Global Guerrillas

JOURNAL: No More Katrinas?

More evidence of an orchestrated government/corporate campaign to choke off media and scientific access to the Gulf continues to pour in (see "Leaking Legitimacy" for an overview of the situation).   Not only has BP corrupted local law enforcement to block reporting and scientific analysis of the spill, the Coast Guard now claims that the rare authorization for access requires authorization from the White House.  This campaign is working, from the perspective of BP's and the government's public relations departments.  The media (both traditional and social) coverage of the gulf oil spill doesn't even show up relative to Katrina).  

Another reason that BP may have retained control of the response to the crisis because of its ability to pay for it.  If the government had taken control, it may have required a vast new emergency outlay, measured in the hundreds of billions.  An outlay that could have pushed the US deficit up radically (to the $2 Trillion mark?) at the very moment another global financial crisis looms.  For even if BP is legally liable for the clean up, they would likely be unwilling to open a checkbook for efforts that they didn't completely control.  In contrast, the ability to extract that money forcibly via a tortuous legal process would take years.

As an example of our ability to solve a crisis it's another disaster.  By keeping BP in charge of fixing the situation and limiting outside involvement, the decision making process has been corrupted.  

• Selfish motives may limit options.  BP may still hold the notion that their investment in the well may be salvaged (it would allow them to earn themselves out of the expense).  As in, destroying the well to stop the leak may be put on the back burner.
• Poor orientation.  Without outside input (an industry and scientific team of experts with the experience and perspective that is vital to this process), the decision making process becomes barren.  Valid options aren't presented, evaluations of alternatives are weak, and perspective is lost.  In essence, they are breathing their own exhaust. 
• Unresponsiveness.  A linear, closed loop decision process often fails to adjust to rapid shifts in the problem.  For example, new data may indicate that the real leak may be 5-6 miles form the well head.  

NOTE:  Even if the Navy is put in charge, it might not improve the decision making process unless:  there is a flood of data gathering and analysis (from the leak to the damage it is doing), there is a tiger team of experts assembled from across the world to decide the next moves, and entire process is made as transparent as possible (transcripts, etc.). 

JOURNAL: Jamaica and Global Guerrillas

If Coke is somehow able to hold out and formally establish his community as a state within a state, then Jamaica's future is bleak
Brian Meeks, a professor of government at Jamaica's Mona campus of the University of the West Indies (reuters).

Jamaica has issued a month long state of emergency and sent troops/police into several slums in search of a local gang (the "Shower" Posse) leader, Dudus Coke.  Gunmen loyal to Dudus have not only successfully defended these slums with barricades, they've expanded into an adjacent "parish."  Gunmen have also attacked police stations across the cities of Kingston and St. Andrew and criminal gangs from across the country are streaming in to help the fight.

The conflict is a classic example of a hollow state (Jamaica) in conflict with local sources of order (Dudus).  For many in Kingston's slums, Dudus is a much better provider of political goods (education, security, and food) than the state, which translates into the popular support he gets locally (see inset).  Although his gang has more legitimacy than the state, this doesn't necessarily translate into military power, since he maintains a monopoly of force locally.  

As long as the conflict is mainly fought via barricades, the government has a chance of winning.  If it expands to include disruption of energy, water, and food to the wider population of Jamaica (inflicting costs on those outside the slums) via blockades of intersections by protesters and the intentional breaking of Kingston's infrastructure networks, the government is likely to lose.  

JOURNAL: Synthbio Platforms

"...from the point of view of technology, a code generated within a digital computer is now self-replicating as the genome of a line of living cells. From the point of view of biology, a code generated by a living organism has been translated into a digital representation for replication, editing, and transmission to other cells." George Dyson in response to Craig Venter's announcement of "synthetic" life.

Now that we have a self-replicating biological platform (yeast -- likely one of many different platforms that will be floated over the next couple of years) that can accommodate a completely synthetic genome, the race in on:   towards an abundance in nearly every material or process that can be enabled via biological means.  

For resilient communities, this will likely lead to the ability to replicate on the micro scale, many of the difficult to produce materials currently available only through a global industrial system.  All that needs to be shared is the information necessary to do it.  P2P pharmaceuticals and fuels?

Of course, this also means that the global system is about to become even more prone to massive instability than it is today (and it's pretty bad already).  Threats will emerge out of nowhere as errors, failures, and misuse of this technology occur (inevitably).  These threats, in turn, will be quickly amplified by the network dynamics of our tightly interconnected global system, which converts relatively small events into global scale catastrophes.  

There is a bright side to this:  This technology makes resilient communities both more necessary and more viable at the same time.  

The localization of production and the virtualization of everything else precludes the chance that damage from this technology will spread to a global scale via network amplification.  It contains any potential damage to a small area.  On the other hand, the virtualization of production and portability of discovery/productivity enabled by this technology will make it possible for very small communities to replicate the industrial power of a nation-state.  Very nice.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Writing

Sorry for the light posts.  I'm working on my new book about networked resilient communities.  It's coming along nicely, but at times it is a tough slog to get it exactly right.  

LINKS: 21 MAY 2010

Some random items of interest:

• Roubini goes very negative and predicts double dip global recession.  He adds: "What needs to be done is clear. We need to raise taxes and cut spending. Otherwise we're going to get a fiscal train wreck."  Also, Gross at Pimco warns of a crisis akin to 2008.   I still maintain that D2 (the second great depression) is already here, however the results are unevenly distributed.
• Backyard farms for income security.
• Mexican lake pirates on border (zeta clones).
• Insights from conflict in the natural world.  An interesting approach to understanding open source warfare.
• Taleb video.  Summary:  the global system is extremely fragile.  It can't withstand debt and leverage.  It can't withstand complex derivates that nobody understands.  It can't be regulated since the regulators will always be outwitted/corrupted.  As it is going today, the system will breakdown.  

LEAKING LEGITIMACY

Tensions between the Obama administration and the scientific community over the gulf oil spill are escalating, with prominent oceanographers accusing the government of failing to conduct an adequate scientific analysis of the damage and of allowing BP to obscure the spill’s true scope... The scientists point out that in the month since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, the government has failed to make public a single test result on water from the deep ocean. And the scientists say the administration has been too reluctant to demand an accurate analysis of how many gallons of oil are flowing into the sea from the gushing oil well. NYTimes.

Over the last month, it's become increasingly clear that there is a coordinated information operations campaign in place to downplay the impact of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. The US government and British Petroleum have imposed a scientific and media blackout to prevent the gathering of the information on the oil leak needed to generate precise estimates (specifically, updates to very low estimates made during the very early days of the crisis).  Despite this blackout, credible outside estimates made possible by the little information that has trickled out show that the amount of oil leaking from the broken wellhead is upwards of twenty times the official British Petroleum and Government estimates -- nearly 4,000,000 gallons a day vs. 210,000.   

No More Katrinas

Why is this effort in place?  To reduce the political damage to both the government and BP.  The information related to the amount of oil that is leaking from the broken wellhead is a critical factor in:

• Damage assessments.  Lower estimates make this spill relatively small in relation to historical incidents.  
• The immediacy and pace of the response.  Lower estimates allow a more leisurely response and limits public outcry and anger.
• Evaluation of the solutions being proposed.  There's no way to evaluate whether the response is useful or a waste of time.  Less criticism.

So far, this information operation is working (it has been so successful, the blackout has even being extended to blocking coverage of the damage being done to public coastlines and marshes).  The lower estimates have successfully beaten the media cycle.  In the first week of the crisis, most news analysis of the spill downplayed its importance due to lowball estimates.  As a result of this news analysis, coverage of the crisis has dropped and the continual denial of information required for analysis has prevented any resurgence of coverage.  From the perspective of the government and BP, this information operation has achieved its objectives: it has drastically limited political damage and criticism of previous decisions, which is in stark contrast to the damage generate by the media coverage of Katrina.   

Onward to the Hollow State

Of course, this type of behavior is extremely bad over the longer term.  Why is it so bad?   For an increasing number of people it is yet another example of an approach, reinforced by ongoing global financial disasters, that uses media manipulation and confidence boosting as a substitute for real solutions.  It fails to punish bad behavior due to the need for collusion between the government and the offending corporations to construct the information campaign.  It fails to construct real solutions since the facts are not known and the number of people able to address the problem is extremely limited.  Also, since these people are the same people that caused the crisis, real solutions are avoided to prevent adverse publicity.  Most importantly, it is yet another body blow to the nation-state and the global market system as legitimate organizational constructs.   

LINKS: 19 MAY 2010

Some random items of interest:

• Brit (the Guardian) film on DIY community resilience as a political movement.  Very short segment on Totnes (UK) planning to back their currency with kilowatt hours.  Here's part one of the above film.  
• Reuters liveblog of the Thai government's battles with protesters.
• Coast Guard and BP's private military contractors team up to enforce media and scientific blackout (part of BP's information operations campaign) on the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster.  Here, they are caught on camera turning away a CBS film crew.
• Brain chemistry and creativity.  I've always thought that creativity is a function of high rates of error -- lots of erroneous connections -- in conjunction with a great error filter.  This research on Dopamine receptors suggests that it may be correct: "Fewer D2 receptors in the thalamus probably means a lower degree of signal filtering, and thus a higher flow of information from the thalamus.."
• Jeremie "Jabber" Miller has a new easy to use real-time, decentralized routing protocol for events called Telehash.  Nice.

LINKS: 18 MAY 2010

Some random items of interest:

• OSE True Fans.  Here's a great way to support building resilient communities globally.  Instead of donating money to patch the world's ever growing list of problems (ultimately futile), here's a useful alternative.  This team is actually building (with the technological and visionary chops to do so) the technologies we need to make communities resilient, self supporting, productive, and prosperous.  This is the fishing pole and not the fish.
• Ross Douthat.  The Great Consolidation.  This is a strange column from the NY Times since it is a global guerrilla viewpoint.  There is a problem with the logic:  if the best and the brightest are failures, are they the best and brightest?  
• This guy would have fit right in on Wall Street and made tens of millions $$ but he made a wrong move.
• Arboravita, a low money effort by Littlefish farms (they are running experiments on ways to use salvaged materials as containers for urban gardens -- and also a reader of GG).
• I've been invited to speak at the Aspen Environment Forum this summer.
• Rough specification for a maker production platform by Reto Stauss.  Nice.  

 

LINKS: 16 MAY 2010

Some random items of interest:

• Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, caught offering the personal data of Facebook users to a friend and calling people that trusted him with their info "dumb f**ks."
• Mark Bowdin has an article on the history of Conficker.   Nice introduction to a form of superempowerment via self replication.
• Open source and multi-node social network:  Diaspora.  A replacement to Facebook.  Raised $168 thousand in donations ($10 thousand was the goal).  Excellent!  Can this be used to bootstrap a darknet?  
• Capitalism, a game.
• Niall Fergueson:  A rapid rise in western debt with collapse the West (Audio).  
• IMF:  US is headed for debt debacle.  Here's the chart on how much government spending must be cut to stop growth in the ratio of debt/GDP.  They estimate that it is a huge 12% of US GDP, that's 60% of the USG's budget.  Of course, that's assuming the global oligarchy doesn't accelerate the process (run on shadow system, interest rate spike on treasuries, currency collapse, etc.) and force more bailouts/economic failure. 
• A single syndicate "Avalanche" responsible for 2/3rds of phishing attacks.
• Brooklyn Grange Rooftop Farm.  1 acre greenhouse farm built on an industrial building's roof.  Also Tradeschool:  bartering for education microschool.  Raising seed money via  kickstarter.
• "The answer is no to that" BP spokesman.  NOAA and BP continue to claim the Gulf leak is 5,000 barrels a day and won't allow independent measurement when it is increasingly clear they are off by MORE than an order of magnitude (60,000 bpd or much higher).  The entire Gulf is being destroyed and what's left of the US still can't get rough with a bunch of corporate thugs to get to the truth.  LOL.

QUOTE: On the EU Crisis

"We now see ... wolfpack behaviours, and if we will not stop these packs, even if it is self-inflicted weakness, they will tear the weaker countries apart"
Swedish Finance Minister Anders Borg (at the EU Summit).

In open source warfare, small independent guerrilla groups often using swarming tactics to take down large targets. Many groups converge on the target from all points on the compass, overwhelming defenses.  Think of the above in terms of a war between nation-states and the global economic system.

NOTE:  The first downgrade of US government debt may occur as soon as 2013 (as debt servicing tops 20% of all budget outlays).

JOURNAL: Marketbots and Shadow Liquidity

On any given day, nearly 70% of all trades on the major stock exchanges are done by the bots (see below for more on what a bot is) owned by the high frequency traders at the top investment banks and boutique trading firms. An interesting side effect of all these bots, is that their activity serves as a form of critical shadow liquidity for the stock market. Venture capitalist Paul Kedrosky has some insight into what this means (which was the driver for failure on Thursday):

For the first time we have large providers of this shadow liquidity, algorithms and high-frequency sorts, that individually account for large percentages of daily trading activity, and, at the same time, that can be turned off with a switch, or at an algorithmic whim. As a result, in market crises, when liquidity was always hardest to find, it now doesn't just become hard to find, it disappears altogether, like water rushing out of sight via a trapdoor to hell. Old-style market-makers are standing aside as panicky orders pour in, and they look straight at shadow liquidity providers and say, "No thanks. You battle bots take it". And, they don't.

What is a bot?  It's simply software that automatically gathers information and makes simple decisions.  It does this very quickly, without pause, day in and day out.  You can run thousands of them on a standard PC (depending on their complexity).  Larger operators (bot herders) can run hundreds of thousands to millions of them simultaneously.   Firms or individuals that have many, many bots are called bot herders.

What do bots do?  Bots do everything from trading stocks (to generate pennies of profit per trade) to scanning credit card purchasing records for fraudulent activity to approving you for a mortgage loan to generating e-mail spam (or pinging your home network's firewall for weaknesses to exploit).  They are everywhere (and a big reason that a small group of global financiers can manipulate the global economy).

Some deep thinking on the future of bots. Daniel Suarez has a great presentation on this topic at the Long Now Foundation.  

NOTE: In Daniel's book of near term fiction called Daemon (soon to be a movie), decentralized bots collectively known as the Daemon were used to automate a foco for a revolution against the corrupt status quo.  During the early phases, the foco bots of the Daemon engineered the slaughter of everyone operating competitive bot systems (aka: any system it wasn't able to gain control of), from spammers to high frequency traders. 

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

Most analysts (at least the ones that are worth reading) contend that the sovereign default crisis (Greece, Portugal, Spain, etc.) in the EU is about the collapse of a system that created monetary union without a political union.  It isn't.  That's actually a narrow, parochial view.  Instead, the current sovereign debt crisis is about something much more interesting:  it's another battle in a war for dominance between "our" integrated, impersonal global economic system and traditional nation-states.  At issue is whether a nation-state serves the interests of the governed or it serves the interests of a global economic system.

Who's winning?  The global economic system, of course.  The 2008 financial crisis, the first real battle of this war (as opposed to the early losses in skirmishes in Russia, Argentina, the Balkans, etc.), generated a very decisive outcome.  It was a resounding defeat for nation-states.*   The current crisis in the EU will almost certainly end with the same results.

When this war ends, and it won't be long, the global economic and financial system will be the victor.  Once that occurs, the nation-states of the West will join those of the global south as hollow states: mere shells of states that serve only to enforce the interests of the global economic system.  These new states, more market-states than nation-states, will offer citizens a mere vestige of the public goods they offered historically.  Incomes will fall to developing world levels (made easy to due highly portable productivity), and wealth will stratify.  Regulatory protections will be weak.  Civil service pensions will be erased and corruption will reign.  The once dominant militaries of the West will be reduced to a small fraction of their current size, and their focus will be on the maintenance of internal control rather than on external threats.  The clear and unambiguous message to every citizen of the West will be:  

You are on your own.  You are in direct competition with everyone else in the world, and your success or failure is something you alone control.  

For those that think that this will bring about a surge of peaceful economic vigor, you will be wrong.  It will fragment society and lead to perpetual stagnation/depression, endemic violence/corruption, and squalor.  For absent any moral basis (a social compact), stability, or (widely shared) prosperity: new sources of order will emerge to fill the gap left by the hollowing out of the nation-state.  These new sources of order will be first seen in the rise of the criminal entrepreneur, whether they be the besuited corporate gangster or the gang tattooed thug.  For in the world of hollow states (without a morality that limits behavior) and limitless connectivity to the global economic system, these criminal entrepreneurs quickly become dominant, violently coercing or corrupting everyone in the path to their enrichment. 

As this occurs, you have a choice.  

1. You can stand alone and do nothing.  Thereby suffering the predations of this new criminal class.  
2. You can join them and prey on your former compatriots, enriching yourself in the process.  
3. Or finally, you can build something new.  Resilient communities and independent economic networks based on freedom, prosperity, and a new moral compact.

*  An ambush that yielded:  excessive debt, endless deficits, state guarantees (against financial system failure), and moral ambiguity/corruption.   

JOURNAL: Depression 2.0 Update

Here are some interesting dynamics in the financial world that may generate instability and conflict in the not too distant future:

• Globe.  The first world is still awash in debt, bad actors in the financial industry still dominate, and destabilizing financial connectivity remains ($600 trillion in derivatives).  
• US.  Government deficits are still well north of $1 trillion.  The housing sector is about to take another deep dive as banks unload their swollen property inventories.  Consumers will be worse off than they already are.  Bank books are still abysmal.  Municipalities and states are broke and many are close to default.  A big negative economic impact from the Gulf spill looms (the leak may continue until the reservoir depletes).
• EU.   Big sovereign defaults.   Greece, Portugal, Spain, and onwards.  There's been a breakdown in the social compact in the EU, which will create high levels of instability and lessen the chance of any resolution.
• China.  The bubble in property speculation is about to collapse as the government puts on the brakes.  As much as 60% of China's GDP is estimated to be tied to construction. 

Unfortunately, all of this is lining up to generate a replay of 2008 but worse.  It will be worse this time around because it will be a) more widespread and b) much of what government's could do to stop it has already been done. 

HOLONS AND ECONOMIC RESILIENCE

Here's a new term for you.  It's called a holon (from the Greek term "whole").  A holon is simply something that is both a whole and a part.  Holons are a useful idea when thinking about resilience and complex systems.  Let's dive into this.

Holonic Theory

In this theory, well constructed complex systems are composed of many subsystems called holons that interrelate in the following manner:

• All holons serve as parts in a larger self-contained holon, and simultaneously
• as a self-contained systems that are composed of smaller holons.

Here's an excellent parable from Herbert Simon that may help you get your head around how holonic theory works (and why it is useful):

Suppose each watch consists of 1000 pieces. The first watchmaker constructs the watch as one operation assembling a thousand parts in a thousand steps. The second watchmaker builds intermediate parts, first 100 modules of 10 parts each, then 10 subassemblies of 10 modules each, then a finished watch out of the subassemblies, a somewhat longer process, 110 steps longer. 

It would seem that constructing a watch in a single sequential process would progress faster and produce more watches. Alas, life being what it is, we can expect some interruptions. Stopping to deal with some environmental disturbance, like a customer, the watchmaker puts down the pieces of an unfinished assembly. Each time the first watchmaker puts down the single assembly of 1000, it falls apart and must be started anew, losing up to 999 steps. Interrupting the second watchmaker working on a module of 10 using hierarchical (in the first sense) construction means a loss of at most 9 steps.

For organizing complexity, the moral is this: taking a few extra steps in the short run, saves many steps in the long run.

Scale Invariance, Holons, and Resilience

It should be obvious from the above parable that holonic theory is a useful way to construct, maintain, and repair complex systems (particularly in turbulent environments).  This makes it useful for resilience.  However, the classic approach to the theory does lack a very important attribute:  holons, while self-contained wholes, cannot operate autonomously since they don't contain most of the attributes of the larger system.  In short, when disconnected from the entire system, they fail.

To fix this problem with holonic theory, we need another useful concept from resilience called scale invariance. Scale invariance means that across all scaling factors (large, medium, small, tiny, etc.), the properties that define the whole are conserved (intelligence, mobility, form, productivity, etc.).* The benefits of scale invariance to resilience should be obvious: whenever a scale invariant system breaks down, all undamaged subsystems continue to operate as if unaffected.  As a result of scale invariance, reconstructing the larger system is easier, faster, and done with less damage.  

However, there is a problem with scale invariance.  It operates on a continuum as in, 5% of the entire system should have the same properties as 6%, 15%, 37% etc..  As you can see, this is an attribute of scale invariance that makes it hard to use when constructing or engineering many very useful complex systems.  The solution to this impasse is to combine the two concepts.  

In other words, build holons that can be used to construct larger and more complex systems, but make each holon as self-sufficient and autonomous as possible.  Let's see how this works in the real world, with our economy.  

Economic Scale Invariant Holons

The big problem with our modern economy is that it has been integrated into a single global system (or network).  There aren't any autonomous and self-sufficient intermediate steps (scale invariant holons), only mutually interdependent parts (company, community, state, nation, etc.).  This means that nearly the entire economy must be operating in order for the economy to operate, anything less and the entire thing breaks down (think Fall 2008).  The absence of a holonic structure also makes it very difficult to construct new complex systems that can solve equally complex problems.

The solution to this impasse is to create scale invariant holons at intermediate layers within our economy.  Or, more simply, the minimum necessary step to building economic scale invariant holons is focus on self sufficiency in the necessities critical to economic life (as opposed to all systems, regardless of criticality) such as:  food, energy, water, and many basic products.  So where do we start?  Given the trends in technology and social structure that are currently underway, the best place to accomplish this goal is as the local community level.  To build resilient communities.

* Read: Resilient Communities and Scale Invariance for more about how this works.

JOURNAL: Water Systempunkt near Boston

The crisis began early Saturday, when the metal collar, which wrapped around a rubber gasket, ruptured in a pipe system that delivers water from the Quabbin Reservoir to Boston. The collar, along with millions of gallons of water, then washed into the nearby Charles River.  Boston Globe.

A rupture in a water pipeline (a 10 ft main) kept 2 million residents without drinking water for 4 days.  Runs on bottled water supplies ensued (something to keep in mind when environmentalists push to ban bottled water in your community).

STARTERS: Business Dynamics of Backyard Farms

The sign of success used to be who had the best lawn. Now, it's all about how much food you can grow. Todd Lininger, Owner Farmscape (revenue over the first four months of this year = $54,000).

Backyard farm companies are popping up everywhere.  Here's a short list:

• San Francisco:  My Backyard Farmer
• LA:  Farmscape
• Portland OR:  Your Backyard Farmer
• New Haven CT:  Freelance Farmers
• Durham, NC:  Bountiful Backyards
• Tallahassee, FL:  Man in Overalls
• Vancouver, BC:  City Farm Boy
• Atlanta, GA:  Farmer D
• Atlanta, GA:  Sustenance Design 

These starters are responding to market demand and growth is brisk.  The reason?  Consumer culture is changing:

• People want to control over their food supply (organic, no GM, etc.)   
• Higher quality food is in demand (taste, heirloom varieties, freshness).
• Home value and social status gained through a great garden.

Here are some revenue dynamics (via LAT).  If anyone has better/more data, please let me know and I'll share it:

• For installation/set-up.  4x8 bed = $350 - $900.  (typically raised bed, prices vary considerably based on area)
• Weekly maintenance = est. $20.   (likely ala carte weeding, harvesting, and soil mx).
• All inclusive packages 400 square feet in urban areas ~$1,675
• Typical payback periods for an installation is 2 years.

JOURNAL: VBIED in NYC's Times Square

A carbomb (VBIED) was found in New York's Times Square.  Some details:

• The crude construction indicates a disconnected homegrown group or individual not able to leverage an existing terrorist network.  
• The target was chosen due to the potential for global media coverage of the explosion.
• The bomb was quickly cleared with minimal disruption.  Life returned to normal within ~12 hours.

Analysis:

The selection of Times Square was purely symbolic, it's perceptually the "center of the world."  A large explosion there would generate vast media coverage.  The assumption of the attacker being that vast media coverage of an attack is by definition a form of successful terrorist systems disruption.

It's not.  This is the classic mistake of traditional terrorists.  Vast media coverage, one of the earliest forms of network amplification (as in, the network converts a small event into something large), isn't useful as systems disruption unless it divides or shatters targeted social networks.  As in:  the disruption of a social network only occurs when trust breaks down and segments of network become non-cooperative (typically, by enticing them to act selfishly at the expense of other parts of the network). 

Fortunately, the disruption of social networks through the media alone is very hard to do.  Social systempunkts are very hard to discern (however, when they are found and successfully attacked, the results are very impressive*).  That's why, the trend in terrorism and warfare in general is increasingly directed towards the disruption of physical infrastructure: the systempunkts of critical infrastructure are relatively easy to discern and the results are nearly always as expected (excellent ROIs due to network amplification and the potential for social network disruption since the results directly impact the populace).  

* Two good examples of successful attacks against social systempunkts include 9/11 and the attack on Iraq's Golden Mosque.  9/11 launched the US on ten plus years of financially debilitating warfare.  The attack on the Golden Mosque led to an Iraqi civil war (which, in a good demonstration of how tricky this is, backfired on the Sunni insurgency and led them to seek protection from the US military).