An Internet tool to shield Chinese dissidents from their government seems to do just the opposite and also probes military, financial and academic networks in the U.S., Canada and Taiwan, according to research presented at Black Hat.
UltraSurf software is promoted as a means to proxy Internet traffic so that when it arrives at its destination forensic experts can't figure out where it came from.
But observation of UltraSurf at work reveals that it also automatically attempts to make HTTPS encrypted connections to unrelated servers, says Kyle Williams, security director of XeroBank, an Internet privacy vendor, who has researched the software.
Among the sites it has probed without user intervention is acquisitions.army.mil, he says, a U.S. Army URL that would be sure to attract the attention of the Great Firewall of China, the Internet filtering infrastructure the Chinese government uses to restrict the Internet access of its citizens.
The proxy system that versions of UltraSurf has used included six entry proxies, half in California and half in Taiwan, and six exit proxies, half in the U.S., two in China and two one in Taiwan, Williams says. A Chinese dissident sending traffic to an entry node in the U.S. or Taiwan and receiving traffic from the U.S. and Taiwan would also flag attention, he says.
The software used to have a two-hop proxy but that has been downgraded to one hop, he says.
The software is available free from UltraReach, whose Web site doesn’t list an address or management team. It says the company is “dedicated to providing technologies and service for people to exchange information on Internet freely and safely” and was founded “by a group of successful entrepreneurs, renowned scientists and engineers in Silicon Valley.”
UltraReach hasn't responded to a request left at its Web site for an interview about the software.
The software is promoted on the Web site of Global Internet Freedom Consortium, a group whose Web site describes its purpose this way: “Our mission is to build a pioneering online platform that breaks down the Great Firewalls blocking the free flow of information penetrating into, moving within, and originating from closed societies (e.g., China and Iran) via the Internet.”
UltraSurf does some other puzzling things. For instance, if one of the HTTPS requests hits an invalid URL, the request is redirected to UltraSurf’s page. “How does it know I got an invalid server if the traffic is really end-to-end encrypted?” Williams says.
UltraSurf has an auto-update feature that uses Google Reader RSS feeds to receive a Google Docs URL where it downloads encrypted payloads. Williams says he thinks the payloads are lists of target addresses for the software to probe.
In experimenting with UltraSurf in virtual machines, he has had the software succeed in accessing IP addresses with what seem to be internal IP addresses, making it seem that the software has successfully accessed another network. Once this happens, the software checks a few more addresses in that range as if to discover more about the apparent internal network, he says.
UltraSurf doesn’t launch any attacks, but seems to be doing Internet reconnaissance, Williams says. Reconnaissance traffic sent by earlier versions of the software had Trojans attached that set off alerts from mainstream anti-virus software. He says he doesn’t know what the Trojans did and at the time they were part of the software package anti-virus vendors might not have had signatures for them. “They might not have been known then,” he says.
Williams says he plans further research into UltraSurf.
Friday, July 31, 2009
GSM phones vulnerable to SMS hacks, Patches Coming Soon by Chris Foresman
As promised, iPhone security expert Charlie Miller, along with colleague Collin Mulliner, demonstrated a vulnerability in the SMS messaging system which can ultimately lead to hacking of an iPhone. Miller and his cohorts identified similar flaws in the Android and Windows Mobile operating systems, though no complete exploits were demonstrated. However, security researchers Zane Lackey and Luis Miras also demonstrated that the vulnerability can affect any GSM phone, though exactly how each phone reacts to the vulnerability differs.
The problem stems from the SMS system. Phones have to accept SMS messages, and these security experts have found that carefully crafted messages can be interpreted as binary instructions instead of text. Some phones may see a scrambled message—the iPhone, for instance, will show a text with just a square—or may see nothing at all. Lackey and Miras showed an exploit for a Sony Ericsson phone that simply showed the message, "New settings received. Install?" The user might easily assume the data is from a legitimate source.
Miller wrote a "non-malicious" exploit for the SMS bug on the iPhone that demonstrated that Miller could take over the device, though he stopped short of actually doing so. "What I actually demoed showed that I could get to the point I could do anything I wanted," he told Ars over the phone. "I didn't want to show actual malicious code, but if I wanted to, I could steal contact info or passwords, dial the phone, send other SMS messages, anything."
Google has already patched the vulnerability that Miller identified in Android and Apple has been working on a patch for the iPhone OS. An O2 spokesperson told BBC News that a patch would be available via iTunes on Saturday, though Apple has not confirmed that information. Miller told Ars that Apple has asked him to help test a patch, though that test hasn't yet happened. Miller did confirm that the problem affects iPhone OS up to 3.0, and he suspects it also affects current 3.1 betas. Other phone operating systems would also need patched to the fix the problem.
"AT&T is going to be involved [in the test with Apple], and they are going to monitor and see if they can filter these messages or do anything on their end," Miller said. Lackey and Miras have said that they are working with all major carriers to fix the problems they identified as well. Miller told Ars it would be relatively trivial for AT&T or other carriers to simply filter out "bad" SMS messages that he has identified, which would stop the problem before it ever got to a user's phone.
Miller said that users shouldn't be worried yet—that is unless Apple and other vendors are slow to release patches. "Probably nothing is going to happen for at least a week," Miller said. "What I gave out at Black Hat wasn't enough to actually just turn around and write malware. It took me about two and a half weeks for me to write all the code for my exploit, so it would take some time to be able to duplicate that."
The problem stems from the SMS system. Phones have to accept SMS messages, and these security experts have found that carefully crafted messages can be interpreted as binary instructions instead of text. Some phones may see a scrambled message—the iPhone, for instance, will show a text with just a square—or may see nothing at all. Lackey and Miras showed an exploit for a Sony Ericsson phone that simply showed the message, "New settings received. Install?" The user might easily assume the data is from a legitimate source.
Miller wrote a "non-malicious" exploit for the SMS bug on the iPhone that demonstrated that Miller could take over the device, though he stopped short of actually doing so. "What I actually demoed showed that I could get to the point I could do anything I wanted," he told Ars over the phone. "I didn't want to show actual malicious code, but if I wanted to, I could steal contact info or passwords, dial the phone, send other SMS messages, anything."
Google has already patched the vulnerability that Miller identified in Android and Apple has been working on a patch for the iPhone OS. An O2 spokesperson told BBC News that a patch would be available via iTunes on Saturday, though Apple has not confirmed that information. Miller told Ars that Apple has asked him to help test a patch, though that test hasn't yet happened. Miller did confirm that the problem affects iPhone OS up to 3.0, and he suspects it also affects current 3.1 betas. Other phone operating systems would also need patched to the fix the problem.
"AT&T is going to be involved [in the test with Apple], and they are going to monitor and see if they can filter these messages or do anything on their end," Miller said. Lackey and Miras have said that they are working with all major carriers to fix the problems they identified as well. Miller told Ars it would be relatively trivial for AT&T or other carriers to simply filter out "bad" SMS messages that he has identified, which would stop the problem before it ever got to a user's phone.
Miller said that users shouldn't be worried yet—that is unless Apple and other vendors are slow to release patches. "Probably nothing is going to happen for at least a week," Miller said. "What I gave out at Black Hat wasn't enough to actually just turn around and write malware. It took me about two and a half weeks for me to write all the code for my exploit, so it would take some time to be able to duplicate that."
Smart Meters Not Ready for Primetime by Erica Naone
Money from the United States' stimulus package is flowing into the energy industry, in part to improve the infrastructure for delivering electricity by adding "smart meters" to homes. But security researchers say the dollars are flowing too fast, without enough attention to security.
Mike Davis, a senior security consultant at the Seattle-based security research company IOActive, tested several varieties of the new meters and presented some of his findings yesterday at Black Hat, a computer-security conference in Las Vegas.
Davis explains that smart meters contain a radio chip and mesh networking software that enable them to automatically report customers' energy use, automatically update the software running the devices, and have remote controls that allow a utility to shut off a customers' electricity over the network. Previously, meters have been able to report energy use wirelessly, but it required using a short-range signal that could be picked up from a utility company vehicle as it drove by. The new meters are more automated, and could operate with less human intervention, Davis says.
With the influx of stimulus dollars, Davis says, a lot of companies have huge lists of features they want to add to the meters. There is also a high level of competition between manufacturers so products are being rushed to market, he says.
Of particular concern to Davis are commands that allow remote control over consumers' meters. Though individuals have long tried to hack into their meters to save themselves a few dollars, the results of remote control could have a broader effect. "This generation of smart meters is probably not mature enough to handle the remote disconnect feature," he says.
Though Davis is not at liberty to disclose what brands of meters he tested, he says that, for one brand, he was able to design a worm that he could install in one meter and propagate through the network. In simulations, Davis calculated that, in a region where 100 percent of homes have a smart meter installed, the worm could infect some 15,000 meters in the span of 24 hours. Once the worm spreads, an attacker could use it to give commands to the infected meters such as to shut down.
Davis says all the meters he has tested have security flaws that need further examination before the devices are widely deployed. "Cleaning up from a compromise is going to be expensive and slow," he says, and it's better to fix as much as possible before that happens.
Davis is not the only one investigating the security of smart meters. Security researcher Travis Goodspeed also presented at Black Hat his attacks on some of the chips that typically go into smart meters (Goodspeed specializes in chips that use the Zigbee protocol, a communications protocol that's typically used for the low-power digital radios found in smart meters). Goodspeed believes that the chips need more work. "The Zigbee chips presently available are not secure against a local attack," Goodspeed says, meaning that, if an attacker can get access to a device, he believes the attacker can compromise it.
Davis believes better security is possible on the devices. For example, he suggested that the meters themselves could be programmed to detect and report anomalies in the network. In his talk, Davis said, "Customers need to pressure their utilities to make conservative choices when it comes to the security of their meters."
Mike Davis, a senior security consultant at the Seattle-based security research company IOActive, tested several varieties of the new meters and presented some of his findings yesterday at Black Hat, a computer-security conference in Las Vegas.
Davis explains that smart meters contain a radio chip and mesh networking software that enable them to automatically report customers' energy use, automatically update the software running the devices, and have remote controls that allow a utility to shut off a customers' electricity over the network. Previously, meters have been able to report energy use wirelessly, but it required using a short-range signal that could be picked up from a utility company vehicle as it drove by. The new meters are more automated, and could operate with less human intervention, Davis says.
With the influx of stimulus dollars, Davis says, a lot of companies have huge lists of features they want to add to the meters. There is also a high level of competition between manufacturers so products are being rushed to market, he says.
Of particular concern to Davis are commands that allow remote control over consumers' meters. Though individuals have long tried to hack into their meters to save themselves a few dollars, the results of remote control could have a broader effect. "This generation of smart meters is probably not mature enough to handle the remote disconnect feature," he says.
Though Davis is not at liberty to disclose what brands of meters he tested, he says that, for one brand, he was able to design a worm that he could install in one meter and propagate through the network. In simulations, Davis calculated that, in a region where 100 percent of homes have a smart meter installed, the worm could infect some 15,000 meters in the span of 24 hours. Once the worm spreads, an attacker could use it to give commands to the infected meters such as to shut down.
Davis says all the meters he has tested have security flaws that need further examination before the devices are widely deployed. "Cleaning up from a compromise is going to be expensive and slow," he says, and it's better to fix as much as possible before that happens.
Davis is not the only one investigating the security of smart meters. Security researcher Travis Goodspeed also presented at Black Hat his attacks on some of the chips that typically go into smart meters (Goodspeed specializes in chips that use the Zigbee protocol, a communications protocol that's typically used for the low-power digital radios found in smart meters). Goodspeed believes that the chips need more work. "The Zigbee chips presently available are not secure against a local attack," Goodspeed says, meaning that, if an attacker can get access to a device, he believes the attacker can compromise it.
Davis believes better security is possible on the devices. For example, he suggested that the meters themselves could be programmed to detect and report anomalies in the network. In his talk, Davis said, "Customers need to pressure their utilities to make conservative choices when it comes to the security of their meters."
Apple Fixes iPhone OS SMS Security Flaw and Exploit
The SMS security flaw and exploit in the iPhone OS had been at the center of one of the most talked about exploits at this week's Black Hat Technical Security: USA 2009. The security flaw and exploit involved malicious SMS messages that could allow hackers to take control of any GSM phone. The flaw could have let them make calls, send text messages, or almost anything they wanted on the victim's GSM phone.
Security researchers Collin Mulliner and Charlie Miller showed the flaw in action at Black Hat earlier this week. Miller said the flaw could take control of the iPhone because of the way the device handled the SMS message. Researchers at Black Hat also showed how SMS vulnerabilities can affect Windows Mobile smartphones and Symbian phones including those from Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Samsung, HTC, and others.
According to Apple, the iPhone OS 3.0.1 update released today improves the device's memory handling, essentially fixing the exploit and the iPhone OS 3.1 Beta 3 released to developers several days ago also improves the device's memory handling, essentially fixing the exploit.
Security researchers Collin Mulliner and Charlie Miller showed the flaw in action at Black Hat earlier this week. Miller said the flaw could take control of the iPhone because of the way the device handled the SMS message. Researchers at Black Hat also showed how SMS vulnerabilities can affect Windows Mobile smartphones and Symbian phones including those from Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Samsung, HTC, and others.
According to Apple, the iPhone OS 3.0.1 update released today improves the device's memory handling, essentially fixing the exploit and the iPhone OS 3.1 Beta 3 released to developers several days ago also improves the device's memory handling, essentially fixing the exploit.
Challenges, Solutions for Western Intelligence by William Maclean and Janet McBride
Improving intelligence collection, coordination and analysis has been a major focus for Western governments since the Sept 11, 2001 attacks and the 2003 Iraq invasion, events involving profound faults in preparedness.
Here are some of the challenges, and solutions, being addressed by intelligence service managers.
Challenges
A changing threat.
Al Qaeda has been a big change for the services, created in a previous era essentially to fight bureaucracies like themselves. A lack of al Qaeda hierarchy and the brief lifecycle of sub-groups acting without central direction make these networks hard to penetrate.
The moral high ground.
If spies want to recruit good sources, the pool of potential sources must believe the agency they will help is worthy of the risks they take, former British Secret Intelligence Service head Richard Dearlove and co-author Tom Quiggin wrote. For more, click here.
Information Overload
Explosive growth in open source information from the internet and new media, more active covert collection and the blending of overseas and domestic intelligence streams puts great pressure on analytical capacity, according to Jim Judd, former Director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
Consultant Kevin O'Brien says information deluge "creates the danger of over reliance on the technology to do the so-called thinking for you." For more, click here.
Generation Gap
Thomas Fingar, a former U.S. Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis, has praised the impulse among younger analysts to collaborate and conduct peer review. "For them it is the natural way to operate." He has said older spies have seen this impulse as "somewhere between" heretical and impossible.
Jonathan Evans of Britain's MI5 Security Service said in January the average age of his staff of over 3,000 was under 40. Fingar said in 2008 that 55 percent of U.S. intelligence community analysts had joined since 9/11, adding there was a significant lack of mid-career analysts. For more, click here.
Off-Target education
Writing on the U.S. intelligence community, Douglas Hart and Steven Simon have said it is "saddled with large numbers of new recruits who are, on average, ill equipped to manage the complex analytical demands posed by a new, highly distributed and strongly motivated adversary operating within a framework of values, beliefs and experiences alien to the average American." For more, click here.
Culture: Cathedrals versus Pancake People
Tracking a leaderless foe which frames its cause in religious terms requires rare cultural sensitivity and language skills, say analysts. Some fret that web-surfing clogs minds with data shorn of this context. The educational ideal -- creating a "complex, dense and 'cathedral-like' structure of the highly educated and articulate personality", in the words of U.S. playwright Richard Foreman -- has given way to the reality of `pancake people', youths whose knowledge is spread wide and thin, wrote Nicolas Carr. This view is dismissed as a caricature by many in the IT community. For more, click here.
Solutions
More scope for frontline agents.
According to Dearlove, frontline personnel and mid-level managers must be allowed to cultivate their own relationships and methods to track structureless groups, with best practice then shared with other teams. The brief lifecycle of some militant cells means a source will frequently be of use only during planning of one attack, when in the past sources could last several years, so recruitment must be constant and dynamic.
Online Team Working
To prod analysts into sharing information and peer reviewing their work, U.S. intelligence is developing areas of secure cyberspace where work in progress can be posted for discussion, virtual analytical teams set up, or information retrieved across different agencies. These portals include A-Space, Intellipedia and the Library of National Intelligence, variously featuring wikis, blogs, social networking, RSS feeds and content tagging.
Commenting on Intellipedia, Fingar has said: "It's not anonymous. We want people to establish a reputation. If you're really good, we want people to know you're good ... If you're an idiot, we want that known too."
More Transparency
More openness has been forced on spies by public inquiries, court proceedings, the media, greater use of freedom of information law and a desire by politicians to respond to public concern. Openness helps build community support, but also raises the issue as to what is legitimately secret and what is not.
Joint Training Across Agencies
The distinction between domestic and foreign intelligence is increasingly blurred, and so joint training courses are needed for intelligence, police and military personnel. "It may have been a form of heresy to state this five years ago," according to Dearlove and co-author Quiggin, writing in 2006.
Global Futures Forum
The GFF is a U.S.-backed, global intelligence networking forum that gathers government and non-government experts from more than 30 countries to discuss transnational threats. Forum members meet in small community gatherings in the United States and abroad, in larger annual forums, and on a password-protected Web site that enables online conversations around the clock.
New Players
Apart from the GFF, analysts must continuously assess where the best knowledge and expertise on a given topic is – and it's increasingly likely it is not resident within the services, but in a company or university. Traditional services now really don't have a monopoly, or possibly even majority share over, intelligence in the way that they used to, says O'Brien.
Here are some of the challenges, and solutions, being addressed by intelligence service managers.
Challenges
A changing threat.
Al Qaeda has been a big change for the services, created in a previous era essentially to fight bureaucracies like themselves. A lack of al Qaeda hierarchy and the brief lifecycle of sub-groups acting without central direction make these networks hard to penetrate.
The moral high ground.
If spies want to recruit good sources, the pool of potential sources must believe the agency they will help is worthy of the risks they take, former British Secret Intelligence Service head Richard Dearlove and co-author Tom Quiggin wrote. For more, click here.
Information Overload
Explosive growth in open source information from the internet and new media, more active covert collection and the blending of overseas and domestic intelligence streams puts great pressure on analytical capacity, according to Jim Judd, former Director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
Consultant Kevin O'Brien says information deluge "creates the danger of over reliance on the technology to do the so-called thinking for you." For more, click here.
Generation Gap
Thomas Fingar, a former U.S. Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis, has praised the impulse among younger analysts to collaborate and conduct peer review. "For them it is the natural way to operate." He has said older spies have seen this impulse as "somewhere between" heretical and impossible.
Jonathan Evans of Britain's MI5 Security Service said in January the average age of his staff of over 3,000 was under 40. Fingar said in 2008 that 55 percent of U.S. intelligence community analysts had joined since 9/11, adding there was a significant lack of mid-career analysts. For more, click here.
Off-Target education
Writing on the U.S. intelligence community, Douglas Hart and Steven Simon have said it is "saddled with large numbers of new recruits who are, on average, ill equipped to manage the complex analytical demands posed by a new, highly distributed and strongly motivated adversary operating within a framework of values, beliefs and experiences alien to the average American." For more, click here.
Culture: Cathedrals versus Pancake People
Tracking a leaderless foe which frames its cause in religious terms requires rare cultural sensitivity and language skills, say analysts. Some fret that web-surfing clogs minds with data shorn of this context. The educational ideal -- creating a "complex, dense and 'cathedral-like' structure of the highly educated and articulate personality", in the words of U.S. playwright Richard Foreman -- has given way to the reality of `pancake people', youths whose knowledge is spread wide and thin, wrote Nicolas Carr. This view is dismissed as a caricature by many in the IT community. For more, click here.
Solutions
More scope for frontline agents.
According to Dearlove, frontline personnel and mid-level managers must be allowed to cultivate their own relationships and methods to track structureless groups, with best practice then shared with other teams. The brief lifecycle of some militant cells means a source will frequently be of use only during planning of one attack, when in the past sources could last several years, so recruitment must be constant and dynamic.
Online Team Working
To prod analysts into sharing information and peer reviewing their work, U.S. intelligence is developing areas of secure cyberspace where work in progress can be posted for discussion, virtual analytical teams set up, or information retrieved across different agencies. These portals include A-Space, Intellipedia and the Library of National Intelligence, variously featuring wikis, blogs, social networking, RSS feeds and content tagging.
Commenting on Intellipedia, Fingar has said: "It's not anonymous. We want people to establish a reputation. If you're really good, we want people to know you're good ... If you're an idiot, we want that known too."
More Transparency
More openness has been forced on spies by public inquiries, court proceedings, the media, greater use of freedom of information law and a desire by politicians to respond to public concern. Openness helps build community support, but also raises the issue as to what is legitimately secret and what is not.
Joint Training Across Agencies
The distinction between domestic and foreign intelligence is increasingly blurred, and so joint training courses are needed for intelligence, police and military personnel. "It may have been a form of heresy to state this five years ago," according to Dearlove and co-author Quiggin, writing in 2006.
Global Futures Forum
The GFF is a U.S.-backed, global intelligence networking forum that gathers government and non-government experts from more than 30 countries to discuss transnational threats. Forum members meet in small community gatherings in the United States and abroad, in larger annual forums, and on a password-protected Web site that enables online conversations around the clock.
New Players
Apart from the GFF, analysts must continuously assess where the best knowledge and expertise on a given topic is – and it's increasingly likely it is not resident within the services, but in a company or university. Traditional services now really don't have a monopoly, or possibly even majority share over, intelligence in the way that they used to, says O'Brien.
Minimizing Potential Threats from Iran: Assessing Economic Sanctions and Other U.S. Policy Options by Matthew Levitt
On July 30, 2009, Matthew Levitt, senior fellow and director of the Stein Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at The Washington Institute, testified before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs on the efficacy of existing and potential new economic sanctions in the effort to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear arsenal. The following are his prepared remarks.
Chairman Dodd, Ranking Member Shelby, committee members: Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today to discuss the utility and applicability of targeted financial measures as part of a strategic policy, leveraging all elements of national power to deal with the threats presented by Iran's nuclear program.
As a former deputy assistant secretary of the treasury who participated in the department's outreach to the private sector as early as 2006, I am often asked why I support the use of targeted financial measures -- both formal sanctions and informal outreach to the private sector -- if the use of these tools has not stopped Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon. If these efforts have neither altered the decisionmaking of Iranian leaders nor disrupted Iran's ability to continue developing its nuclear program, are they really effective?
The answer is that targeted financial sanctions were never intended to solve the problem of Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons. Sanctions are no silver bullet. On their own, these financial tools can only do so much. But coupled with other tools -- especially robust diplomacy, but also a credible military presence in the region -- financial measures can effectively create leverage for diplomacy. That diplomacy should focus not only on Iran, but on Russia, China, our European and Asian allies, the Gulf States, and others.
What can sanctions accomplish? They are intended to advance any of the following three goals: (1) disrupt Iran's illicit activities; (2) deter third parties from knowingly or unintentionally facilitating Iran's illicit activities; and (3) impact Iran's decisionmaking process so that continued pursuit of illicit activities is reconsidered.
Note, for example, that despite the many problems with the declassified key judgments of the November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran's nuclear intentions and capabilities, the report accurately noted that the tool most likely to alter Iran's nuclear calculus -- if any -- is targeted political and economic pressure, not military action. According to the NIE, Iran's decision to halt its nuclear weapons program in 2003 was "in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran's previously undeclared nuclear work." The key judgments conclude that the intelligence community's "assessment that the [nuclear weapons] program probably was halted primarily in response to international pressure suggests Iran may be more vulnerable to influence on the issue that we judged previously."
Iran may or may not have actually halted its weapons program. Even if it did, this may actually mean far less than the NIE suggested, if what was suspended was a piece of the program that could be quickly resumed at any time. But the potential of such tools to impact the decisionmaking process of key Iranian leaders is worth noting.
That said, recent events suggest that Iran's current hardline leadership sees the pursuit of a nuclear program and ongoing tension with the West as positive things that support their primary objective: regime survival. But even if the goal of altering the Iranian regime's nuclear calculus is not so likely under current circumstances, the other two goals of financial sanctions -- first, constricting the operating environment and making it more difficult for Iran to engage in illicit activities by disrupting its finance, banking, insurance, shipping, and business dealings; second, deterring others from partnering with Iran -- remain important objectives that can be furthered by employing financial tools.
While some question the wisdom of employing sanctions when the administration is actively seeking to pursue engagement with Iran, and others question the wisdom of employing sanctions that might give the regime a straw man and scapegoat to blame for all of Iran's ills, my own conclusion is just the opposite. This is exactly the time to use financial tools to build leverage for diplomacy.
With the hardline regime so significantly delegitimized -- to the point that both moderates and hardliners have overtly questioned decisions of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei -- the regime's ability to easily deflect criticism over the state of the Iranian economy or sanctions imposed over Iran's nuclear program has been significantly undermined. Indeed, the regime faces a far greater legitimacy crisis over its handling of the sham election, the Basij crackdown targeting Iranian citizens, the demonization of protestors by senior leaders, and the incarceration of protestors. Given that Iran's nuclear program continues to progress, the one thing that is clear is that we do not have the luxury of time. The question is not whether or not to use sanctions, but what sanctions, targeting which entities, using which tools and authorities, and in what order?
To be sure, diplomatic engagement, directly with Iran or with others focused on Iran, whether broad or limited, is severely undermined when Iran is able to pursue its nuclear ambitions, support terrorist groups, and erode security in Iraq and Afghanistan without consequence. As Washington Post columnist David Ignatius put it, "[T]hese new, targeted financial measures are to traditional sanctions what Super Glue is to Elmer's Glue-All." Periodically reassessing and adjusting the package of targeted financial measures is the tool most likely to create enough diplomatic leverage to avoid a military confrontation. Short of creating such leverage, negotiation and diplomacy alone will not convince Iran to abandon its nuclear program.
What Sanctions Should Be Employed?
First, we should actively seek international consensus on multilateral sanctions through the United Nations that would be ready to be implemented in the early fall should Iran fail to respond to the administration's offer of engagement by the deadline of the G-8 summit and the UN General Assembly that follows shortly thereafter. As important as the entities to be listed will be the unanimity of the decision to impose sanctions, so it is critical that the administration engage in robust diplomatic engagement with China and Russia now.
New multilateral designations should focus on entities engaged in illicit conduct in support of Iran's proliferation program, in particular those already designated unilaterally by the United States. For example:
• Bank Mellat. Bank Mellat was designated by the United States in October 2007 for providing banking services in support of UN-designated Iranian nuclear entities, namely the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) and Novin Energy Company. A multilateral designation would go far in constricting the activities of the banks foreign regional offices in South Korea, Armenia, and Turkey.
• Bank Melli. As FINCEN noted in a March 2008 advisory to the financial sector, "UNSCR 1803 calls on member states to exercise vigilance over the activities of financial institutions in their territories with all banks domiciled in Iran, and their branches and subsidiaries abroad. While Bank Melli and Bank Saderat were specifically noted, the United States urges all financial institutions to take into account the risk arising from the deficiencies in Iran's AML/CFT regime." Iran's largest bank, Bank Melli was also designated by the Treasury Department in October 2007 for providing banking services to entities involved in Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile programs, including entities listed by the UN for their involvement in those programs. Following up on the warning included in UNSCR 1803 with outright designations of these banks would send a strong message.
• Khatam al-Anbya. The UN should also follow up on the U.S. and EU designations of the Khatam al-Anbya construction company (also called Ghorb), which is one of the most significant of the multiple entities owned or operated by the IRGC that have been designated by the United States. With the increased militarization of the Iranian regime, and the blatant abuses of the IRGC-affiliated Basij militia, now is the time to target IRGC-affiliated entities.
• IRISL. The U.S. designation of Iran's national maritime carrier, the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines (IRISL), in September 2008, was another key unilateral action that should be made multilateral. IRISL was designated for facilitating the transport of cargo for UN designated proliferators and for falsifying documents and using deceptive schemes to shroud its involvement in illicit commerce. And as the State Department noted at the time of the designation, IRISL had already been "called out by the UN Security Council as a company that has engaged in proliferation shipments."
Multilateral action, however, is not only difficult to achieve but can often lead to lowest common denominator decisionmaking. While international consensus is built for robust action at the United Nations, the United States should pursue both unilateral and bilateral financial measures (together with other States or regional bodies like the EU) focused on IRGC-affiliated and other individuals and institutions facilitating Iran's illicit conduct.
The U.S. should also actively support the efforts of multilateral technocratic bodies such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which has issued a series of increasingly blunt warnings about doing business with Iran. The FATF is a thirty-four-member technocratic body based in Paris which seeks to set global standards on combating money laundering and terrorism financing. The FATF has put out multiple warnings on Iran -- the first in October 2007 and the most recent in February 2009. In these warnings, FATF instructed its members to urge their financial institutions to use "enhanced due diligence" when dealing with Iran. In the second warning, the FATF president also urged Iran to address the "shortcomings" in its anti-money-laundering and anti-terrorist-financing regimes immediately. The most recent warning instructed countries to begin developing "countermeasures" to deal with Iran's illicit financial activities -- an indication of how concerned the international body was with Iran's behavior in this arena. After one such warning, Iran sent a delegation to lobby FATF (of which it is not a member) but FATF dismissed the Iranian delegation's claims that legislative changes fixed the regime's shortcomings, calling the changes "skimpy" and noting their "big deficiencies."
Informal sanctions, what I describe as leveraging market forces, should be continued and expanded. As my colleague Michael Jacobson has also argued, the direct outreach that Treasury has pursued with the international financial sector should be broadened to include other U.S. agencies and departments, notably the Commerce Department, engaging with a wider array of private-sector actors in the insurance, shipping, and other industries. We should continue to think creatively about how to leverage our existing influence to achieve our goals. For example, coupled with additional action targeting IRISL, an effort to convince countries concerned about Iran's illicit and deceptive conduct to deny landing rights to Iran Air would further constrict Iran's ability to move funds and material for illicit purposes and isolate the regime internationally. Even in today's economy, and to a certain extent because of it, the private sector is very sensitive to reputational risk and is acutely aware of its due diligence and fiduciary obligations to its shareholders.
Less Targeted Financial Measures
Targeted financial measures have proven impressively effective at disrupting Iran's illicit conduct, but given the short timeframe and the rapid progress Iran is making on its nuclear program, it may be time to consider more drastic and less targeted measures. Secretary of State Clinton has spoken about the possibility of inflicting "crippling sanctions" on Iran, and one particularly promising avenue to pursue would be to exploit Iran's continued reliance on foreign refined petroleum to meet its domestic consumption needs. Due to insufficient refining capacity at home, Iran must still reimport 40 percent of its domestically consumed petroleum from refineries abroad. The prospect of targeting Iran's continued ability to reimport this refined petroleum back into the country could be a powerful tool targeting a regime soft spot. Consider as precedent the dramatic failure of the Iranian regime's gas ration card program in June 2007. The cards were loaded with a six-months ration, but many Iranians reportedly used their entire ration within weeks. Indeed, Iran worries each winter about a possible heating fuel shortage and the consequence of not being able to provide the public with sufficient fuel subsidies.
Technology and Arms Transfers
We should also focus our attention on developing a more systematic approach for dealing with Tehran's efforts to transfer technology and arms to radical allies in the Middle East and elsewhere, even as Washington seeks to engage Iran. Earlier this year, Cyprus impounded the Iranian-chartered freighter Monchegorsk, a vessel laden with war materiel bound for Syria (and perhaps beyond). The episode highlighted the shortcomings of current UN and European Union sanctions on Iran, and underscores the need to fill the gaps in the available policy tools to deal with Iranian arms transfers to its allies and surrogates. To close these gaps, the United States should work with its allies and the international community on a number of fronts:
• Encourage the UN sanctions committee to issue a Security Council communique to the UN General Assembly emphasizing the obligation of all member states, including Iran and Syria, to fully abide by the UN ban on arms transfers;
• Work with the EU to expand its current policy banning the sale or transfer to Iran of "all arms and related material, as well as the provision of related assistance, investment and services" to include a ban on the purchase or transfer from Iran of the same;
• Work with UN and EU member states to adopt legislation pertaining to Iranian arms and technology transfers, to enable them to fulfill their UN and EU obligations. Encourage regional organizations in South America and South and East Asia to adopt similar resolutions;
• Work with the EU and Turkey (the de facto eastern gateway to Europe) to develop an enhanced customs and border security regime to prevent Iranian arms and technology transfers through Turkey;
• Engage the private sector to draw attention to the risk of doing business with IRISL, its subsidiaries, and other banned entities. Given Iran's history of deceptive financial and trade activity, extra scrutiny should be given to any ship that has recently paid a call to an Iranian port;
• Encourage countries to require ports and/or authorities to collect detailed, accurate, and complete data regarding all cargo being shipped to or through their countries (especially from risk-prone jurisdictions like Iran), to conduct rigorous risk assessments, and to proceed with actual inspections as necessary;
• Encourage implementation of the World Customs Organization's (WCO) draft Framework of Standards to Secure and Facilitate Global Trade. The WCO represents 174 Customs administrations across the globe (including Iran) that collectively process approximately 98 percent of world trade. Under the proposed framework, a risk-management approach would be implemented for all cargo to identify high-risk shipments at the earliest possible time. Participating members would benefit from enhanced security and efficiency, and could benefit from lower insurance premiums.
There are signs of success, and with continuing signs of domestic discontent in Iran, targeted financial measures can increase the political pressure on the regime. Indeed, long before the June 12 elections, the U.S.-led campaign had played a role in causing domestic political problems for Iranian hardliners as well. In September 2007, former president Ahkbar Hasehemi Rafsanjani, a moderate opposed to the regime's confrontational approach, was elected as the speaker of the Assembly of Expert -- the body that chooses and has the power to remove Iran's supreme leader. Several days earlier, Supreme Leader Khamenei dismissed Yahya Rahim Safavi, the IRGC's commander since 1997, who was blacklisted by the UN in March 2007. Safavi's replacement, Muhammad Ali Jafari, confirmed that Safavi was removed primarily "due to the U.S. threats." Finally, Motjtaba Hashemi Samarah, one of President Ahmadinezhad's close allies, was removed from his position as the deputy interior minister. Iran's former chief nuclear negotiator, Hasan Rowhani, disparaged the country's growing international isolation and stated that economic sanctions were definitely impacting Iran. Despite high oil prices, he noted, "[W]e don't see a healthy and dynamic economy."
While there are a number of factors contributing to Iran's economic difficulties, including declining oil prices and President Ahmadinezhad's mismanagement of economy policy, the response of international financial institutions to the Treasury Department's outreach has been a key reason as well. Many of the major global financial institutions -- particularly those based in Europe -- have either terminated or reduced their business with Iran. More surprisingly, it appears that banks in the United Arab Emirates and China are also beginning to exercise greater caution in their business dealings with Iran as well.
Conclusion
Even as it continues to pursue a nuclear program and other illicit activities, Iran today is financially and politically exposed. While sanctions are no panacea, if properly leveraged in tandem with other elements of national power, the pinch of targeted financial measures could potentially have a very significant impact.
Chairman Dodd, Ranking Member Shelby, committee members: Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today to discuss the utility and applicability of targeted financial measures as part of a strategic policy, leveraging all elements of national power to deal with the threats presented by Iran's nuclear program.
As a former deputy assistant secretary of the treasury who participated in the department's outreach to the private sector as early as 2006, I am often asked why I support the use of targeted financial measures -- both formal sanctions and informal outreach to the private sector -- if the use of these tools has not stopped Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon. If these efforts have neither altered the decisionmaking of Iranian leaders nor disrupted Iran's ability to continue developing its nuclear program, are they really effective?
The answer is that targeted financial sanctions were never intended to solve the problem of Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons. Sanctions are no silver bullet. On their own, these financial tools can only do so much. But coupled with other tools -- especially robust diplomacy, but also a credible military presence in the region -- financial measures can effectively create leverage for diplomacy. That diplomacy should focus not only on Iran, but on Russia, China, our European and Asian allies, the Gulf States, and others.
What can sanctions accomplish? They are intended to advance any of the following three goals: (1) disrupt Iran's illicit activities; (2) deter third parties from knowingly or unintentionally facilitating Iran's illicit activities; and (3) impact Iran's decisionmaking process so that continued pursuit of illicit activities is reconsidered.
Note, for example, that despite the many problems with the declassified key judgments of the November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran's nuclear intentions and capabilities, the report accurately noted that the tool most likely to alter Iran's nuclear calculus -- if any -- is targeted political and economic pressure, not military action. According to the NIE, Iran's decision to halt its nuclear weapons program in 2003 was "in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran's previously undeclared nuclear work." The key judgments conclude that the intelligence community's "assessment that the [nuclear weapons] program probably was halted primarily in response to international pressure suggests Iran may be more vulnerable to influence on the issue that we judged previously."
Iran may or may not have actually halted its weapons program. Even if it did, this may actually mean far less than the NIE suggested, if what was suspended was a piece of the program that could be quickly resumed at any time. But the potential of such tools to impact the decisionmaking process of key Iranian leaders is worth noting.
That said, recent events suggest that Iran's current hardline leadership sees the pursuit of a nuclear program and ongoing tension with the West as positive things that support their primary objective: regime survival. But even if the goal of altering the Iranian regime's nuclear calculus is not so likely under current circumstances, the other two goals of financial sanctions -- first, constricting the operating environment and making it more difficult for Iran to engage in illicit activities by disrupting its finance, banking, insurance, shipping, and business dealings; second, deterring others from partnering with Iran -- remain important objectives that can be furthered by employing financial tools.
While some question the wisdom of employing sanctions when the administration is actively seeking to pursue engagement with Iran, and others question the wisdom of employing sanctions that might give the regime a straw man and scapegoat to blame for all of Iran's ills, my own conclusion is just the opposite. This is exactly the time to use financial tools to build leverage for diplomacy.
With the hardline regime so significantly delegitimized -- to the point that both moderates and hardliners have overtly questioned decisions of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei -- the regime's ability to easily deflect criticism over the state of the Iranian economy or sanctions imposed over Iran's nuclear program has been significantly undermined. Indeed, the regime faces a far greater legitimacy crisis over its handling of the sham election, the Basij crackdown targeting Iranian citizens, the demonization of protestors by senior leaders, and the incarceration of protestors. Given that Iran's nuclear program continues to progress, the one thing that is clear is that we do not have the luxury of time. The question is not whether or not to use sanctions, but what sanctions, targeting which entities, using which tools and authorities, and in what order?
To be sure, diplomatic engagement, directly with Iran or with others focused on Iran, whether broad or limited, is severely undermined when Iran is able to pursue its nuclear ambitions, support terrorist groups, and erode security in Iraq and Afghanistan without consequence. As Washington Post columnist David Ignatius put it, "[T]hese new, targeted financial measures are to traditional sanctions what Super Glue is to Elmer's Glue-All." Periodically reassessing and adjusting the package of targeted financial measures is the tool most likely to create enough diplomatic leverage to avoid a military confrontation. Short of creating such leverage, negotiation and diplomacy alone will not convince Iran to abandon its nuclear program.
What Sanctions Should Be Employed?
First, we should actively seek international consensus on multilateral sanctions through the United Nations that would be ready to be implemented in the early fall should Iran fail to respond to the administration's offer of engagement by the deadline of the G-8 summit and the UN General Assembly that follows shortly thereafter. As important as the entities to be listed will be the unanimity of the decision to impose sanctions, so it is critical that the administration engage in robust diplomatic engagement with China and Russia now.
New multilateral designations should focus on entities engaged in illicit conduct in support of Iran's proliferation program, in particular those already designated unilaterally by the United States. For example:
• Bank Mellat. Bank Mellat was designated by the United States in October 2007 for providing banking services in support of UN-designated Iranian nuclear entities, namely the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) and Novin Energy Company. A multilateral designation would go far in constricting the activities of the banks foreign regional offices in South Korea, Armenia, and Turkey.
• Bank Melli. As FINCEN noted in a March 2008 advisory to the financial sector, "UNSCR 1803 calls on member states to exercise vigilance over the activities of financial institutions in their territories with all banks domiciled in Iran, and their branches and subsidiaries abroad. While Bank Melli and Bank Saderat were specifically noted, the United States urges all financial institutions to take into account the risk arising from the deficiencies in Iran's AML/CFT regime." Iran's largest bank, Bank Melli was also designated by the Treasury Department in October 2007 for providing banking services to entities involved in Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile programs, including entities listed by the UN for their involvement in those programs. Following up on the warning included in UNSCR 1803 with outright designations of these banks would send a strong message.
• Khatam al-Anbya. The UN should also follow up on the U.S. and EU designations of the Khatam al-Anbya construction company (also called Ghorb), which is one of the most significant of the multiple entities owned or operated by the IRGC that have been designated by the United States. With the increased militarization of the Iranian regime, and the blatant abuses of the IRGC-affiliated Basij militia, now is the time to target IRGC-affiliated entities.
• IRISL. The U.S. designation of Iran's national maritime carrier, the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines (IRISL), in September 2008, was another key unilateral action that should be made multilateral. IRISL was designated for facilitating the transport of cargo for UN designated proliferators and for falsifying documents and using deceptive schemes to shroud its involvement in illicit commerce. And as the State Department noted at the time of the designation, IRISL had already been "called out by the UN Security Council as a company that has engaged in proliferation shipments."
Multilateral action, however, is not only difficult to achieve but can often lead to lowest common denominator decisionmaking. While international consensus is built for robust action at the United Nations, the United States should pursue both unilateral and bilateral financial measures (together with other States or regional bodies like the EU) focused on IRGC-affiliated and other individuals and institutions facilitating Iran's illicit conduct.
The U.S. should also actively support the efforts of multilateral technocratic bodies such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which has issued a series of increasingly blunt warnings about doing business with Iran. The FATF is a thirty-four-member technocratic body based in Paris which seeks to set global standards on combating money laundering and terrorism financing. The FATF has put out multiple warnings on Iran -- the first in October 2007 and the most recent in February 2009. In these warnings, FATF instructed its members to urge their financial institutions to use "enhanced due diligence" when dealing with Iran. In the second warning, the FATF president also urged Iran to address the "shortcomings" in its anti-money-laundering and anti-terrorist-financing regimes immediately. The most recent warning instructed countries to begin developing "countermeasures" to deal with Iran's illicit financial activities -- an indication of how concerned the international body was with Iran's behavior in this arena. After one such warning, Iran sent a delegation to lobby FATF (of which it is not a member) but FATF dismissed the Iranian delegation's claims that legislative changes fixed the regime's shortcomings, calling the changes "skimpy" and noting their "big deficiencies."
Informal sanctions, what I describe as leveraging market forces, should be continued and expanded. As my colleague Michael Jacobson has also argued, the direct outreach that Treasury has pursued with the international financial sector should be broadened to include other U.S. agencies and departments, notably the Commerce Department, engaging with a wider array of private-sector actors in the insurance, shipping, and other industries. We should continue to think creatively about how to leverage our existing influence to achieve our goals. For example, coupled with additional action targeting IRISL, an effort to convince countries concerned about Iran's illicit and deceptive conduct to deny landing rights to Iran Air would further constrict Iran's ability to move funds and material for illicit purposes and isolate the regime internationally. Even in today's economy, and to a certain extent because of it, the private sector is very sensitive to reputational risk and is acutely aware of its due diligence and fiduciary obligations to its shareholders.
Less Targeted Financial Measures
Targeted financial measures have proven impressively effective at disrupting Iran's illicit conduct, but given the short timeframe and the rapid progress Iran is making on its nuclear program, it may be time to consider more drastic and less targeted measures. Secretary of State Clinton has spoken about the possibility of inflicting "crippling sanctions" on Iran, and one particularly promising avenue to pursue would be to exploit Iran's continued reliance on foreign refined petroleum to meet its domestic consumption needs. Due to insufficient refining capacity at home, Iran must still reimport 40 percent of its domestically consumed petroleum from refineries abroad. The prospect of targeting Iran's continued ability to reimport this refined petroleum back into the country could be a powerful tool targeting a regime soft spot. Consider as precedent the dramatic failure of the Iranian regime's gas ration card program in June 2007. The cards were loaded with a six-months ration, but many Iranians reportedly used their entire ration within weeks. Indeed, Iran worries each winter about a possible heating fuel shortage and the consequence of not being able to provide the public with sufficient fuel subsidies.
Technology and Arms Transfers
We should also focus our attention on developing a more systematic approach for dealing with Tehran's efforts to transfer technology and arms to radical allies in the Middle East and elsewhere, even as Washington seeks to engage Iran. Earlier this year, Cyprus impounded the Iranian-chartered freighter Monchegorsk, a vessel laden with war materiel bound for Syria (and perhaps beyond). The episode highlighted the shortcomings of current UN and European Union sanctions on Iran, and underscores the need to fill the gaps in the available policy tools to deal with Iranian arms transfers to its allies and surrogates. To close these gaps, the United States should work with its allies and the international community on a number of fronts:
• Encourage the UN sanctions committee to issue a Security Council communique to the UN General Assembly emphasizing the obligation of all member states, including Iran and Syria, to fully abide by the UN ban on arms transfers;
• Work with the EU to expand its current policy banning the sale or transfer to Iran of "all arms and related material, as well as the provision of related assistance, investment and services" to include a ban on the purchase or transfer from Iran of the same;
• Work with UN and EU member states to adopt legislation pertaining to Iranian arms and technology transfers, to enable them to fulfill their UN and EU obligations. Encourage regional organizations in South America and South and East Asia to adopt similar resolutions;
• Work with the EU and Turkey (the de facto eastern gateway to Europe) to develop an enhanced customs and border security regime to prevent Iranian arms and technology transfers through Turkey;
• Engage the private sector to draw attention to the risk of doing business with IRISL, its subsidiaries, and other banned entities. Given Iran's history of deceptive financial and trade activity, extra scrutiny should be given to any ship that has recently paid a call to an Iranian port;
• Encourage countries to require ports and/or authorities to collect detailed, accurate, and complete data regarding all cargo being shipped to or through their countries (especially from risk-prone jurisdictions like Iran), to conduct rigorous risk assessments, and to proceed with actual inspections as necessary;
• Encourage implementation of the World Customs Organization's (WCO) draft Framework of Standards to Secure and Facilitate Global Trade. The WCO represents 174 Customs administrations across the globe (including Iran) that collectively process approximately 98 percent of world trade. Under the proposed framework, a risk-management approach would be implemented for all cargo to identify high-risk shipments at the earliest possible time. Participating members would benefit from enhanced security and efficiency, and could benefit from lower insurance premiums.
There are signs of success, and with continuing signs of domestic discontent in Iran, targeted financial measures can increase the political pressure on the regime. Indeed, long before the June 12 elections, the U.S.-led campaign had played a role in causing domestic political problems for Iranian hardliners as well. In September 2007, former president Ahkbar Hasehemi Rafsanjani, a moderate opposed to the regime's confrontational approach, was elected as the speaker of the Assembly of Expert -- the body that chooses and has the power to remove Iran's supreme leader. Several days earlier, Supreme Leader Khamenei dismissed Yahya Rahim Safavi, the IRGC's commander since 1997, who was blacklisted by the UN in March 2007. Safavi's replacement, Muhammad Ali Jafari, confirmed that Safavi was removed primarily "due to the U.S. threats." Finally, Motjtaba Hashemi Samarah, one of President Ahmadinezhad's close allies, was removed from his position as the deputy interior minister. Iran's former chief nuclear negotiator, Hasan Rowhani, disparaged the country's growing international isolation and stated that economic sanctions were definitely impacting Iran. Despite high oil prices, he noted, "[W]e don't see a healthy and dynamic economy."
While there are a number of factors contributing to Iran's economic difficulties, including declining oil prices and President Ahmadinezhad's mismanagement of economy policy, the response of international financial institutions to the Treasury Department's outreach has been a key reason as well. Many of the major global financial institutions -- particularly those based in Europe -- have either terminated or reduced their business with Iran. More surprisingly, it appears that banks in the United Arab Emirates and China are also beginning to exercise greater caution in their business dealings with Iran as well.
Conclusion
Even as it continues to pursue a nuclear program and other illicit activities, Iran today is financially and politically exposed. While sanctions are no panacea, if properly leveraged in tandem with other elements of national power, the pinch of targeted financial measures could potentially have a very significant impact.
Terrorism in the West 2008
The Center for Terrorism Research has released its newest report, Terrorism in the West 2008, which I co-authored with my colleagues Joshua D. Goodman and Laura Grossman.
Terrorism is not a new phenomenon, nor is it likely to disappear anytime soon. It is not the exclusive domain of any single religion or ideology, nor do all terrorists come from the same socioeconomic class or share the same mental pathologies. In part, the diversity within contemporary terrorism is what makes it so much of a challenge. The new report is intended to describe, in great detail, the state of terrorism in Western countries over the course of 2008. It features:
A comprehensive look at terrorism events in the West, including attacks, failed plots, and arrests.
A discussion of landmark terrorism prosecutions.
An assessment of broad trends in terrorist activity over the course of the year.
Expert commentary from Jeff Breinholt, Rohan Gunaratna, Andrew C. McCarthy, Reuven Paz, and CT Blog Contributing Expert Douglas Farah.
To download the study, click here.
Terrorism is not a new phenomenon, nor is it likely to disappear anytime soon. It is not the exclusive domain of any single religion or ideology, nor do all terrorists come from the same socioeconomic class or share the same mental pathologies. In part, the diversity within contemporary terrorism is what makes it so much of a challenge. The new report is intended to describe, in great detail, the state of terrorism in Western countries over the course of 2008. It features:
A comprehensive look at terrorism events in the West, including attacks, failed plots, and arrests.
A discussion of landmark terrorism prosecutions.
An assessment of broad trends in terrorist activity over the course of the year.
Expert commentary from Jeff Breinholt, Rohan Gunaratna, Andrew C. McCarthy, Reuven Paz, and CT Blog Contributing Expert Douglas Farah.
To download the study, click here.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Spime Networks and the future of Intelligence Collection by Roderick Jones
I recently had the fortune to attend a seminar by David Orban on the ‘Internet of Things’ hosted by Singularity University at the NASA Ames Research Park. This subject is of deep interest with regard to the future collection of intelligence a fact acknowledged by the National Intelligence Council’s Disruptive Civil Technologies Conference (appendix F). The basic idea surrounding the ‘internet of things’ is that all things become nodes in a global network and to some degree act autonomously or to put it another way, “Our washing machines can ask for soap". This new or developing network creates a new category of object, known as a Spime [SPace +tIME] - a phrase coined by the science fiction writer Bruce Sterling. A Spime was defined by David Orban as an object with memory, computing capacity, location awareness and sensors. These Spimes already exist just not yet to scale. The leading driver of spime networks was initially thought to be RFID tags but actually it is smart phones that are providing the most compelling current platform. A great example of one such, spime is an application developed for the iphone by WideTag - called WideNoise. This uses the iphone to collect decibel readings posting them to a map to determine where the quieter areas in the world are. Following the presentation we divided into groups to design a Spime.
Citizen as Sensor
The Spime I developed in conjunction with two of the SU students was an Intelligence tool – ‘citizen as sensor’. Taking as a start point the success that the Ushahidi project had in tracking both Kenyan post election violence and war-time activity in the Gaza strip we speculated on what an autonomous app might look like, which ran on a smart phone applying a similar theme. Using the idea of unique sound signatures our app, in its first iteration, ‘listened’ for sounds to report them back to a central database. Sounds such as gunfire, military vehicle movement or even militia on horseback provide a unique signature, which could then be used to provide a much richer intelligence picture of events on the ground. Over time other sensors could be layered into the app to monitor the environment for chemical or biological agents or to provide rapid analysis of images. As a system we conceived of this as an open environment. As a quid pro quo for participation, the citizen has the option to subscribe to areas of local interest for feedback, planning and awareness.
The technology clearly already exists for this kind of app, identifying unique sound signatures using a smart phone is present in shazam [which identifies the song playing in a particular locale] the collection of unique sound signatures is also beginning to extend in a variety of different areas including mosquito's. Therefore empowering global citizens to collect a richer level of local intelligence is clearly currently within reach and could be used for their own benefit.
Of course the downside of such a system would be the ability of the bad actors to also use and abuse the data. So far studies on the effectiveness of systems like Ushahidi have shown it remains effective even allowing for misinformation attempts. However, this remains a potentially insurmountable concern. Secondly is the actions of national governments who could shut down cell networks or put pressure on hardware providers to take certain applications down [this last scenario is becoming a constant with Apple’s iphone]. There are some potential solutions for this, P2P cell phone functionality seems like an obvious one, as well as the broad adoption of open platforms such as Android.
While Spime networks seem futuristic they are already here and present current opportunities to collect a richer intelligence picture than was previously possible. It takes little imagination to conceive of a DHS or even NYPD smart phone applications that monitors local conditions based on sound signatures and feeds them back to both government responders and the community of users. The future of intelligence collection may be sitting in the Apple App Store.
Citizen as Sensor
The Spime I developed in conjunction with two of the SU students was an Intelligence tool – ‘citizen as sensor’. Taking as a start point the success that the Ushahidi project had in tracking both Kenyan post election violence and war-time activity in the Gaza strip we speculated on what an autonomous app might look like, which ran on a smart phone applying a similar theme. Using the idea of unique sound signatures our app, in its first iteration, ‘listened’ for sounds to report them back to a central database. Sounds such as gunfire, military vehicle movement or even militia on horseback provide a unique signature, which could then be used to provide a much richer intelligence picture of events on the ground. Over time other sensors could be layered into the app to monitor the environment for chemical or biological agents or to provide rapid analysis of images. As a system we conceived of this as an open environment. As a quid pro quo for participation, the citizen has the option to subscribe to areas of local interest for feedback, planning and awareness.
The technology clearly already exists for this kind of app, identifying unique sound signatures using a smart phone is present in shazam [which identifies the song playing in a particular locale] the collection of unique sound signatures is also beginning to extend in a variety of different areas including mosquito's. Therefore empowering global citizens to collect a richer level of local intelligence is clearly currently within reach and could be used for their own benefit.
Of course the downside of such a system would be the ability of the bad actors to also use and abuse the data. So far studies on the effectiveness of systems like Ushahidi have shown it remains effective even allowing for misinformation attempts. However, this remains a potentially insurmountable concern. Secondly is the actions of national governments who could shut down cell networks or put pressure on hardware providers to take certain applications down [this last scenario is becoming a constant with Apple’s iphone]. There are some potential solutions for this, P2P cell phone functionality seems like an obvious one, as well as the broad adoption of open platforms such as Android.
While Spime networks seem futuristic they are already here and present current opportunities to collect a richer intelligence picture than was previously possible. It takes little imagination to conceive of a DHS or even NYPD smart phone applications that monitors local conditions based on sound signatures and feeds them back to both government responders and the community of users. The future of intelligence collection may be sitting in the Apple App Store.
Sigularity University Spime Design Workshop
View more documents from David Orban.
How To Hijack 'Every iPhone In The World' by Andy Greenberg (FLAW IN SMS SOFTWARES)
If you receive a text message on your iPhone any time after Thursday afternoon containing only a single square character, Charlie Miller would suggest you turn the device off. Quickly.
That small cipher will likely be your only warning that someone has taken advantage of a bug that Miller and his fellow cybersecurity researcher Collin Mulliner plan to publicize Thursday at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas. Using a flaw they've found in the iPhone's handling of text messages, the researchers say they'll demonstrate how to send a series of mostly invisible SMS bursts that can give a hacker complete power over any of the smart phone's functions. That includes dialing the phone, visiting Web sites, turning on the device's camera and microphone and, most importantly, sending more text messages to further propagate a mass-gadget hijacking.
"This is serious. The only thing you can do to prevent it is turn off your phone," Miller told Forbes. "Someone could pretty quickly take over every iPhone in the world with this."
Though Miller and Mulliner say they notified Apple about the vulnerability more than a month ago, the company hasn't released a patch, and it didn't respond to Forbes' repeated calls seeking comment.
The iPhone SMS bug is just one of a series that the researchers plan to reveal in their talk. They say they've also found a similar texting bug in Windows Mobile that allows complete remote control of Microsoft-based devices. Another pair of SMS bugs in the iPhone and Google's Android phones would purportedly allow a hacker to knock a phone off its wireless network for about 10 seconds with a series of text messages. The trick could be repeated again and again to keep the user offline, Miller says. Though Google has patched the Android flaw, this second iPhone bug also remains unpatched, he adds.
The new round of bugs aren't the first that Miller has dug up in the iPhone's code. In 2007, he became the first to remotely hijack the iPhone using a flaw in its browser. But while that vulnerability gave the attacker a similar power over the phone's functions, it required tricking the user into visiting an infected Web site to invisibly download a piece of malicious software. When Miller alerted Apple in July of that year, the company patched the vulnerability before Miller publicized the bug at the Black Hat conference the following month. ("See: Hacking the iPhone.")
The new attacks, by contrast, can strike a phone without any action on the part of the user and are virtually unpreventable while the phone is powered on, according to Miller and Mulliner's research. And unlike the earlier exploits, Apple has inexplicably left them unpatched, Miller says. "I've given them more time to patch this than I've ever given a company to patch a bug," he says.
The Windows bug he and Mulliner plan to reveal hasn't been patched either, says Miller, though he admits that he and Mulliner discovered the Windows flaw on Monday and hadn't yet alerted Microsoft to its existence.
The attack developed by Miller and Mulliner works by exploiting a missing safeguard in the phones' text messaging software that prevents code in the messages' text from overflowing into other parts of the device's memory where it can run as an executable program. The two researchers plan to demonstrate how a series of 512 SMS messages can exploit the bug, with only one of those messages actually appearing on the phone, showing a small square. (Someone could easily design the attack to show a different message or without any visible messages, Miller cautions.) The entire process of infecting an iPhone and then using the device to infect another phone on the user's contact list would take only a few minutes, Miller says.
The vulnerability of SMS to that sort of attack will likely be a hot topic at this year's Black Hat and Defcon cybersecurity confabs. Two other researchers, Zane Lackey and Luis Miras, say they plan to present other vulnerabilities in major vendors' SMS applications, though they declined to discuss which vendors or the specifics of the vulnerabilities before the companies had issued patches.
Lackey and Miras argue that SMS demands far more attention from the cybersecurity community and device vendors. "Like a lot of mobile phone software, it's been relatively unexplored in the past," Lackey told Forbes. "Only recently has there been proper debugging and development tools available. SMS exemplifies a common trend: once it was a simple technology. Now it's being used in devices far beyond its original purposes, and security is still playing catch up."
The researchers' concerns aren't merely theoretical. Finnish security firm F-Secure says it's found nearly 500 different variants of mobile phone malicious software since 2004, mostly using Bluetooth to hop between phones in close proximity. But in the last 18 months, cybercriminals have begun using text messages to send links to malicious Web sites that infect the phone with malware, says Mikko Hyppönen, an F-Secure researcher.
One seemingly-Chinese variant, known as "Sexy View" and currently targeting the Symbian operating system, is far more threatening than an iPhone attack, given that around 50% of cellphones use Symbian, Hyppönen says. "After years of the security industry wondering why we aren't seeing text message worms, it's starting to happen now," he says.
While many of those ongoing attacks are merely hacker experiments, some have used phones to text premium numbers that generate revenue for cybercriminals. "Mostly it's still about curiosity and fun, but eventually the criminal guys move in," says Hyppönen. "We're probably on the verge of that right now."
As dangerous as his iPhone attack sounds, Miller argues that it's important to expose flaws in SMS software before they can be exploited by more malicious actors. Texting applications' insecurity isn't due to the software's complexity so much as the security community's inattention and the expense of sending thousands of text messages to test a phone's security, Miller says.
"The bad news is that SMS is the perfect attack vector, but the good news is that it's probably possible to build it securely," he says. "As a researcher, I can only show [Apple] the bugs. It's up to them to fix them."
That small cipher will likely be your only warning that someone has taken advantage of a bug that Miller and his fellow cybersecurity researcher Collin Mulliner plan to publicize Thursday at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas. Using a flaw they've found in the iPhone's handling of text messages, the researchers say they'll demonstrate how to send a series of mostly invisible SMS bursts that can give a hacker complete power over any of the smart phone's functions. That includes dialing the phone, visiting Web sites, turning on the device's camera and microphone and, most importantly, sending more text messages to further propagate a mass-gadget hijacking.
"This is serious. The only thing you can do to prevent it is turn off your phone," Miller told Forbes. "Someone could pretty quickly take over every iPhone in the world with this."
Though Miller and Mulliner say they notified Apple about the vulnerability more than a month ago, the company hasn't released a patch, and it didn't respond to Forbes' repeated calls seeking comment.
The iPhone SMS bug is just one of a series that the researchers plan to reveal in their talk. They say they've also found a similar texting bug in Windows Mobile that allows complete remote control of Microsoft-based devices. Another pair of SMS bugs in the iPhone and Google's Android phones would purportedly allow a hacker to knock a phone off its wireless network for about 10 seconds with a series of text messages. The trick could be repeated again and again to keep the user offline, Miller says. Though Google has patched the Android flaw, this second iPhone bug also remains unpatched, he adds.
The new round of bugs aren't the first that Miller has dug up in the iPhone's code. In 2007, he became the first to remotely hijack the iPhone using a flaw in its browser. But while that vulnerability gave the attacker a similar power over the phone's functions, it required tricking the user into visiting an infected Web site to invisibly download a piece of malicious software. When Miller alerted Apple in July of that year, the company patched the vulnerability before Miller publicized the bug at the Black Hat conference the following month. ("See: Hacking the iPhone.")
The new attacks, by contrast, can strike a phone without any action on the part of the user and are virtually unpreventable while the phone is powered on, according to Miller and Mulliner's research. And unlike the earlier exploits, Apple has inexplicably left them unpatched, Miller says. "I've given them more time to patch this than I've ever given a company to patch a bug," he says.
The Windows bug he and Mulliner plan to reveal hasn't been patched either, says Miller, though he admits that he and Mulliner discovered the Windows flaw on Monday and hadn't yet alerted Microsoft to its existence.
The attack developed by Miller and Mulliner works by exploiting a missing safeguard in the phones' text messaging software that prevents code in the messages' text from overflowing into other parts of the device's memory where it can run as an executable program. The two researchers plan to demonstrate how a series of 512 SMS messages can exploit the bug, with only one of those messages actually appearing on the phone, showing a small square. (Someone could easily design the attack to show a different message or without any visible messages, Miller cautions.) The entire process of infecting an iPhone and then using the device to infect another phone on the user's contact list would take only a few minutes, Miller says.
The vulnerability of SMS to that sort of attack will likely be a hot topic at this year's Black Hat and Defcon cybersecurity confabs. Two other researchers, Zane Lackey and Luis Miras, say they plan to present other vulnerabilities in major vendors' SMS applications, though they declined to discuss which vendors or the specifics of the vulnerabilities before the companies had issued patches.
Lackey and Miras argue that SMS demands far more attention from the cybersecurity community and device vendors. "Like a lot of mobile phone software, it's been relatively unexplored in the past," Lackey told Forbes. "Only recently has there been proper debugging and development tools available. SMS exemplifies a common trend: once it was a simple technology. Now it's being used in devices far beyond its original purposes, and security is still playing catch up."
The researchers' concerns aren't merely theoretical. Finnish security firm F-Secure says it's found nearly 500 different variants of mobile phone malicious software since 2004, mostly using Bluetooth to hop between phones in close proximity. But in the last 18 months, cybercriminals have begun using text messages to send links to malicious Web sites that infect the phone with malware, says Mikko Hyppönen, an F-Secure researcher.
One seemingly-Chinese variant, known as "Sexy View" and currently targeting the Symbian operating system, is far more threatening than an iPhone attack, given that around 50% of cellphones use Symbian, Hyppönen says. "After years of the security industry wondering why we aren't seeing text message worms, it's starting to happen now," he says.
While many of those ongoing attacks are merely hacker experiments, some have used phones to text premium numbers that generate revenue for cybercriminals. "Mostly it's still about curiosity and fun, but eventually the criminal guys move in," says Hyppönen. "We're probably on the verge of that right now."
As dangerous as his iPhone attack sounds, Miller argues that it's important to expose flaws in SMS software before they can be exploited by more malicious actors. Texting applications' insecurity isn't due to the software's complexity so much as the security community's inattention and the expense of sending thousands of text messages to test a phone's security, Miller says.
"The bad news is that SMS is the perfect attack vector, but the good news is that it's probably possible to build it securely," he says. "As a researcher, I can only show [Apple] the bugs. It's up to them to fix them."
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Talent Search is on for Cybersecurity Students by Elinor Mills
The U.S. government on Monday launched a national talent search for high school and college students interested in working in cybersecurity.
With the U.S. Cyber Challenge the goal is to find 10,000 young Americans to be "cyber guardians and cyber warriors," according to a statement from the Center for Strategic & International Studies, which is sponsoring the event.
"Mostly now we have people (in government) writing policies and reports about security rather than people who can do it," said Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute. "And we're getting killed."
The government is launching a talent search for students with cybersecurity skills.
The need for more security specialists in government has been acknowledged. President Obama said in May that the U.S. government "is not as prepared" as it should be to respond to disruptions caused by Internet attacks. And last week, a study from the Partnership for Public Service concluded that shortages in federal cybersecurity workers and a lack of leadership threaten national security.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government continues to be a target of Internet attacks. The latest public incident involved a series of denial of service attacks the week of July 4 that temporarily took down commercial and government Web sites in the U.S. and South Korea.
There are three competitions that make up the U.S. Cyber Challenge: CyberPatriot network defense high school competition conducted by the Air Force Association; DC3 Digital Forensics Challenge conducted by the U.S. Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center; and NetWars, a vulnerability discovery and exploitation competition conducted by the SANS Institute.
Candidates with promising skills will be invited to attend regional camps at local colleges beginning next year. The top candidates will be hired by the National Security Agency, the FBI, Defense Department, US-CERT, and the U.S. Department of Energy Laboratories.
With the U.S. Cyber Challenge the goal is to find 10,000 young Americans to be "cyber guardians and cyber warriors," according to a statement from the Center for Strategic & International Studies, which is sponsoring the event.
"Mostly now we have people (in government) writing policies and reports about security rather than people who can do it," said Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute. "And we're getting killed."
The government is launching a talent search for students with cybersecurity skills.
The need for more security specialists in government has been acknowledged. President Obama said in May that the U.S. government "is not as prepared" as it should be to respond to disruptions caused by Internet attacks. And last week, a study from the Partnership for Public Service concluded that shortages in federal cybersecurity workers and a lack of leadership threaten national security.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government continues to be a target of Internet attacks. The latest public incident involved a series of denial of service attacks the week of July 4 that temporarily took down commercial and government Web sites in the U.S. and South Korea.
There are three competitions that make up the U.S. Cyber Challenge: CyberPatriot network defense high school competition conducted by the Air Force Association; DC3 Digital Forensics Challenge conducted by the U.S. Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center; and NetWars, a vulnerability discovery and exploitation competition conducted by the SANS Institute.
Candidates with promising skills will be invited to attend regional camps at local colleges beginning next year. The top candidates will be hired by the National Security Agency, the FBI, Defense Department, US-CERT, and the U.S. Department of Energy Laboratories.
Parsing What the Enemy’s Up To
Almost eight years after the alarming lessons of 9/11, the Senate Intelligence Committee finds the nation’s spy agencies mumbling more than mastering the languages of the nation’s adversaries. The committee did not mince words in pronouncing the intelligence community’s foreign language capabilities to be “abysmal.”
“The cadre of intelligence professionals capable of speaking, reading, or understanding critical regional languages such as Pashto, Dari or Urdu remains essentially nonexistent,” the committee warned in a lengthy critique of the C.I.A. and other agencies that raised worries over the loss of information vital to national preparedness. The panel laid bare these problems in the course of approving an intelligence spending bill.
It’s no secret that the intelligence community has been reeling from the disclosure of its shortcomings in the lead-up to the attacks of 9/11 and to the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. The Senate panel performs a worthy service in pointing to the failure to improve on one of the basics: information gathering, let alone eavesdropping, means agencies must do a far better job at language education and hiring new people with needed skills to grasp what dangers may be out there.
The Senate report also warns that intelligence agencies are falling short in tracking rising threats from cyberthieves and others intent on attacking the nation’s information networks. And it once more points to an over-reliance on contractors — who were found to make up 29 percent of the intelligence community’s personnel last year, while consuming 49 percent of its personnel budget.
The Senate committee suggested that the Obama administration create an independent commission to help identify gaps in intelligence policy. Like the language gap, this idea goes back to the 9/11 Commission Report, and seems worth adopting now.
“The cadre of intelligence professionals capable of speaking, reading, or understanding critical regional languages such as Pashto, Dari or Urdu remains essentially nonexistent,” the committee warned in a lengthy critique of the C.I.A. and other agencies that raised worries over the loss of information vital to national preparedness. The panel laid bare these problems in the course of approving an intelligence spending bill.
It’s no secret that the intelligence community has been reeling from the disclosure of its shortcomings in the lead-up to the attacks of 9/11 and to the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. The Senate panel performs a worthy service in pointing to the failure to improve on one of the basics: information gathering, let alone eavesdropping, means agencies must do a far better job at language education and hiring new people with needed skills to grasp what dangers may be out there.
The Senate report also warns that intelligence agencies are falling short in tracking rising threats from cyberthieves and others intent on attacking the nation’s information networks. And it once more points to an over-reliance on contractors — who were found to make up 29 percent of the intelligence community’s personnel last year, while consuming 49 percent of its personnel budget.
The Senate committee suggested that the Obama administration create an independent commission to help identify gaps in intelligence policy. Like the language gap, this idea goes back to the 9/11 Commission Report, and seems worth adopting now.
Iran and the Taliban, allies against America by Thomas Joscely
For some, this cooperation is surprising. After all, the Shiite Iranians and the Sunni Taliban were not allies in the pre-September 11 world. In fact, they were bitter rivals, even enemies.
The US-led invasion of Afghanistan clearly changed the Iranians' priorities, however. But did the Iranians begin their rapprochement with the Taliban only after September 11? Or, had the groundwork for the type of cooperation we see in Afghanistan today already been laid?
The answer to these questions can be found, in part, in the unclassified documents prepared by the US government for Gitmo detainee Khirullah Said Wali Khairkhwa (ISN #579). Khairkhwa is one of more than 200 detainees remaining at Gitmo. His fate will ultimately be decided by the Obama administration's inter-agency review boards.
During Khairkhwa's time at Gitmo, US officials produced several memos for his combatant status review tribunal (CSRT) and administrative review board hearings (ARB). In addition, Khairkhwa testified at his CSRT and one of his ARB hearings. The Defense Department's transcripts of Khairkhwa's testimony, as well as the memos produced by the government, can all be readily found online.
Links began well before September 11 attack
The story laid out in the government's memos and in Khairkhwa's own testimony reveals new details about the collusion between Iran and the Taliban. Interestingly, this cooperation began even before the September 11 attacks.
The story begins in 1998 when the Taliban and Iran were on the verge of war. In August of that year, the Taliban slaughtered hundreds of Shiites, including nine Iranian diplomats, in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan. The Iranians responded by positioning thousands of uniformed Revolutionary Guardsmen and other forces on Iran’s easternmost border with Afghanistan. Mullah Omar and Ayatollah Khameini traded verbal barbs in the press. The world openly fretted over the prospect of war.
Enter Khairkhwa. For years, Khairkhwa had been the public voice of the Taliban, acting as its Pashto spokesman and doing interviews with the BBC and Voice of America. Khairkhwa was trusted by the Taliban’s most senior leaders to spin news for their regime. This was no small task given the Taliban’s continual human rights abuses. Khairkhwa was, according to the US government's unclassified files, also the Taliban commander who helped take Mazar-e-Sharif in 1996. At the time, Mazar-e-Sharif was hotly contested territory.
In 1999, the Taliban would trust Khairkhwa with another mission. He was installed as the governor of Afghanistan’s westernmost province of Herat. Khairkhwa served in that capacity until the Taliban’s fall in late 2001.
The US government alleges that during that time Khairkhwa became a major drug trafficker with ties to senior al Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden. Khairkhwa reportedly built three walled compounds that he used to manage his opium trade. And he allegedly oversaw one of Osama bin Laden's training facilities in Herat as well. One US government memo notes that only Khairkhwa or bin Laden himself "could authorize entrance" to the facility, which was one of bin Laden's "most important bases" and "conducted terrorist training two times per week."
Khairkhwa denied that he was a drug dealer and that he had significant ties to senior al Qaeda leaders during his hearings at Gitmo. But it is clear that US intelligence officials did not believe Khairkhwa’s denials. The allegations were repeatedly included in the memos prepared for Khairkhwa’s case.
Khairkhwa assigned a Taliban liaison to Iran
Khairkhwa played another, more provocative role as well.
According to the US government’s unclassified files, Khairkhwa was installed as the governor of Herat “to improve relations between Iran and the Taliban government.”
By his own admission, Khairkhwa began meeting with the Iranians in early 2000. The US government’s unclassified documents cite at least two instances when Khairkhwa took part in meetings between senior Taliban and Iranian officials: one on Jan. 7, 2000, and a second time in late 2001.
The government’s Oct. 7, 2005, ARB summary of evidence memo for Khairkhwa includes this allegation:
“On 7 January 2000, the detainee and three other Taliban officials attended a meeting with Iranian and Hizbi Islami-Gulbuddin Hikmatyar faction officials. Present at the meeting were Afghan Hizbi Islami-Gulbuddin leader, Gulbuddin Hikmatyar and Ayman Al-Zawahiri [emphasis added]. Topics of discussion included United States intervention in the region, restoration of peace in Afghanistan and strengthening the Taliban’s ties with [the] Iran[ian] government.”
The government’s second and more recent ARB summary of evidence memo (dated June 16, 2006) modified this allegation. US intelligence officials did not allege that Hekmatyar or Zawahiri personally attended the meeting. Instead, the government’s allegation reads:
“On 7 January 2000, the detainee and three other Taliban officials attended a meeting with Iranian and Hizbi Islami-Gulbuddin Hekmatyar faction officials [emphasis added]. Topics of discussion included United States intervention in the region, restoration of peace in Afghanistan, and strengthening the Taliban’s nascent ties with Iran.”
It is not clear why the US government removed the part about Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a long-time ally of Osama bin Laden, and top al Qaeda terrorist Ayman al Zawahiri personally attending the meeting. At the time, Hekmatyar was sheltering in Iran under the care of the Revolutionary Guards Corps.
Regardless, the rest of the details about the meeting between the Taliban and the Iranians were substantively unchanged. And a memo prepared for Khairkhwa's third ARB hearing notes that Khairkhwa did meet with Ayman al Zawahiri to discuss US "intervention" in the region.
During his hearings at Gitmo, Khairkhwa did not deny that he attended the meeting with the Iranians in January of 2000. Khairkhwa also did not deny a second meeting with the Iranians in late 2001. The US government’s Sept. 2, 2004, CSRT summary of evidence memo for Khairkhwa states:
“Detainee was present at a clandestine meeting in October of 2001 between Taliban and Iranian officials in which Iran pledged to assist the Taliban in their war with the United States.”
The government’s unclassified summary of evidence memos for Khairkhwa's first and second ARB hearings allege that the meeting between the Taliban and the Iranians took place in November of 2001, not October.
“In November 2001, the detainee met with an Iranian diplomatic delegation. The Iranian Government was prepared to offer anti-aircraft weapons to the Taliban for use against the United States and Coalition Forces operating in Afghanistan.”
In all likelihood, therefore, this post-September 11 meeting between the Taliban and Iranian officials took place in November, and the US government simply refined its allegation in the latter memos. Khairkhwa discussed this post-September 11 meeting with the Iranians during his CSRT hearing. Khairkhwa did not deny attending the meeting or that the Iranians “pledged to assist the Taliban in their war with the United States,” but claimed that he had only set up security for the meeting and was not the only Taliban official present.
Khairkhwa explained:
“Yes, I participated in that meeting with the Iranians. There was a committee that came from Kandahar and I joined them and was just sitting there. They were conducting the meeting. My job was for the security of this committee. I was not the sole representative of this committee to talk with the Iranians. They were responsible; my job was to provide security and safety for the committee.”
Later in his testimony, Khairkhwa made it clear that the Taliban sent a delegation from its central government to attend the meeting. Khairkhwa undoubtedly wanted to downplay his own role in the secret meetings.
"The meeting with the Iranians, it was designed and conducted by the committee that came from Kandahar, which was the central government at the time. I was just a security member," Khairkhwa said.
During his second round ARB hearing, Khairkhwa denied that the Iranians offered anti-aircraft weapons at the November 2001 meeting. He claimed that the Iranians made this offer only at the Jan. 7, 2000, meeting, which took place on Iranian soil. Khairkhwa also denied that any representatives of Hekmatyar's group attended.
"Yes. There was a meeting with the Taliban delegation on Iran's soil," Khairkhwa said. "There were no Gulbuddin representatives."
Khairkhwa told his Gitmo board that the Taliban had difficulty procuring arms because of international sanctions that had been levied against the regime. "The Iranians offered to buy weapons for us because we were on restriction and could not buy them," Khairkhwa explained. "That is the truth."
Khairkhwa also claimed that the arms deal was never consummated. However, history does not bear out Khairkhwa's denial.
In fact, multiple press outlets have reported that the Iranians have been supplying anti-aircraft missiles, mines, and other arms to the Taliban.
There is another important aspect to the meetings between the Iranians and the Taliban that Khairkhwa attended as well. A US government memo produced for Khairkhwa's third ARB hearing notes that in addition to anti-aircraft missiles, the Taliban and Iran negotiated "an open border to Iran for any Arab or Taliban to smuggle money or goods out of Afghanistan."
This, too, came to fruition. For example, Time Magazine reported in early 2002 that Taliban and al Qaeda terrorists slipped across the border into Iran in order to avoid American forces.
Khairkhwa’s testimony and the US government's evidence against Khairkhwa confirm a central point in this Long War against terrorism. Even one-time enemies like the Taliban and Iran can conspire when it comes to countering their mutual enemy: America. And, somewhat surprisingly, they had begun to plan their countermeasures even before the September 11 attacks prompted America's response in the region. According to the US government's files, that planning may have even involved senior terrorists, including al Qaeda's second in command, Ayman al Zawahiri.
The US-led invasion of Afghanistan clearly changed the Iranians' priorities, however. But did the Iranians begin their rapprochement with the Taliban only after September 11? Or, had the groundwork for the type of cooperation we see in Afghanistan today already been laid?
The answer to these questions can be found, in part, in the unclassified documents prepared by the US government for Gitmo detainee Khirullah Said Wali Khairkhwa (ISN #579). Khairkhwa is one of more than 200 detainees remaining at Gitmo. His fate will ultimately be decided by the Obama administration's inter-agency review boards.
During Khairkhwa's time at Gitmo, US officials produced several memos for his combatant status review tribunal (CSRT) and administrative review board hearings (ARB). In addition, Khairkhwa testified at his CSRT and one of his ARB hearings. The Defense Department's transcripts of Khairkhwa's testimony, as well as the memos produced by the government, can all be readily found online.
Links began well before September 11 attack
The story laid out in the government's memos and in Khairkhwa's own testimony reveals new details about the collusion between Iran and the Taliban. Interestingly, this cooperation began even before the September 11 attacks.
The story begins in 1998 when the Taliban and Iran were on the verge of war. In August of that year, the Taliban slaughtered hundreds of Shiites, including nine Iranian diplomats, in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan. The Iranians responded by positioning thousands of uniformed Revolutionary Guardsmen and other forces on Iran’s easternmost border with Afghanistan. Mullah Omar and Ayatollah Khameini traded verbal barbs in the press. The world openly fretted over the prospect of war.
Enter Khairkhwa. For years, Khairkhwa had been the public voice of the Taliban, acting as its Pashto spokesman and doing interviews with the BBC and Voice of America. Khairkhwa was trusted by the Taliban’s most senior leaders to spin news for their regime. This was no small task given the Taliban’s continual human rights abuses. Khairkhwa was, according to the US government's unclassified files, also the Taliban commander who helped take Mazar-e-Sharif in 1996. At the time, Mazar-e-Sharif was hotly contested territory.
In 1999, the Taliban would trust Khairkhwa with another mission. He was installed as the governor of Afghanistan’s westernmost province of Herat. Khairkhwa served in that capacity until the Taliban’s fall in late 2001.
The US government alleges that during that time Khairkhwa became a major drug trafficker with ties to senior al Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden. Khairkhwa reportedly built three walled compounds that he used to manage his opium trade. And he allegedly oversaw one of Osama bin Laden's training facilities in Herat as well. One US government memo notes that only Khairkhwa or bin Laden himself "could authorize entrance" to the facility, which was one of bin Laden's "most important bases" and "conducted terrorist training two times per week."
Khairkhwa denied that he was a drug dealer and that he had significant ties to senior al Qaeda leaders during his hearings at Gitmo. But it is clear that US intelligence officials did not believe Khairkhwa’s denials. The allegations were repeatedly included in the memos prepared for Khairkhwa’s case.
Khairkhwa assigned a Taliban liaison to Iran
Khairkhwa played another, more provocative role as well.
According to the US government’s unclassified files, Khairkhwa was installed as the governor of Herat “to improve relations between Iran and the Taliban government.”
By his own admission, Khairkhwa began meeting with the Iranians in early 2000. The US government’s unclassified documents cite at least two instances when Khairkhwa took part in meetings between senior Taliban and Iranian officials: one on Jan. 7, 2000, and a second time in late 2001.
The government’s Oct. 7, 2005, ARB summary of evidence memo for Khairkhwa includes this allegation:
“On 7 January 2000, the detainee and three other Taliban officials attended a meeting with Iranian and Hizbi Islami-Gulbuddin Hikmatyar faction officials. Present at the meeting were Afghan Hizbi Islami-Gulbuddin leader, Gulbuddin Hikmatyar and Ayman Al-Zawahiri [emphasis added]. Topics of discussion included United States intervention in the region, restoration of peace in Afghanistan and strengthening the Taliban’s ties with [the] Iran[ian] government.”
The government’s second and more recent ARB summary of evidence memo (dated June 16, 2006) modified this allegation. US intelligence officials did not allege that Hekmatyar or Zawahiri personally attended the meeting. Instead, the government’s allegation reads:
“On 7 January 2000, the detainee and three other Taliban officials attended a meeting with Iranian and Hizbi Islami-Gulbuddin Hekmatyar faction officials [emphasis added]. Topics of discussion included United States intervention in the region, restoration of peace in Afghanistan, and strengthening the Taliban’s nascent ties with Iran.”
It is not clear why the US government removed the part about Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a long-time ally of Osama bin Laden, and top al Qaeda terrorist Ayman al Zawahiri personally attending the meeting. At the time, Hekmatyar was sheltering in Iran under the care of the Revolutionary Guards Corps.
Regardless, the rest of the details about the meeting between the Taliban and the Iranians were substantively unchanged. And a memo prepared for Khairkhwa's third ARB hearing notes that Khairkhwa did meet with Ayman al Zawahiri to discuss US "intervention" in the region.
During his hearings at Gitmo, Khairkhwa did not deny that he attended the meeting with the Iranians in January of 2000. Khairkhwa also did not deny a second meeting with the Iranians in late 2001. The US government’s Sept. 2, 2004, CSRT summary of evidence memo for Khairkhwa states:
“Detainee was present at a clandestine meeting in October of 2001 between Taliban and Iranian officials in which Iran pledged to assist the Taliban in their war with the United States.”
The government’s unclassified summary of evidence memos for Khairkhwa's first and second ARB hearings allege that the meeting between the Taliban and the Iranians took place in November of 2001, not October.
“In November 2001, the detainee met with an Iranian diplomatic delegation. The Iranian Government was prepared to offer anti-aircraft weapons to the Taliban for use against the United States and Coalition Forces operating in Afghanistan.”
In all likelihood, therefore, this post-September 11 meeting between the Taliban and Iranian officials took place in November, and the US government simply refined its allegation in the latter memos. Khairkhwa discussed this post-September 11 meeting with the Iranians during his CSRT hearing. Khairkhwa did not deny attending the meeting or that the Iranians “pledged to assist the Taliban in their war with the United States,” but claimed that he had only set up security for the meeting and was not the only Taliban official present.
Khairkhwa explained:
“Yes, I participated in that meeting with the Iranians. There was a committee that came from Kandahar and I joined them and was just sitting there. They were conducting the meeting. My job was for the security of this committee. I was not the sole representative of this committee to talk with the Iranians. They were responsible; my job was to provide security and safety for the committee.”
Later in his testimony, Khairkhwa made it clear that the Taliban sent a delegation from its central government to attend the meeting. Khairkhwa undoubtedly wanted to downplay his own role in the secret meetings.
"The meeting with the Iranians, it was designed and conducted by the committee that came from Kandahar, which was the central government at the time. I was just a security member," Khairkhwa said.
During his second round ARB hearing, Khairkhwa denied that the Iranians offered anti-aircraft weapons at the November 2001 meeting. He claimed that the Iranians made this offer only at the Jan. 7, 2000, meeting, which took place on Iranian soil. Khairkhwa also denied that any representatives of Hekmatyar's group attended.
"Yes. There was a meeting with the Taliban delegation on Iran's soil," Khairkhwa said. "There were no Gulbuddin representatives."
Khairkhwa told his Gitmo board that the Taliban had difficulty procuring arms because of international sanctions that had been levied against the regime. "The Iranians offered to buy weapons for us because we were on restriction and could not buy them," Khairkhwa explained. "That is the truth."
Khairkhwa also claimed that the arms deal was never consummated. However, history does not bear out Khairkhwa's denial.
In fact, multiple press outlets have reported that the Iranians have been supplying anti-aircraft missiles, mines, and other arms to the Taliban.
There is another important aspect to the meetings between the Iranians and the Taliban that Khairkhwa attended as well. A US government memo produced for Khairkhwa's third ARB hearing notes that in addition to anti-aircraft missiles, the Taliban and Iran negotiated "an open border to Iran for any Arab or Taliban to smuggle money or goods out of Afghanistan."
This, too, came to fruition. For example, Time Magazine reported in early 2002 that Taliban and al Qaeda terrorists slipped across the border into Iran in order to avoid American forces.
Khairkhwa’s testimony and the US government's evidence against Khairkhwa confirm a central point in this Long War against terrorism. Even one-time enemies like the Taliban and Iran can conspire when it comes to countering their mutual enemy: America. And, somewhat surprisingly, they had begun to plan their countermeasures even before the September 11 attacks prompted America's response in the region. According to the US government's files, that planning may have even involved senior terrorists, including al Qaeda's second in command, Ayman al Zawahiri.
Iraqi Troops Raid Iranian Dissident Camp, in Nod to Tehran By Charles Levinson and Yochi J. Dreazen
Iraqi forces stormed a camp of more than 3,000 members of an Iranian dissident group that until recently had been protected by the U.S. military, in the biggest unilateral operation since American forces withdrew from Iraq's cities a month ago.
Iran has long demanded that Iraq take action against the group, the Mujahedin e-Khalq, or MEK, but the U.S. had stood in its way.
The willingness to go ahead with the raid appears to point to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's balancing act between his two most important allies, as the U.S. gradually pulls out of the country and neighboring Iran seeks to expand its influence.
Iraqi forces seized control of the camp by force after the camp's leaders refused requests by Iraqi police to enter the camp peacefully to establish a police station there, according to the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. Ray Odierno, and a spokesman for Prime Minister Maliki.
The raid was within Iraq's rights, the U.S. State Department said Tuesday, and the Iraqi government has assured it that no member of the group in Iraq will be forcibly transferred to a country where he or she fears persecution.
"This is really a matter for the government of Iraq to handle. This is completely within their purview. But we are closely monitoring it," said State Department spokesman Ian Kelly.
The MEK, whose name means People's Mujahedin of Iran, has been based in Iraq since the early 1980s, when Saddam Hussein gave members refuge along with formal military training and arms. The MEK staged attacks against Iranian officials, and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was left partially paralyzed by an MEK attack.
It also targeted U.S. officials in Iran in the 1970s, and the group is designated as a terrorist organization by the State Department.
The MEK renounced violence in 2001 and enjoys some support among hawks in Washington because of its claims to be a pro-American, pro-democracy alternative to Iran's ruling clerics. The U.S. disarmed the group in 2003, and protected its Iraq base, known as Camp Ashraf, in part because of the group's opposition to Tehran.
Gen. Odierno said the Iraqis hadn't given the U.S. advance warning of the raid. Iraq's government had vowed to move against the group after the U.S. handed over control over the territory three months ago -- promising to deal humanely with the group.
Residents of Camp Ashraf said hundreds of Iraqi security forces tore down the camp's walls on Tuesday afternoon with bulldozers. The forces fired water cannon and tear gas and swung batons against camp residents who tried to block their entry, residents said. The operation against the sprawling desert compound 80 miles north of Baghdad and about 70 miles from Iran's border was continuing into the night, they said.
A U.S. military official said the Iraqis used primarily tear gas and smoke grenades, as opposed to live ammunition or other deadly weaponry.
"They promised to deal with the MEK in a humane fashion," Gen. Odierno told a small group of reporters at his office near Baghdad's airport. "That's what we've been watching for and so far they're abiding by that."
There were conflicting reports of casualties during the assault. The MEK said four people had been killed and about 300 men and women had been wounded, but Iraqi media reported just 10 injuries. The reports of violence couldn't be independently confirmed. The MEK has a history of making exaggerated claims to journalists -- though it earned some credibility for being the first to find out about Iran's controversial nuclear-fuel program in 2002.
The MEK was disarmed by the U.S. in 2003, and since then has focused on nonmilitary means of fighting the Iranian regime, such as creating and disseminating Internet propaganda.
The MEK says it is the leading Iranian opposition group, but it his little public support in the country. Supporters of current opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi reject the group.
The MEK lost much of its popular support inside Iran after it fought alongside Iraq's army against Iran in the 1980s. It has also alienated many Iraqis after it was accused of helping Mr. Hussein violently suppress rebellions by Iraq's Kurdish and Shiite minorities, charges the MEK has denied.
With such resentment in Iraq, the raid could win domestic favor for Mr. Maliki, who faces a national election early next year.
Mr. Maliki, a Shiite, has maintained close ties to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and spoken out against the prospect of an American military strike on Iran. At the same time, he has cracked down on Iranian-backed Shiite militias and repeatedly declared that Iran shouldn't interfere in Iraq's internal affairs.
Inside Camp Ashraf, MEK members, many of whom have been raised since childhood by MEK followers, dress in matching olive and khaki fatigues and live monk-like celibate lives.
Iraq has said it hopes to deport camp residents, but that is unlikely to happen soon. Many hold U.S., Canadian and European passports, but may resist repatriation. There is fear that MEK members will be in danger if they are returned to Iran.
For now, the Iraqi government appears to simply be establishing a presence inside the camp, according to a senior Western adviser to the Iraqi government. "There's nothing the government can do with them and no place to put them," the adviser said.
Iran has long demanded that Iraq take action against the group, the Mujahedin e-Khalq, or MEK, but the U.S. had stood in its way.
The willingness to go ahead with the raid appears to point to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's balancing act between his two most important allies, as the U.S. gradually pulls out of the country and neighboring Iran seeks to expand its influence.
Iraqi forces seized control of the camp by force after the camp's leaders refused requests by Iraqi police to enter the camp peacefully to establish a police station there, according to the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. Ray Odierno, and a spokesman for Prime Minister Maliki.
The raid was within Iraq's rights, the U.S. State Department said Tuesday, and the Iraqi government has assured it that no member of the group in Iraq will be forcibly transferred to a country where he or she fears persecution.
"This is really a matter for the government of Iraq to handle. This is completely within their purview. But we are closely monitoring it," said State Department spokesman Ian Kelly.
The MEK, whose name means People's Mujahedin of Iran, has been based in Iraq since the early 1980s, when Saddam Hussein gave members refuge along with formal military training and arms. The MEK staged attacks against Iranian officials, and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was left partially paralyzed by an MEK attack.
It also targeted U.S. officials in Iran in the 1970s, and the group is designated as a terrorist organization by the State Department.
The MEK renounced violence in 2001 and enjoys some support among hawks in Washington because of its claims to be a pro-American, pro-democracy alternative to Iran's ruling clerics. The U.S. disarmed the group in 2003, and protected its Iraq base, known as Camp Ashraf, in part because of the group's opposition to Tehran.
Gen. Odierno said the Iraqis hadn't given the U.S. advance warning of the raid. Iraq's government had vowed to move against the group after the U.S. handed over control over the territory three months ago -- promising to deal humanely with the group.
Residents of Camp Ashraf said hundreds of Iraqi security forces tore down the camp's walls on Tuesday afternoon with bulldozers. The forces fired water cannon and tear gas and swung batons against camp residents who tried to block their entry, residents said. The operation against the sprawling desert compound 80 miles north of Baghdad and about 70 miles from Iran's border was continuing into the night, they said.
A U.S. military official said the Iraqis used primarily tear gas and smoke grenades, as opposed to live ammunition or other deadly weaponry.
"They promised to deal with the MEK in a humane fashion," Gen. Odierno told a small group of reporters at his office near Baghdad's airport. "That's what we've been watching for and so far they're abiding by that."
There were conflicting reports of casualties during the assault. The MEK said four people had been killed and about 300 men and women had been wounded, but Iraqi media reported just 10 injuries. The reports of violence couldn't be independently confirmed. The MEK has a history of making exaggerated claims to journalists -- though it earned some credibility for being the first to find out about Iran's controversial nuclear-fuel program in 2002.
The MEK was disarmed by the U.S. in 2003, and since then has focused on nonmilitary means of fighting the Iranian regime, such as creating and disseminating Internet propaganda.
The MEK says it is the leading Iranian opposition group, but it his little public support in the country. Supporters of current opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi reject the group.
The MEK lost much of its popular support inside Iran after it fought alongside Iraq's army against Iran in the 1980s. It has also alienated many Iraqis after it was accused of helping Mr. Hussein violently suppress rebellions by Iraq's Kurdish and Shiite minorities, charges the MEK has denied.
With such resentment in Iraq, the raid could win domestic favor for Mr. Maliki, who faces a national election early next year.
Mr. Maliki, a Shiite, has maintained close ties to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and spoken out against the prospect of an American military strike on Iran. At the same time, he has cracked down on Iranian-backed Shiite militias and repeatedly declared that Iran shouldn't interfere in Iraq's internal affairs.
Inside Camp Ashraf, MEK members, many of whom have been raised since childhood by MEK followers, dress in matching olive and khaki fatigues and live monk-like celibate lives.
Iraq has said it hopes to deport camp residents, but that is unlikely to happen soon. Many hold U.S., Canadian and European passports, but may resist repatriation. There is fear that MEK members will be in danger if they are returned to Iran.
For now, the Iraqi government appears to simply be establishing a presence inside the camp, according to a senior Western adviser to the Iraqi government. "There's nothing the government can do with them and no place to put them," the adviser said.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
CSR Debuts Breakthrough SiRFstarIV Location-Aware Architecture: SiRFaware Technology Delivers Continuous Location Awareness without Compromising Batte
CSR plc., a leading provider of GPS-powered location platforms, today launched its breakthrough SiRFstarIV™ location-aware architecture with exclusive SiRFaware™ self-assisted, micro-power GPS technology that enables consumer devices to always be location aware – without draining batteries and without requiring network aiding. CSR today also introduced its first SiRFstarIV-based product, the GSD4t receiver, which offers a superior solution for enabling mobile phones and other space- and power-constrained devices to have the robust, always-available geo-awareness consumers are demanding.
“I am very pleased that we are able to launch such a major, breakthrough technology so soon after our merger with SiRF,” said Joep van Beurden, CEO of CSR. “Today’s announcement significantly strengthens our GPS product offerings and our location technology portfolio.”
The essence of the SiRFstarIV breakthrough is its ability to continually maintain “better-than-hot-start” conditions in the GPS receiver for fast location fixes without having to be kept fully turned on all the time and draining precious battery power. Until now, designers of mobile devices were forced to completely turn off GPS receivers when not in use to conserve power, causing annoying start-up delays when a location application needed to get a new location fix quickly. Through a fusion of multiple innovations, the unique SiRFaware technology overcomes this barrier with or without network aiding while consuming only 50-500 microamperes of current.
“With consumers expecting reliable location services everywhere, we had to rewrite the traditional rule book on GPS architectures and create a new, low-energy way to maintain continuous location awareness without draining the device battery or requiring network assistance,” said Kanwar Chadha, chief marketing officer for CSR and founder of SiRF. “With SiRFstarIV and our unique SiRFaware technology, we have developed an architecture that will not only significantly improve the consumer experience when navigating with smartphones, but also enable consumer devices to maintain continuous location awareness.”
According to Chadha, people count on using their mobile phones and other mobile consumer devices just about everywhere, and expect pretty much the same of these devices’ location functionality, and this was a critical consideration while developing the SiRFstarIV architecture. As a result, SiRFstarIV GPS receivers are more compatible with how consumers actually use these kinds of products, delivering a superior user experience by enabling handsets and other mobile devices to always get a fast location fix without significantly impacting battery life. SiRFstarIV’s unique blend of high performance and low energy location-awareness modes opens the door to the more widespread use of GPS in digital still cameras and camcorders, hand-held games and a wide variety of portable consumer electronics devices.
The SiRFstarIV Architecture
The SiRFstarIV architecture core is comprised of a high-performance GPS location engine, smart location sensor interface, adaptive micro-power manager and active jammer remover, which together deliver:
* Twice the search capacity of the industry proven SiRFstarIII™ architecture, resulting in enhanced sensitivity, reduced time-to-fix and improved positional accuracy
* Advanced micro-power management and integrated switched-mode regulation that maintains hot-start conditions with minimal energy (50-500 microamperes)
* Intelligent MEMs sensor support (for accelerometers and other sensors) that improves the location experience, enabling greater contextual awareness, more sophisticated energy management and enhanced indoor positional accuracy
* Advanced DSP technology that actively searches for jammers and removes them prior to correlation for maximum GPS performance and design troubleshooting
SiRFstarIV GSD4t
The first implementation of the SiRFstarIV architecture, the GSD4t host-based platform, is optimized for mobile phones and other space and power-sensitive consumer devices. The GSD4t receiver provides industry leading performance, with navigation to -160 dBm, tracking to -163 dBm and excellent pass margins for E911 and 3GPP. It can maintain its full rated -160-dBm acquisition sensitivity without network assistance. A low-power champion, the GSD4t receiver requires only 8 mW in 1-Hz TricklePower mode – two and a half times less than the industry benchmark SiRFstarIII.
SiRFstarIV GSD4t features such as active jamming removal, single-SAW design, an on-chip LNA, fail-safe I/O, integrated switchers, single supply voltage, simple RF matching and small size and packaging also make SiRF’s GPS receivers easier for designers to use and integrate into their products.
“Radio frequency interference within a portable consumer product, such as from embedded Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and mobile radios, as well as LCD screens, can easily inhibit GPS performance, and often does not become apparent until shortly before the product is due to go into production. This can easily add months of delay until the issue is resolved,” said Dave Huntingford, director of product management for CSR’s handset business unit. “Our unique active jammer removal not only solves this issue, but can pinpoint for designers much earlier in the development process the precise strength and source of these interfering signals, enabling them to be contained in the design phase rather than in later, more costly test phases.”
Available in a 42-ball, 0.4-mm pitch wafer level chip scale package (WLCSP), the GSD4t offers low integration and BOM costs and fast time-to-market, combining RF receiver, baseband, switcher and low-current LDOs on a single chip, and requiring only six to eight external passive components and a single SAW to provide a complete solution that occupies less than 20 square millimeters, including switcher parts.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Pakistan’s Nuclear Weapons and the Doomsday Scenario by Myra MacDonald
When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton raised the possibility in April of Islamist militants taking over Pakistan and its nuclear weapons, her words were dismissed as alarmist - and perhaps deliberately so as a way of putting pressure on Islamabad to act.
The problem with Pakistan is that it is almost impossible to come up with a view that is not either alarmist or complacent. It is such a complex country that nobody can agree a frame of reference for assessing the risk. It is the base for a bewildering array of militants including Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, al Qaeda and anti-India groups, yet also has a powerful and professional army which would be expected to defend to the last its Punjab heartland and nuclear weapons against a jihadi takeover. Its potent mix of poverty and Islamist sympathies among a significant section of the population make it ripe for revolution, yet it also has a strong and secular-minded civil society which was willing to go out into the streets earlier this year to demand an independent judiciary.
You can assess the risk in Pakistan by looking at the rate of decline in stability there, and that was faster than anyone expected over the past year or so until a military offensive against the Taliban in Swat which began in April halted the slide.
Or you can look at the worst case scenario, of Islamist militants taking over a nuclear-armed Pakistan, and decide that even if that outcome is unlikely, the potential dangers arising from it are so great as to put Pakistani stability at the top of global risks.
In an essay in the National Interest, Bruce Riedel, the former CIA officer who led a review of strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan for President Barack Obama, lays out the implications of that worst case scenario.
“A jihadist Pakistan would be the most serious threat to the United States since the end of the Cold War. Aligned with al-Qaeda and armed with nuclear weapons, the Islamic Emirate of Pakistan would be a nightmare. U.S. options for dealing with it would all be bad,” he writes.
And if the United States were to try to invade “the Pakistanis would, of course, use their nuclear weapons to defend themselves. While they do not have delivery systems capable of reaching America, they could certainly destroy cities and bases in Afghanistan, India, the Gulf states and, if smuggled out ahead of time by terrorists, perhaps the United States. A victory in such a conflict would be Pyrrhic indeed.
“Of course, the hardest problem would be the day after. What would we do with a country twice the size of California with enormous poverty, almost 50 percent illiteracy and intense popular hatred for all that we stand for after we have fought a nuclear war to occupy it?”
Riedel’s essay, titled “Armageddon in Islamabad” goes some way to answering the oft-asked question of why western troops are fighting in Afghanistan when al Qaeda and its allies are believed to be based in Pakistan. It also helps explain why the United States is so keen to see a peace deal with India that might help stabilise the country.
“A jihadist, nuclear-armed Pakistan is a scenario we need to avoid at all costs,” he says. That means working with the Pakistan we have today to try to improve its spotty record on terrorism and proliferation. There is good reason for pessimism. Working with the existing order in Pakistan may not succeed. But there is every reason to try, given the horrors of the alternative.”
Do read it in conjunction with this article in the CTC Sentinel (pdf), in which Shaun Gregory, a professor at Britain’s Bradford University, assesses the risk of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons falling into the hands of Islamist militants. The nuclear weapons, he argues, are well guarded by the Pakistan Army against the internal threat of a seizure by Islamist militants. But this also means that they could not be spirited out of the country by a third party, or destroyed, in the event of a state collapse.
The problem with Pakistan is that it is almost impossible to come up with a view that is not either alarmist or complacent. It is such a complex country that nobody can agree a frame of reference for assessing the risk. It is the base for a bewildering array of militants including Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, al Qaeda and anti-India groups, yet also has a powerful and professional army which would be expected to defend to the last its Punjab heartland and nuclear weapons against a jihadi takeover. Its potent mix of poverty and Islamist sympathies among a significant section of the population make it ripe for revolution, yet it also has a strong and secular-minded civil society which was willing to go out into the streets earlier this year to demand an independent judiciary.
You can assess the risk in Pakistan by looking at the rate of decline in stability there, and that was faster than anyone expected over the past year or so until a military offensive against the Taliban in Swat which began in April halted the slide.
Or you can look at the worst case scenario, of Islamist militants taking over a nuclear-armed Pakistan, and decide that even if that outcome is unlikely, the potential dangers arising from it are so great as to put Pakistani stability at the top of global risks.
In an essay in the National Interest, Bruce Riedel, the former CIA officer who led a review of strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan for President Barack Obama, lays out the implications of that worst case scenario.
“A jihadist Pakistan would be the most serious threat to the United States since the end of the Cold War. Aligned with al-Qaeda and armed with nuclear weapons, the Islamic Emirate of Pakistan would be a nightmare. U.S. options for dealing with it would all be bad,” he writes.
And if the United States were to try to invade “the Pakistanis would, of course, use their nuclear weapons to defend themselves. While they do not have delivery systems capable of reaching America, they could certainly destroy cities and bases in Afghanistan, India, the Gulf states and, if smuggled out ahead of time by terrorists, perhaps the United States. A victory in such a conflict would be Pyrrhic indeed.
“Of course, the hardest problem would be the day after. What would we do with a country twice the size of California with enormous poverty, almost 50 percent illiteracy and intense popular hatred for all that we stand for after we have fought a nuclear war to occupy it?”
Riedel’s essay, titled “Armageddon in Islamabad” goes some way to answering the oft-asked question of why western troops are fighting in Afghanistan when al Qaeda and its allies are believed to be based in Pakistan. It also helps explain why the United States is so keen to see a peace deal with India that might help stabilise the country.
“A jihadist, nuclear-armed Pakistan is a scenario we need to avoid at all costs,” he says. That means working with the Pakistan we have today to try to improve its spotty record on terrorism and proliferation. There is good reason for pessimism. Working with the existing order in Pakistan may not succeed. But there is every reason to try, given the horrors of the alternative.”
Do read it in conjunction with this article in the CTC Sentinel (pdf), in which Shaun Gregory, a professor at Britain’s Bradford University, assesses the risk of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons falling into the hands of Islamist militants. The nuclear weapons, he argues, are well guarded by the Pakistan Army against the internal threat of a seizure by Islamist militants. But this also means that they could not be spirited out of the country by a third party, or destroyed, in the event of a state collapse.
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