Author Archives: News Sources

Putin’s counter-revolution

f13-iconJames Meek writes: The Russians and Ukrainians of the 1990s were able to temper regret at the collapse of the USSR with their own knowledge of the dismembered country’s shortcomings. A generation later, this is less and less the case. Many of the most articulate and thoughtful Russians and Ukrainians, those of middle age who knew the realities of Soviet life and later prospered in the post-Soviet world, have moved abroad, gone into a small business or been intimidated: in any case they have been taken out of the political arena. In Russia and Russophone Ukraine the stage is left to neo-Soviet populists who propagate the false notion of the USSR as a paradisiac Russian-speaking commonwealth, benignly ruled from Moscow, a natural continuum of the tsarist empire, disturbed only by Nazi invaders to whom ‘the west’ are heirs and the only obstacle to its re-creation. If you were born after 1985 you have no remembered reality to measure against this false vision, just as you have no way to situate those charming Soviet musical comedies of the 1960s and 1970s, idyllic portrayals of an idealised Russophone socialism, brightly coloured and fun, propaganda now in a way they weren’t when they were made. This is the context that has made it possible for Vladimir Putin and his government to sell Russia’s opportunistic invasion of Ukraine to his own people and to Ukrainian neo-Soviets: the idea that it undoes what should never have been done, an artificial division of Russian-speaking Eurasia by fascists/the West/America/rabid Ukrainian nationalists – in neo-Soviet discourse, avatars of a single anti-Russian monster.

The truth is that Russia and Ukraine have been reunited for a long time, in a corrupt mosaic dominated by Moscow. Putin didn’t begin invading Ukraine to bring it back into the fold but to stop it escaping. He established a patriarchal-oligarchic police state in Russia; the now universally despised Ukrainian president-in-exile, Viktor Yanukovich, was well on his way to establishing one in Ukraine; the leaders of Belarus and the Central Asian republics have established similar repressive polities. Russophone Ukrainians have real fears about Ukraine’s new leaders. Putin’s great fear is that the people of a future better Ukraine might inspire an entirely different unification with their East Slav brethren on his side of the border – a common cause of popular revolt against him and other leaders like him. The revolution on Maidan Nezalezhnosti – Independence Square in Ukrainian – is the closest yet to a script for his own downfall. In that sense the invasion is a counter-revolution by Putin and his government against Russians and Ukrainians alike – against East Slav resistance as a whole.

The Maidan revolution wasn’t a purely ethnic Ukrainian uprising, although ethnic Ukrainians seem to have taken the lead in storming police lines. In the week I spent in Kiev in the immediate aftermath of the revolt I met no one who objected to my speaking Russian. On Maidan there are ethnic Russians speaking Ukrainian and ethnic Ukrainians speaking Russian. In one of the sagging khaki tents pitched on the square I met Vladimir Malyshev, a 44-year-old from St Petersburg, who came to the city to join the demonstrations late last year after a period spent in the anti-Putin movement in Russia. ‘It’s the one form of struggle that seems possible against the particular kind of power that’s appeared in the post-Soviet space: these gangs of criminals and bandits – they can be fought by gathering a large enough group of people to defy them. You can’t bribe or destroy this force. My experience here confirmed that this was possible. It happened.’ [Continue reading…]

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Putin’s dystopian vision of a united, patriotic Russia

o13-iconMaxim Trudolyubov writes: President Vladimir Putin’s decision to slip soldiers in unmarked uniforms into Crimea this month and escalate the race for control over other Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine shows that former assumptions about Moscow’s political behavior no longer apply. The United States and the European Union may still consider sanctions as a tool to check Moscow’s foreign policy, but to Mr. Putin, the threat of such sanctions means little: He has already factored them into his plans.

The chain of events the Kremlin has set in motion contains a message not only for Western policy makers, but also for the Russian plutocrats and corrupt officials who keep much of their wealth in the West. Mr. Putin is letting his Western adversaries know that he is telling his Russian enemies and financially corrupt friends: “If you won’t straighten up and behave as patriots, I am ready to throw you under the bus. If the laws prohibiting you to feather your nests abroad or to serve as ‘foreign agents’ do not persuade you, Western sanctions will do the job.”

After the Russia-supported president of Ukraine, Viktor F. Yanukovych, fled his country on Feb. 22, the Kremlin went into emergency mode. Since then, key decisions have been made by a group of Russia’s top security officials. The diplomatic, military and business establishments have been pushed to the side. [Continue reading…]

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How the Russia Today propaganda apparatus operates

a13-iconBuzzFeed reports: Staci Bivens knew something was seriously wrong when her bosses at Russia Today asked her to put together a story alleging that Germany — Europe’s economic powerhouse — was a failed state.

“It was me and two managers and they had already discussed what they wanted,” Bivens, an American who worked in RT’s Moscow headquarters from 2009 through 2011, said of a meeting she’d had to discuss the segment before a planned reporting trip to Germany. “They called me in and it was really surreal. One of the managers said, ‘The story is that the West is failing, Germany is a failed state.’”

Bivens, who had spent time in Germany, told the managers the story wasn’t true — the term “failed state” is reserved for countries that fail to provide basic government services, like Somalia or Congo, not for economically advanced, industrialized nations like Germany. They insisted. Bivens refused. RT flew a crew to Germany ahead of Bivens, who was flown in later to do a few standups and interviews about racism in Germany. It was the beginning of the end of her RT career.

“At that point I’d been there for a little bit and I’d had enough of the insanity,” Bivens said. She stayed until the end of her contract in 2011 and didn’t make an effort to renew it.

Judging by interviews with seven former and current employees, Bivens’ story is typical. [Continue reading…]

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Former Egyptian general calls promise of free elections a ‘farce’

n13-iconThe New York Times reports: Critics of the military takeover here often say the generals’ promise of free elections is little more than a bad joke. Now a prominent former military man who cheered the takeover seems to agree: Ahmed Shafik, a former general and prime minister and the runner-up in the last presidential election, has called it a “farce.”

Mr. Shafik had not planned on making his opinion quite so public. But these days in Egypt, conversations are often not as private as they seem.

“I know very well they will fix all the ballot boxes,” Mr. Shafik said in a leaked recording of a private conversation that he authenticated Thursday. He said in the recording that he would not run because the new government was rigging the race in favor of Field Marshal Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, who led the ouster of President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood last summer and is expected to enter and win the election to succeed him.

“I have taken myself out of this loop because the election is going to be a farce,” Mr. Shafik said, adding that “they will fix everything for him” and “this is going to be a comedy show.”

His comments stunned Egypt because Mr. Shafik comes from the same military elite as Field Marshal Sisi. Questioning the field marshal’s candidacy is almost heretical in the pro-military and anti-Islamist circles both officers represent, and Mr. Shafik’s comments were a rare hint of possible dissent among the business and military elite. [Continue reading…]

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U.N. refugee chief warns world powers not to forget Syria conflict

n13-iconn13-iconReuters reports: The head of the United Nation’s refugee agency said on Tuesday it must be ready in case Ukraine’s crisis causes refugees to flee Crimea, but his biggest worry is that “a total disaster” could occur if the international community diverts its attention away from Syria’s conflict.

Antonio Guterres, the head of the U.N.’s High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), said in an interview that little progress was being made in efforts by the United States and Russia, now at loggerheads over Ukraine, to bring Syria’s warring sides together after the collapse of talks in Geneva last month.

“In the moment in which we need the most relevant countries in the world to be able to come together to narrow their differences and to try to find a way to move into peace for Syria, this tension around Ukraine will obviously not help,” Guterres told Reuters while visiting Washington to discuss Syria’s refugee crisis.

“I hope that those that have the most important responsibility in world affairs will be able to understand that forgetting Syria will be a total disaster,” he said. [Continue reading…]

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Ukraine crisis: Six reasons why U.S. use of military forces is unthinkable

o13-iconLoren Thompson writes: The interim prime minister of Ukraine was in Washington this week, and according to the New York Times, he was asking just one thing of U.S. leaders. He said as a signatory to a 1994 treaty guaranteeing the security of Ukraine, America “must defend our independent, sovereign state.” Some members of Congress sound like they agree, especially Republicans who are using Washington’s slow response to Russian occupation of the Crimea as the latest evidence that President Obama is weak when it comes to dealing with America’s enemies.

If Obama looks weak, it is mainly because he sees the danger of decisive action in a place that matters far more to Russia than America. Over the last two decades, the United States has gotten used to fighting enemies with modest military capabilities and crackpot leaders, but Russia is a much more imposing player. If Washington somehow stumbled into a military confrontation with Moscow, the U.S. would probably lose and in the process run huge risks to its larger interests.

Most Americans seem to understand this — a CNN poll this week found three-quarters of respondents opposed to even giving military aid to Kiev, with far fewer backing use of U.S. forces. Nonetheless, some hardliners seem to think America’s military might play a role in forcing Russian leader Vladimir Putin to back away from what they see as a return to the expansionist foreign policies of the Cold War era. Here are six reasons why using U.S. military power in the current crisis would be a strategic miscalculation of epic proportions. [Continue reading…]

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Editor of independent Russian news site replaced with pro-Kremlin figure

n13-iconThe Guardian reports: In what appears to be part of a growing state crackdown on liberal media, the editor of a major independent Russian news website has been replaced by a Kremlin-friendly editor after running an interview with a controversial Ukrainian nationalist.

Lenta.ru announced on its site on Wednesday that Galina Timchenko, who had worked there since its founding in 1999, would immediately be replaced by Alexei Goreslavsky, the former editor of the pro-Kremlin internet publication Vzglyad. Goreslavsky is currently deputy general director for external communications at the Afisha-Rambler-SUP media holding that owns Lenta.ru.

The news came only hours after the state communications watchdog issued a warning to Lenta.ru over a recent interview with Dmytro Yarosh, leader of the Ukrainian ultranationalist paramilitary group Right Sector, which played a key role in the protests that ousted President Viktor Yanukovych. The Investigative Committee of Russia, the country’s main federal investigator, has charged Yarosh, who recently announced he would run for president in Ukraine’s May elections, with inciting terrorism over a post on a Right Sector social network page that called on Russia’s most-wanted terrorist, Doku Umarov, to “activate his struggle.”

But a letter posted on Lenta.ru and signed by 69 employees and correspondents said Goreslavsky’s appointment amounted to “direct pressure on the Lenta.ru editorial staff” and a violation of censorship laws. Lenta.ru’s editorial policy, which embraced controversial topics and was often critical of the Kremlin, won the site a wide readership, including 13.6 million unique visitors last month, according to Rambler.ru rankings.

“This is absolutely a political situation,” said Lenta.ru’s night editor, Pavel Borisov. “Galina Timchenko was the best editor-in-chief I ever had. I don’t plan to work with Goreslavsky.” The change in editor came with no warning, he added. [Continue reading…]

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Across Turkey, new unrest as Berkin Elvan is buried

Berkin-Elvan

The New York Times reports: An enormous outpouring of grief and antigovernment rage during the funeral procession for a teenage boy felled by a police tear-gas canister turned into another mass confrontation with the Turkish authorities on Wednesday as mourners clashed with antiriot squads in Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir. At least one person was killed.

The new unrest came a day after protesters battled with police officers in at least 15 cities over news that the boy, Berkin Elvan, 15, had died. He had been comatose with head trauma since June, when Turkey was first engulfed with antigovernment protests against the decade-old tenure of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is seen as increasingly authoritarian.

The boy, who was struck by a tear-gas canister while buying bread, has become the newest symbol of simmering anger at Mr. Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party, known as AKP, and over the tough police repression of political dissent and a recent corruption scandal that has entangled the top echelons of the ruling party.

“Here’s a thief! Here’s a murderer!” and “Mothers’ anger will strangle murderers!” funeral marchers screamed as they walked, blowing whistles. “Berkin’s murderer is AKP’s police!”

More than 100,000 people converged in Istanbul to participate in the boy’s funeral procession to a cemetery. The burial itself was peaceful as hundreds of riot police were deployed nearby.

“He was our hope, he was our miracle, he was our son, brother, everything. We were waiting for him to wake up but we unfortunately lost him,” said Damla Atalay, 32, a lawyer, who marched in a convoy behind the coffin. “We are here because this little boy is part of us, it could happen to any of us, to our son, brother.” [Continue reading…]

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Abbas accuses Dahlan of involvement in six murders

n13-iconReuters reports: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has accused one of his main rivals, Mohammed Dahlan, of involvement in six murders, hinting that he might also be behind the death of former leader Yasser Arafat.

Dahlan, who lives in exile in the Gulf, denied the allegations of his arch foe Abbas, their bitter row now playing out publicly across the Palestinian media and on social media.

Once a prominent official in Abbas’s Western-backed Fatah movement, Dahlan was ousted from the group in 2011 following accusations of corruption. He denied the charges and remains a powerful figure on the sidelines, forging ties with numerous Arab leaders and maintaining links with the splintered Fatah.

Abbas lashed out at Dahlan, who is regularly cited as a possible future president, during a Fatah meeting earlier this week, with his comments later released to the press. [Continue reading…]

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Ukraine, Russia, and the differing conceptions of fascism

a13-iconJeremy Hicks writes: All parties have been drawing historical analogies to interpret the Ukraine crisis: Hillary Clinton and western commentators have compared Putin to Hitler, the annexation of Crimea to the Sudetenland, and referred to appeasement. The Russians insist that the pro-European Ukrainians are fascists.

While the presence of the genuine neo-Nazis of the Svoboda party in Ukraine’s interim government is undeniable, it seems paradoxical that both the West and Russia legitimise their positions by reference to World War II, and opposition to the Nazis. To understand this situation better, it helps to examine quite how different Russian and Western memories of the war really are.

As the West recalls it, World War II saw democracy take a stand against tyranny – but only after prevaricating through appeasement, at the immediate cost of Czechoslovakia and the ultimate price of the Holocaust. The war’s main lesson is the importance of universal human rights, and the need to oppose expansionist dictators intent on small annexations or lesser crimes before they invade at will and commit mass murder.

From the Russian perspective, when it is discussed at all, appeasement is seen as confirmation of Western hypocrisy, and as the factor that drove the Soviets to sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler in self-defence. But in Russia, the real story of World War II begins with the Nazi invasion of the USSR in June 1941. The victims of the unchecked rise of Nazism are not so much the Jewish population of occupied Europe, but rather Russia and Russians. They were both the Nazis’ primary victims and the principal heroes of their defeat. Fascism is therefore not seen in terms of its anti-Semitic and anti-democratic dimensions, but as an anti-Russian phenomenon springing from Western Europe. [Continue reading…]

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Air links between Crimea and Kiev are severed

The New York Times reports: The airport in the regional capital of Simferopol was closed on Tuesday to all flights except those heading to and from Moscow, in the boldest display yet of Russia’s tightening control over Crimea.

The announcement that air links had been severed between Crimea and the Ukrainian capital of Kiev raised the possibility that the peninsula might be closed off indefinitely from the rest of Ukraine, and it immediately prompted a sellout of tickets for connecting flights on Aeroflot, the Russian national carrier.

Even as Russia consolidated its grip on the embattled peninsula, diplomatic efforts between the Obama administration and the Kremlin appeared stalled, with the two sides continuing to engage in menacing military exercises and trade threats of economic retaliation. [Continue reading…]

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How the NSA plans to infect ‘millions’ of computers with malware

f13-iconRyan Gallagher and Glenn Greenwald report: Top-secret documents reveal that the National Security Agency is dramatically expanding its ability to covertly hack into computers on a mass scale by using automated systems that reduce the level of human oversight in the process.

The classified files – provided previously by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden – contain new details about groundbreaking surveillance technology the agency has developed to infect potentially millions of computers worldwide with malware “implants.” The clandestine initiative enables the NSA to break into targeted computers and to siphon out data from foreign Internet and phone networks.

The covert infrastructure that supports the hacking efforts operates from the agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, and from eavesdropping bases in the United Kingdom and Japan. GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, appears to have played an integral role in helping to develop the implants tactic.

In some cases the NSA has masqueraded as a fake Facebook server, using the social media site as a launching pad to infect a target’s computer and exfiltrate files from a hard drive. In others, it has sent out spam emails laced with the malware, which can be tailored to covertly record audio from a computer’s microphone and take snapshots with its webcam. The hacking systems have also enabled the NSA to launch cyberattacks by corrupting and disrupting file downloads or denying access to websites.

The implants being deployed were once reserved for a few hundred hard-to-reach targets, whose communications could not be monitored through traditional wiretaps. But the documents analyzed by The Intercept show how the NSA has aggressively accelerated its hacking initiatives in the past decade by computerizing some processes previously handled by humans. The automated system – codenamed TURBINE – is designed to “allow the current implant network to scale to large size (millions of implants) by creating a system that does automated control implants by groups instead of individually.” [Continue reading…]

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‘What does ISP mean?’ — how government officials are flunking security challenges

a13-iconThe Guardian reports: One of the world’s leading cyberwarfare experts has warned of the damaging lack of government literacy in cybersecurity issues, pointing out that some senior officials don’t know how to use email, and that one US representative about to negotiate cybersecurity with China asked him what an “ISP” was.

Speaking at the SXSW festival, Dr Peter W Singer, director of the Center for 21st Century Security & Intelligence, cited a 2014 poll by the Pew research institute that found Americans are more afraid of cyberattack than attack by Iran or North Korea, climate change, the rise of China or authoritarian Russia.

Sketching out the scale of technology in our lives, Singer said that 40 trillion emails are sent a year, that 30 trillion websites now exist and that 9 new pieces of malware are discovered every second. He claimed that 97% of Fortune 500 companies have admitted they’ve been hacked – the other 3% just aren’t ready to admit it yet.

The consequent rise in cybercrime and state-sponsored attacks has not gone unnoticed. 100 nations now have cyber command, and the Pentagon’s own briefings, which contained the word ‘cyber’ 12 times during 2012, have already mentioned it 147 times so far this year.

Yet former head of US homeland security Janet Napolitano once told Singer. “Don’t laugh, but I just don’t use email at all,” Singer recalled. “It wasn’t a fear of privacy or security – it’s because she just didn’t think it was useful. A supreme court justice also told me ‘I haven’t got round to email yet’ – and this is someone who will get to vote on everything from net neutrality to the NSA negotiations.” [Continue reading…]

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How a shift in the FISA court secretly facilitated mass surveillance

n13-iconThe New York Times reports: Ten months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the nation’s surveillance court delivered a ruling that intelligence officials consider a milestone in the secret history of American spying and privacy law. Called the “Raw Take” order — classified docket No. 02-431 — it weakened restrictions on sharing private information about Americans, according to documents and interviews.

The administration of President George W. Bush, intent on not overlooking clues about Al Qaeda, had sought the July 22, 2002, order. It is one of several still-classified rulings by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court described in documents provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor.

Previously, with narrow exceptions, an intelligence agency was permitted to disseminate information gathered from court-approved wiretaps only after deleting irrelevant private details and masking the names of innocent Americans who came into contact with a terrorism suspect. The Raw Take order significantly changed that system, documents show, allowing counterterrorism analysts at the N.S.A., the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. to share unfiltered personal information.

The leaked documents that refer to the rulings, including one called the “Large Content FISA” order and several more recent expansions of powers on sharing information, add new details to the emerging public understanding of a secret body of law that the court has developed since 2001. The files help explain how the court evolved from its original task — approving wiretap requests — to engaging in complex analysis of the law to justify activities like the bulk collection of data about Americans’ emails and phone calls.

“These latest disclosures are important,” said Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. “They indicate how the contours of the law secretly changed, and they represent the transformation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court into an interpreter of law and not simply an adjudicator of surveillance applications.” [Continue reading…]

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Conflict of interest: CIA lawyer at center of computer snooping clash

n13-iconThe Associated Press reports: The senior CIA lawyer accused by the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee of trying to intimidate the panel over its investigation into secret prisons and brutal interrogations of terrorism suspects was himself involved in the controversial programs. The attorney, the CIA’s top lawyer, is cited by name for his role more than 1,600 times in the Senate’s unpublished, 6,300-page investigative report, according to the panel’s chairwoman, Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

Until the California Democrat’s extraordinary Senate speech Tuesday, the CIA’s senior deputy general counsel, Robert Eatinger, was little known outside a small cadre of highly specialized national security lawyers. He has maintained a low profile in a legal career that has spanned two decades at the CIA and in the Navy. But Feinstein’s remarkable accusations instantly made Eatinger famous — or infamous — over a simmering constitutional dispute that threatens to engulf two branches of the government.

Eatinger had filed a formal criminal complaint earlier this year on behalf of the CIA asking the Justice Department to investigate whether the Senate Intelligence Committee had improperly obtained classified CIA documents for an as-yet unreleased Senate report on the agency’s use of waterboarding and other abusive tactics against al-Qaida prisoners during the George W. Bush administration.

Eatinger’s move boomeranged Tuesday. [Continue reading…]

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How the CIA snooped on the Senate intelligence committee

f13-iconArs Technica reports: It sounds like something out of Homeland: at a secret location somewhere off the campus of the CIA, the agency leases a space and hires contractors to run a top-secret network, which it fills with millions of pages of documents dumped from the agency’s internal network. But that’s apparently exactly what the CIA did for more than three years as part of an agreement to share data with the staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on its controversial detention and interrogation program.

And it’s also how the agency was able to gain access to the computers and shared network drive used by committee staffers in a search that Senator Diane Feinstein contended yesterday crossed multiple legal and constitutional boundaries. In a speech on the Senate floor yesterday morning, Feinstein detailed the strange arrangement and accused the CIA of breaking its agreement with the committee on multiple occasions. She also accused the agency of reportedly filing a criminal report against committee staffers with the Justice Department in “a potential effort to intimidate this staff.”

The details shared by Feinstein show the length to which the CIA went to try to control the scope of the data that was shared with Senate staffers — and still managed to give them more than some officials in the agency wanted to. Even with multiple levels of oversight, the CIA managed to hand over the data along with an internal review of that very data, which included the agency’s own damning assessment of the interrogation program. [Continue reading…]

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