Russia Gives a Gift of 10,000 Automatic Rifles to Afghanistan
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Russia Gives a Gift of 10,000 Automatic Rifles to Afghanistanby webdesk@voanews.com (Reuters)
Afghan officials took delivery of 10,000 automatic rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition as a gift from Russia on Wednesday, another sign of deepening involvement by Moscow in the war-torn country. Dependent almost entirely on foreign aid, Afghan security forces are struggling to secure the country amid a rising insurgency. As the NATO-led coalition's military presence dwindled last year, Afghan leaders reached out to Moscow, which fought a war of its own in Afghanistan...
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Syria’s state-run news agency says Syrian President Bashar Assad has received a phone call from Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
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BAMAKO (Reuters) - Gunmen attacked a checkpoint southwest of the Malian town of Timbuktu overnight killing three soldiers and wounding two others, a soldier in the town said on Wednesday.
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THE government and Apple have chosen interesting ground on which to contest the limits of government access to data on mobile devices. The case involves an F.B.I. request for Apple’s assistance in opening a phone once carried by Syed Rizwan Farook, who with his wife was responsible for the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif., that left 14 dead and 22 wounded.
On one level, this should be comfortable space for the government. First, the phone is owned by the County of San Bernardino, which issued it to Mr. Farook, an employee of its health department. The county, as Apple’s customer, has no problem having its phone opened. Second, Mr. Farook and his wife were killed in a gun battle with the police early last December. Under the law, dead people have no privacy rights.
But Apple is making a stand because the government wants it to create something against its will: code that would disable a feature that erases all content after 10 failed password attempts. Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, has said that if this happens, the floodgates will open to similar law enforcement requests, putting customers’ data at risk. And not just in the United States: Apple supporters have raised concerns that other countries, particularly China and Russia, are likely to follow suit.
Mr. Cook’s position is hyperbolic, in our view. But beyond the legal case, there is an ethics issue unfolding here.
Until 17 months ago, Apple held the key that could override protections and open phones. Apple used this “master key” to comply with court orders in drug, kidnapping, murder and terrorism cases. There was no documented instance of this code getting out to hackers or to the government. So what was the problem Apple was trying to fix when it abruptly announced, in September 2014, that with its new iOS 8, “Apple will not perform iOS data extractions in response to government search warrants”?
Some believe that allegations by Edward J. Snowden of mass surveillance of phone and Internet communications by the National Security Agency stoked fears among Apple’s customers that the government was spying on them. Perhaps an iPhone that even Apple couldn’t unlock might allay such fears, while also helping sales by offering more privacy and security.
But Mr. Snowden claimed that the N.S.A. was capturing some Americans’ Internet traffic from overseas, not that the agency was hacking into smartphones. Moreover, Apple’s position on privacy seems at odds with its own strategy of encouraging customers to pay to store personal data on iCloud, which is also vulnerable to hackers.
Apple partisans also argue that the company is trying to protect privacy in places like China, where governments could demand access to phones belonging to dissidents. But Apple could refuse those requests, or have China make them through the State Department, a means of insulating itself from unreasonable demands. That is often how the United States asks for assistance from overseas corporations in investigations.
Apple and privacy advocates have framed this debate as the government wanting to “create a back door” into people’s devices. But the Constitution protects people from unreasonable search and seizure. And for more than 200 years, the standard has been for law enforcement to obtain a warrant signed by a judge, based on probable cause.
What the government is actually requesting here is that Apple restore a key that was available until late 2014. Complying with constitutionally legal court orders is not “creating a back door”; in a democracy, that is a front door.
Mr. Cook says Apple’s ultimate goal is to provide customers “safety” from “attack.” But Mr. Cook does not seem to be talking about the kind of attack that took 14 lives in San Bernardino. Presumably, he means attacks from hackers or what he may view as government intrusion — even when that intrusion is legal.
The phone in the San Bernardino case stopped uploading data to the cloud about six weeks before the killings. That suggests there may be information inside the device that was deliberately concealed. That could include the identities of terrorists who influenced or directed the attack; such information, if pursued, could prevent future plots. Or the iPhone might contain nothing of value. It is Apple’s position that we should never know.
The ramifications of this fight extend beyond San Bernardino. Brittany Mills was a 29-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant when she was murdered in Baton Rouge, La. Apple says it can’t comply with a search warrant and open her iPhone even though the police believe the identity of the killer is contained in her device.
Ms. Mills was an Apple customer. So were some of the people who died with iPhones in their pockets in the San Bernardino and Paris attacks. How is not solving a murder, or not finding the message that might stop the next terrorist attack, protecting anyone?
Google, which owns the Android system, now indicates that it will follow Apple’s lead. For those companies, and others like them, there is a sound argument in not wanting, even indirectly, to become an arm of the government. But when you are the two companies whose operating systems handle more than 90 percent of mobile communications worldwide, you should be accountable for more than just sales.
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Almost anything Vladimir Putin touches these days is perceived by the West as a weapon, and almost everything he does is seen as an attack, very often a successful one. The Kremlin can change facts on the ground, stage quasi cease-fires and create zones of influence to exert pressure on other nations. It has done so in Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine, and the pattern is now being repeated in Syria.
Meanwhile, the West goes on declaring one Kremlin success after another in ways that many Russians themselves cannot see. Under an editorial headline “Putin’s Syria Victory,” for example, The Wall Street Journal opined on Feb. 12: Negotiations can “‘freeze’ the conflict in place, a tactic Russia used to its advantage after the invasion of Georgia in 2008 and last year’s Minsk agreement over eastern Ukraine.”
It is not by crude force alone that Russia twists events to its advantage. By using its total control over the Russian news media to sow confusion in the West, Mr. Putin has managed, in the words of the journalists Peter Pomerantsev and Michael Weiss, to “weaponize” information. In a report published in late 2014 by the New York-based Institute of Modern Russia, they outlined how the Kremlin manipulates the media, ethnic tensions and trade and financial transactions abroad to further its own ends.
Take the example of a news story by Russia’s state-run television this January about the alleged rape by migrants of a German girl of Russian extraction in Berlin. German prosecutors said the allegations were not confirmed, and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier — who usually weighs his words with great care — dismissed the affair as “propaganda.” But the Russian media succeeded in blowing the incident out of all proportion, stoking anti-immigrant protests and resentment among Germany’s nearly six million Russian speakers.
Moscow is also widely seen to have “weaponized” the migrant crisis. Many analysts and government officials — the Turkish security services among them — agree that Moscow not only thwarts U.S. policies in the Middle East, but is targeting Russia’s perceived enemies by purposely creating additional flows of migrants moving through Turkey and, ultimately, on to the European Union. Mr. Putin’s strategy, Senator John McCain said recently, is “to exacerbate the refugee crisis and use it as a weapon to divide the trans-Atlantic alliance and undermine the European project.”
Moreover, proposals to build another natural gas pipeline are being used to divide the European Union. Germany, France and Britain treat the Nord Stream 2 project as a business venture; Poland, Slovakia and Ukraine bitterly oppose it. They say it would enable Moscow to avoid funneling gas through Central Europe, deprive them of revenue from transit fees, and enable Moscow to cut off their supplies without jeopardizing its customers in Western Europe.
The German vice chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, who also serves as minister of economic affairs and energy, recently went to Warsaw to push for the project, even though his partner in Germany’s governing coalition, Chancellor Angela Merkel, remains silent. Opponents argue that another pipeline is unnecessary at a time when Nord Stream 1 is operating at half its capacity. Brussels has yet to issue a ruling.
Mr. Putin’s talent for disruption amounts to a kind of “Midas touch.” It has made him a formidable adversary in Russia’s hybrid war of force and manipulation, where anything can be a target and everything can be a weapon. It has also given him what he has long coveted: Western acknowledgment that Russia is a force to be reckoned with.
“It is much safer to be feared than to be loved” Machiavelli wrote, an observation that the Russian leader and generations of his predecessors have taken to heart. As one high-ranking Russian official told me: “We are not known for being particularly nice or elegant. But that is fine with us as long as our interests are taken seriously.”
And so Moscow is not loved but feared. But snatching land from other nations, scaring your neighbors and destabilizing your business and political rivals are not policies you can maintain forever. They will return to haunt Moscow.
Historically, the Kremlin’s rulers have always considered their country’s first line of defense against what they perceive as Western mischief to lie well beyond Russia’s borders. But Moscow has made people in the West think that its policies are motivated by aggressive revisionism, not defense. Their success is full of ironies.
It may not be true that Mr. Putin is purposefully exacerbating the refugee crisis, or that there is no sound economic logic behind Nord Stream 2. But if you have the reputation of turning everything you touch into a weapon, everything you say and do might be construed as an attack. You become everyone’s enemy. Russia’s leaders have become so adept at their game of projecting menacing ambiguity that it is now impossible for them to persuade anyone that sometimes the Russians might just simply want to do business.
Maxim Trudolyubov, editor at large at the business newspaper Vedomosti, writes The Russia File blog for the Kennan Institute and is a fellow at the Bosch Academy in Berlin.
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