Antony Loewenstein

A cyber-army of terrifying intent:

Iranian hackers working for the powerful Revolutionary Guard’s paramilitary Basij group have launched attacks on websites of the “enemies,” a state-owned newspaper reported Monday in a rare acknowledgment from Iran that it’s involved in cyber warfare.

The report followed an announcement in January that Iran had formed its first cyber police unit in an attempt by authorities to gain an edge in the digital world.

The Internet has also been a key outlet for Iran’s opposition since the 2009 disputed presidential election. In addition, Iran has been trying to boost its web defenses after the Stuxnet computer worm made its way into computers involved with the country’s controversial nuclear program.

Gen. Ali Fazli, acting commander of the Basij, was quoted by state-owned IRAN paper as saying Iran’s cyber army is made up of university teachers, students and clerics. He said its attacks were a retaliation for similar attacks on Iran, according to the semi-official Mehr news agency. There were no further details about the possible targets or the time of the attacks.

This last weekend saw a large break-out at Australia’s Christmas Island detention facilities. The federal government acknowledges tear gas was used to quell the protests. Thousands of asylum seekers languish for months and often longer with no indication when their cases may be resolved. It’s a prison camp designed to punish those seeking asylum.

My source tells me that Serco, the British multinational running Australia’s detention centres, is simply unable to cope with the number of refugees in the country. They are bringing in Serco managers from Britain to “manage” the situation, tasked to try and control frustrated asylum seekers by using similar methods tried (and failed) overseas at Serco centres. I’m hearing that the same people are appearing in various Serco institutions across the world, simply being moved from one place to another and applying tested methods of management. They failed overseas and they’re failing here but Serco is desperate not to lose the hugely profitable contract with Canberra.

This is what the profit motive is doing to human beings.

The recent push to boycott and/or highlight the gross human rights abuses in Sri Lanka during the Galle Literary Festival – something I supported with a strongly worded petition – continues now in a different form:

An international human rights watchdog has called on over 50 invited countries to boycott a conference aimed at sharing Sri Lanka’s war experience.

The Sri Lankan government has invited militaries of 54 countries for the “Defeating Terrorism Sri Lankan Experience” to be held from 31 May to 02 June in Colombo.

But Human Rights Watch (HRW) said it “understands” that some of the key invitees have already decided not to take part.

“What we are telling the militaries around the world is that they should not attend a meeting to celebrate a military policy that involves killing so many civilians,” HRW Executive Director Brad Adams told BBC Sinhala service, Sandeshaya.

Foreign Minister GL Peiris, Secretary to President Lalith Weerathunga, Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, Central Bank Governor Ajith Cabraal, terrorism expert Prof Rohan Gunaratne and many senior military officers are among the list of speakers.

“It will endeavour to propose adequate measures to manage and counter global terrorism and discuss strategies for nation building while introducing a Sri Lankan perspective in counter terrorism,” said the statement in the defence ministry run website.

But the rights watchdog says many of the tactics employed by the Sri Lankan military in its war against the Tamil Tigers were “illegal.”

“If militaries around the world are going to meet they should be talking about those illegal activities and not trying to copy the Sri Lankan government’s doctrine,” Mr Adams said.

My following story appears in today’s edition of Crikey:

The New South Wales election is weeks away and privatisation is a key issue of concern for voters. Liberal opposition leader Barry O’Farrell, the likely next premier, leads a team that openly talks about restructuring the ways in which public assets could be sold.

It’s possible that O’Farrell will look to Western Australia for inspiration. But the Liberal government of Colin Barnett is facing public opposition to increasingly working with British multinational Serco in its plans to outsource key public services.

United Voice union is leading a campaign to fight the government’s expected $3 billon contract with Serco to privatise Fiona Stanley Hospital. Public protests in Perth are on the increase and union leaders tell Crikey that the sell-off move has happened without any public consultation.

Hospital support workers are introducing work bans and refusing to remove linen or rubbish, all without affecting patient care. The WA Industrial Relations Commission has ordered the union to stop the bans.

Further insecurity among staff occurred late last year when Serco acknowledged it might introduce robots to replace humans at Fiona Stanley Hospital. And Perth’s Sunday Times obtained a document that showed Serco was likely to gain access to medical records.

It’s not dissimilar to recent reports that the leading American arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin will be recording and processing census information this year in Britain, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. As one activist wrote: “Having companies like this deal with public census data is rather like having Monsanto carry out your gardening.”

Many West Australians told me last week in Perth they worried about Serco gaining access to intimate, personal details and wondered why the Barnett government was so keen to allow them to do it. Liberal politician Troy Buswell has praised Serco in parliament as a model corporation and reportedly meets regularly with Serco representatives in the state.

The truth remains that Serco is a deeply troubled company. A 2006 British investigation found that Serco was part of a consortium that had milked taxpayers of tens of millions of dollars in the running of hospitals in Norfolk and Norwich.

Western Australia’s Community and Public Sector Union secretary Toni Walkington tells Crikey that both Essential Media Communications and her own union have conducted opinion polling this year and found overwhelming public backing to keep public services (prisons, child protection, etc) in public hands.

“The main driver for privatisation is the Chamber of Commerce and Industry WA,” she said. “The organisation repeatedly calls for more contracting of the private sector to deliver public services. Premier Colin Barnett is a former CEO of the CCIWA.”

Walkington argues that a wealth of research backs the claim there is a reduced standard of services when privatised, as well as the profit motive superseding fair treatment of clients.

Take the firm’s running of the country’s detention centres. Activists in Perth last weekend detailed to me an alleged litany of breaches by Serco in remote centres where public access is close to impossible. These allegations included physical abuse of refugees, massive over-crowding, stealing of toys for children if Serco guards believe they should be more “equitably distributed” and deep mental trauma of largely untrained Serco staff unable to cope with asylum seeker frustrations.

Critics say all the federal government does is think of ways to fine Serco for alleged “breaches” rather than dealing with the structural problems.

Walkington worries it will be no different in other workplaces if the company expands its presence in Australia. She tells Crikey the lack of accountability and locked-in contracts will only increase if details about hospitals and other services can’t be accessed through the parliament: “The WA government continues its declared agenda to reward its business supporters through lucrative contracts to deliver public services despite clear public opposition and early adverse consequences for our community.”

In Western Australia, the Labor opposition has also long backed privatisation though now claims it is less supportive than the Liberals. Like in NSW, this creates a political atmosphere of bi-partisan desire for corporate largesse.

The Barnett government is currently considering a massive expansion of privatised services, including the parole system. There are real concerns that a profit-driven company, as has happened with similar programs in the US, will deliberately exaggerate client problems to gain more money.

Deaths in Custody Watch Committee spokesman Marc Newhouse told me last weekend in Perth that privatised prisoners could become a valuable commodity for Serco and the state would have little ability to discover whether cover-ups were taking place (as happens routinely in the detention centre system).

But none of these issues apparently bother the Serco hierarchy. Chief executive Christopher Hyman told London’s Daily Telegraph last week that overseas markets will “underpin” growth in the coming years as David Cameron’s government cuts costs.

Around 40% of Serco’s revenue comes from overseas projects, including in Africa, Australasia and Asia. According to Hyman, “they [international governments] love seeing the Brits wherever you go. They think we have clever ways of doing services.”

It was a position shared by David Brockton from Espirito Santo. “Serco’s relatively low margin and the critical nature of its front-line services should ensure it can continue to generate attractive earnings growth,” he told the Telegraph.

Britain’s Channel 4 program Dispatches discovered in a new report that the heads of companies such as Serco and G4S are making a killing from the outsourcing of public services, seemingly immune from the large swathe of government cuts as governments create a market for outsourced services.

With the Orwellian named Serco Institute “advising” the NSW Liberals on ways to manage the state’s budgetary issues by sacking many in the public service and privatise services for greater “efficiency”, pro-privatisation sharks are circling O’Farrell’s office.

“Privatisation is unpopular, it’s always unpopular,” an unnamed adviser who has worked on several privatisations told The Australian.

Imperial historian Niall Ferguson wrote recently about outsourcing and could have been whispering to O’Farrell personally: ”Privatisation: a policy that has been a huge success nearly everywhere it’s been tried.”

Very unconvincing interview, and one wonders what the government has asked/told Adrian Lamo to say to try and implicate Julian Assange:

It may take a little bit longer to bring serious political reform to China, especially when the connected class is so comfortable. Barbara Pollock writes in Artnet:

During a recent visit to Beijing, the conversation at a local restaurant on a Saturday night turned briefly, only briefly, to politics. The video artist Wang Gongxin spoke excitedly about China’s so-called Jasmine Revolution, which has been much reported in the American press but barely felt in Beijing art circles. Apparently, he noted, 700 people had descended on a McDonald’s in the Wangjing neighborhood, in response to a call on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter.

Even U.S. ambassador Jon Huntsman showed up at the McDonald’s, though he was wearing a jacket with an American flag patch, which drove Chinese bloggers crazy. They complained that he was grandstanding in anticipation of a run against Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election. But then Lin Tianmiao, Wang’s wife and one of the most famous women artists in China, turned the conversation to her upcoming 2012 retrospective at Asia Society in New York, ignoring the nearby television blaring reports of the turmoil in Libya.

The whole scene was a little surprising. Some successful artists in China look forward to political reform, but many more of them are in bed with the ministry of culture. In that sense, the Chinese avant-garde is conservative. The current system has made them millionaires, and the last thing they want is change.

As Saudi Arabia crushes peaceful pro-democracy protesters, let’s not forget the Western firms doing business with the brutes:

A newly-released secret U.S. diplomatic cable has alleged that British-based defense contractor BAE Systems PLC bribed Saudi officials in return for lucrative arms deals.

The cable from the U.S. embassy in Paris, released by WikiLeaks on Friday, said Britain’s anti-fraud agency told a private OECD meeting in Paris in 2007 that they had evidence that BAE paid more than 70 million pounds ($113 million) to a Saudi prince with influence over arms deal contracts.

The SFO dropped an investigation into BAE’s overseas dealings in 2006 after Saudi objection.

BAE did not explicitly refute the cable’s content on Sunday, but said in a statement that no charges of bribery or corruption were brought up against the company.

Most Western press talk about the online revolution occurring in Egypt. That’s happening but is only a small part of the picture.

Here’s independent Australian journalist Austin Mackell – currently based in Egypt and showing a post-revolution nation when most Western corporate reporters have left – interviewing local journalist Jano Charbel on the ongoing struggles by citizens to get the minimum wage:

Here’s the way not to report from a war-zone. Western journalist parachutes into a country and starts condemning the actions of the Libyan rebels, offering advice how to better fight a war. Because a Murdoch hack who lives a comfortable middle class existence in Israel knows so much about winning wars against dictators.

John Lyons in the Australian:

If you’re going to engage in a military confrontation with one of the nastiest of the Arab dictators, there are some fairly simple rules you should follow.

Libya’s rebels are being slaughtered. Muammar Gaddafi has paid African mercenaries to fire anti-tank shells and rocket-propelled grenades at unarmed Libyans.

The odds of the rebels succeeding without any international support were never high. They’re not helping themselves by breaking almost every rule in the book.

Here is a dummies’ guide on how to stage a violent uprising against a ruthless dictator.

Rule 1: Forget the media. The rebels should be concentrating on the foe, but many have become obsessed with camera crews, playing up to them at every opportunity.

Rule 2: Spread out. It makes no sense on a battlefield to have all your anti-aircraft guns grouped together — one Gaddafi bomb and you lose several guns and men.

Rule 3: Don’t smoke hashish. Some American troops in Vietnam did it but it didn’t help them either. When you’re so heavily outgunned and out-trained, you need all your wits.

Rule 4: You are not Rambo. Real soldiers don’t go around shooting machineguns and AK-47s with one arm.

As Britain’s conservative government embarks on a massive program of privatisation, Britain’s Channel 4 Dispatches discovers that many major multinationals, including Serco and G4S, are doing very nicely, thank you, out of the public cuts:

Channel 4′s Ben Laurance writes in the Daily Mail:

It has been a week in which public sector workers have been told to tighten their belts. Millions have learned they will have to pay more into their pensions, work longer and receive less when they retire.

Their only comfort, as the Coalition -Government fights to close the yawning gap in Britain’s public finances, is Messrs Cameron and Osborne’s regular reminder that ‘we are all in this together’.

Recent revelations about the scale of top salaries in local government – Britain’s highest-paid council chief executive receives almost £300,000 a year and scores are paid more than the Prime Minister – undermined this feeling of mutual pain.

But a new investigation by Channel 4’s Dispatches programme has revealed that the taxpayer is funding far bigger individual pay packages – in one case we found, an astonishing £10 million a year.

This is no ordinary tale of Fat Cattery. These multi-million-pound deals are being paid to the heads of the ‘outsourcers’ – the giant private companies that say they can do a better and more efficient job collecting bins, say, or providing nursing care than the State.

They are private companies but they are also the creation of the Government’s drive to outsource services. The lion’s share of their turnover – and of their executives’ enormous pay packages – comes from the public purse. But there is little in the way of public accountability.

These outsourcers already account for £79 billion of state expenditure every year, a figure which is set to grow if the Government fulfils its pledge to put nearly all state-run services out to contract.

…

In Canterbury Serco collects rubbish, trims trees, maintains road signs, cuts grass and looks after public toilets.

Surely a company with such close ties to the shrinking public sector is going to be feeling the effect of government spending cuts?

Not according to the company’s chief executive Chris Hyman. Serco’s profits grew by a fifth last year, and the company reckons to have an order book of £16.5 billion.

…

Roger Waters, once of Pink Floyd fame, has become a high-profile supporter of Palestinian rights and endorser of BDS:

In 1980, a song I wrote, Another Brick in the Wall Part 2, was banned by the government of South Africa because it was being used by black South African children to advocate their right to equal education. That apartheid government imposed a cultural blockade, so to speak, on certain songs, including mine.

Twenty-five years later, in 2005, Palestinian children participating in a West Bank festival used the song to protest against Israel’s wall around the West Bank. They sang: “We don’t need no occupation! We don’t need no racist wall!” At the time, I hadn’t seen firsthand what they were singing about.

A year later I was contracted to perform in Tel Aviv. Palestinians from a movement advocating an academic and cultural boycott of Israel urged me to reconsider. I had already spoken out against the wall, but I was unsure whether a cultural boycott was the right way to go.

The Palestinian advocates of a boycott asked that I visit the occupied Palestinian territory to see the wall for myself before I made up my mind. I agreed.

Under the protection of the United Nations I visited Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw that day. The wall is an appalling edifice to behold. It is policed by young Israeli soldiers who treated me, a casual observer from another world, with disdainful aggression.

If it could be like that for me, a foreigner, a visitor, imagine what it must be like for the Palestinians, for the underclass, for the passbook carriers. I knew then that my conscience would not allow me to walk away from that wall, from the fate of the Palestinians I met: people whose lives are crushed daily by Israel’s occupation. In solidarity, and somewhat impotently, I wrote on their wall that day: “We don’t need no thought control.”

…

Artists were right to refuse to play in South Africa’s Sun City resort until apartheid fell and white people and black people enjoyed equal rights. And we are right to refuse to play in Israel until the day comes – and it surely will come – when the wall of occupation falls and Palestinians live alongside Israelis in the peace, freedom, justice and dignity that they all deserve.

The murder of Al-Jazeera cameramen, Ali Hassan Al Jaber – killed after a reporting team for the Arabic-language channel was ambushed by government forces near the town of Benghazi – has been mourned in Libya itself.

A crowd gathered in the city’s main square to honor al-Jaber, a Qatari national. They waved Qatari flags and chanted slogans in support of Al Jazeera, such as “with our soul, our blood, we’ll defend Al Jazeera”: