by Charlie Edwards | Jan 21, 2008 | Conflict and security
The Huffington Post features some of the 900 plus questions put to Al Qaeda deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in an online interview. They range from the impatient to the concerned, sublime to the ridiculous. One thing that strikes the Post is that self-proclaimed AQ supporters are as much in the dark about the terror network’s operations and intentions as Western analysts and intelligence agencies. Here are some of the more interesting questions:
– Why hasn’t al-Qaida attacked the U.S. again, why isn’t it attacking the Israelis and when will it be more active in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria?
– Does al-Qaida have a long-term strategy?
– Should followers be focusing their jihad, or holy war, against Arab regimes, or against Americans?
– Why doesn’t al-Qaida open a front in Egypt, where there are wide opportunities and fertile ground for drawing in mujahedeen?
– What do you expect from us? Should we follow the instruction of the mother organization to target the ‘far enemy’ (America) or do we focus our efforts on the apostate regime (Algeria)? Or do you advise a middle path of striking both enemies?
– We hear a lot about the non-centralization of al-Qaida… is the loss of direct control by al-Qaida’s leadership over the jihadi cells harmful to al-Qaida? … Does al-Qaida intend to try to reassert its control?
– Do you have a body that studies events and reviews them to correct mistakes and assess them?
– I want to travel to join jihad and I sought my mother’s permission, be she would not give it to me… can I go without her permisson?
by Alex Evans | Jan 21, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Middle East and North Africa
Israel is today announcing plans to set up a nationwide electric car network, involving half a million recharging and battery-swap points within 18 months, and a Renault-Nissan electric car with a range of over a hundred miles in mass production by 2011. The plan’s $200 million price tag is privately financed, and organised by Project Better Place, a US start-up. According to the New York Times,
Project Better Place’s major investor, Idan Ofer, 52, has put up $100 million for the project and is its board chairman. He will remain chairman of Israel Corporation Ltd., a major owner and operator of shipping companies and refineries. “What’s driving me is a much wider outlook than Israel,” Mr. Ofer said. “If it were just Israel, I’d be cannibalizing my refinery business. I’m not so concerned about the refineries, but building a world-class company. If Israel will ever produce a Nokia, it will be this.”
The plan has the strong backing of the government too: President Shimon Peres is quoted in the FT as saying that Israel’s oil import needs would be halved within a few years, and the remainder slashed via large scale solar power. Needless to say, security considerations make the plan especially attractive to Israel. As Peres succintly puts it, “the Saudis don’t control the sun”.
by Alex Evans | Jan 21, 2008 | Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks, UK
Adam Boulton at Sky News, travelling with the PM in India, gives us a heads-up of another speech on multilateral reform:
The Prime Minister believes that the world has changed so much since then that we need to rewrite the rules. He is particularly interested in the growing might of the so-called BRICs – Brazil, Russia, India and China – the last two of which he is visiting on this tour. Mr Brown cheered his hosts by repeating Britain’s longstanding view that India should join Britain, France, the US, Russia and China with a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. But in return he wants India to do more in the global conflict against fundamentalist terrorism. The Prime Minister also wants the UN to establish a standing rapid response team of judges, police, and civilian experts who can be deployed immediately to stabilize countries immediately following violent conflicts.
He seems to have the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the knock on collapse of Northern Rock on his mind in his ideas for the IMF. Mr Brown says it shoud become the “early warning system for financial turbulence”, with the powers to intervene as soon as potential financial crisis are identified. He wants the World Bank to focust on the environment as well as it’s existing mission of poverty reduction. He wants to set up a global climate change fund (Britain has already earmarked $1.6 billion for a similar project). This would be the carrot for poor countries to do something about their carbon emissions complementing the stick of rich nation threats.
Hang on, you say, isn’t there a slight sense of deja vu here? Why yes: it’s the same as his last speech on multilateral reform – and as I observed at the time, that speech in turn read like a re-run of the 2004 UN High Level Panel on threats, challenges and change. To be fair, it’s hard to find fault with the content. But it would be welcome to hear more about how the PM plans to achieve all this, given the snail’s pace of multilateral reform discussions over the last few years.
by Alex Evans | Jan 21, 2008 | Conflict and security
John Robb notices an AP story on a trend he predicted in his book Brave New War: guerrilla entrepreneurs. Here’s more:
Hackers literally turned out the lights in multiple cities after breaking into electrical utilities and demanding extortion payments before disrupting the power, a senior CIA analyst told utility engineers at a U.S. trade conference.
All the break-ins occurred outside the United States, said senior CIA analyst Tom Donahue. The U.S. government believes some of the hackers had inside knowledge to cause the outages. Donahue did not specify what countries were affected, when the outages occurred or how long the outages lasted. He said they happened in “several regions outside the United States.”
“In at least one case, the disruption caused a power outage affecting multiple cities,” Donahue said in a statement. “We do not know who executed these attacks or why, but all involved intrusions through the Internet.”
Meanwhile, Bruce Schneier picks up a variation on the same theme, though this time the network is rail rather than power, and there’s no extortion involved.
A Polish teenager allegedly turned the tram system in the city of Lodz into his own personal train set, triggering chaos and derailing four vehicles in the process. Twelve people were injured in one of the incidents.
The 14-year-old modified a TV remote control so that it could be used to change track points, The Telegraph reports. Local police said the youngster trespassed in tram depots to gather information needed to build the device. The teenager told police that he modified track setting for a prank. “He studied the trams and the tracks for a long time and then built a device that looked like a TV remote control and used it to manoeuvre the trams and the tracks,” said Miroslaw Micor, a spokesman for Lodz police.
“He had converted the television control into a device capable of controlling all the junctions on the line and wrote in the pages of a school exercise book where the best junctions were to move trams around and what signals to change. He treated it like any other schoolboy might a giant train set, but it was lucky nobody was killed. Four trams were derailed, and others had to make emergency stops that left passengers hurt. He clearly did not think about the consequences of his actions,” Micor added.
Transport command and control systems are commonly designed by engineers with little exposure or knowledge about security using commodity electronics and a little native wit. The apparent ease with which Lodz’s tram network was hacked, even by these low standards, is still a bit of an eye opener.
