Guerrilla Warfare and the OLPC

From OLPC

Guerrilla Warfare and the OLPC

Michael de la Maza 20:19, 11 September 2006 (EDT)

It appears to me that you all know enough to be dangerous, but not enough to be helpful. *<{%<[]}}} The OLPC designers are way ahead of you. Comments below.--Mokurai 21:23, 13 December 2007 (EST)

A retired Army Lieutenant Colonel once told me that the greatest challenge soldiers in combat face is communicating effectively with the soldiers beside them. Special operations forces practice for countless hours to master hand signals and have extensive communications back-up exactly for this reason.

The OLPC will serve as an inexpensive and effective communication device for guerillas. Many of the features that children want in a computing and communications device are also features that an irregular army would want: the OLPC is hardened; the OLPC is small; the OLPC is multi-functional; the OLPC is innocuous; and the OLPC is human powered.

The OLPC also broadcasts even when turned off, unless the battery is removed. It is easily detectable at a distance of a kilometer or more when powered, and easily identified. On the battlefield you want something like encrypted spread-spectrum wireless (sounding as much like random static as possible) to avoid detection and interception.--Mokurai 21:23, 13 December 2007 (EST)

Neutralizing the OLPC is difficult. Destroying OLPCs is politically unpalatable. Jamming the OLPC is not cost effective except for high value missions.

The Taleban burn down schools. I'm pretty sure that they wouldn't be deterred from destroying XOs by Western or even local condemnation.

The DoD should consider examining the value of the OLPC by giving it to the opposition forces at the Army’s National Training Center and quantifying how it affects mission accomplishment. The experience should be educational.

Comments:

I am amused by the idea that technologically unsophisticated guerillas will trust the OLPC. Use, absolutely, if only as a detonator for IEDs. Trust, no way. It's hard for the Pentagon's infowar people to stretch their skills without an enemy network infrastructure to use them on.

The OLPC's specs will be sufficiently open-source that guerillas and their adversaries will both have access to code. However, the government will have more programmers and more time to invest in the project.

ROTFL. Are you aware of the Pakistani Brain Virus, the very first documented computer virus for IBM PC floppy disks? (It was supposed to be a copy-protection scheme, but it got away.)

Easy enough for the government to program OLPCs to have any or all of the following behaviors:

• periodically and without fanfare announce their location to other wireless devices, such as those carried by government agents or soldiers

XOs announce themselves to the mesh network at all times by design.--Mokurai 21:23, 13 December 2007 (EST)

• clobber themselves (temporarily or permanently) if they do not contact the host/village network in a specified time period (which can be changed during each update)

A built-in feature of the Bitfrost security system.

• allow government agents free rein in the user file(s), even those that might be kept on flash disk

Disabling Bitfrost, and thus exposing children to crackers/stalkers/spammers/etc. is a good way for governments to get into trouble with large numbers of computer-wielding schoolchildren and the voters in their families.

• record conversations covertly using the built-in microphone

The microphone light cannot be turned off in software. What you suggest would require a hardware modification.

• use GPS to keep a log of the device's movements, revealing any bunker or safehouse or cache it might have been used in or near

GPS currently costs more than the laptop. Your suggestion requires a significant hardware redesign and private manufacturing. Given the broadcast requirements of GPS, there is no way to keep this secret from the public, much less your enemy. Anyway, I'm not clear how you would read a GPS on an XO in the enemy's possession. Stick to listening for mesh networking signals from laptops not in schools, residences, or other reasonable locations.

In bulk, as when producing XOs, one can get GPS chips for under a dollar.

This all poses . . . interesting implications.

If I wanted to use a OLPC for warlike purposes, I'd clip the antennas and the radio first thing. On the modern battlefield, to transmit is to be detected; to be detected is to be destroyed.

clarka:clarka 13 October 2006

Communication is a tradeoff between intelligence and command/control. you have to reveal yourself to communicate and so it is being done. with that as a given, the OLPC allows for spread-spectrum communication (with low electromagnetic emission),

Sorry, how's that? It emits 802.11b, g, and s signals, but has no spread spectrum capability.

mesh networking (for lower transmission power and jam protection),

Sorry, no. The mesh network has been upgraded to over a kilometer in communication radius. It is as vulnerable to jamming as any other 802.11 devices.

encryption and built-in frequency hopping. everything a c4l officer can possibly ask for.

In your scenario, how is the government going to get this malicious code into the OLPC Open Source code base?--Mokurai 03:09, 14 October 2006 (EDT)

Fair question. The government would either insist on it as a condition of initial purchase / deployment (at which point the OLPC project can't say anything on the subject, on pain of losing access to that country and possibly endangering the whole project), or upload it later as a mandatory software update. I doubt that the cost factors would allow for chipping, but entire categories of civil and military hardware have been discreetly chipped already, including mobile phones. I'd hide such a Trojan in the translation software, myself, as trusting Western programmers are less likely to look for it in there and everything that the government agents would want is in the local dialect anyway. clarka 30 December 2006

It's not as if they can't hack the device, flash its bios or even insert 'modchips'. if it has been done for XBOX and PS2, it can be done for the OLPC. or they can simply recieve the keys from corrupt governments for the right price.

I think that the risk for abusing the OLPC deserves a lot more merit. Guerilla Fighters sometimes have access to quite sophisticated technology, surely enough to replace the internal flash and even modify its software. the image of guerilla warriors as savages setting off bombs does them no justice. In particular in light of possible training by sponsor countries, the OLPC can become a highly effective command and control tool with very little modification - changing some driver behaviour regarding emissions and putting a few simple tactical apps. the hardware surely has great appeal for these purposes.

Contents 1 Military use 2 The issues raised 3 Antiwar use of XO 4 XO as an IED

[edit] Military use

unsigned content originally in Ask OLPC a Question about Social Issues#Military use

While this issue is mostly overlooked, it may surprise you to know that XO hardware, being somewhere in between industrial and MILSPEC hardened, equipped with extremely sophisticated networking measures, makes for a very powerful tactical computer. with the right software changes, a lot of militias, insurgents or even third-world state armies would be happy to put their paws on a shipment. XO's relatively modest hardware can easily host an embedded combat application. Moral considerations would also not be a deterrant to these kind of people. With some modification capability, such an organization can remove distinctive marks from the laptops. While all the components are readily available in the market, the research, development and integration effort is beyond the capabilities of most such organizations. by performing this service for them and shipping "free" laptops, there is potential for serious havoc. (I'm a retired c4l officer and a systems administrator and have dealt with tactical computing before).

[edit] The issues raised

• It would be immoral to supply a tool that can be used in this way to a conflict zone. Or even: it would be immoral to build this tool because it may one day filter to a conflict zone.

I think this argument can be largely dismissed. An OLPC will never directly kill anyone; as a tool, it is more like a screwdriver than a gun or even a sledgehammer, with many more constructive than destructive uses. By this logic, we would stop making screwdrivers.

Even if it does see use as a guerrilla (or, on a similar basis, narcotics) tool, it could be argued that it will still help educate its users, or even that sometimes it may be beneficial to increase guerrilla comunication (to warn civilians of an oncoming government massacre, for instance).

• This will be a motive for governments to reject these computers

There is a vast gulf between an underdeveloped nation, even a relatively severe case, and an ongoing civil war. Countries in the latter position will hardly be in a position to purchase or distribute OLPC's anyway, even through aid programs.

• In a future world where OLPC's are common and a civil war starts, possession of an OLPC even by children may stigmatize one as a guerrilla and trigger repression.

This is a relatively distant hypothetical. I'd say it's worthy of consideration (to make the machine less attractive to guerrillas out-of-box, for instance, not to include an option to turn off wireless in the base interface), but not serious worry. Homunq 14:16, 28 July 2007 (EDT)

---

---Three topics: Disaster-preparedness potential; Risk factors in conflict zones; Guerrilla potential.---

added by G., 26 september 2007.

1) Disaster preparedness:

The laptop itself and the XO operating system & apps have tremendous potential for disaster preparedness: communicating warnings, news of conditions, calls for help, coordination of supplies and aid, etc. Consider by analogy a country where large numbers of kids are trained to use Amateur Radio, and where subsequently a major disaster strikes.

Relevance to military considerations: In countries that are conflict zones, the impact of warfare is similar to that of certain types of natural disasters. Thus, a communications network could save lives in a conflict zone in the same manner as it would in an impending disaster (e.g. warning of approaching severe storm or flash-flood condition, or warning of approaching hostile forces preparing to do battle in an area).

2) Risk factors in conflict zones:

Consider a country that undergoes a violent change of power, and the new Regime is committed to an agenda of overt obscurantism (denial of learning and knowlege, with violent consequences). For example the Taliban in Afghanistan, both in their previous iteration and in their current iteration, made it policy to execute entire families where girls were allowed to attend school. In the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge (sp?) in Cambodia, sent educated people and their families, by the hundreds of thousands or possibly millions, to "re-education camps" that were in fact death camps. Or consider a country where a genocide is underway. (BTW, the term "ethnic cleansing" is derived from "public cleansing," the international term for "solid waste management." That should tell you something about those who engage in the practice: they view other humans as a form of refuse to be disposed of.)

Here is a blunt fact that cannot be ignored: If, in order to gain access to certain countries, OLPC actively or passively allows host governments to insert surveillance functions into the software, a) OLPC will be facilitating human rights violations, and b) OLPC will immediately suffer a complete loss of trust/reputation, as it will be considered party to the deeds and their fatal consequences. Consider: you are a village leader in an unstable country where violent factions are known to either be associated with government or infiltrated into government. If you heard that the laptops had been implicated in search-and-destroy or roundups/killings of innocent children in another country, would you trust having them in your village? No way. I have to believe OLPC's leadership know this (or if they don't, someone please tell them), and have taken it into consideration.

Logically the policy that should follow, should be to refuse any distribution into any country where a government wants to alter the machine for surveillance or control purposes. The children in those countries may suffer loss of the learning opportunities that the laptop entails, but better that than to suffer worse at the hands of an oppressive regime. And those regimes will eventually come under pressure to allow the machines into their countries unaltered, for the same reasons of international competitiveness and commerce as have enabled the internet itself to go into such places (in this case specifically that a nation whose children are denied an educational tool that has otherwise become universal around the world, will be seen as backward and incapable). As well, any regime that uses the presence of these machines as a means to conduct violent acts against civilians, will rapidly face the condemnation of the world for subverting an otherwise-innocent tool: by analogy, like using a UN vaccination program as cover for germ warfare testing on its own population.

3) Comments on potential for use in guerrilla warfare:

Unlikely, as follows: Guerrilla forces must necessarily rely on weapons and tools and infrastructure that are highly robust and easily procured under the most unfavorable conditions (hence their frequent choice of the Kalashnikov rifle and the related ammunition). This basically precludes using or repurposing single-source computer hardware, when other means of communication are available and already in use.

Where guerrillas use laptops at all, they are more likely to favor generic market products by diverse manufacturers, not only for ease of replacement and alteration, but to avoid the risk that possession of a specific type of machine will indicate that one is a member of a guerrilla organization. A guerrilla leader is more likely to get through a checkpoint appearing to be a business person carrying a conventional laptop, than if they are carrying an OLPC machine. The latter is sufficiently unconventional for a business traveler. that it would raise immediate suspicion.

True, but not to the point. The terrorist would simply go disguised as a harmless schoolteacher.--Mokurai 21:23, 13 December 2007 (EST)

Thus, there is not even a good reason for a suspicious government to attempt to subvert the OLPC laptop. This machine is simply a learning tool, not a weapon, and not even a combat support system. Governments may as well worry about chalkboards and chalk: only those regimes that are truly insanely paranoid would even begin to go there.

--- end of comments by G., 26 September 2007 ---

[edit] Antiwar use of XO

What are the odds that the next barbarian incursion into a fragile society that has XOs will be seen live on YouTube and hence CNN the very same day? What effect will that have on articulate voting populations around the world?

Do you remember that Abu Ghraib was in the news sporadically for months before the pictures came out and the outrage spiked?

[edit] XO as an IED

Roadside bombs (Improvised Explosive Devices or IED) are being cobbled together using cellphones, cheap walkie-talkies, remote-controlled toys and other cheap wireless receiver-transmitter combos. The XO laptops can easily be ripped off from kids on their way home from school (you think the school bullies stealing your lunch money was bad) and modified by the Taliban or Al Quaeda into IEDs. The architecture is perfect for that use; replace the display with a pound or two of C4 and not only do you have a remote-controlled bomb but a mesh-network of detonation devices scattered throughout the village. How can this use be prevented or, worse yet, government disapproval of the entire OLPC program be countered?

It would be a short-lived IED unless the school can be coerced into preventing the laptop from deactivating itself. (there is an anti-theft system) 24.110.145.202 02:48, 25 December 2007 (EST)