Really good Ross Anderson interview: It’s as if you had a forest where all the animals could see only in black and white, and suddenly, along comes a mutation in one of the predators allowing it to see in color. All of a sudden it gets to eat all the other animals, at least those…
Read More In colourWhen I started hearing about a blogger called Brown Moses, who collated Syrian rebel videos and identified unexploded ordnance, and regularly posted remarkably sharp depth pieces on the Leveson inquiry, I assumed this person was some retired six-letter agency type with their SAS badge on the mantelpiece, in the formaldehyde jar, stuck through Jimmy Savile’s…
Read More So you think you’re a bloggerGood NYT piece is good – working through the effort to arm Syrian rebels, with Saudi and Qatari money, Croatian surplus warstocks, and Jordanian airlift. Inevitably, the kit is moving aboard Il-76s. This time out, though, the aircraft are Jordanian (and occasionally other) military aircraft that sometimes operate as “Jordan International Air Cargo”, a nationalised…
Read More Don’t read this, read them!Remember Kam Air, fabulous Afghan airline, repeatedly blogged here? Sure you do. The U.S. military has blacklisted Afghanistan’s largest private airline, alleging it is smuggling “bulk” quantities of opium on civilian flights to Tajikistan, a corridor through which the drugs reach the rest of the world. Kam Air was barred this month from receiving U.S.…
Read More Kam AirWell, I wasn’t expecting that. @cjchivers he used to egosurf and come up in my server log, from Syria and Russia, and occasionally leave threats and abuse in comments. — Alex Harrowell (@yorksranter) January 13, 2013 And a response from C.J. Chivers, too. Richard Chichakli has shown up in Australia, after eight years in the…
Read More It’s Richard…Chi-Backli!Here’s an interesting story about US efforts to aid the Syrian rebels. Especially this bit: A centerpiece of the effort this year focused on getting Iraq to close its airspace to Iran-to-Syria flights that U.S. intelligence concluded were carrying arms for Assad loyalists—contrary to flight manifests saying they held cut flowers… One example of the…
Read More O RLY?So we spent quite a while wondering about where all the Antonovs would go after the UAE eventually turned nasty on them and cleaned up, after a fashion. We even found some of them in Russia. We speculated about locations. Here’s a data point, and quite an encouraging one – an old mate of Viktor’s…
Read More RefusalFedorcio out they cry! See also this New Yorker piece on Viktor Bout. On April 26, 2005, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), in the Treasury Department, unveiled sanctions aimed at Bout, thirty companies associated with him, and Chichakli. That morning, F.B.I. agents went to Chichakli’s home, in Texas, to search his office. They…
Read More out!Having fixed the Viktorfeed, I notice with some pleasure that the activity levels continue to decline. It looks like the last gang in town is “Reliable Unique Services”, ICAO:RLB, an alias for Rus Aviation, operating five Il-76, a couple of which served with various version of Click Airways.
Read More …like it’s 2008!It has just come to my attention that both Dubai and Sharjah airports have redesigned their websites. Also, I’ve added 395 more meetings to the scraper this weekend, but for some weird reason the DFID disclosure isn’t actually being treated as a csv file by the csv module. Scraping, scraping, scraping, always bloody well scraping.…
Read More technical update