Category Archives: History

History, Security

BBC Journalists Tortured by Libyan Military

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A harrowing first-person account has been published by BBC journalists who were arrested and tortured in Libya. The role of identities in these conflicts is illuminating. Note for example that one of the three journalists, a Palestinian, receives the harshest treatment. The torturer seems to call out bad relations between Libya and Hamas, as well as a hatred for Al-Jazeera:

“He said something bad about Palestinians, a lot of bad things, and he asked his team what they thought about Palestinians and they said the same things. He thought they had helped the Palestinians a lot, but Hamas has given a very bad reaction to Gaddafi. Lots of bad language.

“When I tried to respond he took me out to the car park behind the guard room. Then he started hitting me without saying anything. First with his fist, then boots, then knees. Then he found a plastic pipe on the ground and beat me with that. Then one of the soldiers gave him a long stick. I’m standing trying to protect myself, I’m trying to tell him we’re working, I’m a Palestinian, I have a good impression of the country. He knew who we were [ie journalists] and what we were doing.

“I think there was something personal against me. They knew me and the sort of coverage I had been doing, especially from Tajoura the Friday before. I think they monitored the BBC and had an idea, not just the reports but also DTLs [interviews from the studio with a correspondent in the field]. They don’t like us or Al-Arabiya or Al-Jazeera.”

While in detention they had access to other prisoners and their stories.

…they had been arrested because their phone calls had been intercepted – including ones to the foreign media…

Then after days of beatings and interrogation by the military, they are sent to intelligence headquarters for review.

We were crammed in worse than sardines. The others were so badly beaten, and it was so full, that every time you moved someone screamed. They had mashed faces, broken ribs. We were handcuffed, really tightly, behind our backs.

The intelligence group changes the situation dramatically. The BBC journalists point out that things are cleaner, and more organized. Their description of their oppressors switches, from the above examples of basic and angry brutality, to something far more sinister.

A man with a small sub-machine gun was putting it to the nape of everyone’s neck in turn. He pointed the barrel at each of us. When he got to me at the end of the line, he pulled the trigger twice. The shots went past my ear.

“They all laughed as though it was very funny. There was a whole group of them in plain clothes.”

At this point a man “who spoke very good English, almost Oxford English” interrogates them and then they are released. Another man tells them “sorry it was a mistake by the military”.

It is hard not to notice the flow of identities in this story from an outsider view; a British man is left unharmed and even finds a commonality when facing Libyan intelligence, while an Arab is despised and brutalized. Differences between people obviously have been the source and focus of great tragedy in history, however differences are very relative. Another awful reality is seen here; the fear of espionage and civil war leads oppressors to treat those who we may see as similar to them far more brutally than those who are far more different. The integrity (papers, please) and confidentiality (networking) of communication in Libya today thus are issues of life and death.

Updated to add: below is a video released today of an American Congressman remembering an American 9/11 first responder who died while trying to help rescue people from the North Tower.

Muhammad Hamdani loved his country and sacrificed himself to help other Americans similar to himself, but other Americans have tried to denigrate him and hold his differences in contempt.

After Mr. Hamdani, 23, disappeared on Sept. 11, ugly rumors circulated: he was a Muslim and worked in a lab; he might have been connected to a terrorist group. Months later the truth came out. Mr. Hamdani’s remains had been found near the north tower, and he had gone there to help people he did not know.

Energy, History, Security

It’s China! It’s Israel! It’s…

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Pick your favorite bogeyman. The latest outsider attack is probably their fault…

My presentation at BSidesSF this year tried to make the argument that attribution is harder than ever online. Attackers make extensive use of proxies and remote control, so it can be very difficult to trace all the points back to an actual person…and even if you do, they may only be one of a thousand mules following instructions. It was gratifying to hear General Alexander at the RSA keynote on February 17th after my presentation admit to his audience “We don’t have situational awareness”.

I could go into the complicated philosophy of why attribution is a double-edged sword (e.g. users on the Internet do not want to sacrifice their privacy) or go into the long history of technical issues with attribution (e.g. smurfing), but instead I just want to point out the two most recent spectacular attribution failures.

First, WordPress suffered a denial of service attack that came from systems in China. I asked my audience at BSidesSF “how many people in the audience use products made in China” and the entire room raised their hand. Granted, there were only three people in the room (jk), but my point is that “it came from China” should be immediately discounted as a strong attribution link. If a weapon found after an attack has “from China” stamped on it, investigators should not jump to the conclusion that the attacker therefore must also be from China. Even worse is to super-impose Chinese state motives onto a suspected Chinese attacker, all because the weapon is “from China”.

WordPress said last week the attacks might have been politically motivated and aimed at an unnamed Chinese-language blog, but it no longer has that view.

“Don’t think it’s politically motivated anymore,” WordPress Founder Matt Mullenweg said in an e-mail to IDG News Service. “However the attacks did originate in China.”

Mullenweg did not elaborate on the change in view or offer details on the source of the attacks.

I had tried to warn against this in my Operation Sloppy Night Dragon post.

Second, I have a lot of respect for Ralph Langner who has been credited with exposing the details of the Stuxnet attack. When I listened to his recent interview he made points like Stuxnet was very basic because it did not need to be complex and Stuxnet was directed at Natanz, never at Busheir. Why did he say at first it was probably directed at Busheir? In the interview he said it was because he assumed that would be a target of Mossad…in other words, his bias on international politics overshadowed his analysis of the facts. He recently reiterated it was the Mossad.

“My opinion is that the Mossad is involved,” Ralph Langner said while discussing his in-depth Stuxnet analysis at a prestigious TED conference in the Southern California city of Long Beach.

We should not lose sight of the fact that he already has admitted he made one serious mistake because he believed Mossad was to blame before his investigation started. The Mossad certainly has a lot of people spooked, but every suspicious bird and rock is not necessarily their handiwork.

Every piece of dog poop you see, on the other hand, should in fact be attributed to the CIA.

I appreciate Langner’s honest, clear and open style; yet it seems when he switches to geopolitical analysis he overlooks important data points like the significance of Pakistan and German intelligence operations.

Note the recent mass exodus of US special forces and operatives from Pakistan after the arrest of Davis. The US denies he was anything more than a diplomat, but let’s face the fact that a fight with Afghans and Iranians makes Pakistan a really good proxy. The British certainly made this point when they told the CIA under Tenet that Iran was stealing nuclear secrets from Pakistan. Without the Davis incident (he killed two motorcyclists that probably were trying to assassinate him) we would have far less data on how Pakistani operations might be attributed back to American objectives. Instead an exodus of US operatives now is suggested by some to be related to the drop in US drone attacks in Afghanistan (e.g. disruption of intelligence channels); it probably also is impacting other Pakistan-originated operations that could affect Iran (e.g. Stuxnet).

While there is a case to be made that Pakistan has been a proxy to US and Israeli objectives, that is far from achieving attribution. Maybe Britain was acting on its own, with the support of Germany, on behalf of the US. Time will tell and probably reveal a more complicated picture than we might believe today; and that is just for the physical world. Take for example the overthrow of Iran’s Mossadegh in 1953. It served British objectives, but today we know it was an American-led operation masked to look like an insider revolt against nationalism, despite the fact that the prior year Iran’s nationalist movement fit American interests. Attribution of crowd events was hard. Attribution of Internet crowd events is even harder.

Energy, History, Security

Winning the Oil Endgame

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Amory Lovins from 2005

Unexpectedly, whalers ran out of customers before they ran out of whales…the remnant whale populations were saved by technological innovators and profit maximizing capitalists.

He proposes two steps, both of which cost less than buying the petroleum they offset

  1. Retool transportation to be two or three-times more efficient (save more than 60% by 2025)
  2. Move to biofuel

We’ve done this before…1977-1985 when we last paid attention…oil imports from the Persian Gulf fell 87% and would have been gone if we had kept that up one more year.

History, Security

The London Schools on Libya

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It is hard for me, an alumnus of both the London School of Economics (LSE) and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), not to juxtaposition their announcements on recent international news.

Professor Stephen Chan OBE at SOAS has provided commentary on the characteristics of the current uprisings in Libya and Egypt and the underlying reasons behind the demonstrations.

Meanwhile, I received the following alert in my inbox from LSE with a link to a full announcement. The LSE Student Union has successfully pushed out the Director after protesting his ties to Libya.

It is with great regret that I am writing to inform you, as an alumnus/alumna of LSE, that the LSE Council has accepted the offer of resignation of Sir Howard Davies as Director. This follows an extraordinary meeting of the LSE Council yesterday evening. Sir Howard has, at the behest of the Council, agreed to continue to serve as Director whilst arrangements for succession are resolved.

At the same meeting, Council also resolved to commission an independent external inquiry into the School’s relationship with Libya, to be Chaired by Lord Woolf.

Sir Davies now says his decision to accept £300,000 from the son of Col Gaddafi has “backfired” as he has lost the confidence of the student body.

There were risks involved in taking funding from sources associated with Libya which should have been weighed more heavily in the balance, he concluded in his resignation letter.

He said the decision to accept the British government’s invitation to become an economic envoy to Libya had “muddled” his personal position and his role at the LSE.

A former head of the Financial Services Authority and deputy governor of the Bank of England, Sir Howard gave advice to the Libyan Investment Authority.

He said he was offered a $50,000 (£30,700) fee for doing so, but asked that it be used for a scholarship at the LSE.

The LSE Student Union also has successfully redirected the £300,000 amount from Gaddafi into scholarships for North African students.

This perhaps illustrates the irony of the political history of these two London schools. LSE, which was a liberal institution of social change, has come to serve and represent some of the most conservative voices in the world while SOAS, once an institution of military/colonial intelligence and training, has evolved into a liberal thought leader for students of the developing world.