USIP's Science, Technology & Peacebuilding Roundup

 

Center of Innovation: Science, Technology and Peacebuilding Weekly News Roundup, May 31 - June 6, 2012 Table of Contents Ugandan Innovators Don't Get the Credit They Deserve (Foreign Policy, 6/6/12) Cyberweapons, Drone Strikes Circumvent Congress' Constitutional Authority (Huffington Post, 6/6/12) Drone Attacks Create Terrorist Safe Havens, Warns Former CIA Official (Guardian, 6/5/12) Is It Possible to Wage a Just Cyberwar? (Atlantic, 6/5/12) Flame Hijacks Microsoft Update to Spread Malware Disguised as Legit Code (Wired, 6/4/12) MTN Irancell, Iranian Cellphone Carrier, Obtained Banned U.S. Tech (Reuters, 6/4/12) A Massive Web of Fake Identities and Websites Controlled Flame Malware (Wired, 6/4/12) March of the Robots (Economist, 6/2/12) Balancing Advocacy and Accuracy (NPR, 6/1/12) Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran (New York Times, 6/1/12) Ugandan Innovators Don't Get the Credit They Deserve Three Ugandan pre-university students have designed a bomb detector and detonator prototype. The bomb detector is a response to a pressing issue in the community: Uganda has experienced several bomb scares over the past few years. The most recent threat was the 2010 twin bomb attacks against crowds watching the World Cup soccer games in Kampala. The attacks were attributed to the al-Shabaab militant group operating out of Somalia. See the full article (Foreign Policy, Jackee Budesta Batanda, 6/6/12) [Return to top] Cyberweapons, Drone Strikes Circumvent Congress' Constitutional Authority The United States' use of cyberweapons against Iran threatens to undermine the critical and sensitive ongoing negotiations over Iran's nuclear program. Building trust is a significant component of these negotiations, and the use of cyberweapons may break down that trust and leave us vulnerable to similar attacks. Congress must reassert its constitutional authority and conduct proper oversight of government's "counterterrorism" policies regardless of the technology being used. See the full article (Huffington Post, Dennis Kucinich, 6/6/12) [Return to top] Drone Attacks Create Terrorist Safe Havens, Warns Former CIA Official A former top terrorism official at the CIA has warned that President Barack Obama's controversial drone programme is far too indiscriminate in hitting targets and could lead to such political instability that it creates terrorist safe havens. Drone strikes in Pakistan over the weekend hit a funeral gathering for a militant slain in a previous strike and also may have accidentally hit a mosque. That sort of action adds credence to the claims that the drone campaign is likely to cause more damage by creating anger at the US than it does in eliminating terrorist threats. See the full article (Guardian, Paul Harris, 6/5/12) Click to read "Saving Lives in Pakistan: the USIP Connection," a USIP Olive Branch Post by Thomas Omestad. [Return to top] Is It Possible to Wage a Just Cyberwar? In the last week or so, cyberwarfare has made front-page news. This digital evolution means that it is now less clear what kind of events should reasonably trigger a war, as well as how and when new technologies may be used. With cyberweapons, a war theoretically could be waged without casualties or political risk, so their attractiveness is great -- maybe so irresistible that nations are tempted to use them before such aggression is justified. See the full article (Atlantic, Patrick Lin, Fritz Allhoff, and Neil Rowe, 6/5/12) Click to read about USIP's upcoming event "The Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR)" on June 15 at 9:00am. [Return to top] Flame Hijacks Microsoft Update to Spread Malware Disguised as Legit Code It's a scenario security researchers have long worried about, a man-in-the-middle attack that allows someone to impersonate Microsoft Update to deliver malware - disguised as legitimate Microsoft code - to unsuspecting users. The fact that this vulnerability existed in the first place is what has security experts all aflame. Code that is officially signed by Microsoft is considered safe by millions of machines around the world, something that put them all at risk. See the full article (Wired, Kim Zetter, 6/4/12) [Return to top] MTN Irancell, Iranian Cellphone Carrier, Obtained Banned U.S. Tech A fast-growing Iranian mobile-phone network managed to obtain sophisticated U.S. computer equipment despite sanctions that prohibit sales of American technology to Iran. MTN Irancell, a joint venture between MTN Group Ltd of South Africa and an Iranian government-controlled consortium, sourced equipment from Sun Microsystems Inc, Hewlett Packard Co and Cisco Systems Inc. The procurement - through a network of tech companies in Iran and the Middle East - offers further evidence of the limitations of U.S. economic sanctions. See the full article (Reuters, Steve Stecklow, 6/4/12) [Return to top] A Massive Web of Fake Identities and Websites Controlled Flame Malware The attackers behind the complex Flame cyberespionage toolkit, believed to be a state-sponsored operation, used an extensive list of fake identities to register at least 86 domains, which they used as part of their command-and-control center. Many of the domains, set up as early as 2008 in some cases and as late as April this year, were registered with the GoDaddy registrar service, and used fake addresses in Germany and Austria. See the full article (Wired, Kim Zetter, 6/4/12) [Return to top] March of the Robots Demand for land robots, also known as unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), began to pick up a decade ago after American-led forces knocked the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. Soldiers hunting Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda fighters in the Hindu Kush were keen to send robot scouts into caves first. Remote-controlled ground robots then proved enormously helpful in the discovery and removal of makeshift roadside bombs in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. See the full article (Economist, 6/2/12) [Return to top] Balancing Advocacy and Accuracy In a Washington Post op-ed last month, Senator Joseph Lieberman spoke of "horrific human rights abuses perpetrated daily, including the widespread and deliberate use of rape and other sexual violence as weapons of war." Lauren Wolfe, director of the Women Under Siege Project, which has curated a map plotting instances of sexual violence in Syria, talks with [On the Media] about trying to check the senator's claim and the difficulty of verifying claims of rape in a war-zone. See the full article (NPR, 6/1/12) Click to read "Atrocity Prevention through Persuasion and Deterrence," a USIP Peace Brief by Jonas Claes. [Return to top] Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran's main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America's first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program. This account of the American and Israeli effort to undermine the Iranian nuclear program is based on interviews over the past 18 months with current and former American, European and Israeli officials. See the full article (New York Times, David E. Sanger, 6/1/12) *NYT sign-up may be required to view the full article [Return to top] Did we miss anything?     Share this: | Forward this to a Friend

 

USIP's Media, Conflict & Peacebuilding Roundup

 

Center of Innovation: Media, Conflict and Peacebuilding Weekly News Roundup, May 31 - June 6, 2012 Media and Journalism Army Veterans Use Filmmaking as Therapy for PTSD (AP, 6/6/12) Shooting the Messenger: Four Reporters Murdered in Pakistan in One Month (Huffington Post, 6/5/12) Syria's Year of Chaos: Photos of a Slow-Motion Civil War (TIME, 6/5/12) Myanmar Article Hints at Strains Between Top Figures (New York Times, 6/5/12) The Six-Day War: Photos from a Short, Bloody Conflict (TIME, 6/5/12) Photos: A Gallery of Vietnam War Photography by Nick Ut 40 Years after His 'Napalm Girl' Photo (Washington Post, 6/4/12) North Korea Threatens to Blow up Media Offices over Critical Coverage (Telegraph, 6/4/12) One Syrian Journalist on Houla, Assad and Why He Hasn't Left (Huffington Post, 6/1/12) Israel's Attorney General to Indict Reporter (Washington Post, 5/31/12) Internet and Social Media PSNI Warning over West Belfast Facebook Sectarian Posts (BBC, 6/4/12) Kuwaiti Tweeter Gets 10 Years for Blasphemy (RFE/RL, 6/4/12) China Blocks Tiananmen Talk on Crackdown Anniversary (Reuters, 6/4/12) Chinese Censorship Gets Complicated (NPR, 6/1/12) Google to Alert Users to Chinese Censorship (New York Times, 6/1/12) Wadah Khanfar: Syrian Social Media Proved Vital and Accurate (Journalism.co.uk, 5/31/12) What's New from PeaceMedia "Harness Technology for Social Change" - US Embassy Tel Aviv Media and Journalism Army Veterans Use Filmmaking as Therapy for PTSD With a growing demand for ways to treat the psychological damage of war, one Army pilot project is offering therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder by encouraging soldiers to take control of their own stories in a filmmaking class titled I Was There Media Workshop. Some 2.3 million men and women have served tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan in the past decade. The Rand Corp. said as many as 300,000 veterans of those wars may have suffered PTSD or major depression. See the full article (AP, P. Solomon Banda, 6/6/12) [Return to top] Shooting the Messenger: Four Reporters Murdered in Pakistan in One Month In May 2012 alone, at least four journalists have been killed in Pakistan, increasing to six the total number of slain reporters for this year. Within Pakistan, Balochistan has experienced an upsurge in attacks on journalists in the recent years due to an ongoing conflict that results in a highly insecure environment for reporters. Two journalists, a correspondent of a Sindhi language newspaper and a television reporter for Kawaish Television Network, were killed in Sindh province on May 9th and 10th. See the full article (Huffington Post, Malik Siraj Akbar, 6/5/12) Click to read "Saving Lives in Pakistan: the USIP Connection ," a USIP Olive Branch Post by Thomas Omestad. [Return to top] Syria's Year of Chaos: Photos of a Slow-Motion Civil War Slightly more than a year ago, Arab Spring-inspired protests kicked off in the impoverished Syrian agricultural town of Dara'a. The mini-uprising met a brutal response. With Syrian authorities clamping down on journalistic access and freedoms, we saw glimpses of the unrest there for months only through grainy YouTube footage, images as uncertain and hard to corroborate as the events on the ground. See the full article (TIME, Ishaan Tharoor, 6/5/12) [Return to top] Myanmar Article Hints at Strains Between Top Figures A state-run newspaper in Myanmar published an analysis on Tuesday expressing concerns that undercut the government's message that the country, one of the poorest in Asia, is ripe for investment. The New Light of Myanmar was the government's main mouthpiece under military rule, but with the country's news media landscape now evolving, it is unclear how much the paper reflects the thinking of Mr. Thein Sein's government and whether the article can be taken as an official rebuke or warning. See the full article (New York Times, Thomas Fuller, 6/5/12) *NYT sign-up may be required to view the full article [Return to top] The Six-Day War: Photos from a Short, Bloody Conflict [Photos] from LIFE photographer Paul Schutzer's last roll of film before he was killed in combat in Gaza on the first day of the Six-Day War. Schutzer was traveling in an Israeli half-track as they advanced towards the Egyptian border [on] June 5, 1967. The war, fought 45 years ago from June 5-10, helped bolster Israel's legend of military invincibility but also left a legacy of displacement and bitterness that unsettles the region to this day. See the full article (TIME, 6/5/12) [Return to top] Photos: A Gallery of Vietnam War Photography by Nick Ut 40 Years after His 'Napalm Girl' Photo The Vietnam War had been raging for years. On June 8, 1972, a single photo communicated the horrors of the fighting in a way words could never describe, helping to end one of the most divisive conflicts in American history. In the Pulitzer Prize-winning image, children run screaming from a burning Vietnamese village. The little girl in the center of the frame, Kim Phuc, is naked and crying, her clothes and layers of skin melted away by napalm. Now, four decades later, Nick Ut and Kim Phuc remain close. See the full article (Washington Post, 6/4/12) [Return to top] North Korea Threatens to Blow up Media Offices over Critical Coverage North Korea's military threatened on Monday to blow up the Seoul offices of South Korean media outlets following critical coverage of a mass children's event in Pyongyang. The military general staff said missile units and other forces had fixed the longitude and latitude coordinates for several firms' offices in central Seoul. The North's military accused conservative South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak of inciting the coverage and called on him to apologise to avert an attack. See the full article (Telegraph, 6/4/12) [Return to top] One Syrian Journalist on Houla, Assad and Why He Hasn't Left More civilians have been killed in Syria in the last year than in Afghanistan and Iraq combined. Since Syria's uprising erupted 14 months ago, Syrian journalists living and working abroad returned home to report on the growing conflict from within their own country. From the beginning, journalists attempting to report from Syria confronted perilous threats. Even the act of speaking to journalists risk conviction of treason by the Assad regime. See the full article (Huffington Post, Marcos Barbery, 6/1/12) [Return to top] Israel's Attorney General to Indict Reporter Israel's attorney general has decided to indict an Israeli journalist who in an investigative report revealed that top army officers had approved killings of wanted Palestinian militants in the West Bank, charging him with illegal possession of classified documents. The move against Uri Blau, a reporter with the liberal newspaper Haaretz, drew sharp criticism from civil rights advocates and prominent defense correspondents, who called it a blow to freedom of the press. See the full article (Washington Post, Joel Greenberg, 5/31/12) [Return to top]   Internet and Social Media PSNI Warning over West Belfast Facebook Sectarian Posts Police have threatened to prosecute people who posted a series of sectarian messages on the PSNI west Belfast Facebook page. Police also warned that they may 'pull the plug' on the wall posts. In a statement on Monday, a police press officer said the messages had been removed and the content would be examined to assess if any laws had been broken. "It is important to remember posting inappropriate comments on social media networks may be against the law," she said. See the full article (BBC, 6/4/12) [Return to top] | [Return to section] Kuwaiti Tweeter Gets 10 Years for Blasphemy A Kuwaiti man has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for insulting the Prophet Muhammad and the Sunni Muslim rulers of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain on microblogging website Twitter. In recent months, Kuwaiti courts have issued jail terms against tweeters and activists amid a sharp rise in sectarian tensions between the emirate's Sunni majority and Shi'ite minority. See the full article (RFE/RL, 6/4/12) [Return to top] | [Return to section] China Blocks Tiananmen Talk on Crackdown Anniversary China's censors blocked internet access to the terms "six four", "23", "candle" and "never forget" on Monday, broadening extensive efforts to silence talk about the 23rd anniversary of China's bloody June 4 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters. Searches for the terms related to the anniversary were blocked on Sina Weibo, the most popular of China's Twitter-like microblogging platforms. Users encountered a message that said the search results could not be displayed "due to relevant laws, regulations and policies". See the full article (Reuters, Sui-Lee Wee and Ben Blanchard, 6/4/12) [Return to top] | [Return to section] Chinese Censorship Gets Complicated Chinese censorship is nothing new. But recently the relationship between censor and dissident has grown more complicated as the government comes to accept that social media is no longer something it can simply take away from Chinese citizens. [On the Media] speaks with Slate's Jacob Weisberg, who recently traveled to China and spoke with some tech-savvy new dissidents. See the full article (NPR, 6/1/12) [Return to top] | [Return to section] Google to Alert Users to Chinese Censorship Google has quietly upped the ante in a long-running dispute with the Chinese authorities over censorship, adding a software twist to its search page that warns users when they type a search term whose results are likely to be blocked in China. The change is described as an improvement in the search experience for users in mainland China, who can be disconnected from Google without explanation when they try to open a Web page that was found using a censored search term. See the full article (New York Times, Michael Wines, 6/1/12) *NYT sign-up may be required to view the full article [Return to top] | [Return to section] Wadah Khanfar: Syrian Social Media Proved Vital and Accurate Wadah Khanfar, the former director general of Al Jazeera Wadar, warned news outlets today about embracing "the narrative of the government." News outlets early on could not get into the country to find out what was happening on the ground for themselves. "When the revolution started, we did not have access to the field," he said, and many journalists unable to get their own cameras on the ground were instead following the footage emerging on social media networks and accounts from activists. See the full article (Journalism.co.uk, Rachel McAthy, 5/31/12) [Return to top] | [Return to section]   What's New from PeaceMedia "Harness Technology for Social Change" - US Embassy Tel Aviv "TechCamp Tel Aviv" brought Israeli Arab and Jewish civil society organizations together under the theme of women's empowerment with the focus on education and entrepreneurship. The two-day, interactive event exposed the participants to a range of low cost, easy-to-implement technologies that assisted them in creating new avenues of communication, community and network building techniques, leveraging of mobile applications, and inspire out-of-the-box solutions to the common problems faced in advancing the role of women in today's society. See the full video [Return to top] Did we miss anything?     Share this: | Forward this to a Friend