Author Archives: News Sources

A profile of India’s new prime minister, Narendra Damodardas Modi

Vinod K Jose writes: In the second week of January 2011, more than 10,000 businessmen from 100 countries descended on Gandhinagar for the fifth instalment of the biannual summit branded as “Vibrant Gujarat”—a marathon matchmaking ceremony of investment pledges and signings intended to bring business to Gujarat and, not incidentally, to make headlines while doing so. The 2011 mela did not disappoint on either count: by the time it was all over, the businessmen had promised investments in excess of $450 billion, the largest-ever sum for a single event in an emerging economy, and the media had obligingly trumpeted both the jaw-dropping figure and the unending chorus of corporate titans paying tribute to Gujarat and its chief minister.

On the first day of the summit—held inside the newly-constructed Mahatma Mandir, a monument to Gandhi in the unlikely form of a convention centre—the stage was preposterously crowded, in keeping with the usual tradition at Indian public events. Eighty people were seated on the dais in three rows, but all eyes were on the man at the centre, the organiser and unquestioned star of the show, Narendra Damodardas Modi. Wearing an ivory-coloured suit and his trademark rimless Bulgari glasses, with a neatly-trimmed grey beard, Modi looked every bit the serious man of action: he listened intently to every speaker, deep in concentration that was rarely broken by a smile. At his side were envoys from the two nations who had signed on as official partners for the fair, the Japanese ambassador and the Canadian high commissioner, and these men were in turn flanked by the two most prominent ambassadors from India Inc, Ratan Tata and Mukesh Ambani. Another three dozen corporate chairmen and CEOs were also on stage, smiling and satisfied, along with the prime minister of Rwanda and the president of the US-India Business Council, who announced from the stage that he wished to see the United States as a partner country at the next summit.

Vibrant Gujarat has been successfully marketed as a major global business event—so much so that Modi’s American lobbying and public relations firm, APCO Worldwide, recently won two international awards for its work promoting the project. The five summits since 2003 have generated investment pledges worth $920 billion for Gujarat, but their value for Modi can’t be measured by mere numbers. In fact, the figures themselves may be misleading: though Modi claims an implementation rate of greater than 60 percent for pledges made at the summits, an analysis of data from the state industry department suggests that only 25 percent of the promised investments have actually been made. While one-quarter of a trillion dollars is hardly small change, the considerable disparity between the image and the reality actually highlights the tactical genius behind the investment summits, which are the crowning achievement in one of the most extraordinary acts of reinvention in Indian politics.

Modi has turned the act of investing in what has long been one of India’s most business-friendly and industrialised states into a high-profile spectacle—and amplified the disclosure of annual investment inflows into singular triumphant announcements. In other words, Modi has successfully deployed the ancient mercantile and entrepreneurial energy of Gujarat to overhaul his own image.

Ten years after the anti-Muslim pogroms that killed more than 1,200 Gujaratis, Modi has managed to bury the past and resurrect his own extinct prospects for political advancement, replacing epithets like “fascist”, “mass murderer” and “Hindutva fanatic” with a title of his own choosing: Vikaas Purush, or Development Man. For the first families of Indian business, Modi is “the next leader of India”, “a visionary”, “the unstoppable horse”, and “the CEO who can lead the country”, to quote just a sampling of the effusive endorsements from men named Tata, Ambani and Mittal. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Everyone should know just how much the government lied to defend the NSA

Trevor Timm writes: If you blinked this week, you might have missed the news: two Senators accused the Justice Department of lying about NSA warrantless surveillance to the US supreme court last year, and those falsehoods all but ensured that mass spying on Americans would continue. But hardly anyone seems to care – least of all those who lied and who should have already come forward with the truth.

Here’s what happened: just before Edward Snowden became a household name, the ACLU argued before the supreme court that the Fisa Amendments Act – one of the two main laws used by the NSA to conduct mass surveillance – was unconstitutional.

In a sharply divided opinion, the supreme court ruled, 5-4, that the case should be dismissed because the plaintiffs didn’t have “standing” – in other words, that the ACLU couldn’t prove with near-certainty that their clients, which included journalists and human rights advocates, were targets of surveillance, so they couldn’t challenge the law. As the New York Times noted this week, the court relied on two claims by the Justice Department to support their ruling: 1) that the NSA would only get the content of Americans’ communications without a warrant when they are targeting a foreigner abroad for surveillance, and 2) that the Justice Department would notify criminal defendants who have been spied on under the Fisa Amendments Act, so there exists some way to challenge the law in court.

It turns out that neither of those statements were true – but it took Snowden’s historic whistleblowing to prove it. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

German government tightens rules for sensitive public IT contracts

Reuters reports: The German government has tightened tender rules for sensitive public IT contracts in the wake of reports about mass surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry said on Friday.

Last year former NSA contractor Edward Snowden exposed U.S. technology companies’ close cooperation with national intelligence agencies by leaking documents on the NSA’s access to the accounts of tens of thousands of net companies’ users.

German Interior Ministry spokesman Johannes Dimroth said suspect firms would be banned from taking on some public contracts in Germany if they had to hand over confidential data to foreign intelligence or security services. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Snowden fallout still echoes across cyber industry

Reuters reports: Revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden changed lives in the cyber community, from slowdowns in obtaining high-level security clearances to providing material for a “really good comedy routine.”

Experts at the Reuters Cybersecurity Summit this week were asked how Snowden, now living under asylum in Russia after exposing the National Security Agency’s phone and Internet spying programs in 2013, altered their worlds.

The creation of a mini “Snowden industry” is one on them.

“I give a lot more speeches,” said Michael Hayden, the former NSA and CIA director. “It has allowed someone of my background to comment on issues of national importance.”

The website of Leading Authorities, the speakers’ bureau that represents Hayden, shows the retired four-star general can command $20,000 to as much as $75,000 for a speech.

“It’s made my life busier,” deadpanned Robert Anderson, who steered the Snowden investigation as the FBI’s assistant director of counterintelligence. “What it has done for me is to very much broaden the way I look at an issue.”

Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist with the American Civil Liberties Union, lauded the spotlight that Snowden’s disclosures shone. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Fighting among pro-Assad groups points to factional future

The Daily Star reports: Fierce clashes erupted between pro-Assad militias from the National Defense Forces and the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party in Homs this week in an unusually public confrontation between allies.

The skirmish, which left one person dead according to activists, came in the wake of a landmark deal that saw the last remaining anti-Assad fighters surrender the city last week. The deal was seen as an important victory for Bashar Assad, crowning a string of recent gains and as he campaigns for re-election in a presidential vote to be held on June 3, on a platform of restoring security and stability.

In the days following the deal, Homs residents have flooded back to their battered and abandoned homes in the Old City, where the rebels had been penned in under an intense government siege for over two years. But the city remains deeply divided, and the days following the deal have also seen intense looting and vandalism by vengeful elements of NDF paramilitaries and others, according to dozens of reports circulated on social media and residents’ testimony.

While it remains unclear what triggered the firefight in the Hamadieh neighborhood of Homs, the incident has served to highlight the chaotic and acrimonious conditions in the city, and the challenges that factionalism and rivalry present to any lasting settlement.

Some reports suggested the battle broke out after NDF troops looted Christian homes. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The U.S. Intelligence Community doesn’t understand the world in which we live

Josh Kerbel writes: In 2012, the once-mighty Eastman-Kodak company declared bankruptcy. It was an event that should have reverberated strongly with the United States Intelligence Community (IC) — and not just due to the obvious connection between imaging and spying. Rather, it should have resonated because in Kodak the IC could have glimpsed a reflection of itself: an organization so captivated by its past that it was too slow in changing along with its environment.

To understand the IC’s similar captivation and lethargy — to remain focused on classified collection in an era of increasingly ubiquitous, useful and unclassified data — one must first understand the type of problem around which the modern IC business model remains designed: the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was fundamentally a collection problem. That is to say, it was a closed system (i.e., a discrete entity) with clear edges and a hierarchical governance structure. Given that nature, knowing what was happening in the Soviet Union required the use of classified means of collection — most of which the IC alone possessed.

Today, however, the IC no longer has the luxury of watching a single discrete entity that demands classified collection in order to obtain relevant data. There is a much more expansive range of interconnected and complex challenges. These challenges — economic contagion, viral political and social instability, resource competition, migration, climate change, transnational organized crime, pandemics, proliferation, cyber security, terrorism, etc. — are interdependent phenomena, not discrete ”things.” As such, they are less collection issues than cognitive ones. To put it differently: relevant data about all these issues is widely available—the real challenge is to make sense of it.

This, of course, is a very different world for the IC, one in which it has little experience. Consequently, the IC — unfortunately, but not surprisingly — does what it knows; it grafts its own legacy experience and expertise — classified collection — onto the new challenges that loom. Accordingly, terrorism (a broad phenomenon that needs to be thought about contextually) becomes — mistakenly — about terrorists (distinct things that need to be targeted for collection). Indeed, the whole slew of complex issues mentioned above get artificially and erroneously reduced to discrete chunks. Not only is this dangerously simplistic, it effectively puts the IC on a divergent path from the increasingly complex world it is tasked to understand. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

China, Russia on verge of gas deal

The Associated Press reports: China plans to sign a multibillion-dollar deal to buy Russian gas during a visit by President Vladimir Putin next week despite U.S. pressure to avoid undermining sanctions on Moscow over the Ukraine crisis.

Washington has appealed to Beijing to avoid making business deals with Russia, though American officials acknowledge the pressing energy needs of China, the world’s second-largest economy.

Negotiations that began more than a decade ago had stalled over price. But analysts say Moscow, isolated over its role in Ukraine, faces pressure to make concessions in exchange for an economic and political boost.

“We are still exchanging views with Moscow and we will try our best to ensure that this contract can be signed and witnessed by the two presidents during President Putin’s visit to China,” a deputy Chinese foreign minister, Cheng Guoping, told reporters on Thursday. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Steelworkers unite against separtists in eastern Ukraine

The New York Times reports: Thousands of steelworkers fanned out on Thursday through the city of Mariupol, establishing control over the streets and banishing the pro-Kremlin militants who until recently had seemed to be consolidating their grip on power, dealing a setback to Russia and possibly reversing the momentum in eastern Ukraine.

By late Thursday, miners and steelworkers had deployed in at least five cities, including the regional capital, Donetsk. They had not, however, become the dominant force there that they were in Mariupol, the region’s second-largest city and the site last week of a bloody confrontation between Ukrainian troops and pro-Russian militants.

While it was still far too early to say the tide had turned in eastern Ukraine, the day’s events were a blow to separatists who recently seized control here and in a dozen or so other cities and who held a referendum on independence on Sunday. Backed by the Russian propaganda machine and by 40,000 Russian troops just over the border, their grip on power seemed to be tightening every day.

But polls had indicated that a strong majority of eastern Ukrainians supported unity, though few were prepared to say so publicly in the face of armed pro-Russian militants. When President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia withdrew support for the separatists last week, calling for a delay in the referendum and for dialogue on Ukraine’s future, the political winds shifted, providing an opening that the country’s canny oligarchs could exploit. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Inside eastern Ukraine’s make-believe republics

The Daily Beast reports: Two months ago a band of chanting pro-Russian separatists marched past commuter traffic into the state treasury building in Donetsk—the east Ukrainian city they now say they rule following Sunday’s flawed secession referendum. Their first order of business: instructing startled officials to stop transferring the region’s tax money to Kiev and to give it to them instead.

Twelve days before, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych had fled Kiev, ousted after months-long protests by pro-European agitators. Revolution was in the air and now a bunch of pro-Russian protesters faced the state treasurer of Donetsk oblast, a province with 4.3 million people—10 percent of Ukraine’s population—and much of the country’s heavy industry. At first nervous, the portly state treasurer’s confidence grew as he realized the emphatic would-be revolutionaries were ignorant of the complexity of state finance and didn’t even realize revenues were not physically stored in the treasury but were deposited in various commercial bank accounts.

What started out as a confrontation turned swiftly into a noisy class on the intricacies of taxes and pensions, with the state treasurer switching from sitting defensively in his chair to standing up, smoking a cigarette and teaching.

“Would there be enough revenue to cover all the obligations in Donetsk without Kiev’s contribution?” the state treasurer asked them. And in a Saturday Night Live moment, the revolutionaries protested they were sure there would be.

Well, “pretty sure,” they amended.

The leader of the group, Pavel Gubarev, a man who declared himself the “people’s governor” of Donetsk oblast at a rally four days before, can be spotted in an online video of the confrontation student-like scribbling notes as the state treasurer lectures. The would-be revolutionaries are finally advised to open bank accounts and to set up a country before they can demand tax.

That surreal moment of revolutionary play-acting by a motley group of Moscow-backed insurrectionists is now being performed every day in what feels to increasingly frustrated locals like a make-believe state. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Putin’s Nixon strategy is just beginning and it’s going to get uglier

Mark Ames writes: It goes without saying that Putin didn’t plan this crisis to happen — he already had his man in power in Kyiv. But Putin did exploit the situation, turning a major humiliating defeat in February into a massive political victory within Russia by doing what the Silent Majority would’ve wanted Putin to do: Redress grievances, air out resentments nonstop against the West and against west Ukraine fascists, and screw whatever the West thinks.

There’s not much comfort here for any side in the West when you frame Putin’s actions through local politics. Here, in our proxy war way of framing Ukraine, either Putin’s a crazy evil empire-r looking to reestablish his empire, meaning we better stop him now; or Putin’s merely reacting defensively to our aggression (or, according to the faulty thinking of a lot of people sick of American interventionism, Putin is heroically defying the US Empire, acting as a counterweight).

What he’s doing is shoring up his new political base while tightening the screws on whatever remained of liberal freedom in Russia, taking control of the Internet, seizing control of the handful of opposition online media sites, and ramping up the culture war against liberals, gays, the decadent West… The fact that we, the US and EU and a few billionaires, funded violent regime change groups in bed with west Ukraine fascists and Russophobes has only made Putin’s domestic job easier. You can see it in the aftermath of the Odessa fire massacre that killed over 40 pro-Russian separatists: It shut up even Navalny.

The liberal-yuppie elites’ momentum is over. Putin’s popularity among the rest of the country has never been higher.

So if Putin is neither the defiant counterweight hero or the neo-Stalinist imperialist, but rather playing a Russian version of vicious Nixon politics, what should the West do?

That’s easy: Stay the Hell out of Russia’s way for awhile, its version of Nixon politics is just beginning, and it’s going to get uglier. Russia has a history of turning inward in ways that will strike us as feral and alien, something the abandoned Silent Majority will welcome, but no one else will. (Our sanctions only helped speed up that process of inward isolationism.)

America’s Silent Majority was crazy enough in the Nixon years: the Silent Majority cheered Nixon on when college students were gunned down on campuses; 80% of Americans sided with Lt. William Calley, the officer in charge of the My Lai massacre. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Ukraine civil war fears mount as volunteer units take up arms

The Guardian reports: The men, dressed in irregular fatigues and with balaclavas pulled over their heads, fingered their Kalashnikovs nervously and jumped at every unusual sound. Eager to aid their country’s military struggle, the so-called Donbas volunteer battalion was ready to fight, but appeared to be short on training.

The battalion commander, Semyon Semenchenko, a 40-year-old from Donetsk with a degree in film-making, insisted that he and all his men had combat experience, from the Ukrainian or Soviet armies. They are all volunteers, receiving zero salary from either the state or oligarchs, he said, claiming they live off their own savings and donations from patriotic Ukrainians, who transfer them money after reading about them on social media.

“Our state needs defending, and we decided that if the army could not do it, we should do it ourselves,” said Semenchenko, during a meeting with the Guardian outside the town of Mariupol, where his men were based and offering support to regular units of the Ukrainian army in their fight against armed separatists in the region.

With military operations inside Ukraine’s borders an unappealing prospect for many of the country’s professional soldiers, irregular units are springing up as Kiev struggles to wrest back control of Donetsk and Luhansk regions from the grip of pro-Russia fighters. They have been given semi-legitimacy by the Ukrainian authorities, grateful for any help they can get in their fight in the east. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Local media silenced in eastern Ukraine

AFP reports: Fiddling angrily with the radio in his car, Donetsk resident Oleksandr exclaims: “This is unbelievable! There used to be a Ukrainian radio station on this frequency, now it’s Russian!”

In Ukraine’s restive eastern region of Donetsk, where separatists are in control of several areas and have declared a “People’s Republic”, local media are being shut down, taken over and intimidated.

The pattern is always the same, said Sergei Garmash, who runs the local news website Ostrov: “Armed men have gone to the headquarters of media outlets — including ours — and demanded that programming be coordinated with them.”

And if the outlet refuses? The men threaten to “shut it down”, Garmash said.

Here in Donetsk the wider information war between pro-Moscow and pro-Kiev media over coverage of Ukraine’s crisis is playing out at the local level.

After taking over local media, the well-armed rebels have dismissed journalists, blocked access to offices and cut signals to Ukrainian stations — which are quickly replaced by Russian ones.

There have also been reports of abductions, equipment seizures and break-ins as the separatists seek to silence opposition to their efforts to bring eastern Ukraine into Russia. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Bill to curb NSA spying looks like change, but isn’t really

McClatchy reports: The bipartisan bill that aims to put serious curbs on the National Security Agency’s mass collection of Americans’ communications is being hailed by Republicans and Democrats as a big breakthrough.

It’s not.

“The bottom line: This is largely faux reform and a surveillance salve,” said Thomas Drake, a former NSA senior official turned whistle-blower who’s critical of the agency’s collection programs. “To date, neither the House nor Senate attempts go far enough.”

That’s not easy to discern, thanks to an outpouring of raves for the legislation. Democrats, Republicans and traditionally skeptical watchdog groups have put their muscle behind the USA Freedom Act.

The House of Representatives is expected to vote on its version of the bill next week, the first time since news about the surveillance broke last year that major legislation supported by top congressional leaders like this has come to the floor. The Senate might take up its own version as early as this summer.

The top Republican and Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee even issued a joint statement praising the bipartisan cooperation, a rarely seen trait around Congress these days.

But peek just past all the good will and there’s serious concern that Congress has much more to do. Not only are loopholes easy to find but also the government has other ways of collecting the data. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

NSA may be putting Israeli security interests above U.S., new document reveals

Haaretz reports: A document suggesting that the U.S. National Security Agency may put the interests of Israel above those of the United States was released Wednesday by journalist Glenn Greenwald.

The document is one of the many slides leaked by NSA defector Edward Snowden, currently a fugitive from American law in Moscow.

Greenwald, who published many of Snowden’s revelations over the last year, released his book “No Place to Hide” on Wednesday. Concurrently with the release of the book, Greenwald made public slides that Snowden obtained from the NSA. One of them deals with intelligence relations with Israel.

“Balancing the SIGINT exchange equally between U.S. and Israeli needs has been a constant challenge in the last decade; it arguably tilted heavily in favor of Israeli security concerns. 9/11 came, and went, with NSA’s only true Third Party CT relationship being driven almost totally by the needs of the partner,” one slide reads.

Another slide states, “The Israelis are extraordinarily good SIGINT partners for us, but … they target us to learn our positions on Middle East problems. A NIE [National Intelligence Estimate] ranked them as the third most aggressive intelligence service against the U.S.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Who watches the watchers? Big Data goes unchecked

Politico reports: The National Security Agency might be tracking your phone calls. But private industry is prying far more deeply into your life.

Commercial data brokers know if you have diabetes. Your electric company can see what time you come home at night. And tracking companies can tell where you go on weekends by snapping photos of your car’s license plate and cataloging your movements.

Private companies already collect, mine and sell as many as 75,000 individual data points on each consumer, according to a Senate report. And they’re poised to scoop up volumes more, as technology unleashes a huge wave of connected devices — from sneaker insoles to baby onesies to cars and refrigerators — that quietly track, log and analyze our every move.

Congress and the administration have moved to rein in the National Security Agency in the year since Edward Snowden disclosed widespread government spying. But Washington has largely given private-sector data collection a free pass. The result: a widening gap in oversight as private data mining races ahead. Companies are able to scoop up ever more information — and exploit it with ever greater sophistication — yet a POLITICO review has found deep reluctance in D.C. to exercise legislative, regulatory or executive power to curb the big business of corporate cybersnooping.

The inertia — and lack of a serious legislative push — on private-sector data mining has several causes. Many Republicans are averse to any new regulation of business. Many Democrats are skittish about alienating campaign donors in Silicon Valley. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Greenwald sells movie rights of Snowden story to Sony Pictures

The New York Times reports: After a long, slow haul, the film rights to Glenn Greenwald’s book about Edward J. Snowden and his revelations about electronic surveillance by United States security officials have found a home, at Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Sony said on Wednesday that it had acquired rights to Mr. Greenwald’s book, “No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the U. S. Surveillance State,” for the producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli. Mr. Wilson and Ms. Broccoli are known for their work on James Bond films like “Skyfall” and “Quantum of Solace,” both of which were released by Sony and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Facebooktwittermail