Former Israeli Nuclear Head: No Iran Bomb for Ten Years—If They Even Want It

Trita Parsi

May 8, 2014 

Source Link

A statement highlights the Netanyahu government's tenuous position.

The former head of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission Brigadier General (res.) Uzi Eilam just dropped a bombshell (no pun intended): "The Iranian nuclear program will only be operational in another 10 years," he told the Israeli paper Yediot Ahronoth. "Even so, I am not sure that Iran wants the bomb." And he added that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is employing needless fearmongering about Iran's atomic aspirations in order to further his own political aims.

Mindful of the ongoing—and thus far successful—nuclear talks with Iran, and Netanyahu’s vocal opposition to them, Eilam’s statement must be music to the ears of the Obama administration. It further embarrasses those in Washingtonwho so uncritically swallowed Netanyahu’s talking points hook, line and sinker—and repeated the Israeli prime minister’s arguments as their own.

But when such an Israeli authority as Eilam publicly tears apart the official Israeli narrative about Iran’s nuclear intentions, one must ask oneself why such a unfounded narrative—in the words of Netanyahu himself, “It’s 1938 and Iran is Germany. And Iran is racing to arm itself with atomic bombs”—ever gained foot in the first place.

Particularly when ample evidence has existed in the public realm that the Israeli-Iranian enmity is exacerbated, but not caused or driven by Iran’s nuclear program.

As I write in Treacherous Alliance—the Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the United States, not only does Netanyahu’s characterization of Iran have little relationship to reality; Netanyahu himself knows this better than most. Outside of the realm of cynical posturing by politicians, most Israeli strategists recognize that Iran represents a strategic challenge to the favorable balance of power enjoyed by Israel and the U.S. in the Middle East over the past fifteen years, but it is no existential threat to Israel, the U.S. or the Arab regimes.

And that was the view embraced by the Likud leader himself during his last term as prime minister of Israel. In the course of dozens of interviews with key players in the Israeli strategic establishment, a fascinating picture emerged of Netanyahu strongly pushing back against the orthodoxy of his Labor Party predecessors, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, which treated Iran as one of Israel’s primary enemies. Not only that, he initiated an extensive discreet program of reaching out to the Islamic Republic.

When he took office in June of 1996, the U.S.-educated Likud leader sought not only to undo the peace process with the PLO and the land-for-peace formula; he also sought a return to Israel’s longstanding strategic doctrine of the periphery—the idea that the Jewish State’s security was best achieved by forming secret or not-so-secret alliances with the non-Arab states in the periphery of the Middle East—primarily Turkey and Iran—in order to balance the Arabs in Israel’s vicinity.

Such a shift required efforts to undo Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin’s rhetoric on Iran—deemed “exaggerated and self-defeating” by many in Israel at the time—as well as attempts to quietly reach out to Tehran. Unlike his Labor predecessors, Netanyahu chose to follow the recommendations of an internal Israeli government report on how to address the Iranian challenge, which had concluded that Labor’s inflammatory rhetoric had only attracted Iran’s attention and strengthened Iran’s perception of an Israeli threat, which in turn had made Israel less rather than more secure. 

What Will Happen to Syria's Christians?

Dr. W. Andrew Terrill

May 5, 2014

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The Syrian civil war is widely understood to have a strong sectarian component. In this conflict, Bashar Assad’s Alawite–dominated regime is seeking to crush an uprising led by majority Sunni Arabs. The Alawites are a branch of Shi’ite Islam and have been supported by Shi’ite allies including Iran, the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah, and Iraqi Shi’ite militias. Various Sunni Arab states, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, support different branches of the rebels. Yet, Syria is also a country of numerous ethnic and religious minorities, and the Syrian civil war is traumatic for them as well. Syria, unlike a number of other Arab states, has a large and significant Christian population of around 2.2 million (including internal and external refugees). Some Christians in western Syria have joined the war against Assad, but these people are in the minority within their community. Rather, Syrian Christians are, in most cases, sympathetic to the secular minority Assad regime which traditionally has given them security, although not democracy. The problem for these Christians is that most of them would prefer the Assad regime over Islamic radicals like the al-Qaeda linked Al Nusra Front, but they do not wish to move so close to Assad that they inevitably would be punished to the same extent as pro-Assad Alawites if the Islamist rebels eventually manage to win the civil war. 

The Assad regime is directing a great deal of propaganda toward all Syrian minorities, predicting that they will suffer greatly if rebel forces win the war. Regime leaders routinely suggest that Christians will be slaughtered by Islamists in territory that they control. Assad also portrays himself as the protector of Christians. The Syrian propaganda machine claims that regime military forces have made a special effort to protect churches in contested areas, maintaining that they would otherwise be burned by the “terrorists” fighting the regime. Some of this propaganda is crudely melodramatic, but it may have some impact, especially when Syrian Christians consider the fate of their co-religionists in post-Saddam Iraq. The Christian community in Iraq was estimated to be between 800,000 and 1,500,000 in 2003, but subsequently declined to between 450,000 and 600,000 after a campaign of intense harassment by Islamic extremists who emerged as an important force in Iraq after 2003 and forced many Christians to emigrate.

Sadly, mistreatment of Syria Christians by Islamic extremists is not simply Assad propaganda. In areas of Syria controlled by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, an al-Qaeda spinoff that no longer takes direction from al-Qaeda central), the group has imposed the 7th century status of “dhimmi” on Christians under their control. This status requires the Christians to pay a special tax (the jizyah) in order to live under ISIL rule. They are not required to live under ISIL’s harsh form of Islamic law (except for modesty codes) but cannot worship outside of churches, cannot display the cross, and cannot build new churches. They also cannot refurbish or repair existing churches and monasteries, although some of these have been very badly damaged in the civil war. Those Christians who are unwilling to accept these provisions have to leave the area or face execution.

Be Afraid: The EU's Next Economic Crisis is Looming

Milton Ezrati

May 9, 2014 

Debt. Deflation. Disaster. 

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While Ukraine has wiped much economic and financial news from the front pages, Europe’s problems have taken a turn for the worse. Signs of inordinately low inflation and possibly even deflation now threaten to compound all the debt and policy problems that have bedeviled the euro zone for over four years now. To meet this new challenge, the European Central Bank (ECB) has promised a particularly energetic response. But even if it were to act on all its promises, immediately and thoroughly, there is only so much it can do. Monetary policy, even of the most energetic kind, cannot ultimately answer Europe’s needs. The best the ECB can do is buy time for more fundamental economic and fiscal reform in each member nation, especially in regulatory, labor, and product market policies. Without this (or extraordinary good luck) Europe’s problems can only get worse, no matter how active the ECB.

The deflationary threat is clear. As of the most recent report, zone-wide inflation over the past twelve months came in at a mere 0.7 percent. In Ireland and other countries of Europe’s troubled periphery, reports already indicate outright deflation. Inflation can have its own evils, but that does not mean deflation is harmless. On the contrary, all involved—the ECB, governments, investors, and business people—see it carrying a dual threat. On an economic level stands the warning of Japan, where deflation has contributed to two decades of stagnation. On the financial side, deflation raises the already great risk of default, for falling price levels would mean that the payments on Europe’s already outsized debt load, typically fixed in euros, would demand more and more real revenue, something these already-beleaguered nations can ill afford.

With both these concerns in mind, but especially the implicit default risk, the ECB has atypically promised bold action. President Mario Draghi, contrary to all earlier pronouncements, has promised “extraordinary measures” to guard against deflation, describing the bank as “resolute” and willing “to act swiftly if required,” including a resort to outright asset purchases, commonly called qualitative easing. This is a far cry from his past reluctance to make such purchases or his tendency to use guarded language. It is even more remarkable, considering that at the same time the Federal Reserve in the United States and the Bank of England are beginning to unwind their quantitative easing programs. Draghi has even talked about negative interest rates. Following a policy previously used in Denmark, his thought is that deflation would have more difficulty taking root if banks lent more freely to businesses and individuals; he is convinced that they would do so if, instead of paying them interest on the spare reserves they keep on deposit at the ECB, they actually had to pay a charge on them.

The pressure on Draghi and the ECB is that much greater, because low inflation has already blunted past stimulative policy efforts. To date, the ECB has relied mostly on low interest rates to relieve the strain on debtor nations and generally reliquefy the financial system. But with each notch down in inflation, those rates look less low in real terms. In 2012, for instance, when the ECB held short-term interest rates at 1.5 percent, zone-wide inflation averaged 2.5 percent. The real expense of borrowing that year was actually a negative 1.0 percent. But in the intervening period, interest rates have fallen only 0.5 percentage points, but the annual rate of inflation has fallen by almost two percentage points to, as indicated, near 0.7 percent. The real cost of borrowing has accordingly risen out of negative territory, still low by broad historic standards but clearly a lot less supportive than it was two years ago.

"Don’t Make Ukraine About Energy"

Op-Ed, The Brookings Institution

May 2, 2014

Author: Andreas Goldthau, Visiting Scholar, The Geopolitics of Energy Project

Belfer Center Programs or Projects: The Geopolitics of Energy Project

The United States and the European Union on Wednesday, April 2, 2014 vowed to help Ukraine in its efforts to gain more independence from Russian energy supplies and are working to wean Europe off an over-reliance on gas from Moscow.

As tensions in Ukraine continue to rise, G7 countries have decided to impose new sanctions on Russia. Sanctions targeting the energy sector, which account for roughly 25 percent of Russian GDP and half the country's budget revenues, have increasingly gained support. Yet, energy sanctions are not the way to go, as the price will be too high—not for Russia, but for Europe. Instead, policy strategies should aim at disentangling energy from indisputable security aspects surrounding the Ukraine crisis.

Impact on Global Oil Prices

For starters, proponents of energy sanctions should consider what it will mean for global oil prices if, say, just a third of Russia's current 10 mmbd crude output is taken off the market. This would probably trigger a stock-draw from the OECD countries' strategic oil reserves. Short of that, sanctions targeting the Russian oil sector will likely lead to a price hike, hurting the world economy—but not necessarily the Russian budget. This also holds for the U.S.: abundant resource production does not make the country less exposed to global price shocks. It is also worth considering the large financial interests that are at stake for U.S. private sector firms and European banks holding large Russian assets.

Europeans Will Bear the Cost

Second, the costs of energy sanctions will be unevenly distributed. To put it bluntly: Europeans will pay the price. The European gas market is not resilient enough to deal adequately with a potential Russian gas-cutoff, whether as a response to energy sanctions or their effect. Substantial investments are still required to better connect currently scattered markets. Also, national regulatory regimes have not been harmonized, and most of the gas markets in Eastern Europe cannot absorb a supply shock. What's more, the often proposed exports of U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) will not be available in any conceivable near term time horizon Even if they were available they would not come to Europe's rescue but instead go to Asia because of higher prices there, a reason why Cheniere's CEO Charif Souki called the idea “nonsense.”

Isolating Russia is Impossible

Finally, the idea of isolating Russia, notably through energy sanctions, is unrealistic. As tensions between Europe/U.S. and Russia continue to rise, Russian energy delegations recently visited Egypt, Kuwait, India, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam. Sanctions will push Russia further East in its search for alternative markets. In May, the next round of talks between the Russians and the Chinese are scheduled, and this may well be the moment where the two sides consummate a deal, after a decade of tough negotiations. Russia may be encouraged to give up on a price premium to gain long term business partners. “Isolating” Russia through energy sanctions is therefore not a viable strategy. Costs are certainly high, benefits unclear and Russia will firmly turn to other consumer markets. Industry outcries from Finland through Germany to Italy confirm that there is no broad interest in Europe to walk down this path. Also, the hesitant stance that both U.S. and EU politicians have demonstrated so far, indicate that there is no real willingness to get tough on Russia, for exactly these good reasons.

What gives Boko Haram its strength

By David Jacobson. Atta Barkindo and Derek Harvey

May 12, 2014 

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People march in Lagos, Nigeria, on Monday, May 12, to demand the release of schoolgirls kidnapped from Chibok last month. The abduction of nearly 300 female students who remain captives of the Islamist militant group Boko Haram has attracted mounting national and international outrage.

Nigerians protest over kidnapped schoolgirls

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Boko Haram has killed hundreds of Nigerians each month 

Authors: Kidnapping of schoolgirls brought world's attention to the terror group 

They say it is fueled by a reaction in impoverished north to Western education, values 

Backward schooling must yield to education that teaches marketable skills, they say 

Editor's note: David Jacobson, founding director of the Citizenship Initiative at the University of South Florida, is the author of "Of Virgins and Martyrs: Women and Sexuality in Global Conflict." Atta Barkindo is a fellow at the Citizenship Initiative. Derek Harvey, director of the Citizenship Initiative, formerly led the Afghanistan-Pakistan Center of Excellence at U.S. military's Central Command. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the authors.

(CNN) -- The Islamist terrorist organization Boko Haram has been active as a violent group since 2009 and in recent months has killed Nigerians, both Christian and Muslim, at rates frequently exceeding a hundred people weekly.

It is puzzling how little attention this has received in world media, especially in comparison to, say, the attack of Islamist militants on the mall in Kenya in September, resulting in 67 dead.

That is, until now. The abduction of a reported 276 schoolgirls from Chibok village in the northeastern Borno state has shocked people around the world. A deeper examination of Boko Haram provides a revealing prism of the conflict in Nigeria.

Boko Haram translates as "Western education is sin." Rarely has the name of a terrorist organization revealed so much, but it does in ways beyond the surface interpretations sometimes portrayed in the media.

In Boko Haram, we see a total storm coming together: Globalization has brought Western ideas and imagery, especially around issues of women and sexuality, into the most patriarchal corners of the world. Globalization, through Internet and broader interconnectedness, has facilitated and favored global ideologies, including globalized versions of Islam, some of which are extremist.

New media have shined a light on poor governance, including that of the corrupt Nigerian government. The impact of Wahhabi Islam, actively promoted by Saudis and Gulf Arabs, has had such an impact that in northern Nigeria, even Arabic street signs and Middle Eastern dress are seen together with Saudi-funded mosques.

Waging War in Nigeria, and Seeking New Battlegrounds

Explaining Boko Haram, Nigeria’s Islamist Insurgency

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

MAY 7, 2014 

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A frame from a video of a man claiming to be Abubakar Shekau, the leader of Boko Haram.Creditvia Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Boko Haram is an Islamist extremist group responsible for dozens of massacres of civilians in its five-year insurgency in Nigeria, including the brazen kidnapping last month of more than 250 schoolgirls and the abduction, reported Tuesday, of 11 more teenagers.

The kidnappings are the latest assault by the insurgent group, which has terrorized local populations and regularly engages the Nigerian military in bloody combat with the aim of destabilizing and ultimately overthrowing the government and establishing an Islamic caliphate in its place.

The State Department’s annual report on terrorism around the globe, issued last month, estimated that the group’s members ranged from “the hundreds to a few thousand.” The report warned that “the number and sophistication of BH’s attacks are concerning,” and that Boko Haram had increasingly crossed into neighboring Cameroon, Chad and Niger to “evade pressure and conduct operations.”

In the model of many of Al Qaeda’s affiliates, Boko Haram receives the bulk of its funding from bank robberies and related criminal activities, including extortion and kidnapping for ransom, the State Department report said.

Nigerians on Boko Haram Abductions 

Nigerians on Boko Haram Abductions 

President Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria vowed to find the girls kidnapped from their school in northeastern Nigeria last month, but relatives of the missing accused the government of not doing enough. 

CreditPius Utomi Ekpei/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images 

Founded in Maiduguri, Nigeria, in 2002 by the Muslim cleric Mohammed Yusuf, Boko Haram was largely contained to the northern part of the country before expanding its reach with the help of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the terrorist organization’s affiliate in West Africa.

Killing Them With Love and Metadata

May 11, 2014 

‘We Kill People Based on Metadata’ 

David Cole 

New York Review of Books 

Supporters of the National Security Agency inevitably defend its sweeping collection of phone and Internet records on the ground that it is only collecting so-called “metadata”—who you call, when you call, how long you talk. Since this does not include the actual content of the communications, the threat to privacy is said to be negligible. That argument is profoundly misleading. 

Of course knowing the content of a call can be crucial to establishing a particular threat. But metadata alone can provide an extremely detailed picture of a person’s most intimate associations and interests, and it’s actually much easier as a technological matter to search huge amounts of metadata than to listen to millions of phone calls. As NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker has said, “metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata, you don’t really need content.” When I quoted Baker at arecent debate at Johns Hopkins University, my opponent, General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, called Baker’s comment “absolutely correct,” and raised him one, asserting, “We kill people based on metadata.” 

It is precisely this power to collect our metadata that has prompted one of Congress’s most bipartisan initiatives in recent years. On May 7, the House Judiciary Committee voted 32-0 to adopt an amended form of the USA Freedom Act, a bill to rein in NSA spying on Americans, initially proposed by Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy and Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner. On May 8, the House Intelligence Committee, which has until now opposed any real reform of the NSA, also unanimously approved the same bill. And the Obama administration has welcomed the development. 

For some, no doubt, the very fact that this bill has attracted such broad bipartisan approval will be grounds for suspicion. After all, this is the same Congress that repeatedly reauthorized the 2001 USA Patriot Act, a law that was also proposed by Sensenbrenner and on which the bulk collection of metadata was said to rest—even if many members of Congress were not aware of how the NSA was using (or abusing) it. And this is the same administration that retained the NSA’s data collection program, inherited from its predecessor, as long as it was a secret, and only called for reform when the American people learned from the disclosures of NSA contractor Edward Snowden that the government was routinely collecting phone and Internet records on all of us. So, one might well ask, if Congress and the White House, Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, all now agree on reform, how meaningful can the reform be? 

This is a reasonable question. This compromise bill addresses only one part of the NSA’s surveillance activities, and does not do nearly enough to address the many other privacy-invasive practices that we now know the NSA has undertaken. But it’s nonetheless an important first step, and would introduce several crucial reforms affecting all Americans. 

First, and most importantly, it would significantly limit the collection of phone metadata and other “business records.” Until now, the NSA and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court have aggressively interpreted a USA Patriot Act provision that authorized collection of business records “relevant” to a counterterrorism investigation. The NSA convinced the court that because it might be useful in the future to search through anyone’s calling history to see if that person had been in contact with a suspected terrorist, the agency should be able to collect everyone’s records and store them for five years. 

Scenes From the Intelligence Community’s Hidden Drone War

Drone war: Remote and personal

Pratap Chatterjee

Asia Times

May 12, 2014

Enemies, innocent victims, and soldiers have always made up the three faces of war. With war growing more distant, with drones capable of performing on the battlefield while their “pilots” remain thousands of miles away, two of those faces have, however, faded into the background in recent years. Today, we are left with just the reassuring “face” of the terrorist enemy, killed clinically by remote control while we go about our lives, apparently without any “collateral damage” or danger to our soldiers. Now, however, that may slowly be changing, bringing the true face of the drone campaigns Washington has pursued since 9/11 into far greater focus.

Imagine if those drone wars going on in Pakistan and Yemen (as well as the United States) had a human face all the time, so that we could understand what it was like to live constantly, in and out of those distant battle zones, with the specter of death. In addition to images of the “al-Qaeda” operatives who the White House wants us to believe are the sole targets of its drone campaigns, we would regularly see photos of innocent victims of drone attacks gathered by human rights groups from their relatives and neighbors.

And what about the third group - the military personnel whose lives revolve around killing fields so far away - whose stories, in these years of Washington’s drone assassination campaigns, we’ve just about never heard?

After all, soldiers no longer set sail on ships to journey to distant battlefields for months at a time. Instead, every day, thousands of men and women sign onto their computers at desks on military bases in the continental United States and abroad where they spend hours glued to screens watching the daily lives of people often on the other side of the planet. Occasionally, they get an order from Washington to push a button and vaporize their subjects.

It sounds just like - and the comparison has been made often enough - a video game, which can be switched off at the end of a shift, after which those pilots return home to families and everyday life.

And if you believed what little we normally see of them - what, that is, the Air Force has let us see (the CIA part of the drone program being off-limits to news reporting) - that would indeed seem to be the straightforward story of life for our drone warriors. Take Rene Lopez, who in shots of a recent homecoming welcome at Fort Gordon in Georgia appears to be a doting father. Photographed for the local papers on his return from a tour in Afghanistan, the young soldier is seen holding and kissing his infant daughter dressed in a bright pink top. He smiles with delight as the wide-eyed child tries on his military hat.

From an online profile posted to LinkedIn by Lopez last year, we learn that the clean-cut US Army signals intelligence specialist claims to be an actor in the drone war in addition to being a proud parent. To be specific, he says he has been working in the dark arts of hunting and killing “high value targets” using a National Security Agency (NSA) tool known as Gilgamesh.

That tool is named after a ruthless Sumerian king who ruled over Uruk, an ancient city in what is now Iraq. With the help of the massive trove of NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill recently explained that Gilgamesh is the code name for a special device mounted on a Predator drone that can track the mobile phones of individuals without their knowledge by pretending to be a cell-phone tower.

Control Over Israel’s New Radar Imaging Satellite in Orbit Is Being Transferred to Israeli Military

IAI To Transfer Spy Sat to Military Users

Barbara Opall-Rome

Defense News

May 12, 2014

The Ofek 10 satellite was launched on April 9 and carriers a synthetic aperture radar. (Israel Aerospace Industries)

YEHUD, ISRAEL — A month after launching Israel’s newest spy satellite into space, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), producer of the Ofek 10 and its advanced radar-imaging payload, is poised to transfer the strategic intelligence system to military hands.

IAI Chief Executive Yossi Weiss said Ofek 10 should be delivered to operational users “within weeks,” following extensive in-orbit testing by specialists with the company’s MBT Space Division here and Defense Ministry research and development authorities.

“So far, along all parameters, we’re quite satisfied,” Weiss said of the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite launched April 9 by an IAI-produced Shavit rocket.

“We’re taking our time to work through a very methodical and thorough testing program,” he said. “There will be no cutting corners. … And when it’s ready — within weeks — we will hand it over to the government of Israel to operate as an additional strategic asset for its use.”

In a May 4 interview, Weiss said Ofek 10 and its SAR payload, built by IAI subsidiary Elta Systems, embody “the edge of technology in the imaging satellite domain … with substantial cost-effectiveness for our clients.”

Like the IAI-built TecSAR serving Israel’s intelligence community since early 2008, Ofek 10 uses scanning radar arrays, rather than electro-optical cameras, to capture high-resolution images at night, in bad weather and even through camouflage nets.

But Ofek 10 — at 330 kilograms, just 30 kilograms heavier than TecSAR — is more powerful, agile and capable of capturing more high-resolution imagery over wider areas, executives here said.

Security restrictions prevented executives from discussing the clarity of images produced by Ofek 10 as it flies more than 7.5 kilometers per second, orbiting the globe every 90 minutes at an altitude of some 600 kilometers.

Heartbleed: Understanding When We Disclose Cyber Vulnerabilities

Michael Daniel

April 28, 2014 

When President Truman created the National Security Agency in 1952, its very existence was not publicly disclosed. Earlier this month, the NSA sent out a Tweet making clear that it did not know about the recently discovered vulnerability in OpenSSL known as Heartbleed. For an agency whose acronym was once said to stand for “No Such Agency,” this step was unusual but consistent with NSA’s efforts to appropriately inform the ongoing discussion related to how it conducts its missions.

While we had no prior knowledge of the existence of Heartbleed, this case has re-ignited debate about whether the federal government should ever withhold knowledge of a computer vulnerability from the public. As with so many national security issues, the answer may seem clear to some, but the reality is much more complicated. One thing is clear: This administration takes seriously its commitment to an open and interoperable, secure and reliable Internet, and in the majority of cases, responsibly disclosing a newly discovered vulnerability is clearly in the national interest. This has been and continues to be the case. 

This spring, we re-invigorated our efforts to implement existing policy with respect to disclosing vulnerabilities – so that everyone can have confidence in the integrity of the process we use to make these decisions. We rely on the Internet and connected systems for much of our daily lives. Our economy would not function without them. Our ability to project power abroad would be crippled if we could not depend on them. For these reasons, disclosing vulnerabilities usually makes sense. We need these systems to be secure as much as, if not more so, than everyone else. 

But there are legitimate pros and cons to the decision to disclose, and the trade-offs between prompt disclosure and withholding knowledge of some vulnerabilities for a limited time can have significant consequences. Disclosing a vulnerability can mean that we forego an opportunity to collect crucial intelligence that could thwart a terrorist attack stop the theft of our nation’s intellectual property, or even discover more dangerous vulnerabilities that are being used by hackers or other adversaries to exploit our networks.

Building up a huge stockpile of undisclosed vulnerabilities while leaving the Internet vulnerable and the American people unprotected would not be in our national security interest. But that is not the same as arguing that we should completely forgo this tool as a way to conduct intelligence collection, and better protect our country in the long-run. Weighing these tradeoffs is not easy, and so we have established principles to guide agency decision-making in this area. 

We have also established a disciplined, rigorous and high-level decision-making process for vulnerability disclosure. This interagency process helps ensure that all of the pros and cons are properly considered and weighed. While there are no hard and fast rules, here are a few things I want to know when an agency proposes temporarily withholding knowledge of a vulnerability: 

How much is the vulnerable system used in the core internet infrastructure, in other critical infrastructure systems, in the U.S. economy, and/or in national security systems? 

Five Unanswered Questions on the UK’s New Computer Emergency Response Team

2 Apr 2014

By Calum Jeffray, Research Analyst

The UK’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) was launched this week to universal nods of approval. Questions remain, however, over how it will achieve its aims and what value it will add in an increasingly crowded UK network of cyber security teams.

On Monday the Cabinet Office officially launched the UK’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UK), seen as a key milestone in achieving the objectives laid out in the national Cyber Security Strategy. Speaking at the launch event in central London, officials gave an overview of the CERT’s main functions; in short, providing a centralised incident management response capability in the wake of major cyber attacks, situational awareness and analysis of threats, and a main point of contact for international CERT engagement.

Perhaps most importantly, government, industry and overseas partners now know who to call (ortweet) in a crisis.

However, the very public launch of this initiative elicited few details on set-up and cost. Though it is still early to judge UK-CERT, here are important questions that must be answered at the outset:

1. What’s New?

Although a new entity, it could be argued that CERT-UK does little more than bring together teams that existed previously – namely, the Cyber Security Incident Response Team and Cyber Security Information Sharing Partnership (CISP) – under one management structure.

In this new form, CERT-UK can be placed on the long – and often confusing – list of bodies responsible for anticipating and responding to cyberspace threats in the UK. CERT-UK joins, rather than replaces, other government CERTs such as GovCertUK (assisting public sector organisations in the response to incidents) and MODCERT (responsible for coordinating the Ministry of Defence’s response to incidents).

Indeed, CERT-UK will be the twenty-third CERT in the UK recognised by the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA). This is in addition, of course, to bodies such as the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI) and units such as the National Crime Agency’s National Cyber Crime Unit, who conduct their own situational awareness and threat analyses.

Russia, US Conduct Nuclear Weapon Drills

Amid tensions over Ukraine, Russia and the U.S. are conducting nuclear exercises within days of each other.

By Zachary Keck

May 14, 2014

Source Link

Last Thursday Russian President Vladimir Putin oversaw a large-scale nuclear drill involving all three legs of the Russian nuclear triad. This week, the U.S. Strategic Command is following suit.

According to Russian media reports, “During the drills, it was demonstrated how the missile corps, artillery, aviation and anti-aircraft defenses can be used – for instance, to destroy troops on the ground or to counter massive missile, aviation or nuclear strikes by an enemy. Plus, it was shown how to inflict a launch-through-attack strike with nuclear missiles.”

The drill consisted of a ground-based missile launch, submarine-based missile launches, and air-based missile launches. The ground-based portion of the drill consisted of the launching of a Topol intercontinental ballistic (ICBM) at the Plesetsk launch facility in northwest Russia. The reports also said that two submarines that are assigned to Russia’s Pacific and Northern fleets test-fired long-range ballistic missiles. Finally, Tu-95 strategic bombers fired off air-to-surface missiles from an undisclosed location in western Russia.

The drills also had an anti-ballistic missile component. A Russian Defense Ministry official told local media outlets: “At the Priozersk training area (Kazakhstan), a successful interception of a ballistic target by a short-range countermissile was carried out. A massive rocket nuclear strike was repelled by a ballistic missile defense unit of air and missile defense troops.”

Russia previously carried out a massive drill simulating a nuclear attack back in March. As The Diplomatreported at the time:

“Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces began a massive three-day exercise involving 10,000 soldiers and 1,000 pieces of equipment from more than 30 units. The major purpose of the drill, according to the report — which cites multiple senior Russian military officers — is to ensure Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces have sufficient readiness to conduct offensive operations involving the massive and simultaneous use of nuclear missiles.”

Before the start of this week’s exercises, Russian President Putin said, “Today’s planned exercises will involve all of the armed forces across Russia, including our nuclear deterrent.” He went on to stress that the military drills had been planned back in November, implying that they weren’t related to the ongoing crisis in the Ukraine.

The drill took place a day ahead of Russia’s massive May Day celebrations commemorating Moscow’s victory over Nazi Germany in WWII.

*** 5 QUESTIONS WITH DAVE DILEGGE ON SMALL WARS AND COIN COCKTAILS

Ryan Evans

May 12, 2014 

This is the latest installment of our 5 Questions series, in which we feature an expert, practitioner, or leader answering — you guessed it — five questions on a topic of current relevance in the world of defense, security, and foreign policy. Well, four of the questions are topical. The fifth is about booze. We are War on the Rocks, after all.

This week I spoke with Dave Dilegge, the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Small Wars Journal. Dave also serves as a Director at Small Wars Foundation. He is a retired USMCR Intelligence and Counterintelligence/HUMINT officer, and former USMC civilian intelligence analyst, as well as a defense consultant in the private sector.

1. Dave, thanks so much for doing this. Could you tell us about the origins of Small Wars Journal? Did you ever anticipate it would grow to become one of the more influential online forums in the defense world?

It’s my pleasure to be interviewed by War on the Rocks. You have a great site with outstanding contributors. It is most certainly a must read.

As for SWJ’s origins, here is the Reader’s Digest version: In the mid and late ‘90s I was working urban operations issues for the Marine Corps to include supporting concept development, experimentation, and development of tactics, techniques and procedures. Most of what we required had to be open source (unclassified). I did a lot of online research and began to get numerous requests for what I found. In 1998, tired of sending out laundry lists of web addresses, I created what I called my electronic file cabinet — The MOUT (Military Operations on Urban Terrain) Homepage on Geocities and it quickly became a must-read site for Joint, Marine and Army personnel working urban operations issues. This effort morphed into the Urban Operations Journal, my private open-to-anyone site and an official-use-only version funded by the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

In 2003, I became a project officer for the Marine Corps-Joint Forces Command’s Joint Urban Warrior program that included seminars, workshops and an annual war-game and was lucky enough to be assigned an office that I shared with then Marine Major Bill Nagle. Bill and I often chewed the fat over the terms MOUT and urban operations — on how they had a “last 300 yards” kicking down doors and clearing rooms feel about them thus diverting attention away from the larger issues associated with why we were in cities and villages in the first place and what we needed to be seriously thinking about. We thought “Small Wars” or “Irregular Warfare” was more inclusive in describing what we were then doing in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as a likely future operating environment. Being Marines, and in deference to the USMC’s 1940 Small Wars Manual, we decided to rebrand the Urban Operations Journal as the Small Wars Journal. SWJ was launched in February of 2005.

As far as Small Wars Journal’s influence, no, I did not fully anticipate how influential we would become — only that we might influence those “niche” groups working or participating in Small Wars-related issues and operations. That said, if I had to define one event that exposed us to a much larger and wider audience it would be when, in 2007 and 2008, Dr. David Kilcullen in his role as the Senior Counterinsurgency Adviser, Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I) blogged for SWJ concerning counterinsurgency and “The Surge.” His participation in an open forum — and most importantly, one that allowed for reader participation — provided an “insider account” of what MNF-I was doing and intended to do during a critical period of the war.

But I think, for the most part, our influence and popularity was incremental over time and due, for the most part, to our dedication in maintaining a clearinghouse of resources and a springboard for discussion and collaboration across traditional boundaries. In short — a serious, professional, open source, unclassified, inclusive, unofficial community of interest and practice.

New Navy Intel Reports on Piracy and Threats to Shipping

May 10, 2014

The U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) has just released the latest editions of their unclassified Piracy Analysis and Warning Weekly and World Wide Threat to Shipping OSINT intelligence summaries.

UK Parliament’s 2014 Report on the State of Global Terrorism

May 11, 2014

Counter-terrorism: Seventeenth Report of Session 2013–14

House Affairs Committee

UK House of Commons

The complete report can be accessed here. The table of contents of the report follows:

Contents

1. Introduction

2. Threat Assessment

The United Kingdom

Global

Syria

Afghanistan and Pakistan

Horn of Africa

Yemen

North Africa

Nigeria

3. Foreign Fighters

UK nationals fighting in Syria

Numbers and the threat posed

Response

4. Capacity Building

UK capacity building

Counter Terrorism and Extremism Liaison Officers (CTELOs) Network in action

Funding for capacity building

The European Union

International capacity building efforts

5. The UK’s response to the terrorist threat

Countering terrorist activity

Schedule 7

Withdrawal of passports

Citizenship stripping

Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures

Countering extremist narratives

Countering terrorist financing

Charities

The proposal to move counter terrorism to the National Crime Agency

Partnership in the fight against terrorism

6. Oversight of the security and intelligence agencies

Parliamentary oversight

Judicial and expert oversight

Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000

The Data Retention Directive and Section 94 of the Telecommunications Act 1984.

Counter terrorism

Annex A: Case chronology of Mohammed Ahmed Mohamed

Annex B: Comparison of the UK and US oversight systems of the security and intelligence agencies

Legislative oversight

Expert oversight

Judicial oversight

UK system of oversight

History

Parliamentary accountability

Failures of parliamentary accountability

Other systems of accountability

US system of oversight

History

Congressional accountability

Failures of Congressional accountability

Other systems of accountability

Comparison

Conclusion

Conclusions and recommendations

Formal Minutes

Witnesses

Published written evidence

U.S. Military Trying to Stop the CIA From Closing All Its Intelligence Facilities in Afghanistan Ahead of Pullout

CIA, U.S. military at odds over Afghanistan pullback plan

David S. Cloud

Los Angeles Times

May 9, 2014

The CIA has made plans to close its network of secret bases in Afghanistan and pull its personnel back to Kabul this summer, an unexpectedly abrupt withdrawal that the U.S. military fears will deprive it of vital intelligence while thousands of American troops remain in the country, U.S. officials said.

CIA Director John Brennan informed U.S. military commanders in March that his agency would start to shutter Afghan operations outside Kabul, the capital, removing CIA clandestine officers and analysts as well as National Security Agency specialists responsible for intercepting insurgents’ communications, which have been a rich source of daily intelligence, the officials said.

Pentagon officials warn that the CIA drawdown is coming at a time when insurgent attacks normally intensify, after a winter lull. As a result, the plan has strained relations between the agency and military commanders in Kabul, the officials said.

Caption Afghanistan patrol

Scott Olson / Getty Images

The CIA is planning to close its satellite bases in Afghanistan and pull all its personnel back to Kabul by early summer. The U.S. military says it needs the intelligence the CIA provides. Above, Army 1st Lt. Eric Cannon speaks by radio on patrol near a village south of Kabul.

"They are beginning their own retrograde and they kind of sprung it on the military, which is raising concern," said a senior military official, who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss classified CIA plans.

Intelligence officials confirmed the drawdown would occur, but said the pace remained uncertain and no final plan had been approved.

They linked the move to the steady pullout of U.S. combat troops from America’s longest war. Soldiers and Marines have provided protection and logistics support for intelligence-gathering outposts, which often are inside U.S. military facilities. Hundreds of those frontline military bases and camps have now closed, although dozens are still operating.

Soldering soldiers

May 13, 2014

Shankar Roychowdhury

Source Link

General elections 2014 turned out to be elections like no other, and if this is indeed what the practice of democracy has been reduced to in our country, then we should look forward to the future with some degree of trepidation. But right now the wait is to see what kind of a dispensation will take office in the country after this massive (and massively expensive) exercise in democracy.

There are many question marks, some of them enormous, but hopefully they will all be answered come May 16.

However, what has been of particular concern this time around is the emergence of a particularly virulent type of rabble-rouser to whom no sacrilege is too egregious in the pursuit of votebank electoral advantage, even if it calls for deliberate disrespect of even the most highly respected institutions in the country. One amongst these is undoubtedly the Indian Army, which was targeted recently by one such street corner demagogue who is also (along with several others of his kind) a state-level government minister in a north Indian state (no prizes for guessing the state!). In a supremely vicious display of the lowest form of communal sentiment and disregard for all norms of propriety, this person attempted to besmear the Kargil War itself by reducing one of the Indian Army’s greatest achievements down to the level of the communal gutter he himself inhabits. That such an approach is not a flash in the pan, or limited to one particular instance was confirmed by the statement of another politician (this time from a metropolis in western India) — that members of a particular community who do not vote in favour of a particular “secular” party should have their collective DNA examined.

These comments were widely projected on the visual media, and the Election Commission did take note of them but, in the opinion of some, not proactively or strongly enough. The case of these two politicians (amongst others), notorious enough to begin with, must now be taken up strongly so that freedom of speech is not interpreted as liberty to blaspheme. No one, not even street politicians, have so far plunged into such depths of perversity as to cast aspersions on the totally impartial, secular image of the Army.

The Election Commission of India — yet another world-class institution every Indian is proud of — has done its best to civilise the electoral jamboree, but has not succeeded in doing so in every case. That the EC has incurred the wrath of both sides is a striking testimonial to its fairness. Meanwhile, the Indian Army soldiers on, loftily oblivious to the shrill political cacophony all around, though truth to tell, it has its own share of problems, wounds and injuries inflicted by some of its best and brightest who once marched in its ranks and attained its highest echelons. As the saying goes, it is enough to make an angel swear!