've probably had the idea for a lot longer, more resources than just one guy and a weekend, and much, much more data, but check out the neat picture from their main page:

It's (of course) got a map to track visitors! (Their map is Flash, though.  Odd, I thought, when they have a map tool. Seems like this analytics suite was bought/enhanced from some company called 'Urchin5'?  May have to look into it, may not care so much, either).  It uses a simple little javascript to ping their servers. It has pie charts.  Everyone knows that pie charts are the end-all-be all of cool.  Google:1, Me: 0.

Of course, I'm not competing with their product or even into "analytics," I'm just experimenting.  I learned a whole bunch, too.  For instance, NET 1.1 (which I used instead of Java, for kicks, or 2.0, which looks pretty neat, too) is pretty straightforward, once you get used to its quirks.  I dislike how it reformats HTML and how it doesn't compile in the background like Eclipse.  Parsing registry data into a db's easy, lookup reconciliation's not too bad, and generating javascript for the Google maps is a snap.  I'll keep playing around with my app, trying to make it more efficient and automated, but I'm going to stick on the Google Analytics' javascript on a few urls.  Since they're (Google, collectively) smarter than I am (and have a patent on address geocoding), I'll be interested to see how well my data tracks.

[Edit: here's a story about how Google's liberation of the Urchin product effects analytics firms: WebSideStory Stock Falls on Google Plans, AP, 11/14/2005.
Urchin, also a San Deigo company, was acquired by Google in March 2005 and was, apparently, big news in the SEO community.  Urchin's service was a $199/mo.]

[Edit: replaced the link to the Google patent on USPTO with a link to Google's patent search on the patent. Neat!]

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Abu Musab al-Suri caught?

posted Thursday, November 03, 2005 1:32 PM by hussain

from Pak Tribune, in Quetta, Pakistan 10/31, in the evening:

“QUETTA, November 04 (Online): Law enforcing agencies have arrested two Al-Qaeda suspects during a raid on a house in the city of Quetta. The arrests took place on Oct 31 after Iftari time during a raid by law enforcing agents at Al-Madina Utility store at Gawalmandi Chowk.”

"After an exchange of firing Al-Qaeda leader Mustafa Setmarian Nasar and an Afghan national who is said to be a member of Jaish Mohammad were arrested while another AL-Qaeda suspect Sheikh Ali Mohammad Al Salam was killed."

I took a peek at GEO TV, Pakistan's satellite news channel, and they had an interview with a top security official who said that the op was on Tuesday and was based upon a tip and that both individuals arrested were foreign nationals.

Who is Mustafa Setmarian Nasar?

Mustafa Setmarian Nasar is also known as Abu Musab al-Suri (he's of Syrian descent, with Spanish nationality since 1987) wanted in Spain and a suspect in the London 7/7 bombings.  Mostly a writer or propagandist for al Qaeda, he's claimed to have receieved training in explosives, special operations, and guerilla tactics "in Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt."  Iraq, huh?  During the mid 90's, he was in the UK as "a European intermediary for Al-Qaeda" and was closely associated with the Algierian Armed Islamic Group (GIA), editing their underground jihadi exile magazine.  After a split with them, he went off to Afghanistan where he swore allegiance (bayat) to Taliban leader Mullah Omar. He fought in Afghanistan against the Americans and went into hiding thereafter, fighting the jihad via his writings.

A sample, on the use of chemical/radioactive weapons:
I believe now that the American administration has revealed the evil and wickedness of its forces during the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is not a far cry from justice to adopt the slogan, 'Dirty Bombs for a Dirty Nation.' This is practically equal treatment.  Let the American people - those who voted for killing destruction , the looting of other nations' wealth, megalomania, and the desire to control others - be contaminated with radiation! We apologize for the radioactive fallout.
  • MSNBC's background on al-Suri
  • Evan Kohlmann's profile (pdf) of Abu Musab al-Suri.

There're some interesting avenues for analysis here: catching a pr guy for al Qaeda can result in knowing more about their network, catching any guy in Quetta means that the local police are (possibly) "doing their job," catching a guy in Quetta (see below) might mean that said guy is on the outs with the local sympathies (my personal favorite), and (a slightly more obscure one that combines the last analysis jump-point) catching an ex-GIA guy could mean that the shout out the "Zawahri" letter gave to the "Algerian brothers" isn't what it seemed (apart from the fact that letter doesn't seem to be what it seems).

Where is Gawalmandi Chowk in Quetta, Pakistan?

Quetta (map), a city of about 700k, is in Baluchistan province (a 350,000 km2 area, with about 6.5 million people (1998)) in southwest Pakistan.  It's a somewhat 2nd tier Pakistani city as far as size goes (~10th largest).

It's frustrating looking for maps for an area that seems to be described as quaint, historical, and picturesque.  I guess no one spends any time in town.  There are sparse maps on-line for Quetta and there aren’t any that I can find that show either the Pashtoonabad or Khartobad areas of the city.  And no luck at all finding Gawalmandi Chowk. (major intersection)

Another fun note about this city is that it's ethnicity's quite mixed: Afghanis (Pustuns), Pakistanis, Punjabis, Iranians, a melting pot city if you will.

So, the search proceeds to look at Taliban-y/al Qaeda-y connections in Quetta, what with it being a huge Taliban supporter in the late 90’s to pretty much now and under 45 miles from Afghanistan.  It's not very hard to find references to Quetta or Baluchistan wrt to the Taliban.  There's even pretty recent info:

01/29/2005 “16 Taliban held in Quetta,” Rediff
01/28/2005 “Pakistan police arrest 23 Afghans,” USA Today

“"Yes, we have arrested 16 suspects in different raids conducted in Pashtoonabad and Kharotabad areas of the city," DIG of Police, Quetta Rafi Pervez Bhatti said.” (Rediff)

Pashtoonabad is frequently cited as region that has Kashmiri Jihadi sympathy and Taliban madrassas, particularly Dar-ul-Loom (also Darul Uloom, “House of Sciences” – a phrase equivalent to a center of higher learning, is too generic to be definitive) a Hanafi school located in the area.

09/01/2001 “Pakistan’s Role in the Kashmir Insurgency,” Peter Chalk, Jane's Intelligence Review, Rand Corporation commentary

The fun one is looking at who the local government's made of.  Here's a random one:

Elected representative Maulvi Noor Muhammad Hussain of the Mutahidda Majlis-i-Amal Pakistan (MMAP) party – a group that wants to enforce the Sharia
http://www.na.gov.pk/baluch.htm (see if you can tell which ones are Talibani - yeah, I know, not scientific, but then you can look at their MMAP designation)
http://www.khyber.org/people/pol/MaulviNoorMuhammad.shtml
http://www.ciaonet.org/olj/sa/sa_apr03/sa_apr03mia01.html

What do you know, Maulvi Noor Muhammad’s mailbox is at the Dar ul-Uloom in Pashtoonabad.

It's a bit speculative to say that Abu Musab al-Suri was on the outs with the ex-Taliban sentiment of the town and was ratted out to local police, but a "border town" like Quetta's sort of opaque to me.  More to keep eyes on.

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Foray into Maps

posted Wednesday, November 02, 2005 12:56 AM by hussain

Perusing Ian's flickr, I saw UTM coords on some of the photos.  I couldn't resist.  Here's a page with a Google Maps plot of the points, with links to a Microsoft Virtual Earth plot, too.  And the obligatory Google Earth KML.  I won't go outside, but I damn sure will fiddle with bits.

Here's a screenshot of the route in Earth: ->

In all, it was a good experience learning about UTM coordinate systems, the Maps and VE APIs, and managing waypoints/coordinates. I'll probably end up making a database to store points and some more fully automated maps js, ve js, and kml generation. Tweakery is fun.

Update: 11/03/2005
Yahoo!'s come out with a map API, so now there're three different ajax/html + 1 kml generation thingies going on.  More updates when I get to a pause-point in kneading this maplication.

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