Tahrir ammo

Apologies, this post is really just a place to dump a load of stuff - following a couple of requests, I thought it might be useful to post somewhere a round-up of arms and ammunition being used against protestors in Tahrir right now.

There seem to be a growing number people in and around the Square angry at being fired on by weapons supplied from countries making nice noises about democracy and restraint in Egypt, and are starting to document markings and specifications of what's being used. It won't help stop any violence, but I'm generally in favour of causing a modicum of embarrassment to those governments and companies which continue to supply tools of repression, usually for profit, to those who they well know will use them to violate human rights and repress their own citizens.

There are lots of good ID resources around - for the real afficionado of "less-lethal technologies", you can't beat Mispo (subscription only), which also has a live update stream of identified military/security equipment being used images from around the world.

All the usual caveats, of course, apply below: the provenance of most of these photos can't be definitively verified; and a given country of manufacture doesn't indicate that that country's government supplied the weapons to Egypt. I'll try to update this as more info becomes available.

9x19mm ammunition

9mm Parabellum/Luger ammunition is designed for use by 9mm pistols (either single-shot or semi-automatic), or semi-automatic/automatic sub-machine guns like the MP5-series submachine guns with which some Egyptian security forces were photographed back in February.



These 9mm cartridge cases, from @RiverDryFilm on 19th November:

• Right-hand cartridge case is a fired 9x19 round manufactured by Sellier & Bellot (Czech Republic). Not sure if '10' indicates a 2010 manufacture date, or a batch number (some S&B ammo doesn't carry a manufacture date marking).


• Left-hand cartridge case is an unfired round, difficult to see the headstamp markings to determine their manufacture or age. I *think* it has a NATO (cross-in-circle) marking, indicating a NATO country of manufacture, but difficult to tell for sure.

Most significantly, this *appears* to be 'live' ammunition (although we'd need to see the bullet - other end - of the unfired round to check 100% that it wasn't a blank; and to see what kind of live ammo it was).

(Added 23 Nov 2011) Other *possible* live cartridges (not 100% certain)

I've so far seen one picture (undated, from - er - Russia Today) of a larger cartridge case with a 'shoulder' narrowing towards the end (unlike 9x19mm cartridge cases, which are straight in profile). These appear to be around the right size for assault rifles (they *look* a bit like 7.39 short for AKs, but it's basically impossible to tell at this distance). Again, these *don't look like blanks* (which generally have characteristic 'crimped' necks), but it's not possible to tell definitively whether these are 'live' rounds or not without examining the bullets or the cartridges. (There *is* ammunition of this kind produced with plastic or rubber bullets plus metal rifle cartridge cases, but it really isn't at all common; and the rounds of this kind that do exist are more commonly 9mm rather than larger). Even if they *are* some kind of weird rifle-fired 'rubber' bullet (which personally I don't think is likely): at this small calibre, with the inability to 'skip fire' them along the ground rather than direct-fire them, and with the energy that a rifle-sized round can produce, they are arguably likely to be dangerous.

12 gauge shotgun ammunition

These can come in all sorts of varieties, lethal and 'less-than-lethal'. Lead buckshot, rubber buckshot, other impact munitions, irritants, and all sorts of other weird things.

I've seen at least 5 types so far:

• quite a lot of pictures of 12 gauge rounds from Fiocchi Munizioni S.P.A. I *think* these ones are actually manufactured in Italy (there is also manufacturing capability at Fiocchi USA, but these tend to be marked 'FIOCCHI 12 USA 12'). Once again, Italy-made doesn't necessarily mean Italy-supplied.


• a 12 gauge round with either Arabic or Farsi markings - difficult to make out which. Marked '12' (presumably for 12-gauge calibre) in Eastern Arabic numerals, plus a symbol which *could* be that of Egypt's domestic military production unit, the AOI. But that's just a complete guess.


• (added 23 Nov 2011)">Others have western numeral headstamps ('12 12' denoting a 12 gauge round) but Arabic script on the cartridge body, including 'عيار' (shells).


• Another variety with a mix of Arabic and Roman script on the cartridge body e.g. pic below from @msheshtawy on 22 Nov) marked 'CRIME' (Roman letters) and what I *think* reads 'خرطوشة' ('cartoosh'/ cartridge),'عيار' (shells), and the numerals for '12' [gauge]. Also reportedly carries the word 'مطاطية ' (made of rubber), so presumably containing rubber buckshot or other rubber impact munitions. Anyone with proper Arabic skills - help greatly appreciated!



• US-manufactured Federal Premium shells (below from @RiverDryFilm). Difficult to make out the 'load' markings which would indicate what kind of round it was. Likewise no date marking.

CS gas canisters/grenades

I haven't seen anything yet that isn't standard 'CS' (2-chlorobenzalmalononitrile) - probably the most common form of 'tear gas' used around the world. There are obviously two main risks from tear gas: in an enclosed space concentrations can cause severe respiratory problems and even death; and the impact from tear gas canisters themselves (which are generally not safe to fire directly at people, rather than 'skip-fired' across the ground) can injure and kill.

(added 23 November 2011)There was a lot of Twitter chatter yesterday (22nd Nov) about palbably stronger tear gas being used in Tahrir Square, and more medical admissions of those affected by it. I still *haven't* seen any evidence that anything other than standard CS (nasty stuff in itself) is being used. Nonetheless people's experience of stronger tear gas seems to have coincided with the appearance of three new types of tear gas canister:

1. Silver-bodied, entirely unmarked cartridges - appear to be either 37/38/40mm weapon-fired - some short with flat end, some long with metal fins for stabilisation in flight (suggesting design for longer-range use). (Below image from The Egypt Report, 22 Nov.) These were also apparently photographed back in June; and similar ones in Tunisia in February, but with markings '530 CS' (speculating, could be the US '530 CS' Flite-Rite rounds?)
Also sighted are Federal Laboratories' manufactured 560 CS and 570 CS rounds (different models for different ranges).



2. Longer silver-bodied, entirely unmarked cartridges - appear around 200mm long. Difficult to identify at this stage (there are various manufacturers of very long anti-riot rounds, mainly US and Chinese). Further pics of the example below (taken by @mikaminio 23 November), showing the primer, are here and here.



3. Red/silver 38mm CS cartridges reportedly marked "CART 38MM IRRITANT MK2 LONG RANGE CS". (Below image from @msheshtawy, 22 Nov 2011). Still unidentified definitively - although the markings precisely match those of 38mm CS cartridges advertised by the United Kingdom's Chemring Defence group, which incorporates former UK tear gas manufacturer PW Defence, the colouring is slightly different. Not clear how old (no lot number or manufacturer markings). Again, images of the headstamp/primer (on the base of the cartridge) could help positive identifications; and again, UK manufactured doesn't mean UK supplied.

Also seen:

• 3430 CS Muzzle Blast 37mm/40mm cartridges - manufactured in the USA, according to clear markings, some in 2001 and some in 2003 (meaning these are well past their 5 year shelflife). these ones reportedly photographed by two different photographers on 20 November. Amnesty also found some in Cairo back in January. The 3430's US manufacturer is Combined Tactical Systems Inc, but another manufacturer cannot be ruled out from the pictures from Tahrir. The 3430 is a comparatively short-range launcher-fired munition intended for either indoor or outdoor use (specs here)


• Federal Laboratories CS rounds (this pic from @mmbilal, 22 Nov). Think this might be a weapon-fired Mk II 560 CS round, but can't be sure from the picture. Definitely US-made, but could be comparatively old: Federal Laboratories are now part of US firm Defense Technology).
  

Other kinetic impact munitions
There are also a few photos floating around of what appear to be rifle-fired fin-stabilised rounds - too big to be the rubber fin-stabilised rounds from 12 gauge specialty ammo. I've no idea where these are from, or what their properties are - would be good to know more.

Update 22/11/2011 PM: Brazilian and US owners of arms firms

In case anyone fancies any shareholder activism (not that I'm, er, inciting any):

(unfortunately, with the exception of Federal Premium, most of these are owned by private individuals or high-end investment funds, so unless you have a stake in one of these, shareholder activism isn't going to get us very far. We could still have demos though!)

• Federal Premium (shotgun shells) is wholly owned by Arlington VA-based US arms giant ATK. ATK is majority-owned by large institutional investors. A top-10 list is here. (Hat-tip @mina_el_Naguib)



• Sellier & Bellot (9mm ammunition) is a Czech firm, with two branches - Sellier & Bellot a.s. - the main company - and Sellier & Bellot Trade a.s. for trading operations. The latter has a lot of private investors, but the former was acquired in 2009 by the established Brazilian ammunition manufacturer Companhia Brazileira de Cartuchos (CBC). According to the Czech company registry, CBC owns Sellier & Bellot via a US company, CBC Ammo LLC, registered in the notorious tax haven of Delaware. CBC is itself apparently privately owned.



• Combined Systems Inc (tear gas) is majority-owned by New York private equity firm Point Lookout Capital Partners. At least some of its equity is held by the defence investment giant The Carlyle Group (via its Carlyle Mezzanine Partners fund), which debt-financed Point Lookout's acquisition in 2005.

Pedants against guns

Short Circuit is finally going to get some R.E.S.P.E.C.T.

(Many apologies for 'all arms, all the time' at the moment on this blog. What can I say - it's a good time for guns, apparently).

Don't get me wrong - I don't think arms fairs should be banned. I don't oppose the arms trade per se, and the little buggers have got to do it somewhere. I don't mind them doing it, as long as they don't hurt anyone, and they don't do it in public. Some of my best friends are arms dealers. Etc.

But I do prefer the organisers of arms fairs to understand export control law. If you're going to help people sell guns, read the manual.

The organisers of the gunfest currently occupying a swathe of London's Docklands, the DSEi arms fair, are the perma-cheerful Clarion Events (they also do the Baby Show at Earls' Court. Bless.)

They've produced a lovely passive-aggressive little FAQ for lazy journos headed "DSEI: The Facts". Because Clarion are apparently concerned that

There is a lot of incorrect information, and deliberate misinformation, about DSEi available online.

Absolutely. Unfortunately, quite a lot of it is on the same Clarion webpage. Here's a selection from Clarion's wide-eyed journey into the evidently puzzling world of UK firearms and export control law:

"Promotion or display of the following items is banned at DSEi:...Portable devices designed for riot protection or self defence using an electric shock (e.g. tasers, electric shock batons and shields, stun guns) – even though these have been deployed by UK police forces"

Um, no. UK police do have Tasers, but the Home Office has absolutely not authorised 'electric shock batons' or 'electric shock shields' to be deployed with the UK police.

"Any contracts signed on UK soil by foreign companies require UK export licenses and are therefore subject to the UK’s strict export regime."

Nope. First of all, they wouldn't need an export licence unless the goods or services were physically leaving the country. Second, they *might* need a trade control licence (different to an export licence, but Clarion Events don't seem to have heard of them), depending on exactly what commercial/contracting activity and goods were involved. A large amount of 'trade arrangement' activity is actually provided with an effective exemption from case-by-case licensing by the Open General Trade in Goods Control Orders. For most kinds of weapons, these exempt from individual licensing the act of arranging deals for arms to be moved from anywhere in the world except Iran, North Korea or Zimbabwe (or from the Taliban, let's not forget) to a list of 32 'friendly' countries; or from these 32 friendlies to anywhere except 45 hyper-dodgy places. That's one of the reasons why London is probably quite a convenient place for arms dealers to come to sign contracts - the UK has lots of open licensing (read: licensing exemption) for arms brokering that many other European countries don't have.

"Q. Which countries have Clarion Events invited to DSEi? A. Clarion Events is not responsible for inviting overseas delegations. They are all invited by the UK Government."

Well yeah. Except that just a little further down the page they also say "Out of courtesy, Clarion invites defence attaches from London based embassies". So Clarion Events *does*, er, invite foreign governments themselves. And unlike the UK Government, Clarion doesn't provide a list of the foreign defence attaches it's invited.

"Q. Didn’t Mark Thomas find illegal equipment on display at DSEi in 2005? A. No. Mark Thomas was invited to attend DSEi 2005 by its owners at the time. What he found was literature about equipment. Nonetheless, this was a breach of DSEi policy, so when the leaflet was discovered the stand in question was closed and the companies involved were reported to HM Revenue and Customs."

Wrong. The equipment in the sales material that Mark Thomas found was classified as 'Restricted' (now 'category A') in UK export control law. Under the Trade in Goods (Control) Order 2003, which had entered into force by 2005, any person in the UK who does "any act calculated to promote the supply or delivery of" such goods is breaking the law. The UK government's own helpful guidance on this law makes it explicitly clear that all advertising or promotion of such equipment, including at trade fairs and even when the equipment is not pysically present, is banned. Although HMRC chose not to press for prosucution, the activity described by Mark Thomas was still unlawful.

"Since then [the Mark Thomas caper] there have been two other DSEi Exhibitions (in 2007 and 2009) and the exhibition is now owned by Clarion Events"

Absolutely. What Clarion neglect to mention is that the 2007 event didn't really do any better than in 2005. As Amnesty International UK notes: "At DSEi in 2007, researchers discovered two companies, BCB International (Cardiff) and Famous Glory Holding (China) promoting banned leg restraints."

And now that the event's happily in Clarion's hands, any progress? Umm:

14 September 2011: Amnesty International has obtained brochures from the Defense and Security International fair (DSEi) currently taking place in London’s Docklands, which appear to clearly show illegal torture equipment advertised. Despite explicit acknowledgments on the DSEi website that the sale of “leg irons, gang chains, shackles and shackle bracelets” are prohibited, the brochures Amnesty has obtained, advertise the products for sale from a company called CTS-Thompson on display at the Beechwood Equipment stall. A double-page spread in the brochure clearly offers oversized leg cuffs, waist chains, lead chains and “the enhanced transport restraint system”, which combines waist chains and cuffs with leg cuffs.

Note to Clarion Events: Try harder. Or at all.

Sousveillance redux

Image: Burkina Estudio design

How do we – citizens, journalists, researchers - winkle secrets from the state (corporation / criminal network / NGO / armed group)?

In at least two ways, ordinarily:

• Make friends: find informants who, by design or chance, have access or experience of your object of desire, be it a business deal, an aircraft landing strip or a committee meeting



• Hack the gaze of the state: piggy-back on governments’ own information-gathering systems through official records, registries, freedom of information laws and court cases

Over the past couple of years, though, I’ve found myself excited and impressed by the increasing possibilities of a third way: more democratic, more collegiate, and less indebted to the agendas of individuals or to the power of the state.

• Organise your own surveillance programme: networks of private citizens getting together and organizing observation and data-collection to gaze back at the state, the corporation, the organisation.

A pioneering example of this has been watching nuclear weapons. Verifying the condition and location of strategic weapons is a critical component of counter-proliferation regimes, helping to prevent the degeneration of trust that can fuel arms races and worse. Despite nuclear powers’ big words about the value of verification, nuclear weapons treaties (unlike those covering chemical weapons) tend to have comparatively weak verification regimes. And so since the late 1970s, frustrated by the opacity of their governments’ nuclear arsenals, networks of activists and enthusiasts – these days often little old ladies (and gentlemen) living in anodyne places like Colchester and Wichita - have got together on both sides of the Atlantic to undertake continuous “citizen verification” of the UK and US’ nuclear weapons - simply by observing, photographing and recording the movement of trucks and trains carrying nuclear warheads and their accessories around national road and rail networks. Sharing information about a nuclear convoy in real-time through phone trees and email lists, different observers in the network can alert each other, tracking nuke movements right across the country.

The nukewatchers’ efforts are part protest, part verification. But they’re more than symbolic. While they can’t come up with definitive weapons inventories - it's not wonk-grade intelligence - the nukewatchers have been able to provide approximations of deployed warhead numbers; logs of warhead servicing; when and where they’re redeployed; and spikes in transport activity that often indicate the timings of upgrades or decommissioning.

And they were doing it in the 1970s: contrary to a lot of interwebguff, Web 2.0 didn’t invent this kind of socially-networked observation. But declining technology costs and online organising have, I think, made life far easier for these kinds of initiatives. Hobbyist plane spotters, famously, provided the data that exposed the unlawful rendition programme. They had two things in their favour: internet fora to share flight logs and photos, piecing together transnational flight plans that aren’t publicly available at all, or even available in one piece to a single national authority. And rapidly declining technology costs: the plane nerds are no longer just stood at airport fences with pencils and binoculars, but with digital SLR cameras making high-quality photos uploaded instantly onto photo-share sites; cheap UHF radio scanners to listen to the chatter between pilots and control towers; and, since 2004/5, laptop-ready aircraft transponder receivers (I bought one myself down the Edgware Road - for 350 quid I can receive the transponder codes, call signs, altitudes and flight bearings of aircraft 100 miles away. And if there are hundreds of us across the world with transponder receivers, we can get together online, feed in our data, and track aircraft globally, in real time, for free).



We can do the same with ships, using their AIS transponder system, although the networks are less well-developed than those of the plane spotters. I’ve used these data feeds to help identify mid-conflict weapons deliveries to Sudan and the Middle East; and to track the movements of ICC indictees and under-fire newspaper executives.

And similar stories can be told about the amateur astronomers who map the proliferation of secret spy satellites.** Or the amateur ‘bucket brigades’ compiling simple air and water pollution data, from Thailand to Poland, to challenge industrial polluters. In a looser, more unstructured way, the collation and circulation of cameraphone pictures and videoclips taken by demonstrators in news-neglected places like Guinea during the ‘28 septembre’ massacre, and more recently in Yemen and Syria, have in the absence of TV cameras served as insurance against regimes’ attempts to lie about oppression and killings.

The nukewatchers are salutary pioneers precisely because one might imagine that nuclear weapons were one of the hardest targets for radical curtain-twitchers. You’d think that citizen surveillance would have to go after softer targets: council service provision, for instance. But what the nukewatchers realised, early on, is that even the most sensitive of state and corporate arcana are often conducted in full view - often, in fact, right outside their wisteria-covered front doors on the A357 to Basingstoke - if you just know where to look. As the NYT pointed out about the satellite watchers, they realised that just by looking in the right place, carefully compiling data, and sharing it in networks, they could “uncover some of the deepest of the government’s expensive secrets and share them on the Internet”. How glorious is that?

Steve Mann and other privacy activist-artists coined the term ‘sousveillance’ in the early 2000s to describe citizen efforts to gaze back, from below, at the gaze of the state. Mann and his collaborators use devices and routines – body-worn cameras, computer programmes that automatically activate recorders and sensors when citizens interact with bureaucrats and officials – to subvert surveillance, to turn the power of information collection back at the watchers. I think citizen information-collection networks are doing something similar. But Mann’s model of sousveillance is individual, not collective: designed to alter the dynamic of individual encounters with official surveillance, and to protect the user (the state is always penetrating and male etc. - there’s a great picture of a highly conspicuous bra-cam in one of Mann's fake souveillance company brochures). Successful architects of official surveillance recognise that if you’re interested in gathering information, rather than just intimidating or altering the behaviour of the surveilled, only networked surveillance, producing pooled and organised data, is really effective. For every decent lawful intercept system, you need an Echelon database. The same goes for the networked, organised sousveillance I’m talking about here.

Meanwhile the intent to ‘sousvey’ is rather less important than in Mann’s techniques, which are specifically designed to gaze back, to be deployed in ‘surveillance environments’ themselves. The enthusiasts and obsessives involved in networked citizen information-gathering, by contrast, are not always doing it to poke their finger in the state’s all-seeing eye, or even to uncover wrongdoing. Plane spotters and satellite watchers are mostly just interested in planes and satellites, and in mapping and understanding the systems that organise them.

This kind of networked sousveillance is also, I think, fundamentally different to crowd-sourcing, or citizen journalism. They don’t aim to tap into participants’ wisdom or knowledge; nor to turn them into amateur investigators. There are few heroic Erin Brockoviches here. Instead the network as a whole harnesses hundreds of small, repetitive acts of observation, and the empowerment of its participants comes from their collective efforts being so much greater than the sum of its parts. This means that we still need investigators, researchers and journalists to make sense of the fruits of networked sousveillance. The best sousveillance participants are focussed obsessives; investigators have instead to be magpies, picking and assembling from sousveillance networks, informants, and information leaked or prised from the state’s own information gathering. The plane spotters alone, for instance, couldn’t have exposed the infrastructure of unlawful rendition without testimonies from individual detainees to corroborate suspicious flight plans; civil aviation and company records to trace the ownership and provenance of suspicious planes; litigation and freedom of information requests to prove their suppositions about government complicity. But without them really intending it, their humble network of eyes (electronic and real) has furnished a gaze as unblinking and powerful as the most powerful governments. And as collective action, it seems to me that this quiet OCD is often easily as effective as any strike or demonstration.

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**Incidentally (although it’s different to the kind of networked souveillance discussed above): if there’s something pleasingly symmetrical about literally gazing back at governments’ eyes in the sky, it’s also becoming economically feasible for non-governmental researchers to acquire 20cm-resolution satellite imagery from commercial satellites - around 200 quid for a 5km-square image, or a bit more if it’s newly commissioned imagery. 20cm isn’t spy-satellite-grade, but it is good enough to allow amateurs, essentially, to spot smuggled tanks, map bombing raids and village burnings, identify new oil exploration, or spot nuclear submarines.