MISUSE OF POWER AND THE SUBVERSION OF ORDER

Commentarao - S.L. Rao 

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Indira Gandhi tried to nurture a ‘committed’ bureaucracy and judiciary. A charitable interpretation was that she was looking for commitment to ideas and ideology. Another view is that she sought to create a conformist administration and judiciary. Subsequent governments (especially the Janata Party and the National Democratic Alliance) tried to change the administration back from ‘commitment’ to neutrality. However, the rot had gone deep. The institutions had learnt the ways to cooperate with politicians in framing policies in ways that would leave loopholes for leakage and theft. Implementation was the means that enabled even much lower levels in the administration to get illegal incomes. The United Progressive Alliance in both its tenures of over 10 years of governance has carried this cooperative commitment that benefited politicians and bureaucrats alike much farther.

The power of politicians over administrators has always been supreme. Lack of tenure in any office, frequent transfers, suspensions, poor confidential reports — there are many means available to politicians to suborn recalcitrant bureaucrats. The response of some bureaucrats (a declining number, especially at senior levels) has been to persist in opposing what they consider wrong policies and face the unpleasant consequences. Many choose the alternative route and let the politicians have their way. Many in the administration have participated and benefited as well.

There have been recommendations for correcting the system by administrative reforms commissions and police commissions. They have made recommendations to guarantee minimum tenures in one position, improve individual accountability in each of the Central services, minimize political interference, ensure objective performance evaluation, improve selections, even introduce recruitment of outsiders at middle and higher levels of the bureaucracy, while developing methods to enable career officers to work outside the government. Almost none of these recommendations has been accepted, and hence not implemented. Meanwhile, the overall quality of the services appears to be declining and there are growing instances of bribery, corruption and cooperation with politicians to earn illegal wealth, or to favour people who could help them.

The present prime minister spent over 30 years in top government positions (as chief economic advisor, finance secretary, governor of the Reserve Bank of India, deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, advisor to the prime minister, Chandra Sekhar, finance minister, and the last 10 years as prime minister). Almost the first of the few statements he has made over 10 years as prime minister was when he took office in 2004. He expressed his determination to implement necessary administrative reforms. Many welcomed this since he did not need anyone to tell him what needed to be done. He has introduced no reforms.

The administrative services and the police (at all levels) have experienced further deterioration under the UPA. Frequent transfers of upright officers after only a few months in a position are common, causing huge problems for young families. Suspensions of young, upright officers happen often, intimidating many into silence. Charge-sheeting officers on flimsy pretexts, on trumped up charges occurs, but this is essentially for not obeying wrong instructions.

At the same time, the salaries and pensions of government servants were greatly increased. Today’s officers will not easily consider leaving government service. In addition, many important new positions, especially as independent statutory regulators in various fields, were created. Selections to these positions were confined to retired Central service personnel. Lobbying for such positions many times included being compliant to the wishes of the deciding political masters. This was to ensure that the officer got one of these positions. When the temptation to cooperate because of the juicy carrots did not work, the stick was used.

Bright young people joining the administrative services find themselves in increasingly difficult work conditions. However, the challenge of effective administration and development persuade many to stay on. In spite of this deterioration in work conditions, many bright young people continue to join the Central services of the government. Many are idealistic, and choose this over other careers. Many may lose their ideals as they are exposed to the realities of public administration in a political system that uses the government services to earn money for its own representatives and their political parties.

The television news has revolutionized our knowledge about how officers are mistreated. Let us look at three instances at different levels that have received media attention in the last year or so. Durga Shakti Nagpal was a recent entrant into the administrative service. She is said to have been effective, firm and enthusiastic in her work. Some illegal constructions were demolished on her instructions. This was converted into a communal issue, instead of recognizing the constructions being what they were — violations of law. She was bullied and suspended. The young officer has not said anything about her experience. Perhaps she was too traumatized and feared further consequences for herself and her family.

Pulling a village out of poverty

ALEX PAUL MENON

Is the blind implementation of social welfare schemes the only approach of governance in rural India, especially in Maoist-affected areas? A small village in Chhattisgarh provides a viable alternative

In 2012, the young IAS officer, Alex Paul Menon was the Collector of Chhattisgarh’s Sukma district. On the evening of April 21, 2012, Mr. Menon had just finished his lunch and was about to preside over a function to announce the introduction of some agricultural schemes. But there was a squad of Maoists hiding among the villagers, and they suddenly launched an attack, killing two of Mr. Menon’s bodyguards. He was then taken hostage.

Mr. Menon was released after spending 13 days in Maoist captivity. He is now the deputy CEO at the office of the Chief Electoral Officer in Chhattisgarh. In the following piece, Mr. Menon explains how small steps of governance can go a long way in changing the lives of people.

Chindhbarri is an auxiliary village in Chhattisgarh’s Dhamtari district, about 140 kilometres from the State capital Raipur. It is a part of the Bastar Development Council, eight kilometres away from Bagrumnala, where Dr. Binayak Sen set up a clinic in 1994.

Chindhbarri is a tiny tribal hamlet of 75 families. In 2010, I was posted in this area as the chief executive officer of the zila panchayat. Though close to the periphery of the Gangrael dam, the village faced an acute shortage of water; 95 per cent of the households were Scheduled Tribes, and 85 per cent households below the poverty line. The average land holding was five acres and 65 per cent of farmers were marginal. Food was hard to come by. Only 38 per cent of families had food to last from six months to a year, while 50 per cent of families had food that would last them for six months or less. As a result, distress migration was quite common.

We decided to reverse the fate of Chindhbarri.

First steps to a renewal

Many years ago, the social activist, Baba Amte had shown us the way forward with his unique water conservation models. We decided to replicate them in Chindhbarri. Backed by a non-governmental organisation and its committed volunteers, participatory micro-planning exercises were taken up by self-help groups and the local community. To begin with, we listed on a sheet of paper, the landholding size of each household, and its nature and needs. Then, we put down a list of various schemes under subheadings. All benefits possible from these schemes were listed to match the needs of each household. The idea was to move away from the usual bureaucratic jargon of “targeting numbers” to “targeting names.”

The Black Box of China’s Military

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Beijing is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on defense, but no one quite knows what they're up to. 

BY Isaac Stone Fish 

MARCH 7, 2014 

isaac.stonefish 

@isaacstonefish

The People's Liberation Army does not have a website. There is China Military Online, which boasts that it's "approved by the Central Military Commission," (CMC) the 11-member body chaired by Chinese President Xi Jinping, which oversees the PLA, and is the military's "only news portal website." There are other Chinese news sites, like Chinamil, which hosts Liberation Daily, a newspaper put out by the PLA's general political department, the shadowy department tasked with running the army's political activities. And there's a website for China's Ministry of National Defense, an organ which is subordinate to the CMC, and which is nominally the public face of the PLA. But the world's largest standing army, and the CMC which oversees it, has decided not to bother. 

On March 5, during an annual meeting of its legislature, Beijing announced that it is increasing its military budget by 12.2 percent, to a total of $131.6 billion in 2014. While still less than a third of the $496 billion that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel proposed in February for the U.S. military in 2015, it still represents a significant expansion, even after two decades of double-digit growth in the PLA's official budget. But few doubt that the grand total allocated to China's military is yet higher, and many in the U.S. government wish they had more insight into the method to the darkness surrounding the PLA. 

There is general consensus that China, like many nations, spends more on its military than it reports: In February, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency said that China's military budget reached $240 billion in 2013, according to Bloomberg. As the most salient data point of China's military, Beijing's official budget gets a lot of attention. And that's largely because there's little other information that comes with it. "The single number, without any accompanying detail, represents the sum total of public transparency by the world's second-largest defence spender and the fastest rising military power, pored over by intelligence agencies and military experts from around the world in an effort to glean any clues about China's future strategic intentions," reported the Financial Times. 

So how opaque is the PLA, and how much insight and information does the United States possess? It's important to distinguish between what the general public and the media understands, and classified information on the PLA available to U.S. government officials. "There's a big difference between what you know and what we know," said a senior Pentagon official, who asked to speak on background because of the sensitivity of the matter. The United States has long worried about the Chinese military's lack of openness. "They mock us some times, for how much we repeat" this call for a higher level of transparency, said the senior Pentagon official. Most recently, Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., the commander of the United States Pacific Fleet, expressed concerns about the "aggressive" growth of the Chinese military and "their lack of transparency" in a February speech. 

Leadership: China And The Bad Old Ways

http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htlead/articles/20140315.aspx

March 15, 2014: U.S. Navy leaders and American intelligence agencies are trying to figure out if the Chinese strategy of using intimidation, rather than weapons or more direct threats, to obtain control of the South China Sea and several other disputed islands off the Chinese coast is deliberate or partly the result of inexperience. 

To senior naval officers who served in the 1980s what the Chinese appear to be doing evokes memories of the Russian tactics back then. The “Chicken of the Sea” confrontations that were mainly about keeping American ships from closely observing Russian warships or intelligence ships at sea. But the Chinese are not just using these tactics to keep the Americans at a distance but also to assert sovereignty and control over areas, like the South China Sea, where China, according to international law and treaties that China signed, has no real claim. 

But the Chinese use of these tactics seem reckless compared to the Russian methods. The Russians used warships to make these threatening maneuvers while the Chinese will often use commercial vessels, especially fishing ships, to “get in the way.” The Chinese also use these tactics on the high seas (international waters) where there is no disputed territory and a high risk for deadly and expensive accidents. This has led some American naval officers and admirals to believe that some of this behavior is the result of inexperience on the part of Chinese naval officers mixed with a bit of arrogance and recklessness. 

Naval historians see familiar patterns here as well. When the Chinese Empire built its first modern, Western style navy in the late 19th century the force was crippled by corruption, arrogance and inexperience. This led to a defeat at the hands of the similarly modernized, but much more diligent and pragmatic Japanese. From there the Japanese went on to defeat Russia at sea and on land in 1905. This was unprecedented (for East Asians to defeat a Western nation). The Japanese then joined the Allies in World War I and quickly conquered German colonies in the Pacific. Japan got to keep some of those conquests after World War I but felt they had received insufficient respect from their Western allies and that resentment fueled the arrogance that led to Japan attacking the United States and other World War I allies in 1941. That ended badly for the Japanese, a lesson that seems lost on the current generation of Chinese naval leaders. 

It appears that China is planning to obtain some disputed territory with “grab and negotiate” tactics. The way this works the Chinese would quickly mobilize forces and seize some territory from South Korea or Japan and then offer to make peace. This can work, but is highly risky if you are facing a foe, like the Japanese, who are better trained, very determined and more experienced in naval operations. Failing to achieve victory with such tactics would be disastrous for the Chinese leadership which is also disliked by its own people because of corruption and mismanagement. The “grab and make peace” tactics might work against the Philippines or Vietnam but against a more determined neighbor with more powerful air and naval forces, it could get very messy. It could result in a very embarrassing Chinese defeat. China could threaten to use nukes, but to actually do so would be crossing a line that no one else has dared to do since 1945. China is playing a very dangerous game here and some American analysts fear too many Chinese leaders are unaware (or don’t care) how dangerous this is.

Welome To Xinjiang, As China's Ethnic Unrest Simmers

The massacre of 29 people in Kunming this month is related to Xinjiang, a province where the relations between the Han Chinese and Uyghur are more tense than ever. 

URUMQI — In Mongolian, this city’s name means “beautiful pasture,” but don't be fooled. This capital of the autonomous Xinjiang region, located 2,400 kilometers from Beijing, is a Chinese city like so many others, with its clunky glass-and-concrete towers criss-crossed by expressways.

Ürümqi may be a mixed-race city, but the Han Chinese and Uyghur live separately in distinct neighborhoods. They have their own supermarkets, shops, restaurants and nightclubs. Traveling within Xinjiang, there are scenes all around that one would have thought belonged to the past. On flights inside the province, for example, the Han are seated in the front of the plane, the Uyghur in the back.

The schism dividing the province was horrifically manifested March 1, when eight attackers armed with cutlass swords slaughtered 29 people at the Kunming train station, in the southwest of China.

Chinese authorities believe separatist Uyghur were the attackers. Media have covered the tragedy as though it were the “Chinese 9/11.” At the opening of the annual parliamentary session, lawmakers observed a moment of silence. Chinese Premier Li Keqiang went off script to offer his condolences to the victims’ families.

This attack seems to indicate that the violent acts that regularly occur inside Xinjiang are progressively spreading to the rest of China. It is also reminiscent that tensions here continue to worsen. Radio Free Asia listed 14 violent incidents in the autonomous region that led to the death of at least 135 people, civilians and police officers, in 2013.

Turning point

At the Erdaoqiao Bazaar, the smell of boiled lamb, spices, fabrics and clothing are all indicators that this is Central Asia, and not the Far East. “There’s no objective threat, but since the 2009 events, I don’t feel in my proper place in the Bazaar. It feels uneasy,” says Liu Yong*, a 40-year-old Han entrepreneur born in Ürümqi.

China’s military spending At the double

 China’s fast-growing defence budget worries its neighbours, but not every trend is in its favour Mar 15th 2014 | From the print edition

ON THE first day of the annual session of the National People’s Congress last week, China announced a defence budget for 2014 of $132 billion, a generous increase of 12.2% on the year before. That was the official figure, though the real one may be 40% higher still. It set off a flurry of alarm among neighbouring countries. They see the relentless growth in China’s military spending—double-digit increases almost every year for the past two decades, and now the biggest in three years—as going hand-in-hand with a determination to settle sovereignty disputes in its “near seas”, that is, the Yellow, East China and South China Seas, on China’s own terms.

China’s growing military capability inevitably causes concern. As it happened, only a day earlier the Pentagon had published a Quadrennial Defence Review that reflected the probability of flat or declining American defence spending over the next five years. China’s military budget is only about a third the size of America’s but, if present trends continue, the gap will quickly narrow. Certainly Japan, Vietnam and South Korea are raising their military expenditure in response to the Chinese military build-up, but China will still vastly outspend the combined efforts of all its maritime neighbours. Tensions are high with Japan over the Senkaku Islands (Japan controls the islands but China claims them, calling them the Diaoyu). In light of China’s unilateral declaration in November of an “air defence identification zone” in the East China Sea, and bouts of provocative behaviour in maritime disputes with the Philippines and Vietnam, concerns are growing that China is eager to flex its new military muscle.

A great deal about what China spends on defence remains opaque. Yet that 12.2% headline figure needs to be seen in context. Some argue that with China’s economic growth forecast at a steady 7.5% this year, military spending is now decisively outstripping growth in GDP. In fact, adjusted for inflation, the real increase comes down to 8.4%.

Kunming Terrorist Attack: A Resident’s Perspective

Our correspondent recounts the aftermath of the deadly knife attack. 

By William Smith

March 16, 2014

At around 11 pm on March 1, I was in bed and about to fall asleep, when I saw a post on Facebook from a journalist friend of mine in the U.S. It said that a major violent incident had occurred at the Kunming Railway Station. Given that the station is only a 20-minute walk from where I live, I sent a text message to my girlfriend and a few close friends who live in the area advising them to be careful.

Normally, China is a safe place to live and the government puts a lot of emphasis on trying to keep society stable and harmonious. Nonetheless, it is a country still undergoing enormous change, and as elsewhere, this doesn’t come without its fair share of problems. Whether it’s ethnic strife or the widening gap between rich and poor, China has yet to arrive at a place of domestic stability.

I stayed up late checking for stories online about the attack. By midnight Chinese media had published a couple of stories, describing a knife attack at the station that had left dozens dead and more than a hundred injured. By 2 am, Google News was filling up with reports from news agencies around the world. My social network accounts were also overflowing with posts about the story. On Weibo, when the news came out that the attack might have been carried out by a group of people belonging to the Uyghur minority, one angry Chinese person started venting hate indiscriminately at all Muslims while offering exhortations such as “Kunming stay strong, let’s fight!” and “Pray for Kunming.”

The next morning, after a very poor sleep, I woke up and immediately returned to scouring the news from around the world, searching for answers. Eventually I pulled myself away from the computer and ventured out to meet up with friends. Over the next two days, I spoke with a number of Chinese and non-Chinese residents about the incident. One of the first Chinese people I met was a nurse who works at one of the main hospitals. She didn’t happen to be working the night of the attack, but said some of the casualties had been sent to her hospital and at least one of them had died in the emergency room soon after. “There was a lot of blood everywhere, it was very bad. The attackers knew what they were doing because they aimed at people’s vital organs.”

When I asked another Chinese friend for his opinion, he said to me, “William, you know, I think we need to ask ourselves why this could have happened.” This was a sober reflection on the fact that ethnic tensions are a growing political problem in today’s China. Ethnic pressure inside China has been building for some time now. Tibet and Xinjiang, two restive flashpoints, continue to have a strained relationship with the central government in Beijing. Issues over religious freedoms, greater autonomy, and other geo-political disagreements are rife.

Still, so soon after the attack, it was not the response I was expecting, yet many other local people I spoke with shared a similar analytical perspective.

JAPAN HAS A NUCLEAR ‘BOMB IN THE BASEMENT’ AND CHINA ISN’T HAPPY

March 14, 2014 · by Fortuna's Corner 

Japan Has Nuclear ‘Bomb in the Basement,’ and China Isn’t Happy

By Robert Windrem

No nation has suffered more in the nuclear age than Japan, where atomic bombs flattened two cities in World War II and three reactors melted down at Fukushima just three years ago.

But government officials and proliferation experts say Japan is happy to let neighbors like China and North Korea believe it is part of the nuclear club, because it has a “bomb in the basement” -– the material and the means to produce nuclear weapons within six months, according to some estimates. And with tensions rising in the region, China’s belief in the “bomb in the basement” is strong enough that it has demanded Japan get rid of its massive stockpile of plutonium and drop plans to open a new breeder reactor this fall.

Japan signed the international Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which bans it from developing nuclear weapons, more than 40 years ago. But according to a senior Japanese government official deeply involved in the country’s nuclear energy program, Japan has been able to build nuclear weapons ever since it launched a plutonium breeder reactor and a uranium enrichment plant 30 years ago.

Related Story: Japan Producing Huge Stockpile of Plutonium

“Japan already has the technical capability, and has had it since the 1980s,” said the official. He said that once Japan had more than five to 10 kilograms of plutonium, the amount needed for a single weapon, it had “already gone over the threshold,” and had a nuclear deterrent.

Japan now has 9 tons of plutonium stockpiled at several locations in Japan and another 35 tons stored in France and the U.K. The material is enough to create 5,000 nuclear bombs. The country also has 1.2 tons of enriched uranium.

Technical ability doesn’t equate to a bomb, but experts suggest getting from raw plutonium to a nuclear weapon could take as little as six months after the political decision to go forward. A senior U.S. official familiar with Japanese nuclear strategy said the six-month figure for a country with Japan’s advanced nuclear engineering infrastructure was not out of the ballpark, and no expert gave an estimate of more than two years.

In fact, many of Japan’s conservative politicians have long supported Japan’s nuclear power program because of its military potential. “The hawks love nuclear weapons, so they like the nuclear power program as the best they can do,” said Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Non-Proliferation Program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California. “They don’t want to give up the idea they have, to use it as a deterrent.”

Mapping Violence and Protests in Nigeria

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How Big Data can find the big story. 

BY Kalev Leetaru 

MARCH 13, 2014 

The escalating tension between Ukraine and Russia in Crimea has captivated the world's headlines the past few weeks, invoking imagery of Russian occupation not seen since the fall of the Soviet Union. As the world's media outlets run round-the-clock coverage of masked soldiers facing off against besieged Ukrainian military outposts, the rest of the world has largely been drowned out. Few, for example, have likely followed the events in Nigeria, where Boko Haram has executed 59 children in an attack on a boarding school and killed more than 150 over the past two weeks. 

While both Nigerian attacks were reported by international outlets like the BBC and The Guardian, the token attention they received was almost immediately lost in the enormity of articles, blog posts, and social media updates that the unraveling situation in Ukraine has generated. Can the promise of "big data" be leveraged to sift through the world's news coverage over the past year and create a map of the evolving unrest in Nigeria? 

Using the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT) Project, which monitors global media each day, and Google's BigQuery system, one can identify the location and intensity (as proxied by media volume) of protests (indicated by the pink dots) and violence against civilians (red circles) in Nigeria from April 1, 2013, to the present. In all, international media outlets produced nearly 3.5 million news stories on events in Nigeria during this period that were monitored by the database, providing a rich portrait of a nation in turmoil. 

In general, Africa tends to be underrepresented in mainstream U.S. media compared with coverage of European nations or American hotspots like the Middle East, skewing the American public's understanding of world events. 

Nigeria presents a particularly interesting case study as a geographically-divided country in that the nation's stability is being increasingly challenged through the rise of Boko Haram in the country's northeast, domestic unrest in the southwest, intensifying ethnic strife in the center, and the growing influence of radical groups on the continent at large. 

Most striking is that protest activity is largely centralized in the country's south, while violence far outpaces peaceful protests in its north. President Goodluck Jonathan's concerns in January 2012 that the Boko Harem violence in northeast Nigeria had become "even worse than the [1967-1970] civil war" are seen in stark relief today with the visible violence there. These range from an attack that killed 10 in a remote village in Adamawa last April to the more than 150 killed in Borno State in clashes between Boko Haram and government soldiers. Kano saw gunmen open fire on a primary school and a raid on a major Boko Haram bomb-making factory. In Zamfara State a five-hour attack killed 48 people and included hilltop snipers. 

Boots on the Ground

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Should NATO troops help enforce an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement? 

BY William J. Durch 

MARCH 10, 2014 

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas recently stirred controversy when he suggested that a U.S.-led NATO force might backfill Israeli soldiers as they withdraw from Palestinian areas under a two-state peace agreement. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has voiced skepticism about foreign peacekeepers, most recently in his March 4 speech to AIPAC in Washington. Hamas meanwhile has said that they'd view NATO as a hostile occupier. For his part, Secretary of State John Kerry cautiously noted in February that a third-party force is "something for the parties to work out." 

Controversial though it may be, Abbas's proposal is not going to fade quickly. Indeed, if negotiators in the peace process start making progress on other contentious issues, the question of how to transition Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) out of the West Bank in a way that both sides would find reassuring will loom ever larger. Negotiators shouldn't wait to shift gears toward implementation challenges. They should start thinking now about how to surmount obstacles to a successful security transition. In doing so, they'll need to focus on six critical questions. 

How would an international peacekeeping presence be viewed? Peacekeepers would need to be seen by the Palestinian public as tangible evidence of outside support for their independence, lest they become lightning rods for radicalization or magnets for foreign jihadists or Hamas spoilers. Managing such dynamics could be the biggest challenge that a peacekeeping force would face. An energetic public affairs strategy -- a collaboration of troop-contributing countries, the Palestinian Authority, civil society, and the private sector - would need to show how the force advanced the goal of a peaceful, sovereign Palestine and how extremist attacks against it could jeopardize that goal. Equally important would be a strategy for engaging Israeli stakeholders to convey credible assurances that the third-party force would not tolerate activities that would directly threaten Israelis' security. 

What would the peacekeepers' responsibilities actually be? While the final peace agreement would be the ultimate decider on these terms, peacekeepers could be tasked to assist in the return or resettlement of Palestinian refugees, as well as stabilize areas within the borders of a Palestinian state. (They should not be responsible for managing any mutually agreed-upon land swaps, as no third-party force would have the political credibility to do so; only Israeli government entities have the strength and credibility within Israel to implement those parts of agreed-upon land swaps that require the relocation of Israeli settlements.) They could also help the Palestinian Civil Police continue to build its capacity, or support the delivery of essential services to underserved communities. This is a very diverse menu but not unusual for a complex peacekeeping mission. 

What "stress tests" would peacekeepers likely face? In addition to the extremist/spoiler problem, one could imagine civil disturbances flaring in urban areas (especially greater Jerusalem) or at newly established border crossings. If local police were overwhelmed, a third-party force would surely get the call and would need to be prepared to respond. Hamas-style cross-border rocket attacks are clearly Israel's greatest concern and would immediately trigger pressures for IDF air strikes or commando raids, unless third-party units were willing and able to quickly suppress the threat. Security along a Palestinian state's eastern border would also be a grave concern, given how stressed Jordan is by the Syrian conflict. Border and riverine operations, enabled by overhead reconnaissance and Amman's active cooperation, would be vital for denying access to foreign fighters. A stronger U.N. peacekeeping presence and mandate on the Golan Heights could be an important supporting factor, as well. 

HPSR Threat Intelligence Briefing - Episode 11

February 21, 2014 - last edited February 25, 2014

Threat Actors Operating within the Islamic Republic of Iran 

Iranian hacker groups and their allies launched increasing numbers of cyber attacks over the last year, despite strict state controls of Internet traffic including: spying, censorship, and filtering laws and technology. HPSR has observed an increasing level of attacks targeting Western interests. James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, stated in the DNI Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, that “Advanced cyber actors— such as Russia and China—are unlikely to launch a devastating attack against the United States outside of a military conflict or crisis that they believe threatens their vital interests. However, isolated state or nonstate actors might deploy less sophisticated cyber attacks as a form of retaliation or provocation. These less advanced but highly motivated actors could access some poorly protected US networks that control core functions, such as power generation, during the next two years”. He then went on to describe two specific incidents, both of Iranian origin – OpAbabil that targeted the US financial sector and the attack on Saudi Aramco that destroyed 30,000 computer systems. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has pointed out that "Iranians are unusually talented in cyber war for some reason we don’t fully understand." And Gabi Siboni, Senior Research Fellow at Tal Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, has stated that "Iran should be considered a first-tier cyber power.”

In June 2013, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said “In the past few months, we have identified a significant increase in the scope of cyber attacks on Israel by Iran. These attacks are carried out directly by Iran and through its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah.” He stated that these attacks were against “vital national systems” such as water, power, and banking systems. In September 2013, US officials disclosed that Iran had compromised the Navy Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) to such an extent that it took four months to fully resolve the breach.

Historically, attacks originating from these groups range from gaming scenarios to politically motivated retaliation attacks, though their sophistication is increasing. These attacks primarily target Western entities and their affiliates. Members of these groups operate in stark contrast to the strict controls that Iran imposes on electronic communications for the general population. This unchecked vigilante activity indicates the regime either supports these activities or has chosen to turn a blind eye to their actions. This HPSR Threat Intelligence Briefing (see attached) profiles the essential threat actors; their motives; their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP); and evidence of possible ties to state sponsored cyber warfare. An in-depth focus of the group Ashiyane examines how these groups operate, despite the regime’s strict control of the Internet. Finally, this paper identifies solutions for dealing with attacks by these groups and risk mitigation strategies for potential targets. 

In testimony given before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection, and Security Technologies, on March 20, 2013, Ilan Berman, Vice President of the American Foreign Policy Council, said that in the past year “Iran has demonstrated a growing ability to hold Western targets at risk in cyberspace, amplifying a new dimension in the asymmetric conflict that is now taking place over the Iranian regime’s nuclear program.” 

Thomas D'Agostino, head of the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration, has stated that “nuclear labs are under constant attack” receiving up to “10 million security significant cyber security events" each day.” And Frank Cilluffo, Director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University, testifying before the US House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security stated that US officials are investigating “reports that Iranian and Venezuelan diplomats in Mexico were involved in planned cyber attacks against U.S. targets, including nuclear power plants.”

All Hail Shale

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As Putin's army masses in the East, Europe starts to rethink its opposition to fracking. 

BY Keith Johnson

MARCH 13, 2014 

Twitter Russian leaders, especially Vladimir Putin, have spent years trying to persuade European countries to hold off on expanding shale gas production for the simplest of reasons: Such a shift would pose a long-term threat to Russia's energy dominance over Europe. But the Russian invasion of the Crimean peninsula is giving Europe new enthusiasm for fracking -- and potentially bringing about the exact outcome Russia has spent years trying to avoid. 

The Old Continent has been largely reluctant to use the drilling technology that has enabled the U.S. energy boom despite indications that Europe sits atop plentiful shale gas reserves. Only a handful of countries, led by Poland and the U.K., have seriously considered it, while several have banned fracking altogether. There are growing signs, however, that Russia's heavy-handed antics could be changing Europe's energy calculus in fundamental ways. 

On Wednesday, the European Parliament passed energy legislation that included tougher environmental rules for oil and gas exploration -- but specifically excluded shale gas projects from the new regulations. This week, Poland passed tax breaks meant to juice shale gas exploration there. Big European business lobbies, including steel-makers and the EU employers' association, just called for the continent to embrace shale gas as a way out of its energy straitjacket. 

"Given the absolute necessity for Europe to diversify its sources of supply of gas and to find solutions to the huge energy price differential with its main competitors, we see no alternative but to proceed as rapidly as possible with shale gas exploitation as part of the energy mix in Europe while retaining all the precautions necessary in pursuing this approach," Gordon Moffatt, director general of European steel lobby Eurofer said in a statement Thursday, a day after the group sent an open letter to all European heads of state and government urging a shift in energy policy. 

Europe's growing support for fracking isn't entirely new. Business groups across the continent were calling for more shale gas production even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine triggered fears that Moscow could use energy as a weapon to prevent European powers from intervening. Even in France, home to some of the continent's most ardent environmentalist groups, fracking's high-profile defenders include Industry Minister Arnaud Montebourg. 

But in the past, fracking proponents zeroed in on economic arguments, namely the fear that European industrial firms are losing ground to their U.S. counterparts, which are blessed with relatively cheap and abundant natural gas that serves as both fuel and a key ingredient of petrochemicals like plastics and gas-derived diesel. Now, though, energy security fears unleashed by Russia's aggressive behavior have joined economic arguments in fracking proponents' arsenal. 

"It's been a shot in the arm for Europe, in a way it wasn't in the previous two gas cutoffs" in 2006 and 2009, said Elizabeth Rosenberg, director of the energy security program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). "This is a significant reinvigoration of efforts that are already under way, but has served to make the public and policymakers to think more creatively about the energy options they have." 

Putting the focus on the security of energy supplies, as Putin's approach to Ukraine seems to have done, could make it easier to muster support across Europe for the controversial practice. That's because the economic arguments business groups brandish to advocate for fracking -- bringing energy prices closer to U.S. levels -- don't pass muster. 

Who Lost Europe?

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How the standoff in Ukraine could split NATO and kill the Asia pivot. 

BY Jeffrey Mankoff 

MARCH 14, 2014 

Even if the United States succeeds in its last-ditch effort to prevent Russia's annexation of Crimea, the Ukrainian crisis will have long-lasting reverberations for U.S. foreign policy. For the past five years, the Obama administration's focus has been on limiting overseas commitments while shifting resources from Europe and the Middle East to Asia. The current standoff with Moscow will almost certainly make that harder. In addition to further eroding the U.S.-Russian relationship, it will force Washington to take European security more seriously, reduce the prospects for a negotiated outcome in Syria, and limit the scope and ambitions of Washington's Asia rebalance. 

The most direct impact of the current standoff will be on Washington's relationship with Moscow. Although the U.S.-Russia "reset" was a signal achievement of Obama's first term, bilateral relations have cooled significantly in recent years. With tension mounting over Russia's support for Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, crackdown on dissent and gay rights at home, and decision to grant asylum to NSA leaker Edward Snowden, the Obama administration made a conscious decision to de-prioritize relations with Moscow, cancelling a September 2013 summit and refusing to send a high-level government delegation to the Sochi Olympics. 

Nevertheless, Washington attempted to preserve limited cooperation in order to broker an end to the Syrian civil war and roll back Iran's nuclear program. Even before the crisis in Ukraine, it was becoming clear that a second round of Syria talks in Geneva were going nowhere, and that the fate of an Iranian nuclear deal would depend on direct contacts between Washington and Tehran. Coupled with the drawdown of U.S. forces in Afghanistan (a priority area for U.S.-Russian cooperation during the reset), these developments were already reducing Washington's interest in partnership with Moscow. With its need for Russian cooperation significantly reduced, the invasion of Ukraine sets the stage for the U.S. to further disengage, and to pursue a harder line toward Moscow, likely for several years. 

But it's not just relations with the Kremlin that will be affected. America's European allies have frequently accused the Obama administration of taking Europe for granted. To the extent that these criticisms are justified, they reflected a belief within the administration that European security -- Washington's principal foreign policy concern for the past century -- had been solved and that it was time for Europe to become a producer, rather than a consumer, of security. Unfortunately, the Ukrainian crisis has called that assumption into question. 

At least until President Vladimir Putin exits the Kremlin for good, Washington is going to have to focus more on sustaining its NATO alliance commitments and providing reassurance to vulnerable states on Europe's periphery, even if doing so undermines the Obama administration's desire to simultaneously slash defense spending and divert resources from Europe to Asia. Washington has already taken some short-term, mostly symbolic measures to reassure its allies, including holding Article 4 consultations within NATO (invoked when a member state believes its security or independence is threatened) and dispatching additional fighter jets to the Baltic states and personnel to Poland. In the wake of the current crisis, the United States may also need to reconsider its 2012 decision to withdraw two full brigade combat teams from Europe as a cost-saving measure, and possibly consider the re-deployment of forces from traditional bases in Germany to NATO's eastern flank. Similarly, the Ukraine crisis will strengthen opposition on Capitol Hill to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel's plan to impose cost savings on the Pentagon by slashing the size of U.S. land forces following their withdrawal from Afghanistan. 

Obama's Not Carter -- He's Eisenhower

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And he's prepared to let Putin win the battle, knowing that the West will win the war. 

BY James Traub

MARCH 7, 2014 

On Nov. 4, 1956, Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest after Hungarian authorities announced that they would withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. A last, desperate teletype message from Hungarian insurgents read, "They just brought us a rumor that the American troops will be here within one or two hours.… We are well and fighting." Troops were not on the way. U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, who had vowed to roll back Soviet control of Eastern Europe, did nothing, and the Hungarian uprising was crushed. Leaders of both U.S. parties accused Eisenhower of kowtowing to the Soviets. Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate for president, alleged that the incumbent had "brought the coalition of the free nations to a point where even its survival has been threatened." 

Russia has invaded a border nation once again, and once again the American president stands accused of vacillation. Barack Obama is not the former supreme commander of Allied forces, so the darts fired his way penetrate much deeper than they did into Eisenhower, who coasted to re-election. Obama's cautious response to Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of the Ukrainian region of Crimea has confirmed his growing reputation as a weak-willed figure whose faltering leadership has sent a message of impunity to the world's bullies. Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham recently tweeted that Obama's failure to attack the Libyans who killed U.S. diplomat Chris Stevens in 2012 invited "this type of aggression." Graham has a partisan ax to grind, but much of the commentariat has followed suit. My colleague David Rothkopf, straining for terms of abuse sufficient to the moment, has written that comparing Obama to Jimmy Carter, the gold standard for presidential weakness, may be "unfair to Carter." 

There is an implicit analogy here to the world of human relations. Since the only language a bully understands is intimidation, he can be deterred only if he knows in advance that he'll pay an intolerable price for his behavior: beat up my little brother and you'll answer to me. In the realm of foreign relations, this logic dictates Donald Rumsfeld's famous truism, "Weakness is provocative." Rumsfeld believed that the U.S. invasion of Iraq would serve as a demonstration project for bullies all over the Middle East, who would now think twice before testing American resolve. That experience taught many people, though not the former defense secretary, that bellicosity can be even more provocative than weakness. 

The impulse to chestiness is hard to resist, whether in life or in foreign affairs. There is something glamorous and enviable about the freedom of action a bully enjoys. He swaggers, while lesser souls cower. We yearn to emulate that freedom without indulging in that cruelty -- thus our Walter Mitty fantasies. Bullying behavior seems even more intolerable when, like the United States, you're the most powerful kid on the playground. We thrill at the big brother who balls up his fist in the name of justice. Ronald Reagan got vastly more credit with the American people for crying, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall!" than his successor George H.W. Bush did for helping Mikhail Gorbachev end the Soviet empire peacefully. But the world owes Bush a much greater debt of gratitude. 

The U.S. Military Operations You've Never Heard Of

March 15, 2014

By Nick Turse

Lion Forward Teams? Echo Casemate? Juniper Micron?

You could be forgiven if this jumble of words looks like nonsense to you. It isn't. It's the language of the U.S. military's simmering African interventions; the patois that goes with a set of missions carried out in countries most Americans couldn't locate on a map; the argot of conflicts now primarily fought by proxies and a former colonial power on a continent that the U.S. military views as a hotbed of instability and that hawkish pundits increasingly see as a growth area for future armed interventions.

Since 9/11, the U.S. military has been making inroads in Africa, building alliances, facilities, and a sophisticated logistics network. Despite repeated assurances by U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) that military activities on the continent were minuscule, a 2013 investigation by TomDispatch exposed surprisingly large and expanding U.S. operations -- including recent military involvement with no fewer than 49 of 54 nations on the continent. Washington's goal continues to be building these nations into stable partners with robust, capable militaries, as well as creating regional bulwarks favorable to its strategic interests in Africa. Yet over the last years, the results have often confounded the planning -- with American operations serving as a catalyst for blowback (to use a term of CIA tradecraft).

U.S. Cyber Command to Be Designated As a Unified Command by Pentagon

March 15, 2014

Cyber Command headed toward unified command status

Jared Serbu

Federal News Radio

Four years after its inception, the time has come to elevate U.S. Cyber Command to the status of a full unified combatant command, its outgoing chief said Wednesday.

Gen. Keith Alexander, the commander of Cyber Command and the director of the National Security Agency, said the growth of CYBERCOM since 2010, including the development of its cyber mission teams, shows it has now reached a level of maturity that he called a “tipping point.”

Alexander, who has led the command since its inception and will retire within the next few months, said it’s likely that within the next year, DoD will extract CYBERCOM from its parent command, U.S. Strategic Command, and turn it into a unified command all its own.

"Why a unified command? Command and control, directly from the President and the Secretary [of Defense], directly to that commander," Alexander told the House Armed Services Committee. "In cyberspace, that speed is going to be absolutely important. And I think as we add more teams and more complexity, STRATCOM’s ability to actually play in this will continue to go down."

Obama nominated Adm. Mike Rogers, the Navy’s commander of the U.S. Fleet Cyber Command, to replace Alexander. Rogers testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday for his nomination hearing.

Turning CYBERCOM into the nation’s 10th combatant command always has been one option as the White House and DoD considered the longer-term vision for the organization. But when it was first created as a sub-unified command of STRATCOM four years ago, Defense leaders wanted to take a slower start while they decided on a permanent structure.

The options included making it into a more traditional combatant command organized in a similar fashion to Strategic Command itself, or giving it specialized authorities, similar to those held by Special Operations Command.

"We believe that the SOCOM model is where you need to go," Alexander said. "That gives us the training and some of the acquisition authorities ,specifically over the cyber lane. So it’s SOCOM- like."

Not a favored approach yet

Another option the department had been considering over the past several years was to place all of the military’s cyber forces in a separate, newly-created military service, based on the military’s understanding that cyber is its own domain of warfare in the modern era.

But Alexander said a new cyber service is not DoD’s favored approach at the moment.

"I think for at least the next several years, we need to have an integrated cyber capability that goes into the services," he said. "I think that in places like Iraq, if we were to embed cyber capabilities at the brigade level, which we will need to do, you need to have service participation in that, not a separate service with external people coming in, but an embedded, organic capability to that brigade itself. But they need to be trained to a standard. So it’s analogous to the way the cryptologic system works. We have cryptologists who go down to brigades who are trained to a certain level. We have them in the air and we have them at sea. All of them are trained together, and they act as one system, but they have them by service. So I think the next correct step would be go to a unified cause and then see if it makes sense to take the step beyond that. And I think that kind of a deliberate approach makes sure we don’t go too far and then have to collapse back."

Feinstein vs. CIA

The Senator vs. The C.I.A.

Steve Coll

The New Yorker

March 24, 2014 print edition

In the vestibule of Room 211 of the Hart Senate Office Building, just to the north of the Capitol, a cop guards an inner door that requires a numerical code to open it. The room, where the staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence sits, is called a “skiff,” for “sensitive compartmented information facility.” Last week, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the committee’s chair, described secret documents that are now apparently stored in the office. She did so publicly, during a remarkable jeremiad on the Senate floor, which was part “Homeland” treatment, part grand-jury instruction. She recounted several years of maneuvering between the committee staff and the C.I.A., before announcing “grave concerns” that agency officers had broken the law and violated the Constitution during a struggle over the documents.

Feinstein called them the Panetta Review, in reference to the former C.I.A. director Leon Panetta, who left the agency in 2011. The documents were prepared by C.I.A. officers, and although their contents are secret, their subject matter is clear and vitally important: the true history of the brutal interrogation of about a hundred Al Qaeda leaders and suspects at offshore C.I.A. “black sites” between roughly 2002 and 2006, on orders of the Bush Administration. The interrogations included the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” such as waterboarding, which constituted torture in the judgment of the Red Cross and many other authorities. Feinstein suggested that the Panetta Review may illuminate still disputed issues; namely, whether the program produced significant intelligence, whether the C.I.A. lied to Congress about it, and how cruel and degrading the black sites really were.

Barack Obama ended the program on his second day in office, in 2009, denouncing it as torture. Yet he also signalled that he would not hold the C.I.A. or its career officers accountable for the past. Moreover, he decided to advance the C.I.A.’s role in counterterrorism, which complicated the options for examining the interrogation program. The C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center ran the sites. It also managed the agency’s drone program and the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Obama called its officers into action, ordering drone strikes in Pakistan and encouraging the agency to finally find bin Laden, which it did, in 2011. For the President to have investigated some of the same personnel for past complicity in torture would have been awkward.

The Coming Revolution in Orbit

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How space went from a superpowers-only club to a DIY playground. 

BY Zach Rosenberg 

MARCH 12, 2014 

Last November, a rocket built from a decommissioned U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile lifted off from Wallops Island, Virginia, carrying not nuclear warheads headed for the Soviet Union, but rather 29 small satellites bound for orbit. Among them was the TJ3Sat, built by students at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in nearby Fairfax County. 

The satellite is relatively rudimentary, as such things go. It is not much bigger than a can of soup and weighs only a couple of pounds. Its main purpose is to convert students' text messages into speech and broadcast them over amateur-radio bands -- a demonstration project, much like the Soviet Sputnik, the world's first orbital satellite, which broadcast beeps. 

Thomas Jefferson is a selective, science-oriented school in a highly educated county, and the satellite project was largely funded by established space companies, which also provided some technical know-how. In other words, if any kids were going to launch a satellite, the students at TJ were precisely the ones you would expect to do it -- and they had help. Still, they accomplished what 30 years ago would have required the resources of a major nation-state or a Fortune 500 company. 

Until recently, orbital space was an exclusive club. The Soviet Union and Russia, the United States, certain European nations, Japan, and China were the only builders of large satellites, and they controlled the only rockets capable of actually putting a heavy payload into orbit. Everyone else who wanted to send a package (or a person) whizzing around the planet had to deal with them. 

But the club's membership is expanding. In the past three years, Bolivia, Hungary, Belarus, and Lithuania -- countries not known for their technological prowess, let alone their space-faring experience -- have placed their first satellites in orbit, as have dozens of obscure universities, scientific research institutions, and start-up companies. TJ3Sat was the first high school–built satellite, but it will certainly not be the last. 

Spaceflight is enormously expensive, and the single most costly component of operating a satellite is getting it into orbit in the first place. The upfront financial costs of designing, building, and testing a rocket run well into the billions or even tens of billions of dollars. International Launch Services, a U.S. subsidiary of the Russian company that builds Proton rockets, charges around $100 million to launch a single large satellite, according to industry clearinghouse Seradata. The highly reliable Ariane 5, sold by French company Arianespace and launched from French Guiana, will run you about $210 million per launch. All told, the cheapest launch options cost around $5,000 per pound of payload. 

It is a commonly held view in the space industry that once prices break $1,000 per pound, the market will grow exponentially, ushering in an orbital revolution. Twenty years ago that threshold was a fever dream, but one company is set to run up against it as soon as this year. The result could be nothing less than the democratization of access to space -- and a boon for the students, scientists, companies, and governments that have grand plans for the final frontier. 

*** THE ORBITAL REVOLUTION IS BEING DRIVEN FIRST AND FOREMOST BY THE fact that satellites are getting smaller, cheaper, and ever more capable. The miniaturization of electronics has led to new markets of small satellites with better capabilities -- variously called microsats, nanosats, picosats, and the like. "A lot of the growth we're seeing in small satellites is in the 10-kilogram range," says Jeff Foust, a senior analyst with Futron, a prominent space analysis firm. "A lot of developments out of universities can weigh as little as 1 kilogram, as opposed to the 100-kilogram microsatellites that constituted most of the small-satellite market a few years ago." 

Obama's Not Carter -- He's Eisenhower

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And he's prepared to let Putin win the battle, knowing that the West will win the war. 

BY James Traub

MARCH 7, 2014 

Twitter Facebook Google + Reddit On Nov. 4, 1956, Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest after Hungarian authorities announced that they would withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. A last, desperate teletype message from Hungarian insurgents read, "They just brought us a rumor that the American troops will be here within one or two hours.… We are well and fighting." Troops were not on the way. U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, who had vowed to roll back Soviet control of Eastern Europe, did nothing, and the Hungarian uprising was crushed. Leaders of both U.S. parties accused Eisenhower of kowtowing to the Soviets. Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate for president, alleged that the incumbent had "brought the coalition of the free nations to a point where even its survival has been threatened." 

Russia has invaded a border nation once again, and once again the American president stands accused of vacillation. Barack Obama is not the former supreme commander of Allied forces, so the darts fired his way penetrate much deeper than they did into Eisenhower, who coasted to re-election. Obama's cautious response to Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of the Ukrainian region of Crimea has confirmed his growing reputation as a weak-willed figure whose faltering leadership has sent a message of impunity to the world's bullies. Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham recently tweeted that Obama's failure to attack the Libyans who killed U.S. diplomat Chris Stevens in 2012 invited "this type of aggression." Graham has a partisan ax to grind, but much of the commentariat has followed suit. My colleague David Rothkopf, straining for terms of abuse sufficient to the moment, has written that comparing Obama to Jimmy Carter, the gold standard for presidential weakness, may be "unfair to Carter." 

There is an implicit analogy here to the world of human relations. Since the only language a bully understands is intimidation, he can be deterred only if he knows in advance that he'll pay an intolerable price for his behavior: beat up my little brother and you'll answer to me. In the realm of foreign relations, this logic dictates Donald Rumsfeld's famous truism, "Weakness is provocative." Rumsfeld believed that the U.S. invasion of Iraq would serve as a demonstration project for bullies all over the Middle East, who would now think twice before testing American resolve. That experience taught many people, though not the former defense secretary, that bellicosity can be even more provocative than weakness. 

The impulse to chestiness is hard to resist, whether in life or in foreign affairs. There is something glamorous and enviable about the freedom of action a bully enjoys. He swaggers, while lesser souls cower. We yearn to emulate that freedom without indulging in that cruelty -- thus our Walter Mitty fantasies. Bullying behavior seems even more intolerable when, like the United States, you're the most powerful kid on the playground. We thrill at the big brother who balls up his fist in the name of justice. Ronald Reagan got vastly more credit with the American people for crying, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall!" than his successor George H.W. Bush did for helping Mikhail Gorbachev end the Soviet empire peacefully. But the world owes Bush a much greater debt of gratitude.