WoW Sequel Lets WoW Players Play A Player Playing WoW (Onion)

I wonder what the DNI will think of this new threat...



'Warcraft' Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing 'Warcraft'

Security Sector Reform In Sub-Saharan Africa: An Estimate (Original Research)

When Tom Dempsey of the US Army's Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute ("the US military's premier center of excellence for mastering stability and peace operations...") agreed to sponsor a strategic intelligence project with my graduate students last winter, I have to admit I was nervous. I had worked with Tom before and I knew he was going to ask tough questions and demand good, well researched and thoroughly analyzed answers. That didn't bother me, though. That is just another day at the office. What bothered me was the topic.

Africa.

I knew Tom was interested in security sector reform in Africa and that is a tough nut to crack from here in Erie. It requires our very best student analysts to use their most sophisticated open source skills to acquire and then analyze relevant and reliable information from Africa. Its not impossible; just hard to do and in a ten-week course, there is not much room for failure.

Fortunately, the team that put together A Strategic Study Of Security Sector Reform In Sub-Saharan Africa was top quality and their wiki based product is available as of today for public viewing (Tom was even kind enough to link it to the PKSOI site). Specifically, the students were asked to provide answers to the following questions (part of their Terms of Reference):

• What international or regional authorities, bilateral partnerships, or non-governmental organizations currently are and are likely to remain major players in security sector reform, specifically with regard to the civil oversight, administration of justice, and law enforcement sectors, in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Sudan?
• What are the strategies and resources that are being used and are likely to continue to be used to build capacity and sustainability in the civil oversight, administration of justice, and law enforcement sectors in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Sudan? Why have these strategies been selected and, if appropriate, why are they likely to continue to be used? Can any of these strategies be used as benchmarks for effectiveness?
• What are the likely short (12 months), medium (2-3 years), and long term (3-5 years) impacts of civil oversight, administration of justice, and law enforcement reform policies currently in place in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Sudan?

The students provided over 70 summary and supporting reports that provided estimative answers to each of these questions. All of the reports are loaded onto the wiki along with internal and external hyperlinks to sources used in the reports, pictures, maps and videos used to support the reports and an extensive resources page for anyone who gets bored and needs something else to read.

If you are not particularly interested in security sector reform in any of the four targeted countries (Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Southern Sudan or Sierra Leone) and you are already familiar with wiki-based analytic projects (like this one and this one and this one), you might still find the methods used in the study to be of some interest. The students used a multi-method approach (much like the study on the role of non-state actors in sub-Saharan Africa) that included comparative case study analysis, accelerated analysis, social network analysis and a matrix-style analysis. The multi-method approach allows analysts to essentially triangulate their estimates and can be very effective if, as here, done correctly.

Of particular interest from a methodological standpoint are the social network analyses and the multi-attribute matrix. The social network analysis examined the connections between each of the organizations within the country in order to determine a wide variety of qualities (such as "closeness" and "betweenness") attributable to each of the organizations examined. The chart below is one of the 3-D graphs of a social network of agencies in Sierra Leone built using the amazing UCINET software.


The multi-attribute matrix looked at each of the programs in all four countries against the stated goals of those programs with respect to security sector reform and made estimative evaluations about how successful each of the programs was likely to be in meeting those criteria. Some of the programs did not do very well because they were small, some did not do well because they were only partially designed to impact the security sector and some did not do well because the political environment was not conducive to the methods that the program was using. Whatever the reason, in the end, the students were able to give a rough estimate of what were likely to be the most and least effective programs attempting in whole or in part to reform the security sector in the four countries. Combined with the data from the other methods used in the analysis, they were able to come up with some pretty nuanced answers to the questions they had been asked and some interesting trends in general.

Related Posts:
The Virtual Jihad Project
Non-state Actors In Sub-Saharan Africa
A Wiki Is Like A Room...

More Steganographic Resources (Thank You!)

You know when you have published a good post when a ton of people reply with links or other resources on the same topic. Here is a quick list of some additional steganographic and other resources (in no particular order) received by SAM over the last 48 hours:

• The Steganography And Analysis Research Center
• Information Hiding: Steganography & Digital Watermarking
• Steganography Detection with Stegdetect
• Center For Information Technology Integration
• Secure Communications Operational Tradecraft
• Pictorial Semiosis: The Way Pictures Mean
• The NSA's Kid's Page

If you have any more, post them to the comments!

(Thanks to Greg, Mark, Linda, Jeffrey, J. and Rex and all the others who read, participated or commented!)

Hiding Documents In Pictures: The Secrets Of Steganography (S-Tools Via MakeUseOf)

As a child, I remember being fascinated by the story about the ancient Greek king, Histiaeus, who reportedly shaved a servant's head and tattooed a secret message on it. By the time the servant entered hostile territory, the message was hidden by hair. I thought at the time that this was immensely clever. It was also my introduction to steganography, or the art of hiding messages more or less in plain sight.

Today's steganographers have gotten pretty sophisticated and are able to hide documents in the pixels of a picture. The picture below, for example (from the game Forbidden Kingdom), contains an entire MS Word document.

Really. No kidding.


I used a clever little program called "s-tools" and the tutorial on MakeUseOf to convert my GIF image into a GIF image with a secret message. If you want to find out what the message is, you need to click on the image above. When the new page opens up with the larger image of the picture, right click and "save image as". You got it right if you have saved an image called steganography.gif. Then download the software and follow the instructions (Note: The site to download the software appears to be Slovenian. I have downloaded the software to two separate computers and virus checked both downloads with two separate virus checkers. McAfee SiteAdvisor also gives the site a green light. Still, as with any software, take care in downloading it to your computer). You will also need to know the passphrase, which is "sam" (lower case, no quotes) and the encryption algorithm, which is IDEA. It is extremely user friendly -- all drag and drop and point and click.

Of course, once you start looking for steganography tools, they are easy to find and there is some concern that terrorists or organized crime gangs are using steganography techniques to hide instructions or other data of interest. All the more reason to understand it, to my way of thinking.
S-tools itself has been around since 1996 (you get a little pop-up when you first open the software that indicates that the program has been built taking into account the "new" features available in Windows 95...). It is so old that I suspect that the bad guys have already found it and used it and the good guys have already figured out how to crack it. Still, if you are not familiar with steganography and want to understand it better, I recommend this exercise (I think it would generate some real classroom interest as well).

Changes To SAM (Feedback Welcome!)

Astute readers of SAM will note that I have been moving stuff around over the last several weeks on the blog. I have added a couple of new features and shifted stuff around based on my perceptions of your (the reader's) interests. I would welcome any feedback you might have...

All the posts will remain on the left-hand side of the page. I added the Madkast feature a while back to make it easier for readers to share the posts. For example, about 18 people used Madkast to share the post about Dan Mulligan returning from Iraq. It also gives some useful statistics on the top three stories on any given day so it seems like a good tool for the both of us.

I know I use a tons of tags and the tag list has gotten pretty long. Blogger won't let me edit the list in a useful way. I am pretty sure, however, that this is the way some of the search engine spiders find the site, so I probably will continue to use tags even though they don't seem to be of too much use to individual readers.

The right hand column of the blog is where things have changed most, though. The biggest problem I have is deciding what to put at the top of that column. I am well aware that many people don't scroll down so the space "above the fold" (to use an old newspaper term), or above the bottom of the screen, is prime real estate. I really want the most useful stuff up at the top and the admin or lesser stuff at the bottom.

Right now I have two features that I like but am considering moving down the list. The first is "Save Page As PDF". This is a "nice to have" feature in my estimation. It does nothing for me but I have seen where other bloggers recommend it as a useful tool for readers. On any given day a number of you use it but it does not seem to be too terribly popular. Not sure it belongs at the top of the column but I am pretty sure that if I move it below the fold, then no one will use it all.

I also have a capability to subscribe to the blog via email using RSSFwd. This allows people to get the posts sent straight to their email accounts. I am assuming that this is a useful feature for some people. The service gives me no feedback so I have no way of knowing.

I have added a feature by AideRSS that I really like that keeps a running tab of the top five stories in a given week. It calculates what is a "top" post through a complicated algorithm that includes the number of comments on, links to and bookmarks of a certain post. Since I try to post every day and sometimes two or three times a day, things come and go pretty fast. For those people who only check the blog once a week or so, this seems to be a good way to check out what has been posted -- well, what has been posted and popular at any rate. I like AideRSS because it is really simple to use and provides me with detailed feedback on which posts people are reading. That lets me craft future posts. Again, a tool that seems to be working for me and for you.

My favorite new feature is SAM's Shared Items which is function of Google Reader. I began using Google Reader recently as my RSS feed reader. I had been using the live bookmarks feature of Firefox but once I got to 60 daily RSS feeds, I knew it was time to migrate to a reader. I wish I had done it sooner. Google provides a whole host of tools for making feed reading faster and more useful. One of the neatest tools is the ability to share certain articles with other people. Google does this by letting you designate the article and then it creates a shared items website for your stuff. Since it is a website, it also puts off its own RSS feed, which makes it trivially easy to add a widget to a blog to get the feed to dump anywhere you want.

The net effect is that I go through 60 feeds a day (300-400 items), cull the ones that I think are the best or most interesting and then share them through the SAM's Shared Items box on the blog. I see much more good stuff than I can write posts about and this makes it easy to get this good stuff on the site. All this, hopefully, makes for one stop shopping for you. It is a new feature but I am already starting to see some activity with it.

I really like Top Posts This Week and SAM's Shared Items because they are dynamic. One will change more slowly than the blog itself (Top Posts This Week) and one will change more quickly than the blog (SAM's Shared Items). I like the symmetry...

The next thing is the Mercyhurst Student Projects. These are impressive projects that I have talked about on the blog. I would like to get these even higher up the page but they don't change very often.

The Intelligence News feature is another section I have considered deleting. It is just a Google News feed based on the word "intelligence". It is dynamic and I like that but the results (particularly, as I am told, in foreign countries) are not always very relevant.

Links of Interest is my blogroll and it is not going anywhere. These are almost all people who have supported me or helped as I got this blog set up. Cheers to you all!

The rest of the left hand column is stuff about me and admin stuff (like the archive and the tag list). Personally, my instincts are too be much more private but I understand the issue of credibility in the blogosphere. If I am not willing to share some details about myself (particularly when I am pretty easy to find anyway), why should anyone put any stock in what I have to say? As a result of this logic and a strong belief in online publishing for academics, I am putting as many of my papers on Scribd as possible and intend to try to make much more of my content freely available on this site. I hope, for example, in the next 6 months or so, to come out with a revised edition of The Warning Solution and make it freely available here for download.

All this is probably a bit more detail than you needed but that's why I saved it for Saturday! I, of course, will be interested in any feedback.