--- begin forwarded text
Date: Sat, 22 Oct 2005 01:50:38 -0400
To: Philodox Clips List
From: "R.A. Hettinga"
Subject: Blood, Bullets, Bombs and Bandwidth
The long version of the Wired Story on Ryan Lackey, including lots more
about Tyler Wagner, who I've been reading about almost since he got there
after the liberation :-) in 2003...
Just bumped into the bit below, having abandoned Tyler and Jayme's LJs
after they split, and finding the link after they went back recently.
Meanwhile, the author bought the wrong vowel, apparently. ;-).
Cheers,
RAH
------
http://www.rezendi.com/travels/bbbb.html
Blood, Bullets, Bombs, and Bandwidth:
a tale of two California cipherpunks who went to Baghdad to seek their
fortune, and bring the Internet to Iraq.
Ryan Lackey wears body armor to business meetings. He flies armed
helicopters to client sites. He has a cash flow problem: he is paid in
hundred-dollar bills, sometimes shrink-wrapped bricks of them, and flowing
this money into a bank is difficult. He even calls some of his company's
transactions "drug deals" - but what Lackey sells is Internet access. From
his trailer on Logistics Staging Area Anaconda, a colossal US Army base
fifty miles north of Baghdad, Lackey runs Blue Iraq, surely the most
surreal ISP on the planet. He is 26 years old.
Getting to Anaconda is no joke. Incoming airplanes make a 'tactical
descent' landing, better known to military cognoscenti as the 'death
spiral'; a nose-down plummet, followed by a viciously tight 360-degree
turn, then another stomach-wrenching dive. The plane is dragged back to
level only just in time to land, and brakes so hard that anything not
strapped down goes flying forward. Welcome to "Mortaritaville" - the
airbase's mordant nickname, thanks to the insurgent mortars that hit the
base daily.
From above, the base looks like a child's sandbox full of thousands of
military toys. Dozens of helicopters litter the runways: Apaches,
Blackhawks, Chinooks. F-16 fighters and C-17 cargo planes perch in huge
igloo-like hangars built by Saddam. The roads are full of Humvees and
armored personnel carriers. Rows of gunboats rest inexplicably on arid
desert. A specific Act of Congress is required to build a permanent
building on any US military base, so Anaconda is full of tents the size of
football fields, temporary only in name, that look like giant caterpillars.
Its 25,000 inhabitants, soldiers and civilian contractors like Ryan, are
housed in tent cities and huge fields of trailers.
Ryan came to Iraq in July 2004 to work for ServiceSat International, hired
sight unseen by their CTO Tyler Wagner. Three months later, Ryan quit and
founded Blue Iraq. He left few friends behind. "I think if Ryan had
stayed," Tyler says drily, "the staff would have sold him to the
insurgents."
- - -
Iraq is new to the Internet. Thanks to sanctions and Saddam, ordinary
citizens had no access until 1999. Prewar, there were a mere 1.1 million
telephone lines in this nation of 26 million people, and fewer than 75 Net
cafis, connecting via a censored satellite connection. Then the American
invasion knocked nearly half of Baghdad's landlines out of service, and the
local exchanges that survived could not connect to one another.
After the invasion, an army of contractors flooded into Baghdad. Billions
of reconstruction dollars were being handed out in cash, and everybody -
local Internet cafis, Halliburton, Ahmed Chalabi, the US military itself -
wanted Internet access. With the landline service destroyed by war, and
sabotage a continuing problem, satellite access was the only realistic
option. Among the companies vying to provide this access in early 2003,
scant months after the invasion, was ServiceSat International. SSI, a
startup founded by Kurdish expats, needed an American CTO: partly to import
America's culture of technical excellence, partly to help deal with Western
clients and authorities. They called Tyler Wagner. He was 25 years old.
- - -
San Francisco, aka Baghdad-by-the-Bay, July 2003. Tyler Wagner is a typical
counterculture California techie: a Cal Poly CS graduate, part of the
California punk scene, working for Greenpeace as a network engineer. Then
an old friend in London recommends him to SSI. They call him. They need a
capable Westerner willing to move to Iraq. Is he interested?
When he hangs up the phone, Tyler is shaking with excitement. The risks of
relocating to a war zone are obvious. But it is a lucrative senior
management position, offered to a man only two years out of university.
"Life doesn't often offer you a hand up like that," he reminisces two years
later, "and when it does, you can't afford to turn it down." One big
complication: Tyler's girlfriend, Jayme. They have been dating only six
months. He doesn't want to lose her. He calls and tells her the news - and
they both ask at the same time if she can come with him.
Three weeks later, Tyler and Jayme fly into Amman, Jordan, and take a GMC
Suburban taxi across the desert to Baghdad. Once they reach the city, their
driver tells them to get beneath window level, to avoid snipers. They stay
on the floor of the Suburban until they reach SSI's office in Baghdad's
affluent al-Mansour neighbourhood.
- - -
Baghdad, August 2003. Tyler wakes in his house/office, rolls out of bed,
walks into his office next door, and begins another fifteen-hour day. The
house is full of SSI-employed drivers, engineers, tea-boys, housekeepers,
and Kurdish peshmerga guards armed with AK-47s. Generators and air
conditioners whir. Outside, the Iraqi summer heat regularly hits 130.
Other than the bicultural Kurdish/British directors, Tyler is the company's
only Westerner. He has to build SSI's internal systems, manage the
satellite installs, deal with Western clients, and train the team of Iraqi
engineers, most of whom are older than he. All the problems of a
fast-growing start-up, plus massive culture shock - in a war zone. Bombs
and gunfire serenade them nightly. Meanwhile, Jayme is going stir-crazy;
she has nothing to do, but cannot leave the house. The first few weeks are
rough.
Things get better. Tyler and Jayme adapt to their new lives. If they want
to buy Pop-Tarts or root beer, at the nearby shop that sells American
delicacies at a 1000% markup, they are driven there in a car full of
gunmen. This soon seems normal. Jayme gets a job at Erinys, one of
Baghdad's many thriving private security companies. They go to parties in
the Green Zone with South African mercenaries, American diplomats, and KBR
contractors. Tyler learns new skills: how to install a VSAT satellite
system from scratch; how to open a beer bottle with the Browning pistol he
carries; how to distinguish between an AK-47 and an M-16 by sound alone;
how to use tampons as battle dressings; the fine art of bribery.
Months pass. Business booms. SSI has plenty of competitors, but almost
uniquely, they combine Western funding and technical expertise with a team
of local engineers - a team who have become a band of brothers. Tyler
fosters a community atmosphere, encourages his engineers to stay after
work, play Half-Life and Settlers of Catan together, or watch South Park en
masse. He attends their weddings, first as an honoured guest, then as a
friend. He hires a tutor to teach him Arabic, even though all business is
done in English. SSI has become half employer, half family. Iraq isn't just
his workplace; it's his new home.
Tyler visits monstrous palaces built by Saddam. He meets native speakers of
Aramaic, the language of Biblical times. He travels to Kirkuk, in the
north, and installs a satellite dish in an oilfield straight out of Dante's
Inferno, surrounded by massive pipes vomiting flame and bright green gas.
And he hacks US military security with a digital camera, a $2,000 card
printer, and a little social engineering.
Baghdad is a occupied city of walls and roadblocks. Most of SSI's clients
are guarded by the US military. Many of them are US military. There are two
free passes through checkpoints and gates: white skin, or a Department of
Defense ID card. With neither, you line up for hours to be searched. Tyler
is tired of his engineers losing days at checkpoints. He constructs SSI's
secret weapon: an internal corporate ID that happens to look very much like
a DoD card, right down to an empty smart card, a bar code, and a
magnetic-strip-like line of black ink across the back. And for months, his
engineers are regularly waved past inspection points by US soldiers.
But the insurgency intensifies; security grows tighter, particularly after
the Sadr City revolt and the assault on Fallujah; and the US military
starts denying SSI's engineers access to military bases. What's more, most
Western clients won't take Iraqis seriously, and sales have grown beyond
Tyler's capacity. They need another Westerner. SSI briefly hires a friend
of Tyler's, but Baghdad is too much for him. One day, Tyler mentions on his
blog that he needs a technically skilled Westerner who can handle an
extreme environment. Among his readers is Ryan Lackey.
- - -
San Luis Obispo, July 2004. Late one night, Ryan stops his car here, in
Tyler's hometown, opens his laptop, connects it to Sprint's network, and
caps their months-long email and instant-messaging conversation with an
brief IM: he'll take the job.
Ryan is viscerally aware of the risks. He went to high school with Nicholas
Berg, the American network engineer beheaded by insurgents only two months
earlier. He is led to Iraq by what he calls the "dark calculus" of risk
arbitrage; in his judgement, while the perceived risk of working in Iraq
has caused prices to rocket, it is still possible to operate without much
personal risk. And Ryan is used to intense environments. He dropped out of
MIT at age 19 to work at a startup in Anguilla. Two years later he moved to
Sealand, an offshore oil rig that claimed independent sovereignty, and
cofounded a data haven theoretically beyond the reach of any nation's laws.
Ryan is a libertarian cipherpunk, gun aficionado, and free-market purist:
the notion of Iraq as the new Wild West, untrammeled by laws and
regulations, appeals to him greatly.
By the time he arrives in Baghdad, SSI has outgrown their first house and
moved to a walled compound. By now the company numbers about eighty,
including a dozen engineers. Ryan moves in. He sells to Western clients,
and increasingly is sent with teams of engineers to American military
bases; he has no ID whatsoever, but his passport and American accent always
gets them through the gate. But Ryan isn't adopted into the SSI family. He
oozes ambition and technical skill, but he isn't a people person. Laconic,
iconoclastic, brilliant and contemptuous of anyone who is not, he wants to
make money, build systems, and grow the business, not train Iraqi engineers
or build a community. He is impressed by what Tyler has done, calling him,
"probably the best Westerner who's ever managed Iraqis," but he has no
interest in doing the same. He does not fit in.
Meanwhile, the insurgency gets steadily worse. Mohammed, one of Tyler's
engineers, receives a death threat signed in blood for allegedly working
with the Americans. Two other employees are carjacked by an organized ring
of car thieves, and SSI has to pay thousands to get their vehicle back.
Then Mohammed is kidnapped by insurgents while driving back from LSA
Anaconda. Incredibly, Mohammed manages to beat his guard to death with his
own AK-47, escape, hitch a ride back to SSI, and stagger shaking and bloody
back into the office - just in time for the insurgents, who don't know
their captive has escaped, to call and demand his ransom.
August 2004. Tyler and Jayme are married in an Iraqi Catholic ceremony
attended by all of SSI. The subsequent party features copious celebratory
gunfire. Shortly afterwards, they travel back to the USA for a month-long
vacation. Ryan is meant to step into Tyler's shoes while he's away.
One month later, when Tyler and Jayme return, Baghdad is locked down. It
isn't safe to go to the Green Zone. It isn't safe to go to the shop around
the corner. They are effectively under house arrest, with direct orders
from SSI not to leave the compound for any reason short of an emergency.
- - -
September 2004. As the sun sets, Ryan drives back to Baghdad from a job on
LSA Anaconda, with two SSI engineers - and no guards. They have to stop for
gas on a stretch of road that the US military seems unable to secure,
famous for mujahedeen attacks. The gas station is a concrete hut next to a
pump. The power is out. Ryan waits, knowing that if any passerby calls his
location in to the insurgents, they will be there in minutes. Power
eventually returns, the car is refuelled, they continue on - and reach a
roadblock with no American supervision, which Ryan believes is a false
checkpoint run by insurgents. He huddles in the back of the car, clutching
his Browning pistol, ready to try to shoot his way out rather than be taken
hostage. They are waved through without inspection. Then the engineers
decide to get food, meaning they stop on a busy Baghdad street and wait in
the open for 15 nervewracking minutes.
Not long after this experience, Ryan spends a day flying around Iraq in an
air ambulance helicopter, installing satellite dishes at five different
locations. When they return to Anaconda, the Marine Corps captain who
accompanied him offers him a tent to stay in, indefinitely, in exchange for
technical support. The US military is rife with these unofficial exchanges
of services, widely known as "drug deals"; agreements which, while
technically against regulations, bypass the months and reams of paperwork
that would be necessary to do them officially. Ryan spends two months
living in this tent. He barely sees the SSI compound again.
- - -
October 2004. Tyler and Jayme reluctantly accept that they can no longer
safely stay in Baghdad. They move north to Arbil, in relatively free and
safe Kurdistan. The departure is wrenching. They are leaving friendships
forged by the searing intensity of a year's mutual struggle, and they don't
know when, if ever, they might return. Weeks later, insurgents bomb the
al-Jazeera headquarters in Baghdad, and Hassan, one of SSI's engineers, the
man who chauffered Tyler and Jayme on their wedding day, is killed in the
blast. Tyler is devastated. His team, his family, has been struck by
tragedy, and he can't be there for them.
In November, Ryan officially leaves SSI. According to Ryan, "It was clear,
with the security situation, that there was no way we could continue to
operate in the way we were operating." He says, since he was living on
Anaconda rather than at SSI, and doing satellite installs rather than
sales, while being paid on commission, there was no point in continuing as
an employee. Tyler says Ryan alienated the staff, treated the Iraqi
engineers badly, and was about to be fired when he left. One thing everyone
agrees on is that his exit was for the best.
With Ryan gone, and Tyler in Arbil, SSI is effectively shut out of the
military market. Despite a theoretical "buy Iraqi" policy, it is impossible
to get Iraqi engineers onto bases. Ryan finds himself living on an American
military base, with a few important contacts, a lot of technical knowhow, a
large prepaid contract that eliminated any need for startup funding - and a
technical advantage over every competitor.
- - -
If you want to call Ryan Lackey in his trailer in Iraq today, you dial a
Virginia phone number. The 703 area code just means that it's Virginia
where the sound of your voice is packetized into VOIP and shipped via fiber
to London, where Blue Iraq's teleport operator is located. This company
pops your voice packets off the Internet, encodes them for satellite
transmission, and beams them as 14 GHz radio waves from a five-metre dish
to a Greek satellite. The signal bounces down to Ryan's own 1.2-metre
iDirect dish, on a table weighed down with sandbags just behind his
trailer. The iDirect system, robust enough to handle Iraq's extreme heat,
dust, and wind, converts the signal back to IP packets and outputs them via
Ethernet to Ryan's VOIP phone.
If you talk to Ryan, the conversation will be scratchy, and you'll be aware
of a half-second delay, but the amazing thing is that you can talk to him
at all. iDirect, the latest generation of VSAT technology, can be difficult
to set up, which is why his competitors use older Hughes or Tachyon
technology, but it is the first that can manage usable VOIP. When you
compare the price Ryan charges - circa $1,000 per month for 1 megabit
download and 384 kilobit upload, plus 1-5 cents per minute for prioritized
VOIP traffic, for a dish generally shared by 20-30 people - to the
dollars-per-minute price of an analog satellite telephone, it's easy to see
where Blue Iraq's customers come from.
At its peak, SSI had nearly a hundred employees. Blue Iraq has three, and
almost no overhead. They pay no rent for their trailer on Anaconda. They
eat for free at military dining facilities, which on Anaconda serve good
food prepared by a horde of Halliburton-managed "TCNs" - Third Country
Nationals, mostly Filipino and Sri Lankan.
That doesn't mean business is easy. The technical problems are trivial; the
logistical problems are crippling. Ryan has to to buy hardware remotely,
have it shipped to Anaconda, and then get it to the customer. His clients
are official military facilities, private DoD contractors, or units of
troops who have all chipped in to pay for their own Internet access. If, as
is often the case, they are stationed at one of Iraq's dozens of other
American military bases, he flies there on a Blackhawk.
- - -
To book space on a Blackhawk from LSA Anaconda, you flash your DoD ID card
and sign up at the space-available tent. There are daily shuttle flights to
and from most of the scores of US military bases in Iraq. At your appointed
hour, a minibus takes you out to the flight line, where dozens of aircraft
await.
Inside the helicopter, there isn't quite enough room to stand. The door
gunners sit on padded seats behind the cockpit. Machine guns are mounted on
flexible arms in the open windows before them. Everything is painted black.
Behind the door gunners are three forward-facing seats; behind them, two
facing five-seat benches. The seats are canvas and metal pipe. The safety
buckle is circular, with apertures for the belt and two shoulder straps; to
release, you twist its propellor-shaped top.
Earplugs are distributed. The aircrew slide shut the windowed side doors
and power up the engine. The rotors start to turn. They are like
fifteen-foot knife blades with the sharp edge away from the rotation
direction, the last foot or so bent back about thirty degrees, forming a
vaguely swastika shape. Taxi out onto the runway, and up you go, as if in
an elevator, in sync with the other Blackhawk next to you - they almost
always travel in buddy-system pairs. The ground falls away. But not too
far. Blackhawks fly about 100 feet above the ground, at circa 200 miles per
hour.
The area outside Anaconda is much greener, a patchwork of farming fields
fissured with canals and pocked with clusters of palm trees. Then villages,
big L-shaped concrete blocks and crude brick buildings with thatch/mud
roofs. Roads, smooth and modern, well-trafficked. Herds of goats flee from
the helicopter noise. Lots of people wave; some keep their arms lowered and
stare; some just ignore the noise. There are wide muddy rivers, vast barren
brown patches, more roads, towns, farmland. At night, you can see street
lights in the larger towns, fluorescent tubes mounted on
hockey-stick-shaped poles. The door gunners occasionally drop stuffed
animals from their windows, part of a hearts-and-minds initiative.
It's a remarkably smooth ride. The whole aircraft vibrates, but it's a
soothing white-noise vibration rather than anything jarring. The journey is
exhilirating, landscape zooming past and disappearing under you, like a
dream of flying. As commutes go, it can't be beat.
But Blackhawk flights are risky. Passengers are required to wear helmets
and body armor. There are a few Forward Operating Bases that space-a
flights do not go to; Ryan has to ride to them on convoys, which is even
riskier. Then, when the dish is installed and functional, after the
paperwork is finally processed and Blue Iraq is paid, Ryan has to hitch a
ride to Dubai on cargo planes with unpredictable schedules, and physically
carry a large wad of cash into his bank.
Business as usual, it's not. But it suits Ryan. He doesn't plan to ever
move back to the USA, except possibly to finish his MIT degree. He is full
of ambitions. He wants to build a mobile phone network for Anaconda. If
Iraq stabilizes, he would like to build its first ATM network. If not, Blue
Iraq has plenty of room for expansion, into Afghanistan and, as he says
with a bleak grin, "other markets that the US military opens up for us." He
doubts those markets will be saturated any time soon.
- - -
Tyler and Jayme left Iraq in May 2005. The Arbil office failed; there
wasn't enough business in Kurdistan. They moved to London, where Tyler
still works for SSI. His time in Iraq has transformed him to the extent
that, like Ryan, he doesn't think he can ever move back to the USA. His
years of living hyperintensely, carrying a gun, building an organization
from scratch in a war zone, have distanced him from his home. His friends
seem to him to have stagnated. Their concerns seem trivial. And living with
real, known, tangible danger has bred contempt for what he calls America's
"culture of fear."
- - -
One of the few things Ryan and Tyler agree on is their scorn for America's
attempt to secure and rebuild Iraq. Tyler rages that the US military
"couldn't bother to protect" the road between Baghdad and Anaconda, or even
the four-kilometre stretch between Baghdad International and the Green
Zone. And he found that when most other Americans dealt with Iraqis, "they
were very insulting, they were often very condescending, and in many cases
I felt that they treated them like subhumans."
Both of them lament the sorry state of the electrical system. "Not having
power was probably the single biggest problem that created animosity among
Iraqis," Ryan says. "The US tried to rebuild it in the Western
industrialized-country model. The way Iraqis install a power system is,
they put a bunch of small generators on neighbourhood blocks, with power
cables running to everyone's house, and just sell them access directly. And
it's easy to have a market-driven pricing mechanism. But the US solution
was to give large US companies business here
If they'd had electricity
working within a month or two of the invasion, there probably wouldn't have
been near as much violence."
Iraqis desperately want to work. "You don't see people begging for money.
You see people selling gas for money, selling cigarettes by the side of the
road," Ryan says. Tyler agrees: "I interviewed a lot of people, and I never
met one that wasn't so painfully eager it almost hurt to turn them away."
But their economy remains paralyzed.
"The best way to deal with terrorism in the long run is to fix the
underlying conditions that create terrorism," Ryan says. "It's difficult to
fix their ideology, but it's easy to fix their infrastructure. But the US
has done a bad job
It's like a feedback loop. They got on the wrong side
of the feedback loop." Iraqi frustration breeds insurgents; insurgent
violence cripples reconstruction efforts; and the resulting lack of power,
communications, finances, and jobs breeds more frustration.
In the face of this feedback loop, American forces have withdrawn into
heavily guarded enclaves. SSI's modern, globalized, best-of-both-worlds
strategy, bringing Americans and Iraqis together to help rebuild the
shattered country, has faltered. Blue Iraq's neo-colonial approach, living
and working exclusively on military bases, continues to thrive. The seeds
Tyler has helped to plant - a team of crack engineers still erecting dishes
around the country - may someday help drag Iraq into the 21st century, one
satellite link at a time. But not until the rain of insurgent bombs and
bullets has ended. And neither Ryan nor Tyler expects that to happen for
years.
Jon Evans, rezendi.com
--
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
--- end forwarded text
--
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'