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War is Gods way of teaching Americans geography. This 19th-century quip, often attributed to the satirist Ambrose Bierce, deserves a 21st-century update: Attacks against the U.S. are Gods way of teaching Americans how weaker enemies are stronger than they seem.

Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda are the paradigmatic examples of this. On September 11, 2001, they gave Americans, along with the rest of the world, a lesson in asymmetric warfarearmed conflict between two sides whose relative military power differs significantly, and in which one party can gain advantage by targeting the other ones weak points.

Did Putin Direct Russian Hacking? And Other Big Questions

In that case, 19 suicidal terrorists armed with box cutters gained control of three commercial jetliners and used them to strike some of the most sensitive and symbolic targets of the most powerful and technologically advanced nation in the world. Al-Qaeda spent an estimated $500,000 on the attacks, which killed almost 3,000 people and cost hundreds of billions of dollars in material losses. The reactions that followed were even larger and more consequential than the attacks themselves: The United States launched what is to date its longest war ever (in Afghanistan), and its third-longest (in Iraq), at the estimated combined cost of $3 trillion to $5 trillion. Moreover, the geopolitical disruptions from all these events are still shaping todays world.

If Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda taught a new generation of Americans about kinetic asymmetric war, WikiLeaks and the Kremlin have taught them about cyber asymmetric war. While the first relies on physical violence to kill people, destroy buildings, and disable critical infrastructure, the second uses the internet and other cyber tools, which can cause not only physical damage but also weaken the institutions that are critical for the functioning of a democratic government.

When Leon Panetta, then the U.S. secretary of defense, warned in 2012 about the possibility of a cyber-Pearl Harbor, he envisioned physical calamity like hackers causing train derailments or contaminating the water supply. Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, involving what U.S. intelligence believes were Kremlin-directed hacks and leaks of emails damaging to the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, differed from this vision. It represented a political cyber-Pearl Harbor.

And that cyber confrontation was asymmetrical, not because America was at a technological disadvantage (the U.S. is among the worlds leaders in the technologies needed to wage cyberwars), but because Russia was able to exploit the weak points of America as a democracy.

What made America uniquely susceptible to the attack from an authoritarian Russia is emblematic of what makes other democracies particularly vulnerable, relative to their authoritarian counterparts, to political cyberattack. For one thing, the 2016 election attack targeted the democratic process itself. In the words of the intelligence communitys January 2017 report on the incident, the hacks and leaks worked to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. They aimed to take advantage of the free flow of information in a democratic society, the affect of that information on public opinion, and the electoral mechanisms through which public opinion determines a countrys leadership. (The assessment did not allege cyberattacks on voting machines, nor asses the actual impact Russian meddling might have had on the final outcome.)

If, on the other hand, a hacker leaked damaging information about Vladimir Putin, there are various obstacles in the way of its having an electoral effect. Restrictions on the media in Russia could prevent the information from circulating widely. Even if it did manage to attract publicity and sway public opinion, what then? Putin has tight control over the countrys electoral apparatus, meaning that a voting citizenry inclined to punish him for leaked evidence of misdeeds has no real mechanism to do so. The Panama Papers leaks of spring 2016, which resulted from the alleged hack of a law firm specializing in offshore banking, help illustrate the point. Though they exposed shady financial dealings within Putins inner circle, the Russian media covered them in a way favorable to Putin. The leaks made virtually no dent in his popularity.

And if democratic politicians are more vulnerable to the effects of leaks, democracies are also more likely to produce leakers to begin with. The legal protections individuals enjoy in the democratic states make it hard to deter this type of behaviorthough as illustrated by the case of Chelsea Manning, who provided classified U.S. government documents to WikiLeaks in 2010, leakers can be prosecuted and jailed. (Edward Snowden, who leaked classified details of government surveillance programs to journalists, fled the U.S. before he could face prosecution.) But the cost of leaking in an autocratic society like Russia, where political opponents of Putin have been known to wind up dead, could be far higher, obviously posing a major disincentive.

Democracies, too, have used cyberattacks against non-democratic states. Perhaps the best known example is the use of StuxNet, the successful attack, most likely by the United States and Israel, involving a malicious computer worm that sabotaged an element of Irans nuclear program. Other countries with similar capabilities could be stealthily using them against their rivals. As a member of former President Barack Obamas council of advisers on science and technology told me: The internet is now fully weaponized.

But, so far, the main political victims of cyberattackers have been leaders and public figures in democratic countriesespecially the United States. And the United States is not the only democracy vulnerable to political cyberattacks. One of the conclusions of the intelligence communitys report on the 2016 election hacks points to a much broader implication: We assess Moscow will apply lessons learned from its Putin-ordered campaign aimed at the U.S. presidential election to future influence efforts worldwide, including against U.S. allies and their election processes.

With elections coming up in several European countries, the Kremlin might turn its attention to influencing outcomes that would benefit its national interests. From bolstering populist candidates who have vowed to leave the EU, to encouraging skepticism of NATO by global leaders (most notable, so far, being President Trump), to supporting candidates who would ease the economic sanctions imposed on Russia for its actions in Crimea, there are numerous incentives for Putin to interfere, and numerous ways in which he could do so. Indeed, Russian cyber meddling was longstanding practice in Europe before 2016, and France, Germany, and the Netherlands are facing cyberattacks ahead of their elections this year.

The question is: Why havent Western democracies made the necessary reforms to adapt to the threat? Why have they let countries like Russia get the upper hand, not in capabilities, but in practice? One answer is that democracies, by their very nature, hinge on checks and balances that limit the concentration of power and slow down governmental decisionmaking. While all bureaucracies, including those of authoritarian regimes, are slow-moving, Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping surely are less encumbered by their laws and institutional constrains than their democratic counterparts.

Japans attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 unleashed a massive American reaction. It remains to be seen what the reaction to Americas political cyber-Pearl Harbor will beif any.

See the article here:
How Democracies Lose in Cyberwar - The Atlantic

President Trump met with law enforcement leaders twice this week, saw Jeff Sessions confirmed as top cop, and signed three tough-on-crime executive orders, which were then condemned by an organization composed of some of the nations top law enforcement officers.

Heres how Trumps tough-on-crime week went down:

Trump met with law enforcement brass from major cities on Wednesday and said there would be a "zero-tolerance policy for acts of violence against law enforcement," adding that we need national action to deal with crime in Chicago and declaring that since drugs are "afflicting our nation like never, ever before," we need to be ruthless in the fight against them. "We're going to stop these drugs from poisoning our people," he said.

At the swearing-in of Sessions, he signed three tough on crime executive orders declaring a new era of justice.

"The murder rate in our country is the highest its been in forty-seven years, right?" Trump told a group of county sheriffs he met with on Tuesday, the day before the police chiefs. "Did you know that? Forty-seven years. I used to use that, Id say that in a speech and everybody was surprised, because the press doesnt tell it like it is. It wasnt to their advantage to say that. But the murder rate is the highest its been in, I guess, from forty-five to forty-seven years."

In reality, the murder rate is historically low, despite a sharp spike in cities like Baltimore and Chicago over the last two years.

This confab with top cops was taking place at the same time that anti-drug crusader and racist pettifogger Sessions was being confirmed as the chief law enforcement officer in the country.

Law enforcement has already taken on much of the language and tactics of the War on Terror, which in some ways borrowed from the War on Drugs. But Trump further confuses them, complaining to the police chiefs, for instance, about the judicial branch questioning his Muslim ban. "They're taking away our weapons one by one," Trump said, as if the unfettered power of the president is synonymous with effective law enforcement. "This is a weapon that you need, and they're trying to take it away from you.

An executive order signed Thursday morning announced that the administration would begin developing policies that comprehensively address illegal immigration, drug trafficking, and violent crime.

Talking to the chiefs, Trump declared that the country supports law enforcement, while the dishonest media tries to convince you it's different," presumably referring to coverage of widespread protests over the past few years in the wake of police killings of unarmed African Americans.

The country may support law enforcement, but law enforcement might not necessarily support Trump. In what should be seen as a stinging rebuke on Friday, a report written by Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime and Incarceration, a group comprising nearly two hundred current and former police chiefs, sheriffs, federal and state prosecutors, and attorneys general from all fifty states, rejected Trumps tough-on-crime approach.

In early February, the President signed an executive order creating this Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety at the Justice Department, and signed another order to curb gang and drug activity. The proposal and these orders, however, do not target their language and efforts on fighting violent crimethe most serious threat to our public safety. Instead, they encourage law enforcement to focus on crime more generally. Federal resources are imperative to combat crime across the country, but failing to direct these resources toward our most immediate and dangerous threats risks wasting taxpayer dollars, the report, called Fighting Crime and Strengthening Criminal Justice: An Agenda for the New Administration, reads.

We need not use arrest, conviction, and prison as the default response for every broken law. For many nonviolent and first-time offenders, prison is not only unnecessary from a public safety standpoint, it also endangers our communities, it continues.

The paper was co-authored by David Brown, who was the widely praised police chief in Dallas when five law enforcement officers were shot at a protest there last summer.

Well have to wait and see how the regime responds to these recommendations. But it is likely the administration will push back against a more measured approach to policing because a comprehensive war on crime is a great way to scare the populace and eliminate political enemies, as Nixon aide John Ehrlichman made clear in a conversation with Harpers last year.

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people," Ehrlichman said. "We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

If anything, Trump is more paranoid and vindictive than Nixon. And it will be hard for police departments to refuse federal money. Because tons of cops are empowered by the election of Trump, and because policing is one of the few professions where the union is often as powerful as the boss, chiefs who dont support Trumps policies may fall.

Read the original here:
Democracy in Crisis: Trump's Tough-on-Crime Week - The Independent Weekly

The mission of Democracy is to build a vibrant and vital progressivism for the twenty-first century that builds on the movements proud history, is true to its central values, and is relevant to present times.

Democracy will publish on a quarterly basis and serve as a place where ideas can be developed and important debates can be spurred.

We do not seek to publish policy papers; well leave the important details on budget line items and dollar figures to others. Rather, we seek breakthrough thinking on the concepts and approaches that respond to the central transformations of our time: the breakdown of the ladder of upward mobility; the promise and problems of an information-based, globalized economy; new national security threats which cross old boundaries and defy old assumptions from jihadist terrorism and nuclear proliferation to climate change, pandemics, and poverty; and a society where people work and live in new and different ways.

Progressives have been at their best when we are both rigorous in looking at the world as it is and vigorous in introducing creative approaches to remake the world as we believe it should be. Democracy is not interested in either reiterating the conventional wisdom or maintaining unity around outdated orthodoxies. We see our role as upsetting tired assumptions, moving past outdated and obsolete divisions, and stretching the envelope of what is accepted by and of progressives.

Our ambitions are largeas is the scale of the work before usbut we have no doubt that ideas can change the course of our nation. Now is the time to fashion a new progressivism for the twenty-first century, and we welcome all who are willing to join in this conversation.

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Under the new proposals, Alan Rusbridger could have faced criminal charges for handling the US intelligence data leaked by Edward Snowden. Photograph: -/AFP/Getty Images

The Law Commissions purpose is to review the state of the law in England and Wales and where necessary to suggest how it should be updated. It is one of those rarely noticed constitutional cogs, an important institution that does important work. The law that relates to official secrets is indeed dated and, in a digital age of global publication, it is also technologically obsolete. Yet this is not at the heart of the proposals the commission is making. Instead, it proposes powers that would herald a new journalistic ice age. Anyone that published an intelligence- or foreign affairs-related story based on a leak would be open to criminal charges. Reporters, as well as the whistleblowers whose stories they tell, would be under threat of sentences of up to 14 years, regardless of the public interest and even if there were no likelihood ofdamage.

This all began in 2015, when the government asked the barrister Professor David Ormerod, the law commissioner for criminal law and evidence, to examine the protection of official data. The date is significant: the Guardian, together with other European and American newspapers, had recently published some of the huge volume of material leaked by Edward Snowden about surveillance techniques. Some of the information had been shared by British intelligence with the US National Security Agency, where Mr Snowden was a contractor. But there were no grounds for legal action, as no British citizen or resident had been responsible for the leaks. Nor could British journalists be charged with collecting and disseminating the material under the Official Secrets Act of 1911, because, in the terms of the legislation, they did not have a purpose prejudicial to the safety or interests of the state. That is, they were not spies. In fact, this paper strongly believes that the stories we published were in the public interest. That view is supported by the debate and inquiries that have followed.

The updated 1989 Official Secrets Act would also have been difficult to apply. To secure a conviction for unauthorised publication, the prosecution would have had to show that it had been damaging. This paper was very careful in what information it disclosed. What we published might have been embarrassing, but we believed that it was not damaging. The Law Commissions proposals for a new act appear expressly designed to make sure that if such a thing happened again, this time charges could be brought with confidence. Its proposals require only that someone had been gathering information that might benefit a foreign power or might prejudice the interests or safety of the state. They would not need to involve any intent to pass the information on to a foreign agency. A journalist would merely have to be notified that the information was capable of benefiting a foreign power for its publicationto be banned.

It is not so long ago that the menu in MI5s staff canteen was an official secret. Now the Law Commissions proposals would make it almost impossible for anyone who handles such data to publish anything about security activities that the government preferred to keep secret. If they had been in force three years ago, they would certainly have meant that Alan Rusbridger, the Guardians editor at the time of the publication of the Snowden files, could have faced criminal charges.

Assurances that these tools of state would never be used in an oppressive way look increasingly hollow when the US judiciary is castigated by President Trump for upholding the constitution, while British politicians fail to defend judges here against media attack.

In its report, the Law Commission lists Guardian Media as one of the organisations that was consulted on its proposals. This consultation was brief and informal and ended with a promise, honoured only in the breach, that everyone would be kept informed about the next steps.

News organisations, in an intensely hostile business climate, operate in an ever harsher environment. Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013 may yet be brought into force, exposing any news organisation that refused to sign up to the recognised regulator to the full costs of both parties in a libel action, regardless of whether it won or lost. The Investigatory Powers Act, which became law last autumn, has in the words of one lawyer, ripped the heart out of any ability to protect journalistic sources. In this angry digital age of fake news, where hard fact grows ever more precious, accurate and fair reporting has never been more important. Without it, democracy itself is weakened.

Read the original here:
The Guardian view on official secrets: new proposals threaten democracy - The Guardian

The Supreme Court, Jerusalem. (photo credit:Wikimedia Commons)

US President Donald Trump and numerous Likud MKs and ministers believe that the separation of powers means the judiciary should avoid interfering with executive decisions, or with laws passed by the legislature. In other words, they are inclined to belittle the legitimacy of judicial review, under which the courts may review executive and legislative decisions on grounds of unconstitutionality, illegality or unreasonableness.

In Trumps case the issue came up in connection with his executive order, issued on January 27, suspending the US refugee resettlement program for 120 days, restricting entry to the US from seven Muslim countries for 90 days and suspending Syrian refugee resettlement indefinitely.

When Seattle Federal District Court judge James Robart temporarily blocked the executive order on February 3, Trump tweeted: The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned! When on February 9 the San Francisco-based Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the lower courts ruling, Trumps reaction was that courts seemed to be so political, after he had previously implied that in his opinion the courts are biased. The court itself had rejected the administrations claim that it did not have the authority to review the presidents order.

In Israel the issue of the right of the High Court of Justice to review government policy, as it manifests itself in legislation and policy measures, emerges with growing frequency as Israels current government pursues increasingly controversial policies, which even the legal gatekeepers sometimes find difficult to defend. In reaction, members of the opposition are increasingly resorting to the HCJ in an attempt to redress policies that they claim constitute a danger to Israels democracy and future. Currently the HCJ is being called upon to review the so called Regulation Law that was passed by the Knesset last week, and which the attorney- general has refused to defend in court.

The reactions of the government and its supporters have not been as crass as Trumps reactions, though especially Bayit Yehudi ministers and MKs have been known to attack High Court justices for issuing rulings critical of the governments policies (especially in Judea and Samaria), and one MK Moti Yogev suggested that a bulldozer should be sent to tear down the court.

Trump accused the American federal courts of being political (i.e. liberal), even though the American system ensures that both liberal and conservative judges get appointed over time, with the balance being tilted alternately to one side or the other depending on the identity of the president.

In Israel the argument on the Right is that the system is permanently tilted in direction of the secular, liberal Left, and that as long as the method for selecting new judges is not amended, the bias against religious, conservative judges will continue. It is thus not surprising that there are voices on the Right that would like to change the method of selecting judges, and until that happens limit the ability of the opposition to petition the court on issues on which the Knesset has decided.

While it cannot be ruled out that in future an attempt might be made to force President Trump out of office before his term is over on legal grounds of one sort or another, in Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters are accusing the opposition is trying to oust him from office by means of a flood of media investigations some of which have turned into official police examinations and investigations.

Netanyahu and his supporters are arguing that if the opposition wishes to bring down the government and its head and replace them, it should do so by means of elections, and not legal proceedings against the prime minister that resemble a witch hunt.

The question is whether the accumulation of suspicions regarding the conduct of the prime minister and his family, some related to material benefits received from extremely wealthy acquaintances with or without the latter expecting to receive something in return; some having to do with highly questionable media-related deals designed to ensure Netanyahus remaining in power indefinitely; yet others related to alleged corruption in Israels arms acquisitions, involving persons some of whom are intimates of the prime minister should simply be set aside until Netanyahu is no longer prime minister.

If Netanyahu were accused of outright criminal offenses, the answer to this question would clearly be negative. The current situation is not clear-cut.

However, despite the fact that each of the suspicions against Netanyahu if taken separately dont amount to much, action should be taken immediately, because taken together and over time, all these affairs, combined with Netanyahus constant proclamations he will remain in office for a long time to come (what other prime minister of a democratic state talks like this?) create a highly disturbing picture.

Contrary to what I wrote two weeks ago, Netanyahu has now started accusing the media of spreading fake news in connection with all the examinations and investigations being carried out against him, but without citing a shred of evidence to refute the accusations leveled against him. It is really a question of how the disturbing facts are interpreted. This should be done by the legal authorities, not the lay voters, and the sooner the better.

If the court decides Netanyahu has done no wrong so be it.

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Think About It: The courts and democracy - Jerusalem Post Israel News