Academic literature on the topic 'Enemy intelligence cooperation'

The concept of intelligence cooperation and national security is not new, particularly after realism which interpreted these concepts with different perspectives. International states are sovereign, and they got the capacity to secure themselves from internal and external threats, i.e., army is a key to state security as it can attack the enemy to protect its borders. States are not all the time hostiles, but after 9/11, the concept of national security with refers to intelligence cooperation is a highly debatable issue. This paper study the concept of intelligence cooperation with reference to Pakistan in the previous history and present perspectives after 9/11 and the Global war against terrorism.

Abstract Characterised by the capability to rapidly penetrate the enemy disposition, at long distance, by air, using transport aircraft, by parachuting or landing, as well as by own combat capacity, airborne troops could successfully execute a wide range of specific missions, either independently or in cooperation with other units or large units in the land, air or naval forces, to meet the operational and strategic goals. Mention should be made that almost all belligerents in the Second World War successfully employed groups of well-trained fighters, parachuted behind the enemy disposition, to execute intelligence missions: information collection, “commando”-type diversionary actions, as well as supply of weapons for local partisans and resistance formations

In 1897, the Vice-Chief of the Japanese Armys General Staff, Lieutenant General Kawakami Sōroku, visited the Russian Far East. Based on a large body of hitherto unstudied documents from the Russian State Military Historical Archive, this article analyzes the composition of the Japanese delegation as well as that of the Russian administration that hosted the Japanese guests. Among the hosts were Vladimir A. Oranovskiy and Vladimir K. Samoilov, who would later became famous as military orientalists and as the founders of Russias military intelligence in the region. The highest official who met the Japanese mission was the Temporary Chief of Troops of Priamur Military District, Lieutenant-General Nikolay I. Grodekov, widely known at that time as a military man, administrator, and scholar. The article discusses in detail the preparation of the visit by the Russian regional government, including the planned itinerary, preparations for the diet of the guests as well as their accommodation and transport issues. Equally analyzed are the organizational difficulties that occurred during the visit. The main interests of the Japanese delegation were the current condition of the Russian forces in a region, the development of military transport and port infrastructure, the level of regional colonization, issues of military training and combat readiness, new artillery systems, small arms, and winter outfit. The Japanese General Staff was particular interested in the defense condition of Vladivostok Fortress, with one officer in the Japanese delegation being assigned to investigate this particular question. An interesting feature is the cooperation between the General Staff and semi-commercial Japanese organizations for the collection of data about the current state of the Russian Far East. The article also studies the conclusions drawn by the Russian military attach in Japan, which appear to be inaccurate and questionable. While this visit did not arouse much interest in the central administration of the Russian War Ministry, it was of utmost importance to Japan, which already at that time regarded the Russian Empire as a potential threat and enemy.

The article analyzes the level and features of research of OUN activities in the 1930–1940s by Ukrainian foreign and Soviet historiography. A historiographical reflection and comparative analysis of works on this problem are carried out, the methodological and ideological confrontation of Ukrainian foreign and Soviet authors is described. The author describes the debatable, the least researched issues and concludes that in the Soviet historiography regarding the Ukrainian nationalist movement, an "image of the enemy" was formed, events were falsified. It was summed up that the generally accepted statements among Soviet historians were charges of the OUN leadership in collaboration with the German intelligence and the Polish government, as well as allegations of leading influence on the OUN of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC). It is emphasized that the Soviet authors introduced the documentary sources of the Soviet special services into scientific circulation, in which many facts of the population's cooperation with the OUN and information about its activity in Western Ukraine were presented. A large number of historical works on this issue underscore its significance and relevance in the 1950-1980s. The author finds that the first in-depth study of various aspects of the activities of the OUN and the creation of a significant scientific heritage are the main achievements of the Ukrainian foreign historiography on this issue. At the same time, she notes that, from a methodological point of view, these researches were on the border between memoirs and historical studies since they were influenced by authors' affiliation with a particular group of the Ukrainian nationalist movement. It is pointed out that the specifics of a significant part of Ukrainian foreign publications was the material politicization, the deliberate concealment of unfavorable problems, and facts. However, Ukrainian foreign historians proved that in the 1930-1950s, the Ukrainian nationalist movement, which gained unprecedented development and popularity, was a significant political force in Western Ukraine. The memoirs of participants of the liberation movement, which became an important achievement of Ukrainian foreign historiography, are analyzed. The author concludes that both Ukrainian foreign and Soviet historiography were active representatives of the confrontation of competing political systems, and their research do not meet the criteria of science. Keywords: foreign historiography, Soviet historiography, modern Ukrainian historiography, Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, Ukrainian nationalist movement.

Recent research has shown that surprisingly rich models of human activity can be learned from GPS (positional) data. However, most effort to date has concentrated on modeling single individuals or statistical properties of groups of people. Moreover, prior work focused solely on modeling actual successful executions (and not failed or attempted executions) of the activities of interest. We, in contrast, take on the task of understanding human interactions, attempted interactions, and intentions from noisy sensor data in a fully relational multi-agent setting. We use a real-world game of capture the flag to illustrate our approach in a well-defined domain that involves many distinct cooperative and competitive joint activities. We model the domain using Markov logic, a statistical-relational language, and learn a theory that jointly denoises the data and infers occurrences of high-level activities, such as a player capturing an enemy. Our unified model combines constraints imposed by the geometry of the game area, the motion model of the players, and by the rules and dynamics of the game in a probabilistically and logically sound fashion. We show that while it may be impossible to directly detect a multi-agent activity due to sensor noise or malfunction, the occurrence of the activity can still be inferred by considering both its impact on the future behaviors of the people involved as well as the events that could have preceded it. Further, we show that given a model of successfully performed multi-agent activities, along with a set of examples of failed attempts at the same activities, our system automatically learns an augmented model that is capable of recognizing success and failure, as well as goals of people's actions with high accuracy. We compare our approach with other alternatives and show that our unified model, which takes into account not only relationships among individual players, but also relationships among activities over the entire length of a game, although more computationally costly, is significantly more accurate. Finally, we demonstrate that explicitly modeling unsuccessful attempts boosts performance on other important recognition tasks.

The paper presents the concept of mission planning for a short-range tactical class Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) that recognizes targets using the sensors it has been equipped with. Tasks carried out by such systems are mainly associated with aerial reconnaissance employing Electro Optical (EO)/Near Infra-Red (NIR) heads, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), and Electronic Intelligence (ELINT) systems. UAVs of this class are most often used in NATO armies to support artillery actions, etc. The key task, carried out during their activities, is to plan a reconnaissance mission in which the flight route will be determined that optimally uses the sensors’ capabilities. The paper describes the scenario of determining the mission plan and, in particular, the UAV flight routes to which the recognition targets are assigned. The problem was decomposed into several subproblems: assigning reconnaissance tasks to UAVs with choosing the reconnaissance sensors and designating an initial UAV flight plan. The last step is planning a detailed flight route taking into account the time constraints imposed on recognition and the characteristics of the reconnaissance sensors. The final step is to generate the real UAV flight trajectory based on its technical parameters. The algorithm for determining exact flight routes for the indicated reconnaissance purposes was also discussed, taking into account the presence of enemy troops and available air corridors. The task scheduling algorithm—Vehicle Route Planning with Time Window (VRPTW)—using time windows is formulated in the form of the Mixed Integer Linear Problem (MILP). The MILP formulation was used to solve the UAV flight route planning task. The algorithm can be used both when planning individual UAV missions and UAV groups cooperating together. The approach presented is a practical way of establishing mission plans implemented in real unmanned systems.

Introduction. The article substantiates the importance of the industrial development to strengthening the country's defense capability and ensure the civilian population needs. Based on a comparison of the financing of the defense complex in different countries, it is shown that, in addition to direct military expenditures, defense capability depends on a developed industrial complex. Prospective types of industrial activity in Ukraine, which have a high degree of influence on meeting the needs of the economy in the conditions of war time, have been identified. New technologies for ensuring defense capability are defined and tools for digital and innovative transformations in Ukrainian industry are proposed. Materials and methods. The substantiation of the industrial complex capabilities to strengthen the national security, the determination of key areas of production to meet the needs of the economy in the conditions of war time, as well as the set of tools for realizing such capabilities in Ukraine was carried out by dialectical, formal-legal, systemic-structural and comparative methods. The dialectical method made it possible to determine the possibilities of manufacturing modern means of defense and products for the lifesaving of the country's population. With the help of the formal-legal method, the content of the norms of separate current normative legal acts of Ukraine, which define the concept of the country's defense capability, is highlighted. The use of the system-structural method made it possible to determine key strategic goals and key strategic initiatives for digital and innovative transformations in Ukrainian industry. Comparative methods of economic and statistical analysis based on statistical data of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the Ministry of Finance and the Central Bank of the Russian Federation were used to determine the trends in the financing of defense expenditures in different countries. Results and discussion.Countering military threats depends on the state's ability to ensure the safety of the population and the integrity of the territory, where a powerful industrial complex plays the main role. Financing of the defense sector for the supply of weapons and means of warfare in Ukraine is insufficient compared to other countries, although during wartime its volumes increase. At the same time, it is impossible to imagine a combat-ready army without proper provision of special uniforms, protective equipment, food, fuel and lubricants, medicines, etc. All this confirms the importance of a developed industrial complex in creating available resources to meet the needs of not only the civilian population, but also the needs of the army. To increase the country's readiness for military threats, it is necessary to activate innovative transformations in advance by introducing technologies to production processes in industry, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning; robotics, bioinformatics, blockchain, and countermeasures against cyber threats. The wide application of such technologies in all spheres of scientific, industrial and military activity will allow strengthening the country's defense capabilities and provide additional opportunities for managing combat operations, destroying enemy equipment and preventing infiltration into the country's territory; hiding one's positions and masking; conducting search and rescue operations; data collection and documentation of war crimes; protection, productivity and life support, as well as to counter cyberattacks. Conclusions. As a result of the study, a list of advanced Industry 4.0 technologies was determined, the production of which can be organized at Ukrainian factories with the cooperation of foreign partners. The primary measures to accelerate the technological transformation of Ukrainian production based on the establishment of an effective dialogue between state and local authorities, national manufacturers and scientific and educational institutions, as well as close cooperation with European and international clusters, are substantiated.

On the morning of Thursday, 4 May 2006, the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence held an open hearing entitled “Terrorist Use of the Internet.” The Intelligence committee meeting was scheduled to take place in Room 1302 of the Longworth Office Building, a Depression-era structure with a neoclassical façade. Because of a dysfunctional elevator, some of the congressional representatives were late to the meeting. During the testimony about the newest political applications for cutting-edge digital technology, the microphones periodically malfunctioned, and witnesses complained of “technical problems” several times. By the end of the day it seemed that what was to be remembered about the hearing was the shocking revelation that terrorists were using videogames to recruit young jihadists. The Associated Press wrote a short, restrained article about the hearing that only mentioned “computer games and recruitment videos” in passing. Eager to have their version of the news item picked up, Reuters made videogames the focus of their coverage with a headline that announced, “Islamists Using US Videogames in Youth Appeal.” Like a game of telephone, as the Reuters videogame story was quickly re-run by several Internet news services, each iteration of the title seemed less true to the exact language of the original. One Internet news service changed the headline to “Islamic militants recruit using U.S. video games.” Fox News re-titled the story again to emphasise that this alert about technological manipulation was coming from recognised specialists in the anti-terrorism surveillance field: “Experts: Islamic Militants Customizing Violent Video Games.” As the story circulated, the body of the article remained largely unchanged, in which the Reuters reporter described the digital materials from Islamic extremists that were shown at the congressional hearing. During the segment that apparently most captured the attention of the wire service reporters, eerie music played as an English-speaking narrator condemned the “infidel” and declared that he had “put a jihad” on them, as aerial shots moved over 3D computer-generated images of flaming oil facilities and mosques covered with geometric designs. Suddenly, this menacing voice-over was interrupted by an explosion, as a virtual rocket was launched into a simulated military helicopter. The Reuters reporter shared this dystopian vision from cyberspace with Western audiences by quoting directly from the chilling commentary and describing a dissonant montage of images and remixed sound. “I was just a boy when the infidels came to my village in Blackhawk helicopters,” a narrator’s voice said as the screen flashed between images of street-level gunfights, explosions and helicopter assaults. Then came a recording of President George W. Bush’s September 16, 2001, statement: “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.” It was edited to repeat the word “crusade,” which Muslims often define as an attack on Islam by Christianity. According to the news reports, the key piece of evidence before Congress seemed to be a film by “SonicJihad” of recorded videogame play, which – according to the experts – was widely distributed online. Much of the clip takes place from the point of view of a first-person shooter, seen as if through the eyes of an armed insurgent, but the viewer also periodically sees third-person action in which the player appears as a running figure wearing a red-and-white checked keffiyeh, who dashes toward the screen with a rocket launcher balanced on his shoulder. Significantly, another of the player’s hand-held weapons is a detonator that triggers remote blasts. As jaunty music plays, helicopters, tanks, and armoured vehicles burst into smoke and flame. Finally, at the triumphant ending of the video, a green and white flag bearing a crescent is hoisted aloft into the sky to signify victory by Islamic forces. To explain the existence of this digital alternative history in which jihadists could be conquerors, the Reuters story described the deviousness of the country’s terrorist opponents, who were now apparently modifying popular videogames through their wizardry and inserting anti-American, pro-insurgency content into U.S.-made consumer technology. One of the latest video games modified by militants is the popular “Battlefield 2” from leading video game publisher, Electronic Arts Inc of Redwood City, California. Jeff Brown, a spokesman for Electronic Arts, said enthusiasts often write software modifications, known as “mods,” to video games. “Millions of people create mods on games around the world,” he said. “We have absolutely no control over them. It’s like drawing a mustache on a picture.” Although the Electronic Arts executive dismissed the activities of modders as a “mustache on a picture” that could only be considered little more than childish vandalism of their off-the-shelf corporate product, others saw a more serious form of criminality at work. Testifying experts and the legislators listening on the committee used the video to call for greater Internet surveillance efforts and electronic counter-measures. Within twenty-four hours of the sensationalistic news breaking, however, a group of Battlefield 2 fans was crowing about the idiocy of reporters. The game play footage wasn’t from a high-tech modification of the software by Islamic extremists; it had been posted on a Planet Battlefield forum the previous December of 2005 by a game fan who had cut together regular game play with a Bush remix and a parody snippet of the soundtrack from the 2004 hit comedy film Team America. The voice describing the Black Hawk helicopters was the voice of Trey Parker of South Park cartoon fame, and – much to Parker’s amusement – even the mention of “goats screaming” did not clue spectators in to the fact of a comic source. Ironically, the moment in the movie from which the sound clip is excerpted is one about intelligence gathering. As an agent of Team America, a fictional elite U.S. commando squad, the hero of the film’s all-puppet cast, Gary Johnston, is impersonating a jihadist radical inside a hostile Egyptian tavern that is modelled on the cantina scene from Star Wars. Additional laughs come from the fact that agent Johnston is accepted by the menacing terrorist cell as “Hakmed,” despite the fact that he utters a series of improbable clichés made up of incoherent stereotypes about life in the Middle East while dressed up in a disguise made up of shoe polish and a turban from a bathroom towel. The man behind the “SonicJihad” pseudonym turned out to be a twenty-five-year-old hospital administrator named Samir, and what reporters and representatives saw was nothing more exotic than game play from an add-on expansion pack of Battlefield 2, which – like other versions of the game – allows first-person shooter play from the position of the opponent as a standard feature. While SonicJihad initially joined his fellow gamers in ridiculing the mainstream media, he also expressed astonishment and outrage about a larger politics of reception. In one interview he argued that the media illiteracy of Reuters potentially enabled a whole series of category errors, in which harmless gamers could be demonised as terrorists. It wasn’t intended for the purpose what it was portrayed to be by the media. So no I don’t regret making a funny video . . . why should I? The only thing I regret is thinking that news from Reuters was objective and always right. The least they could do is some online research before publishing this. If they label me al-Qaeda just for making this silly video, that makes you think, what is this al-Qaeda? And is everything al-Qaeda? Although Sonic Jihad dismissed his own work as “silly” or “funny,” he expected considerably more from a credible news agency like Reuters: “objective” reporting, “online research,” and fact-checking before “publishing.” Within the week, almost all of the salient details in the Reuters story were revealed to be incorrect. SonicJihad’s film was not made by terrorists or for terrorists: it was not created by “Islamic militants” for “Muslim youths.” The videogame it depicted had not been modified by a “tech-savvy militant” with advanced programming skills. Of course, what is most extraordinary about this story isn’t just that Reuters merely got its facts wrong; it is that a self-identified “parody” video was shown to the august House Intelligence Committee by a team of well-paid “experts” from the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a major contractor with the federal government, as key evidence of terrorist recruitment techniques and abuse of digital networks. Moreover, this story of media illiteracy unfolded in the context of a fundamental Constitutional debate about domestic surveillance via communications technology and the further regulation of digital content by lawmakers. Furthermore, the transcripts of the actual hearing showed that much more than simple gullibility or technological ignorance was in play. Based on their exchanges in the public record, elected representatives and government experts appear to be keenly aware that the digital discourses of an emerging information culture might be challenging their authority and that of the longstanding institutions of knowledge and power with which they are affiliated. These hearings can be seen as representative of a larger historical moment in which emphatic declarations about prohibiting specific practices in digital culture have come to occupy a prominent place at the podium, news desk, or official Web portal. This environment of cultural reaction can be used to explain why policy makers’ reaction to terrorists’ use of networked communication and digital media actually tells us more about our own American ideologies about technology and rhetoric in a contemporary information environment. When the experts come forward at the Sonic Jihad hearing to “walk us through the media and some of the products,” they present digital artefacts of an information economy that mirrors many of the features of our own consumption of objects of electronic discourse, which seem dangerously easy to copy and distribute and thus also create confusion about their intended meanings, audiences, and purposes. From this one hearing we can see how the reception of many new digital genres plays out in the public sphere of legislative discourse. Web pages, videogames, and Weblogs are mentioned specifically in the transcript. The main architecture of the witnesses’ presentation to the committee is organised according to the rhetorical conventions of a PowerPoint presentation. Moreover, the arguments made by expert witnesses about the relationship of orality to literacy or of public to private communications in new media are highly relevant to how we might understand other important digital genres, such as electronic mail or text messaging. The hearing also invites consideration of privacy, intellectual property, and digital “rights,” because moral values about freedom and ownership are alluded to by many of the elected representatives present, albeit often through the looking glass of user behaviours imagined as radically Other. For example, terrorists are described as “modders” and “hackers” who subvert those who properly create, own, legitimate, and regulate intellectual property. To explain embarrassing leaks of infinitely replicable digital files, witness Ron Roughead says, “We’re not even sure that they don’t even hack into the kinds of spaces that hold photographs in order to get pictures that our forces have taken.” Another witness, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and International Affairs, Peter Rodman claims that “any video game that comes out, as soon as the code is released, they will modify it and change the game for their needs.” Thus, the implication of these witnesses’ testimony is that the release of code into the public domain can contribute to political subversion, much as covert intrusion into computer networks by stealthy hackers can. However, the witnesses from the Pentagon and from the government contractor SAIC often present a contradictory image of the supposed terrorists in the hearing transcripts. Sometimes the enemy is depicted as an organisation of technological masterminds, capable of manipulating the computer code of unwitting Americans and snatching their rightful intellectual property away; sometimes those from the opposing forces are depicted as pre-modern and even sub-literate political innocents. In contrast, the congressional representatives seem to focus on similarities when comparing the work of “terrorists” to the everyday digital practices of their constituents and even of themselves. According to the transcripts of this open hearing, legislators on both sides of the aisle express anxiety about domestic patterns of Internet reception. Even the legislators’ own Web pages are potentially disruptive electronic artefacts, particularly when the demands of digital labour interfere with their duties as lawmakers. Although the subject of the hearing is ostensibly terrorist Websites, Representative Anna Eshoo (D-California) bemoans the difficulty of maintaining her own official congressional site. As she observes, “So we are – as members, I think we’re very sensitive about what’s on our Website, and if I retained what I had on my Website three years ago, I’d be out of business. So we know that they have to be renewed. They go up, they go down, they’re rebuilt, they’re – you know, the message is targeted to the future.” In their questions, lawmakers identify Weblogs (blogs) as a particular area of concern as a destabilising alternative to authoritative print sources of information from established institutions. Representative Alcee Hastings (D-Florida) compares the polluting power of insurgent bloggers to that of influential online muckrakers from the American political Right. Hastings complains of “garbage on our regular mainstream news that comes from blog sites.” Representative Heather Wilson (R-New Mexico) attempts to project a media-savvy persona by bringing up the “phenomenon of blogging” in conjunction with her questions about jihadist Websites in which she notes how Internet traffic can be magnified by cooperative ventures among groups of ideologically like-minded content-providers: “These Websites, and particularly the most active ones, are they cross-linked? And do they have kind of hot links to your other favorite sites on them?” At one point Representative Wilson asks witness Rodman if he knows “of your 100 hottest sites where the Webmasters are educated? What nationality they are? Where they’re getting their money from?” In her questions, Wilson implicitly acknowledges that Web work reflects influences from pedagogical communities, economic networks of the exchange of capital, and even potentially the specific ideologies of nation-states. It is perhaps indicative of the government contractors’ anachronistic worldview that the witness is unable to answer Wilson’s question. He explains that his agency focuses on the physical location of the server or ISP rather than the social backgrounds of the individuals who might be manufacturing objectionable digital texts. The premise behind the contractors’ working method – surveilling the technical apparatus not the social network – may be related to other beliefs expressed by government witnesses, such as the supposition that jihadist Websites are collectively produced and spontaneously emerge from the indigenous, traditional, tribal culture, instead of assuming that Iraqi insurgents have analogous beliefs, practices, and technological awareness to those in first-world countries. The residual subtexts in the witnesses’ conjectures about competing cultures of orality and literacy may tell us something about a reactionary rhetoric around videogames and digital culture more generally. According to the experts before Congress, the Middle Eastern audience for these videogames and Websites is limited by its membership in a pre-literate society that is only capable of abortive cultural production without access to knowledge that is archived in printed codices. Sometimes the witnesses before Congress seem to be unintentionally channelling the ideas of the late literacy theorist Walter Ong about the “secondary orality” associated with talky electronic media such as television, radio, audio recording, or telephone communication. Later followers of Ong extend this concept of secondary orality to hypertext, hypermedia, e-mail, and blogs, because they similarly share features of both speech and written discourse. Although Ong’s disciples celebrate this vibrant reconnection to a mythic, communal past of what Kathleen Welch calls “electric rhetoric,” the defence industry consultants express their profound state of alarm at the potentially dangerous and subversive character of this hybrid form of communication. The concept of an “oral tradition” is first introduced by the expert witnesses in the context of modern marketing and product distribution: “The Internet is used for a variety of things – command and control,” one witness states. “One of the things that’s missed frequently is how and – how effective the adversary is at using the Internet to distribute product. They’re using that distribution network as a modern form of oral tradition, if you will.” Thus, although the Internet can be deployed for hierarchical “command and control” activities, it also functions as a highly efficient peer-to-peer distributed network for disseminating the commodity of information. Throughout the hearings, the witnesses imply that unregulated lateral communication among social actors who are not authorised to speak for nation-states or to produce legitimated expert discourses is potentially destabilising to political order. Witness Eric Michael describes the “oral tradition” and the conventions of communal life in the Middle East to emphasise the primacy of speech in the collective discursive practices of this alien population: “I’d like to point your attention to the media types and the fact that the oral tradition is listed as most important. The other media listed support that. And the significance of the oral tradition is more than just – it’s the medium by which, once it comes off the Internet, it is transferred.” The experts go on to claim that this “oral tradition” can contaminate other media because it functions as “rumor,” the traditional bane of the stately discourse of military leaders since the classical era. The oral tradition now also has an aspect of rumor. A[n] event takes place. There is an explosion in a city. Rumor is that the United States Air Force dropped a bomb and is doing indiscriminate killing. This ends up being discussed on the street. It ends up showing up in a Friday sermon in a mosque or in another religious institution. It then gets recycled into written materials. Media picks up the story and broadcasts it, at which point it’s now a fact. In this particular case that we were telling you about, it showed up on a network television, and their propaganda continues to go back to this false initial report on network television and continue to reiterate that it’s a fact, even though the United States government has proven that it was not a fact, even though the network has since recanted the broadcast. In this example, many-to-many discussion on the “street” is formalised into a one-to many “sermon” and then further stylised using technology in a one-to-many broadcast on “network television” in which “propaganda” that is “false” can no longer be disputed. This “oral tradition” is like digital media, because elements of discourse can be infinitely copied or “recycled,” and it is designed to “reiterate” content. In this hearing, the word “rhetoric” is associated with destructive counter-cultural forces by the witnesses who reiterate cultural truisms dating back to Plato and the Gorgias. For example, witness Eric Michael initially presents “rhetoric” as the use of culturally specific and hence untranslatable figures of speech, but he quickly moves to an outright castigation of the entire communicative mode. “Rhetoric,” he tells us, is designed to “distort the truth,” because it is a “selective” assembly or a “distortion.” Rhetoric is also at odds with reason, because it appeals to “emotion” and a romanticised Weltanschauung oriented around discourses of “struggle.” The film by SonicJihad is chosen as the final clip by the witnesses before Congress, because it allegedly combines many different types of emotional appeal, and thus it conveniently ties together all of the themes that the witnesses present to the legislators about unreliable oral or rhetorical sources in the Middle East: And there you see how all these products are linked together. And you can see where the games are set to psychologically condition you to go kill coalition forces. You can see how they use humor. You can see how the entire campaign is carefully crafted to first evoke an emotion and then to evoke a response and to direct that response in the direction that they want. Jihadist digital products, especially videogames, are effective means of manipulation, the witnesses argue, because they employ multiple channels of persuasion and carefully sequenced and integrated subliminal messages. To understand the larger cultural conversation of the hearing, it is important to keep in mind that the related argument that “games” can “psychologically condition” players to be predisposed to violence is one that was important in other congressional hearings of the period, as well one that played a role in bills and resolutions that were passed by the full body of the legislative branch. In the witness’s testimony an appeal to anti-game sympathies at home is combined with a critique of a closed anti-democratic system abroad in which the circuits of rhetorical production and their composite metonymic chains are described as those that command specific, unvarying, robotic responses. This sharp criticism of the artful use of a presentation style that is “crafted” is ironic, given that the witnesses’ “compilation” of jihadist digital material is staged in the form of a carefully structured PowerPoint presentation, one that is paced to a well-rehearsed rhythm of “slide, please” or “next slide” in the transcript. The transcript also reveals that the members of the House Intelligence Committee were not the original audience for the witnesses’ PowerPoint presentation. Rather, when it was first created by SAIC, this “expert” presentation was designed for training purposes for the troops on the ground, who would be facing the challenges of deployment in hostile terrain. According to the witnesses, having the slide show showcased before Congress was something of an afterthought. Nonetheless, Congressman Tiahrt (R-KN) is so impressed with the rhetorical mastery of the consultants that he tries to appropriate it. As Tiarht puts it, “I’d like to get a copy of that slide sometime.” From the hearing we also learn that the terrorists’ Websites are threatening precisely because they manifest a polymorphously perverse geometry of expansion. For example, one SAIC witness before the House Committee compares the replication and elaboration of digital material online to a “spiderweb.” Like Representative Eshoo’s site, he also notes that the terrorists’ sites go “up” and “down,” but the consultant is left to speculate about whether or not there is any “central coordination” to serve as an organising principle and to explain the persistence and consistency of messages despite the apparent lack of a single authorial ethos to offer a stable, humanised, point of reference. In the hearing, the oft-cited solution to the problem created by the hybridity and iterability of digital rhetoric appears to be “public diplomacy.” Both consultants and lawmakers seem to agree that the damaging messages of the insurgents must be countered with U.S. sanctioned information, and thus the phrase “public diplomacy” appears in the hearing seven times. However, witness Roughhead complains that the protean “oral tradition” and what Henry Jenkins has called the “transmedia” character of digital culture, which often crosses several platforms of traditional print, projection, or broadcast media, stymies their best rhetorical efforts: “I think the point that we’ve tried to make in the briefing is that wherever there’s Internet availability at all, they can then download these – these programs and put them onto compact discs, DVDs, or post them into posters, and provide them to a greater range of people in the oral tradition that they’ve grown up in. And so they only need a few Internet sites in order to distribute and disseminate the message.” Of course, to maintain their share of the government market, the Science Applications International Corporation also employs practices of publicity and promotion through the Internet and digital media. They use HTML Web pages for these purposes, as well as PowerPoint presentations and online video. The rhetoric of the Website of SAIC emphasises their motto “From Science to Solutions.” After a short Flash film about how SAIC scientists and engineers solve “complex technical problems,” the visitor is taken to the home page of the firm that re-emphasises their central message about expertise. The maps, uniforms, and specialised tools and equipment that are depicted in these opening Web pages reinforce an ethos of professional specialisation that is able to respond to multiple threats posed by the “global war on terror.” By 26 June 2006, the incident finally was being described as a “Pentagon Snafu” by ABC News. From the opening of reporter Jake Tapper’s investigative Webcast, established government institutions were put on the spot: “So, how much does the Pentagon know about videogames? Well, when it came to a recent appearance before Congress, apparently not enough.” Indeed, the very language about “experts” that was highlighted in the earlier coverage is repeated by Tapper in mockery, with the significant exception of “independent expert” Ian Bogost of the Georgia Institute of Technology. If the Pentagon and SAIC deride the legitimacy of rhetoric as a cultural practice, Bogost occupies himself with its defence. In his recent book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, Bogost draws upon the authority of the “2,500 year history of rhetoric” to argue that videogames represent a significant development in that cultural narrative. Given that Bogost and his Watercooler Games Weblog co-editor Gonzalo Frasca were actively involved in the detective work that exposed the depth of professional incompetence involved in the government’s line-up of witnesses, it is appropriate that Bogost is given the final words in the ABC exposé. As Bogost says, “We should be deeply bothered by this. We should really be questioning the kind of advice that Congress is getting.” Bogost may be right that Congress received terrible counsel on that day, but a close reading of the transcript reveals that elected officials were much more than passive listeners: in fact they were lively participants in a cultural conversation about regulating digital media. After looking at the actual language of these exchanges, it seems that the persuasiveness of the misinformation from the Pentagon and SAIC had as much to do with lawmakers’ preconceived anxieties about practices of computer-mediated communication close to home as it did with the contradictory stereotypes that were presented to them about Internet practices abroad. In other words, lawmakers found themselves looking into a fun house mirror that distorted what should have been familiar artefacts of American popular culture because it was precisely what they wanted to see. References ABC News. “Terrorist Videogame?” Nightline Online. 21 June 2006. 22 June 2006 http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=2105341>. Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: Videogames and Procedural Rhetoric. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Game Politics. “Was Congress Misled by ‘Terrorist’ Game Video? We Talk to Gamer Who Created the Footage.” 11 May 2006. http://gamepolitics.livejournal.com/285129.html#cutid1>. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006. julieb. “David Morgan Is a Horrible Writer and Should Be Fired.” Online posting. 5 May 2006. Dvorak Uncensored Cage Match Forums. http://cagematch.dvorak.org/index.php/topic,130.0.html>. Mahmood. “Terrorists Don’t Recruit with Battlefield 2.” GGL Global Gaming. 16 May 2006 http://www.ggl.com/news.php?NewsId=3090>. Morgan, David. “Islamists Using U.S. Video Games in Youth Appeal.” Reuters online news service. 4 May 2006 http://today.reuters.com/news/ArticleNews.aspx?type=topNews &storyID=2006-05-04T215543Z_01_N04305973_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY- VIDEOGAMES.xml&pageNumber=0&imageid=&cap=&sz=13&WTModLoc= NewsArt-C1-ArticlePage2>. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London/New York: Methuen, 1982. Parker, Trey. Online posting. 7 May 2006. 9 May 2006 http://www.treyparker.com>. Plato. “Gorgias.” Plato: Collected Dialogues. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961. Shrader, Katherine. “Pentagon Surfing Thousands of Jihad Sites.” Associated Press 4 May 2006. SonicJihad. “SonicJihad: A Day in the Life of a Resistance Fighter.” Online posting. 26 Dec. 2005. Planet Battlefield Forums. 9 May 2006 http://www.forumplanet.com/planetbattlefield/topic.asp?fid=13670&tid=1806909&p=1>. Tapper, Jake, and Audery Taylor. “Terrorist Video Game or Pentagon Snafu?” ABC News Nightline 21 June 2006. 30 June 2006 http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/Technology/story?id=2105128&page=1>. U.S. Congressional Record. Panel I of the Hearing of the House Select Intelligence Committee, Subject: “Terrorist Use of the Internet for Communications.” Federal News Service. 4 May 2006. Welch, Kathleen E. Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and the New Literacy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Losh, Elizabeth. "Artificial Intelligence: Media Illiteracy and the SonicJihad Debacle in Congress." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/08-losh.php>. APA Style Losh, E. (Oct. 2007) "Artificial Intelligence: Media Illiteracy and the SonicJihad Debacle in Congress," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/08-losh.php>.

‘We are faced today with an entire system of communication technology which is the perfect medium to host and transfer the very programs designed to destroy the functionality of the system.’ (IBM Researcher: Sarah Gordon, 1995) Despite renewed interest in open source code, the openness of the information space is nothing new in terms of the free flow of information. The transitive and nonlinear configuration of data flow has ceaselessly facilitated the sharing of code. The openness of the info-space encourages a free distribution model, which has become central to numerous developments through the abundant supply of freeware, shareware and source code. Key moments in open source history include the release in 1998 of Netscape’s Communicator source code, a clear attempt to stimulate browser development. More recently in February 2004 the ‘partial leaking’ of Microsoft Windows 2000 and NT 4.0 source code demonstrated the often-hostile disposition of open culture and the potential threat it poses to existing corporate business models. However, the leading exponents of the open source ethic predate these events by more than a decade. As an extension of the hacker, the virus writer has managed, since the 1980s, to bend the shape of info-space beyond recognition. By freely spreading viruses, worms and hacker programs across the globe, virus writers have provided researchers with a remarkable set of digital footprints to follow. The virus has, as IBM researcher Sarah Gordon points out, exposed the info-space as a ‘perfect medium’ rife for malicious viral infection. This paper argues that viral technologies can hold info-space hostage to the uncertain undercurrents of information itself. As such, despite mercantile efforts to capture the spirit of openness, the info-space finds itself frequently in a state far-from-equilibrium. It is open to often-unmanageable viral fluctuations, which produce levels of spontaneity, uncertainty and emergent order. So while corporations look to capture the perpetual, flexible and friction-free income streams from centralised information flows, viral code acts as an anarchic, acentred Deleuzian rhizome. It thrives on the openness of info-space, producing a paradoxical counterpoint to a corporatised information society and its attempt to steer the info-machine. The Virus in the Open System Fred Cohen’s 1984 doctoral thesis on the computer virus locates three key features of openness that makes viral propagation possible (see Louw and Duffy, 1992 pp. 13-14) and predicts a condition common to everyday user experience of info-space. Firstly, the virus flourishes because of the computer’s capacity for information sharing_; transitive flows of code between nodes via discs, connected media, network links, user input and software use. In the process of information transfer the ‘witting and unwitting’ cooperation of users and computers is a necessary determinant of viral infection. Secondly, information flow must be _interpreted._ Before execution computers interpret incoming information as a series of instructions (strings of bits). However, before execution, there is no fundamental distinction between information received, and as such, information has no _meaning until it has been executed. Thus, the interpretation of information does not differentiate between a program and a virus. Thirdly, the alterability or manipulability of the information process allows the virus to modify information. For example, advanced polymorphic viruses avoid detection by using non-significant, or redundant code, to randomly encrypt and decrypt themselves. Cohen concludes that the only defence available to combat viral spread is the ‘limited transitivity of information flow’. However, a reduction in flow is contrary to the needs of the system and leads ultimately to the unacceptable limitation of sharing (Cohen, 1991). As Cohen states ‘To be perfectly secure against viral attacks, a system must protect against incoming information flow, while to be secure against leakage of information a system must protect against outgoing information flow. In order for systems to allow sharing, there must be some information flow. It is therefore the major conclusion of this paper that the goals of sharing in a general purpose multilevel security system may be in such direct opposition to the goals of viral security as to make their reconciliation and coexistence impossible.’ Cohen’s research does not simply end with the eradication of the virus via the limitation of openness, but instead leads to a contentious idea concerning the benevolent properties of viral computing and the potential legitimacy of ‘friendly contagion’. Cohen looks beyond the malevolent enemy of the open network to a benevolent solution. The viral ecosystem is an alternative to Turing-von Neumann capability. Key to this system is a benevolent virus,_ which epitomise the ethic of open culture. Drawing upon a biological analogy, benevolent viral computing _reproduces in order to accomplish its goals; the computing environment evolving_ rather than being ‘designed every step of the way’ (see Zetter, 2000). The _viral ecosystem_ demonstrates how the spread of viruses can purposely _evolve through the computational space using the shared processing power of all host machines. Information enters the host machine via infection and a translator program alerts the user. The benevolent virus_ passes through the host machine with any additional modifications made by the _infected_ _user. The End of Empirical Virus Research? Cohen claims that his research into ‘friendly contagion’ has been thwarted by network administrators and policy makers (See Levy, 1992 in Spiller, 2002) whose ‘apparent fear reaction’ to early experiments resulted in trying to solve technical problems with policy solutions. However, following a significant increase in malicious viral attacks, with estimated costs to the IT industry of $13 billion in 2001 (Pipkin, 2003 p. 41), research into legitimate viruses has not surprisingly shifted from the centre to the fringes of the computer science community (see Dibbell, 1995)._ _Current reputable and subsequently funded research tends to focus on efforts by the anti-virus community to develop computer hygiene. Nevertheless, malevolent or benevolent viral technology provides researchers with a valuable recourse. The virus draws analysis towards specific questions concerning the nature of information and the culture of openness. What follows is a delineation of a range of approaches, which endeavour to provide some answers. Virus as a Cultural Metaphor Sean Cubitt (in Dovey, 1996 pp. 31-58) positions the virus as a contradictory cultural element, lodged between the effective management of info-space and the potential for spontaneous transformation. However, distinct from Cohen’s aspectual analogy, Cubitt’s often-frivolous viral metaphor overflows with political meaning. He replaces the concept of information with a space of representation, which elevates the virus from empirical experience to a linguistic construct of reality. The invasive and contagious properties of the biological parasite are metaphorically transferred to viral technology; the computer virus is thus imbued with an alien otherness. Cubitt’s cultural discourse typically reflects humanist fears of being subjected to increasing levels of technological autonomy. The openness of info-space is determined by a managed society aiming to ‘provide the grounds for mutation’ (p. 46) necessary for profitable production. Yet the virus, as a possible consequence of that desire, becomes a potential opposition to ‘ideological formations’. Like Cohen, Cubitt concludes that the virus will always exist if the paths of sharing remain open to information flow. ‘Somehow’, Cubitt argues, ‘the net must be managed in such a way as to be both open and closed. Therefore, openness is obligatory and although, from the point of view of the administrator, it is a recipe for ‘anarchy, for chaos, for breakdown, for abjection’, the ‘closure’ of the network, despite eradicating the virus, ‘means that no benefits can accrue’ (p.55). Virus as a Bodily Extension From a virus writing perspective it is, arguably, the potential for free movement in the openness of info-space that that motivates the spread of viruses. As one writer infamously stated it is ‘the idea of making a program that would travel on its own, and go to places its creator could never go’ that inspires the spreading of viruses (see Gordon, 1993). In a defiant stand against the physical limitations of bodily movement from Eastern Europe to the US, the Bulgarian virus writer, the Dark Avenger, contended that ‘the American government can stop me from going to the US, but they can’t stop my virus’. This McLuhanesque conception of the virus, as a bodily extension (see McLuhan, 1964), is picked up on by Baudrillard in Cool Memories_ _(1990). He considers the computer virus as an ‘ultra-modern form of communication which does not distinguish, according to McLuhan, between the information itself and its carrier.’ To Baudrillard the prosperous proliferation of the virus is the result of its ability to be both the medium and the message. As such the virus is a pure form of information. The Virus as Information Like Cohen, Claude Shannon looks to the biological analogy, but argues that we have the potential to learn more about information transmission in artificial and natural systems by looking at difference rather than resemblance (see Campbell, 1982). One of the key aspects of this approach is the concept of redundancy. The theory of information argues that the patterns produced by the transmission of information are likely to travel in an entropic mode, from the unmixed to the mixed – from information to noise. Shannon’s concept of redundancy ensures that noise is diminished in a system of communication. Redundancy encodes information so that the receiver can successfully decode the message, holding back the entropic tide. Shannon considers the transmission of messages in the brain as highly redundant since it manages to obtain ‘overall reliability using unreliable components’ (in Campbell, 1982 p. 191). While computing uses redundancy to encode messages, compared to transmissions of biological information, it is fairly primitive. Unlike the brain, Turing-von-Neumann computation is inflexible and literal minded. In the brain information transmission relies not only on deterministic external input, but also self-directed spontaneity and uncertain electro-chemical pulses. Nevertheless, while Shannon’s binary code is constrained to a finite set of syntactic rules, it can produce an infinite number of possibilities. Indeed, the virus makes good use of redundancy to ensure its successful propagation. The polymorphic virus is not simply a chaotic, delinquent noise, but a decidedly redundant form of communication, which uses non-significant code to randomly flip itself over to avoid detection. Viral code thrives on the infinite potential of algorithmic computing; the open, flexible and undecidable grammar of the algorithm allows the virus to spread, infect and evolve. The polymorphic virus can encrypt and decrypt itself so as to avoid anti-viral scanners checking for known viral signatures from the phylum of code known to anti-virus researchers. As such, it is a raw form of Artificial Intelligence, relying on redundant inflexible_ _code programmed to act randomly, ignore or even forget information. Towards a Concept of Rhizomatic Viral Computation Using the concept of the rhizome Deleuze and Guattari (1987 p. 79) challenge the relation between noise and pattern established in information theory. They suggest that redundancy is not merely a ‘limitative condition’, but is key to the transmission of the message itself. Measuring up the efficiency of a highly redundant viral transmission against the ‘splendour’ of the short-term memory of a rhizomatic message, it is possible to draw some conclusions from their intervention. On the surface, the entropic tendency appears to be towards the mixed and the running down of the system’s energy. However, entropy is not the answer since information is not energy; it cannot be conserved, it can be created and destroyed. By definition information is something new, something that adds to existing information (see Campbell, 1982 p. 231), yet efficient information transmission creates invariance in a variant environment. In this sense, the pseudo-randomness of viral code, which pre-programs elements of uncertainty and free action into its propagation, challenges the efforts to make information centralised, structured and ordered. It does this by placing redundant noise within its message pattern. The virus readily ruptures the patterned symmetry of info-space and in terms of information produces something new. Viral transmission is pure information as its objective is to replicate itself throughout info-space; it mutates the space as well as itself. In a rhizomatic mode the anarchic virus is without a central agency; it is a profound rejection of all Generals and power centres. Viral infection, like the rhizomatic network, is made up of ‘finite networks of automata in which communication runs from any neighbour to any other’. Viral spread flows along non-pre-existent ‘channels of communication’ (1987 p. 17). Furthermore, while efforts are made to striate the virus using anti-viral techniques, there is growing evidence that viral information not only wants to be free, but is free to do as it likes. About the Author Tony Sampson is a Senior Lecturer and Course Tutor in Multimedia & Digital Culture, School of Cultural and Innovation Studies at the University of East London, UK Email: t.d.sampson@uel.ac.uk Citation reference for this article MLA Style Sampson, Tony. "A Virus in Info-Space" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0406/07_Sampson.php>. APA Style Sampson, T. (2004, Jul1). A Virus in Info-Space. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0406/07_Sampson.php>

Photograph by Gonzalo Echeverria (2010)“Let us not doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.” (C. S. Peirce) Introduction Doubting has always had a somewhat bad name. A “doubting Thomas” is a pejorative term for one who doubts what he or she has not witnessed first-hand, a saying which derives originally from Thomas the Apostle’s doubting of the resurrected Christ. That doubt is the opposite of faith or conviction seems to cast doubt in a bad light. There is also the saying “He has the strength of his convictions” which seems to imply we ought correspondingly to say, “He has the weakness of his doubts”. One might recall that Socrates was likened to an electric eel because his peculiar form of questioning had the power to stun his interlocutors by crushing their pet convictions and cherished beliefs under the weight of the wise man’s reasonable doubts. Despite this bad press, however, doubting is a rational activity motivated by a vitally important concern for the truth, for getting things right. And our capacity to nurture reasonable doubts and to take them seriously is now more important than ever. Consider these examples: 1) In the modern world we are relying more and more on the veracity of the Internet’s enormous and growing mass of data often without much thought about its epistemic credentials or provenance. But who or what underwrites its status as information, its presumption of truth? 2) The global financial crisis depended upon the fact that economists and bank analysts placed unbounded confidence in being able to give mathematically precise models for risk, chance and decision-making under conditions of unavoidable ignorance and uncertainty. Why weren’t these models doubted before the crisis? 3) The CIA helped build the case for war in Iraq by not taking properly into account the scant and often contradictory evidence that Saddam Hussain’s regime had weapons of mass destruction. The neat alignment of US neo-conservative policy and CIA “intelligence” ought to have raised serious doubts that might have derailed the justification for war and its inevitable casualties and costs. (See Burns in this issue — Eds.) 4) On the other hand, it is quite likely that corporations that stand to lose large sums of money are fuelling unreasonable doubts about climate change—to what extent we are responsible for it, what the chances are of mitigating its effects, etc.—through misinformation and misdirection. In this paper I want to go a step beyond these specific instances of the value of appropriate doubt. Learning how to doubt, when to doubt and what to doubt is at the heart of a powerful pragmatist approach to philosophy—understood as reflective thinking at its best. After considering two ways of thinking about doubt, I shall outline the pragmatist approach and then briefly consider its bearing on the problems of dogmatism and bullshit in contemporary society. Two Notions of Doubt It is important to distinguish doubts about beliefs from doubts about certainty. That is, in everyday parlance the term “doubt” seems to have two connotations depending on which of these notions it is contrasted with. First of all, doubt can be contrasted with belief. To doubt a belief is to be in “twosome twiminds” as James Joyce aptly put it: a state of neither believing nor disbelieving but hovering between the two, without committing oneself, undecided. To doubt in this sense is to sit on the fence, to vacillate over a truth commitment, to remain detached. In this context doubt is not disbelief but, rather, un-belief. Secondly, doubt can be contrasted with certainty, the absence of doubt. To doubt something that we thought was certain is not to doubt whether it is true or reasonable to believe. If someone asks what the colour of my car is and I say it’s painted blue they might then say, “How do you know that someone has not painted it red in your absence?” This is, of course, possible but it is not at all likely. Even if it causes me to be very slightly doubtful—and, as we shall see, pragmatism offers reasons to block this step—it would not lead me to actually doubt what the colour of my car is. To be less than fully certain is consistent with continuing to believe and doing so for good (even overwhelming) reasons. Of course, some forms of belief such as religious faith may require certainty, in which case to doubt them at all is tantamount to undermining the required attitude. There is also a notion of absolute certainty, meaning the impossibility of doubt. Descartes inaugurates modern philosophy by employing a method of extreme and radical doubting in order to discover absolutely certain (i.e. indubitable) truths. His Meditations involves solipsistic doubts about whether there is an external world, including one’s own body and other people, since perhaps its all a myriad of one’s own subjective experiences. Clearly such philosophical doubt concerns matters that are not ordinarily doubted or even seen as open to doubt. As we shall see, pragmatism sides with common sense here. A Pragmatist Perspective on Doubt With this preliminary distinction in place we can now list four pragmatist insights about doubt that help to reveal its fruitfulness and importance for critical reflection in any field, including philosophy itself: 1) Genuine doubts require reasons. Genuine doubts, doubts we are required to take seriously, arise from particular problematic situations for definite reasons. One does not doubt at will just as one does not believe at will. I cannot believe that I am the Wimbledon tennis champion just by willing to believe it. So, too, I cannot doubt what I believe just by willing to doubt it. I cannot doubt that it is a sunny day if everything speaks in favour of its being so: I’m outside, seeing the sun and clear blue skies etc. Some philosophers think that the mere conceivability or possibility of error is enough to generate a live doubt but pragmatists contest this. For example, is knowledge of what I see before me now undermined because I am not able to rule out the possibility that my brain is being artificially stimulated to induce experiences, as seen in The Matrix? Such brain-in-a-vat doubts are not genuine for the pragmatist because they do not constitute a legitimate reason to doubt. Why? For one thing we have no actual machine that can create an artificial temporally extended “world image” through brain stimulation. These are merely conceivable or “paper” doubts, unliveable paradoxes that we think about in the study but do not take seriously in everyday life. Of course, if we did have such a machine—and it is not clear that this is even technically possible today—this situation would no doubt change. 2) There are no absolute certainties (guaranteed indubitable truths). As we have seen, ordinarily the term “certainty” stands for the actual absence of doubt. That is what we might call subjective certainty since where I am free of doubt another might be doubtful. Subjective certainty is the common state of most people most of the time about many things such as what their name is, where they live, who their family and friends are, what they like to eat etc. There is also Descartes’s notion of what cannot be doubted under any circumstances, which we might call absolute certainty. Traditional philosophy believed it could discover absolute certainties by means of reason alone, these truths being called a priori. At the heart of pragmatism are doubts about all propositions that were previously regarded as absolute certainties. That is, there are no a priori truths in the traditional sense according to the pragmatist. Nothing is guaranteed to be true come what may, even the truths of logic or mathematics which we currently cannot imagine being false. It was at one time thought to be a necessary truth that two straight lines both perpendicular to another straight line never meet… that was, until the nineteenth century discovery of Riemannian geometry. What was supposedly a necessary a priori truth turned out to be false in this context. That anything can be doubted does not mean that everything can be doubted all at once. The attempt to doubt all one’s worldly beliefs presumably includes doubting that one knows the meaning of the words one uses in raising this very doubt (since one doubts the meaning of the term “doubt” itself)—or doubting whether one knows the contents of one’s thoughts—in which case one would undermine the sense of one’s doubts in the very attempt to doubt. But that makes no sense. The moral is that if doubt is to make sense then it might be wide-reaching but it cannot be fully universal. The human desire for absolute certainty is probably inescapable so the lessons of fallibilism need to be hard won again and again. Anything can be doubted—in so far as it makes sense to do so. This is the pragmatist doctrine of fallibilism. It is the position one gets by making room for doubt in one’s system of beliefs without lapsing into complete skepticism. 3) Inquiry is the fallibilistic removal of doubt. Doubt is an unsettled state of mind and “the sole object of inquiry is the settlement of opinion” (Peirce, "Fixation" 375). We are, by nature, epistemically conservative and retain our body of beliefs, or as many of them as possible, in the face of positive reasons for doubt. A doubt stimulates us to an inquiry, which ends by dissolving the doubt and, perhaps, a slight readjustment of our network of beliefs. Since this inquiry is a fallible one nothing is guaranteed to be held fast: there are no eternal truths or indispensable methods. Ancient Pyrrhonian skeptics developed techniques for doubting whether we have any reason to believe one thing rather than another. A famous argument-form they explored is called Agrippa’s Trilemma. If we ask why we should believe any given belief then we must give another belief to serve as a reason. But then the same question arises for it in turn and so on. If we are to avoid the looming infinite regress of reasons for reasons we seem to only have two unpalatable options: either to argue viciously in a circle; or to simply stop at some arbitrary point. The argument thus seems to show that nothing we believe is justified. Pragmatism blocks this trilemma at its origin by arguing that our beliefs conform to a default-and-challenge structure. Current beliefs have the status of default entitlements unless or until specific challenges to them (real doubts) are legitimately raised. On this conception we can be entitled to the beliefs we actually have without requiring reasons for them simply because we have them and lack any good reason for doubt. In an image owed to Otto Neurath, we rebuild our wooden ship of beliefs whilst at sea, replacing planks as need be but, since we must stay afloat, never all planks at once (Quine). Inquiry demands the removal of all actual doubt, not all possible doubt. A belief is, as Charles Peirce conceives it, a habit of action. To doubt a belief, then, is to undermine one’s capacity to act in the relevant respect. The ancient philosopher, Pyrrho, was reputed to need handlers to stop him putting his hands into fire or walking off cliffs because, as a radical skeptic, he lacked the relevant beliefs about fire and falling to make him aware of any danger. The pragmatist, oriented towards action and human practices, does not rest content with his doubts but overcomes them in favour of settled beliefs by way of “a continual process of re-experimenting and re-creating” (Dewey 220) 4) Inquiry requires a democratic ethics. The pragmatist conception of inquiry rehabilitates Plato’s analogy between self and society: the norms of how one is to conduct one’s inquiries are the norms of democratic society. Inquiry is a cooperative human interaction with an environment not, as in the Cartesian tradition, a private activity of solitary a priori reflection. It depends on a social conception of (fallible) reason—understood as intelligent action— which conforms to the democratic ethical principles of the fair and equal right of all to be heard, an invitation and openness to criticism, the toleration of dissenting voices, and instituting methods to help cooperatively resolve disagreements, etc. We inquire in medias res (in the middle of things)—that is, from the midst of our current beliefs and convictions within a community of inquirers. There is no need for a Cartesian propaedeutic doubt to weed out any trace of falsity at the start of inquiry. From the pragmatist point of view we must learn to live with the ineliminable possibility of error and doubt, and of inevitable shortcomings in both our answers and methods. Problems can be overcome as they arise through a self-correcting experimental method of inquiry in which nothing is sacred. A key feature of this conception of inquiry is that it places reasonable doubt at its centre: 1) a sustained doubting of old “certainties” of traditional authorities (e.g. religious, political) or of traditional a priori reason (philosophy); 2) a constant need to distinguish genuine or live doubts from philosophical or paper doubts; 3) and the idea that genuine doubts are both the stimulant to a new inquiry and, when dissolved, signal its end. Dogmatism The importance of the pragmatist conceptions of inquiry and doubt can be appreciated by seeing that various pathologies of believing—pathologies of how to form and maintain beliefs that—are natural to us. Of particular note are dogmatism and fanaticism, which are forms of fixed believing unhinged from rational criticism and sustained without regard to such matters as evidential support, reasonableness and plausibility within the wider community of informed inquirers. Since they divide the world into us and them, fellow-believers and the rest, they inevitably lead to disagreements and hostility. Dogmatists and fanatics loom large in the contemporary world as evidenced by the widespread and malevolent influence of religious, ideological and political dogmas, confrontational forms of nationalism, and fanatical “true believers” in all shapes and forms from die-hard conspiracy theorists to adherents of fad diets and the followers of self-appointed gurus and cult-leaders. The great problem with such forms of believing is that they leave no room for reasonable doubts, which history tells us inevitably arise in matters of human social life and our place in the world. And as history also tells us we go to war and put each other to death over matters of belief and disbelief; of conviction and its lack. Think of Socrates, Jesus, the victims of the Spanish Inquisition, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, and Oscar Romero to name only a small few who have been killed for their beliefs. A great virtue of pragmatism is its anti-authoritarian stance, which is achieved by building doubt into its very methodology and by embracing a democratic ethos that makes each person equally answerable to reasonable doubt. From this perspective dogmatists and fanatical believers are ostracised as retaining an outmoded authoritarian conception of believing that has been superseded in the most successful branches of human inquiry—such as the natural sciences. Bullshit To bullshit is to talk without knowing what one is talking about. Harry Frankfurt has observed, “one of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit” (117); and he goes on to argue that bullshitters are “a greater enemy of truth than liars are” (132). Liars care about the truth since they are trying to deceive others into believing what is not true. Bullshitters may say what is true but more often exaggerate, embellish and window-dress. Their purposes lies elsewhere than getting things right so they do not really care whether what they say is true or false or a mixture of the two. Politicians, advertising agents, salesmen and drug company representatives are notorious for bullshitting. Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sex with that woman” is a famous example of political bullshit. He said it for purely political reasons and when he was found to have lied (the evidence being the infamous unwashed dress of Monica Lewinsky) he changed the lie into a truth by redefining the word “sex”—another example of bullshit. The bullshitter can speak the truth but what matters is always the spin. The bullshitter need not (contra Frankfurt) hide his own lack of concern for the truth. He plays at truth-telling but he can do this more or less openly. The so-called bullshit artist may even try to make a virtue out of revealing his bullshit as the bullshit it is, thereby making his audience complicit. But the great danger of bullshit is not so much to others, as to oneself. Inveterate bullshitters are inevitably tempted to believe their own bullshit leading to a situation in which they do not know their own minds. Only one who knows his own mind is aware of what he is committed to, and what he takes responsibility for in the wider community of inquirers who rely on each other for information and reasonable criticism. Doubting provides a defence against bullshitters since it blocks their means: the doubter reaffirms a concern for the truth including the truth about oneself, which the bullshitter is wilfully avoiding. To doubt is to withhold a commitment to the truth through a demand not to commit too hastily or for the wrong reasons. A concern for the truth, for getting things right, is thus central to the practice of reasonable doubting. And reasonably doubting, in turn, depends on knowing one’s own mind, what truths one is committed to, and what epistemic responsibilities one thus incurs to justify and defend truths and to criticise falsehood. Democracy and fallibilist inquiry were borne of doubts about the benevolence, wisdom and authority of tyrants, dictators, priests and kings. Their continued vitality depends on maintaining a healthy skepticism about the beliefs of others and about whether we know our own minds. Only so can we sustain our vital concern for the truth in the face of the pervasive challenges of dogmatists and bullshitters. References Descartes, R. “Meditations on First Philosophy.” In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes: Vols. I-III. J. Cottingham et. al., eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985/1641. Dewey, J. The Middle Works, 1899-1924 Vol 12. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982. Dewey, J. The Middle Works, 1899-1924 Vol 14. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. Frankfurt, H. “On Bullshit.” The Importance of What We Care About. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1988. Joyce, J. Finnegan’s Wake. Penguin: London, 1999/1939. Peirce, C.S. “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities.” 1868. In The Essential Peirce.———. “The Fixation of Belief.” 1877. In The Essential Peirce. ———. “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.” 1878. In The Essential Peirce. ———. The Essential Peirce: Vol. 1. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. ———. The Essential Peirce: Vol. 2. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Quine, W.V. Theories and Things. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1981. Sextus Empiricus. Outlines of Scepticism. Trans. J. Barnes & J. Annas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Wittgenstein, L. On Certainty. Oxford: Blackwell, 1969.

Chapter 1 describes the historical and contemporary practice of collaboration during times of armed conflict. Key illustrative examples are provided of the principal forms of cooperation with an adversary, namely informing, fighting with enemy forces, and bureaucratic collaboration, as well as other forms of aiding the enemy. With regard to informing, consideration is given to the significance placed on intelligence in warfare and to military doctrine addressing the recruitment and use of informers. The practice of non-state armed groups is also considered in this chapter. The various rationales behind the use of informers collaborators are explored, as are the diverse motivations of those who engage in wartime collaboration. This chapter aims to provide the conceptual and factual foundation for the detailed legal analysis that follows in the subsequent chapters.