Iranian human rights activist given six years in prison for hand-written unpublished story

IranWire reports: On Tuesday, October 4, writer and human rights activist Golrokh Ebrahimi received a strange phone call ordering her to present herself at Evin Prison by noon on Wednesday evening to start serving her prison sentence. By law, authorities much convey such an order by way of a written summons. But that was not the only unusual thing about the call.

“The arresting officer used the phone of Navid Kamran, a codefendant of mine,” Ebrahimi told IranWire hours before presenting herself at Evin. “They had gone to his shop to arrest him and used his phone. When I answered the call, the man who introduced himself as an agent of the Centre for the Implementation of Sentences said that I must present myself to serve the sentence. I said that I had received no official summons or a call from Evin Court. ‘You are using my friend’s phone to call me and it might be a joke,’ I said. ‘I don’t know you and I have no idea who is talking to me.’ He answered back that ‘you might think this is a joke but we are here to arrest your friend and you must present yourself at Evin’s court right away.’ I said that I could not get there by the end of business hours but perhaps I could do it the next day. He said that I would be arrested if I did not present myself by the next day.”

Ebrahimi’s ordeal began when the Revolutionary Guards arrested her along with her husband, Arash Sadeghi, at his workplace in Tehran on September 6, 2014. The Guards had no arrest warrant, but took the couple to their home, ransacked the place, and confiscated their computers, CDs, and notes. Among the confiscated items was a story about the punishment, under Islamic law, of death by stoning. According to a report from Amnesty International, “The story describes the emotional reaction of a young woman who watches the film, The Stoning of Soraya M, which tells the true story of a young woman stoned to death for adultery — and becomes so enraged that she burns a copy of the Quran.” [Continue reading…]

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Donald Trump’s threat to reject election results alarms scholars

Max Fisher writes: Donald J. Trump’s suggestions that he might reject the results of the American election as illegitimate have unnerved scholars on democratic decline, who say his language echoes that of dictators who seize power by force and firebrand populists who weaken democracy for personal gain.

“To a political scientist who studies authoritarianism, it’s a shock,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor at Harvard. “This is the stuff that we see in Russia and Venezuela and Azerbaijan and Malawi and Bangladesh, and that we don’t see in stable democracies anywhere.”

Throughout October, Mr. Trump has claimed, without evidence, that the vote will be “rigged” and “taken away from us.” At the final presidential debate, he refused to say he would accept the election’s outcome, and later joked at a rally that he would accept the results “if I win.”

In weak democracies around the world, scholars warned Friday, political leaders have used the same language to erode popular faith in democracy — often intending to incite violence that will serve their political aims, and sometimes to undo democracy entirely.

The United States is not at risk of such worst-case scenarios. American democratic norms and institutions are too strong for any one politician to destabilize. But Mr. Trump’s language, the scholars say, follows a similar playbook and could pose real, if less extreme, risks. [Continue reading…]

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Trump Organization is using horribly insecure email servers

Zack Whittaker reports: If you thought Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server was a mess, Donald Trump’s company is running email servers that look like a dumpster fire by comparison.

Security researcher Kevin Beaumont said in a tweet on Monday that the Trump Organization, the parent company of the alleged billionaire’s portfolio of realty, steaks, golf, and hotels, is running a set of email servers that are horribly outdated and long past the end-of-life, meaning they haven’t received security patches in over a year.

Beaumont said he found that the company’s email system is running the decade-old Windows Server 2003 and Internet Information Servers 6, both of which haven’t been supported in over a year.

Both sets of software are so old that Microsoft no longer patches even known security vulnerabilities. Instead, users should upgrade. Patches remain as one of the best ways for preventing hackers from exploiting security flaws.

A spokesperson for Trump, now the Republican presidential candidate, could not be reached on Tuesday. [Continue reading…]

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The cult of the expert — and how it collapsed

Sebastian Mallaby writes: On Tuesday 16 September 2008, early in the afternoon, a self-effacing professor with a neatly clipped beard sat with the president in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. Flanked by a square-shouldered banker who had recently run Goldman Sachs, the professor was there to tell the elected leader of the world’s most powerful country how to rescue its economy. Following the bankruptcy of one of the nation’s storied investment banks, a global insurance company was now on the brink, but drawing on a lifetime of scholarly research, the professor had resolved to commit $85bn of public funds to stabilising it.

The sum involved was extraordinary: $85bn was more than the US Congress spent annually on transportation, and nearly three times as much as it spent on fighting Aids, a particular priority of the president’s. But the professor encountered no resistance. “Sometimes you have to make the tough decisions,” the president reflected. “If you think this has to be done, you have my blessing.”

Later that same afternoon, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, the bearded hero of this tale, showed up on Capitol Hill, at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. At the White House, he had at least been on familiar ground: he had spent eight months working there. But now Bernanke appeared in the Senate majority leader’s conference room, where he and his ex-Wall Street comrade, Treasury secretary Hank Paulson, would meet the senior leaders of both chambers of Congress. A quiet, balding, unassuming technocrat confronted the lions of the legislative branch, armed with nothing but his expertise in monetary plumbing.

Bernanke repeated his plan to commit $85bn of public money to the takeover of an insurance company.

“Do you have 85bn?” one sceptical lawmaker demanded.

“I have 800bn,” Bernanke replied evenly – a central bank could conjure as much money as it deemed necessary.

But did the Federal Reserve have the legal right to take this sort of action unilaterally, another lawmaker inquired?

Yes, Bernanke answered: as Fed chairman, he wielded the largest chequebook in the world – and the only counter-signatures required would come from other Fed experts, who were no more elected or accountable than he was. Somehow America’s famous apparatus of democratic checks and balances did not apply to the monetary priesthood. Their authority derived from technocratic virtuosity. [Continue reading…]

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Brexit: Leading banks set to pull out of UK early next year

The Guardian reports: Britain’s biggest banks are preparing to relocate out of the UK in the first few months of 2017 amid growing fears over the impending Brexit negotiations, while smaller banks are making plans to get out before Christmas.

The dramatic claim is made in the Observer by the chief executive of the British Bankers’ Association, Anthony Browne, who warns “the public and political debate at the moment is taking us in the wrong direction”.

A source close to Brexit secretary David Davis said he and the chancellor Philip Hammond had last week sought to offer reassurance that they were determined to secure the status of the City of London.

However, the government’s stated intention to take control of the freedom of movement into the UK is widely recognised among officials to be a hammer blow to any chance of retaining the present terms of trade for banks, particularly given the bellicose rhetoric of major politicians on the continent. [Continue reading…]

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The crew are cutting each other’s throats on Mrs May’s leaking ship

Andrew Rawnsley writes: It is the classic Spitting Image sketch of Margaret Thatcher in her pomp. The satirists created a scene in which the rubber puppet of the prime minster sat at a restaurant table surrounded by her cabinet. She orders raw steak. The waitress then asks: “And what about the vegetables?” Motioning to her cringing ministers, Mrs T replies: “They’ll have the same as me.”

That was a caricature. In his recently published memoir, Ken Clarke contends that the “Iron Lady” liked ministers who argued back and she promoted him even though they had many humdinger rows. But the Thatcher legend remains very lively in the Tory imagination. It was played up to by Theresa May when she arrived at Number 10 just over 100 days ago. “Iron Mayden” and “the new Maggie” were among the welcoming headlines in the rightwing press. Her team didn’t object. They did not discourage anyone from portraying her as a reincarnation of the dominatrix of folklore.

In her early days at Number 10, there was an ambition to achieve a grip over government more steely than that achieved by Mrs T even at the zenith of her power. Ministers reported that they were being forbidden to make any statement or give any interview unless it had first been cleared through Number 10. I wrote at the time that Mrs May would discover that she would not be able to impose such a stifling level of control. What I did not foresee – and neither did she nor anyone else – is just how rapidly cabinet cohesion would unravel. Discipline is now breaking down in a way that Mrs T would never have tolerated.

There are almost daily reveals of confidential papers prepared for internal discussions between ministers, especially of anything touching on Brexit. Mrs May says she will not give a “running commentary” on how she plans to approach the negotiations. We don’t need one because we have a running tap of leaks from within her cabinet. These are being accompanied by a drip feed of poisonous briefings, as some ministers try to promote themselves and their ambitions at the expense of rivals they seek to thwart or damage. [Continue reading…]

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Mice feel each other’s pain

Science magazine reports: To most people, the phrase “I feel your pain” is just an expression of sympathy. But it’s also a real biological phenomenon, a new study in rodents suggests. Healthy mice living in the same room with mice experiencing pain are up to 68% more sensitive to pain themselves, regardless of their stress levels, according to the new study, which found that mice could scent when their fellows were suffering. The discovery suggests that current methods for studying rodent pain may need to be overhauled, and it may even point to a novel mechanism for pain transmission between humans, the authors say.

Andrey Ryabinin, a behavioral neuroscientist at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, and colleagues stumbled on the phenomenon largely by accident. They were studying the effects of alcohol withdrawal in mice, looking for new ways to help people overcome addiction. One of the most common, but challenging, symptoms of alcohol withdrawal is an intense, generalized pain throughout the body—a difficult-to-define condition that often leads people back to drinking, he says. Recreating those painful withdrawal symptoms in mice is difficult, leading some researchers to question whether the rodents are a good model for alcohol addiction.

Ryabinin and his team were using a standard setup: The mice are allowed to lap freely at an ethanol and water solution, but then go into withdrawal after the bottle is removed. A control group, housed in the same room, drinks only water. Using multiple measures of pain sensitivity—including brushing their forepaws with a thin hair and dipping their tails into hot water, the researchers attempted to gauge how withdrawal might be affecting the addicted rodents.

The initial results were disappointing, showing no significant difference between the two groups. Before giving up, however, the scientists decided to cage the control mice in a different room. This time, the sober controls showed far less pain sensitivity than the controls in the previous experiment, suggesting that the latter group had somehow acquired a heightened pain sensitivity from their roommates, Ryabinin says. [Continue reading…]

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Science shows the richer you get, the less you pay attention to other people

Lila MacLellan writes: No one can pay attention to everything they encounter. We simply do not have enough time or mental capacity for it. Most of us, though, do make an effort to acknowledge our fellow humans. Wealth, it seems, might change that.

There’s a growing body of research showing how having money changes the way people see — or are oblivious to — others and their problems. The latest is a paper published in the journal Psychological Science in which psychologists at New York University show that wealthy people unconsciously pay less attention to passersby on the street.

In the paper, the researchers describe experiments they conducted to measure the effects of social class on what’s called the “motivational relevance” of other human beings. According to some schools of psychological thought, we’re motivated to pay attention to something when we assign more value to it, whether because it threatens us or offers the potential for some kind of reward. [Continue reading…]

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How massive DDoS attacks are undermining the Internet

NBC News reports: Andrew Komarov of InfoArmor told NBC News he didn’t see any sign of Russian involvement at all, whether state or private [in the “denial of service,” or DDoS, attacks that caused massive internet outages across the U.S. on Friday]. He noted that the botnet used in the attack, “Mirai,” was developed by an English speaker and that he had found no link between “Mirai” and the Russians, who have their own much more sophisticated methods.

He said the attacks seemed more consistent with the methods used by the hacking group known as Lizard Squad, two of whose members, both teens, were arrested earlier this month in the U.S. and the Netherlands and charged in connection with DDoS attacks.

Said Komarov, “We have some context, that because of similar victims, using Dyn, and also tactics, tools and procedures by threat actors, it may be a revenge for the past arrests of DDoS’ers in the underground, happened several weeks ago.”

Dmitri Alperovitch of Crowdstrike also expressed doubt about a link to the Russian government, and speculated the attacks might have to do with a recent interview that cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs did with Dyn mentioning Russian organized crime. Alperovitch said use of a botnet bears the hallmark of a criminal rather than state attack, and the target may simply have been Dyn, not the U.S.

Flashpoint, a private cybersecurity and intelligence firm, noted that the Krebs site was attacked in September by a Mirai botnet, and the Krebs site was among those attacked Friday. The hacker who attacked Krebs in September released the source code on the web earlier this month, and hackers have copied the code to create their own botnets.

Flashpoint said it had concluded that the Friday attacks were not mounted by hacktivists, a political group or a state actor. [Continue reading…]

TechCrunch reports: In the past few weeks, hackers have upped the DDoS stakes in a big way. Starting with the attack on KrebsonSecurity.com and increasing in severity from there, hundreds of thousands of devices have been used to perpetrate these actions. A number that dwarfs previous attacks by orders of magnitude.

While it isn’t yet confirmed, evidence points to the attack that we saw on Friday morning following this same playbook, but being perpetrated on a much larger scale, relying on Internet of Things (IoT) devices rather than computers and servers to carry out an attack.

In fact, in all likelihood an army of surveillance cameras attacked Dyn. Why surveillance cameras? Because many of the security cameras used in homes and business around the world typically run the same or similar firmware produced by just a few companies.

This firmware is now known to contain a vulnerability that can easily be exploited, allowing the devices to have their sights trained on targets like Dyn. What’s more, many still operate with default credentials — making them a simple, but powerful target for hackers.

Why is this significant? The ability to enslave these video cameras has made it easier and far cheaper to create botnets at a scale that the world has never seen before. If someone wants to launch a DDoS attack, they no longer have to purchase a botnet—they can create their own using a program that was dumped on the internet just a few weeks ago. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: Dale Drew, chief security officer at Level 3, an internet service provider, found evidence that roughly 10 percent of all devices co-opted by Mirai were being used to attack Dyn’s servers. Just one week ago, Level 3 found that 493,000 devices had been infected with Mirai malware, nearly double the number infected last month.

Mr. Allen added that Dyn was collaborating with law enforcement and other internet service providers to deal with the attacks.

In a recent report, Verisign, a registrar for many internet sites that has a unique perspective into this type of attack activity, reported a 75 percent increase in such attacks from April through June of this year, compared with the same period last year.

The attacks were not only more frequent, they were bigger and more sophisticated. The typical attack more than doubled in size. What is more, the attackers were simultaneously using different methods to attack the company’s servers, making them harder to stop.

The most frequent targets were businesses that provide internet infrastructure services like Dyn. [Continue reading…]

Brian Krebs reports: The attack on DYN comes just hours after DYN researcher Doug Madory presented a talk on DDoS attacks in Dallas, Texas at a meeting of the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG). Madory’s talk — available here on Youtube.com — delved deeper into research that he and I teamed up on to produce the data behind the story DDoS Mitigation Firm Has History of Hijacks.

That story (as well as one published earlier this week, Spreading the DDoS Disease and Selling the Cure) examined the sometimes blurry lines between certain DDoS mitigation firms and the cybercriminals apparently involved in launching some of the largest DDoS attacks the Internet has ever seen. Indeed, the record 620 Gbps DDoS against KrebsOnSecurity.com came just hours after I published the story on which Madory and I collaborated.

The record-sized attack that hit my site last month was quickly superseded by a DDoS against OVH, a French hosting firm that reported being targeted by a DDoS that was roughly twice the size of the assault on KrebsOnSecurity. As I noted in The Democratization of Censorship — the first story published after bringing my site back up under the protection of Google’s Project Shield — DDoS mitigation firms simply did not count on the size of these attacks increasing so quickly overnight, and are now scrambling to secure far greater capacity to handle much larger attacks concurrently. [Continue reading…]

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Senior administration official says Obama is ‘giving the Russians time to finish the job in Aleppo’

Josh Rogin writes: At last Friday’s National Security Council meeting on the Middle East, top Obama administration officials tabled any decisions on whether to increase the U.S. response to the ongoing Syrian and Russian aerial bombardment of civilians in Aleppo, The Post reported earlier this week. The administration prioritized discussing the new Iraqi-led offensive against the Islamic State in Mosul and the future offensive in Raqqa, for which planning is already underway.

But despite what Secretary of State John F. Kerry has called ongoing Syrian and Russian war crimes in Aleppo, there was no action on any of the several options discussed at lower-level administration meetings, including but not limited to limited strikes against the Assad regime’s air force or an increase in the quantity or quality of arms provided to the moderate Syrian rebels in the area.

One senior administration official pointed toward the slow pace of the bureaucracy in responding to the Aleppo crisis as evidence the White House has decided that Aleppo can’t be saved and therefore the United States should not try.

“They are giving the Russians time to finish the job in Aleppo, in part to tie the hands of the next president,” the official told me. [Continue reading…]

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Inquiry finds Syrian government forces responsible for third gas attack

Reuters reports: An international inquiry found Syrian government forces responsible for a third toxic gas attack, according to a confidential report submitted to the U.N. Security Council on Friday, setting the stage for a showdown between Russia and western council members over how to respond.

The fourth report from the 13-month-long inquiry by the United Nations and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the global chemical weapons watchdog, blamed Syrian government forces for a toxic gas attack in Qmenas in Idlib governorate on March 16, 2015, according to a text of the report seen by Reuters.

The third report by the inquiry in August blamed the Syrian government for two chlorine attacks – in Talmenes on April 21, 2014 and Sarmin on March 16, 2015 – and said Islamic State militants had used sulfur mustard gas.

The results set the stage for a Security Council showdown between the five veto-wielding powers, likely pitting Russia and China against the United States, Britain and France over how those responsible should be held accountable. [Continue reading…]

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The siege starts without warning

Miljenko Jergovic writes: I woke one morning 24 years ago to find a war all around me. The night before I had been at a concert for the Partybreakers, a punk band from Belgrade. I’d had too much beer and I had a headache. Bursts of gunfire were audible, along with the explosions of the mortar shells that would rain down on Sarajevo for the next three and a half years.

I don’t know what it was like when the war first came to Aleppo, Syria. Only the people still living there do — thousands of men, women and children who have now been under siege for years. From the perspective of an ordinary citizen, let’s say a 25 year old with literary and musical interests, the siege starts without warning and comes out of nowhere.

Yes, the papers and the TV have been reporting for months about how the situation in the country is growing more complicated, how conflict is brewing among political opponents, and how in the provinces there has already been fighting. But as long as a city continues to live its normal, placid life, which is the sort of life it lives up until the very last instant and the final quiet evening, war seems impossible. You look at your dog and your books, the spider in the corner of your room spinning a web that tomorrow will catch its first little fly, and you can’t imagine that the next morning all this, including the dog and the spider, will be caught up in war.

At the beginning of Bosnia’s war, Sarajevo had some 400,000 inhabitants. Aleppo, before its war, was five times larger. Sarajevo was founded about five centuries ago. Aleppo is one of the oldest cities on earth, in the part of the world that brings together Europe and the East, where the Abrahamic religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — were born and grew up. It was there at the emergence of our civilization. Not so long ago, just 150 years back, the two cities were under the same monarch. Sarajevo was the last great city at the western boundary of the Ottoman Empire, while Aleppo was the greatest city on its eastern side.

But none of that is important to an ordinary citizen who is just trying to get through another day of a siege. When the war began, that person probably believed that reason would never allow the bombing and destruction of such a place as Aleppo. We in Sarajevo had the same illusion. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS executes hundreds of Mosul area residents

CNN reports: ISIS executed 284 men and boys as coalition forces closed in on Mosul, an Iraqi intelligence source told CNN.

Those killed on Thursday and Friday had been rounded up near and in the city for use as human shields against attacks that are forcing ISIS out of the southern sections of Mosul, the source explained.

ISIS used a bulldozer to dump the corpses in a mass grave at the scene of the executions — Mosul’s defunct College of Agriculture in the north of the city, the intelligence source said.

The victims were all shot and some were children, said the source, who wanted anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media. CNN could not independently confirm the claim. [Continue reading…]

BBC News reports: Hundreds of people in Iraq are being treated for the effects of toxic gases after a sulphur plant was set alight in fighting with so-called Islamic State.

The US military says IS fighters set the plant on fire earlier this week, as they fled an advance by pro-government forces on their Mosul stronghold.

On Saturday, US soldiers at a base near Mosul donned protective masks as wind blew smoke towards them.

Reuters said another 1,000 people were being treated for breathing problems. [Continue reading…]

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Bunkers and booby-traps as ISIS makes a stand in Libya

Reuters reports: Sheltering in tunnels, improvised bunkers and rooms fortified by sand-filled fridges, Islamic State is holding out in the Libyan city of Sirte, defending itself with snipers, booby-traps and car bombs against pro-government forces.

After a six-month campaign of often fierce street fighting, Islamic State militants are surrounded in a district less than one-kilometer square, after hundreds of U.S. air strikes that began in August in support of Libyan forces.

The battle for Sirte, taken by Islamic State more than a year ago, may be over soon. But how the militants managed to survive may give insight into the kind of tactics they could use to defend other cities. [Continue reading…]

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David Duke applauds his hero, Julian Assange

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Trump can’t just be defeated — he must be humiliated

Dana Millbank writes: The need to deal Trump a humiliating defeat has a sociological basis in the “degradation ceremony,” in which the perpetrator (Trump) is held by denouncers (officeholders and others in positions of influence) to be morally unacceptable, and witnesses (the public) agree that the perpetrator is no longer held in good standing.

Psychologist Wynn Schwartz, who teaches at Harvard Medical School, explained to me that what’s needed to have a successful degradation of Trump is an epic defeat. “If it is lopsided enough,” he said, “you don’t have critical masses of people who feel disenfranchised” or “who feel justified in saying that it was stolen.”

But if Clinton’s victory is narrow, the degradation ceremony fails, because a large chunk of the population feels swindled and remains loyal to Trump. “The margin matters a lot,” Schwartz said.

Trump’s recent actions — talking about a “rigged” election while laying the foundation for a Trump TV network — suggest that he will attempt to defy the degradation ceremony that a loss typically confers. Hence the importance of a landslide.

Arizona would offer an ideal rebuke. Carolyn Goldwater Ross, granddaughter of the conservative icon, introduced Obama on Thursday by saying, “I come from a long line of Republicans and I’ve stayed independent. . . . But this time it’s different.” She submitted that Trump violates her grandfather’s “basic values.”

Apparently, many Arizonans agree. Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the anti-immigrant icon and Trump backer, is trailing his Democratic opponent by 15 points in polling by the Republic. The newspaper endorsed Clinton, its first embrace of a Democrat for president in its 126-year history. Arizona’s junior Republican senator, Jeff Flake, is an outspoken Trump critic, its senior Republican senator, John McCain, has been attacked by Trump, and former Republican attorney general Grant Woods has endorsed Clinton. [Continue reading…]

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