*** The Partnership of the Future

By Satya Nadella

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Microsoft’s CEO explores how humans and A.I. can work together to solve society’s greatest challenges. 

From left, visually impaired Microsoft developer Saqib Shaikh stands next to CEO Satya Nadella during his keynote address at the 2016 Microsoft Build Developer Conference.

Advanced machine learning, also known as artificial intelligence or just A.I., holds far greater promise than unsettling headlines about computers beating humans at games like Jeopardy!, chess, checkers, and Go. Ultimately, humans and machines will work together—not against one another. Computers may win at games, but imagine what’s possible when human and machine work together to solve society’s greatest challenges like beating disease, ignorance, and poverty.

Doing so, however, requires a bold and ambitious approach that goes beyond anything that can be achieved through incremental improvements to current technology. Now is the time for greater coordination and collaboration on A.I.

I caught a glimpse of what this might yield earlier this year while standing onstage with Saqib Shaikh, an engineer at Microsoft, who has developed technology to help compensate for the sight he lost at a very young age. Leveraging a range of leading-edge technologies, including visual recognition and advanced machine learning, Saqib and his colleagues created applications that run on a small computer that he wears like a pair of sunglasses. The technology disambiguates and interprets data in real time. In essence, technology paints a picture of the world for him audibly instead of visually. He experiences the world in richer ways, like connecting a noise on the street to a skateboarder or sudden silence in a meeting to what co-workers might be thinking. He can “read” a menu as his technology whispers in his ear. Perhaps most important to him, he finds his own loved ones in a bustling park where they’ve gathered for a picnic.

*** Fragile states index 2016

Click on the map to open a magnified version.	Copyright (C) FFP 2016

We are pleased to present the twelfth annual Fragile States Index. The FSI focuses on the indicators of risk and is based on thousands of articles and reports that are processed by our CAST Software from electronically available sources. We encourage others to utilize the Fragile States Index to develop ideas for promoting greater stability worldwide. We hope the Index will spur conversations, encourage debate, and most of all help guide strategies for sustainable security.

*A NOT-SO SECRET HISTORY OF CYBER WAR

BEN BUCHANAN

JUNE 30, 2016

http://warontherocks.com/2016/06/a-not-so-secret-history-of-cyber-war/

The first rule of Cyber Club is that you don’t talk about Cyber Club.

This is for all the usual reasons: mission security, a culture of secrecy, some operators’ preternatural shunning of the spotlight, and — sometimes — the importance of the strategic goals at stake. Without the first rule, many cyber operations simply wouldn’t be effective.

But the first rule of Cyber Club, strictly enforced, poses challenges. It dictates that the expansion of intelligence collection, the development of new means of sabotage and attack, and the use of capabilities in what the Pentagon calls a new domain of warfare, all must take place out of view.

In the post-Snowden age, and with additional transparency from the U.S. government and incident reports from major cybersecurity companies, it goes without saying that the first rule hasn’t been consistently obeyed. But, even so, much remains undisclosed. There is much the public doesn’t know about how cyber operations work, both historically and today.

Fred Kaplan’s Dark Territory aspires to fill at least part of this gap, promising “A Secret History of Cyberwar.” The book, which begins its treatment of the topic in the early 1980s, aims to provide a sweeping account of the field’s development. It chronicles a variety of cases, from President Reagan’s WarGames-inspired worries to Stuxnet’s destructive power, and tries to fit them together into a broader narrative.

Telangana, Et Al: Judicial Independence Faces Its Greatest Threat From Within

R Jagannathan

June 29, 2016

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The Supreme Court, needs to ask itself a simple question: is independence merely related to who selects judges, or about how judges conduct themselves?

For some time now, warning signals have been flashing from many lower courts where judicial discipline has been impaired by the injection of politics into their functioning. 

This politics has been injected not by politicians, but the judiciary and the legal fraternity themselves.

The Supreme Court, which believes that judicial independence depends on not giving the government any say in the appointment of judges to the higher judiciary, needs to ask itself a simple question: is independence merely related to who selects judges, or about how judges conduct themselves?

For some time now, warning signals have been flashing from many lower courts where judicial discipline has been impaired by the injection of politics into their functioning. This politics has been injected not by politicians, but the judiciary and the legal fraternity themselves.

The Cleanup Of Public Sector Banks Is On, But The Basic Problem Remains

Vivek Kaul

June 30, 2016

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In the past one year, the bad loans of banks went up by 300 basis points

Despite rise in bad loans, it is good news because the banks (particularly public sector banks) are finally getting around to recognising their bad loans problem.

But they still need to be aggressive about recovering their loans, and govt should force the defaulting promoters to give up on their equity.

The bigger problem is the fact that the public sector banks continue to remain government-owned.

Earlier this week, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) released the biannual Financial Stability Report. And this is how the most important paragraph of the report reads:

The gross non-performing advances (GNPAs) of SCBs sharply increased to 7.6 per cent of gross advances from 5.1 per cent between September 2015 and March 2016 after the asset quality review (AQR). A simultaneous sharp reduction in restructured standard advances ratio from 6.2 per cent to 3.9 per cent during the same period resulted in the overall stressed advances ratio rising marginally to 11.5 per cent from 11.3 per cent during the period. PSBs continued to hold the highest level of stressed advances ratio at 14.5 per cent, whereas, both private sector banks (PVBs) and foreign banks (FBs), recorded stressed advances ratio at 4.5 per cent.

In fact: Happy Birthday peace: The Mizo Accord turns 30

by Sushant Singh

June 30, 2016 

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In fact: Happy Birthday peace: The Mizo Accord turns 30 

How the Indian state and erstwhile rebels chose to embrace an agreement that turned into a permanent symbol of peace and development in NE, and a template for other, later negotiations.

Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi in Aizawl on July 11, 1986, 11 days after the signing of the historic Mizo Peace Accord. (Source: PIB) On this day — June 30 — 30 years ago, the Mizo Peace Accord was signed, one of the Indian state’s enduring peacemaking successes. It was signed by the Mizo National Front (MNF) leader Laldenga, Mizoram Chief Secretary Lalkhama, and union Home Secretary R D Pradhan. In his book Working with Rajiv Gandhi, Pradhan describes in fascinating detail how the deal was eventually clinched in 1986.

On June 27, his birthday, Pradhan invited Laldenga for a cup of tea, and told him that he would retire from service in three days, and that it was up to Laldenga now to take a decision on the terms suggested to him. Laldenga told the Home Secretary that he would get back to him — but Pradhan did not hear from him for the next two days.

Around 2.30 pm on June 30, Pradhan’s last day in service, Laldenga came to see the officer alone in his office. Over a cup of tea, Pradhan told him, “Mr Laldenga, I have fallen in love with your land and the Mizos. Perhaps one day, very soon, I can greet you and your family there.”

The Brexit upside for China

BY PETER LEE 
JUNE 26, 2016 
http://atimes.com/2016/06/the-brexit-upside-for-china/

Ah, Brexit.

Yes, there are some China angles.

If the world economy goes into the dumper — though my definition of “end of the world” is a bit more double-digity than the 3% hiccup the Dow experienced post-Brexit vote on Friday — the West may be less inclined to add to its economic problems by pursuing confrontation with the PRC in the South China Sea. Maybe.

The PRC will also derive some consolation from the outsized horror that neo-liberal globalists have expressed at the excesses of direct democracy as displayed in the referendum: “emotional, bigoted, low-information voters” delivering “catastrophic” outcomes against the earnest but unheeded advice of their intellectual and moral betters.

Certainly, the prospects for the PRC yielding to demands for a referendum on the future of Hong Kong were not improved by musings such as “Britain’s Democratic Failure” (Kenneth Rogoff, Harvard boffin, previously chief economist of the IMF) and “The American Founding Fathers Had It Right: Direct Democracy is a Dead Duck” (Franz-Stefan Gady, over at The Diplomat). Give us proper guidance by the proper sort of people, seems to be the message, one that the CCP, with its allegiance to the Leninist principle of leadership by a revolutionary vanguard — and its practice of the rather sleazy minutiae of non-representative elite governance delivered via the Legco constituencies in Hong Kong—will happily endorse.

But the practical consequences of Brexit to the PRC are probably more disadvantageous.

Ride with Queen to naught?

Critical Stage In Turkey’s Relations With The European Union – Analysis

By Çınar Özen*

JUNE 29, 2016

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Turkey-EU relations have unfortunately been stuck in debates over the ‘easing of visa restrictions’ for Turkish citizens to a limited extent and for specified periods. This issue has been brought to the forefront of Turkey-EU relations without any consideration of the various difficulties that would be created by the internal developments within the EU from such a deal. The EU, as one may have easily predicted, has opted to approach the matter from an utterly narrow perspective, by linking the fate of negotiations to that of others which bear no relevance to the essential debate here. The European Parliament and the domestic public of individual EU countries have begun to discuss the issue on political grounds.

Negotiations over the issue have gained additional dimensions that far exceed the original scope of discussions among the European and Turkish policy-makers alike. As a result, we are now confronted with a crisis that is not only unwarranted but also dangerous. We can assess the current situation as an ultimate failure on the part of both the EU and Turkey. To our regret, this failure has coincided with an ill-fated period. Now we have to deal with the repercussions of a truly unnecessary political crisis when we could have capitalized on the existing political context instead, as it seems more conducive to the cultivation of Turkey-EU relations. The situation is genuinely disheartening.

THE BEST BOOK ABOUT THE IRAQ WAR ISN’T ABOUT THE IRAQ WAR

DOUGLAS A. OLLIVANT

JUNE 30, 2016

http://warontherocks.com/2016/06/the-best-book-about-the-iraq-war-isnt-about-the-iraq-war/

Iraq veterans finally have their book; a manuscript that really deals with the whole of the Iraq experience. After over a decade at war in Iraq, we now have the best first-person account, not only of fighting against the insurgency, but also what it felt like to come home after. The book gives the most vivid account of what it is like to return to a society that doesn’t understand or support your war. It also draws some conclusions about what this all means for the larger Middle East.

But the best book about the Iraq War isn’t actually about the Iraq War. In Pumpkinflowers, Matti Friedman tells the story of a small outpost — called the Pumpkin, thus the title (“flowers” refers to the code word for wounded soldiers) — during the unnamed Israeli occupation of Lebanon’s “security zone” in the 1990s. The many clear parallels between these two experiences are, quite frankly, haunting. While the two experiences are not identical, they appear plagiarized from each other.

It’s misleading to call Pumpkinflowers first-person, as the book doesn’t slip into personal narration until page 90. The first section is from the perspective of Avi, a soldier who was stationed at the Pumpkin some years before Matti would arrive. The compound literary device works, and provides both a longer historical perspective, and a second viewpoint of the events in Southern Lebanon and the Israeli’s opponents in Lebanese Hezbollah.

Iran’s empty condemnation of terrorism

By Tom Ridge
June 29, 2016

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jun/29/irans-empty-condemnation-of-terrorism/

While denouncing the Orlando shooter, Tehran leads the world in attacks

About two days after an Orlando gunman carried out the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, the Iranian foreign ministry issued a statement purporting to decry the incident. Speaking via the state-run IRNA, a spokesperson said the Iranian regime “condemns” the attack “based on its principled policy of condemning terrorism and its strong will to seriously confront this evil phenomenon.”

It’s hard to imagine an expression of sympathy more disingenuous. Tehran’s comments must be viewed against a backdrop of its status as the world’s most active state sponsor of terrorism, its steady propaganda against the United States, and its own brand of homophobia that has its origins in Islamic extremism.

Iran is not all talk. The rhetoric about Western “arrogance” and “hostility” has been backed up by the arrests of numerous people who hold both Iranian and Western citizenships. The same goes for journalists, artists and professionals who have any meaningful connections with the West, and for activists the regime deems pro-Western.

What Comes After the Istanbul Airport Attack?

Mustafa Akyol 
JUNE 29, 2016

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Relatives mourn a victim of Tuesday’s attack on Ataturk airport in Istanbul, Turkey. CreditOsman Orsal/Reuters

ISTANBUL — ON Tuesday night, just as millions of Muslims here were breaking their Ramadan fasts, three terrorists attacked the city’s busy airport. They fired randomly at passengers with automatic weapons before blowing themselves up. They killed 41 innocent people, most of them Muslims, supposedly in the name of Islam.

The assault on the airport is the latest in a series of horrible traumas inTurkey. In the past year, the country has endured almost a dozen major terrorist attacks. Some were the work of the Islamic State, which kills in the name of God; others were the work of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., which kills in the name of the people.

This country was much more peaceful a year ago. It was only last summer that a two-year-old peace process between the government and the P.K.K. fell apart. Meanwhile, the Islamic State, which initially benefited from Turkey’s lax control of the Syrian border, began to carry its violence inside Turkey. Islamic State suicide bombers first aimed at secular Kurds, then Western tourists and finally random people at the airport.

After Five Years Of Flat Revenues, Strategies Of Big Defense Companies Begin To Diverge

Loren B. Thompson

June 29, 2016

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The initial response of the biggest defense contractors was to adopt the standard litany of tactical measures that they always embrace when demand from their main customer softens. 

The U.S. defense industry is now in the sixth year of a downturn in domestic demand. Pentagon spending peaked in 2010 at nearly $700 billion, and then began falling as overseas wars wound down and the Budget Control Act capped military outlays. Industry's biggest challenge isn't so much the scale of military spending as its composition, which is heavily weighted towards personnel and readiness at the expense of modernization. In other words, Obama-era defense budgets are big on consumption, but neglect investment.

The initial response of the biggest defense contractors was to adopt the standard litany of tactical measures that they always embrace when demand from their main customer softens. Divest under-performers. Acquire niche businesses to fill out the portfolio. Do more share buybacks to strengthen stock prices. Increase foreign sales. Grow commercial revenues. And, of course, cut costs through plant consolidations and layoffs. All of the Pentagon's top suppliers have taken at least some of these steps, and the results have been spectacular.

CIA Trying to Go Digital to Stay Up on Spying Technology

Gordon Corera

June 29, 2016

CIA taps huge potential of digital technology

At CIA headquarters in Langley, the office of the director of digital innovation sits next to the agency’s in-house museum filled with artefacts from its history.

Featuring heavily are gadgets such as early secret cameras and bugging devices that would not appear out of character in a Hollywood film.

The line-up makes the point that even though the CIA is an intelligence agency whose central mission has been to recruit people to provide secrets, technology has always had a crucial role.

Andrew Hallman - who runs the recently created Directorate of Digital Innovation - has the job of making sure that the new digital world works to the CIA’s advantage rather than disadvantage.

A major focus of Mr Hallman’s effort is to use data to provide insights into future crises - developing what has been called “anticipatory intelligence”.

This means looking for ways in which technology can provide early warning of, say, unrest in a country.

“I think that’s a big growth area for the intelligence community and one the Directorate of Digital Innovation is trying to promote,” Mr Hallman says.

The volume and variety of data produced around the world has grown exponentially in recent years - a process about to accelerate as more and more items as well as people are connected up in the so-called internet of things.

The BREXIT Reality: A Key Opportunity for European Reform

By HARALD MALMGREN and ROBBIN LAIRD

June 29, 2016

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Brexit, instead of being the end of an era, may be an opportunity for a political opening to a much needed, long overdue reform process in Europe. Much of the discussion of the British vote to leave the European Union (EU) has ignored the reality of political sclerosis in Europe; the status quo is not stable; the Brexit vote can allow the British government working with other key states to re-launch Europe.

There is little question that the result of the recent British referendum shocked most members of Britain’s Parliament as well as politicians across the entire European Union. The unexpected vote to leave the EU also shocked global financial markets.

BREXIT’S MIDDLE EAST ROOTS

JON ALTERMAN

JUNE 30, 2016

http://warontherocks.com/2016/06/brexits-middle-east-roots/

Those looking to explain the roots of the Brexit campaign should look beyond distressed economies of Northumberland and Norfolk. They need to look toward Aleppo and Homs as well. The prospect is not as farfetched as it sounds.

The rise of parochial nationalists in Europe and the triumph of the “Leave” vote in Britain seem at least partially a consequence of Middle Eastern disorder. As terrorists strike Paris and Brussels, refugees flood across borders and mass in cities and towns, and the prospects for any return to normalcy in Europe seem remote. With the fraying of global order, Europeans feel an instinct to raise national borders once again.

While it is wrong to say that Europe’s current struggles are all a consequence of U.S. actions, it is hard to argue that U.S. actions and, more importantly, inaction have not strengthened the course on which Europe is now embarking. The U.S. government has made its own decisions about how best to contribute to global order, and Washington sees the Middle Eastern conflicts that loom so large in European minds as a secondary affair. President Obama’s sometime chronicler, Jeffrey Goldberg, judged that the president had concluded “that only a handful of threats in the Middle East conceivably warranted direct U.S. military intervention,” including al-Qaeda, attacks on Israel, and a nuclear-armed Iran.

The evolution of social technologies

By Martin Harrysson, Detlef Schoder, and Asin Tavakoli
June 2016

Leading companies have passed through three distinct phases of organizational usage. What should we learn from them?

Since the dawn of the social-technology era, executives have recognized the potential of blogs, wikis, and social networks to strengthen lines of company communication and collaboration, and to invigorate knowledge sharing. Many leaders have understood that by harnessing the creativity and capabilities of internal and external stakeholders, they can boost organizational effectiveness and potentially improve strategic direction setting. But they have also found that spreading the use of these new technologies across the organization requires time to overcome cultural resistance and to absorb the lessons of early successes and failures. Social technologies, after all, raise new sensitivities, seeking to breach organizational walls and instill more collaborative mind-sets.

McKinsey’s long-running research into enterprise use of social technologies provides a unique vantage point for examining the nature and pace of this evolution. Surveys of more than 2,700 global executives over each of the last ten years have probed technology diffusion within organizations and the patterns of technology adoption.1

Our review of survey data spanning the years 2005 to 2015 suggests three distinct, progressively more sophisticated phases of usage. Companies in our sample began with trial-and-error applications—for example, using social platforms such as YouTube to expand their marketing mix to attract younger consumers. They then switched their focus to fostering collaboration. Most recently, some have deployed social technologies to catalyze the cocreation of strategy. Across this spectrum, we also found that companies shifted the mix of technologies and expanded the terrain of application.

Climbing the learning curve

How to avoid Brexit

The Economist explains

Jun 29th 2016

http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2016/06/economist-explains-27

IN A referendum on June 23rd, Britons were asked: “Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?” By a margin of 52% to 48%, they voted to leave. But that answer raises two new questions. First, what will be the terms of the divorce? As it becomes clear that the separation will be costly, a second question about Brexit will come to the fore: might there still be a way to avoid it? 

The referendum was advisory, not binding. To set Brexit in motion, the British government has to invoke Article 50 of the EU’s Lisbon treaty, which lays out the process for a member to leave the club. Once it has fired that starting gun, Britain and its EU partners have two years to come to a divorce deal (the deadline can be extended only if all 27 other EU members agree). The trouble is that the deal on offer is likely to fall well short of that promised by Leave campaigners, who suggested Britain could continue to enjoy access to the giant European single market while at the same time paying less into the EU budget and restricting the free movement of people from the EU. Disgruntlement could grow, especially if the British economy plunges into recession, as business confidence and investment collapses. Calls for a rethink could grow louder. A threatened Scottish veto is unlikely to scupper Brexit. Simply holding a second referendum to undo the outcome of the first (the traditional expedient, when countries such as Ireland and Denmark voted to block EU treaty changes) looks politically impossible, despite the millions of signatures on a petition calling for one. But a combination of time, events and Parliament could—just possibly—turn Brexit into Bremain.

After Brexit, Europe’s Elite May Now Opt For Germany

Clemens Wergin 
2016-06-30

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Germany and Britain have always competed for top European talents. Now, Europe's best and brightest may see the UK as too complicated. One of many potential positive side effects of Brexit.

BERLIN — The outcome of the Brexit referendum is a shock for Germany too. With Britain's coming exit from the European Union, the weight of the EU shifts towards the weak economies that are neither fond of globalization nor particularly competitive in the face free trade.

Germany on the other hand, with its strong export economy, benefits like no other European country from the open international marketplace. With Britain out, Germany’s globally geared economy loses its toughest companion within the EU. There are already EU member countries who want to severely punish Britain in negotiations for the establishment of new contracts of collaboration. Berlin should do everything possible in order to resist such desire for vengeance.

Britain has become the biggest export market for Germany. And only if the EU grants Britain free access to the European market in the future will German companies be able to continue to have such success in the British market.

Long Live the Business Transformation Agency

By Tom Modly, Paul Brinkley

June 30, 2016

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This past October marked the ten year anniversary of the creation of the Defense Business Transformation Agency (BTA). It was an anniversary that passed without fanfare, which in the grand scheme of all things celebrated in Washington is probably fitting. To those of us involved with the founding and early growth of the BTA, this anniversary is both a sad and precautionary tale, but one we believe provides valuable lessons that can inspire others to maintain the fight for greater government agility and accountability. 

As the BTA’s original proponents, and ultimate co-founders, we believed that creating this new defense agency was not only required to control and rationalize business IT spending across the DoD enterprise, it was necessary to achieving the goal of improving cost management and operating efficiencies for the Department’s business mission. Most recognized that business transformation in DoD was going to be a decades-long proposition just as it had been for other large industrial enterprises. Unlike large private sector organizations, however, the DoD is a unique entity that turns over senior leadership every few years. Creating an agency within the Department plants a “permanent change agent” that could theoretically survive elections, different presidential administrations, and multiple waves of political appointees with diverse agendas and managerial competencies. Our insistence that the BTA be created was largely based on the assumption that once you create a government agency it is next to impossible to kill it. It was a form of “organizational jujitsu,” in that our intent was to use the character of the bureaucracy against itself—to create a permanent anti-body within the DoD that would drive change over decades. This was correct in principle, but wrong in the sense that we disregarded what role the nature of the agency as a challenger to the status quo would play in its own longevity. 

All Not Quiet on NATO’s Eastern Front

By Andrew Michta

June 30, 2016

All Not Quiet on NATO’s Eastern Front

The last NATO summit, in Wales in 2014, was defined by the recognition that with Russia having just seized Crimea and expanded war into Ukraine, the post–Cold War security regime in Europe was effectively being dismantled. Moscow was redrawing borders in Eastern Europe while accelerating its military modernization and pushing for a sphere of privileged interest along its periphery. Since then, the Baltic states, Poland, and Romania have called for NATO to return the alliance to its traditional collective territorial defense function, asking that permanent U.S. bases be established on their territories as a means to strengthen deterrence.

As NATO leaders prepare to meet in Warsaw on July 8–9, the deep security concerns of the states along the frontier remain. That is despite the fact that in the past two years the alliance has taken steps to begin addressing the deepening NATO-Russia military imbalance along the Eastern frontier, albeit short of the request for the permanent stationing of U.S. troops.

The persistent sense of insecurity in the region has been fed by Russia’s continued military buildup—it is midway through aten-year $700 billion modernization program. In the process, Russia has created an effective anti-access and area-denial (A2/AD) bubble over the Baltic and Black Seas, forcing the larger question of what capabilities NATO must have available if deterrence is to be credible, including the need for a new NATO maritime strategy. This is felt acutely in Poland, the Baltic states, and Romania, where the recent memory of Russian (Soviet) domination remains the immediate reference point for thinking about collective defense, generating persistent calls for a strategic adaptation of the alliance.

Russia is in Charge in Syria: How Moscow Took Control of the Battlefield and Negotiating Table

Sam Heller

June 28, 2016

Source Link

The Kremlin has successfully made itself the most powerful party to this war. The best the White House can do now is to make them own it. 

Earlier this month, 51 mid-level officers at the U.S. State Department wrote a “dissent cable” arguing for the limited use of U.S. military force against the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad. By using standoff weapons and airstrikes on regime targets, they said, the United States could force regime compliance with Syria’s nationwide “cessation of hostilities” and compel the regime to participate in political negotiations to resolve the country’s bloody years-long war.

Yet these diplomats seem to have mostly ignored Russia’s role in Syria — and at least for now, it is Russia, not America, that is the decisive force in the Syrian war.

Russia has leveraged its September 2015 military intervention on behalf of the Assad regime to establish itself as the central military actor in Syria’s war. With its punishing air campaign in January and February of this year, Russia gave the opposition and its backers a lesson in the destruction Russia can inflict on rebel factions, civilian centers, and key infrastructure. Russia’s intervention successfully stabilized the regime and served to deter the sort of unilateral U.S. action advocated by these State Department officials. Russia has used its military primacy to oblige others — including the United States — to treat it as the gatekeeper to a negotiated solution to the conflict.

Why It Seems Like Everyone Is Getting Hacked Lately 43 67 8 By Lily Hay Newman

Source Link

I have long made it a policy not to pay attention to news about data breaches. I'm starting to think that was a bad idea.

Well, it's understandable. In the past five years, high-profile hacks and data breaches have gotten a lot more common. But lately the frequency has really ramped up. Data from old breaches has been resurfacing, new breaches have been occurring, and particularly there have been a number of political hacks related to the U.S. presidential race. At a certain point you probably just started tuning it out, but the general apprehension remains.

Can you catch me up on all the stuff I've been avoiding?

Yeah, let's do it. In May, data from old breaches of LinkedIn, Tumblr, Myspace, and the dating service Fling resurfaced and wreaked havoc for users who hadn't changed their passwords, or who had reused those old username/password combinations on other sites. Fling's original breach was in 2011, LinkedIn's occurred in 2012, and Tumblr's happened in 2013. It's not clear when the Myspace breach took place, but it was almost definitely before 2012. All that data came pouring back out and was being sold by the same hacker, known as Peace or peace_of_mind. Ars Technica estimatedthat the these four data troves together comprised 642 million passwords.

NATO Designates Cyber as Official Domain for Warfare

Anna Ferrara / David Inserra

June 29, 2016

http://dailysignal.com/2016/06/29/nato-designates-cyber-as-official-domain-for-warfare/

Anna Ferrara is currently a member of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation.

David Inserra specializes in cyber and homeland security policy, including protection of critical infrastructure, as policy analyst in The Heritage Foundation’s Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies. Read his research.

While the claim that hackers linked to the Russian government hacked the Democratic National Committee to steal research on GOP candidates certainly grabbed headlines, a more important story on cyberspace was unfolding in Brussels.

In a press conference on June 14, NATO Allied ministers formally agreed to include cyber operations in its war domain along with air, land, and sea operations, and to amplify the defense of its computer networks.

The Future of Warfare

Declaring cyber as an official domain of warfare allows NATO to improve planning and better manage resources for cyber defense operations. In 2014, NATO stated that a cyber-attack could rise to the level of a military assault and trigger Article 5 protections, which means that NATO could respond to cyber attacks with conventional weapons just as they would for an air, land, or sea attack.

End-to-end encryption is safe, for now

Bedavyasa Mohanty

29 Jun 2016 

http://www.orfonline.org/expert-speaks/end-to-end-encryption-is-safe-for-now/

The Supreme Court of India today heard and dismissed a PIL seeking to ban messaging services like Whatsapp and Telegram that provide end-to-end encryption. End-to-end encryption protects communication from being accessed by third parties not only in transit but also when it is stored on a service providers’ servers. The service provider retains no decryption key; even if it may be directed by a court order to do so, cannot access the information. The PIL filed by Sudhir Yadav, an RTI activist, sought to project end-to-end encryption services and platforms that use them as a threat to national security.

Yadav’s concerns that these services would be used by criminals and would stonewall police investigation seem to have found no merit in the apex court who reportedly directed the petitioner to approach the appropriate authorities (which in this case could be the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) in the matter. If the matter is filed in the Tribunal, then would be the first time that the Indian judicial system has taken cognizance of the data protection and security concerns surrounding encryption.

Over the past year, encryption has polarised policy debates on law enforcement and data protection. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation had, until recently, been involved in a much publicised legal battle against Apple over accessing the iPhone 5C that belonged to Syed Rizwan Farook, the terrorist that killed 14 people in the mass shooting at San Bernardino, California. The phone, locked with a passcode, could only be accessed if Apple developed firmware to bypass it. This claim by the US government met with concerns from privacy activists and the tech industry that the creation of such a backdoor, if leaked, would not only compromise existing devices, but also set a dangerous legal precedent that could be misused by the government for unrestricted surveillance over its citizens.

THE MYTH OF HIGH-THREAT CLOSE AIR SUPPORT

MIKE PIETRUCHA

JUNE 30, 2016

http://warontherocks.com/2016/06/the-myth-of-high-threat-close-air-support/

Close air support (CAS) is air action by fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft against hostile targets that are in close proximity to friendly forces and requires detailed integration of each air mission with the fire and movement of those forces.

Department of Defense Joint Publication 3-09.3

The (eventual) retirement of the A-10 Warthog has been a challenging issue for the Air Force. The original plan to replace the A-10 entirely with F-35 has fallen by the wayside, buttressed by the reality that the extended combat deployments undergone by the fighter/attack force were never envisioned when the F-35 plan was hatched. Twenty-five years of continuous conflict, most of it irregular in nature, has highlighted the utility of a relatively slow, heavily armed multirole aircraft. Our operations over the past decades have been largely very similar to the kind of counterinsurgency demands that led to the requirement for a new attack aircraft (then called A-X) in 1966.

As the Air Force has moved toward the position that a replacement attack aircraft (A-X2 or OA-X) is necessary, one persistent issue continues to arise: What kind of aircraft might be able to do “high threat” CAS? In a presumed environment where the air defenses are too lethal for the A-10 to survive, wouldn’t the F-35 be a better alternative? The question itself is highlights a persistent trend in Air Force concept development — a mythical set of conditions that is highly unlikely, fundamentally not credible, based on a misunderstanding of the air threat, or, in this case, all three. There is no reasonable case to be made for an aircraft that can survive in a high-threat CAS environment, because there is no credible case to be made that any aircraft can survive in such an environment. It isn’t that there isn’t a need to apply airpower in such an environment. Rather, it is that having a need doesn’t equate with delivering a capability. The idea that the Air Force can deliver effective CAS in a highly contested environment is a myth, one that the Air Force would be well served to get rid of.

A Challenging Environment

5 Attitude Adjustments America's Foreign-Policy Leaders Need Now

Daniel L. Davis

June 29, 2016

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I’ve often railed against the foreign policy elite in this country and the often illogical and ineffective plans they support. But it occurs to me there is a much bigger problem at play. It’s not merely a matter of a flawed policy here or a bad decision there. The heart of the problem is much deeper. The majority of America’s increasingly defective foreign policies grow out of an unsustainable and flawed worldview.

Many on both the right and left in the United States believe America has an obligation and a responsibility to help those who want democracy to have it. There are some major problems with this belief.

On the first point is the very definition of democracy itself. When we say it is a universal human desire to live free, we subconsciously mean freedom in the American style. Thus, we believe that all who live under any other type of government are oppressed and in need of deliverance. That is one of the key beliefs that have underpinned our support of regime change as enduring American policy.

We claimed the people of Iraq deserved liberation from Saddam Hussein, even aside from the weapons of mass destruction claim. Libya was suffering under a totalitarian rule, and we supported the downfall of Qaddafi. We currently believe that Assad in Syria and the ayatollah in Iran don’t deserve to rule and should be overthrown or replaced. We celebrated the Arab Spring when many “threw off the shackles” of oppression, and we rejoiced during the Color Revolutions that took place in Europe following the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

All Not Quiet on NATO’s Eastern Front

By Andrew Michta

June 30, 2016

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The last NATO summit, in Wales in 2014, was defined by the recognition that with Russia having just seized Crimea and expanded war into Ukraine, the post–Cold War security regime in Europe was effectively being dismantled. Moscow was redrawing borders in Eastern Europe while accelerating its military modernization and pushing for a sphere of privileged interest along its periphery. Since then, the Baltic states, Poland, and Romania have called for NATO to return the alliance to its traditional collective territorial defense function, asking that permanent U.S. bases be established on their territories as a means to strengthen deterrence.

As NATO leaders prepare to meet in Warsaw on July 8–9, the deep security concerns of the states along the frontier remain. That is despite the fact that in the past two years the alliance has taken steps to begin addressing the deepening NATO-Russia military imbalance along the Eastern frontier, albeit short of the request for the permanent stationing of U.S. troops.

The persistent sense of insecurity in the region has been fed by Russia’s continued military buildup—it is midway through aten-year $700 billion modernization program. In the process, Russia has created an effective anti-access and area-denial (A2/AD) bubble over the Baltic and Black Seas, forcing the larger question of what capabilities NATO must have available if deterrence is to be credible, including the need for a new NATO maritime strategy. This is felt acutely in Poland, the Baltic states, and Romania, where the recent memory of Russian (Soviet) domination remains the immediate reference point for thinking about collective defense, generating persistent calls for a strategic adaptation of the alliance.

The British Army of the Vistula

By James Hasik

June 30, 2016

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At the beginning of last week, as everyone else in the commentariat was commenting, I resolved myself not to comment on Brexit. But after a flurry of articles about Britain turning inward, I want everyone to calm down. Just yesterday, US Secretary of State John Kerry said he thought that Brexit would actually strengthen NATO. As Jakub Grygiel of the Center for European Policy Analysis put it today, “Europeans now have clear incentives to put more efforts into NATO.” For both industrial and operational reasons, it’s the Alliance, not the Union, that guarantees security, at least west of Crimea.

For illustration, let's talk about tanks, a coin of the realm in land warfare, and a source of some serious coin for contractors too. From the recent Strong Europe Tank Challenge, we know that NATO countries produce some good tanks andgood tank crews. After a long interlude, it’s good that the games are on again, as tanks suddenly seem important again. Rumors hold—as one senior officer recently put it to me—that Uralvagonzavod “has made some advances” with its new T-14 Armata. Russian plans for wholesale replacement of all those T-72s are another matter. As Prime Minister Medvedev recently told a complaining pensioner, “there is no money, but be strong! All the best.”