Streamtime and Iraqi Linux
From What The Wiki?!
Four people from Streamtime were at WhatTheHack:
Bassam Hassan - Iraqi Linux Group (ILUG)
Cecile Landman – Streamtime’s content manager [1]
jaromil - Dyne.org and dyne;bolic, shared developer of Streamtime’s shared software
Jo vd Spek - invented Streamtime.org’s concept while travelling through Afghanistan and later Iraq.
To start with, the written speech of Bassam Hassan, cofounder of the Iraqi Linux Group – ILUG [2], and quite fresh from Baghdad:
IT WAS NOT EASY, BUT NOT IMPOSSIBLE EITHER
I realize that you have many questions surrounding the situation inside Iraq and I also realize that most of you hold a very specific perception about the situation in Iraq. A perception which was modulated, nurtured and hugely influenced by the image the western media tried to conduct about the Iraqi community in the past two years. I’m aware of that. And it’s my intention here today to rectify, clarify and elucidate any deficient or missing chapters of the story.
Iraq today is an occupied country, we all know that. However, that doesn’t conflict with the fact that there has been a technological progression or more precisely (variation in the technological state) during the past two years. It is the scope of this presentation to discuss the state of technology in Iraq before and after the war and also to tackle the subject of new technologies installed and operated in Iraq by the U.S army during the past two years.
Please note that I’m not a journalist and I can’t call this anything but a personal opinion. I couldn’t structure this in terms of (what, who, when, where or how), mine is a very personal perspective; Nevertheless, I tried to sustain objectivity whenever possible.
I do not represent the Iraqi community, no single entity does. Nevertheless, I do represent myself, I do represent the Iraqi Linux Users Group and I think that I can be considered as a representative for the Iraqi youth which constitute a huge slice of the Iraqi community since my observations and opinions were influenced and shaped in a huge part by those of my friends, comrades and colleagues and when considering the fact that I lived my entire life inside Iraq and I witnessed the wars, the sanctions and the devastation and destruction which accompanied them and when considering also that my entire life revolved around technologies in various domains like software engineering, operating systems, medical technology, communications and HCI (human computer interaction). I think that I’m sufficiently credible to talk about the technology variance in Iraq before and after the war. Or to put it in another way: I know what the hell I’m talking about!.
QUESTIONS
A question which I’ve been asked over and over since I’ve been here in Europe was: ‘If there is so much violence inside Iraq and internal conflicts and civil religious wars, what aspects of technology could survive in that bloody environment? I mean what can we expect?’
People started asking me questions like: ‘Do you have schools? Do you have colleges and universities? What level of education these institutions can offer? What technological educational means do you utilize? Do they use blackboards? Slates maybe? A hammer and chisel to carve letters on rocks? Do you use computers? If so, what kind of hardware and software do they utilize? Is there a well structured IT sector inside Iraq? And if yes, what are the opportunities and possibilities of investment in that IT sector inside Iraq? Is it possible to make any significant contribution now, later? Do you have software licensing?’
I’ve been also asked about the state of the IT infrastructure inside Iraq before and after the war. ‘Did you have internet access under Saddam regime? How many ISPs were in Iraq before the war? What kind of service did they possess? And how different it’s today?’
And the most important question of all: ‘What kind of technology did the U.S army bring to Iraq? What forms of technologies do they utilize to reinforce their personal security? Did they make any significant contribution to the technological progression of the Iraqi community or not?’
WAR AND TECHNOLOGY IN IRAQ - BEFORE THE ACTUAL WAR
So, let’s start by answering an important question: What was the state of technology in Iraq before the war?
You must be quite specific when discussing this issue since you have to mention whether you are speaking about before or after the first gulf war. Since before 1991, Iraq was a pretty developed country when compared to its neighbors despite the fact that it was sustaining a bloody war with Iran; high quality public services and functional governmental entities and institutes, well formed and properly maintained infrastructure and things of that nature.
However, after the first gulf war and after our initial encounter with the U.S army, things changed dramatically. Since the United Nations (which is essentially the U.S in disguise) had imposed a set of stringent economical sanctions which influenced, or more precisely, hindered the technological evolution and the adoption of new technologies during the past 14 years, which really - in my opinion - had the biggest effect which led the country to a catastrophic state.
The situation after the first gulf war and precisely after the imposition of the sanctions changed dramatically. I witnessed it myself; like one day I was playing video games on my MSX machine, next thing I knew, I was traveling north with my family holding my bunny toy. I was attending my cousin’s birthday party the night before the attack. Nobody took it seriously until it actually happened.
The US air forces attack like a beast. They do not attack to RESPOND to a counter attack or to defend themselves. They attack to paralyze. Like in 1 hour, they destroyed everything from electrical power stations, telephone lines, communications, you name it.
I’ve seen it more than once. They leave you blind and deaf in the dark. This is how they attack. The US army can accomplish in a manner of hours what other armies may take days or even weeks to accomplish.
I was too young to catch with the Iranian war. But I can clearly remember that I did have a beautiful city called Baghdad albeit Iraq was in a state of war with Iran. But after the first gulf war, I could hardly recognize my city anymore. The devastation, the havoc and destruction was too enormous to be described by words alone.
FIREWALL
The sanctions which were imposed later on by the U.N created a form of a firewall which left Iraq in a state of seclusion and isolation. No new computers could be imported, no new magazines appeared on the market, video games ceased to appear.
Most importantly, foreign corporations and investment companies ceased their activities in Iraq after the first gulf war which really severely influenced the state of the infrastructure in Iraq which suffered from continuous neglect and persistent strokes.
Many countries closed their diplomatic offices in Baghdad and cut or kept a minimum form of diplomatic relations with Baghdad. In the meantime, Saddam fostered the state of seclusion and isolation. He started to kill and jail everyone and anyone. People started to migrate, I know many people who migrated immediately after the first gulf war. I met few of them in Belgium during the past 10 days. And you can say that the waves of migrations just continued and it still continuous hitherto.
But as far as technology is concerned, Saddam exclusively controlled the local T.V broadcasting, newspapers, radio transmission or any form of media inside the country. He banned the installation of satellite receivers; he imposed death penalties on anyone who obtain an international subscription mobile phone like in Thurai mobiles or something.
He directed all the communications through central surveillance units which were sophisticatedly equipped, highly trained and unlimitedly funded. They worked 24/7 on monitoring any form of communication, every phone call, any newspaper article or publications and alike for the last 14 years. They didn’t need any evidence or authorization to capture and arrest anyone whom they suspected that he or she was trying to leak any form of information outside the country.
Traveling abroad was impossible for certain slices of the community like doctors or engineers, students as well.
A few years later, he made his biggest mistake when he declared: ‘He didn’t need the United States’. It is the same declaration the current president of Iran made and that’s why I deeply believe that Iran will follow suit Iraq soon. You don’t just declare that you don’t need the United States, everyone needs the U.S. It’s not democracy and it’s not an option. In a country like Iraq where you can dig 10 meters in your backyard and extract raw oil, you can’t just make such a declaration.
He also started collaborating with Russian companies and Chinese companies for projects like building thermal electrical stations and such. Before the war, Japanese as well as Belgian companies used to implement electrical power stations in Iraq but they had to stop their activities because of the economical sanctions which prevented any decent company from approaching Iraq for investment. Because seriously, who would bring a Russian company to construct electrical power stations? But that is how it was.
Here I present this example just to emphasize the role of the sanctions in the deterioration which occurred after the first gulf war. The main influence was, like I told you, to create a form of firewall which prohibited any form of communications with the outside world. However, life always finds its ways despite everything.
As in any firewall, ours had its vulnerabilities. Indeed, satellite receivers were banned in Iraq before the war, but some people installed those nontheless. They were taking a huge risk since the penalties were massive, but some people risked that. Mobile phones were banned inside Iraq, but some people risked holding Thurai international mobile phones. Importing hardware, software, PC magazines or any form of technology was prohibited.
You can’t just call the sells department in a company and post an order. However, you could very easily see any new hardware or software on the Iraqi market. IBM workstations, technical magazines and papers, video games and video consoles like Sega, Micro, Nintendo and PlayStation I at that time with the latest games were all present. For people who could afford them, of course.
HACK THE SYSTEM
The point here is that despite the declared and imposed sanctions, people found ways for communications and staying in touch with the outside world. You could import anything you can possibly desire but not directly. However, the severe effect here is that people adopted the attitude of working around, scanning for any open port which is better described by my friend from the US army when he describes the inefficient hierarchy in the infantry and I’m quoting here:
“The Sacred Hypocrisy that every recruit learns in Basic Training: "Don't get caught doing that". In other words: hack the system. Work around obstacles. Bribe, cheat, and accomplish the mission.�
This kind of attitude was adopted in every aspect of life in Iraq and in my opinion it is the only expected natural outcome when you live under the flag of the republic of fear and undergoing stringent and strict economical sanctions. Unfortunately, that paradigm became more or less like a de facto standard in Iraq that people still adopt the same attitude even today and it’s expected to persist for quite some time.
From an alternative perspective, you can say that this is the extreme example of technology survival. You know, because there was a possibility that people just drop adopting new technologies and they could just let the current drift them away and leave them behind. However, Iraqi people and intellects proved to be ambitious and persistent.
I can’t say that all people were hacking their ways to get their hands on the latest and greatest inventions. Sanctions did make a major damage there. Still, however, at least within the boundaries of the academic communities and the Iraqi intellects, they firmly grasped any opportunity they could conceive and perceive in order to progress.
And that’s fundamentally why people kept on studying in Iraq despite the devastated economical situations. There was no point of graduation, since the private sector in Iraq was very limited before the war and in the governmental sector; the average salary for an employee was less than 3 dollars per month!!!
The salary for a specialist medical doctor was about 15 dollars per month and I’m exaggerating here. The average salary for a University professor was around 20 dollars per month.
And all of the huge amounts of money which were present in Iraq were in the hands of a relatively few (namely members of the former Iraqi regime). So, the situation was devastated in terms of life conditions, still, however, people never gave up hope and kept on fighting and struggling for survival.
It was not easy, but it was not impossible either.
So to sum up to this point, I say that technology in it’s broad term and variant meanings, did exist in Iraq before the war and it was largely adopted by a large number of people from different slices and variant educational levels, but as you can logically deduce from my description, everything was far from ideal. You had to find your own way for getting the technology you required and most importantly: DO NOT GET CAUGHT!
EARLY WAKINGS, WEB ACCESS AND RADIO JAMMIN’
One last issue I want to cite on before I jump to the current situation after the war is the Internet access in Iraq. Internet was present in Iraq before the war and it was absent too. Internet went to the Iraqi intelligence first, governmental institutions second, Universities and colleges third and to the public last.
Internet service inside Iraq was a phone dialup service, crappy, slow, lousy and totally unreliable. Still, however, it was the only available access at that time for anyone who was seeking to connect with the outside world. The only other alternative was to listen to BBC Arabic on the radio but even that was not an easy option since a continuous jamming on the frequency of most news stations was part of the job of the intelligence surveillance and monitoring units formerly mentioned.
So, it was pretty useless to try to get access to the internet when it was in the hands of the intelligence. But after it went to the governmental institutions, you could take a risk and try to steal a password for the dialup access since governmental institutions used only a dialup based connection to the main server. But it was your neck, if you get caught, the least you would expect is to be executed or beheaded. It was a horrible era and many people were so frightened from taking any further step toward gaining an internet access.
I’m not trying to brag here but I can confidently say that I was among the pioneers in Iraq to get illegal Internet access. I had to crack the system and took a huge a risk but it was the only option me and many others like myself had.
There was absolutely no other way of connection; I used to wake up as early as 5 a.m just to connect to the Internet before the governmental institution from which I stole the password start working at 8 a.m. I used to stay late at night flipping pages and trying to find my way amidst the cyber jungle trying to find a way to crack the proxy which banned almost all the web.
WEB-BLOCKS
People don’t believe me when I say that hotmail was blocked and you get the lousy page of access denied whenever you try to access it. Every news station was blocked. Every forum, every web mail service was blocked. Accessed pages were constantly monitored and blocked. For instance, I once found a free web mail service which was not blocked. I was so happy that it passed unnoticed. I created an account and started sending emails to people all around the world from different disciplines for variant reasons and sometimes for no reason at all, just the thrill of getting an email message back from someone on the other side of the world, outside Iraq, replying you back.
Few days later, they blocked that site and I got really, really mad. I was pissed off, me and my friend who shares all of my knowledge and experience and the same suffering was mad as well. However, later on I cracked the proxy and the Iraqi mail server.
One night, I was tired but I couldn’t sleep; I decided to try my new software on the mail server. I had about four user names and password lists which I updated with what I thought to be a possible hit list. I waited for about 2 hours and then suddenly a message popped up signifying that an account had been retrieved. Yes, an email user name and password has been retrieved.
I still remember the username and password, it was test: test. Most probably, some jerk at the mail server created this account to test the service and he forgot to delete it. But, who cares. That account changed lots of things for me, since I could get non monitored access to the outside world with this email address.
We took a very huge risk since security was the major issue in Iraq and such kind of activities would be easily misinterpreted by the atrocious and ignorant intelligence people as spying and treason. However, I didn’t care and so did my friend, and many others from my generation did not care as well. We were willing to go as far as it takes no matter what and that’s why I believe that it’s essential to have faith in your own ideas and the will to carry them to completion.
This might give you a small picture of what it was like in Iraq before the war. The internet connection was a crappy, lousy and slow one and it was not available, it was banned and when it was available, all the good sites were blocked and lord knows that I did not seek porn. Nevertheless, it did exist and people like me used it for years to get access to articles and information and to communicate with others
The only other alternative was to shut your mouth and take what was given to you and that was something I was not willing to accept. In my dictionary, this is technological development. This is an extreme example of technology survival against all the odds. This should prove to you that many Iraqis (youth at least enjoy a high level of persistence and ambition). Even people who knew nothing about the Internet or how to crack in and get a password, they were willing to give us any form of favor in order to get their hands on one. And when it was finally released to the public in late 2001 and early 2002, Internet access was hugely adopted in Iraq.
FROM THE REPUBLIC OF FEAR TO THE REPUBLIC OF CHAOS
Now I’ll jump ahead to the period immediately after the start of the war in 2003. At the beginning, there were no security concerns at all. American soldiers used to normally mix and interact with civilians, have chats and such. And when I went to the green zone a few months later, after the fall of Baghdad, security at the entrance was quite a joke. You don’t have to present any special form of ID, any lousy ID you have with your picture on it will do, even if it’s in Arabic - the soldiers don’t understand Arabic - and the translator is in the bathroom or something. The soldier would simply ask you about the reason of your visit and you can come up with anything which crosses your mind (Like booking a flight to Jordan, NGO meeting, anything).
Personal inspection was minimal and you could easily pass any electronic device with in the size of an MP3 player or an IPOD inside the palace.
The metal detector was a standard detector and there was only one installed at the front door of the convention palace which was operated by a young Iraqi couple whom gave me the impression at that time that they take their job less seriously.
The entire network inside the palace was a Windows based network, operated by an Iraqi American administrator who knew nothing about Linux. So for me it was a disappointment because I expected to see more.
Nevertheless, that was in the beginning. Soldiers were roaming around with their standard M16 and the vehicle loaded M240. Standard night vision goggles and standard radio communication. Nothing special as far as I saw.
NEW TECHNOLOGIES
However, later on with the escalating pace of organized terror and the increasing number of casualties among the US army personnel. I witnessed the installation of new, custom made, extremely sophisticated new technologies.
One of which was the Z backscatter detector, developed by AS&E Body search personnel inspection system. These scanners can detect both organic and inorganic components within a certain volume. These detectors possess huge discrimination efficiency when it comes to objects of low Z (or low atomic number) like explosives, drugs or smoke or even people. These are most valuable for detecting sneakers, timed bombs in a complex environment like in a closed shipment or large luggage and they can produce images of very high resolution in something which might resemble a DVT (Digital Volume Tomography).
These are scanners with very low exposure doses thus can be routinely used within a military complex. They are called backscatter detectors because they utilize the backscattering technology for detecting objects.
Very briefly, the principle is that when X-ray interact with an object, the ray can be transmitted, absorbed or scattered. Standard x-ray detectors depend on the absorption/transmission value for constructing an image. While backscatter detectors depend on the scattered radiation which is material specific in contrast to the standard scanners which are material non specific.
This is one of the sophisticated technologies installed nowadays in military complexes inside Iraq. AS&E site -> http://www.as-e.com/products_solutions/z_backscatter.asp
A second technology which is routinely used inside Iraq is the armored bus. I don’t believe that many of you know that such bus exist. Well, it’s the Rhino runner bus and it’s the toughest bus on this planet. This bus could sustain a massive explosive and pass intact.
It is the bus which was used to deploy Saddam Hussein and many VIP prisoners on the cards list. It is the same bus which was used to move the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld from Baghdad international airport to the Green Zone, despite what you might think, Choppers and Apaches are not the safest technology for traveling from one place to another.
This bus has proven to be quite reliable since it sustained multiple strokes to many VIP American and foreign contractors and high ranked officers and generals. See Gizmac site for images: http://www.gizmag.co.uk/go/4081/
Another new technology recently adopted by the US army which lies within my domain of expertise is the Virtual Baghdad project. They created a 3D terrain model of Baghdad based on advanced 3D scanning technology mostly LIDAR ( Light Detection and Ranging) which is the same technology used in featured films like LoR or Day After Tomorrow and such.
They then created virtual models of local civilians and used an advanced visualization technologies like HMD (Head Mounted Devices), Cave technology and stereoscopic glasses to train soldiers on how to behave when they are encountered by a local citizen at a check point for inspection or questioning. This is a new technology which was recently adopted as a standard to train soldiers in the infantry in the U.S before deploying the troops to the battle field.
Of course, there is a huge difference between the virtual reality and the bloody reality but that was the concept.
They also tested many robots for detecting mines, IED (Improvised Explosive Devices) and insurgents. The same robot which is used to clean your room (the vacuum cleaner) is now being armed with a miniature machine gun and sent to fight on behalf of the soldiers. The unfortunate news is that this robot does not distinguish between unarmed civilians and militants. But for some reason, this issue doesn’t seem to bother the U.S commanders and generals.
Latest updates I’m aware of are that the military is adopting a batch of novel Non-Lethal technologies for paralyzing and torturing an opponent. I’ve heard some rumors from people that albeit the fact that the utilization of such weapons is illicit and comes in direct conflict with any human law or constitution; but it looks like the Human Rights Watch does not acknowledge that we do exist.
Here I excerpt some of the literature I found on the web: Scientists have reacted angrily to the revelation that the US military is funding development of a weapon intended to deliver an ‘excrutiating bout of pain’ from over a mile away. The ‘Pulsed Energy Projectile’ (PEP) device ‘fires a laser pulse that generates a burst of expanding plasma when it hits something solid’, the New Scientist explains. If you happen to be that something solid, then you get temporarily incapacitated without suffering permanent injury. That’s the theory, but pain reasearchers fear that the proposed riot control weapon could be used for torture, and further doubt a solid ethical basis for the research. Andrew Rice, a consultant in pain medicine at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London, said: “Even if the use of temporary severe pain can be justified as a restraining measure, which I do not believe it can, the long-term physical and psychological effects are unknown.�
U.S ARMY GETS RAYGUN FOR IRAQ
US troops in Iraq are set to use a non-lethal energy beam weapon mounted on a Humvee. The ray uses a beam which heats up the skin to a depth of 1/64 of an inch. This burning sensation is very painful but won’t cause actual damage unless the subject stays in the beam for as long as 250 seconds. It is hoped it will provide a less lethal way of clearing the streets of (live) Iraqi civilians.
Or that’s the theory. Testing has been carried out by the US Airforce Lab, which also develops the weapon, which is a ‘clear conflict’, according to Louis Slesin, editor of Microwave News. There is concern that the beam could damage eyesight - although probably not as much as an M-16 rifle can. The barrier to using such technology on a vehicle has been a strong enough power source. Researchers claim to have solved this problem, and 15 vehicles have been ordered under Project Sheriff. The ‘Vehicle-Mounted Active Denial System’, or V-MADS, looks like an ordinary Humvee but with an enormous, square satellite dish on its roof.
Only this time it’s not Sky One that’ll be frying your brain. And there is the ‘Around-the-Corner’ gun… [3]
UNDERNEATH: COMPLETE TRANSCRIPTION Streamtime and Iraqi Linux presentation at WhatTheHack!? (took place: June 30)
Jo:
"With this presentation we will move to Iraq. There is four of us here. We are part of a communication project that started more than a year ago, basically from Amsterdam.
We are a group of media activists, both techies and content people, like journalists, software developers, and coders and whatever you have. The basic two aims of Streamtime are to introduce some Open Source and Free Software tools for open publishing in Iraq. The tool we use is the bootable cd with the Dyne;bolic Open software.
Jaromil will speak about that later. So far we have done three missions to Iraq, where we introduced dyne;bolic, where we did some streaming, and workshops, we produced our first program at the end of June last year, from Halabja in Kurdistan, the village that was gassed by Saddam Hussein. We were in Baghdad where we did streaming last summer. And lately we produced streaming from Basra around the three days Merbed - poetry festival. On the website which we will show you in a minute, we have a lot of links, with links to resources, but also a long list of interesting bloggers from Iraq. We do also have the audio-archive, with different published cases of Iraqi poetry and interviews, as well as the streams from Iraq. So as a whole it is a kind of publishing platform. Really at the heart of the content that you see on the site and that has been developed over the last year in close contact with mainly Iraqi bloggers, and other publishers in Iraq and as well outside Iraq, is basically a kind of meta-blog, where we in contact with the bloggers we select and we edit the interesting stories that come out from Iraq itself. I think it is one of the very few attempts to create a kind of communication platform between the West, between Europe, and Iraqis. Cecile Landman who is managing the content of the website, will be second speaker.
First speaker is Bassam Hassan, he just arrived from Baghdad. He is a founding member of the Iraqi Linux User Group (ILUG). We have been requested to tell about what new technologies have been introduced by the US after the invasion in Iraq. Bassam has prepared a presentation, starting from the invasion, giving a little bit of context about what it was like before the invasion, then he will focus on some new hardware technologies that have been introduced by the Americans. after each presentation we will have a short round of questioning.
Bassam Hassan, take the floor, please!"
Bassam: "Good afternoon, i realize that you have many questions now about the situation in Iraq. And i also realize that you hold a very specific perception about the situation now in Iraq. I also know that your perception was more or less violated, nurtured and hugely influenced by the image that the media conducts about the Iraqi community during the past two years. It is my intention here to rectify, clarify and elucidate any deficient and missing chapters of the story, okay?
Iraq today is an occupied country, and we all know that. But this doesn't conflict with that we had an IT structure in Iraq, and we did have technology in Iraq before the war.
It is the scope of this presentation to discuss the state of technology, or more precisely, the variation in the state of technology in Iraq before and after the war. And i have been asked by the management of this conference to shed some light over the recent technologies that are deployed and used by the US army, inside Iraq.
Please notice that i am not a journalist and that i can't call this anything but a personal perspective. Nevertheless i try to sustain objectivity whenever possible, okay? I do not represent the Iraqi community, no single entity does, but i do represent myself, i do represent the Iraqi Linux User Group, and i am part of the Streamtime organisation, and i can be considered as a representation of the Iraqi youth, which constitutes a huge slice of the Iraqi community.
Many questions have risen in the last few days, since i arrived here in Europe. People kept asking me: 'If there is so much violence nowadays in Iraq, so many internal conflicts and civil religious war. What aspects of technology can possibly survive in such a bloody environment. What can we expect? I have also been asked about the state of the infrastructure in Iraq. Do we have internet access? What kind of education you have present in your colleges and universities?
The scope is to discuss the variation in technology before and after the war. The first thing i want to go into is the state of technology before the war. You have to be quite specific when you are dealing with this issue. Are we speaking of before the First Gulf war in 1991? Or about later? Because before the First Gulfwar, Iraq was a pretty developed country, compared with neighbors like Jordan, Syria, UAE, and such.
But after the First Gulfwar, and after our initial encounter with the US army and after the United Nations had imposed a set of stringent and strict regulations and economical sanctions over Iraq, things changed dramatically. So one day you are playing with your computer or MSX machine or so, and the next day you have no electricity, no telephone lines, no communication. Nothing. So. I witnessed it. I was inside Iraq, i lived in Iraq for my entire life. My entire life evolved around technologies and multiple disciplines like human computer interaction, communicating, operating systems, software engineering. Stuff of that nature. So i think i am credible enough to speak about the variation in technology in Iraq, before and after the war.
The situation after the First Gulf war and after the imposition of the sanctions provoked dramatic changes as i said. The US forces destroyed every possibility of evolving any kind of technology in Iraq after the First Gulfwar, they destroyed the infrastructure in Iraq like the electrical power stations, the communication infrastructure; they just leave you, blind, deaf, in the dark. The US army can do in some hours where other armies need days or even weeks to accomplish the same effect.
I have to say that i was too young to catch with the Iranian war, but i can still remember that i had a beautiful city called Baghdad before the First Gulf war. But after that First Gulf war i told you that things changed to a huge extend. The sanctions that were imposed by the UN created like a form of firewall which left Iraq in a state of seclusion and isolation. No new computers were coming to the country, no new magazines, or articles or whatever appeared on the market. So it was like having a Firewall inside Iraq. You can't communicate with the outside world, and the outside world can't communicate with you. The situation was devastating. But as far as technology is concerned i can say that Saddam Hussein after the First Gulfwar fostered this state of technology isolation and seclusion. Because he controlled the media like TV broadcasting, like radio communication, he banned the installation of satellite receivers, so that you can't actually see any news station, he imposed death penalties on anyone who obtained an international subscription to a mobile phone, like the Thurai phone as you have in the Middle-east. You can imagine what it was like. You live in a country and you hold a mobile phone and the penalty for holding that mobile phone is death. Execution. Okay? He also directed all the communication in the country to central surveillance units. These units were sophistically equipped, highly trained and unlimitedly funded. When i say unlimitedly funded, i mean absolutely unlimitedly funded. It could be funded for millions or billions of dollars, or for whatever. Those surveillance units worked 24/7 on monitoring any form of communication, every phone call, any newspaper, article, any publication. They didn't need any authorization. Or any kind of evidence. To arrest anyone, jail anyone, execute anyone. So it is like you created an independent entity which is able of functioning by its own. That situation really hindered the progression of technology in Iraq, during the past fourteen years, precisely, since after the First Gulfwar. Traveling abroad was impossible for certain slices of the Iraqi community. Like highly educated people like doctors, engineers, even students, so.
Anyway, an issue i want to focus on which i have been asked repeatedly when i came in here is about the state of internet connections in Iraq. Did you have ISPs or what kind of service did you have, and things of that nature. Yes. In Iraq indeed we had internet service since before the war. We had ISPs. We are not like the statistics in Microsoft Encyclomedia, according to which the ISP population is zero in Iraq before the war. No. We had a crappy, lousy dial-up server, but what was available. It was a very secured, usually monitored, and if you try to manipulate the system, the least you can expect is execution or something like it. So you can just imagine how it was.
People don't believe me when i say that Hotmail was blocked, like Yahoo was blocked. You can't have any e-mail service, like a web based e-mail service or so. Access pages were frequently monitored and blocked. Like one day when i had found an e-mail server that was passed unnoticed and next thing i knew, after i created an account and i logged in, next thing i knew was that they had blocked the server. But that was available. If you wanted to have access, you had to hack your way into the web, okay?
So, really as an IT infrastructure, the private sector in Iraq before the war was very limited. You had to work with the government, if you were a technical person, or you didn't work at all and had to migrate or get out of the country. These were the only possible options available at that time.
Now jumping ahead to the year 2003, things again changed dramatically. The flag of Iraq changed from the Republic of Fear to the Republic of Mayhem or Chaos. Now in Iraq, yes, we have, like a huge selection of terrorism. You can pick up any kind you want. But at the same time we had a huge variation or abrubted transition between the state of technology from before and after the war. Nowadays in Iraq, we have like above 100's of ISPs, no internet traffic is monitored, you can operate any kind of business, there are unlimited possibilities for investment nowadays, but they are right now hindered because of the violence in the country. But when this war is over i believe that there are unlimited possibilities for rebuilding the infrastructure in Iraq. Because Iraq is a rich country and despite the fact that we wasted over 400 billion dollars over the past 15 years, but even this amount of money does not mean anything in Iraq.
The issue i want to focus on right now is some of the US army technologies that were deployed and utilized in Iraq after the war. You have to realize that in the beginning the security of the US army was really a joke. You could go to the Convention Palace and just present a lousy ID and they would admit you. There was only one simple metal detector at the entrance. It was operated by an Iraq couple at that time who gave me the impression at that time that they were taking their job less seriously.
However after the organization in Iraq increased and the rythm, or the pace of the strikes against the US army and the US troops increased they have installed a batch of sophisticated technologies inside Iraq, one of which i would like to show you now. This is called body-search security technology. You already know that in the airports or, well, even in the WhatTheHack you have an X-ray transmission scanner but this is really a standard scanner which has low infinity, or low incrimination power for certain standards or objects with low atomic numbers like you have an explosive or a cigarette in your pocket or like if you have a huge cargo, or a truck, you can like sneak people in, or sneak explosives. In the beginning these technologies were not installed, but nowadays they use a different technology, called *Z-back-scatter technology*. The principle of action is really simple. An X-ray searches an object, it has one of three possibilities. Either transmitted through the object, absorbed, or scattered. Standard X-Ray transmission scanners utilize the transmission absorbing system, but Zback scatter technologies uses the scattered ray from the object and this is a really material specific, each object has a certain scatter and so it can really detect, and as you can see, it represents a 3D representation like you are actually seeing an X-ray vision. Like you have an X-ray coddle mounted on your head. This is a new technology now installed at Baghdad International Airport. When you arrive at Baghdad International Airport this is the first security measure you'll encounter. This is the principle of action, as i told you, you can see that this is the backscattering. It is a scattered X-ray and this is a material specific, so you can detect organic as well as inorganic objects and this is a new technology.
Bassam shows pictures of a car with the scattering rays through it. The information, pictures and such can be found at:
http://www.as-e.com/products_solutions/z_backscatter.asp
So as far as body search technologies, they switched from standard machines to this backscattered technology.
This is really something weird, this is like, the *toughest bus* on the planet: pictures at -> http://www.gizmag.co.uk/go/4081/
This is an armored bus, which is used to transport VIP prisoners like Saddam Hussein was transported in this bus. US Secretary of defense traveled in this bus, because despite what you might think, traveling in an Apache is not the safest way in Iraq nowadays. We have a route from Baghdad International Airport and the Green Zone; we call it the Irish route. Because it is a deadly route, the deadliest now in Baghdad these days. So they used this bus, developed by Rhino, or, I don't know if you pronounce it in French. This is called the Rhino Runner bus and around one or two hundred of these are being deployed in Iraq. But this is a technology i have personally seen in Iraq. This is a picture of Saddam Hussein with the bus behind him.
And this is an actual testing for the bus, so you can see that it can sustain a medium to heavy weight explosive, not like a single projectile launcher, but this can sustain what we call the IED (Improvised Explosive Devices). This is a military term. This technology is now being used. This has only recently been deployed to Iraq.
And this thing is something i witnessed in Iraq just before i left. This is called an 'around-the-corner-rifle'. It was actually developed by an Israeli company, but this is a modification.
This is a new system. This gun can shoot grenades, and rounds, and rumbles or something from around the corner, and it is equipped with an LCD camera, so you can actually see the opponent or the rifle, while you are protecting yourself, hiding behind the wall. But this is not a toy, and standard troops in Iraq do not use this weapon. It is only used by VIP guards and people of very high ranks. But i have seen it inside the Convention palace and it is quite heavy. Okay? (Picture) This is the actual design of the weapon.
So. I just want to emphasize here that all these technologies have been very, very recently deployed to Iraq like in 2003 and early 2004 none of these technologies were there. But nowadays they realize that they really need to change their policy or their level of military code.
(pic) This is something else that nowadays is being deployed in Iraq, called Cavlar gun vest. Nowadays when troops are hit, when they are mounted on a humvee or hammer, when they receive a very large strike, they survive because they have cavler vests, but their arms are mingled and destroyed to a point beyond repair, so this is from the US army, from the EOD department of defense, many soldiers who are hit in Iraq nowadays, they lose one or both arms. Like the cavler gun vest can be worn on the arm, to protect the arm from destruction, but it also limits the manual security for handling the guns. It is not really hugely used, but it is available nowadays.
I didn't want to speak about ... but there are many, many more technologies nowadays in Iraq, for instance, they have changed the standard education level for getting an ID to get an FBI record. Like when you now want to enter the Green Zone, or if you want to enter in Falluja, or any military base, you have to have an FBI record, and this imposes that they have to have your fingerprints, DNA, retinal scan. So they are really switched to the Bio-authentification systems nowadays in Iraq. I heard many stories about, they are like having robots, which they use to mount machine guns or for autonomous strikers, but they are not really being used in Iraq.
But what i have witnessed now in Iraq, just before i left, that really the security concern has changed from technical to human factors. In Iraq now they focus on the human factors in the security system. Which means that they do not get like, the best firewall, or surveillance cameras or stuff of that nature. No. But they limit who can enter and get out, what access level they need to possess, those people who get in and get out. They really switched more to human factors more than computer factors.
I just wanted to present you some technologies nowadays being utilized in Iraq. What i want to conclude this presentation with is that we as an organization, the Iraqi Linux User Group, we are very much aware of the current constraints and limitations of having an IT market or an open source community. But nevertheless we are very optimistic about the future of Iraq, because wars come and go, and this situation will resolve one day. Nothing lasts forever. This is what i know for sure and when it will resolve we will push it up and rehabilitate our country."
>>klapklapklap. questions:
Q: "How wide spread are close circuit cameras in Iraq? Is it just in the Green Zone?"
Bassam: "Just in the Green Zone, mostly."
Q: "So you are saying that they are switching more to human factors than computers, but you can also say that it is not exactly working. They have admitted very recently, even the US have admitted that the army is very much infiltrated by the resistance, so that even if you van identify a person, you still don't know who they exactly are. So my opinion is that there are resistance cells inside the Green Zone itself. And that there is no way that you could have that many people in an area, and have it totally secure. In other words there is no, this cannot really work in the long run if the US is in that country against the wishes of the people in Iraq."
Bassam: "Well, my impression was that they didn't know what they were doing in the beginning. About the human factor, nowadays an Iraqi has to keep a distance of at least 500 meters from a Humvee, or from a Hammer. So they really don't have so much sophisticated technology. And as you emphasized, yes, there is a resistance inside the army. There is a mixture. But the situation is structured on multiple levels and is very complex. You have the US army from one side. From my perspective and experience with the US army: there is no one who represents the US army. Every man speaks for himself, every single entity speaks for his company, and there are thousands of security companies nowadays in Iraq, who are making billions of dollars. Don't you think that they can possibly pay 500 dollars for someone, to dump some explosives in the streets? Yes. I know that in the long run it might not work. But this is their current strategy."
Jo: "There are maybe more questions but we have another ten minutes for Cecile Landman to speak about publishing and networking with Iraqi bloggers."
Cecile: "Bassam was talking about that 'around-the-corner-weapon', you know? I think Streamtime developed a kind of strategy that you could consider a kind of 'around-the-corner' strategy. Seen the fact that we can't be in Iraq, our crew has been there, it is a mixed crew, of Iraqis, some Swiss, Iraqis from the Diaspora. But we can't be there. We have been there but we can't be there. [4]
We decided at the end of August last year, when the whole circus of kidnappings and beheadings reached a kind of peak, we decided to start networking with people in Iraq, and what is more sort of logic to do this with the bloggers, who make their move, indisputable, outward. They started already some time ago, the first one, and most famous one is Salam Pax [5]. He started blogging in 2002 with his friend Raed Jarrar [6] These are also the first people with who we had real contact. They came to visit us. we met them, and so on.
- )
At the end of June, 2004, you can see how the website sort of started up. There were first announcements of radio transmissions through the web, from Iraq [7]. Then through August you can see that it is becoming more difficult and that people are coming back. Then there is a real change in how the website is being treated. There is a sort of shy reproducing information of blogs... [8] (website gives error...) Yea, this also happens, you know!
This sort of, was really shy, because trust is an incredible very difficult thing in Iraq. I think most Iraqis are very much trained, to sort of, distrust a lot of things and people around them. And when i had an interview with Salam Pax at the beginning of February this year, he also mentions that very clearly. That it is a difficult situation. That he can put things on his blog, in English, he writes about a lot of things that a lot of Iraqis certainly don't like, and also other people ... (that is on February 10th) [9]. He really says that you can't go and behave as if it were Hyde Park, to shout his opinions through the streets of Baghdad.
There are other kinds of... what Salam Pax does, i find him very funny. What he does, i call it oxygen, because it is another kind of information that you CAN get from Iraq, where journalists, well, maybe Patrick Cockburn (The Independent + Counterpunch) is the only one left, really.
So from Salam Pax, who had contacts with a blogger, or a blogster i should say: Riverbend, of 'Baghdad Burning' [10]. She is around 25 years, a computer specialist, she lost her job and her career because of the war, and she started blogging somewhere at the second half of 2003. Now she is very sharp, and she is also funny. That is why i want to show you indeed a post of her of the 22nd November 2003. Which is when she states that the first al-Qaida link in Iraq has really been discovered. She discovers it in 'Donkeys and Guerillas'. [11]
Then, i should say something else also. When we had a team in Basra at the end of March / beginning of April this year, Bassam came from Baghdad down to Basra to do the technique of the streaming, so you have a lot of things that you have to deal with. The first day connections fell down, and the day after, when we would have the second stream the whole site was cracked. So we had some real serious problems, because, without a site, where do you stream from? [12]; [13]
Riverbend has her virtual digital brother Raed Jarrar[14], who we are in contact with. He did some heavy stuff also in 'Civil Bodycount' [15] wanting to give faces to the people who are dying in the war. And well, these are really difficult projects. He and his family have been sending transports of medicines to Falluja [16]. Raed comes from a 'blogging family'. His mother blogs, Faiza, and his brother Khalid blogs; Khalid has been in prison for about three weeks, in the jails of the secret service in Iraq [17]. It was not known where he could be. His family has been searching in morgues, to find him back. After some weeks they found him and he is now in Amman. Like so many other Iraqi people there, because Iraqis, what you now see, are now going out. They're fleeing again. [18]
I would want to leave it here, to leave time for Jaromil, who will tell something about the software involved with the project."
Jaromil: "Just a few words about the software we adopted and how we structured the technical work of broadcasting from Iraq, and also what is the vision behind it. I like to recall something that Raed told me once about the Iraqi culture when we met in The Netherlands. We were talking about the Iraqi culture, and i remember this particularly. Under Saddam, most of the people were not really agreeing about what was going on. Also Bassam described the closure after the First Gulfwar. But no one was speaking about it outside their home. So there was a lot of bitching inside, at diner or lunch about what was seen of Saddam in television and such, but outside their homes everyone was just agreeing with what was happening. So, this shows the fact of so many years of that regime, it is hard to approach independent media production, and even forming the criticism of the situations. That is what we try to foster with Streamtime. We try to bring this attitude right in a crisis zone, which lays extremely on the other side of, extremely tamed down by a regime, to bring in the tools and what is needed to produce your own media. The few pioneers that did that, who Cecile mentioned and she knows an amazing lot of stories, that find even a lot of troubles in publishing them all the time, this created a panorama of existing persons, trying it out. There are amazing stories. Well we think that it is one of the possible help that we can give from outside to a place like Baghdad now, to the Iraqi people."
Jo: "I think there are two aspects. There are many people who can write like the bloggers. And they want to get their message out, they want to be heard. Cecile knows better than i that what they get in terms of feedback are mainly Americans giving their, or using the comment section to react from their patriotic point of view. But i think it is also important to have this kind of exchange with, well, normal people, or regular people, because it is also a well-known thing that when you are in a country in crisis, you also need stuff from abroad. To get information and content and context with people outside Iraq. So it is really a two-way stream. One of the things we are trying to create in this is a platform for exchange with Iraqis living abroad and Iraqis living in Iraq. So there are the bloggers, but there is also a wider circle of activists and artists who want to be part of that. So the communication platform that Streamtime wants to be is a kind of tool to use by Iraqis in Iraq and outside Iraq. And secondly it is a way for people who want to get more informed or who want to find out ways to give some form of assistance or help to initiatives of publishing or initiatives for creating Linux tools in Iraq. It is also a way to get into the system. That is what Streamtime is about."
Jaromil: "Some last remarks about technologies: for streaming we used icecast server, so streaming over http, which is quite stable. You can use it from an internetbar-line, which is what we mostly used. We used actually, to communicate with bloggers we also use *via voice* programs like Skype..."
Cecile: "And Yahoo messenger!"
Jaromil: "Well, we need technologies that can run everywhere and that people can just grab as soon as they need to. Skype is working so you can make telephone calls to Baghdad with it."
Cecile: "Well, the reality is, of course, you can't pretend that people would want to use Open Source you know? People want to communicate and will use everything they can get their hands on! Which goes from Skype to Yahoo, to whatever. WTF!? Bill Gates? So I'll will use his software."
Jaromil: "Of course you can imagine the situation. I am really pro-Open Source, and I develop it myself, so. But when you have somebody else on the line, with the bombs at the background, you don't stop there to say: Hey! You should install this program now, because Open Source is good! So there is a lot to be done in terms of needs.
The translation, we try hard to have the website half english / half arabic, which allows publishing in arabic. It works quite well on most platforms, but still we need more enhancement on that, especially on the Open Source, the operating system side. There is one attempt named Arabic eyes and we seek integration of this translation project into Dyne;bolic and other systems we use. And then i also have to mention a technicality about the website. We have a lot of attacks on the website. They are quite much bound to the things we announce and the things we publish, they have been repeatedly happening in the last time, like DoS attacks, or esquill-injections and stuff like that on the content-management system, which is something insecure by definition. So we had quite some problems by publishing all the things. So since quite some hackers are here, and if anyone would want to engage in a quite hot field of security, and maintaining a secure website, talking about what happens to Iraq and not being the mainstream, then you are really welcome to volunteer in some sysadmin work, because it is tough stuff.
(klapklapklap)
Related Pages:
- Streamtime - the abstract
- Bassam Hassan, Cecile Landman, jaromil and Jo vd Spek - the speakers
- Track:Streamtime - the video and other material
Categories: Published | Top | Open Source | Culture | Programming | Politics | Sustainability | 25 July 2008 | July 2008
