Considering Cyber Attacks & Availibility

In our July/August issue, writer Evgeny Morozov wrote on the instances, capabilities, and possible ramifications of cyber-warfare, while questioning the rules of engagement. This released questions of a pensive, yet still paranoid olfaction: At what point are cyber-attacks considered armed attacks, how feasibly could cyber-terrorism be used as a DHS-esque scare-tactic and if an actual threat, should such attacks to be considered a matter of international law? Comforting was the fact that most hackers are more blackmail artists than they are the chaos loving, movie villain types.

Still, it is easy to fear something we hardly understand. Morozov followed up this piece with a brief analysis of the cyber-scare South Korea, in which he points out the distinct possibility that it was drummed up by politicians as propaganda against North Korea and keeping (already) archaic digital laws intact. With that said, we should not be so naive to think that somewhere down the road, something drastic could not happen. And awareness is growing. Today, threatpost.com posted a digested article based off a Center for Strategic and International Studies report, iterating the point that developed countries (America, most so) are most vulnerable to cyber attacks because of the dependence and numerous ties into digital technology, re: personal information resting on other peoples servers ripe for the hacking.

What these articles fail (or choose not to) show us is what kind of counter strike we would be capable of unleashing. Yes we are most dependent on the Internet, but doesn’t that mean we are also inexorably bound to understand what is coming at us, and innovate? One may counter and say, most Americans have better things to do than write damaging code, but the fact is Americans invented hacking. I say ‘Bring it!’ Easy for me to say, I don’t partake in online banking, nor do have any idea of the consequences of waging cyber-warfare against theAmerican government. Ignorance is bliss, I say. There is a different dynamic than our arms race with Soviet Russia, because this type of engagement is not a matter of accumulating resources, but of preparation and defense. So my simple solution is we (on a government scale) should be allocating money into to prestigious tech schools, teaching Dikembe Mutumbo like defense coding and encryption techniques, or we should start taking the most sensitive information off of web servers and going the floppy-discs protected by ex-ivy league football players holding big guns. Why empower virus writers by giving them the faintest whiff of possible chaos? The more conservative root  is to create more complex web security systems.Yet doesn’t that only encourage an escalation of who can better hack or defend? If someone wants to steal information, make them do it in person. With less access to sensitive material, the chance of espionage inevitable decreases as well.

On a more personal level, I hate feeling like I’m marked on the web as a marketing function and unit with a credit card. And the fact that cyber attacks are entering into the national consciousness (soon to be rhetorical fodder) is almost as scary as the attacks themselves. While FDR would have me believe that there is nothing to fear but fear itself, I’m going to hedge my bets by minimizing my information and accounts on the Internet, and read more books. I like stealing information from those.

Let’s Go Back in Time to 1909

Since my youth, I have had a habit of connecting things, and I’ll probably never kick it. I take nothing at face value. Show me something and it will trigger synapses.

With that said, lately, I have been hearing the term “Human Condition” thrown around a lot. Usually, it is proffered in terms of what one’s portfolio of work represents. Makes sense: a human artist creates human work in human conditions (no matter the filth). However, when I connect things I tend to gravitate towards of paranoia. Thankfully, I am not a 9/11 truther like my “The more you know, the less you understand” cousin. I’m more of a “Robots will take over the world” kind of guy. Knowing just enough about technology to be interested, I have connected my paranoia to cybernetics, synthetic biology and the aforementioned Human Condition.

In the September 28th issue of the New Yorker, Michael Specter writes on the germinating field that is synthetic biology. What I took out of this article (because all the technical science stuff escapes me) is that the Bio Bricks lab is making $235 kits that attempt to turn DNA into bicycle parts to tinker with. All with a goal of keeping it open and accessible to the public. Fascinating? Check. Paranoia? Double check.

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Congratulations to Heather McHugh on her ‘Genius’ grant!

Heather McHugh first published her poetry in BR in our April 1986 issue. In that first poem, The Night, she explores the dependent relationships of language and proffers a paradox.

Just think of it,
and you surround it with

its opposite. Take here
and now, for instance. Do we see

a line where there is none? We draw
up sides, forgetting how

in cells, division
made things whole. To me

I’m complete,
but I’m partial to you.

Here, McHugh’s form compliments her content, as when she aptly uses a comma and enjambment to divide the line “in cells, division/made things whole.” The surprising confluence of these divisive words into a coherent union is juxtaposed with the breakdown of the “complete” self into a Read the rest of this entry »

Fiction Contest Deadline

To the masses, my people:

In two days time it will be October 1st, 2009. You say you know this but did you also know that it is the last day to submit to our Fiction Contest? And by submit, we mean place your darling writing in hard copy form into an envelope and send it to us to love and coddle.

Our address is:

Boston Review – Short Story Contest

35 Medford St Suite 302

Somerville, MA

02143

& here is the link to the guidelines and past winners (also known as the happiest people in the world.)

http://bostonreview.net/about/contest/#Seventeenth

Posner and Morozov write for Foreign Policy magazine

Two contributors to Boston Review have recently published articles in Foreign Policy magazine.

Eric Posner’s December 2008 article for BR, “Destructive technologies require us to re-assess civil liberties,” was a response to David Cole’s “Closing Guantánamo.” Posner argues that we ought to appreciate the Bush administration’s impulse to restrict civil liberties after 9/11. While Cole describes a preventive detention scheme that lurches into operation only after Congress declares war on a particular group, Posner’s alternative is less concerned about executive overreaching. “It is only a matter of time,” Posner writes, “before a general preventive detention system will be added to the criminal justice repertoire.”

Posner begins his recent article for Foreign Policy, “Think Again: International Law,” by stating that Bush did not brush aside international law as casually as his critics claimed. On a more controversial note, he asserts that President Barack Obama’s approach is likely to be surprisingly similar. This is not necessarily a bad thing, Posner suggests. He supplies the example of Kosovo: “The illegal military intervention in Kosovo stopped ethnic cleansing and, for a time, the wars that racked the Balkans.”

Evgeny Morozov, a Belarus-born researcher and blogger, is a frequent contributor to Boston Review. His articles, “Texting Towards Utopia,” “Cyber-Scare,” and most recently, “The Cyber-Attack that Wasn’t,” all address the question of how the Internet transforms global politics. In “Israel lobby: the blog edition,” Morozov writes at the cross-section of two issues: the Internet as a burgeoning political tool and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Several articles on the Israel-Palestine Conflict, including “Peace Out: The decline of Israel’s progressive movement,” by Helena Cobban and “The Best Hope–Still?” by Jeremy Pressman, are included in the same July/August 2009 issue.

Morozov responds to the surprising dearth of research “into the effectiveness of Israel’s decentralized new media advocacy efforts and the impact they have had on the international opinion.” Individual bloggers have emerged as “important opinion makers,” working to shape their country’s foreign policy. This argument was echoed in the article, “Reflections on Information Technology and Democracy,” by BR’s co-editor Joshua Cohen. Information Technology and the blogging scene are evolving in tandem with diplomacy and democracy. Cohen asks and responds to the pivotal question: How does the Internet shape this informal process of discussion–public discourse?

Do The Right Thing: Sarah’s Sewall’s Take on Genocide Policy

In the September/October edition of the Boston Review, Sarah Sewall discusses the roadblocks that face the Genocide Prevention Task Force, chaired by Madeleine Albright and William Cohen, on the way to creating an effective genocide policy.

Sewall needs hardly to mention the necessity of such a policy. In the 20th century, genocides and other mass murders killed more people than all wars.

In the 21st century, the United States has responded to genocide with fits and starts. President Barack Obama, before visiting a World War II-era concentration camp in Germany in June, said the world has an obligation to stop genocide, even when it’s inconvenient.

Sewall asks: “The President is sympathetic [to the issue of genocide], but how will he rank the objective of preventing mass atrocity in the context of other foreign policy goals?”

While running for president, Obama promised to recognize the Armenian Genocide. On January 19, 2008 Obama voiced his conviction “that the Armenian Genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion, or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence.” However, he avoided the term during a speech in Turkey in April, despite an open letter addressed to the President published by the International Association of Genocide Scholars, urging him to refer to the mass slaughter of Armenians.

Turkey and Armenia have recently agreed to start political negotiations. The two countries have never had diplomatic relations, and their border has been closed since 1993, when Armenia and Azerbaijan, both former Soviet republics, went to war over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. Marc Ambider—an associate editor at the Atlantic—believes that this step in the right direction would have been jeopardized “if the U.S. took the rhetorical step of calling the genocide a genocide,” Ambider writes: “For the sake of historical memory, it might have been a bad call, but for the sake of the lives of people in Turkey and Armenia today, it probably was the right call. Neutrality, of course, implied a de facto endorsement of the Turkish version of events, but behind the scenes, officials say, it was made clear to Obama that getting Turkey to come to terms with the genocide would require a lighter touch.” In response to genocide, should we follow a consistent policy or should we approach genocide with a lighter, more nuanced, “touch,” and on a case-by-case basis?

Another question concerns rhetoric. Sewall begins her article with a basic assumption: we will recognize genocide when we see it. This is not necessarily the case. Historically, Turkey has resisted the label of genocide, arguing that the Armenians were killed in warfare. If most of the rest of world argues that the Ottoman government tried to exterminate its Armenian population, why does Turkey disagree? In an October 12, 2007 aricle for the New York Times, Sabrina Tavernise wrote in response to this question, “The answer is hidden deep inside the Turkish psyche, and to a large extent, printed on the pages of Turkish history books.”

For one, even if we do recognize mass killing, we might not jump to label it as a “genocide.” Former secretary-general of Doctors Without Borders, Alain Destexhe, believes the word genocide has fallen victim to “a sort of verbal inflation, in much the same way as happened with the word fascist.” Because of that, he says, the term has progressively lost its initial meaning and is becoming “dangerously commonplace.”

The newest rhetorical (albeit not so new historically) debate concerning a case of genocide is the conflict in the Middle East. It has become increasingly difficult to characterize. In 2002, Bulent Ecevit, Prime Minister of Turkey (Israel’s longstanding and sole Muslim ally) accused Israel of genocide against the Palestinians. Ecevit made the denunciation as he was addressing his political base, the Democratic Left Party. “A genocide is being carried out against the Palestinians before the eyes of the whole world,” Ecevit said. In August 2006, President Hugo Chavez recalled his envoy to Israel and described the Jewish state’s campaign in Lebanon as a “new genocide”. On September 9, 2009, Chavez accused Israel of genocide against the Palestinian people, telling a French newspaper that the bombing of Gaza late last year was an unprovoked attack. Boston Review published an article on the uses of anti-Semitism in Chávez’s Venezuela, and one reader posted in a thread: “The Arabs have launched one genocidal war against Israel after another.”

Perhaps the first step in creating a genocide policy is deciding on a clear definition. Clearly, the rhetorical debate cannot be sidestepped on the way to an effective genocide policy.

Health Care Round-up

This summer health care reform is all over the news, and politicians back home in their districts during the recess are encountering all sorts of interesting characters. The Washington Post characterized a recent spate of town hall meetings, held by legislators to discuss the subject with their constituents, as “[having] transcended their original purpose [to] become a kind of professional wrestling for the civically engaged.”

Following up on Sam’s post, and on all the craziness going on in town halls, here is a sampling of past Boston Review on health care. The magazine has been covering health care issues for over a decade, in a manner hopefully closer to chess, or perhaps poker, than professional wrestling. But don’t take it from me – I’m a rugby person, myself.

Also: see if you can spot the brother of a White House official in this list (hint: the official in question is sometimes called “Rahmbo.”)
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American Amnesia and the Unaddressed Legacy of the Iraq War

“Having spent the better part of the Bush era arguing foreign policy with a fury not seen since Vietnam, Americans have settled on a remarkably durable consensus: It was a mistake. We’re winning. Let’s leave.” ~Ross Douthat

We can never be sure of the alchemy by which historical conflicts and experiences influence the decision making of national leaders in comparable situations. Were it not for the rapid escalation of World War I, would European leaders have proved as cautious in appeasing Hitler? But alternatively, Soviet defeat in Afghanistan and the American humiliation in Vietnam did not deter the Bush Administration from trying to tame Afghanistan and Iraq.

As for the legacy of the current war in Iraq, one aspect of its legacy in foreign policy decision-making seems clear – that no one is considering it.

Since 2003, the Fertile Crescent has been the setting of a great test of Neoconservative American foreign policy. This grand Neoconservative vision, resurgent and emboldened in the 90’s by America’s triumph over the Soviets, calls for “a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity.” That is, a foreign policy of an American hegemon exerting global leadership and moral superiority, protecting fellow democracies while utilizing strong military intervention against hostile regimes to recast them in America’s own democratic image.

As President Clinton prepared for his 1998 State of the Union, he received a letter signed by a score of prominent Neoconservatives. Citing the inevitability of Saddam Hussein producing weapons of mass destruction, destabilizing the Middle East, threatening the safety of our troops and allies in the region, and cutting off the oil supply, they urged Clinton “to turn [his] Administration’s attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam’s regime from power,” a strategy that “will require a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts.”

Three years later, the signers of this letter populated Washington with only a Texas cowboy between them and control of the American war machine: Dick Cheney was Vice-President, Donald Rumsfeld the Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz his Deputy, and Elliott Abrams Special Assistant to the President and a National Security Council member. When September 11 introduced the Middle East to the national consciousness as a land of sinister threats, it offered the opportunity to push their Neoconservative vision into action.

Not long ago, this vision appeared to have been torn asunder by IED’s and lying dead in the ethnically charged landscape of Iraq – de-legitimized by its failed implementation as Iraq descended into chaos and civil war. The Neoconservatives planning and running Operation Iraqi Freedom were criminally negligent, arrogant, unprepared and perhaps even corrupt in a plethora of ways so well discussed in the last several years they need not be repeated, although it can largely be summed up by an Army lieutenant colonel’s presentation to war planners days before the invasion, which described post-invasion re-construction plans as “To be provided.” They never were.

But the surge no longer reflects President Bush going down with the Neoconservative ship. Competent US military personnel, reconstruction experts and Iraqi citizens have wrought an amazing transformation, achieving modest successes in Iraq. I began this post with a quote by journalist Ross Douthat describing the collective American reaction to success in Iraq: relief and an attempt at amnesia. But lurking behind this collective silence on the meaning of Iraq remains the question of whether continued improvements will redeem Neoconservatism’s ideals and principles, and whether it will allow this strongly interventionist foreign policy, which simultaneously promotes American democracy, values and interests, to re-enter the decision making calculus of American leaders.

While our collective silence on Iraq leaves the fate of Neoconservativism unclear, the events unfolding there hold implications for other foreign policies. The Neocons have no monopoly on interventionism as a policy tool. American intervention has long been advocated, simply without the Neoconservative military focus and assumed moral clarity/superiority. The chaos of 2003-2006 Iraq has hurt prospects for more modest interventionists – realists advocating intervention to maintain international stability and idealists advocating intervention for democracy or human rights promotion. In addition, the forum in this past Boston Review contains a number of prominent political scientists who believe that interventions in one form or another could be the best hope for ending civil conflict and bringing development to the world’s “Bottom Billion.” Without dialogue, the differences between these approaches and the Neoconservativism that resulted in Iraq’s failures will be neither addressed nor discerned.

We are silent today, but the question remains: as history plays out in the keystone country of the Middle East, what will it mean for the foreign policy of the world’s superpower?

Bibliographical note: I drew extensively on Gilles Kepel’s excellent book The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West in writing this post. For further reading on Neoconservative intentions in the Middle East, see Wolfowitz’s leaked “US Defense Planning Guidance” and this Neoconservative memo for Israeli leaders, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.”

Minimum Wage Round-up

As an unsigned editorial in The New York Times pointed out today,

An estimated 2.8 million employees will get a raise on Friday, as the federal minimum wage rises from $6.55 an hour to $7.25. Another 1.6 million whose hourly pay hovers around $7.25 are also expected to get a boost as employers adjust their pay scales to the new minimum. The raise is badly needed. It is also wholly inadequate.

In honor of this much needed but totally insufficient increase in pay to much of low-wage America, here is a collection of past Boston Review articles that look at wages and inequality in the United States.

• Inequality Matters: Nancy Birdsall on globalization’s failure to “lift all boats.” (March/April 2007)




• American Sweatshops: Jennifer Freeman on organizing American workers in a global economy (Summer 2005)




• The American Jobs Machine: Erik Olin Wright and Rachel Dwyer take a close look at those left behind in the Clinton-era “jobs boom.” (December 2000/January 2001)




• For a Living Wage: Arnie Graf and Jonathan Lange examine the political reasons behind the decline in real wages (Summer 1997)




• Solving the New Inequality: Richard Freeman kicks off a New Democracy forum on economic disparities in the U.S., with responses by Frances Fox Piven, Heidi Hartmann, Paul Krugmann, Michael Piore, James Tobin, James Heckman, and Ernesto Cortes, and a reply to the responses from Freeman (December/January 1996-1997)

Cyberwar hysteria? Reading Morozov against recent attacks

I found Evgeny Morozov’s article in the latest BR to be a compelling argument against cyberwar hyperbole, and I thought his call for a focus on infrastructure needs rather than on overblown claims Internet terrorism was a sound one.

A friend in NYU’s Computer Science department pointed out after reading the article that he was troubled by the author’s tendency to put the weight of responsibility for cyber-security on “end-users,” that is, consumers of software systems and platforms, rather than on those who designed the systems. I think this point is valid, and while perhaps Morozov’s emphasis on user action is to be expected in a time so focused on individual responsibility rather than systemic accountability, I too am skeptical of blaming individual Internet users for any security problems they may encounter. The solutions that Morozov espouses —

be careful, and avoid trafficking data in open spaces

– are somewhat over-simplified, and while his caution about believing government hype about cybersecurity may be justified, he may be going too far in obscuring the real steps that governments can take to protect their citizens and their own classified data.

Of course, the moment I was ready to turn the page on Internet terrorism, the news media became saturated with coverage about North Korean cyberattacks on South Korea and the US. Read the rest of this entry »