London Riots: Decentralized Intelligence Collection and Analysis more

SMALL WARS JOURNAL smallwarsjournal.com London Riots: Decentralized Intelligence Collection and Analysis by Alex Calvo Figure One. One of the many disturbing sights published by the press1. Identifying Occasional Criminal Insurgents The purpose of this paper is to comment on one of the developments arising from the current riots in the United Kingdom, where a website has been set up so that the public can identify those involved and report them to the Police. The use of modern technology to identify insurgents could be a response to the lack of working censuses in many areas where stability operations are conducted, seen by some observers as a major weakness. The central idea is to tell friend from foe, or in classical Maoist terminology, fish from the water, using some of the widely available tools which, on the other hand, seem to be used to spread the violence in the UK. The use of a website to spread pictures of violent incidents and have the perpetrators identified by the population would be a way to plug a gap in police capabilities, since the British authorities are unlikely to have the necessary manpower and knowledge to do so on their own. This is why we can talk of "decentralized intelligence collection and analysis." 1 HALLIDAY Josh "London riots: BlackBerry to help police probe Messenger looting 'role'", The Guardian, 8 August 2011, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/08/london-riots-blackberry-messenger-looting . © 2011, Small Wars Foundation August 9, 2011 Looking Beyond the Protection of the Population The current riots in London and other cities in the United Kingdom2 have led to widespread calls for a wider police presence in the affected areas, and the social media have reflected some of these complaints, featuring stories about flashpoints where the population was left unprotected in the face of what could be described as a combination of urban guerrillas3 and occasional criminal insurgents45. With the riots still raging, it is obviously too early to draw any in-depth conclusions in terms of policing, and, furthermore, the complex nature of the incidents would make it inappropriate to concentrate on any single factor. It is obvious that the Police cannot be everywhere, and, furthermore, their duty to protect the population is a key organizational weakness of government forces6 in the face of insurgents of any sort7. This forces us to look beyond the protection of the population as a goal, and ask ourselves how to identify those responsible for the violence so that they can be arrested8 and, ideally, those who may join them in the future deterred. 2 An interesting discussion of the likely wider causes of the violent wave which has engulfed the country can be found in SINGH Sunny "London Riots: An Alternative 'Larger Context'", Sunny Singh Online, 9 August 2011, available at http://networkedblogs.com/lrDZy . 3 As always, it is difficult to choose the right terminology to describe a diverse and mutating enemy. However, given the degree of violence and some of the tactics evident in the available footage of the incidents, urban guerrillas seems more appropriate than simply rioters. 4 Occasional criminal insurgents refers to the members of organized (even if informal) criminal networks which usually refrain from openly confronting government forces and from seeking control of the territory, but which may change their posture and temporarily pursue both aims in circumstances such as the current ones. They are therefore different, despite sharing some traits, to the criminal insurgents described in the COIN literature, for a review of which one can see SULLIVAN John P. and ELKUS Adam " Strategy and insurgency: an evolution in thinking?", Open Democracy Net, 16 August 2010, available at http://www.opendemocracy.net/john-p-sullivan-adam-elkus/strategy-and-insurgency-evolution-in-thinking . 5 We should note the presence of third armed component, Islamist militias protecting the population of certain areas, in an open attempt to gain the legitimacy, prestige, and organizational skills, to achieve their aims of setting up self-policed enclaves ruled by Sharia, a goal repeatedly put forward in the last few months. "Bethnal Green - Gang of vandals broke the windows of an Islamic bank but were chased off by a rival gang Muslim youths who were standing guard outside the East London Mosque. Local shops attacked" PAYNE Sebastian and QUILTY-HARPER Conrad "London riots: all incidents mapped in London and around the UK", The Daily Telegraph, 9 August 2011, available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-andorder/8689355/London-riots-all-incidents-mapped-in-London-and-around-the-UK.html. 6 For the purposes of our discussion we shall not distinguish between the Police and the Military, since in non-conventional operations, such as post-conflict stabilization or counterinsurgency both can be employed and will have to resort to similar techniques. Actually, despite all the legal and constitutional problems this may imply, one of the key aspects of today's global security scenario is the confluence of police and military functions, as exemplified, in the US, by the setting up of a specialized USMC reserve battalion made up of civilian police officers. SANBORN James K., “Amos touts Reserve law enforcement unit”; Marine Corps Times, 15 April 2011, available at http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2011/04/marine-amos-reserve-lawenforcement-battalion-041511w/; and OLESKER Alex, “Cops in the Corps”; Small Wars Journal, 23 April 2011, available at http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2011/04/cops-in-the-corps/; the author would like to thank John P. Sullivan, Lieutenant at Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, for having brought Alex Olesker’s piece to his attention. 7 Spreading them thin on the ground and preventing their concentration against groups of rioters and looters. 8 It is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss the purposes of arrest and imprisonment, although this is an area where two factors may force an in-depth rethink in the future. On the one hand, the overcrowding of prisons in many industrialized countries, and on the other the clear gap between the criminal law and the laws of war in terms of terrorism, with a dangerous and controversial gap obscuring the response to the phenomenon. 2 smallwarsjournal.com The Challenge of Identifying Urban Guerrillas and Occasional Criminal Insurgents In past post-conflict stability operations some observers have pointed out at the lack of a population census as a major weakness in attempting to identify the enemy, hidden among the population9. It is one of the capability gaps behind the calls for the deployment of military units with police training and skills10. This is however where we can notice a key difference between London and other British cities currently under siege and the battlefields where our troops have been fighting in the last decade, since the former's population is already recorded on a number of databases. We must however be careful before we jump to the conclusion that, given the ample available footage and pictures of the criminals, their identification will be a simple task, to be undertaken at leisure once order has been restored. For the time being, the software tools which may in the future allow the automated matching of pictures to identities are still not available, and the resulting volume of man-hours necessary to accomplish the task is probably beyond the capabilities of the London's Metropolitan Police Force and other British police forces and security agencies. To make matters worse, even if such a feat could technically be accomplished, it is not clear whether the resulting intelligence would translate into legally admissible evidence, something that the rioters, or at least some of them, seem to be aware of, judging from the text of a pamphlet found in one of the scenes of devastation in Great Britain's capital, which among other pearls of wisdom reads "Don't assume that because you can identify yourself in a video, a judge will be able to as well. 'That isn't me' has got many a person off before now."11 9 "The war would have been over in a month, had the insurgents worn uniforms. Throughout history, government forces have employed a census to sort out insurgents not wearing uniforms. It is a technique enshrined in all counterinsurgency manuals. I asked a four-star general in early 2005 why there was no census, complete with fingerprints. Why, he said, that could take a year to 18 months, implying the war would be over before then. On average, a military-aged male in the Sunni Triangle, which includes Baghdad, was stopped once or twice a year for a cursory identification check. But we never used the existing technology to take fingerprints on the spot and send a report back to a central data base for comparison with prints associated with unsolved crimes. This was the single greatest technical deficiency in the war. Most rifle companies tried to construct their own local census on laptops using digital photos, spreadsheets, and Google mapping. Millions of man-hours were wasted due to a failure at the top to understand how identification of the male population was equivalent to putting uniforms on the insurgents." WEST Bing, "Counterinsurgency Lessons From Iraq", Military Review, March-April 2009, pages 8-9. 10 Or, in the countries having them, constabulary-type police forces with military training and discipline. 11 Don't Panic, Don't Talk Leaflet, available at http://yfrog.com/z/h07mxcyzj 3 smallwarsjournal.com Figure Two. Don't Panic, Don't Talk Leaflet, available at http://yfrog.com/z/h07mxcyzj12. The leaflet also refers to the problems posed by the identification of photographed rioters, reminding its readers that "just because the police have a blurry photo that might be of you doesn't mean that they know who you are"13. 12 13 http://yfrog.com/z/h07mxcyzj Don't Panic, Don't Talk Leaflet, available at http://yfrog.com/z/h07mxcyzj 4 smallwarsjournal.com A Decentralized Approach to Occasional Criminal Insurgent Identification It is this problem, the inability of the Police to identify all the participants in the violence and mayhem, that seems to have prompted an interesting grassroots initiative, namely a website where the public can post pictures and look at them in order to identify the participants in the violence and call the authorities. Under the name "Catch a Looter," the website aims at "Collating all images of looters from the London riots." and invites readers to "contact Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111" if they " recognise anyone"14 The owner of the website is careful to make it clear that "This site does not support vigilante action; merely using social media to collate all images in one place," and, furthermore, warns that it is "Worth mentioning that some of these photos *may* be innocent bystanders who happen to have [been] shopping. It’s not up to me to decide if they have committed a crime; I’m just helping to collate and perhaps provide a central place for these pics15" These statements make it clear that there is no question of replacing the security forces, but rather of aiding them in a task for which they do not have the necessary manpower and expert knowledge16: the identification of criminals involved in the rioting and looting. 14 15 Catch a Looter, available at http://catchalooter.tumblr.com/ . Catch a Looter, available at http://catchalooter.tumblr.com/ . 16 The lack of police officers living in some of the affected areas, with good local knowledge, as been identified by some observers as one of the failures to be addressed in the reaction to the riots. " Another element of police practice contributed to their failure. The police do not have deep roots in most localities and especially areas such as Tottenham. Few, if any, officers live locally. In earlier times, policing was seen as primary prevention, based on a visible uniformed presence. Gradually, under pressure to appear more “efficient”, policing became more a matter of reaction and detection. Officers waited for calls and responded as fast as possible, while teams of investigators tried to solve past crimes. Only in the past couple of years has it begun to be accepted that primary prevention has its merits, and the Government is supposed to be moving towards neighbourhood policing with named officers covering particular areas and charged with getting to know everyone. An officer who knows the law-abiding locals as well as the miscreants is in a much stronger position when things go wrong than the officer whose “response unit” has been called in to deal with some trouble every now and then" GREEN David, " London riots: why did the police lose control?", The Daily Telegraph, 8 August 2011, available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8689004/London-riots-why-did-the-police-lose-control.html. 5 smallwarsjournal.com Figure Three. One of the looters whose picture has been posted at the Catch a Looter website17. Unless this or similar efforts succeed, the proportion of rioters arrested will remain low, since the hundreds taken into Police custody to date are but a small fraction of the criminals involved. This will mean, as has been the case in similar instances in the UK and other countries, that crime will pay, given the low likelihood of being arrested and punished. Effective deterrence requires the identification of as large a proportion as possible of those responsible for the wave of violence which has hit the United Kingdom, so that, using Mao's terminology, the fish cannot remain hidden in the water. A Look at the Use of Modern Technology by Criminals and Security Forces We can conclude by briefly referring to the widespread reports that the occasional criminal insurgents have made extensive use of modern technology to coordinate their actions. Reporting on this, Radio Free Europe stressed the role of "Blackberry's instant message service (BBM) in the riots," which, as first pointed out by Blogger Jonathan Akwue18, "is an instant messenger system that has become popular for three main reasons: it’s fast (naturally), it’s 17 18 Catch a Looter, available at http://catchalooter.tumblr.com/ . AKWUE Jonathan "The unlikely social network fuelling the Tottenham riots", The Urban Mashup Blog, 7 August 2011, available at http://urbanmashup.wordpress.com/2011/08/07/the-unlikely-social-network-fuelling-the-tottenham-riots/ . 6 smallwarsjournal.com virtually free, and unlike Twitter or Facebook, it’s private." This privacy19, together with "the ability to broadcast messages, which then go to all your contacts, and can quickly go viral," seems to be among the reasons for its popularity20. This is yet another reminder that technology in itself is often neutral, potentially aiding both criminals and insurgents on the one hand, and government forces on the other21. In addition to the possibility of fellow rioters gathering to strike at targets, another risk posed by modern communication technology may be disinformation. Reports of false incidents on social networks may have confused first responders and aggravated the lack of boots on the ground22. However, despite all these instances of usage by occasional criminal insurgents and their moral sponsors of modern communication equipment and technologies, the birth of a website devoted to the collection of pictures of the incidents with a view to the identification by the population of those responsible and their reporting to the Police is clear evidence that these same technologies can be employed to deter violent crime. Websites like the one discussed above can plug a gap in the capabilities of security forces, using a decentralized approach to collect and process intelligence, turning the mere collection of thousands of pictures we all have seen in the media over the last few days into useful, actionable, intelligence leading to the arrest of those who thought they could maim, steal, and burn, with impunity. In a way, this would be a replication of the variable-geometry networks currently destroying Britain's main cities. Just like all sorts of criminals have joined forces to concentrate, gaining local superiority at their chosen schwerpunkts, mainstream society, the population that the security forces must protect, would also join together, to repel them, providing the authorities with that most valuable of commodities in any struggle of this kind: intelligence. Just like the criminal insurgency networks at large often don't have overarching leaders, this would also be a horizontally coordinated, not vertically led, effort. Finally, once these possibilities have been fully explored in largely stable and industrialized societies, it may be possible to adopt some of the lessons to the kind of scenarios where, as rightly pointed out by a number of observers23, the inability to identify insurgents due to the lack of a census has hampered stabilization and reconstruction operations in the past. 19 " Chats on BlackBerry Messenger are encrypted and stored on Canadian servers; governments that want access to messages must go through Research In Motion, the Canadian company that owns Blackberry. In short, BBM is more secure than SMS for users living in restrictive communications environments" "Blackberry: The London Rioters' Tool Of Choice" Radio Free Europe, 08 August 2011, available at http://www.rferl.org/content/blackberry_the_london_rioters_tool_of_choice/24290270.html . 20 "Blackberry: The London Rioters' Tool Of Choice" Radio Free Europe, 08 August 2011, available at http://www.rferl.org/content/blackberry_the_london_rioters_tool_of_choice/24290270.html . 21 Something which should give pause for thought to those voices stressing the transforming effects of technologies such as drones, which we should not be surprised to soon see in the hands of non-state actors. 22 "There is a bigger civic - and indeed - policing angle to this madness. Twitter, SMS, Facebook, have been hysterically reporting incidents where there aren't any, ensuring that anyone monitoring the situation would be constantly led astray. While leading police astray may seem like a laudable goal to some 'anarchist' sitting cosy at home, it merely added to the misinformation and most likely contributed to delayed responses by emergency services: if the cops were spread thin, were they following irresponsible leads to nonexistent incidents?" SINGH Sunny "London Riots: An Alternative 'Larger Context'", Sunny Singh Online, 9 August 2011, available at http://networkedblogs.com/lrDZy . 23 Ibidem 8. 7 smallwarsjournal.com Conclusions When faced with widespread urban violence, which we can refer to using terms such as urban guerrilla or occasional criminal insurgency, security forces do not have the capacity to process the graphical information collected in order to identify and arrest the culprits. Since it is practically impossible to arrest them all on the spot, this means that unless an alternative way is found, deterrence will not work, because the chances of being caught will be statistically negligible, thus encouraging participation in future events of the same nature. The security forces do not only lack the capacity to process all the information collected in the form of video footage and photographs, they are also unable to protect all the population and infrastructure, and trying to do so may only result in being spread even thinner. Therefore, only deterrence can diminish the likelihood and gravity of future riots, and as a result a way must be found to turn the large amounts of information on the identity of the culprits into actionable intelligence leading to their arrest. The existence of different government databases where the whole population is recorded means that part of the job is already done in advance, a welcome chance from many scenarios of recent counterinsurgency campaigns, but the key linkage of faces to names remains. It is here that the population at large can bridge the gap in police capabilities, by using the Internet. Although the setting may seem very different, the key question in London and the rest of Britain right now is the same as in almost every insurgency: getting the population to provide intelligence to the government forces, so that they can isolate the insurgents, whatever their exact nature and motivations. Otherwise, hidden among the civilians, they will just wait for another opportunity to strike. Alex Calvo is a global economics and international relations professor at European University (Barcelona Campus), and a former teaching and research fellow at the OSCE Academy in Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan). He is a law graduate from the School of Oriental and African Studies (London University). This is a single article excerpt of material published in Small Wars Journal. Published by and COPYRIGHT © 2011, Small Wars Foundation. Permission is granted to print single copies for personal, non-commercial use. Select noncommercial use is licensed via a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license per our Terms of Use. No FACTUAL STATEMENT should be relied upon without further investigation on your part sufficient to satisfy you in your independent judgment that it is true. Please consider supporting Small Wars Journal. 8 smallwarsjournal.com