Monitoring Weapons Bans With Social Media

Harperdog writes "Kirk Bansak has a great article outlining a coming revolution in non-proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and bio-weapons, courtesy of smart phones and social media. Early theory on arms control foresaw 'inspection by the people' as a promising method for preventing evasion of arms control and disarmament obligations and serves as a starting point for understanding 'social verification.' As Rose Gottemoeller recently stated: '[Cell phone-based] sensors would allow citizens to contribute to detecting potential treaty violations, and could build a bridge to a stronger private-public partnership in the realm of treaty verification.'"

Comments

Begs for false negatives

[i kan reed]

Doing something untoward? Give lots of falsified negative readings in your area to give the impression to observers that nothing is wrong.

Re:Begs for false negatives

[Baloroth]

Or hack the system and give your neighbors or other enemies lots of falsified positives so that the UN launches sanctions against them. A system like this would be more or less completely worthless, even assuming they could make the physical hardware accurate enough. Seismometers on a cell phone? Never mind, of course, that if there is a big enough sample for you to detect a bio-weapon, you will have a much bigger and more immediate problem to worry about than non-compliance with treaties. Specifically, the fact that you are probably already dead. Similarly with chemical weapons, although to a lesser degree.

Re:Begs for false negatives

[vlm]

A system like this would be more or less completely worthless, even assuming they could make the physical hardware accurate enough

The article was pure blue sky, and you seem to be thinking of primary data gathering.

Here's how it would really work in the real world (probably). So you've got a off the shelf U-235 reactor. And an adjacent reprocessing plant. You'd like to make a nice Pu-239 based a-bomb (nagasaki style, hold the wasabi). But there's this pesky non-proliferation treaty. What to do?

Your "U-235" plant contains 90+% U-239 as a non-fissionable filler material. OK so holding a chunk of U-239 in a neutron flux results in the formation of Pu-239. And holding Pu-239 in a neutron flux results in Pu-240. For reasons beyond this discussion Pu-239 is a really great material for big kabooms and Pu-240 is virtually Fing useless for big kabooms.

So you make abomb fuel by reprocessing the fuel, extracting the yummy goodness of Pu-239, like every month or so, before it can be corrupted into icky Pu-240 by sitting in the neutron flux, and putting the leftovers right back in the reactor to cook some more. Now if you don't want to make a abomb the fuel rods can sit in the reactor for years and years before the burnup ratio gets too high and/or corrosion sets in.

At least some of the non-proliferation people actually know this, so if you have a reactor they freak out if you reprocess your fuel every month, but they're pretty chill if you reprocess only lets say 3 times per decade. Now rather than hiring one poor bastard to follow each of 1000+ fuel rods around in person, you track reprocessing materials shipments. Most of that stuff is pretty weird. Zirconium tubes, or thick foil to make your own. Strange acids to dissolve fuel. Strange organic solvents to extract Pu from U (which is actually somewhat tricky... simpler than isotopic concentration but harder than separating, say, iron from sulfur). to the ratio of "good guy" to "bad guy" consumables use (and presumably, consumables delivery) is something like 100 to 1.

So you do some analysis and your average hazmat semi driver posts 0.x twits per mile and 0.y twits per delivery. Also your average reprocessing tech tweets 0.a times when he's Fing off and 0.b times when he's actually working. The point is you can build a model from the safety of your home based solely on traffic stats to measure that 1 to 100 ratio between naughty and nice.

So suddenly tweets indicating hazmat truck traffic go up 100x, mostly whining about bad food out on the road or whatever it is truckers whine about when they've got work. Ditto chemistry techs. Now you know what they're up to. And you don't need something blindingly obvious like "yo homies chillin with a sep funnel fulla Pu239 save some hookah 4 ur bro". All you need is "hmm, thats odd, the chemistry techs stopped tweeting from home during 2nd shift, all at the same time... as if they're putting on an 'illegal' second shift... hmm" combined with "hmm, thats odd, whining about backaches from transfering 55 gallon drums of solvent went up 100x on average at the same time". combined with "hmm, thats odd, every whiny bored unemployed chemist in the country suddenly stopped tweeting, as if they all got jobs"

And thats how you do it!

Yeah, that's called "whistleblowing"

[crazyjj]

And it's a great way to get your ass killed or thrown into prison if you do it in the wrong country. It's also a great way to get shitty intelligence from fake reports of WMD's. Hell, even in the U.S., whistleblowers are VERY rarely thanked (usually it costs you your job at the very least). How do you think some guy downloading the "Monitor My Country's WMD Activity" app will be treated in the third world?

Re:Yeah, that's called "whistleblowing"

[Lehk228]

And it's a great way to get your ass killed or thrown into prison if you do it in the wrong country.

You mean like the USA?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Manning

Re:Yeah, that's called "whistleblowing"

[Trepidity]

I agree, but I imagine there are some circumstances where it could work, if it's fairly passive on the user's part (no individualized choice to report) and their country agrees to the rollout as part of a treaty. Basically, countries A and B sign a treaty that says that both countries will roll out this WMD app or whatever, and then there are some regular-style inspections to make sure it's actually rolled out. Now both countries have armies of regular citizens who're walking around with the WMD app, and can't do much about it without causing a diplomatic incident. Maybe the citizens would even get paid something to make the overall scheme popular in both countries.

If it's up to individual citizens' initiative, then the plan does lack some plausibility. I think of this as making more sense when both countries genuinely are committed to the treaty but are worried about the other country reneging, so would really sign on to plausible symmetric inspection measures.

Re:Yeah, that's called "whistleblowing"

[0123456]

Countries that agree to monitoring are unlikely to be a problem, because to agree to that they either have to be honest or very good at hiding things. In fact, countries in general are rarely a problem, because they have too much to lose from actually using nukes or bio-weapons when they know other countries will retaliate.

The real problem is individuals with such weapons, because many are crazy enough to use them.

Re:Yeah, that's called "whistleblowing"

[clarkkent09]

There is a line between whistle blowing and treason. I suggest you look it up.

Re:Yeah, that's called "whistleblowing"

[Hatta]

Don't forget Thomas Drake. He was an NSA analyst who compared a billion dollar surveillance program with a million dollar surveillance program and concluded that the million dollar program worked far better. As was his job, he reported this and was told to stop asking questions. At this point he took evidence of billions of dollars of fraud and waste inside the NSA to the media. He was then charged as a spy.

Hey Obama voters. Were you aware that Obama has prosecuted more whistelblowers under the espionage act than all previous administrations combined. Obama is a radical authoritarian. Remember that when you cast your ballots in November.

Re:Yeah, that's called "whistleblowing"

[ILongForDarkness]

Yeah and I'm pretty sure that leaking something that is a state secret for national security reasons qualifies as treason.

Re:Yeah, that's called "whistleblowing"

[Hatta]

Gladly.

Re:Yeah, that's called "whistleblowing"

[Hatta]

I don't think racking up a total count of SIX is sufficient to refer to him as a "radical authoritarian".

Twice as many as all other presidents in history combined. Do I need to do the statistics and report how many standard deviations from the mean Obama is?

Also, was it OBAMA who initiated the proceedings or, say, the DOD and CIA?

As head of the executive, Obama is responsible for everything the DOD and CIA does.

Re:Better than...

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Crowdsource actionable violations? What a great idea. You'd have domain-expertise, on the spot, in real-time - for all cases.

There's no way that could be co-opted or manipulated by social engineering!

It would be like "Kony 2012" on steroids.

All you'd need to do is add automated drone-strikes to this plan, and we will be living in the Humanitarian Utopia promised us by technology.

Re:Let's apply the standard 2nd amendment argument

[0123456]

Nuclear weapons have arguably been the greatest force for peace in the history of the world. The only problem is that if the deterrent effect breaks down, we all die.