Category Archives: History

History, Security

Libyans Flee to Egypt, Release Evidence of Crimes

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Al Masry Al Youm has posted an update from Libya delivered via Egypt, since Libya’s Internet access has been cut.

Suleiman Saghir, a Libyan who made it to Egypt’s Marsa Matrouh through Salloum, described the current events back home as “atrocious and unimaginable.” He said hunderds of Libyans have sought refuge in Egypt since the violence erupted.

Saghir added that some eyewitnesses of the developments in Libya fled to Egypt so their voices can reach Arab and world media outlets. Some photographs and video clips brought across the border show Libyan authorities committing crimes against unarmed women and the elderly, he said.

Several news outlets are reporting hundreds of Libyans dead from fighting with the government and hundreds more fleeing through Egypt’s Salloum border terminal, which recently was destabilized by violent protests.

On 28 January, now known as the “Day of Anger,” bloody clashes took place in the city that resulted in the burning of all police stations, the state security headquarters, and three buses.

The clashes led to the injury of 13 police officers.

Salloum is the north-west corner of Egypt, bordered by Libya and the Mediterranean coast, only 150 miles west of Marsa Matrouh on a modern highway. I suppose there is a touch of irony to these developments. Libya used to criticize Egypt for restriction of trade and movement from Egypt through Salloum and demanded the border be more open. Now that the government has lost its grip over the border post the Libyans not only can more easily escape to Marsa Matrouh and bring goods home but Egypt can increase its export of revolution to Libya.

In related news, the Libyan military seems to be making emergency flights to Malta, about 600 miles northwest.

Two Libyan fighter jets with four military personnel on board who said they had escaped Benghazi air base after it was taken over by protesters landed in Malta on Monday, military sources told AFP.

Two civilian helicopters also landed on the Mediterranean island around the same time, carrying seven people who said they were French nationals working on oil rigs near Benghazi, although only one had a passport, the sources said.

The helicopters were given permission to land in Malta but had not been given clearance to leave Libya, indicating that they had escaped, they added.

Malta has had friendly intelligence relations with Libya, so it is little surprise military pilots would head there. It reminds me that Maltese Prime Minister Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici (given prior notice by Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi) in 1986 sent advance warning to Libya to try and foil Ronald Reagan’s plan to assassinate Qaddafi. He sounded the alarm when some of the 100 US military aircraft used in Operation El Dorado Canyon flew over water towards Libya (France, Spain and Italy had refused airspace).

The warnings were of little help to stop the attack due to incompetence in the Libyan military and technology like the F-111F’s terrain-mapping radar and laser-guided weapons (Pave Tack) that allowed for high-speed low level standoff attacks even at night. However, Qaddafi was able to run and hide to survive, which is probably what he is doing again now.

Updated to add: Reuters and the BBC say the Libyan jet pilots, both colonels, defected after they were ordered to bomb civilians.

History, Poetry, Security

SMS protest language censored by phone companies in Uganda

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Reuters reveals an interesting African development related to protests in the Middle East and mobile communication:

Uganda has ordered phone companies to intercept text messages with words or phrases including “Egypt”, “bullet,” and “people power” ahead of Friday’s elections that some fear may turn violent.

“Messages containing such words, when encountered by the network or facility owner or operator, should be scrutinised and, if deemed to be controversial or advanced to incite the public, should be stopped or blocked,” he said.

[…]

The other English words or phrases on the list are: “Tunisia”, “Mubarak”, “dictator”, “teargas”, “army”, “police”, “gun”, “Ben Ali” and “UPDF”.

Bad idea. It will not work, not least of all because the black-list can be leaked; I see an impossible goal of staying abreast of slang and permutations already typical of SMS.

Who would type dictator when they can say tator, or tater, or tot? Who uses police when they can put cops, 5-0 or bobs? Wikipedia provides a list of euphemisms for police that covers every letter in the alphabet. I would use gas, or mace, or lach (short for lachrymatory), or pep(per), or RCA (riot control agent) instead of teargas.

I mean the obvious and historic defense is encoded language: the words gas and pepper have many meanings, and thus are hard to ban. This is a form of substitution. The key to decipher their correct (intended) meaning using message context or metadata. That easily defeats word-list censorship. How cool is that? Or should I say how radical? I’ve mentioned this before in terms of songs and poems like Kumbaya.

Energy, History, Security

Stuxnet Failed to Stop or Delay LEU

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Three days ago an updated report by the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) was published with the following conclusion:

While it has delayed the Iranian centrifuge program at the Natanz plant in 2010 and contributed to slowing its expansion, it did not stop it or even delay the continued buildup of LEU [low enriched uranium]. […] At the time of the attack, the Natanz FEP contained a total of almost 9,000 IR-1 centrifuges. The destruction of 1,000 out of 9,000 centrifuges may not appear significant, particularly since Iran took steps to maintain and increase its LEU production rates during this same period. […] One observation is that it may be harder to destroy centrifuges by use of cyber attacks than often believed.

They suggest that the malware was injected into systems in the supply-chain for Natanz.

Because of sanctions and trade controls, Iran operates international smuggling rings to obtain industrial control equipment, including the Siemens 315 and 417 PLCs. Although foreign intelligence agencies could infect or sabotage these PLCs abroad, they would have far greater chance of ultimately infecting Natanz by inserting Stuxnet in the core of Iran’s supply chain for the centrifuge program’s control systems.

This points strongly to an outsider cut-off from direct site access yet influential, which echoes a CIA method claimed to have caused the trans-Siberian pipeline disaster in 1982. On the other hand, it is said the attackers monitored and continued to modify Stuxnet, almost as if they had inside access and knowledge of their progress:

Symantec has established that Stuxnet first infected four Iranian organizations in June and July 2009. After the 2009/2010 attack, and before Stuxnet’s public discovery, the malware’s operators tried to attack again. Symantec found that in March, April, and May 2010, two of the original organizations were again infected. In May, a new Iranian organization was also infected. Were the Stuxnet operators dissatisfied with destroying only 1,000 centrifuges, or were they encouraged by their success? In any case, they were improving the code’s ability to spread by the spring of 2010, according to Symantec. These improvements undoubtedly sought to enable the program to again breech Iran’s security on its gas centrifuge program and destroy more centrifuges.

The report points out that the level of knowledge required for the attack had to come from a plant insider, but that the attack vector is more likely to have been from an outsider. The blended approach of Stuxnet emphasizes a loss of secrecy in their program, which may significantly affect Iran’s management of their nuclear effort far more than damage to controllers and centrifuges. The objective may have not been destruction but rather to demonstrate the sophisticated level of information leakage.

History, Poetry, Security

The History and Meaning of Finding Kumbaya

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The NYT attempts to preserve or even restore meaning for the song often known only as Kumbaya

The lyrics told of people in despair and in trouble, calling on heaven for help, and beseeching God in the refrain, “Come by here.”

[…]

Far from compromise, “Come By Here” in its original hands appealed for divine intervention on behalf of the oppressed. The people who were “crying, my Lord” were blacks suffering under the Jim Crow regime of lynch mobs and sharecropping. While the song may have originated in the Georgia Sea Islands, by the late 1930s, folklorists had made recordings as far afield as Lubbock, Tex., and the Florida women’s penitentiary.

With the emergence of the civil rights movement in the 1950s, “Come By Here” went from being an implicit expression of black liberation theology to an explicit one. The Folkways album “Freedom Songs” contains an emblematic version — deep, rolling, implacable — sung by the congregation at Zion Methodist Church in Marion., Ala., soon after the Selma march in March 1965.

Like other songs I have mentioned before here, it was an encoded message among slaves to fight against injustice such as restrictions on speech.

To sing Kumbaya was to resist, perhaps even to signal to others an event that would need more resources — calling in backup. The peculiar characteristics of this song that originated in the American south are born out of resistance to authority; simple repetition with obfuscation helped ensure the availability, integrity and confidentiality of a message.

Also Folklife Center News, Volume 32, Nos 3-4, Summer/Fall 2010, in their exhaustive research of the song origins, explains how an alleged link is problematic and… Wikipedia tends to publish garbage.

The most common claim made today about the origins of “Kumbaya” is that it is from the Gullah-Geechee people of coastal Georgia and South Carolina. (The more outlandish versions of this theory, such as the one espoused on Wikipedia on April 2, 2010, claim that “Yah” is a remnant of Aramaic, and refers to God, despite the fact that “yah” means “here” in Gullah.) While a Gullah origin is certainly closer to the truth than either of the previous theories, AFC’s archival versions also call the Gullah claim into question.

The Folklife Center News provides instead a self-dealing alternative story:

…the evidence from the American Folklife Center Archive does not fully support any of the common claims about the origin of “Kumbaya.” Instead, it suggests that “Kumbaya” is an African American spiritual which originated somewhere in the American south, and then traveled all over the world…. Although it is truly a global folksong, its earliest versions are preserved in only one place: the AFC Archive.

Coastal Georgia and South Carolina is somewhere in the American south, no? Perhaps too specific. Either way, Kumbaya is a fight song.