A spy’s deceptive complaints

In an editorial, the New York Times says: Robert Hannigan, the new director of Britain’s electronic intelligence agency, threw down quite a gauntlet with an op-ed article in The Financial Times arguing that the ever more secure communications services provided by the American technology companies that dominate the web have become the “command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals.” He is not the first spy to complain that post-Snowden concerns over privacy, including increased encryption on the web, have put serious constraints on fighting terrorism, though his phrasing is the toughest yet.

Mr. Hannigan primarily makes two points. One, quite familiar, is that the Islamic State has been spectacularly successful in using the web to promote itself, intimidate enemies and radicalize recruits. The other is that tougher privacy controls have enabled the terrorists to conceal their operations, while impeding “lawful investigation by security and law enforcement agencies.” But the crocodile tears of the intelligence chiefs overlook the fact that before those barriers were put in place, the United States National Security Agency and Mr. Hannigan’s GCHQ misused their powers for an illegal dragnet surveillance operation. The technology companies are doing their job in protecting people’s private data precisely because the intelligence agencies saw fit to rummage through that data.

Mr. Hannigan’s argument overlooks the many legal avenues intelligence agencies have to seek data. Demanding that the technology companies leave “back doors” open to their software or hardware also potentially assists Chinese, Russian and other hackers in accessing reams of data.

Still, there is a terrorist threat; it is dispersed around the world and it does have a global tool on the web and in social networks. At the same time, there are powerful reasons for technology companies to protect the economic interests, personal privacy and civil liberties of their clients.

The ways to solve potential conflicts include requiring court orders for data mining, restrictions on specific practices such as exploiting the back doors, and far stronger oversight of the intelligence community. They do not include blaming technology companies for doing their job.

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Senator who put Pentagon Papers into public record urges Udall to do same with torture report

Dan Froomkin writes: Article 1, Section 6 of the Constitution establishes an absolute free-speech right for members of Congress on the floor or in committee, even if they are disclosing classified material. It states that “for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.”

Within hours of Colorado Senator Mark Udall losing his reelection bid last week, transparency activists were talking about how he should go out with a bang and put the Senate intelligence committee’s torture report into the congressional record. The report is said to detail shockingly brutal abuse of detainees by the CIA during the George W. Bush administration, as well as rampant deception about the program by top officials. But the Obama White House is refusing to declassify even a summary of the report without major redactions. And Republicans take over the Senate in January.

Udall is one of two senators — along with fellow Intelligence Committee member Ron Wyden — who have consistently demanded greater transparency from the intelligence community. If he made the report public on the Senate floor or during a hearing, he couldn’t be prosecuted.

The last time any senator did anything nearly so grand was in 1971, when Mike Gravel, two years into his 12 years representing the state of Alaska, entered 4,000 pages of the Pentagon Papers into the congressional record just before the U.S. Supreme Court lifted an injunction on publishing them in the press.

Now, Gravel is urging Udall to join the club. [Continue reading…]

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The Pentagon wants an airborne aircraft carrier to launch drones

Dan Lamothe writes: In the 2012 movie “The Avengers,” Captain America, the Hulk, Iron Man and the rest of the gang flew on a massive aircraft carrier that carried dozens of planes through the air and disappeared from plain view with the help of a cloaking device. The idea that the U.S. military could develop something similar is still seen as far-fetched, but this much is true: a Pentagon agency has just launched a new effort to develop an airship sure to draw comparisons.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is exploring whether it would be possible to turn an existing plane into a flying fortress capable of launching and recovering numerous drone aircraft. Doing so would extend the range of drones that gather intelligence and perform other missions while saving money and limiting the risks pilots take, DARPA officials said Sunday.

“We want to find ways to make smaller aircraft more effective, and one promising idea is enabling existing large aircraft, with minimal modification, to become ‘aircraft carriers in the sky,’” said Dan Patt a DARPA program manager. “We envision innovative launch and recovery concepts for new [unmanned aerial system] designs that would couple with recent advances in small payload design and collaborative technologies.” [Continue reading…]

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Mirror neurons may reveal more about neurons than they do about people

Jason G. Goldman writes: In his 2011 book, The Tell-Tale Brain, neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran says that some of the cells in your brain are of a special variety. He calls them the “neurons that built civilization,” but you might know them as mirror neurons. They’ve been implicated in just about everything from the development of empathy in earlier primates, millions of years ago, to the emergence of complex culture in our species.

Ramachandran says that mirror neurons help explain the things that make us so apparently unique: tool use, cooking with fire, using complex linguistics to communicate.

It’s an inherently seductive idea: that one small tweak to a particular set of brain cells could have transformed an early primate into something that was somehow more. Indeed, experimental psychologist Cecilia Hayes wrote in 2010 (pdf), “[mirror neurons] intrigue both specialists and non-specialists, celebrated as a ‘revolution’ in understanding social behaviour and ‘the driving force’ behind ‘the great leap forward’ in human evolution.”

The story of mirror neurons begins in the 1990s at the University of Parma in Italy. A group of neuroscientists were studying rhesus monkeys by implanting small electrodes in their brains, and they found that some cells exhibited a curious kind of behavior. They fired both when the monkey executed a movement, such as grasping a banana, and also when the monkey watched the experimenter execute that very same movement.

It was immediately an exciting find. These neurons were located in a part of the brain thought solely responsible for sending motor commands out from the brain, through the brainstem to the spine, and out to the nerves that control the body’s muscles. This finding suggested that they’re not just used for executing actions, but are somehow involved in understanding the observed actions of others.

After that came a flood of research connecting mirror neurons to the development of empathy, autism, language, tool use, fire, and more. Psychologist and science writer Christian Jarrett has twice referred to mirror neurons as “the most hyped concept in neuroscience.” Is he right? Where does empirical evidence end and overheated speculation begin? [Continue reading…]

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Israel’s one-state reality

David Remnick writes: Reuven (Ruvi) Rivlin, the new President of Israel, is ardently opposed to the establishment of a Palestinian state. He is instead a proponent of Greater Israel, one Jewish state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. He professes to be mystified that anyone should object to the continued construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank: “It can’t be ‘occupied territory’ if the land is your own.”

Rivlin does not have the starched personality of an ideologue, however. He resembles a cheerfully overbearing Borscht Belt comedian who knows too many bad jokes to tell in a single set but is determined to try. Sitting in an office decorated with mementos of his right-wing Zionist lineage, he unleashes a cataract of anecdotes, asides, humble bromides, corny one-liners, and historical footnotes. At seventy-five, he has the florid, bulbous mug of a cartoon flatfoot, if that flatfoot were descended from Lithuanian Talmudists and six generations of Jerusalemites. Rivlin’s father, Yosef, was a scholar of Arabic literature. (He translated the Koran and “The Thousand and One Nights.”) Ruvi Rivlin’s temperament is other than scholarly. He is, in fact, given to categorical provocations. After a visit some years ago to a Reform synagogue in Westfield, New Jersey, he declared that the service was “idol worship and not Judaism.”

And yet, since Rivlin was elected President, in June, he has become Israel’s most unlikely moralist. Rivlin—not a left-wing writer from Tel Aviv, not an idealistic justice of the Supreme Court—has emerged as the most prominent critic of racist rhetoric, jingoism, fundamentalism, and sectarian violence, the highest-ranking advocate among Jewish Israelis for the civil rights of the Palestinians both in Israel and in the occupied territories. Last month, he told an academic conference in Jerusalem, “It is time to honestly admit that Israel is sick, and it is our duty to treat this illness.”

Around Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, Rivlin made a video in which he sat next to an eleven-year-old Palestinian Israeli boy from Jaffa who had been bullied: the two held up cards to the camera calling for empathy, decency, and harmony. “We are exactly the same,” one pair read. A couple of weeks ago, Rivlin visited the Arab town of Kafr Qasim to apologize for the massacre, in 1956, of forty-eight Palestinian workers and children by Israeli border guards. No small part of the Palestinian claim is that Israel must take responsibility for the Arab suffering it has caused. Rivlin said, “I hereby swear, in my name and that of all our descendants, that we will never act against the principle of equal rights, and we will never try and force someone from our land.”

Every Israeli and Palestinian understands the context of these remarks. In recent years, anti-Arab harassment and vitriol have reached miserable levels. The Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who treasures his fragile ruling coalition above all else, is more apt to manipulate the darkling mood to his political advantage than to ease it.

“I’ve been called a ‘lying little Jew’ by my critics,” Rivlin told the Knesset recently. “ ‘Damn your name, Arab agent,’ ‘Go be President in Gaza,’ ‘disgusting sycophant,’ ‘rotten filth,’ ‘lowest of the low,’ ‘traitor,’ ‘President of Hezbollah.’ These are just a few of the things that have been said to me in the wake of events I’ve attended and speeches I’ve made. I must say that I’ve been horrified by this thuggishness that has permeated the national dialogue.” [Continue reading…]

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Iran’s Khamenei: No cure for barbaric Israel but annihilation

Slate: Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei took to Twitter to call for the destruction of Israel over the weekend. He first started with a string of vitriolic anti-Israel tweets that called for the destruction of the “barbaric, wolflike & infanticidal regime of Israel.”


He then culminated by posting a “neat table,” as Haaretz puts it, that lays out nine key questions on why—and how—his plan to destroy Israel should be implemented. The post begins with the basic: Why? Because throughout its existence “the fake Zionist regime has tried to realize its goals by means of infanticide, homicide, violence & iron fist.” But rest easy, Iran definitely does not want “the massacre of the Jewish people” but rather Iran has proposed “a practical & logical mechanism” to eliminate Israel through a referendum involving “all the original people of Palestine, including Muslims, Chrsitians and Jews” anywhere in the world.


The referendum would then give rise to a new government that would then have to decide whether Jews who have relocated to Israel can stay there or “should return to their home countries.” Khamenei is confident that the plan “can enjoy the supports of the independent nations and governments.”

Until the day when Khamenei’s plan can be realized, “powerful confrontation and resolute and armed resistance” is the only way to deal with “this ruinous regime.” And what should be the first step? Arming the West Bank. [Continue reading…]

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Violence spreads across Israel after shooting in Galilee

The Guardian reports: Months of simmering violence between Israelis and Palestinians in East Jerusalem spread to Israeli Arab towns this weekend after police shot and killed a 22-year-old man in the Galilee town of Kufr Kana, apparently as he was running away.

In their original statements about the death on Friday night police said Kheir Hamdan was shot when he tried to stab an officer during an attempt to arrest him for allegedly throwing a stun grenade in the town, near Nazareth.

However, CCTV footage of the shooting shows Hamdan tried to strike a police car several times with an object in his hand – allegedly the knife – but officers were inside, with Hamdan posing no immediate threat to them. When a police officer opens the door, Hamdan is seen retreating. It is at this point he is shot.

Police can then be seen dragging the severely injured Hamdan along the ground and bundling him into their car without offering first aid or calling for assistance. He died several hours later. [Continue reading…]

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Israel moves to extend law to West Bank settlers

Al Jazeera reports: An Israeli ministerial committee has approved a proposed bill that would ensure the wholesale application of Israeli law to Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank, a move sponsored by politicians who want Israel to annex part of the territory

The bill needs to be submitted to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, for voting and must pass three readings before becoming law.

However, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, Israel’s chief negotiator in peace talks with the Palestinians that collapsed in April, said she would appeal against the decision, effectively putting parliamentary ratification on indefinite hold, the Reuters news agency reported on Sunday.

Israeli settlers living in the occupied West Bank are currently formally subject to military rule.

However, the area’s 350,000 settlers are effectively under the jurisdiction of civilian courts in Israel because parliament has already applied a clutch of laws, primarily criminal and tax laws and military conscription, to them.

At present, to ensure that other Israeli laws are binding on settlers in the West Bank, the military commander there has to transpose them, at his discretion, into military regulations.

The new draft bill would make it mandatory for the commander to issue, within 45 days of a law’s passage in parliament, an identically-phrased military order, effectively ensuring that all ratified legislation also applies to settlers.

According to the new bill, Israelis living in the occupied West Bank will be under Israeli law, while Palestinians who live in the same areas would remain under military rule. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian Kurds give women equal rights, snubbing jihadists

AFP reports: The local government in a majority Kurdish area of Syria has passed a decree granting women equal rights in what a monitoring group called “an affront” to discriminatory jihadist moves.

Published on the local government’s official Facebook page on Wednesday, the decree states that women and men should enjoy “equality… in all walks of public and private life.”

Last year, Syria’s Kurds created autonomous governments in the three regions where they are a majority, establishing self-proclaimed rule.

Arabs also hold office, and the decrees apply to all ethnicities living in the self-governing areas.

The decree, passed by the leaders of the Al-Jazira canton — officially Hasakeh province — stipulates that women have the right to equal labour rights, including pay.

Women must be 18 years old to marry, and they are cannot be married off without their consent.

“Polygamy is forbidden,” the decree states, adding that women have the same right to bear witness in court as men, and that they have full inheritance rights. [Continue reading…]

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The Kurds can’t afford to leave Iraq

Luay Al Khatteeb and Ahmed Mehdi write: The federal government in Baghdad believes the Kurds have been playing a double game by demanding their share of federal oil revenues while also signing a string of independent contracts with international oil companies and midsize wildcatters and then pocketing the oil export profits after bypassing Baghdad.

In the past, Iraq and the Kurds have always come back to the negotiating table. This time could be different.

Despite Mr. Barzani’s calls for an independence referendum, K.R.G. officials are still counting on Baghdad to send them money. However, this double strategy is precarious — and the threat doesn’t come from Baghdad, but from Basra in the south.

There is a real risk that Iraq’s southern Shiite provinces — which produce over 90 percent of Iraq’s oil — could copy the Kurds in their call for autonomy. Basra’s political elites do not see why a share of their oil profits should go to the K.R.G. government in Erbil if those funds are only helping to subsidize Kurdish independence ambitions.

The Kurds face a hard choice: either they become part of a viable federal oil revenue sharing system or go their own way. And for the K.R.G., losing revenues from the central government would be irreversible and disastrous. That’s because an independent Kurdistan would make less than $7 billion per year — almost a third less than they received when given just 12 percent of Iraq’s total oil revenues. [Continue reading…]

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‘You’re not anonymous anymore when you’re using Tor’

The Wall Street Journal reports: Law enforcement authorities across Europe and the U.S. shut dozens of illegal websites and arrested some operators, employing new and as yet unknown techniques to unmask those using an anonymity network.

Authorities said on Friday they made the arrests by piercing the anonymity offered by Tor, a network that relies on encryption tools and 1,000s of servers to mask online activities. Tor, which is partly funded by the U.S. government, is used by dissidents in authoritarian countries such as Iran, China and Saudi Arabia to access the Internet, but people operating and visiting websites that sell contraband also use it to conceal their identities.

Internet security experts said it was unlikely authorities had cracked Tor’s sophisticated encryption protocols. “If that were the case, the implications would be huge,” said an official with Welund Horizon, a London firm that provides intelligence on cybercrime to law-enforcement agencies and large corporations.

That law enforcement was able to locate Tor users is “a game changer,” said Ulf Bergstrom, a spokesman for Eurojust, the European Union’s legal coordination agency. “You’re not anonymous anymore when you’re using Tor.” [Continue reading…]

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Gossip makes human society possible

Julie Beck writes: While gossiping is a behavior that has long been frowned upon, perhaps no one has frowned quite so intensely as the 16th- and 17th-century British. Back then, gossips, or “scolds” were sometimes forced to wear a menacing iron cage on their heads, called the “branks” or “scold’s bridle.” These masks purportedly had iron spikes or bits that went in the mouth and prevented the wearer from speaking. (And of course, of course, this ghastly punishment seems to have been mostly for women who were talking too much.)

Today, people who gossip are still not very well-liked, though we tend to resist the urge to cage their heads. Progress. And yet the reflexive distaste people feel for gossip and those who gossip in general is often nowhere to be found when people find themselves actually faced with a juicy morsel about someone they know. Social topics—personal relationships, likes and dislikes, anecdotes about social activities—made up about two-thirds of all conversations in analyses done by evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar. The remaining one-third of their time not spent talking about other people was devoted to discussing everything else: sports, music, politics, etc.

“Language in freely forming natural conversations is principally used for the exchange of social information,” Dunbar writes. “That such topics are so overwhelmingly important to us suggests that this is a primary function of language.” He even goes so far as to say: “Gossip is what makes human society as we know it possible.”

In recent years, research on the positive effects of gossip has proliferated. Rather than just a means to humiliate people and make them cry in the bathroom, gossip is now being considered by scientists as a way to learn about cultural norms, bond with others, promote cooperation, and even, as one recent study found, allow individuals to gauge their own success and social standing. [Continue reading…]

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War on ISIS: Only one of every four strike missions result in airstrikes

The New York Times reports: More than three months into the American-led air campaign in Iraq and Syria, commanders are challenged by spotty intelligence, poor weather and an Iraqi Army that is only now starting to go on the offensive against the Islamic State, meaning that warplanes are mostly limited to hitting pop-up targets of opportunity.

Weekend airstrikes hit just such targets: a convoy of 10 armed trucks of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, near Mosul, as well as vehicles and two of the group’s checkpoints near the border with Syria. News reports from Iraq said the Islamic State’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had been wounded in one of the raids, but American officials said Sunday that they were still assessing his status.

In Iraq, the air war is tethered to the slow pace of operations by the Iraqi Army and Kurdish forces. With relatively few Iraqi offensives to flush out militants, many Islamic State fighters have dug in to shield themselves from attack.

The vast majority of bombing runs, including the weekend strike near Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, are now searching for targets of opportunity, such as checkpoints, artillery pieces and combat vehicles in the open. But only one of every four strike missions — some 800 of 3,200 — dropped its weapons, according to the military’s Central Command. [Continue reading…]

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Mosul resident: ‘Anybody would be better than ISIS, even the Israelis’

The Independent reports: “It is like a terrible dream,” says a man who has just fled Mosul for Irbil, describing conditions in the city five months after Isis captured it in June.

He adds that “from the day they started to blow up the mosques people hated them”, referring to the destruction of the Mosque of Younis (Jonah) and other mosques denounced by Isis “as places for apostasy not prayer”.

The man, a small businessman who had been an army officer under Saddam Hussein and is now on a pension, was very nervous that anybody should learn his name. Some of his family have stayed on in Mosul to prevent their house being confiscated by Isis. Its officials check house-to-house demanding to see documents proving that the occupant is the owner. If they discover that the real owner has left the city, he is given 10 days to return or his house is confiscated by Isis.

He said actually crossing from Isis-controlled territory to that under the authority of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) had not been difficult. He had taken the road between Mosul and Kirkuk that was guarded by “a couple of 15- or 16-year-olds with guns” at a checkpoint. A Kurdish friend sponsored him to enter the KRG. [Continue reading…]

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How the NSA began a new form of warfare in Iraq

Shane Harris writes: In a meeting of senior national security officials with President George W. Bush in the spring of 2007, the commander-in-chief authorized the NSA to begin hacking into the phone and computer networks of Iraqi insurgents.

The Iraqi cell phone network was a potential intelligence gold mine. Cell phone contracts were among the first business deals struck in Iraq after Saddam Hussein was driven from power. Wireless was cheaper than wired communications, and cell phones were proliferating. The NSA had access to foreign telecommunications networks through agreements struck with the United States—based carriers that operated them. These companies were paid handsomely — each receiving tens of millions of dollars annually, according to one former company executive — to give the spy agencies privileged access to their networks and the data coursing through them….

After Bush gave his order, daily strikes in Iraq were being carried about by a hybrid military and intelligence unit that brought together soldiers and spies. Their center of operations was a concrete hangar at the Balad Air Base, north of Baghdad, which had once housed Iraqi fighter jets. Most of the planes here now were unmanned drones. Their pilots worked alongside NSA hackers, FBI cyber forensics investigators, and special operations forces — the military’s elite commando squads. They all broke off into clusters, working with a seamless, almost organic precision. The hackers stole information from the enemy’s electronic devices and passed it to the analysts, who drew up target lists for the troops. As they went off on raids, the drone pilots watched overhead, giving eye-in-the-sky warning to the troops on the ground, thanks to sophisticated cameras and other sensors developed by the CIA. Sometimes the drone pilots themselves made the kill with a missile shot.

When an attack was finished, the troops gathered more intelligence from the site or from the fighters they captured — cell phones, laptop computers, thumb drives, address books, scraps of paper called “pocket litter” that might contain nothing more than a name, a phone number, or a physical or e-mail address. The troops brought the information back to the base and gave it to the analysts, who fed it into their databases and used data-mining software to look for connections to other fighters either in custody or at large. They paid close attention to how the fighters were getting money for their operations, including sources outside Iraq — in Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.

Every day the unit netted between ten and twenty fighters. Whole terrorist networks were illuminated in this way, by U.S. forces who were starting to think and act like their enemy. They structured themselves not in vertical hierarchies but in networks, each member responding to conditions on the ground. They were making it up as they went along, and creating a new kind of warfare. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. airstrike on ISIS convoy killed leader’s key aide

The Guardian reports: A key aide to the leader of Islamic State (Isis) was killed in a US strike on a convoy near the Iraqi city of Mosul that destroyed 10 vehicles carrying a number of the group’s top militants.

Abdul Rahman al-Athaee, also known as Abu Saja, is known to have died in the attack on Friday. A key aide to the Isis leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, he travelled frequently with the group’s top leadership.

Colonel Patrick Ryder, a spokesman at US central command, said on Saturday: “I can confirm that coalition aircraft did conduct a series of air strikes yesterday evening [Friday] in Iraq against what was assessed to be a gathering of Isil [Isis] leaders near Mosul. We cannot confirm if Isil leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was among those present.”

Iraqi officials were also unable to confirm whether Baghdadi was among the 50 casualties. Isis did not immediately issue any statement on the strikes.

The news came as Britain’s chief of the defence staff, General Sir Nick Houghton, warned on Sunday that the Isis leadership would regenerate itself even if Baghdadi had been killed.

In a sign that the UK believed there was a strong chance Baghdadi died in the air strikes, Houghton spoke of “potential death” as he said it would take some days for the US to confirm whether the Isis leader was alive or not.

Speaking on the Andrew Marr Show on BBC1, the general said: “I can’t absolutely confirm that al-Baghdadi has died. Even the Americans themselves are not yet in a position to do that. Probably it will take some days to have absolute confirmation.”

But Houghton warned that Isis would fight back if its leader had been killed. He said: “What I wouldn’t want to do is rush to the sense that the potential death of one of their totemic leaders is going to create some strategic reverse within Isis. They will regenerate leadership … because of the current potential attractiveness of this warped ideology. Unless we get the political dimension of the strategy in place then Isis has the potential to keep regenerating and certainly regenerating its leaders.” [Continue reading…]

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