G20 Summit: Leaving West to Deal With Crises, China Focuses on Positives

By François Godement

This article was originally published by YaleGlobal Online on 30 August 2016.

G20 agenda hints at China’s vision for global order with focus on long-term rather than immediate concerns

With the approach of the Group of 20 summit in Hangzhou, there is expectation that China might clarify its position on the contested South China Sea. Contrary to expectations, those Asian neighbors and Western leaders who want to seize the occasion to press China on immediate issues will be disappointed. There will be little space to question publicly China’s drive into the South China and East China Seas, to seek confirmed implementation by China of UN sanctions targeting North Korea, to ask for more direct involvement by China in resolving the most urgent issue of our time – the Middle East in tatters and resulting refugee flows – or even to challenge China’s record-breaking attack on human rights and legal activists at home.

Instead, the summit offers China’s leader Xi Jinping a unique occasion to shine and for China to extoll its complementary – or alternative – vision of the global order.

As host country, China has engineered impeccable rhetoric and goals that are hard to disagree with, if somewhat distant and abstract, for the G20 leaders to focus on. US President Barack Obama is now a lame-duck president with much uncertainty over what follows him. European leaders are weakened by the continent’s inward turn, so powerfully shown by the Brexit. Western leaders are on the defensive much more than their Chinese counterparts. There may be isolated supporters in favor of focusing on issues of the day – Australia, Japan and even Korea spring to mind. Others like Brazil or Indonesia may not fully support China’s professed goals for the G20. Few will take the risk of disowning them. Too much of their economy is now tied to China’s fortune.

U.S. Looks to Beat ISIS Before Obama’s Out

Nancy A. Youssef
09.02.16
Source Link

There are only a few months left in the Obama presidency. Which means the pressure is on to score a major win against ISIS before he leaves the White House.

To hear members of the national security community tell it, ISIS is about to lose its grip on its Iraqi capital.

In the last 10 days alone, the two U.S. generals leading the war effort have promised that the city of Mosul will be out of ISIS hands soon. Telegraphing the military’s next move usually is considered strategically daft, but American commanders now are spelling out the dates of their operation within weeks.

Meanwhile, those with a political bent are pushing for the U.S.-led coalition and the Iraqi forces to move into Mosul before the end of the Obama administration term so it can end on the cusp of a major battlefield win, one U.S. official told The Daily Beast.

“It is a way to end on a high note,” one U.S. official explained. The White House “would love to see us kick off Mosul” before the administration’s term ends in January.

It makes some sense: What general would want to leave a war to Commander-in-Chief Donald Trump?

The military is adamant that political calculations are not part of their planning. Rather, they want to move on Mosul soon to exploit the war’s momentum—a momentum, they insist, that has swung against the so-called Islamic State, widely known as ISIS.

They point to a depleted ISIS that failed to fight for the Syrian city of Jarabulus last month; its inability to retain control of the city of Dabiq southwest of there; and the repeated failed efforts of the terror group to take back the eastern Syrian city of al-Shaddadi, a key route into Iraq.

When ISIS has tried to fight to retain control of a city, its militants have failed, officials noted. Most recently, despite heavy fighting, ISIS could not hold onto the strategically important city of Manbij in northern Syria and during the three-month battle for Fallujah that ended in June. And since then, the Turks have sought to close off its border beyond the area around Manbij, making it potentially harder for the terror group to move its fighters and supplies into Syria and Iraq.

Why Europe’s Idea Of Multiculturalism Is A Mirage

http://swarajyamag.com/world/why-europes-idea-of-multiculturalism-is-a-mirage
Leon Hadar - September 03, 2016,
As more Muslims settle in the West, and gain citizenship and the right of vote, the contours of the debate over religion and its place in society are bound to change.
It all started, as it does quite frequently these days, as a debate on Facebook, this one among a group of libertarians discussing the relationship between religion and state.

A friend posted a news story reporting that a halal supermarket— i.e., a supermarket selling only food and drinks that are permissible under Islamic law—in Paris has been ordered by local authorities to sell pork and alcohol (which are not halal) or face closure. Apparently, older residents of the area had complained that they were no longer able to buy the full range of products that had been available under the store’s previous ownership.
“We want a social mix,” said the head of the municipality. “We don’t want any area that is only Muslim or any area where there are no Muslims.” He added that he would have reacted in the same way had a kosher supermarket opened on the site, and indicated that the authority was taking legal action to revoke the shop’s lease, which runs until 2019.
Members of the Facebook group seemed to agree that this was another example of the French tradition embodied in the nation’s constitutional requirement of laïcité, or the strict separation of state and religious activities. This is sometimes contrasted with the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution— which guarantees freedom of religion but doesn’t require the government to maintain secularism.

Turkey and Iran’s Problems with Russia as an Ally

By George Friedman
In geopolitics, sometimes distance makes the heart grow fonder.
Turkey sent troops into Syria yesterday. This caused Russia to declare its unhappiness with Turkey. U.S. Vice President Joe Biden visited Turkey yesterday. The atmosphere may not have been loving, but it was cordial, with none of the venom that had been visible since the coup attempt. The Russians have agreed that to halt operations from Iran’s Hamedan air base, but might return at some point. There is some sort of political battle raging in Iran over giving the Russians permission to use Hamedan in the first place. All of these apparently distinct threads tie together into a single, geopolitical story.
Let’s begin with Iran. Iran has kept its independence for centuries, fending off two threats. One was Turkey, in its Ottoman guise. The other was Russia, both the empire and the Soviet phase. As an example, during World War II, Iran remained formally independent, but was occupied in the north by the Soviets and in the south by the British. After the war, the Soviets showed themselves reluctant to leave. It was American pressure on both the Soviets and the British that restored Iranian independence. It wasn’t American goodness. The Americans opposed Soviet expansion and were undermining the British Empire. Iranian and American interests coincided.

The United States increased its power and influence in Iran, until the Islamic Revolution tore the relationship apart. The United States became Iran’s main adversary, but not its only one. Iran remained extremely cautious about Soviet designs, particularly in the early phase of the Islamic Republic. It remembered its long history with Russia. As for Turkey, it was weak in this period and didn’t present a threat. Iran was hostile to the United States and cautious about Russia.
The recent deal on nuclear weapons was forced through in Iran by factions who argued that a policy of complete hostility toward the United States was undermining the Iranian economy and political interests. Another faction (or several) opposed the deal as a betrayal of Iranian interests and as a capitulation to the United States. This faction, rooted in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, fought and lost the fight. But it did not give up.

For those in this faction, hostility toward the United States was the foundation of Iran’s foreign policy. Given the decline in U.S.-Russian relations, they saw Russia as an alternative to the United States. The government, which negotiated the deal, saw Russia as more dangerous to Iran in the long term, simply because the United States was far away and Russia was very near. To force the situation, someone in the Iranian government gave the Russians permission to use Hamedan air base for strikes against Syria. They apparently did not tell a wide range of people in the government that this was going on. There were apparently a number of flights out of Hamedan before the news broke. When the news broke, the flights were stopped cold. Since then, a political battle has raged in Tehran that has multiple dimensions, including a clash over who is actually in charge.

NSA’s Secret Stash of “Digital Holes”

Opinion: The NSA’s stash of digital holes is a threat to everyone online
John Naughton, The Guardian, September 4, 2016
Here’s a phrase to conjure with: “zero-day vulnerability”. If you’re a non-techie, it will sound either like a meaningless piece of jargon or it’ll have a vaguely sinister ring to it. “Year Zero” was the name chosen by the Khmer Rouge for 1975, the year they seized power in Cambodia and embarked on their genocidal rule. Behind the term lay the idea that “all culture and traditions within a society must be completely destroyed or discarded and a new revolutionary culture must replace it, starting from scratch”.
If you run a computer network, though, especially one that hosts sensitive or confidential data, then zero-day vulnerability evokes nightmares and worse. It means that your system has a security hole that nobody, including you, knew about and that someone is now in a position to exploit. And you have no real defence against it.

In its determination to screw the bad guys, the NSA left all of us vulnerable
All software has bugs and all networked systems have security holes in them. If you wanted to build a model of our online world out of cheese, you’d need emmental to make it realistic. These holes (vulnerabilities) are constantly being discovered and patched, but the process by which this happens is, inevitably, reactive. Someone discovers a vulnerability, reports it either to the software company that wrote the code or to US-CERT, the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team. A fix for the vulnerability is then devised and a “patch” is issued by computer security companies such as Kaspersky and/or by software and computer companies. At the receiving end, it is hoped that computer users and network administrators will then install the patch. Some do, but many don’t, alas.
It’s a lousy system, but it’s the only one we’ve got. It has two obvious flaws. The first is that the response always lags behind the threat by days, weeks or months, during which the malicious software that exploits the vulnerability is doing its ghastly work. The second is that it is completely dependent on people reporting the vulnerabilities that they have discovered.

Waze for War: How the Army Can Integrate Artificial Intelligence

http://warontherocks.com/2016/09/waze-for-war-how-the-army-can-integrate-artificial-intelligence/
Benjamin Jensen and Ryan Kendall
September 2, 2016
It is 2025. Protests in the ethnic Russian enclave in Riga, Latvia have NATO on edge. Russian units in the Western Military District are on alert conducting snap exercises involving autonomous ground and air attack systems.
The Russian president makes a speech promising to protect ethnic Russians wherever they are with military forces if necessary. In response, a U.S. Army brigade combat team bolstered by intelligence, air defense, and aviation support elements from U.S. Army Europe deploys. Their mission is to reassure Latvian forces, deter Russian aggression, and if necessary conduct a mobile defense.

The task force processes petabytes of unclassified social media posts. Machine learning software agents isolate images of potential Russian covert elements agitating protests, cross referencing cell phone pictures posted on social media with police traffic cameras, and more sensitive collection platforms. U.S. forces provide these images to the Latvians along with a projection of likely Russian activities over the next 48 hours.
The Latvians distribute the images on a cellular alert network that lets concerned citizens turn their cell phones and other personal devices into a civil defense sensor network. This civil defense network acts as a cloud, helping cyber defense apps secure critical infrastructure and conducting predictive models of where possible Russian cross-border insertions might occur based on historical data, weather, terrain, and news reports.

Understanding the military buildup of offensive cyberweapons

http://www.zdnet.com/article/understanding-the-military-buildup-of-offensive-cyberweapons/

Over the past few years, offensive cyberweapons have risen in prominence as a part of international military efforts. The full impact of these weapons remains to be seen, however.

By Conner Forrest | September 1, 2016 

"Shall we play a game?"

"Love to. How about Global Thermonuclear War?"

True geeks will recognize the above exchange as one of the seminal pieces of dialogue from the 1983 film WarGames, where a young hacker named David Lightman nearly starts World War III after gaining access to a powerful military supercomputer. The film was a critical success, and set the stage for a variety of films that explored the relationship between cybersecurity and the military.

WarGames, and films like it, were meant to be perceived as fictional. As time has gone on, though, the line between what kinds of cyberwarfare are possible, and what are science fiction has begun to blur. Computer programs like the Stuxnet worm, for example, have taken down large portions of government infrastructure, including centrifuges used in Iran's nuclear programme.

But, when and how did this happen? The rise of offensive cyberweapons has changed the landscape of cyberwar, from protecting against data theft to defending against physical destruction. To understand this rise, it's helpful to look at the history of such weapons.

The birth of offensive cyber

There's much confusion around some of the language used when referring to elements of cyberwarfare. According to Ewan Lawson, senior research fellow for military influence at RUSI (Royal United Services Institute), it's important to clarify that offensive cyberweapons don't typically deal with passive activities like data collection or surveillance; rather, a cyberweapon is something that is "deliberately designed to do damage or destruction."

Bob Gourley, co-founder of the cyber security consultancy Cognitio and former CTO of the Defense Intelligence Agency, echoed that sentiment. According to Gourley, at least in the US, "offensive cyber weapons are not designed to take information, but to degrade, disrupt or destroy systems."

A Cyberattack Has Caused Confirmed Physical Damage for the Second Time Ever

https://www.wired.com/2015/01/german-steel-mill-hack-destruction/

KIM ZETTER  

DATE OF PUBLICATION: 01.08.15.

AMID ALL THE noise the Sony hack generated over the holidays, a far more troubling cyber attack was largely lost in the chaos. Unless you follow security news closely, you likely missed it.

I’m referring to the revelation, in a German report released just before Christmas (.pdf), that hackers had struck an unnamed steel mill in Germany. They did so by manipulating and disrupting control systems to such a degree that a blast furnace could not be properly shut down, resulting in “massive”—though unspecified—damage.

This is only the second confirmed case in which a wholly digital attack caused physical destruction of equipment. The first case, of course, was Stuxnet, the sophisticated digital weapon the U.S. and Israel launched against control systems in Iran in late 2007 or early 2008 to sabotage centrifuges at a uranium enrichment plant. That attack was discovered in 2010, and since then experts have warned that it was only a matter of time before other destructive attacks would occur. Industrial control systems have been found to be rife with vulnerabilities, though they manage critical systems in the electric grid, in water treatment plants and chemical facilities and even in hospitals and financial networks. A destructive attack on systems like these could cause even more harm than at a steel plant.

It’s not clear when the attack in Germany took place. The report, issued by Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security (or BSI), indicates the attackers gained access to the steel mill through the plant’s business network, then successively worked their way into production networks to access systems controlling plant equipment. The attackers infiltrated the corporate network using a spear-phishing attack—sending targeted email that appears to come from a trusted source in order to trick the recipient into opening a malicious attachment or visiting a malicious web site where malware is downloaded to their computer. Once the attackers got a foothold on one system, they were able to explore the company’s networks, eventually compromising a “multitude” of systems, including industrial components on the production network.

“Failures accumulated in individual control components or entire systems,” the report notes. As a result, the plant was “unable to shut down a blast furnace in a regulated manner” which resulted in “massive damage to the system.”

5 Steps To Make U.S. Elections Less Hackable

http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2016/09/5-steps-make-us-elections-less-hackable/131242/?oref=d-topstory
By Patrick Tucker
As shadowy actors work to hack U.S. elections, a few simple steps could make electronic voting more secure, says one expert.
Voting machine vulnerabilities go well beyond what most voters know, warns Dan Zimmerman, a computer scientist who specializes in election information technology. There probably is not time to fix all of those vulnerabilities by November. But there are still things election officials could do to reduce the hack-ability of the U.S. presidential election. Here are his five steps for making the U.S. election less hackable.

1. More federal oversight (and not just on Election Day)
This week’s report sophisticated actors in Russia trying to penetrate voter databases sounded alarm bells about the U.S. election being hacked.
Zimmerman, who works with Free & Fair, a company that provides election-related IT services, says that because most electronic voting machines are not connected to the internet, the threat of remote hacking from Russia is small. The machines are far from secure, however.

“I haven’t observed anything in particular that would make me think somebody is developing some new attack against these machines. Some of these machines were so terribly easy to attack in the first place, essentially, my concern is that some of these machines have been designed in way such that somebody with an eighth-grade level of knowledge of computer science and a little bit of time could hack them.”
It’s an issue that’s been around for years, but lawmakers haven’t done much about it. Bottom line, there’s no federal standard for physical security around voting machines and that makes them very vulnerable. “They could be in a broom closet in a city clerk’s office. There is no federal level oversight other than there is something called the Election Assistance Commission, or EAC. The EAC was established in the early 2000s, basically as a response to the 2000 debacle, and has until recently effectively been a joke,” he says.

Are things really as bad as the ABC Four Corners' Cyber War documentary makes out?

http://theconversation.com/are-things-really-as-bad-as-the-abc-four-corners-cyber-war-documentary-makes-out-64572
August 30, 2016
Author David Glance , Director of UWA Centre for Software Practice, University of Western Australia

We believe in the free flow of information. We use a Creative Commons Attribution NoDerivatives licence, so you can republish our articles for free, online or in print. Republish The Spy Files, released by WikiLeaks, revealed the scale of surveillance going on around the world. WikiLeaks
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Four Corners' Cyber War program, aired tonight, highlighted the personal, commercial and national threats posed by hackers and a general preparedness on all things cyber security.
The program started by looking at hackers a this year’s DEF CON hacking conference and highlighted just how vulnerable any piece of technology connected to the internet actually is. They proceeded at rapid pace to move from phones, bank accounts and cyber crime to alleged nation state hacking, including the hack of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, revealed in December of last year.

Road to Skynet update - DARPA will use internet of things and AI to dominate cyberwar and regular war

September 01, 2016

http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/09/road-to-skynet-update-darpa-will-use.html

The Defense Advance Research Projects Agency will fund the development of sensors and artificial intelligence systems that could help break into, extract, and analyze information from enemy devices and communication systems.

The components and systems will arm the U.S. with more data to analyze enemy moves and strategy. Information is king in wars, and DARPA wants to develop technology that can break into enemy systems.

"They are talking about going into any situation and extracting information at any time, [with] artificial intelligence systems that can attack and hack any network," said Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research.

DARPA wants to fund the development of sensors and electromagnetic systems that could break into point-to-point wired and wireless communications, even ones that are not linked to the internet. DARPA is making progress to jam resistant communication

DARPA wants intelligent systems that can process and extract only relevant data. The sensors will need edge processing capabilities where they can analyze data immediately and trash irrelevant information. These sensors and systems won't be able to cross-reference larger data repositories on the cloud.

1) controlling and exploiting the electromagnetic spectrum with unprecedented versatility and finesse, 

2) creating new generations of sensors that could keep warfighters informed as they never have been before, and 

3) providing safe, secure, and assured access to an increasingly globalized microelectronics supply chain.

Research: Companies fear mobile devices as massive cybersecurity threat

http://www.zdnet.com/article/research-companies-see-mobile-devices-as-big-cybersecurity-threat/

In a recent poll by Tech Pro Research, 45 percent of respondents chose mobile devices as their company's weakest link, in terms of security

By Amy Talbott | September 1, 2016 

According to an online poll conducted by Tech Pro Research in June, everyday threats like security breaches involving mobile devices are more worrisome than acts of cybercrime. More results from this research are presented in the infographic below:

To learn more, download the full report: Cybersecurity Research: Weak Links, Digital Forensics, and International Concerns. (Tech Pro Research membership required.)

You can also download our full special report on "Cyberwar and the Future of Cybersecurity" as a PDF in magazine format, available for free at registered ZDNet and TechRepublic members.

Microsoft’s Legal Challenge to NSA/FBI Eavesdropping Secrecy Orders Picking Up Steam

Microsoft’s Challenge to Government Secrecy Wins Dozens of Supporters

Nick Wingfield

New York Times

September 3, 2016

SEATTLE — Dozens of allies threw their weight behind Microsoft on Friday in a case that challenges law enforcement’s use of secrecy orders to cloak its pursuit of digital communications in investigations.

Amazon, Google, Snapchat, Salesforce and several others filed a brief on Friday in support of Microsoft in its case against the United States Justice Department, while Apple, Mozilla and others made their own filing. Civil liberties groups and media organizations like Fox News, National Public Radio and The Washington Post submitted their own briefs.

Microsoft was also backed by a collection of law professors and a group of former United States attorneys who worked in the Western district of Washington, where Microsoft filed its federal lawsuit in April.

Microsoft’s effort to rally support is part of a growing resistance by technology companies to government attempts to snoop on the electronic communications of their customers.

Revelations by Edward J. Snowden, the former United States government contractor, about the extent of electronic surveillance by spy agencies have rattled technology companies, which worry that trust in their products is being undermined.

In a statement, Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president and chief legal officer, said the company was grateful for the support from what it expected to total 80 signatories on multiple briefs by the end of the day. He noted the diversity of backgrounds of the signatories, saying, “it’s not every day that Fox News and the A.C.L.U. are on the same side of an issue.”

“We believe the constitutional rights at stake in this case are of fundamental importance, and people should know when the government accesses their emails unless secrecy is truly needed,” Mr. Smith added.

Peter Carr, a spokesman for the Justice Department, declined to comment.

To Find Cyber Flaws in Weapon Systems, DoD Will Move Millions

http://www.defensenews.com/articles/dod-cyber-flaws-weapon-systems-reprogramming
By: Joe Gould, September 1, 2016
WASHINGTON — Amid a growing focus on the Pentagon’s cyber vulnerabilities, it plans to reprogram $100 million toward uncovering such flaws in major weapon systems, according to budget documents posted this week.
Defense Department Comptroller Mike McCord notified Congress Aug. 29 of plans to move the money from a technology analysis account to a research, test and evaluation account—described as classified in the DoD’s 2016 budget justification. The notice was first reported by Inside Defense.

The Defense Department is bound by law to evaluate the cyber vulnerabilities of major weapons systems and report to Congress by the end of 2019, with $200 million authorized for the project. The mandate was the marquee provision in military cybersecurity legislation the president signed last year as part of the 2016 defense policy bill.
Weapons systems developed over the past 20 years are "highly effective on the battlefield and yet also highly vulnerable to network attack," as they are increasingly dependent on "network targeting information, digital satellite communication to GPS networks, and digital command operating pictures/blue force trackers," Jacquelyn Schneider, a scholar at George Washington University warns in a report published this week by the Center for New American Security.

DOT&E: Cyber Vulnerabilities Plague Battlefield Comms The highly networked nature of two key military systems, the the F-35 Lightning II and Distributed Common Ground System-Army, the service's intelligence dissemination system, illustrate how digitally dependent the US military has become.
Indeed, the Pentagon's Director of Operations, Test and Evaluation (DOT&E), Michael Gilmore announced last year he found that nearly all of DoD's major weapons systems were vulnerable to cyber attacks. Forty systems in 2014 needed to fix cyber vulnerabilities, including the Army's Warfighter Information Network-Tactical, the Navy's Joint High Speed Vessel and the Freedom class of Littoral Combat Ship.

The Not So World Wide Web

by Felix Richter, Statista.com

25 years ago, on August 23, 1991, a British computer scientist made the World Wide Web available to the public.
Tim Berners-Lee, who was then working at CERN, could not have imagined the impact his actions would have on the world over the next two and a half decades. Honoring this milestone in the history of the internet, August 23 has become known as Internaut Day.
However, even 25 years after what some call its inception, the World Wide Web is not nearly as universally available as its name suggests. According to the latest estimates by the International Telecommunication Union, a UN agency specializing in information and communication technologies, only 47 in 100 world citizens use the internet these days. While internet access in regions such as North America and Europe has become a commodity not unlike electricity and running water, people in less developed regions often still lack access to what has arguably become the most important source of information of our times.

The chart below shows how widely internet penetration still varies across different world regions.
This chart shows how many people around the world use the internet.



You will find more statistics at Statista.

In Defense of Defense Analysis

http://warontherocks.com/2016/09/in-defense-of-defense-analysis/

Hasty Ambush, John Speed Meyers and Jonathan Wong
September 2, 2016 

As analysts who believe that economics and quantitative analysis ought to occupy a central role in defense planning, we would like to respond to Matthew Fay’s recent War on the Rocks article, “Rationalizing McNamara’s Legacy.”
Fay criticizes Robert McNamara’s economic approach to managing the Department of Defense as running “afoul of political reality.” In fact, McNamara’s approach was necessary to sustain peacetime defense spending and its tools served McNamara’s political purposes.
The author also goes too far in suggesting that there are no useful ways to measure peacetime military efficiency and that McNamara’s economic tools “ironically” left defense decision-making “less efficient” than McNamara found it. There are many ways to measure military efficiency and little ground on which to claim McNamara’s tools left the military less efficient.

Defense Planning is Both a Political and Economic Problem
Fay argues that “national security problems are not best understood as economic problems. They are political problems.” In fact, issues of defense planning and budgeting are both. Each is equally important.
As an economic problem, the Planning, Programming and Budgeting System (PPBS) that Fay criticizes was necessary to moderate the “feast or famine” cycles of defense spending that the United States has endured since its founding. Sustained, long-term defense spending in peacetime was necessary during the Cold War. PPBS provided a systematic venue for doing that. It also mo

Counter-Drone Exercise Black Dart Expands, Moves To Eglin AFB

http://breakingdefense.com/2016/09/counter-drone-exercise-black-dart-expands-moves-to-eglin-afb/?utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=33803440&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_DxcGio_G1r_pry7nNKG8ikfIATpOnE7CIMt-023jjzmf0Sl-SjDCFXhQfpV5O1tKvOHeco3QCS01UwOYQGaSvrlb08Q&_hsmi=33803440
By Richard Whittle on September 02, 2016
PENTAGON: The 2016 edition of Black Dart, the Defense Department’s formerly classified counter-drone exercise, expands to Eglin Air Force Base this year, in search of more space and more capabilities, including ships.
“Eglin will allow us to deliver added uncertainty in the way of providing multiple locations for launching UAS at different distances so we can explore the full nature of the threat and the full nature of the (defensive) capability,” Navy Lt. Cdr. Ryan Leary, the exercise’s director. said in a Pentagon interview.
The exercise will test technologies for detecting, identifying, tracking and defeating or disabling Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) from Sept. 11 to 23. It’s run by the Joint Integrated Air and Missile Defense Organization (JIAMDO). Eglin also provides littoral and maritime areas where counter-drone technologies can be tested against real targets, he added. Two Aegis destroyers will take part in this year’s exercise. “If you count the entire ships’ company, we’ll have over 1,200 participants and observers coming,” Leary said.

Last year Black Dart focused on what the military calls LSS (Low Small Slow) drones. “This year we’ll be using over 20 different variants of UAS,” Leary said.
Those target drones, Leary said, will range in size from Group 1, defined as those that weigh less than 20 lbs. and fly lower than 1,200 feet and slower than 100 knots, to Group 3, which weigh up to 1,320 lbs. and fly lower than about 18,000 feet and slower than 250 knots.
Going up against those “surrogate threat” drones – launched onto the Eglin range from unannounced locations at unannounced times – will be more than 50 counter-UAS systems, ranging from those that merely detect to those designed to take control of a hostile drone.

Spies Love People Who Use Smartphones Because They Are So Easy to Tap

Nicole Perlroth

September 3, 2014

How Spy Tech Firms Let Governments See Everything on a Smartphone

SAN FRANCISCO — Want to invisibly spy on 10 iPhone owners without their knowledge? Gather their every keystroke, sound, message and location? That will cost you $650,000, plus a $500,000 setup fee with an Israeli outfit called the NSO Group. You can spy on more people if you would like — just check out the company’s price list.

The NSO Group is one of a number of companies that sell surveillance tools that can capture all the activity on a smartphone, like a user’s location and personal contacts. These tools can even turn the phone into a secret recording device.

Since its founding six years ago, the NSO Group has kept a low profile. But last month, security researchers caught its spyware trying to gain access to the iPhone of a human rights activist in the United Arab Emirates. They also discovered a second target, a Mexican journalist who wrote about corruption in the Mexican government.

Now, internal NSO Group emails, contracts and commercial proposals obtained by The New York Times offer insight into how companies in this secretive digital surveillance industry operate. The emails and documents were provided by two people who have had dealings with the NSO Group but would not be named for fear of reprisals.

For Years, the Pentagon Hooked Everything To The Internet. Now It’s a ‘Big, Big Problem’

By Patrick Tucker Read bio 

September 29, 2015 

Source Link

The Internet of Things is supposed to make life easier. For the Pentagon, the quintessential early adopter, it has made life much harder. 

Once upon a time, very smart people in the Pentagon believed that connecting sensitive networks, expensive equipment, and powerful weapons to the open Internet was a swell idea. This ubiquitous connectivity among devices and objects — what we now call the Internet of Things — would allow them to collect performance data to help design new weapons, monitor equipment remotely, and realize myriad other benefits. The risks were less assiduously catalogued.

That strategy has spread huge vulnerabilities across the Defense Department, its networks, and much of what the defense industry has spent the last several decades creating.

“We are trying to overcome decades of a thought process…where we assumed that the development of our weapon systems that external interfaces, if you will, with the outside world were not something to be overly concerned with,” Adm. Michael Rogers, the commander of Cyber Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee today. “They represented opportunity for us to remotely monitor activity, to generate data as to how aircraft, for example, or ships’ hulls were doing in different sea states around the world. [These are] all positives if you’re trying to develop the next generation of cruiser [or] destroyer for the Navy.”

Pentagon looks to the past to counter digital warfare of the future

By Tim Johnson

Source Link

U.S. servicemen and women are undergoing "back to basics" training in such things as reading maps and celestial navigation to prepare should adversaries succeed in shutting down the military's digital network, military consultant Peter W. Singer says. Tim Johnson McClatchy DC 

For some U.S. servicemen and women, it’s back to digging foxholes, camouflaging camps and learning celestial navigation.

Just as the Pentagon acquires ever more whizbang technology, military leaders are preparing for what happens when their high-tech wizardry no longer functions.

Potential U.S. adversaries are growing more adept at disruptive digital warfare. They can shoot down satellites, jam communications and sever digital links between operators and their killer drones. Pentagon officials refer to what might happen next as “going dark” – a condition that could endanger U.S. military dominance on the battlefield.

“The idea of going dark is that you’re thrown back to a pre-digital age,” said Peter W. Singer, a military consultant and co-author of a 2015 novel, “Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War,” that has been placed on suggested reading lists for some midlevel Army and Navy officers.

In such a scenario, stealth jet fighters remain grounded, robotic drones lose their human guides, GPS goes haywire and ship-to-ship communications can be reduced to semaphore and beacons flashing Morse code.

*** China Heads West Beijing's New Silk Road to Europe

By Erich Follath

08/31/2016

China is building new roads, railroads and pipelines from Central Asia to Europe in an effort to build new connections to the rest of the world. The results may be good for the Chinese -- but less so for the other countries involved.

In Kashgar, on the western edge of the Peoples' Republic of China, the view is reminiscent of the Bible and the days when the ancient Silk Road began to take shape here in the 1st century B.C. Today, the government plans to use Kashgar as the starting point for a new, global trade route -- but at this point, there is still little evidence of it.

"Posh, Posh," the men shout on their horse-drawn carts, as they make their way to the meadow where drivers are selling camels. Potential buyers expertly reach into the animals' mouths to examine their health. The air is dusty and filed with the sounds of animals neighing, braying and bleating, as if the horses, donkeys and goats know that they won't stay tied up for long. Women, only a few of them wearing veils, walk through the chaos carrying sacks of apricots and raisins.

The Sunday market in Kashgar, one of the world's largest, attracts several thousand livestock owners and traders to the oasis city on the edge of the Taklamakan Desert, near the high mountains of the Pamir and the Hindu Kush. It is a fascinating mix of ethnicities. Uighurs, wiry men with knives in their belts, are in the majority. There are Nomadic Kyrgyz wearing felt hats, and occasional light-skinned, green-eyed boys who look like descendants of Alexander the Great. The market is policed by the region's true rulers, the Han Chinese.

Here, people can still taste and feel the myth of the old Silk Road.

** Balochistan In India’s Pakistan Policy: Time To Up The Ante – Analysis

BY MONISH GULATI 

SEPTEMBER 1, 2016

Source Link

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Independence Day speech from the ramparts of the Red Fort in New Delhi would have endeared him to the ‘hawks’ in the Indian foreign policy establishment as he came out openly in support of “freedom” for Pakistan’s restive border province of Balochistan and Pakistan-occupied (administered) Kashmir (PoK). “I want to speak a bit about the people in Balochistan, Gilgit- Baltistan (GB), and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir,” he had said. Earlier in the week at an all-party meeting on Kashmir, Modi had remarked that it was time for Islamabad to explain to the world “why it has been committing atrocities on people in PoK and Balochistan”.

Some observers view the references to Balochistan, PoK and GB as indication of a significant aggressive change in India’s Pakistan policy provoked by the recent Pakistani interference in the developments in the Kashmir valley; and as the proverbial last straw that has dented Modi’s outreach to, and patience on Pakistan which he had persevered since his government came to power two years ago. It is also an indication of the government in New Delhi’s conviction that external stimulus to the unrest in the Kashmir valley must end before any workable political solution can be found to the issues in Jammu and Kashmir within the framework of the Indian constitution.

This shift in India’s outlook to Balochistan from the oblique reference at Sharm el-Sheikh (after a bilateral between the then India and Pakistani Prime Ministers at this Egyptian resort) some years back to this direct broadside from the Red Fort this month, has been under consideration before but India had not taken this path as it is fraught with geopolitical challenges and implications. The geopolitical challenges on the Baloch issue are complex as Balochis reside not only in Pakistan but also in parts of Iran and Afghanistan. The plight and ethnic dispersion of the Baloch people mirrors that of the Kurds in the Middle East. India might face opposition from Iran and Afghanistan as it tenders its support for Baloch human rights and aspirations. Balochistan strife has a sectarian dimension which has been used by the US, Israeli and the Saudis in the past to build pressure on Iran.

Can SAARC Survive India and Pakistan's Squabbles?

Zahid Shahab Ahmed

September 1, 2016

A few days ago, I read an article titled “Imagine a South Asia without borders”written by Annette Dixon, Vice President of the World Bank. I acknowledge that it is the job of international organizations like the World Bank to provide optimism to aid/loan recipient countries and regions, but the ones facing the realities of South Asia find it difficult to imagine a region without borders—something that had benefited their ancestors before 1947. Considering it my responsibility, I would like to highlight some recent events that fuel scepticism shadowing the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC—an international association composed of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, the Maldives, Nepal and Sri Lanka) and pessimism with reference to a meaningful regional cooperation in South Asia. Here, the focus is on the recent India-Pakistan tensions affecting SAARC.

Most recently, bilateral relations have hit a significant low point due to the resurgence of violence in Indian-administered Kashmir (IAK). It happened after the assassination of a freedom fighter, a twenty-two-year-old Burhan Wani, by the Indian army in IAK. According to a renowned Pakistani scholar,Pervez Hoodbhoy, “Wani was hunted down, and killed instead of captured”. More than two hundred thousand attended Wani’s funeral, and the Indian authorities mishandled the situation by the indiscriminate use of pellet guns against the civilian population. With this has emerged a wave of media paying attention to the movement in IAK. Now, the movement is both on the ground and in social media. The recent events have also reignited the blame game between Delhi and Islamabad with India blaming Pakistan for the situation in IAK and Pakistan blaming India for the troubles in Balochistan. There is a connection between Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s remarks on Balochistan and the recent terrorist attacks for which the authorities in Pakistan had blamed Indian spy agency RAW.

Over 50 years ago, Bengal’s chief engineer predicted that the Farakka dam would flood Bihar

Mridula Chari

Source Link

Though time has proved that the engineer was right, after he flagged fatal flaws in the project, he was vilified, called a Pakistani spy, and forced to resign. Image credit: Ministry of Water Resources

As Bihar faced devastating floods last week, chief minister Nitish Kumar made an unusually strong statement about a politically charged dam.

“The current flood situation has been caused by siltation of river Ganga,”The Indian Express quoted the Bihar chief minister as saying in a conference on August 21. “This situation is the result of silt getting deposited in Ganga after construction of Farakka dam. The only way to remove silt from the river is to remove the dam.”

Evidence now suggests that the flood at that time in Bihar was caused by the sudden release of water from the Bansagar dam across the Sone river in eastern Madhya Pradesh. The dam had been allowed to fill up to 96% of its capacity before more rainfall in its catchment area forced engineers to release that water at once.

But the criticism of the Farakka barrage for causing excessive siltation in the Ganga remains accurate. The dam was considered a doomed project even before it began. But in the 1960s, the media vilified Kapil Bhattacharya, who was the West Bengal government’s chief engineer at the time, for saying exactly what Nitish Kumar would echo five decades later.

Prescient voice

Kapil Bhattacharya is perhaps better known in activist circles today for his role as the first president of the Association for the Protection of Democratic Rights. But he was also superintending engineer with the Irrigation and Waterways Directorate of the West Bengal government in the early 1960s, when plans for the barrage had become all but settled.

What is the business model of Reliance Jio?

Kshitij Salgunan, Indian Internet activist

Source Link

Questions:

a. How are they offering 4G data at such cheap rates?

b. And how are they providing unlimited voice calls (local/STD) free to every JIO customer?

c. How they are offering unlimited 4G data at night? 

It is really simple. Most of you are going to pay the same or probably more money to Jio compared to your current network provider. After reading this answer, you will realize what a clever businessman Mukesh Ambani is. 

I have been following the news about Jio since many years, and have written multiple articles about Jio in the past many months. 

Why Mukesh Ambani wants to enter networking field so badly? 

This story requires us to know why Mukesh Ambani is investing so much in yet another telecom company especially when there is already another company named Reliance Communications. In 2002, when Dhirubhai Ambani died, there were some major ownership issues between his two sons - Anil Ambani & Mukesh Ambani. After some public feud between both the brothers for the control of Reliance empire, their mother intervened and split Reliance into two parts in 2005. Anil Ambani got telecom, power, entertainment and financial services business while Mukesh Ambani received Reliance Industries and IPCL. [1] 

Although Anil Ambani got the Reliance Communications, it was Mukesh Ambani who started it and revolutionized the Indian mobile industry by reducing the call rates in the early 2000s, which made mobile phones affordable to Indians. It was his baby all the way, while Anil Ambani was not even having a seat in it’s board of directors. 

That is not all. To prevent Mukesh Ambani from making another telecom company and competing with Reliance Communications, they had inserted a non-compete clause in the agreement. [2]

Why India May Miss The Demographic Dividend

AAKAR PATEL

Source Link

India’s economy needs to change the way it has worked for the last 25 years, the years of globalisation, if it has to employ the growing working population.

In four years, India will have the world's largest population of working people, about 87 crore in all. When nations reach a high ratio of such people they are expected to earn something called a demographic dividend. This simply means that because most citizens are working, economic growth goes up. The expectation and anticipation is that India is approaching such a position soon.

However, there is a second view on this. A few months ago a report by Indiaspend, which does data-based journalism, looked at the issue of employment and made six observations. These were as follows:

1) "In 2015, India added the fewest organised-sector jobs — in large companies and factories — in seven years across eight important industries.

2) The proportion of jobs in the unorganised sector — without formal monthly payment or social security benefits - is set to rise to 93 per cent in 2017.

3) Rural wages are at a decadal low, as agriculture — which accounts for 47 per cent of jobs — contracted 0.2 per cent in 2014-15, growing 1 per cent in 2015-16.

4) As many as 60 per cent of those with jobs do not find employment for the entire year, indicating widespread ‘under-employment’ and temporary jobs.

A Call for Review: Supreme Court’s Decision on Reliance Jio Perspectives

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta

http://www.epw.in/journal/2016/24/perspectives/call-review.html

Vol. 51, Issue No. 24, 11 Jun, 2016

Download PDF Version

The Supreme Court has ignored evidence of apparent forgery and auction-rigging while dismissing a petition seeking to quash the government's decision permitting Reliance Jio to provide voice telephone services over fourth-generation spectrum. The company, headed by India's richest man, has also failed to meet its roll-out obligations. The apex court should review its decision.

The writer acknowledges research and writing assistance by Abir Dasgupta, Honi Joshi, Natasha Bhide and Mugdha Kinjawadekar.

The 8 April decision of the Supreme Court to dismiss a petition (Business Today 2016) questioning the manner in which Reliance Jio (RJio) obtained a licence to provide a range of mobile voice services ignores evidence relating to criminal forgery of a bank document and rigging of auction procedures (Centre for Public Interest Litigation v Union of India 2016). The country’s highest court also chose not to take into account the failure of the company, headed by India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani and which has reportedly invested a huge ₹1,50,000 crore in this venture, to adhere to contractual obligations relating to rolling out its services (DNA 2016). The verdict by a three-judge bench comprising Chief Justice T S Thakur and Justices A K Sikri and R Banumathi needs review given the information that is now available in the public domain.

A public interest litigation (PIL) petition filed by lawyer and activist Prashant Bhushan in May 2014 had argued that a kind of spectrum called broadband wireless access spectrum was acquired by RJio in 2010 using questionable means, by allegedly rigging the auction for it and by using a front company. The petition also argued that RJio had acquired a licence in March 2013 to offer voice telephony using the spectrum it had won in the 2010 auction without paying the amount it should have. Bhushan also requested an order from the Supreme Court directing the Department of Telecommunications (DOT), which is under the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, to levy on RJio spectrum usage charges (SUC) at par with other operators providing voice telephony. Finally, the petition also sought a court monitored investigation into the decision of the government to grant the licence to RJio.