It was another routine night for Shawn Carpenter. After a long day analyzing computer-network security for Sandia National Laboratories, where much of the U.S. nuclear arsenal is designed, Carpenter, 36, retreated to his ranch house in the hills overlooking Albuquerque, N.M., for a quick dinner and an early bedtime. He set his alarm for 2 a.m. Waking in the dark, he took a thermos of coffee and a pack of Nicorette gum to the cluster of computer terminals in his home office. As he had almost every night for the previous four months, he worked at his secret volunteer job until dawn, not as Shawn Carpenter, mid-level analyst, but as Spiderman--the apt nickname his military-intelligence handlers gave him--tirelessly pursuing a group of suspected Chinese cyberspies all over the world. Inside the machines, on a mission he believed the U.S. government supported, he clung unseen to the walls of their chat rooms and servers, secretly recording every move the snoopers made, passing the information to the Army and later to the FBI.
The hackers he was stalking, part of a cyberespionage ring that federal investigators code-named Titan Rain, first caught Carpenter's eye a year earlier when he helped investigate a network break-in at Lockheed Martin in September 2003. A strikingly similar attack hit Sandia several months later, but it wasn't until Carpenter compared notes with a counterpart in Army cyberintelligence that he suspected the scope of the threat. Methodical and voracious, these hackers wanted all the files they could find, and they were getting them by penetrating secure computer networks at the country's most sensitive military bases, defense contractors and aerospace companies.
Carpenter had never seen hackers work so quickly, with such a sense of purpose. They would commandeer a hidden section of a hard drive, zip up as many files as possible and immediately transmit the data to way stations in South Korea, Hong Kong or Taiwan before sending them to mainland China. They always made a silent escape, wiping their electronic fingerprints clean and leaving behind an almost undetectable beacon allowing them to re-enter the machine at will. An entire attack took 10 to 30 minutes. "Most hackers, if they actually get into a government network, get excited and make mistakes," says Carpenter. "Not these guys. They never hit a wrong key."
Goaded by curiosity and a sense that he could help the U.S. defend itself against a new breed of enemy, Carpenter gave chase to the attackers. He hopped just as stealthily from computer to computer across the globe, chasing the spies as they hijacked a web of far-flung computers. Eventually he followed the trail to its apparent end, in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong. He found that the attacks emanated from just three Chinese routers that acted as the first connection point from a local network to the Internet.
It was a stunning breakthrough. In the world of cyberspying, locating the attackers' country of origin is rare. China, in particular, is known for having poorly defended servers that outsiders from around the world commandeer as their unwitting launchpads. Now Chinese computers appeared to be the aggressors.
If so, the implications for U.S. security are disturbing. In recent years, the counterintelligence community has grown increasingly anxious that Chinese spies are poking into all sorts of American technology to compete with the U.S. But tracking virtual enemies presents a different kind of challenge to U.S. spy hunters. Foreign hackers invade a secure network with a flick of a wrist, but if the feds want to track them back and shut them down, they have to go through a cumbersome authorization process that can be as tough as sending covert agents into foreign lands. Adding in extreme sensitivity to anything involving possible Chinese espionage--remember the debacle over alleged Los Alamos spy Wen Ho Lee?--and the fear of igniting an international incident, it's not surprising the U.S. has found it difficult and delicate to crack these cases.
In Washington, officials are tight-lipped about Titan Rain, insisting all details of the case are classified. But high-level officials at three agencies told TIME the penetration is considered serious. A federal law-enforcement official familiar with the investigation says the FBI is "aggressively" pursuing the possibility that the Chinese government is behind the attacks. Yet they all caution that they don't yet know whether the spying is official, a private-sector job or the work of many independent, unrelated hands. The law-enforcement source says China has not been cooperating with U.S. investigations of Titan Rain. China's State Council Information Office, speaking for the government, told TIME the charges about cyberspying and Titan Rain are "totally groundless, irresponsible and unworthy of refute."
Despite the official U.S. silence, several government analysts who protect the networks at military, nuclear-lab and defense- contractor facilities tell TIME that Titan Rain is thought to rank among the most pervasive cyberespionage threats that U.S. computer networks have ever faced. TIME has obtained documents showing that since 2003, the hackers, eager to access American know-how, have compromised secure networks ranging from the Redstone Arsenal military base to NASA to the World Bank. In one case, the hackers stole flight-planning software from the Army. So far, the files they have vacuumed up are not classified secrets, but many are sensitive and subject to strict export-control laws, which means they are strategically important enough to require U.S. government licenses for foreign use.
Beyond worries about the sheer quantity of stolen data, a Department of Defense (DOD) alert obtained by TIME raises the concern that Titan Rain could be a point patrol for more serious assaults that could shut down or even take over a number of U.S. military networks. Although he would not comment on Titan Rain specifically, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman says any attacks on military computers are a concern. "When we have breaches of our networks, it puts lives at stake," he says. "We take it very seriously."
As cyberspying metastasizes, frustrated network protectors say that the FBI in particular doesn't have enough top-notch computer gumshoes to track down the foreign rings and that their hands are often tied by the strict rules of engagement. That's where independents--some call them vigilantes--like Carpenter come in. After he made his first discoveries about Titan Rain in March 2004, he began taking the information to unofficial contacts he had in Army intelligence. Federal rules prohibit military-intelligence officers from working with U.S. civilians, however, and by October, the Army passed Carpenter and his late-night operation to the FBI. He says he was a confidential informant for the FBI for the next five months. Reports from his cybersurveillance eventually reached the highest levels of the bureau's counterintelligence division, which says his work was folded into an existing task force on the attacks. But his FBI connection didn't help when his employers at Sandia found out what he was doing. They fired him and stripped him of his Q clearance, the Department of Energy equivalent of top-secret clearance. Carpenter's after-hours sleuthing, they said, was an inappropriate use of confidential information he had gathered at his day job. Under U.S. law, it is illegal for Americans to hack into foreign computers.
Carpenter is speaking out about his case, he says, not just because he feels personally maligned--although he filed suit in New Mexico last week for defamation and wrongful termination. The FBI has acknowledged working with him: evidence collected by TIME shows that FBI agents repeatedly assured him he was providing important information to them. Less clear is whether he was sleuthing with the tacit consent of the government or operating as a rogue hacker. At the same time, the bureau was also investigating his actions before ultimately deciding not to prosecute him. The FBI would not tell TIME exactly what, if anything, it thought Carpenter had done wrong. Federal cyberintelligence agents use information from freelance sources like Carpenter at times but are also extremely leery about doing so, afraid that the independent trackers may jeopardize investigations by trailing foes too noisily or, even worse, may be bad guys themselves. When Carpenter deputized himself to delve into the Titan Rain group, he put his career in jeopardy. But he remains defiant, saying he's a whistle-blower whose case demonstrates the need for reforms that would enable the U.S. to respond more effectively and forcefully against the gathering storm of cyberthreats.
A TIME investigation into the case reveals how the Titan Rain attacks were uncovered, why they are considered a significant threat now under investigation by the Pentagon, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security and why the U.S. government has yet to stop them.
Carpenter thought he was making progress. When he uncovered the Titan Rain routers in Guangdong, he carefully installed a homemade bugging code in the primary router's software. It sent him an e-mail alert at an anonymous Yahoo! account every time the gang made a move on the Net. Within two weeks, his Yahoo! account was filled with almost 23,000 messages, one for each connection the Titan Rain router made in its quest for files. He estimates there were six to 10 workstations behind each of the three routers, staffed around the clock. The gang stashed its stolen files in zombie servers in South Korea, for example, before sending them back to Guangdong. In one, Carpenter found a stockpile of aerospace documents with hundreds of detailed schematics about propulsion systems, solar paneling and fuel tanks for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the NASA probe launched in August. On the night he woke at 2, Carpenter copied a huge collection of files that had been stolen from Redstone Arsenal, home to the Army Aviation and Missile Command. The attackers had grabbed specs for the aviation-mission-planning system for Army helicopters, as well as Falconview 3.2, the flight-planning software used by the Army and Air Force.
Even if official Washington is not certain, Carpenter and other network-security analysts believe that the attacks are Chinese government spying. "It's a hard thing to prove," says a network-intrusion-detection analyst at a major U.S. defense contractor who has been studying Titan Rain since 2003, "but this has been going on so long and it's so well organized that the whole thing is state sponsored, I think." When it comes to advancing their military by stealing data, "the Chinese are more aggressive" than anyone else, David Szady, head of the FBI's counterintelligence unit, told TIME earlier this year. "If they can steal it and do it in five years, why [take longer] to develop it?"
Within the U.S. military, Titan Rain is raising alarms. A November 2003 government alert obtained by TIME details what a source close to the investigation says was an early indication of Titan Rain's ability to cause widespread havoc. Hundreds of Defense Department computer systems had been penetrated by an insidious program known as a "trojan," the alert warned. "These compromises ... allow an unknown adversary not only control over the DOD hosts, but also the capability to use the DOD hosts in malicious activity. The potential also exists for the perpetrator to potentially shut down each host." The attacks were also stinging allies, including Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, where an unprecedented string of public alerts issued in June 2005, two U.S. network-intrusion analysts tell TIME, also referred to Titan Rain--related activity. "These electronic attacks have been under way for a significant period of time, with a recent increase in sophistication," warned Britain's National Infrastructure Security Co-Ordination Center.
Titan Rain presents a severe test for the patchwork of agencies digging into the problem. Both the cybercrime and counterintelligence divisions of the FBI are investigating, the law-enforcement source tells TIME. But while the FBI has a solid track record cajoling foreign governments into cooperating in catching garden-variety hackers, the source says that China is not cooperating with the U.S. on Titan Rain. The FBI would need high-level diplomatic and Department of Justice authorization to do what Carpenter did in sneaking into foreign computers. The military would have more flexibility in hacking back against the Chinese, says a former high-ranking Administration official, under a protocol called "preparation of the battlefield." But if any U.S. agency got caught, it could spark an international incident.
That's why Carpenter felt he could be useful to the FBI. Frustrated in gathering cyberinfo, some agencies have in the past turned a blind eye to free-lancers--or even encouraged them--to do the job. After he hooked up with the FBI, Carpenter was assured by the agents assigned to him that he had done important and justified work in tracking Titan Rain attackers. Within a couple of weeks, FBI agents asked him to stop sleuthing while they got more authorization, but they still showered him with praise over the next four months as he fed them technical analyses of what he had found earlier. "This could very well impact national security at the highest levels," Albuquerque field agent Christine Paz told him during one of their many information-gathering sessions in Carpenter's home. His other main FBI contact, special agent David Raymond, chimed in: "You're very important to us," Raymond said. "I've got eight open cases throughout the United States that your information is going to. And that's a lot." And in a letter obtained by TIME, the FBI's Szady responded to a Senate investigator's inquiry about Carpenter, saying, "The [FBI] is aggressively pursuing the investigative leads provided by Mr. Carpenter."
Given such assurances, Carpenter was surprised when, in March 2005, his FBI handlers stopped communicating with him altogether. Now the federal law-enforcement source tells TIME that the bureau was actually investigating Carpenter while it was working with him. Agents are supposed to check out their informants, and intruding into foreign computers is illegal, regardless of intent. But two sources familiar with Carpenter's story say there is a gray area in cybersecurity, and Carpenter apparently felt he had been unofficially encouraged by the military and, at least initially, by the FBI. Although the U.S. Attorney declined to pursue charges against him, Carpenter feels betrayed. "It's just ridiculous. I was tracking real bad guys," he says. "But they are so afraid of taking risks that they wasted all this time investigating me instead of going after Titan Rain." Worse, he adds, they never asked for the passwords and other tools that could enable them to pick up the investigative trail at the Guangdong router.
Carpenter was even more dismayed to find that his work with the FBI had got him in trouble at Sandia. He says that when he first started tracking Titan Rain to chase down Sandia's attackers, he told his superiors that he thought he should share his findings with the Army, since it had been repeatedly hit by Titan Rain as well. A March 2004 Sandia memo that Carpenter gave TIME shows that he and his colleagues had been told to think like "World Class Hackers" and to retrieve tools that other attackers had used against Sandia. That's why Carpenter did not expect the answer he claims he got from his bosses in response to Titan Rain: Not only should he not be trailing Titan Rain but he was also expressly forbidden to share what he had learned with anyone.
As a Navy veteran whose wife is a major in the Army Reserve, Carpenter felt he could not accept that injunction. After several weeks of angry meetings--including one in which Carpenter says Sandia counterintelligence chief Bruce Held fumed that Carpenter should have been "decapitated" or "at least left my office bloody" for having disobeyed his bosses--he was fired. Citing Carpenter's civil lawsuit, Sandia was reluctant to discuss specifics but responded to TIME with a statement: "Sandia does its work in the national interest lawfully. When people step beyond clear boundaries in a national security setting, there are consequences."
Carpenter says he has honored the FBI's request to stop following the attackers. But he can't get Titan Rain out of his mind. Although he was recently hired as a network-security analyst for another federal contractor and his security clearance has been restored, "I'm not sleeping well," he says. "I know the Titan Rain group is out there working, now more than ever."
--With reporting by Matthew Forney/Beijing and Brian Bennett, Timothy J. Burger and Elaine Shannon/Washington
24 Eylül 2010 Cuma
6 Nisan 2010 Salı
NOAM CHOMSKY: "The evil scourge of terrorism":
"The evil scourge of terrorism": Reality, construction, remedy
(Erich Fromm Lecture 2010)
Noam Chomsky
Text of lecture delivered at the International Erich Fromm Society, Stuttgart, Germany, March 23, 2010
The president could not have been more justified when he condemned "the evil scourge of terrorism." I am quoting Ronald Reagan, who came into office in 1981 declaring that a focus of his foreign policy would be state-directed international terrorism, "the plague of the modern age" and "a return to barbarism in our time," to sample some of the rhetoric of his administration. When George W. Bush declared a "war on terror" 20 years later, he was redeclaring the war, an important fact that is worth exhuming from Orwell's memory hole if we hope to understand the nature of the evil scourge of terrorism, or more importantly, if we hope to understand ourselves. We do not need the famous Delphi inscription to recognize that there can be no more important task. Just as a personal aside, that critical necessity was forcefully brought home to me almost 70 years ago in my first encounter with Erich Fromm's work, in his classic essay on the escape to freedom in the modern world, and the grim paths that the modern free individual was tempted to choose in the effort to escape the loneliness and anguish that accompanied the newly-discovered freedom -- matters all too pertinent today, unfortunately.
The reasons why Reagan's war on terror has been dispatched to the repository of unwelcome facts are understandable and informative -- about ourselves. Instantly, Reagan's war on terror became a savage terrorist war, leaving hundreds of thousands of tortured and mutilated corpses in the wreckage of Central America, tens of thousands more in the Middle East, and an estimated 1.5 million killed by South African terror that was strongly supported by the Reagan administration in violation of congressional sanctions. All of these murderous exercises of course had pretexts. The resort to violence always does. In the Middle East, Reagan's decisive support for Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which killed some 15-20,000 people and destroyed much of southern Lebanon and Beirut, was based on the pretense that it was in selfdefense against PLO rocketing of the Galilee, a brazen fabrication: Israel recognized at once that the threat was PLO diplomacy, which might have undermined Israel's illegal takeover of the occupied territories. In Africa, support for the marauding of the apartheid state was officially justified within the framework of the war on terror: it was necessary to protect white South Africa from one of the world's "more notorious terrorist groups," Nelson Mandela's African National Congress, so Washington determined in 1988. The pretexts in the other cases were no more impressive.
For the most part, the victims of Reaganite terror were defenseless civilians, but in one case the victim was a state, Nicaragua, which could respond through legal channels. Nicaragua brought its charges to the World Court, which condemned the US for "unlawful use of force" -- in lay terms, international terrorism -- in its attack on Nicaragua from its Honduran bases, and ordered the US to terminate the assault and pay substantial reparations. The aftermath is instructive.
Congress responded to the Court judgment by increasing aid to the US-run mercenary army attacking Nicaragua, while the press condemned the Court as a "hostile forum" and therefore irrelevant. The same Court had been highly relevant a few years earlier when it ruled in favor of the US against Iran. Washington dismissed the Court judgment with contempt. In doing so, it joined the distinguished company of Libya's Qaddafi and Albania's Enver Hoxha. Libya and Albania have since joined the world of law-abiding states in this respect, so now the US stands in splendid isolation. Nicaragua then brought the matter to the UN Security Council, which passed two resolutions calling on all states to observe international law. The resolutions were vetoed by the US, with the assistance of Britain and France, which abstained. All of this passed virtually without notice, and has been expunged from history.
Also forgotten -- or rather, never noticed -- is the fact that the "hostile forum" had bent over backwards to accommodate Washington. The Court rejected almost all of Nicaragua's case, presented by a distinguished Harvard University international lawyer, on the grounds that when the US had accepted World Court jurisdiction in 1946, it added a reservation exempting itself from charges under international treaties, specifically the Charters of the United Nations and the Organization of American States. Accordingly, the US is self-entitled to carry out aggression and other crimes that are far more serious than international terrorism. The Court correctly recognized this exemption, one aspect of much broader issues of sovereignty and global dominance that I will put aside.
Such thoughts as these should be uppermost in our minds when we consider the evil scourge of terrorism. We should also recall that although the Reagan years do constitute a chapter of unusual extremism in the annals of terrorism, they are not some strange departure from the norm. We find much the same at the opposite end of the political spectrum as well: the Kennedy administration. One illustration is Cuba. According to long-standing myth, thoroughly dismantled by recent scholarship, the US intervened in Cuba in 1898 to secure its liberation from Spain. In reality, the intervention was designed to prevent Cuba's imminent liberation from Spain, turning it into a virtual colony of the United States. In 1959, Cuba finally did liberate itself, causing consternation in Washington. Within months, the Eisenhower administration planned in secret to overthrow the government, and initiated bombing and economic sanctions. The basic thinking was expressed by a high State Department official: Castro would be removed "through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship [so] every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba [in order to] bring about hunger, desperation and [the] overthrow of the government."
The incoming Kennedy administration took over and escalated these programs. The reasons are frankly explained in the internal record, since declassified. Violence and economic strangulation were undertaken in response to Cuba's "successful defiance" of US policies going back 150 years; no Russians, but rather the Monroe Doctrine, which established Washington's right to dominate the hemisphere.
The concerns of the Kennedy administration went beyond the need to punish successful defiance. The administration feared that the Cuban example might infect others with the thought of "taking matters into their own hands," an idea with great appeal throughout the continent because "the distribution of land and other forms of national wealth greatly favors the propertied classes and the poor and underprivileged, stimulated by the example of the Cuban revolution, are now demanding opportunities for a decent living." That was the warning conveyed to incoming President Kennedy by his Latin America advisor, liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger. The analysis was soon confirmed by the CIA, which observed that "Castro's shadow looms large because social and economic conditions throughout Latin America invite opposition to ruling authority and encourage agitation for radical change," for which Castro's Cuba might provide a model.
Ongoing plans for invasion were soon implemented. When the invasion failed at the Bay of Pigs, Washington turned to a major terrorist war. The president assigned responsibility for the war to his brother, Robert Kennedy, whose highest priority was to bring "the terrors of the earth" to Cuba, in the words of his biographer, Arthur Schlesinger. The terrorist war was no slight affair; it was also a major factor in bringing the world to the verge of nuclear war in 1962, and was resumed as soon as the missile crisis ended. The terrorist war continued through the century from US territory, though in later years Washington no longer undertook terrorist attacks against Cuba, but only provided the base for them, and continues to provide haven to some of the most notorious international terrorists, with a long record of these and other crimes: Orlando Bosch, Luis Posada Carriles, and numerous others whose names would be wellknown in the West if the concerns about terrorism were principled. Commentators are polite enough not to recall the Bush doctrine declared when he attacked Afghanistan: those who harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves, and must be treated accordingly, by bombing and invasion.
Perhaps this is enough to illustrate that state-directed international terrorism is considered an appropriate tool of diplomacy across the political spectrum. Nevertheless, Reagan was the first modern president to employ the audacious device of concealing his resort to "the evil scourge of terrorism" under the cloak of a "war on terror."
The audacity of Reaganite terrorism was as impressive as its scale. To select only one example, for which events in Germany provided a pretext, in April 1986 the US Air Force bombed Libya, killing dozens of civilians. To add a personal note, on the day of the bombing, at about 6:30 pm, I received a phone call from Tripoli from the Mideast correspondent of ABC TV, Charles Glass, an old friend. He advised me to watch the 7pm TV news. In 1986, all the TV channels ran their major news programs at 7pm. I did so, and exactly at 7, agitated news anchors switched to their facilities in Libya so that they could present, live, the US bombing of Tripoli and Benghazi, the first bombing in history enacted for prime time TV -- no slight logistical feat: the bombers were denied the right to cross France and had to take a long detour over the Atlantic to arrive just in time for the evening news. After showing the exciting scenes of the cities in flames, the TV channels switched to Washington, for sober discussion of how the US was defending itself from Libyan terror, under the newly devised doctrine of "selfdefense against future attack." Officials informed the country that they had certain knowledge that Libya had carried out a bombing of a disco in Berlin a few days earlier in which a US soldier had been killed. The certainty reduced to zero shortly after, as quietly conceded well after its purpose had been served. And it would have been hard to find even a raised eyebrow about the idea that the disco bombing would have justified the murderous assault on Libyan civilians.
The media were also polite enough not to notice the curious timing. Commentators were entranced by the solidity of the non-existent evidence and Washington's dedication to law. In a typical reaction, the NYT editors explained that "even the most scrupulous citizen can only approve and applaud the American attacks on LibyaÉ the United States has prosecuted [Qaddafi] carefully, proportionately -- and justly," the evidence for Libyan responsibility for the disco bombing has been "now laid out clearly to the public," and "then came the jury, the European governments to which the United States went out of its way to send emissaries to share evidence and urge concerted action against the Libyan leader." Entirely irrelevant is that no credible evidence was laid out and that the "jury" was quite skeptical, particularly in Germany itself, where intensive investigation had found no evidence at all; or that the jury was calling on the executioner to refrain from any action.
The bombing of Libya was neatly timed for a congressional vote on aid to the US-run terrorist force attacking Nicaragua. To ensure that the timing would not be missed, Reagan made the connection explicit. In an address the day after the bombing Reagan said: "I would remind the House [of Representatives] voting this week that this arch-terrorist [Qaddafi] has sent $400 million and an arsenal of weapons and advisers into Nicaragua to bring his war home to the United States. He has bragged that he is helping the Nicaraguans because they fight America on its own ground" -- namely America's own ground in Nicaragua. The idea that the "mad dog" was bringing his war home to us by providing arms to a country we were attacking with a CIA-run terrorist army based in our Honduran dependency was a nice touch, which did not go unnoticed. As the national press explained, the bombing of Libya should "strengthen President Reagan's hand in dealing with Congress on issues like the military budget and aid to Nicaraguan 'contras'."
This is only a small sample of Reagan's contributions to international terrorism. The most lasting among them was his enthusiastic organization of the jihadi movement in Afghanistan. The reasons were explained by the CIA station chief in Islamabad, who directed the project. In his words, the goal was to "kill Soviet Soldiers," a "noble goal" that he "loved," as did his boss in Washington. He also emphasized that "the mission was not to liberate Afghanistan" -- and in fact it may have delayed Soviet withdrawal, some specialists believe. With his unerring instinct for favoring the most violent criminals, Reagan selected for lavish aid Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, famous for throwing acid in the faces of young women in Kabul and now a leader of the insurgents in Afghanistan, though perhaps he may soon join the other warlords of the western-backed government, current reports suggest. Reagan also lent strong support to the worst of Pakistan's dictators, Zia ul-Haq, helping him to develop his nuclear weapons program and to carry out his Saudi-funded project of radical Islamization of Pakistan. There is no need to dwell on the legacy for these tortured countries and the world.
Apart from Cuba, the plague of state terror in the Western hemisphere was initiated with the Brazilian coup in 1964, installing the first of a series of neo-Nazi National Security States and initiating a plague of repression without precedent in the hemisphere, always strongly backed by Washington, hence a particularly violent form of state-directed international terrorism. The campaign was in substantial measure a war against the Church. It was more than symbolic that it culminated in the assassination of six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, in November 1989, a few days after the fall of the Berlin wall. They were murdered by an elite Salvadoran battalion, fresh from renewed training at the John F. Kennedy Special Forces School in North Carolina. As was learned last November, but apparently aroused no interest, the order for the assassination was signed by the chief of staff and his associates, all of them so closely connected to the Pentagon and the US Embassy that it becomes even harder to imagine that Washington was unaware of the plans of its model battalion. This elite force had already left a trail of blood of the usual victims through the hideous decade of the 1980s in El Salvador, which opened with the assassination of Archbishop Romero, "the voice of the voiceless," by much the same hands.
The murder of the Jesuit priests was a crushing blow to liberation theology, the remarkable revival of Christianity initiated by Pope John XXIII at Vatican II, which he opened in 1962, an event that "ushered in a new era in the history of the Catholic Church," in the words of the distinguished theologian and historian of Christianity Hans KŸng. Inspired by Vatican II, Latin American Bishops adopted "the preferential option for the poor," renewing the radical pacifism of the Gospels that had been put to rest when the Emperor Constantine established Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire -- "a revolution" that converted "the persecuted church" to a "persecuting church," in KŸng's words. In the post-Vatican II attempt to revive the Christianity of the pre-Constantine period, priests, nuns, and laypersons took the message of the Gospels to the poor and the persecuted, brought them together in "base communities," and encouraged them to take their fate into their own hands and to work together to overcome the misery of survival in brutal realms of US power.
The reaction to this grave heresy was not long in coming. The first salvo was Kennedy's military coup in Brazil in 1964, overthrowing a mildly social democratic government and instituting a reign of torture and violence. The campaign ended with the murder of the Jesuit intellectuals 20 years ago. There has been much debate about who deserves credit for the fall of the Berlin wall, but there is none about the responsibility for the brutal demolition of the attempt to revive the church of the Gospels. Washington's School of the Americas, famous for its training of Latin American killers, proudly announced as one of its "talking points" that liberation theology was "defeated with the assistance of the US army" -- given a helping hand, to be sure by the Vatican, using the gentler means of expulsion and suppression.
As you recall, last November was dedicated to celebration of the 20th anniversary of the liberation of Eastern Europe from Russian tyranny, a victory of the forces of "love, tolerance, nonviolence, the human spirit and forgiveness," as Vaclav Havel declared. Less attention -- in fact, virtually zero -- was devoted to the brutal assassination of his Salvadoran counterparts a few days after the Berlin wall fell. And I doubt that one could even find an allusion to what that brutal assassination signified: the end of a decade of vicious terror in Central America, and the final triumph of the "return to barbarism in our time" that opened with the 1964 Brazilian coup, leaving many religious martyrs in its wake and ending the heresy initiated in Vatican II -- not exactly an era of "love, tolerance, nonviolence, the human spirit and forgiveness." We can wait until tomorrow to see how much attention will be given to the 30th anniversary of the assassination of the Voice of the Voiceless while he was reading mass, a few days after he wrote a letter to President Carter pleading with him -- in vain -- not send aid to the military junta, who "know only how to repress the people and defend the interests of the Salvadorean oligarchy" and will use the aid "to destroy the people's organizations fighting to defend their fundamental human rights." As happened. And we can learn a good bit from what we are unlikely to see tomorrow.
The contrast between the celebration last November of the fall of the tyranny of the enemy, and the silence about the culmination of the hideous atrocities in our own domains, is so glaring that it takes real dedication to miss it. It sheds a somber light on our moral and intellectual culture. The same is true of the retrospective assessments of the Reagan era. We can put aside the mythology about his achievements, which would have impressed Kim il-Sung. What he actually did has virtually disappeared. President Obama hails him as a "transformative figure." At Stanford University's prestigious Hoover Institution Reagan is revered as a colossus whose "spirit seems to stride the country, watching us like a warm and friendly ghost." We arrive by plane in Washington at Reagan international airport -- or if we prefer, at John Foster Dulles international airport, honoring another prominent terrorist commander, whose exploits include overthrowing Iranian and Guatemalan democracy, installing the terror and torture state of the Shah and the most vicious of the terrorist states of Central America. The terrorist exploits of Washington's Guatemalan clients reached true genocide in the highlands in the 1980s while Reagan praised the worst of the killers, Rioss Montt, as "a man of great personal integrity" who was "totally dedicated to democracy" and was receiving a "bum rap" from human rights organizations.
I have been writing about international terrorism ever since Reagan declared a war on terror in 1981. In doing so, I have kept to the official definitions of "terrorism" in US and British law and in army manuals, all approximately the same. To take one succinct official definition, terrorism is "the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature...through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear." Everything I have just described, and a great deal more like it, falls within the category of terror ism, in fact state-directed international terrorism, in the technical sense of US-British law. For exactly that reason, the official definitions are unusable. They fail to make a crucial distinction: the concept of "terrorism" must somehow be crafted to include their terrorism against us, while excluding our terrorism against them, often far more extreme. To devise such a definition is a challenging task. Accordingly, from the 1980s there have been many scholarly conferences, academic publications, and international symposia devoted to the task of defining "terrorism." In public discourse the problem does not arise. Well-educated circles have internalized the special sense of "terrorism" required for justification of state action and control of domestic populations, and departure from the canon is generally ignored, or if noticed, elicits impressive tantrums.
Let us keep, then, to convention, and restrict attention to the terror they commit against us. It is no laughing matter, and sometimes reaches extreme levels. Probably the most egregious single crime of international terrorism in the modern era was the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11, killing almost 3000 people, a "crime against humanity" carried out with "wickedness and awesome cruelty," as Robert Fisk reported. It is widely agreed that 9/11 changed the world.
Awful as the crime was, one can imagine worse. Suppose that al-Qaeda had been supported by an awesome superpower intent on overthrowing the government of the United States. Suppose that the attack had succeeded: al-Qaeda had bombed the White House, killed the president, and installed a vicious military dictatorship, which killed some 50-100,000 people, brutally tortured 700,000, set up a major center of terror and subversion that carried out assassinations throughout the world and helped establish "National Security States" elsewhere that tortured and murdered with abandon. Suppose further that the dictator brought in economic advisers who within a few years drove the economy to one of the worst disasters in its history while their proud mentors collected Nobel Prizes and received other accolades. That would have been vastly more horrendous even than 9/11.
And as we all should know, it is not necessary to imagine, because it in fact did happen: in Chile, on the date that Latin Americans sometimes call "the first 9/11," 11 September 1973. The only change I have made is to per capita equivalents, an appropriate measure. But the first 9/11 did not change history, for good reasons: the events were too normal. In fact the installation of the Pinochet regime was just one event in the plague that began with the military coup in Brazil in 1964, spreading with similar or even worse horrors in other countries and reaching Central America in the 1980s under Reagan -- whose South American favorite was the regime of the Argentine generals, the most savage of them all, consistent with his general stance on state violence.
Putting all of this inconvenient reality aside, let us continue to follow convention and imagine that the war on terror re-declared by George W. Bush on 9/11 2001 was directed to ending the plague of international terrorism, properly restricted in scope to satisfy doctrinal needs. There were sensible steps that could have been undertaken to achieve that goal. The murderous acts of 9/11were bitterly condemned even within the jihadi movements. One constructive step would have been to isolate al-Qaeda, and unify opposition to it even among those attracted to its project. Nothing of the sort ever seems to have been considered. Instead, the Bush administration and its allies chose to unify the jihadi movement in support of Bin Laden and to mobilize many others to his cause by confirming his charge that the West is at war with Islam: invading Afghanistan and then Iraq, resorting to torture and rendition, and in general, choosing violence for the purposes of state power. With good reason, the hawkish Michael Scheuer, who was in charge of tracking bin Laden for the CIA for many years, concludes that "the United States of America remains bin Laden's only indispensable ally." The same conclusion was drawn by US Major Matthew Alexander, perhaps the most respected of US interrogators, who elicited the information that to the capture of Abu Musab al- Zarqawi, the head of al-Qa'ida in Iraq. Alexander has only contempt for the harsh interrogation methods demanded by the Bush administration. Like FBI interrogators, he believes that
the Rumsfeld-Cheney preference for torture elicits no useful information, in contrast with more humane forms of interrogation that have even succeeded in converting the targets and enlisting them as reliable informants and collaborators. He singles out Indonesia for its successes in civilized forms of interrogation, and urges the US to follow its methods. Not only does Rumsfeld-Cheney torture elicit no useful information: it also creates terrorists. From hundreds of interrogations, Alexander discovered that many foreign fighters came to Iraq in reaction to the abuses at Guant‡namo and Abu Ghraib, and that they and their domestic allies turned to suicide bombing and other terrorist acts for the same reason. He believes that the use of torture may have led to the death of more US soldiers than the toll of the 9/11 terrorist attack. The most significant revelation in the released Torture Memos is that interrogators were under "relentless pressure" from Cheney and Rumsfeld to resort to harsher methods to find evidence for their fantastic claim that Saddam Hussein was cooperating with al-Qaida. The attack on Afghanistan in October 2001 is called "the good war," no questions asked, a justifiable act of self-defense with the noble aim of protecting human rights from the evil Taliban. There are a few problems with that near-universal contention. For one thing, the goal was not to remove the Taliban. Rather, Bush informed the people of Afghanistan that they would be bombed unless the Taliban turned bin Laden over to the US, as they might have done, had the US agreed to their request to provide some evidence of his responsibility for 9/11. The request was dismissed with contempt, for good reasons. As the head of the FBI conceded 8 months later, after the most intensive international investigation in history they still had no evidence, and certainly had none the preceding October. The most he could say is that the FBI "believed" that the plot had been hatched in Afghanistan and had been implemented in the Gulf Emirates and Germany.
Three weeks after the bombing began, war aims shifted to overthrow of the regime. British Admiral Sir Michael Boyce announced that the bombing would continue until "the people of the countryÉget the leadership changed" -- a textbook case of international terrorism. It is also not true that there were no objections to the attack. With virtual unanimity, international aid organizations vociferously objected because it terminated their aid efforts, which were desperately needed. At the time it was estimated that some 5 million people were relying on aid for survival, and that an additional 2.5 million would be put at risk of starvation by the US-UK attack. The bombing was therefore an example of extreme criminality, whether or not the anticipated consequences took place.
Furthermore, the bombing was bitterly condemned by leading anti-Taliban Afghans, including the US favorite, Abdul Haq, who was given special praise as a martyr after the war by President Hamid Karzai. Just before he entered Afghanistan, and was captured and killed, he condemned the bombing that was then underway and criticized the US for refusing to support efforts of his and others "to create a revolt within the Taliban." The bombing was "a big setback for these efforts," he said, outlining them and calling on the US to assist them with funding and other support instead of undermining them with bombs. The US, he said, "is trying to show its muscle, score a victory and scare everyone in the world. They don't care about the suffering of the Afghans or how many people we will lose."
Shortly after, 1000 Afghan leaders gathered in Peshawar, some of them exiles, some coming from within Afghanistan, all committed to overthrowing the Taliban regime. It was "a rare display of unity among tribal elders, Islamic scholars, fractious politicians, and former guerrilla commanders," the press reported. They had many disagreements, but unanimously "urged the US to stop the air raids" and appealed to the international media to call for an end to the "bombing of innocent people." They urged that other means be adopted to overthrow the hated Taliban regime, a goal they believed could be achieved without further death and destruction. The bombing was also harshly condemned by the prominent women's organization RAWA -- which received some belated recognition when it became ideologically serviceable to express concern (briefly) about the fate of women in Afghanistan. In short, the unquestionably "good war" does not look so good when we pay some attention to unacceptable facts.
It should not be necessary to tarry on the invasion of Iraq. Keeping solely to the effect on jihadi terror, the invasion was undertaken with the expectation that it would lead to an increase in terrorism, as it did, far beyond what was anticipated. It caused a seven-fold increase in terror, according to analyses by US terrorism experts.
One may ask why these attacks were undertaken, but it is reasonably clear that confronting the evil scourge of terrorism was not a high priority, if it was even a consideration.
If that had been the goal, there were options to pursue. Some I have already mentioned. More generally, the US and Britain could have followed the proper procedures for dealing with a major crime: determine who is responsible, apprehend the suspects (with international cooperation if necessary, easy to obtain), and bring them to a fair trial. Furthermore, attention would be paid to the roots of terror. That can be extremely effective, as the US and UK had just learned in Northern Ireland. IRA terror was a very serious matter. As long as London reacted by violence, terror, and torture, it was the "indispensable ally" of the more violent elements of the IRA, and the cycle of terror escalated. By the late '90s, London began to attend to the grievances that lay at the roots of the terror, and to deal with those that were legitimate -- as should be done irrespective of terror. Within a few years terror virtually disappeared. I happened to be in Belfast in 1993. It was a war zone. I was there again last fall. There are tensions, but at a level that is barely detectable to a visitor. There are important lessons here. Even without this experience we should know that violence engenders violence, while sympathy and concern cool passions and can evoke cooperation and empathy.
If we seriously want to end the plague of terrorism, we know how to do it. First, end our own role as perpetrators. That alone will have a substantial effect. Second, attend to the grievances that are typically in the background, and if they are legitimate, do something about them. Third, if an act of terror occurs, deal with it as a criminal act: identify and apprehend the suspects and carry out an honest judicial process. That actually works. In contrast, the techniques that are employed enhance the threat of terror. The evidence is fairly strong, and falls together which much else.
This is not the only case where the approaches that might well reduce a serious threat are systematically avoided, and those that are unlikely to do so are adopted instead. One such case is the so-called "war on drugs." Over almost 40 years, the war has failed to curtail drug use or even street price of drugs. It has been established by many studies, including those of the US government, that by far the most cost-effective approach to drug abuse is prevention and treatment. But that approach is consistently avoided in state policy, which prefers far more expensive violent measures that have barely any impact on drug use, though they have other consistent consequences.
In cases like these, the only rational conclusion is that the declared goals are not the real ones, and that if we want to learn about the real goals, we should adopt an approach that is familiar in the law: relying on predictable outcome as evidence for intent. I think the approach leads to quite plausible conclusions, for the "war on drugs," the "war on terror," and much else. That, however, is work for another day.
(Erich Fromm Lecture 2010)
Noam Chomsky
Text of lecture delivered at the International Erich Fromm Society, Stuttgart, Germany, March 23, 2010
The president could not have been more justified when he condemned "the evil scourge of terrorism." I am quoting Ronald Reagan, who came into office in 1981 declaring that a focus of his foreign policy would be state-directed international terrorism, "the plague of the modern age" and "a return to barbarism in our time," to sample some of the rhetoric of his administration. When George W. Bush declared a "war on terror" 20 years later, he was redeclaring the war, an important fact that is worth exhuming from Orwell's memory hole if we hope to understand the nature of the evil scourge of terrorism, or more importantly, if we hope to understand ourselves. We do not need the famous Delphi inscription to recognize that there can be no more important task. Just as a personal aside, that critical necessity was forcefully brought home to me almost 70 years ago in my first encounter with Erich Fromm's work, in his classic essay on the escape to freedom in the modern world, and the grim paths that the modern free individual was tempted to choose in the effort to escape the loneliness and anguish that accompanied the newly-discovered freedom -- matters all too pertinent today, unfortunately.
The reasons why Reagan's war on terror has been dispatched to the repository of unwelcome facts are understandable and informative -- about ourselves. Instantly, Reagan's war on terror became a savage terrorist war, leaving hundreds of thousands of tortured and mutilated corpses in the wreckage of Central America, tens of thousands more in the Middle East, and an estimated 1.5 million killed by South African terror that was strongly supported by the Reagan administration in violation of congressional sanctions. All of these murderous exercises of course had pretexts. The resort to violence always does. In the Middle East, Reagan's decisive support for Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which killed some 15-20,000 people and destroyed much of southern Lebanon and Beirut, was based on the pretense that it was in selfdefense against PLO rocketing of the Galilee, a brazen fabrication: Israel recognized at once that the threat was PLO diplomacy, which might have undermined Israel's illegal takeover of the occupied territories. In Africa, support for the marauding of the apartheid state was officially justified within the framework of the war on terror: it was necessary to protect white South Africa from one of the world's "more notorious terrorist groups," Nelson Mandela's African National Congress, so Washington determined in 1988. The pretexts in the other cases were no more impressive.
For the most part, the victims of Reaganite terror were defenseless civilians, but in one case the victim was a state, Nicaragua, which could respond through legal channels. Nicaragua brought its charges to the World Court, which condemned the US for "unlawful use of force" -- in lay terms, international terrorism -- in its attack on Nicaragua from its Honduran bases, and ordered the US to terminate the assault and pay substantial reparations. The aftermath is instructive.
Congress responded to the Court judgment by increasing aid to the US-run mercenary army attacking Nicaragua, while the press condemned the Court as a "hostile forum" and therefore irrelevant. The same Court had been highly relevant a few years earlier when it ruled in favor of the US against Iran. Washington dismissed the Court judgment with contempt. In doing so, it joined the distinguished company of Libya's Qaddafi and Albania's Enver Hoxha. Libya and Albania have since joined the world of law-abiding states in this respect, so now the US stands in splendid isolation. Nicaragua then brought the matter to the UN Security Council, which passed two resolutions calling on all states to observe international law. The resolutions were vetoed by the US, with the assistance of Britain and France, which abstained. All of this passed virtually without notice, and has been expunged from history.
Also forgotten -- or rather, never noticed -- is the fact that the "hostile forum" had bent over backwards to accommodate Washington. The Court rejected almost all of Nicaragua's case, presented by a distinguished Harvard University international lawyer, on the grounds that when the US had accepted World Court jurisdiction in 1946, it added a reservation exempting itself from charges under international treaties, specifically the Charters of the United Nations and the Organization of American States. Accordingly, the US is self-entitled to carry out aggression and other crimes that are far more serious than international terrorism. The Court correctly recognized this exemption, one aspect of much broader issues of sovereignty and global dominance that I will put aside.
Such thoughts as these should be uppermost in our minds when we consider the evil scourge of terrorism. We should also recall that although the Reagan years do constitute a chapter of unusual extremism in the annals of terrorism, they are not some strange departure from the norm. We find much the same at the opposite end of the political spectrum as well: the Kennedy administration. One illustration is Cuba. According to long-standing myth, thoroughly dismantled by recent scholarship, the US intervened in Cuba in 1898 to secure its liberation from Spain. In reality, the intervention was designed to prevent Cuba's imminent liberation from Spain, turning it into a virtual colony of the United States. In 1959, Cuba finally did liberate itself, causing consternation in Washington. Within months, the Eisenhower administration planned in secret to overthrow the government, and initiated bombing and economic sanctions. The basic thinking was expressed by a high State Department official: Castro would be removed "through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship [so] every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba [in order to] bring about hunger, desperation and [the] overthrow of the government."
The incoming Kennedy administration took over and escalated these programs. The reasons are frankly explained in the internal record, since declassified. Violence and economic strangulation were undertaken in response to Cuba's "successful defiance" of US policies going back 150 years; no Russians, but rather the Monroe Doctrine, which established Washington's right to dominate the hemisphere.
The concerns of the Kennedy administration went beyond the need to punish successful defiance. The administration feared that the Cuban example might infect others with the thought of "taking matters into their own hands," an idea with great appeal throughout the continent because "the distribution of land and other forms of national wealth greatly favors the propertied classes and the poor and underprivileged, stimulated by the example of the Cuban revolution, are now demanding opportunities for a decent living." That was the warning conveyed to incoming President Kennedy by his Latin America advisor, liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger. The analysis was soon confirmed by the CIA, which observed that "Castro's shadow looms large because social and economic conditions throughout Latin America invite opposition to ruling authority and encourage agitation for radical change," for which Castro's Cuba might provide a model.
Ongoing plans for invasion were soon implemented. When the invasion failed at the Bay of Pigs, Washington turned to a major terrorist war. The president assigned responsibility for the war to his brother, Robert Kennedy, whose highest priority was to bring "the terrors of the earth" to Cuba, in the words of his biographer, Arthur Schlesinger. The terrorist war was no slight affair; it was also a major factor in bringing the world to the verge of nuclear war in 1962, and was resumed as soon as the missile crisis ended. The terrorist war continued through the century from US territory, though in later years Washington no longer undertook terrorist attacks against Cuba, but only provided the base for them, and continues to provide haven to some of the most notorious international terrorists, with a long record of these and other crimes: Orlando Bosch, Luis Posada Carriles, and numerous others whose names would be wellknown in the West if the concerns about terrorism were principled. Commentators are polite enough not to recall the Bush doctrine declared when he attacked Afghanistan: those who harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves, and must be treated accordingly, by bombing and invasion.
Perhaps this is enough to illustrate that state-directed international terrorism is considered an appropriate tool of diplomacy across the political spectrum. Nevertheless, Reagan was the first modern president to employ the audacious device of concealing his resort to "the evil scourge of terrorism" under the cloak of a "war on terror."
The audacity of Reaganite terrorism was as impressive as its scale. To select only one example, for which events in Germany provided a pretext, in April 1986 the US Air Force bombed Libya, killing dozens of civilians. To add a personal note, on the day of the bombing, at about 6:30 pm, I received a phone call from Tripoli from the Mideast correspondent of ABC TV, Charles Glass, an old friend. He advised me to watch the 7pm TV news. In 1986, all the TV channels ran their major news programs at 7pm. I did so, and exactly at 7, agitated news anchors switched to their facilities in Libya so that they could present, live, the US bombing of Tripoli and Benghazi, the first bombing in history enacted for prime time TV -- no slight logistical feat: the bombers were denied the right to cross France and had to take a long detour over the Atlantic to arrive just in time for the evening news. After showing the exciting scenes of the cities in flames, the TV channels switched to Washington, for sober discussion of how the US was defending itself from Libyan terror, under the newly devised doctrine of "selfdefense against future attack." Officials informed the country that they had certain knowledge that Libya had carried out a bombing of a disco in Berlin a few days earlier in which a US soldier had been killed. The certainty reduced to zero shortly after, as quietly conceded well after its purpose had been served. And it would have been hard to find even a raised eyebrow about the idea that the disco bombing would have justified the murderous assault on Libyan civilians.
The media were also polite enough not to notice the curious timing. Commentators were entranced by the solidity of the non-existent evidence and Washington's dedication to law. In a typical reaction, the NYT editors explained that "even the most scrupulous citizen can only approve and applaud the American attacks on LibyaÉ the United States has prosecuted [Qaddafi] carefully, proportionately -- and justly," the evidence for Libyan responsibility for the disco bombing has been "now laid out clearly to the public," and "then came the jury, the European governments to which the United States went out of its way to send emissaries to share evidence and urge concerted action against the Libyan leader." Entirely irrelevant is that no credible evidence was laid out and that the "jury" was quite skeptical, particularly in Germany itself, where intensive investigation had found no evidence at all; or that the jury was calling on the executioner to refrain from any action.
The bombing of Libya was neatly timed for a congressional vote on aid to the US-run terrorist force attacking Nicaragua. To ensure that the timing would not be missed, Reagan made the connection explicit. In an address the day after the bombing Reagan said: "I would remind the House [of Representatives] voting this week that this arch-terrorist [Qaddafi] has sent $400 million and an arsenal of weapons and advisers into Nicaragua to bring his war home to the United States. He has bragged that he is helping the Nicaraguans because they fight America on its own ground" -- namely America's own ground in Nicaragua. The idea that the "mad dog" was bringing his war home to us by providing arms to a country we were attacking with a CIA-run terrorist army based in our Honduran dependency was a nice touch, which did not go unnoticed. As the national press explained, the bombing of Libya should "strengthen President Reagan's hand in dealing with Congress on issues like the military budget and aid to Nicaraguan 'contras'."
This is only a small sample of Reagan's contributions to international terrorism. The most lasting among them was his enthusiastic organization of the jihadi movement in Afghanistan. The reasons were explained by the CIA station chief in Islamabad, who directed the project. In his words, the goal was to "kill Soviet Soldiers," a "noble goal" that he "loved," as did his boss in Washington. He also emphasized that "the mission was not to liberate Afghanistan" -- and in fact it may have delayed Soviet withdrawal, some specialists believe. With his unerring instinct for favoring the most violent criminals, Reagan selected for lavish aid Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, famous for throwing acid in the faces of young women in Kabul and now a leader of the insurgents in Afghanistan, though perhaps he may soon join the other warlords of the western-backed government, current reports suggest. Reagan also lent strong support to the worst of Pakistan's dictators, Zia ul-Haq, helping him to develop his nuclear weapons program and to carry out his Saudi-funded project of radical Islamization of Pakistan. There is no need to dwell on the legacy for these tortured countries and the world.
Apart from Cuba, the plague of state terror in the Western hemisphere was initiated with the Brazilian coup in 1964, installing the first of a series of neo-Nazi National Security States and initiating a plague of repression without precedent in the hemisphere, always strongly backed by Washington, hence a particularly violent form of state-directed international terrorism. The campaign was in substantial measure a war against the Church. It was more than symbolic that it culminated in the assassination of six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, in November 1989, a few days after the fall of the Berlin wall. They were murdered by an elite Salvadoran battalion, fresh from renewed training at the John F. Kennedy Special Forces School in North Carolina. As was learned last November, but apparently aroused no interest, the order for the assassination was signed by the chief of staff and his associates, all of them so closely connected to the Pentagon and the US Embassy that it becomes even harder to imagine that Washington was unaware of the plans of its model battalion. This elite force had already left a trail of blood of the usual victims through the hideous decade of the 1980s in El Salvador, which opened with the assassination of Archbishop Romero, "the voice of the voiceless," by much the same hands.
The murder of the Jesuit priests was a crushing blow to liberation theology, the remarkable revival of Christianity initiated by Pope John XXIII at Vatican II, which he opened in 1962, an event that "ushered in a new era in the history of the Catholic Church," in the words of the distinguished theologian and historian of Christianity Hans KŸng. Inspired by Vatican II, Latin American Bishops adopted "the preferential option for the poor," renewing the radical pacifism of the Gospels that had been put to rest when the Emperor Constantine established Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire -- "a revolution" that converted "the persecuted church" to a "persecuting church," in KŸng's words. In the post-Vatican II attempt to revive the Christianity of the pre-Constantine period, priests, nuns, and laypersons took the message of the Gospels to the poor and the persecuted, brought them together in "base communities," and encouraged them to take their fate into their own hands and to work together to overcome the misery of survival in brutal realms of US power.
The reaction to this grave heresy was not long in coming. The first salvo was Kennedy's military coup in Brazil in 1964, overthrowing a mildly social democratic government and instituting a reign of torture and violence. The campaign ended with the murder of the Jesuit intellectuals 20 years ago. There has been much debate about who deserves credit for the fall of the Berlin wall, but there is none about the responsibility for the brutal demolition of the attempt to revive the church of the Gospels. Washington's School of the Americas, famous for its training of Latin American killers, proudly announced as one of its "talking points" that liberation theology was "defeated with the assistance of the US army" -- given a helping hand, to be sure by the Vatican, using the gentler means of expulsion and suppression.
As you recall, last November was dedicated to celebration of the 20th anniversary of the liberation of Eastern Europe from Russian tyranny, a victory of the forces of "love, tolerance, nonviolence, the human spirit and forgiveness," as Vaclav Havel declared. Less attention -- in fact, virtually zero -- was devoted to the brutal assassination of his Salvadoran counterparts a few days after the Berlin wall fell. And I doubt that one could even find an allusion to what that brutal assassination signified: the end of a decade of vicious terror in Central America, and the final triumph of the "return to barbarism in our time" that opened with the 1964 Brazilian coup, leaving many religious martyrs in its wake and ending the heresy initiated in Vatican II -- not exactly an era of "love, tolerance, nonviolence, the human spirit and forgiveness." We can wait until tomorrow to see how much attention will be given to the 30th anniversary of the assassination of the Voice of the Voiceless while he was reading mass, a few days after he wrote a letter to President Carter pleading with him -- in vain -- not send aid to the military junta, who "know only how to repress the people and defend the interests of the Salvadorean oligarchy" and will use the aid "to destroy the people's organizations fighting to defend their fundamental human rights." As happened. And we can learn a good bit from what we are unlikely to see tomorrow.
The contrast between the celebration last November of the fall of the tyranny of the enemy, and the silence about the culmination of the hideous atrocities in our own domains, is so glaring that it takes real dedication to miss it. It sheds a somber light on our moral and intellectual culture. The same is true of the retrospective assessments of the Reagan era. We can put aside the mythology about his achievements, which would have impressed Kim il-Sung. What he actually did has virtually disappeared. President Obama hails him as a "transformative figure." At Stanford University's prestigious Hoover Institution Reagan is revered as a colossus whose "spirit seems to stride the country, watching us like a warm and friendly ghost." We arrive by plane in Washington at Reagan international airport -- or if we prefer, at John Foster Dulles international airport, honoring another prominent terrorist commander, whose exploits include overthrowing Iranian and Guatemalan democracy, installing the terror and torture state of the Shah and the most vicious of the terrorist states of Central America. The terrorist exploits of Washington's Guatemalan clients reached true genocide in the highlands in the 1980s while Reagan praised the worst of the killers, Rioss Montt, as "a man of great personal integrity" who was "totally dedicated to democracy" and was receiving a "bum rap" from human rights organizations.
I have been writing about international terrorism ever since Reagan declared a war on terror in 1981. In doing so, I have kept to the official definitions of "terrorism" in US and British law and in army manuals, all approximately the same. To take one succinct official definition, terrorism is "the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature...through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear." Everything I have just described, and a great deal more like it, falls within the category of terror ism, in fact state-directed international terrorism, in the technical sense of US-British law. For exactly that reason, the official definitions are unusable. They fail to make a crucial distinction: the concept of "terrorism" must somehow be crafted to include their terrorism against us, while excluding our terrorism against them, often far more extreme. To devise such a definition is a challenging task. Accordingly, from the 1980s there have been many scholarly conferences, academic publications, and international symposia devoted to the task of defining "terrorism." In public discourse the problem does not arise. Well-educated circles have internalized the special sense of "terrorism" required for justification of state action and control of domestic populations, and departure from the canon is generally ignored, or if noticed, elicits impressive tantrums.
Let us keep, then, to convention, and restrict attention to the terror they commit against us. It is no laughing matter, and sometimes reaches extreme levels. Probably the most egregious single crime of international terrorism in the modern era was the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11, killing almost 3000 people, a "crime against humanity" carried out with "wickedness and awesome cruelty," as Robert Fisk reported. It is widely agreed that 9/11 changed the world.
Awful as the crime was, one can imagine worse. Suppose that al-Qaeda had been supported by an awesome superpower intent on overthrowing the government of the United States. Suppose that the attack had succeeded: al-Qaeda had bombed the White House, killed the president, and installed a vicious military dictatorship, which killed some 50-100,000 people, brutally tortured 700,000, set up a major center of terror and subversion that carried out assassinations throughout the world and helped establish "National Security States" elsewhere that tortured and murdered with abandon. Suppose further that the dictator brought in economic advisers who within a few years drove the economy to one of the worst disasters in its history while their proud mentors collected Nobel Prizes and received other accolades. That would have been vastly more horrendous even than 9/11.
And as we all should know, it is not necessary to imagine, because it in fact did happen: in Chile, on the date that Latin Americans sometimes call "the first 9/11," 11 September 1973. The only change I have made is to per capita equivalents, an appropriate measure. But the first 9/11 did not change history, for good reasons: the events were too normal. In fact the installation of the Pinochet regime was just one event in the plague that began with the military coup in Brazil in 1964, spreading with similar or even worse horrors in other countries and reaching Central America in the 1980s under Reagan -- whose South American favorite was the regime of the Argentine generals, the most savage of them all, consistent with his general stance on state violence.
Putting all of this inconvenient reality aside, let us continue to follow convention and imagine that the war on terror re-declared by George W. Bush on 9/11 2001 was directed to ending the plague of international terrorism, properly restricted in scope to satisfy doctrinal needs. There were sensible steps that could have been undertaken to achieve that goal. The murderous acts of 9/11were bitterly condemned even within the jihadi movements. One constructive step would have been to isolate al-Qaeda, and unify opposition to it even among those attracted to its project. Nothing of the sort ever seems to have been considered. Instead, the Bush administration and its allies chose to unify the jihadi movement in support of Bin Laden and to mobilize many others to his cause by confirming his charge that the West is at war with Islam: invading Afghanistan and then Iraq, resorting to torture and rendition, and in general, choosing violence for the purposes of state power. With good reason, the hawkish Michael Scheuer, who was in charge of tracking bin Laden for the CIA for many years, concludes that "the United States of America remains bin Laden's only indispensable ally." The same conclusion was drawn by US Major Matthew Alexander, perhaps the most respected of US interrogators, who elicited the information that to the capture of Abu Musab al- Zarqawi, the head of al-Qa'ida in Iraq. Alexander has only contempt for the harsh interrogation methods demanded by the Bush administration. Like FBI interrogators, he believes that
the Rumsfeld-Cheney preference for torture elicits no useful information, in contrast with more humane forms of interrogation that have even succeeded in converting the targets and enlisting them as reliable informants and collaborators. He singles out Indonesia for its successes in civilized forms of interrogation, and urges the US to follow its methods. Not only does Rumsfeld-Cheney torture elicit no useful information: it also creates terrorists. From hundreds of interrogations, Alexander discovered that many foreign fighters came to Iraq in reaction to the abuses at Guant‡namo and Abu Ghraib, and that they and their domestic allies turned to suicide bombing and other terrorist acts for the same reason. He believes that the use of torture may have led to the death of more US soldiers than the toll of the 9/11 terrorist attack. The most significant revelation in the released Torture Memos is that interrogators were under "relentless pressure" from Cheney and Rumsfeld to resort to harsher methods to find evidence for their fantastic claim that Saddam Hussein was cooperating with al-Qaida. The attack on Afghanistan in October 2001 is called "the good war," no questions asked, a justifiable act of self-defense with the noble aim of protecting human rights from the evil Taliban. There are a few problems with that near-universal contention. For one thing, the goal was not to remove the Taliban. Rather, Bush informed the people of Afghanistan that they would be bombed unless the Taliban turned bin Laden over to the US, as they might have done, had the US agreed to their request to provide some evidence of his responsibility for 9/11. The request was dismissed with contempt, for good reasons. As the head of the FBI conceded 8 months later, after the most intensive international investigation in history they still had no evidence, and certainly had none the preceding October. The most he could say is that the FBI "believed" that the plot had been hatched in Afghanistan and had been implemented in the Gulf Emirates and Germany.
Three weeks after the bombing began, war aims shifted to overthrow of the regime. British Admiral Sir Michael Boyce announced that the bombing would continue until "the people of the countryÉget the leadership changed" -- a textbook case of international terrorism. It is also not true that there were no objections to the attack. With virtual unanimity, international aid organizations vociferously objected because it terminated their aid efforts, which were desperately needed. At the time it was estimated that some 5 million people were relying on aid for survival, and that an additional 2.5 million would be put at risk of starvation by the US-UK attack. The bombing was therefore an example of extreme criminality, whether or not the anticipated consequences took place.
Furthermore, the bombing was bitterly condemned by leading anti-Taliban Afghans, including the US favorite, Abdul Haq, who was given special praise as a martyr after the war by President Hamid Karzai. Just before he entered Afghanistan, and was captured and killed, he condemned the bombing that was then underway and criticized the US for refusing to support efforts of his and others "to create a revolt within the Taliban." The bombing was "a big setback for these efforts," he said, outlining them and calling on the US to assist them with funding and other support instead of undermining them with bombs. The US, he said, "is trying to show its muscle, score a victory and scare everyone in the world. They don't care about the suffering of the Afghans or how many people we will lose."
Shortly after, 1000 Afghan leaders gathered in Peshawar, some of them exiles, some coming from within Afghanistan, all committed to overthrowing the Taliban regime. It was "a rare display of unity among tribal elders, Islamic scholars, fractious politicians, and former guerrilla commanders," the press reported. They had many disagreements, but unanimously "urged the US to stop the air raids" and appealed to the international media to call for an end to the "bombing of innocent people." They urged that other means be adopted to overthrow the hated Taliban regime, a goal they believed could be achieved without further death and destruction. The bombing was also harshly condemned by the prominent women's organization RAWA -- which received some belated recognition when it became ideologically serviceable to express concern (briefly) about the fate of women in Afghanistan. In short, the unquestionably "good war" does not look so good when we pay some attention to unacceptable facts.
It should not be necessary to tarry on the invasion of Iraq. Keeping solely to the effect on jihadi terror, the invasion was undertaken with the expectation that it would lead to an increase in terrorism, as it did, far beyond what was anticipated. It caused a seven-fold increase in terror, according to analyses by US terrorism experts.
One may ask why these attacks were undertaken, but it is reasonably clear that confronting the evil scourge of terrorism was not a high priority, if it was even a consideration.
If that had been the goal, there were options to pursue. Some I have already mentioned. More generally, the US and Britain could have followed the proper procedures for dealing with a major crime: determine who is responsible, apprehend the suspects (with international cooperation if necessary, easy to obtain), and bring them to a fair trial. Furthermore, attention would be paid to the roots of terror. That can be extremely effective, as the US and UK had just learned in Northern Ireland. IRA terror was a very serious matter. As long as London reacted by violence, terror, and torture, it was the "indispensable ally" of the more violent elements of the IRA, and the cycle of terror escalated. By the late '90s, London began to attend to the grievances that lay at the roots of the terror, and to deal with those that were legitimate -- as should be done irrespective of terror. Within a few years terror virtually disappeared. I happened to be in Belfast in 1993. It was a war zone. I was there again last fall. There are tensions, but at a level that is barely detectable to a visitor. There are important lessons here. Even without this experience we should know that violence engenders violence, while sympathy and concern cool passions and can evoke cooperation and empathy.
If we seriously want to end the plague of terrorism, we know how to do it. First, end our own role as perpetrators. That alone will have a substantial effect. Second, attend to the grievances that are typically in the background, and if they are legitimate, do something about them. Third, if an act of terror occurs, deal with it as a criminal act: identify and apprehend the suspects and carry out an honest judicial process. That actually works. In contrast, the techniques that are employed enhance the threat of terror. The evidence is fairly strong, and falls together which much else.
This is not the only case where the approaches that might well reduce a serious threat are systematically avoided, and those that are unlikely to do so are adopted instead. One such case is the so-called "war on drugs." Over almost 40 years, the war has failed to curtail drug use or even street price of drugs. It has been established by many studies, including those of the US government, that by far the most cost-effective approach to drug abuse is prevention and treatment. But that approach is consistently avoided in state policy, which prefers far more expensive violent measures that have barely any impact on drug use, though they have other consistent consequences.
In cases like these, the only rational conclusion is that the declared goals are not the real ones, and that if we want to learn about the real goals, we should adopt an approach that is familiar in the law: relying on predictable outcome as evidence for intent. I think the approach leads to quite plausible conclusions, for the "war on drugs," the "war on terror," and much else. That, however, is work for another day.
28 Ocak 2010 Perşembe
JOHN LENNON: Imagine
Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one
26 Ocak 2010 Salı
NEW YORK TIMES: F.B.I. and States Vastly Expand DNA Databases
F.B.I. and States Vastly Expand DNA Databases
Law enforcement officials are vastly expanding their collection of DNA to include millions more people who have been arrested or detained but not yet convicted. The move, intended to help solve more crimes, is raising concerns about the privacy of petty offenders and people who are presumed innocent.
Until now, the federal government genetically tracked only convicts. But starting this month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation will join 15 states that collect DNA samples from those awaiting trial and will collect DNA from detained immigrants — the vanguard of a growing class of genetic registrants.
The F.B.I., with a DNA database of 6.7 million profiles, expects to accelerate its growth rate from 80,000 new entries a year to 1.2 million by 2012 — a 17-fold increase. F.B.I. officials say they expect DNA processing backlogs — which now stand at more than 500,000 cases — to increase.
Law enforcement officials say that expanding the DNA databanks to include legally innocent people will help solve more violent crimes. They point out that DNA has helped convict thousands of criminals and has exonerated more than 200 wrongfully convicted people.
But criminal justice experts cite Fourth Amendment privacy concerns and worry that the nation is becoming a genetic surveillance society.
“DNA databases were built initially to deal with violent sexual crimes and homicides — a very limited number of crimes,” said Harry Levine, a professor of sociology at City University of New York who studies policing trends. “Over time more and more crimes of decreasing severity have been added to the database. Cops and prosecutors like it because it gives everybody more information and creates a new suspect pool.”
Courts have generally upheld laws authorizing compulsory collection of DNA from convicts and ex-convicts under supervised release, on the grounds that criminal acts diminish privacy rights.
DNA extraction upon arrest potentially erodes that argument, a recent Congressional study found. “Courts have not fully considered legal implications of recent extensions of DNA-collection to people whom the government has arrested but not tried or convicted,” the report said.
Minors are required to provide DNA samples in 35 states upon conviction, and in some states upon arrest. Three juvenile suspects in November filed the only current constitutional challenge against taking DNA at the time of arrest. The judge temporarily stopped DNA collection from the three youths, and the case is continuing.
Sixteen states now take DNA from some who have been found guilty of misdemeanors. As more police agencies take DNA for a greater variety of lesser and suspected crimes, civil rights advocates say the government’s power is becoming too broadly applied. “What we object to — and what the Constitution prohibits — is the indiscriminate taking of DNA for things like writing an insufficient funds check, shoplifting, drug convictions,” said Michael Risher, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union.
This year, California began taking DNA upon arrest and expects to nearly double the growth rate of its database, to 390,000 profiles a year from 200,000.
One of those was Brian Roberts, 29, who was awaiting trial for methamphetamine possession. Inside the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in Los Angeles last month, Mr. Roberts let a sheriff’s deputy swab the inside of his cheek.
Mr. Roberts’s DNA will be translated into a numerical sequence at the F.B.I.’s DNA database, the largest in the world.
The system will search for matches between Mr. Roberts’s DNA and other profiles every Monday, from now into the indeterminate future — until one day, perhaps decades hence, Mr. Roberts might leave a drop of blood or semen at some crime scene.
Law enforcement officials say that DNA extraction upon arrest is no different than fingerprinting at routine bookings and that states purge profiles after people are cleared of suspicion. In practice, defense lawyers say this is a laborious process that often involves a court order. (The F.B.I. says it has never received a request to purge a profile from its database.)
When DNA is taken in error, expunging a profile can be just as difficult. In Pennsylvania, Ellyn Sapper, a Philadelphia public defender, has spent weeks trying to expunge the profile taken erroneously of a 14-year-old boy guilty of assault and bicycle theft. “I’m going to have to get a judge’s order to make sure that all references to his DNA are gone,” she said.
The police say that the potential hazards of genetic surveillance are worth it because it solves crimes and because DNA is more accurate than other physical evidence. “I’ve watched women go from mug-book to mug-book looking for the man who raped her,” said Mitch Morrissey, the Denver district attorney and an advocate for more expansive DNA sampling. “It saves women’s lives.”
Mr. Morrissey pointed to Britain, which has fewer privacy protections than the United States and has been taking DNA upon arrest for years. It has a population of 61 million — and 4.5 million DNA profiles. “About 8 percent of the people commit about 70 percent of your crimes, so if you can get the majority of that community, you don’t have to do more than that,” he said.
In the United States, 8 percent of the population would be roughly 24 million people.
Britain may provide a window into America’s genetic surveillance future: As of March 2008, 857,000 people in the British database, or about one-fifth, have no current criminal record. In December, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Britain violated international law by collecting DNA profiles from innocent people, including children as young as 10.
Critics are also disturbed by the demographics of DNA databases. Again Britain is instructive. According to a House of Commons report, 27 percent of black people and 42 percent of black males are genetically registered, compared with 6 percent of white people.
As in Britain, expanding genetic sampling in the United States could exacerbate racial disparities in the criminal justice system, according to Hank Greely, a Stanford University Law School professor who studies the intersection of genetics, policing and race. Mr. Greely estimated that African-Americans, who are about 12 percent of the national population, make up 40 percent of the DNA profiles in the federal database, reflective of their prison population. He also expects Latinos, who are about 13 percent of the population and committed 40 percent of last year’s federal offenses — nearly half of them immigration crimes — to dominate DNA databases.
Enforcement officials contend that DNA is blind to race. Federal profiles include little more information than the DNA sequence and the referring police agency. Subjects’ names are usually kept by investigators.
Rock Harmon, a former prosecutor for Alameda County, Calif., and an adviser to crime laboratories, said DNA demographics reflected the criminal population. Even if an innocent man’s DNA was included in a genetic database, he said, it would come to nothing without a crime scene sample to match it. “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear,” he said.
Law enforcement officials are vastly expanding their collection of DNA to include millions more people who have been arrested or detained but not yet convicted. The move, intended to help solve more crimes, is raising concerns about the privacy of petty offenders and people who are presumed innocent.
Until now, the federal government genetically tracked only convicts. But starting this month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation will join 15 states that collect DNA samples from those awaiting trial and will collect DNA from detained immigrants — the vanguard of a growing class of genetic registrants.
The F.B.I., with a DNA database of 6.7 million profiles, expects to accelerate its growth rate from 80,000 new entries a year to 1.2 million by 2012 — a 17-fold increase. F.B.I. officials say they expect DNA processing backlogs — which now stand at more than 500,000 cases — to increase.
Law enforcement officials say that expanding the DNA databanks to include legally innocent people will help solve more violent crimes. They point out that DNA has helped convict thousands of criminals and has exonerated more than 200 wrongfully convicted people.
But criminal justice experts cite Fourth Amendment privacy concerns and worry that the nation is becoming a genetic surveillance society.
“DNA databases were built initially to deal with violent sexual crimes and homicides — a very limited number of crimes,” said Harry Levine, a professor of sociology at City University of New York who studies policing trends. “Over time more and more crimes of decreasing severity have been added to the database. Cops and prosecutors like it because it gives everybody more information and creates a new suspect pool.”
Courts have generally upheld laws authorizing compulsory collection of DNA from convicts and ex-convicts under supervised release, on the grounds that criminal acts diminish privacy rights.
DNA extraction upon arrest potentially erodes that argument, a recent Congressional study found. “Courts have not fully considered legal implications of recent extensions of DNA-collection to people whom the government has arrested but not tried or convicted,” the report said.
Minors are required to provide DNA samples in 35 states upon conviction, and in some states upon arrest. Three juvenile suspects in November filed the only current constitutional challenge against taking DNA at the time of arrest. The judge temporarily stopped DNA collection from the three youths, and the case is continuing.
Sixteen states now take DNA from some who have been found guilty of misdemeanors. As more police agencies take DNA for a greater variety of lesser and suspected crimes, civil rights advocates say the government’s power is becoming too broadly applied. “What we object to — and what the Constitution prohibits — is the indiscriminate taking of DNA for things like writing an insufficient funds check, shoplifting, drug convictions,” said Michael Risher, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union.
This year, California began taking DNA upon arrest and expects to nearly double the growth rate of its database, to 390,000 profiles a year from 200,000.
One of those was Brian Roberts, 29, who was awaiting trial for methamphetamine possession. Inside the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in Los Angeles last month, Mr. Roberts let a sheriff’s deputy swab the inside of his cheek.
Mr. Roberts’s DNA will be translated into a numerical sequence at the F.B.I.’s DNA database, the largest in the world.
The system will search for matches between Mr. Roberts’s DNA and other profiles every Monday, from now into the indeterminate future — until one day, perhaps decades hence, Mr. Roberts might leave a drop of blood or semen at some crime scene.
Law enforcement officials say that DNA extraction upon arrest is no different than fingerprinting at routine bookings and that states purge profiles after people are cleared of suspicion. In practice, defense lawyers say this is a laborious process that often involves a court order. (The F.B.I. says it has never received a request to purge a profile from its database.)
When DNA is taken in error, expunging a profile can be just as difficult. In Pennsylvania, Ellyn Sapper, a Philadelphia public defender, has spent weeks trying to expunge the profile taken erroneously of a 14-year-old boy guilty of assault and bicycle theft. “I’m going to have to get a judge’s order to make sure that all references to his DNA are gone,” she said.
The police say that the potential hazards of genetic surveillance are worth it because it solves crimes and because DNA is more accurate than other physical evidence. “I’ve watched women go from mug-book to mug-book looking for the man who raped her,” said Mitch Morrissey, the Denver district attorney and an advocate for more expansive DNA sampling. “It saves women’s lives.”
Mr. Morrissey pointed to Britain, which has fewer privacy protections than the United States and has been taking DNA upon arrest for years. It has a population of 61 million — and 4.5 million DNA profiles. “About 8 percent of the people commit about 70 percent of your crimes, so if you can get the majority of that community, you don’t have to do more than that,” he said.
In the United States, 8 percent of the population would be roughly 24 million people.
Britain may provide a window into America’s genetic surveillance future: As of March 2008, 857,000 people in the British database, or about one-fifth, have no current criminal record. In December, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Britain violated international law by collecting DNA profiles from innocent people, including children as young as 10.
Critics are also disturbed by the demographics of DNA databases. Again Britain is instructive. According to a House of Commons report, 27 percent of black people and 42 percent of black males are genetically registered, compared with 6 percent of white people.
As in Britain, expanding genetic sampling in the United States could exacerbate racial disparities in the criminal justice system, according to Hank Greely, a Stanford University Law School professor who studies the intersection of genetics, policing and race. Mr. Greely estimated that African-Americans, who are about 12 percent of the national population, make up 40 percent of the DNA profiles in the federal database, reflective of their prison population. He also expects Latinos, who are about 13 percent of the population and committed 40 percent of last year’s federal offenses — nearly half of them immigration crimes — to dominate DNA databases.
Enforcement officials contend that DNA is blind to race. Federal profiles include little more information than the DNA sequence and the referring police agency. Subjects’ names are usually kept by investigators.
Rock Harmon, a former prosecutor for Alameda County, Calif., and an adviser to crime laboratories, said DNA demographics reflected the criminal population. Even if an innocent man’s DNA was included in a genetic database, he said, it would come to nothing without a crime scene sample to match it. “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear,” he said.
INDEPENDENT_Johann Hari: The hidden truth behind drug company profits
Johann Hari: The hidden truth behind drug company profits
Ring-fencing medical knowledge is one of the great grotesqueries of our age
Wednesday, 5 August 2009
This is the story of one of the great unspoken scandals of our times. Today, the people across the world who most need life-saving medicine are being prevented from producing it. Here's the latest example: factories across the poor world are desperate to start producing their own cheaper Tamiflu to protect their populations – but they are being sternly told not to. Why? So rich drug companies can protect their patents – and profits. There is an alternative to this sick system, but we are choosing to ignore it.
To understand this tale, we have to start with an apparent mystery. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has been correctly warning for months that if swine flu spreads to the poorest parts of the world, it could cull hundreds of thousands of people – or more. Yet they have also been telling the governments of the poor world not to go ahead and produce as much Tamiflu – the only drug we have to reduce the symptoms, and potentially save lives – as they possibly can.
In the answer to this whodunnit, there lies a much bigger story about how our world works today.
Our governments have chosen, over decades, to allow a strange system for developing medicines to build up. Most of the work carried out by scientists to bring a drug to your local pharmacist – and into your lungs, or stomach, or bowels – is done in government-funded university labs, paid for by your taxes.
Drug companies usually come in late in the process of development, and pay for part of the expensive, but largely uncreative final stages, like buying some of the chemicals and trials that are needed. In return, then they own the exclusive rights to manufacture and profit from the resulting medicine for years. Nobody else can make it.
Although it's not the goal of the individuals working within the system, the outcome is often deadly. The drug companies who owned the patent for Aids drugs went to court to stop the post-Apartheid government of South Africa producing generic copies of it – which are just as effective – for $100 a year to save their dying citizens. They wanted them to pay the full $10,000 a year to buy the branded version – or nothing. In the poor world, the patenting system every day puts medicines beyond the reach of sick people.
This is where the solution to the swine flu mystery comes in. Ordinary democratic citizens were so disgusted by the attempt to deprive South Africa of life-saving medicine that public pressure won a small concession in the global trading rules. It was agreed that, in an overwhelming public health emergency, poor countries would be allowed to produce generic drugs. They are the exact same product, but without the brand name – or the fat patent payments to drug companies in Switzerland or the Cayman Islands.
So under the new rules, the countries of the poor world should be entitled to start making as much generic Tamiflu as they want. There are companies across India and China who say they are raring to go. But Roche – the drug company that owns the patent – doesn't want the poor world making cheaper copies for themselves. They want people to buy the branded version, from which they receive profits. Although not obliged to, they have licensed a handful of companies in the developing world to make the treatment – but they have to pay for license, and they can't possibly meet the demand.
And the WHO seems to be backing Roche – against the rest of us. They are the ones best qualified to judge what constitutes an overwhelming emergency, justifying a breaching of the patent rules. And their message is: Don't use the loophole.
Professor Brook Baker, an expert on drug patenting, says: "Why do they behave like this? Because of direct or indirect pressure from the pharmaceutical companies. It's shocking."
What will be the end-result? James Love, director of Knowledge Economy International, which campaigns against the current patenting system, says: "Poor countries are not as prepared as they could have been. If there's a pandemic, the number of people who die will be much greater than it had to be. Much greater. It's horrible."
The argument in defence of this system offered by Big Pharma is simple, and sounds reasonable at first: we need to charge large sums for "our" drugs so we can develop more life-saving medicines. We want to develop as many treatments as we can, and we can only do that if we have revenue. A lot of the research we back doesn't result in a marketable drug, so it's an expensive process.
But a detailed study by Dr Marcia Angell, the former editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, says that only 14 per cent of their budgets go on developing drugs – usually at the uncreative final part of the drug-trail. The rest goes on marketing and profits. And even with that puny 14 per cent, drug companies squander a fortune developing "me-too" drugs – medicines that do exactly the same job as a drug that already exists, but has one molecule different, so they can take out a new patent, and receive another avalanche of profits.
As a result, the US Government Accountability Office says that far from being a font of innovation, the drug market has become "stagnant". They spend virtually nothing on the diseases that kill the most human beings, like malaria, because the victims are poor, so there's hardly any profit to be sucked out.
We all suffer as a result of this patent dysfunction. The European Union's competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, recently concluded that Europeans pay 40 per cent more for their medicines than they should because of this "rotten" system – money that could be saving many lives if it was redirected towards real health care.
Why would we keep this system, if it is so bad? The drug companies have spent more than $3bn on lobbyists and political "contributions" over the past decade in the US alone. They have paid politicians to make the system work in their interests. If you doubt how deeply this influence goes, listen to a Republican congressman, Walter Burton, who admitted of the last big health care legislation passed in the US in 2003: "The pharmaceutical lobbyists wrote the bill."
There is a far better way to develop medicines, if only we will take it. It was first proposed by Joseph Stiglitz, the recent Nobel Prize winner for economics. He says: "Research needs money, but the current system results in limited funds being spent in the wrong way."
Stiglitz's plan is simple. The governments of the Western world should establish a multi-billion dollar prize fund that will give payments to scientists who develop cures or vaccines for diseases. The highest prizes would go to cures for diseases that kill millions of people, like malaria. Once the pay-out is made, the rights to use the treatment will be in the public domain. Anybody, anywhere in the world, could manufacture the drug and use it to save lives.
The financial incentive in this system for scientists remains exactly the same – but all humanity reaps the benefits, not a tiny private monopoly and those lucky few who can afford to pay their bloated prices. The irrationalities of the current system – spending a fortune on me-too drugs, and preventing sick people from making the medicines that would save them – would end.
It isn't cheap – it would cost 0.6 per cent of GDP – but in the medium-term it would save us all a fortune because our health care systems would no longer have to pay huge premiums to drug companies. Meanwhile, the cost of medicine would come crashing down for the poor – and tens of millions would be able to afford it for the first time.
Yet moves to change the current system are blocked by the drug companies and their armies of lobbyists. That's why the way we regulate the production of medicines across the world is still designed to serve the interests of the shareholders of the drug companies – not the health of humanity.
The idea of ring-fencing life-saving medical knowledge so a few people can profit from it is one of the great grotesqueries of our age. We have to tear down this sick system – so the sick can live. Only then we can globalise the spirit of Jonas Salk, the great scientist who invented the polio vaccine, but refused to patent it, saying simply: "It would be like patenting the sun."
j.hari@independent.co.uk
Ring-fencing medical knowledge is one of the great grotesqueries of our age
Wednesday, 5 August 2009
This is the story of one of the great unspoken scandals of our times. Today, the people across the world who most need life-saving medicine are being prevented from producing it. Here's the latest example: factories across the poor world are desperate to start producing their own cheaper Tamiflu to protect their populations – but they are being sternly told not to. Why? So rich drug companies can protect their patents – and profits. There is an alternative to this sick system, but we are choosing to ignore it.
To understand this tale, we have to start with an apparent mystery. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has been correctly warning for months that if swine flu spreads to the poorest parts of the world, it could cull hundreds of thousands of people – or more. Yet they have also been telling the governments of the poor world not to go ahead and produce as much Tamiflu – the only drug we have to reduce the symptoms, and potentially save lives – as they possibly can.
In the answer to this whodunnit, there lies a much bigger story about how our world works today.
Our governments have chosen, over decades, to allow a strange system for developing medicines to build up. Most of the work carried out by scientists to bring a drug to your local pharmacist – and into your lungs, or stomach, or bowels – is done in government-funded university labs, paid for by your taxes.
Drug companies usually come in late in the process of development, and pay for part of the expensive, but largely uncreative final stages, like buying some of the chemicals and trials that are needed. In return, then they own the exclusive rights to manufacture and profit from the resulting medicine for years. Nobody else can make it.
Although it's not the goal of the individuals working within the system, the outcome is often deadly. The drug companies who owned the patent for Aids drugs went to court to stop the post-Apartheid government of South Africa producing generic copies of it – which are just as effective – for $100 a year to save their dying citizens. They wanted them to pay the full $10,000 a year to buy the branded version – or nothing. In the poor world, the patenting system every day puts medicines beyond the reach of sick people.
This is where the solution to the swine flu mystery comes in. Ordinary democratic citizens were so disgusted by the attempt to deprive South Africa of life-saving medicine that public pressure won a small concession in the global trading rules. It was agreed that, in an overwhelming public health emergency, poor countries would be allowed to produce generic drugs. They are the exact same product, but without the brand name – or the fat patent payments to drug companies in Switzerland or the Cayman Islands.
So under the new rules, the countries of the poor world should be entitled to start making as much generic Tamiflu as they want. There are companies across India and China who say they are raring to go. But Roche – the drug company that owns the patent – doesn't want the poor world making cheaper copies for themselves. They want people to buy the branded version, from which they receive profits. Although not obliged to, they have licensed a handful of companies in the developing world to make the treatment – but they have to pay for license, and they can't possibly meet the demand.
And the WHO seems to be backing Roche – against the rest of us. They are the ones best qualified to judge what constitutes an overwhelming emergency, justifying a breaching of the patent rules. And their message is: Don't use the loophole.
Professor Brook Baker, an expert on drug patenting, says: "Why do they behave like this? Because of direct or indirect pressure from the pharmaceutical companies. It's shocking."
What will be the end-result? James Love, director of Knowledge Economy International, which campaigns against the current patenting system, says: "Poor countries are not as prepared as they could have been. If there's a pandemic, the number of people who die will be much greater than it had to be. Much greater. It's horrible."
The argument in defence of this system offered by Big Pharma is simple, and sounds reasonable at first: we need to charge large sums for "our" drugs so we can develop more life-saving medicines. We want to develop as many treatments as we can, and we can only do that if we have revenue. A lot of the research we back doesn't result in a marketable drug, so it's an expensive process.
But a detailed study by Dr Marcia Angell, the former editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, says that only 14 per cent of their budgets go on developing drugs – usually at the uncreative final part of the drug-trail. The rest goes on marketing and profits. And even with that puny 14 per cent, drug companies squander a fortune developing "me-too" drugs – medicines that do exactly the same job as a drug that already exists, but has one molecule different, so they can take out a new patent, and receive another avalanche of profits.
As a result, the US Government Accountability Office says that far from being a font of innovation, the drug market has become "stagnant". They spend virtually nothing on the diseases that kill the most human beings, like malaria, because the victims are poor, so there's hardly any profit to be sucked out.
We all suffer as a result of this patent dysfunction. The European Union's competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, recently concluded that Europeans pay 40 per cent more for their medicines than they should because of this "rotten" system – money that could be saving many lives if it was redirected towards real health care.
Why would we keep this system, if it is so bad? The drug companies have spent more than $3bn on lobbyists and political "contributions" over the past decade in the US alone. They have paid politicians to make the system work in their interests. If you doubt how deeply this influence goes, listen to a Republican congressman, Walter Burton, who admitted of the last big health care legislation passed in the US in 2003: "The pharmaceutical lobbyists wrote the bill."
There is a far better way to develop medicines, if only we will take it. It was first proposed by Joseph Stiglitz, the recent Nobel Prize winner for economics. He says: "Research needs money, but the current system results in limited funds being spent in the wrong way."
Stiglitz's plan is simple. The governments of the Western world should establish a multi-billion dollar prize fund that will give payments to scientists who develop cures or vaccines for diseases. The highest prizes would go to cures for diseases that kill millions of people, like malaria. Once the pay-out is made, the rights to use the treatment will be in the public domain. Anybody, anywhere in the world, could manufacture the drug and use it to save lives.
The financial incentive in this system for scientists remains exactly the same – but all humanity reaps the benefits, not a tiny private monopoly and those lucky few who can afford to pay their bloated prices. The irrationalities of the current system – spending a fortune on me-too drugs, and preventing sick people from making the medicines that would save them – would end.
It isn't cheap – it would cost 0.6 per cent of GDP – but in the medium-term it would save us all a fortune because our health care systems would no longer have to pay huge premiums to drug companies. Meanwhile, the cost of medicine would come crashing down for the poor – and tens of millions would be able to afford it for the first time.
Yet moves to change the current system are blocked by the drug companies and their armies of lobbyists. That's why the way we regulate the production of medicines across the world is still designed to serve the interests of the shareholders of the drug companies – not the health of humanity.
The idea of ring-fencing life-saving medical knowledge so a few people can profit from it is one of the great grotesqueries of our age. We have to tear down this sick system – so the sick can live. Only then we can globalise the spirit of Jonas Salk, the great scientist who invented the polio vaccine, but refused to patent it, saying simply: "It would be like patenting the sun."
j.hari@independent.co.uk
THE ECONOMIST: Employers spying on staff
Employers spying on staff
Big Brother bosses
More than ever, companies want to know what their employees are up to
Your every keystroke, silently logged
IF THE workers at Japan’s Keihin Electric Express Railway Company seem unnaturally cheerful for drizzly autumn mornings, it is because they are being watched. The firm has installed cameras with special scanners at 15 of its stations to measure employees’ smiles, ensuring that harried commuters are always greeted with a grin, however forced.
It may seem extreme to Western eyes but it is just one example of a business that is booming: employee monitoring. Companies have long kept a close eye on employees to maintain productivity and guard against theft. But the economic downturn has prompted some to redouble their efforts—and advances in technology have given them the means.
A recent report from Gartner, a consultancy, found that spending on security software rose by 18.6% to $13.5 billion in 2008. The market for security information and event management software (SIEM), which can be used to mine e-mails for keywords and security breaches, grew by 50% according to Gartner. The fastest-growing area is network forensic software, which lets firms record and playback exactly what happens on employees’ computer screens, and can even record keystrokes.
Gartner’s John Pescatore says the software is “like a giant TiVo” or “a security camera pointed at a till in a bank”. This niche doubled in value between 2007 and 2008, from $25m to $50m. Mr Pescatore predicts that the market will jump another 50% by the end of this year.
Companies use this kind of software, for example, to monitor employees who are about to leave, whether through redundancy or choice, to make sure they do not take sensitive information with them. Managers can spot the moment that an embittered salesperson copies a client database onto a flash-memory stick.
Financial-services firms are particularly vulnerable to the enemy within. The case of Sergey Aleynikov, the Goldman Sachs banker accused in July of stealing high-frequency trading software worth millions of dollars to the bank, was an illustration of the huge value of intellectual property that is at risk of going astray.
Companies also use monitoring software to protect employees from themselves. Malicious software often infects a corporate network by exploiting security holes in web browsers to infiltrate a PC when its user visits a dodgy website. Compromised machines can then be linked up to form “botnets” under external control, which are used to send spam e-mails or disable websites with a flood of bogus requests. When Procter & Gamble ran a security check of its 80,000 PCs, it found 3,000 were infected with botnet software.
Another use of employee-monitoring software is measuring productivity. Managers trying to decide who to make redundant can use forensic software to catch that slacking YouTube addict red-handed.
Even workers on the road are not safe from prying corporate eyes. Several start-up companies, such as Purewire and Zscaler, have launched software to monitor employees outside the company network. Workers accessing the internet from hotel rooms using a company laptop may be surprised to find their web browsing is being monitored by the IT department back in the office. Their page requests flow through a web monitoring service, which can block or report access to certain sites.
Monitoring software can also be used to spot “presenteeism”—employees who turn up in the office every day but then do nothing. Peter Cheese, managing director of Accenture’s talent and organisation practice, says that presenteeism has become more common as communications break down between managers and staff in firms that are under financial stress.
But although workforce-monitoring software may provide what seems like useful information, it is no help when it comes to addressing the problems it uncovers. It may also undermine morale and mutual trust. Mr Cheese warns: “If you have to check up on employees all the time, then you probably have bigger issues than just productivity.”
THE ECONOMIST
Big Brother bosses
More than ever, companies want to know what their employees are up to
Your every keystroke, silently logged
IF THE workers at Japan’s Keihin Electric Express Railway Company seem unnaturally cheerful for drizzly autumn mornings, it is because they are being watched. The firm has installed cameras with special scanners at 15 of its stations to measure employees’ smiles, ensuring that harried commuters are always greeted with a grin, however forced.
It may seem extreme to Western eyes but it is just one example of a business that is booming: employee monitoring. Companies have long kept a close eye on employees to maintain productivity and guard against theft. But the economic downturn has prompted some to redouble their efforts—and advances in technology have given them the means.
A recent report from Gartner, a consultancy, found that spending on security software rose by 18.6% to $13.5 billion in 2008. The market for security information and event management software (SIEM), which can be used to mine e-mails for keywords and security breaches, grew by 50% according to Gartner. The fastest-growing area is network forensic software, which lets firms record and playback exactly what happens on employees’ computer screens, and can even record keystrokes.
Gartner’s John Pescatore says the software is “like a giant TiVo” or “a security camera pointed at a till in a bank”. This niche doubled in value between 2007 and 2008, from $25m to $50m. Mr Pescatore predicts that the market will jump another 50% by the end of this year.
Companies use this kind of software, for example, to monitor employees who are about to leave, whether through redundancy or choice, to make sure they do not take sensitive information with them. Managers can spot the moment that an embittered salesperson copies a client database onto a flash-memory stick.
Financial-services firms are particularly vulnerable to the enemy within. The case of Sergey Aleynikov, the Goldman Sachs banker accused in July of stealing high-frequency trading software worth millions of dollars to the bank, was an illustration of the huge value of intellectual property that is at risk of going astray.
Companies also use monitoring software to protect employees from themselves. Malicious software often infects a corporate network by exploiting security holes in web browsers to infiltrate a PC when its user visits a dodgy website. Compromised machines can then be linked up to form “botnets” under external control, which are used to send spam e-mails or disable websites with a flood of bogus requests. When Procter & Gamble ran a security check of its 80,000 PCs, it found 3,000 were infected with botnet software.
Another use of employee-monitoring software is measuring productivity. Managers trying to decide who to make redundant can use forensic software to catch that slacking YouTube addict red-handed.
Even workers on the road are not safe from prying corporate eyes. Several start-up companies, such as Purewire and Zscaler, have launched software to monitor employees outside the company network. Workers accessing the internet from hotel rooms using a company laptop may be surprised to find their web browsing is being monitored by the IT department back in the office. Their page requests flow through a web monitoring service, which can block or report access to certain sites.
Monitoring software can also be used to spot “presenteeism”—employees who turn up in the office every day but then do nothing. Peter Cheese, managing director of Accenture’s talent and organisation practice, says that presenteeism has become more common as communications break down between managers and staff in firms that are under financial stress.
But although workforce-monitoring software may provide what seems like useful information, it is no help when it comes to addressing the problems it uncovers. It may also undermine morale and mutual trust. Mr Cheese warns: “If you have to check up on employees all the time, then you probably have bigger issues than just productivity.”
THE ECONOMIST
20 Ocak 2010 Çarşamba
New York Times: Fearing Hackers Who Leave No Trace
Fearing Hackers Who Leave No Trace
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — The crown jewels of Google, Cisco Systems or any other technology company are the millions of lines of programming instructions, known as source code, that make its products run.
If hackers could steal those key instructions and copy them, they could easily dull the company’s competitive edge in the marketplace. More insidiously, if attackers were able to make subtle, undetected changes to that code, they could essentially give themselves secret access to everything the company and its customers did with the software.
The fear of someone building such a back door, known as a Trojan horse, and using it to conduct continual spying is why companies and security experts were so alarmed by Google’s disclosure last week that hackers based in China had stolen some of its intellectual property and had conducted similar assaults on more than two dozen other companies.
“Originally we were saying, ‘Well, whoever got it has the secret sauce to Google and some 30 other California companies, and they can replicate it,’ ” said Rick Howard, director of security intelligence at VeriSign iDefense, which helped Google investigate the Chinese attacks. “But some of the more devious folks in our outfit were saying, ‘Well, they could also insert their own code — and they probably have.’ ”
For example, a foreign intelligence agency might find it extremely useful to know who was asking particular questions of Google’s search engine.
Security researchers took particular interest in the fact that the Silicon Valley company Adobe Systems was one of the companies hit by the recent wave of attacks.
Computer users around the globe have Adobe’s Acrobat or Reader software sitting on their machines to create or read documents, and Adobe’s Flash technology is widely used to present multimedia content on the Web and mobile phones.
“Acrobat is installed on about 95 percent of the machines in the world, and there have been a lot of vulnerabilities found in Flash,” said Jeff Moss, a security expert who sits on the Homeland Security Advisory Council. “If you can find a vulnerability in one of these products, you’re golden.”
Products from Microsoft, including Windows, Office and Internet Explorer, have long been favored targets for hackers because so many people use them. But McAfee, a leading software security firm, predicts that Adobe’s software will become the top target this year, as Microsoft has improved its products after years of attacks and Adobe’s software has become ubiquitous.
Adobe said it was still investigating the attacks but so far had no evidence that any sensitive information had been compromised.
Brad Arkin, the director of product security at Adobe, said the company generally expected to face increasing attention from hackers given the growing popularity of its products. But he added that the company employed industry-leading practices to respond to threats. “The security of our customers will always be a critical priority for Adobe,” he said.
Given the complexity of today’s software programs, which are typically written by teams of hundreds or thousands of engineers, it is virtually impossible to be perfectly confident in the security of any program, and tampering could very well go undetected.
Companies are understandably reluctant to discuss their security failures. But one notable episode shows just how damaging the secret tampering with source code can be.
Before the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, an unidentified hacker inserted secret programs into four telephone switching computers operated by the Vodafone Group, the world’s largest cellphone carrier. The programs created a clandestine tapping system that allowed unknown snoops to eavesdrop on cellphone calls and track the location of about 100 prominent Greek citizens, including then-Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis, military officials, the mayor of Athens, activists and journalists.
The infiltration was uncovered in a government investigation after a Vodafone engineer was found dead in 2005 under suspicious circumstances.
Although the recent round of attacks against Google and other companies appears to have come from China, the threat is not limited to that country, according to computer security researchers. A host of nations, private corporations and even bands of rogue programmers are capable of covertly tunneling into information systems.
“Our conventional military dominance drives our adversaries to cheat, lie and steal,” said James Gosler, a fellow at Sandia National Laboratories and a visiting scientist at the National Security Agency, in a speech last year to Pentagon employees. “The offensive technical capability to play this game is well within the reach of the principal adversaries of the United States. In fact, one could argue that some of our adversaries are better at this game than we are.” Over the years, Chinese attackers have shown the most interest in military and technology-related assets, leaving assaults on financial systems to hackers in Russia and Eastern European countries.
A look at the source code of software at a company like Adobe or Cisco can help attackers find new ways to burrow into products before the companies can fix errors in their software. In addition, the hackers can gain insights into how to insert their own code into the software so that they can have ready access to machines down the road. “One of the U.S. government’s biggest worries is that the attackers will place that source code back into products,” said George Kurtz, the chief technology officer at McAfee.
For example, the widespread appearance of counterfeit Cisco routers, which direct traffic on computer networks, has become a major concern in recent years.
Cisco is required by law to include technology in its networking products that allows investigators to tap the hardware for information. The fear is that a country like China could sell counterfeit routers containing slightly modified software that would allow hackers to dial into the systems. “That could provide the perfect over-the-shoulder view of everything coming out of a network,” Mr. Moss said.
A Cisco spokesman, Terry Alberstein, said that the company had extensively tested counterfeit Cisco routers. “We have not found a single instance of software or hardware that was modified to make them more vulnerable to security threats,” he said.
Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute, a security education organization, said American technology companies had gotten better about protecting their most prized intellectual property by creating more complex systems for viewing and changing source code. Such systems can keep a detailed account of what tweaks have been made to a software product.
But such security can be undermined by employees who open malicious files sent to them in e-mail, said Mr. Kurtz. “One of the greatest vulnerabilities remains the people element,” he added.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — The crown jewels of Google, Cisco Systems or any other technology company are the millions of lines of programming instructions, known as source code, that make its products run.
If hackers could steal those key instructions and copy them, they could easily dull the company’s competitive edge in the marketplace. More insidiously, if attackers were able to make subtle, undetected changes to that code, they could essentially give themselves secret access to everything the company and its customers did with the software.
The fear of someone building such a back door, known as a Trojan horse, and using it to conduct continual spying is why companies and security experts were so alarmed by Google’s disclosure last week that hackers based in China had stolen some of its intellectual property and had conducted similar assaults on more than two dozen other companies.
“Originally we were saying, ‘Well, whoever got it has the secret sauce to Google and some 30 other California companies, and they can replicate it,’ ” said Rick Howard, director of security intelligence at VeriSign iDefense, which helped Google investigate the Chinese attacks. “But some of the more devious folks in our outfit were saying, ‘Well, they could also insert their own code — and they probably have.’ ”
For example, a foreign intelligence agency might find it extremely useful to know who was asking particular questions of Google’s search engine.
Security researchers took particular interest in the fact that the Silicon Valley company Adobe Systems was one of the companies hit by the recent wave of attacks.
Computer users around the globe have Adobe’s Acrobat or Reader software sitting on their machines to create or read documents, and Adobe’s Flash technology is widely used to present multimedia content on the Web and mobile phones.
“Acrobat is installed on about 95 percent of the machines in the world, and there have been a lot of vulnerabilities found in Flash,” said Jeff Moss, a security expert who sits on the Homeland Security Advisory Council. “If you can find a vulnerability in one of these products, you’re golden.”
Products from Microsoft, including Windows, Office and Internet Explorer, have long been favored targets for hackers because so many people use them. But McAfee, a leading software security firm, predicts that Adobe’s software will become the top target this year, as Microsoft has improved its products after years of attacks and Adobe’s software has become ubiquitous.
Adobe said it was still investigating the attacks but so far had no evidence that any sensitive information had been compromised.
Brad Arkin, the director of product security at Adobe, said the company generally expected to face increasing attention from hackers given the growing popularity of its products. But he added that the company employed industry-leading practices to respond to threats. “The security of our customers will always be a critical priority for Adobe,” he said.
Given the complexity of today’s software programs, which are typically written by teams of hundreds or thousands of engineers, it is virtually impossible to be perfectly confident in the security of any program, and tampering could very well go undetected.
Companies are understandably reluctant to discuss their security failures. But one notable episode shows just how damaging the secret tampering with source code can be.
Before the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, an unidentified hacker inserted secret programs into four telephone switching computers operated by the Vodafone Group, the world’s largest cellphone carrier. The programs created a clandestine tapping system that allowed unknown snoops to eavesdrop on cellphone calls and track the location of about 100 prominent Greek citizens, including then-Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis, military officials, the mayor of Athens, activists and journalists.
The infiltration was uncovered in a government investigation after a Vodafone engineer was found dead in 2005 under suspicious circumstances.
Although the recent round of attacks against Google and other companies appears to have come from China, the threat is not limited to that country, according to computer security researchers. A host of nations, private corporations and even bands of rogue programmers are capable of covertly tunneling into information systems.
“Our conventional military dominance drives our adversaries to cheat, lie and steal,” said James Gosler, a fellow at Sandia National Laboratories and a visiting scientist at the National Security Agency, in a speech last year to Pentagon employees. “The offensive technical capability to play this game is well within the reach of the principal adversaries of the United States. In fact, one could argue that some of our adversaries are better at this game than we are.” Over the years, Chinese attackers have shown the most interest in military and technology-related assets, leaving assaults on financial systems to hackers in Russia and Eastern European countries.
A look at the source code of software at a company like Adobe or Cisco can help attackers find new ways to burrow into products before the companies can fix errors in their software. In addition, the hackers can gain insights into how to insert their own code into the software so that they can have ready access to machines down the road. “One of the U.S. government’s biggest worries is that the attackers will place that source code back into products,” said George Kurtz, the chief technology officer at McAfee.
For example, the widespread appearance of counterfeit Cisco routers, which direct traffic on computer networks, has become a major concern in recent years.
Cisco is required by law to include technology in its networking products that allows investigators to tap the hardware for information. The fear is that a country like China could sell counterfeit routers containing slightly modified software that would allow hackers to dial into the systems. “That could provide the perfect over-the-shoulder view of everything coming out of a network,” Mr. Moss said.
A Cisco spokesman, Terry Alberstein, said that the company had extensively tested counterfeit Cisco routers. “We have not found a single instance of software or hardware that was modified to make them more vulnerable to security threats,” he said.
Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute, a security education organization, said American technology companies had gotten better about protecting their most prized intellectual property by creating more complex systems for viewing and changing source code. Such systems can keep a detailed account of what tweaks have been made to a software product.
But such security can be undermined by employees who open malicious files sent to them in e-mail, said Mr. Kurtz. “One of the greatest vulnerabilities remains the people element,” he added.
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