Monthly Archives: October 2018

Britain, Government, National Security, Russia, Society, United States

The Kremlin’s power to paralyse

WESTERN SECURITY

RUSSIA’S tentacles of sinister cyber operations are snaking out across the globe and pose the gravest of threats to Western security and democracy.

Recent revelations expose the sheer scale, breadth and audacity of the Kremlin-backed plots – and our vulnerability to this new brand of warfare.

Among those who were targeted were a British television network, the Democratic Party in America, public transport hubs in Ukraine, the US engineering giant Westinghouse, and the World Anti-Doping Agency based in Montreal – apparently hacked in a brazen act of revenge for showing Russia’s systematic abuse of the testing regime at the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014.

Perhaps the most disturbing of all, however, was the unsuccessful attacks on our own soil – at the Foreign Office and Porton Down – and the foiled attempts by four Russian agents to hack the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in the Hague.

The OPCW is continuing to conduct investigations into the Salisbury novichok poisonings and the use of banned weapons by the Russian-backed Assad regime in Syria.

About a dozen or so “cyber-actors” have been identified as responsible, but they are all fronts for the GRU – the Russian military intelligence unit also implicated in the attempted assassination of former Russian agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter.

Given are dependence on computers, its coordinated attacks have huge implications. Everything from cash machines to home heating systems, from electricity generators to mobile phones, and to the health service which is relying more on cyber technology. We have seen many times in recent years the enormous disruption caused by a temporary breakdown in service, as happened during the botched IT upgrade at the TSB bank.

Similarly, 18 months ago the NHS was hit by a major cyber problem, prompting the mass cancellations of appointments and operations. Then the North Korean government of Kim Jong-Un was cynical enough to take the blame and the fear inspired by that. But it is clear, from the wealth of mounting evidence, that the Russians certainly have the capability and determination to launch similar attacks.

If patients’ lives were put at risk by such a cyber-attack, it would create a real global panic – the cyber equivalent of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

That is why we should be worried. What is happening now in cyberspace is even more dangerous and certainly more unpredictable than the darkest days of the Cold War.

For all the anxieties back then about a nuclear stand-off, at least the hostility between the West and the Soviet Bloc was governed by respected boundaries. The rules – such as a prohibition on assassinations – were generally upheld. Both sides communicated with each other, partly from the need to avoid a nuclear apocalypse through a catastrophic misunderstanding.

That culture has disappeared. We live in a much more fluid world where restrictions on movement – especially in Europe – hardly exist at all. At any given moment there are probably more than 100,000 Russians in Britain, most of them wholly innocent and here to work, study or by enjoying a break. Yet that transient mass also provides cover for hostile intelligence agents.

Moreover, technology makes it much easier for someone to cause mayhem. During the Cold War, if the Soviets wanted to hit a water pumping station or sabotage an aircraft, they had to send in armed agents. Today, that could be accomplished from an office in Moscow or Kiev – just as computer programs can churn out millions of emails to damage businesses, influence elections and propagate fake news and untruths.

Then there are the armies of hackers in “troll” factories who spread and disseminate destabilising information, such as Hillary Clinton’s emails or the intricate medical details of Olympic cyclist Bradley Wiggins’ asthma prescriptions. The aim is to undermine public respect for Western politicians and heroes alike.

The fall of the Berlin Wall almost three decades ago was a remarkable triumph for freedom and capitalism over totalitarianism. But that ascendency lulled Western politicians into a false sense of security.

Russia, which has an economy no bigger than that of Britain or France, is showing almost by the day that if resources are focused on a certain area – in this case cyber warfare – then a nation can still have lethal power.

And we are only just coming to terms with it. Lord Ricketts, who served as Britain’s National Security Adviser until 2012, has warned that the recent plots are just the start, “pilot projects” to test defences in advance of a full-blooded cyber assault to bring anarchy to the West.

As President Putin’s invasion of Crimea and his support for the blood-soaked Assad regime in Syria has shown, he is not a man constrained by normal democratic values. Throughout his presidency he has been pushing at boundaries, seeing what he can get away with, what will provoke the West to act.

Now his dwindling popularity at home over his domestic agenda – particularly his attempt to raise the retirement age – makes it all the more imperative for him to wrap himself in the nationalist flag with high-profile attacks on the West.

 

AT least the complacency in Europe and America is beginning to lift and we are starting to fight back – such as when the Dutch defence minister, Ank Bijeveld, and Peter Wilson, the British ambassador to the Netherlands, explained how the OPCW conspiracy was foiled.

In the context of cyber warfare, the West has unparalleled expertise. The staff of both the US National Security Agency and our own formidable base at GCHQ in Cheltenham have world-beating abilities in hacking computers and other electronic devices.

So far, the West has proved far more restrained than Russia in deploying that expertise. There is only one documented case of Western agents using a computer against an enemy state’s infrastructure. That occurred when the Israelis and the Americans worked together to release the Stuxnet virus into the computers that operated Iran’s nuclear programme. It proved what the West can do if necessary.

But any escalation in cyber warfare is fraught with risk. A miscalculation by any rogue agents, anxious to ingratiate themselves with the Kremlin, could have disastrous consequences.

The reality of the new world disorder is one in which Putin is not only promoting, but relishing. We would do well to remember that.

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Britain, European Union, Government, Politics, Society

A Brexit Plan B is needed

BREXIT

TIME is running out for Theresa May to save her Chequers plan.

The Cabinet have given the Prime Minister one last chance to sell her proposals to EU leaders at a summit next week.

Ministers have now warned, however, they will demand a Plan B if there is a repeat of the humiliating rejection she faced in Salzburg last month.

European Union negotiators have been talking up the chances of reaching an agreement at the meeting on issues such as the Irish border. But, largely, they are still refusing to accept the proposals set out in Mrs May’s Chequers plan on how a trade deal could work.

The European Commission is expected to offer the UK a “supercharged” free trade deal but will reject about 60 to 70 per cent of the Prime Minister’s blueprint, including the demand for frictionless trade.

Despite the anticipated setback, ministers are planning to hold off on moves to force Mrs May into ditching her Chequers plan until after next week’s meeting in Brussels.

Hopes of a breakthrough in Brexit talks have continued to rise as Ireland said the chances of a deal were good.

Dublin’s deputy prime minister Simon Coveney said: “The withdrawal treaty is already about 90 per cent agreed in terms of text – the issues that have not been signed off yet relate predominately to Ireland and the two negotiating teams need to lock themselves in a room.”

The more optimistic remarks came after both European Commission president Jean Claude Juncker and his counterpart at the European Council, Donald Tusk, delivered an unusually upbeat message.

 

YET, Theresa May remains adamant that it is either her Brexit plan or nothing. Brexiteers, most notably Boris Johnson, takes issue with Mrs May’s assertion and set out an alternative approach that would keep the promises previously made to leave the EU in a manner that fulfils the referendum mandate to return control to the UK.

Mr Johnson resigned from the Cabinet in July in protest at the policy thrashed out at Chequers, so his antipathy to that plan is well known. But, in the meantime, it has become clear that not only does he and many Conservative (and Opposition) MPs oppose Chequers, but so does the EU. Mrs May’s humiliation at Salzburg should have convinced the Prime Minister that her way is a dead end. Instead, she has decided to plough ahead with a set of proposals hardly anyone thinks can work.

The alternative put forward by Mr Johnson – as it was by the European Research Group of Conservative MPs recently – is for Britain to seek a Canada-style trade deal when talks on the future relationship begin after Brexit.

Mrs May insists that this would not solve the problem of the Irish border, in that the so-called “backstop” to which she has agreed would mean Northern Ireland staying – unlike the rest of the UK – in a customs union with the EU, thus breaking the Union.

Mr Johnson’s answer to this conundrum is for Mrs May to withdraw that promise. As he appreciates, that would mean a different type of withdrawal agreement would have to be negotiated and the Irish border question settled as part of future economic arrangements. It would, indeed, be a “difficult step” for Mrs May, who made the ill-advised pledge last December in order to move on to the next stage of the talks, only to find that it is proving an insuperable stumbling block to an acceptable agreement.

It may be a difficult step, but it is one she must be ready to make if the impasse is to be broken. We are now just days away from what is supposed to be the summit to settle the withdrawal agreement and only six months away from the Brexit date itself. We need a Plan B, and Mr Johnson has offered one. Not only Mrs May, but the Cabinet, too, need to consider that with time running out fast, accelerating towards the cliff edge is no longer a realistic option.

. See also Scotland’s EU Continuity Bill now being tested in Supreme Court

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Arts, Films

Film Review: The Wife (15 cert) 100 min

REVIEW

GLENN Close is the living actress who has most often been beaten to an Oscar: six times since 1982, the words “but no cigar” have been ringing in her ears. With The Wife, she has her best shot since Dangerous Liaisons (1989) of laying this curse to rest. The tantalising irony of the film is that it’s actually about an awards presentation – the Nobel Prize in literature, no less – and that her character is not the one receiving it. She’s the one sitting, in a manner Close presumably knows all too well, neglected and on the sidelines.

She is cast as Joan Castleman, destined forever to remain a mere adjunct to Joe (Jonathan Pryce), one of those Great American Novelists in the Roth/Updike mould. The pair have been married for most of a lifetime, ever since Joan’s college days, when Joe, her energetic professor, squirmed out of a loveless first marriage to pursue her. Their life together has involved a kind of crooked deal, where he gets all the credit for literary brilliance, and she uncomplainingly tags along. She turns a blind eye to his frequent affairs and often questions what exactly is in it for her.

Meg Wolitzer’s 2003 novel was narrated by Joan, and on its very first page, as Joe took fancy to an air stewardess on their flight, she began savagely outlining to the reader all the reasons why she planned to leave him. Adroitly adapted by Jane Anderson and directed by Swedish veteran Bjӧrn Runge, the film eases itself into her predicament more stealthily, laying down the basis for all her buried grievances. It lets Close come in wearing a kind of kabuki mask, a civilised if lightly sardonic front concealing who knows what dissatisfaction and anger lies beneath.

The glittering, frozen quality of her performance is as mesmeric as it is mysterious. The camera lingers on her often as she’s absorbing various slights: when Joe introduces her to peers at a pre-prizegiving social event, announcing “my wife doesn’t write”, her expression barely flickers, but the thermometer somehow drops a thousand degrees. When she watches him flirt with a photographer, you imagine daggers flying out of her eyes.

Veiled hints about the true nature of their marriage are gradually dropped by the script. A hack biographer played by Christian Slater, thwarted in his attempts to gain authorised access, pesters Joan into a private drink, hoping to prise those secrets out of her. But her ability to remain a smiling clam, who can toy with succulent revelations and even flirt with Slater without giving anything concrete away, should never be underestimated.

The Castlemans have a daughter, who has not followed them to Stockholm, and a son (Max Irons) who has, a would-be writer bitterly struggling to escape his father’s shadow. In the book he was a disturbed, occasionally violent computer nerd – a recluse – which felt like a less clichéd conception, but it has presumably been decided that the film needs someone on screen, besides Slater, who notices what doesn’t quite add up about Joe’s literary credentials: his ability, say, to forget the name of a major character from one of his novels.

Pryce’s bluff, garrulous performance suggests a born blagger, as well as an overgrown toddler whose ego needs constant spoon-feeding, whether from Joan, Nobel Prize committees, or the young woman he has managed to ensnare with his spuriously earned fame. The role fits Pryce like an expensive silk glove.

Still, the real point of The Wife is the interior journey it offers to Close, like a red carpet smoothly unfurling towards the kind of Oscar-clip-showcase scenes that genuinely warrant the airplay. She unleashes an explosion in a limousine that feels like 40 years of neglect and disappointment fizzing free from a test tube. But still that glacial repose is hers to resume, if Joan feels like it, choosing to become the sole custodian of her own private legacy.

Close could feasibly miss the Oscar, but watching her lose again – for this, of all roles – will be a thespian psychodrama for the ages.

Verdict: Glenn Close is on stupendous form. A mesmerising performance.

★★★★

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