Category Archives: Government

Aid, Arts, Government, Society, United Nations

It is the poor who bear the brunt when calamities strike

SYRIA-TURKEY EARTHQUAKES

Intro: Far too often, “recovery efforts” and international aid do not reach those who need it most

THE massive earthquakes which struck southern Turkey and northern Syria on February 6 inflicted ghastly damage across a geographic region that has already borne a great deal of earthly devastation in recent decades. The ongoing war in Syria has produced millions of refugees, many of whom find themselves victims of seismic activity in the Turkish south.

The death toll from this week’s quakes quickly jumped into the thousands and will no doubt soar to far more. An untold number of people remain buried beneath the rubble. Traumatised survivors contend with frigid temperatures and the aftershocks, and refugees contend with the loss of any semblance of refuge.

The natural disaster has served once again to underscore what should hardly by earth-shattering news: that life for the global poor is extremely precarious and plagued by multiple, simultaneous crises from which recovery is often futile.

The dwellings inhabited by the have-nots are structurally less reliable and potentially more vulnerable to tectonic tumult – as was seen, for example, in the Peruvian earthquake of 2007, when homes collapsed across impoverished neighbourhoods in the province of Ica. But in a world structured upon capitalist foundations, precarity goes much deeper than shoddy construction materials or a blatant disregard for building codes.

For a start, capitalism’s insistence on acute inequality and the tyranny of an elite minority means there are major global fault lines between rich and poor – ones that are becoming ever more pronounced in the era of climate change and ecological calamity. And while aid pledges and donations inevitably pour in after high profile disasters, they often only exasperate the divide by lining the pockets of the aid industry rather than benefiting the disaster-stricken areas themselves.

There is also the stark realisation that, for much of the world’s precarious population, life constitutes more-or-less a continuous disaster, but one that generates no attention. In June last year, The New Humanitarian news agency noted gross disparities in disaster relief, with almost half of all emergency funding for 2022 “going to only five protracted – and largely conflict-driven – crises”. Citing a recent United Nations estimate that the number of annual disasters will increase to 560 by the year 2030, the agency described how victims of under-the-radar disasters are often forced to remain in unsafe locations – thereby setting the scene for new crises.

Let’s take the case of Afghanistan, where an ongoing dependence on aid has done nothing to make the country safe. Last August, floods killed more than 180 people, just two months after an earthquake had killed more than 1,000. Save the Children, an NGO, reported that the country was suffering its “worst hunger crisis on record”, with nearly 50 per cent of the population going hungry on account of a raging drought and continuing economic breakdown.

Such are the toxic legacies of more than two decades of a US-led “war on terror” that devastated the lives, livelihoods and futures of millions of Afghans and sucked in billions of dollars of “recovery funds”.

For a further illustration of how politics, greed and mismanagement overlap with and compound environmental catastrophe, we need look no further than the Caribbean nation of Haiti, where in 2021 a devastating 7.2 magnitude earthquake was followed by a deadly storm and landslides. More than 2,200 people were killed and some 130,000 homes destroyed, in addition to a number of schools and hospitals.

This came just over a decade after a 2010 earthquake killed 220,000 people and rendered 1.5 million homeless. Only a smidgen of the billions of dollars that flowed in to rescue Haiti actually reached poor Haitian earthquake victims. The bulk of the aid went to aid organisations, security forces, and other supposedly competent bodies – like the UN peacekeepers who promptly unleashed a cholera epidemic upon the nation.

During the ensuing years, US support for official corruption in Haiti has made the terrain extra fertile for political crisis, while further eroding the country’s ability to respond to natural disasters.

Things are getting more precarious by the minute, as capitalism breaks new ground in the field of obliterating all aspirations toward a common humanity or planetary wellbeing – and the “disaster relief” industry concerns itself with maintaining its own viability while poor communities lurch from one disaster to the next.

While the rich insulate themselves from the fallout, the poor bear the brunt of military conflict, economic upheaval, climate-related havoc, and the coronavirus pandemic. It has left the have-nots on even shakier ground.

As with all other present earthly afflictions, this week’s quakes in Turkey and Syria will hit the poor the hardest. A total seismic shift in a world where profit for the few means precarity for the many is urgently needed.

Standard
Britain, China, Defence, Government, National Security, United States

The Chinese spy balloon: we cannot dismiss the storms

NATIONAL SECURITY: DEFENCE

Tobias Ellwood, Chairman of the Commons Defence Select Committee, has written on the need to thwart China and Russia’s mission to splinter our world into two. He was writing following the shooting down of a Chinese spy balloon by a US fighter jet off the coast of North Carolina.

Mr Elwood asks us to consider if it was the other way around had a US balloon gone into Chinese airspace. The Beijing regime would not have hesitated in shooting it down.

For too long, Ellwood says, America has dithered. With the West preoccupied with helping Ukraine, the diplomatic stand-off that has ensued between Washington and Beijing comes at a time when there is significantly more choreography occurring between the leaders of China and Russia.

Having enjoyed decades of relative peace, those two countries are fully aware that the West has become complacent and have lost its appetite to defend fledgling democracies such as in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya and Yemen.

It is no coincidence, either, that ahead of the invasion of Ukraine almost a year ago, Russia began its immediate military build-up not long after America and NATO retreated from Afghanistan.

Mr Ellwood asserts that together, China and Russia are not just openly pioneering a more authoritarian approach to governance, but are also encouraging other countries to follow suit, as they hope to see not just America but the entire West weakened.

China’s balloon over Montana should prompt another pivotal moment in history: a realisation that a China-Russia axis is looking ever more likely, and that we in the West are ill-prepared for the looming geo-strategic threats that the next decade will throw at us.

During his commentary, Ellwood says that the incident reminds him of what happened in October 1957, when millions of Americans looked to the skies in unprecedented panic after the Soviet Union launched the world’s first satellite.

The feat was awesome. It lapped the world every 98 minutes, and was assumed to be peering down with sinister aims.

While Vladimir Putin poses the single largest threat to European security as he leverages Russia’s ability to endure hardship and drag out the Ukraine conflict, China’s President Xi poses a greater geopolitical challenge as he competes with America for global economic and technological dominance. Since gaining office in 2013, he has expanded the Chinese military to become the largest in the world and used Covid as an excuse to build the most advanced domestic surveillance system.

Xi is now starting to flex his muscles. China has taken clusters of rocks deep in international waters south of neighbouring Taiwan and turned them into military fortresses. All illegal under international maritime law – but unimpeded by the West.

Ellwood’s view that this is no time for strategic ambiguity is well stated. We need a clear plan, he says, to check both Russia and China’s destabilising agendas. We must accept that they are bent on a mission to see our world splinter into two spheres of dangerously competing influence. We urgently need to craft a strategy which influences Beijing’s behaviour, rather than one which prompts a reaction each time Xi pushes the envelope further.

Without a coherent approach, the risk of sudden escalation is increasingly likely.

TOUGH QUESTIONS

OF COURSE, all this raises some tough questions for the UK, too. We helped design the post-war security architecture, much of which still functions today.

Our efforts and actions earned us a permanent seat at the UN Security Council created in 1945. Nearly eight decades later, the world has changed. Do we still deserve this seat? And do we still want it?

If the answer is “Yes” – which our actions in Ukraine suggest – we must urgently upgrade our foreign policy, defence posture and international statecraft not only to justify our place at the table, but to anticipate what is coming over the horizon.

It may have been just a weather balloon – but the storms it forecasted are not so easily dismissed.

Standard
Arts, Books, Government, National Security, Society

Book Review: Pegasus

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: The reporting of the world’s most powerful spyware program should teach us that no one is safe from such systems. But will it?

EDWARD SNOWDEN’S infamous leaks in 2013 from the US National Security Agency triggered a global debate around state surveillance – but even he couldn’t quite believe the scale of the story described to him in the summer of 2021.

Whistle-blowers had handed French investigative journalists Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud a list of 50,000 mobile phone numbers. These belonged to people flagged for attack by a cybersurveillance software package called Pegasus.

The investigation that followed is the subject of Pegasus: The story of the world’s most dangerous spyware, a non-fiction thriller and a must-read for all, not just those interested in cryptography and communications. As the authors warn: “Regular civilians being targeted with military-grade surveillance weapons – against their will, against their knowledge, and with no recourse – is a dystopian future we really are careening toward if we don’t understand this threat and move to stop it.”

Pegasus offers a fascinating insight into how journalism is coping with a hyper-connected world. Eyewitnesses and whistle-blowers have better access than ever to sympathetic campaigning journalists worldwide. But this advantage is shared with the very governments, corporations and organised crime networks that want to silence them.

To drag Pegasus into the light, Richard’s ‘Forbidden Stories’ consortium choreographed the activities of more than 80 investigative journalists from 17 media organisations working across four continents and in eight languages. The consortium’s mission is to continue and publish the work of other journalists facing threats, prison or murder.

Its Pegasus investigation commenced in March 2021, knowing full well that it had to conclude by June that year. By then, NSO – the Israeli company that created Pegasus in 2016 – was bound to twig that its brainchild was being hacked.

The bigger the names linked by the consortium to that list of phone numbers, the harder it would be to keep the investigation under wraps. Early on, the name of a journalist called Jorge Carrasco cropped up. He led one of the consortium’s cross-border collaborations, which aimed to finish the investigations of murdered Mexican journalist Regina Martinez. Then things got silly: the names of half the French cabinet appeared. Then president Emmanuel Macron.

The narrative of Pegasus is a pulse-accelerating account that is never afraid to delve into well-crafted technical detail. The authors explain how Pegasus gains free rein on a mobile device without ever tipping off the owner to its presence. It turns out to have evolved out of software designed to serve consumers waiting in queues on tech support call lines.

Shalev Hulio and Omri Lavie, two of the founders of NSO, cut their teeth developing programs that allowed support technicians to take charge of a caller’s phone.

Before long, a European intelligence service came calling. Eventually, Pegasus was sold to more than 60 clients in over 40 countries. It was the first software to give security services an edge over terrorists, criminal gangs and paedophiles – and over whistle-blowers, campaigners, political opponents, journalists and at least one Emirati princess struggling for custody of her children.

The book is detailed but it isn’t a diatribe against the necessary business of government surveillance and espionage. It is about how, in the contest between ordinary people and the powerful, software is tilting the field wildly in the latter’s favour.

The international journalistic collaboration that was the Pegasus Project sparked the biggest global surveillance scandal since Snowden. It led to a European Parliament inquiry into government spyware, legal action from major tech companies, government sanctions against NSO and countless individual legal complaints.

Yet, the authors spend little time sitting on their laurels. Demand for such systems is only growing. Certain governments are making offers to certain tech firms that add zeroes to the fees NSO once enjoyed. Nor do the authors expect much from the public debate sparked by their investigation: “The issues… might have been raised,” they concede, “but the solutions are not even in the works.”

– Pegasus by Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud is published by Macmillan

Standard