Antony Loewenstein

Well, that didn’t take long. Even before Gaddafi was found and murdered, Western businesses were dreaming of the huge profits that could be made. Disaster capitalism on crack.

Now, in a front page New York Times story, the joys continue:

The guns in Libya have barely quieted, and NATO’s military assistance to the rebellion that toppled Col. Muammar el-Qaddafiwill not end officially until Monday. But a new invasion force is already plotting its own landing on the shores of Tripoli.

Western security, construction and infrastructure companies that see profit-making opportunities receding in Iraq and Afghanistan have turned their sights on Libya, now free of four decades of dictatorship. Entrepreneurs are abuzz about the business potential of a country with huge needs and the oil to pay for them, plus the competitive advantage of Libyan gratitude toward the United States and its NATO partners.

A week before Colonel Qaddafi’s death on Oct. 20, a delegation from 80 French companies arrived in Tripoli to meet officials of the Transitional National Council, the interim government. Last week, the new British defense minister, Philip Hammond, urged British companies to “pack their suitcases” and head to Tripoli.

When Colonel Qaddafi’s body was still on public display, a British venture, Trango Special Projects, pitched its support services to companies looking to cash in. “Whilst speculation continues regarding Qaddafi’s killing,” Trango said on its Web site, “are you and your business ready to return to Libya?”

The company offered rooms at its Tripoli villa and transport “by our discreet mixed British and Libyan security team.” Its discretion does not come cheaply. The price for a 10-minute ride from the airport, for which the ordinary cab fare is about $5, is listed at 500 British pounds, or about $800.

“There is a gold rush of sorts taking place right now,” said David Hamod, president and chief executive officer of the National U.S.-Arab Chamber of Commerce. “And the Europeans and Asians are way ahead of us. I’m getting calls daily from members of the business community in Libya. They say, ‘Come back, we don’t want the Americans to lose out.’ ”

Yet there is hesitancy on both sides, and so far the talk greatly exceeds the action. The Transitional National Council, hoping to avoid any echo of the rank corruption of the Qaddafi era, has said no long-term contracts will be signed until an elected government is in place. And with cities still bristling with arms and jobless young men, Libya does not offer anything like a safe business environment — hence the pitches from security providers.

Like France and Britain, the United States may benefit from the Libyan authorities’ appreciation of NATO’s critical air support for the revolution. Whatever the rigor of new rules governing contracts, Western companies hope to have some advantage over, say, China, which was offering to sell arms to Colonel Qaddafi as recently as July.

So this is where our supposed civilised world is heading. A disturbing piece in the weekend’s New York Times:

At the Zhuhai air show in southeastern China last November, Chinese companies startled some Americans by unveiling 25 different models of remotely controlled aircraft and showing video animation of a missile-armed drone taking out an armored vehicle and attacking a United States aircraft carrier.

The presentation appeared to be more marketing hype than military threat; the event is China’s biggest aviation market, drawing both Chinese and foreign military buyers. But it was stark evidence that the United States’ near monopoly on armed drones was coming to an end, with far-reaching consequences for American security, international law and the future of warfare.

Eventually, the United States will face a military adversary or terrorist group armed with drones, military analysts say. But what the short-run hazard experts foresee is not an attack on the United States, which faces no enemies with significant combat drone capabilities, but the political and legal challenges posed when another country follows the American example. The Bush administration, and even more aggressively the Obama administration, embraced an extraordinary principle: that the United States can send this robotic weapon over borders to kill perceived enemies, even American citizens, who are viewed as a threat.

“Is this the world we want to live in?” asks Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Because we’re creating it.”

…

So far, the United States has a huge lead in the number and sophistication of unmanned aerial vehicles (about 7,000, by one official’s estimate, mostly unarmed). The Air Force prefers to call them not U.A.V.’s but R.P.A.’s, or remotely piloted aircraft, in acknowledgment of the human role; Air Force officials should know, since their service is now training more pilots to operate drones than fighters and bombers.

Philip Finnegan, director of corporate analysis for the Teal Group, a company that tracks defense and aerospace markets, says global spending on research and procurement of drones over the next decade is expected to total more than $94 billion, including $9 billion on remotely piloted combat aircraft.

Israel and China are aggressively developing and marketing drones, and Russia, Iran, India, Pakistan and several other countries are not far behind. The Defense Security Service, which protects the Pentagon and its contractors from espionage, warned in a report last year that American drone technology had become a prime target for foreign spies.

This week’s New York Times featured an investigation about sourcing future energy needs. The world is open, so we’re told, and human beings, indigenous groups or the environment are ignored. That’s “business journalism” in a nut shell:

Brazil has begun building its first nuclear submarine to protect its vast, new offshore oil discoveries. Colombia’s oil production is climbing so fast that it is closing in on Algeria’s and could hit Libya’s prewar levels in a few years. ExxonMobil is striking new dealsin Argentina, which recently heralded its biggest oil discovery since the 1980s.

Up and down the Americas, it is a similar story: a Chinese-built rig is preparing to drill in Cuban waters; a Canadian official has suggested that unemployed Americans could move north to help fill tens of thousands of new jobs in Canada’s expanding oil sands; and one of the hemisphere’s hottest new oil pursuits is actually in the United States, at a shale formation in North Dakota’s prairie that is producing 400,000 barrels of oil a day and is part of a broader shift that could ease American dependence on Middle Eastern oil.

For the first time in decades, the emerging prize of global energy may be the Americas, where Western oil companies are refocusing their gaze in a rush to explore clusters of coveted oil fields.

“This is an historic shift that’s occurring, recalling the time before World War II when the U.S. and its neighbors in the hemisphere were the world’s main source of oil,” said Daniel Yergin, an American oil historian. “To some degree, we’re going to see a new rebalancing, with the Western Hemisphere moving back to self-sufficiency.”

The hemisphere’s oil boom is all the more remarkable given that two of its traditional energy powerhouses, Venezuela and Mexico, have largely been left out, held in check by entrenched resource nationalism. Venezuela is now considered to have bigger oil reserves than Saudi Arabia, putting it at the top of OPEC’s rankings. If it opened up more to foreign investment, it could tip the scales further in the hemisphere’s direction.

Exactly how the Americas’ growing oil clout might rebalance energy geopolitics remains an open question. The Middle East can still influence oil prices greatly, its oil fields are generally cheaper to develop, and some countries in the region are endowed with great reserves.

Philip Dorling writes in Fairfax in Australia that there are serious questions about who holds vital information, who releases it, who should horde it and where responsibility lies in an age where Wikileaks (rightly) forces governments and journalists to own up to their own culpability in human rights abuses and cover-ups:

Confirmation that the full WikiLeaks archive of United States diplomatic cables has been leaked on the internet is bad news for US diplomacy – but potentially much worse for many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people who have talked confidentially with US diplomats.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and The Guardian, one of a handful of newspapers that began publishing redacted cables in co-operation with WikiLeaks last November, are now trading ever more sharp accusations about responsibility for the massive security breach.

More important, however, is the breach itself.

More here and here.

Despite what Wikileaks may claim – the release of US embassy cables undeniably revealed the depravity of the relationship between Washington and various dictators but they hardly sparked the Arab Spring – social media played a part in the uprisings and subsequent changes. As I argue in the recently released and updated edition of my book The Blogging Revolution, blogging, Twitter and Facebook were important to galvanise support for democratic movements but they didn’t bring down any regimes on their own.

Take one (via Global Voices):

After seeing the huge impact of social media on the Egyptian revolution, Egyptian blogger and Twitter user, Mahmoud Salem (@SandMonkey) decided to collaborate with a local non-profit organisation to help them raise funds using the power of Twitter to offer basic services in an impoverished neighborhood of Cairo.

Ezbet Khairalla is one of the largest unplanned communities in Egypt, with a population close to 650,000 inhabitants. It is a sprawling area of about 12 square kilometres on a rocky plateau that lies in the southern part of Cairo. Although Ezbet Khairalla is located within the boundaries of Cairo, most basic services are missing; not only sewage and garbage collection, but also inadequate education, poor health and social services. Hence the densely populated area is considered fertile soil for crime and social unrest.

To help improve the quality of life in Ezbet Khairalla, Khair Wa Baraka (Peace and Plenty), an organisation founded in 2004, started working on educational, health and environmental programs, especially after their research showed that the most important issue in the community was dealing with both solid and liquid waster (sewage). They also provide medical caravans and pilot educational centres.

With the support of people on Twitter, Peace and Plenty and raised EGP 2 million Egyptian pounds (over $330,000 US dollars as well as awareness for the community. Salem called his initiative “tweetback” (@tweetbackevent), and it relied on the social capital of 20 of power-Twitter users who collectively have around a quarter of a million followers. They each raised money from donors in exchange for giving contributing companies PR among their followers. They also created a buzz about the initiative and helped explain to people how they can help.

Peace and Plenty held a fundraising event on July 26, 2011 at the Marriott hotel in Cairo, where they announced that EGP 1,349,000 ($226,600) had already been raised.

Take two (via Lebanon’s Daily Star):

Finally, social media, the impact of which has been so widely publicized, is unlikely to be pivotal in the elections. World Bank figures show one-fifth of Egyptians use the Internet overall, let alone access sites such as Twitter or Facebook. Despite claims to the contrary, Jan. 25 itself was not a ”social media revolution”; only 8 percent of Egyptians say they used Facebook or Twitter to get their news about the protests, according to Gallup’s data. Social media was not then, nor is it now, the core information medium for the average Egyptian. There are no shortcuts in reaching out to that “man on the street,” and all parties must be perceived as trying to do just that.

Take three (via the New York Times):

The mass media, including interactive social-networking tools, make you passive, can sap your initiative, leave you content to watch the spectacle of life from your couch or smartphone.

Apparently even during a revolution.

That is the provocative thesis of a new paper by Navid Hassanpour, a political science graduate student at Yale, titled “Media Disruption Exacerbates Revolutionary Unrest.”

Using complex calculations and vectors representing decision-making by potential protesters, Mr. Hassanpour, who already has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford, studied the recent uprising in Egypt.

His question was, how smart was the decision by the government of President Hosni Mubarak to completely shut down the Internet and cellphone service on Jan. 28, in the middle of the crucial protests in Tahrir Square?

His conclusion was, not so smart, but not for the reasons you might think. “Full connectivity in a social network sometimes can hinder collective action,” he writes.

To put it another way, all the Twitter posting, texting and Facebook wall-posting is great for organizing and spreading a message of protest, but it can also spread a message of caution, delay, confusion or, I don’t have time for all this politics, did you see what Lady Gaga is wearing?

It is a conclusion that counters the widely held belief that the social media helped spur the protests. Mr. Hassanpour used press accounts of outbreaks of unrest in Egypt to show that after Jan. 28, the protests became more spread around Cairo and the country. There were not necessarily more protesters, but the movement spread to more parts of the population.

He called this a “localization process.” “You can say it would be hard to measure that,” he added, talking about his research, “but you can test it, what happens when a disruption goes into effect.”

“The disruption of cellphone coverage and Internet on the 28th exacerbated the unrest in at least three major ways,” he writes. “It implicated many apolitical citizens unaware of or uninterested in the unrest; it forced more face-to-face communication, i.e., more physical presence in streets; and finally it effectively decentralized the rebellion on the 28th through new hybrid communication tactics, producing a quagmire much harder to control and repress than one massive gathering in Tahrir.”

In an interview, he described “the strange darkness” that takes place in a society deprived of media outlets. “We become more normal when we actually know what is going on — we are more unpredictable when we don’t — on a mass scale that has interesting implications,” he said.

My following book review appeared in yesterday’s Sydney Sun Herald newspaper:

There Goes the Neighbourhood
Michael Wesley
(New South Books, $32.95)

Australia’s insecurity in the Asia-Pacific region is legendary. Over decades prime ministers and commentators have urged a close relationship with Washington while remaining open to romance with leading powers such as China to buy security and stability. Wesley challenges this outlook, asking policy makers to take far more seriously countries such as South Korea and the Philippines and recognise that the 21st century has already forced challenges to established doctrine. However, any serious human rights agenda is absent – a blind spot that’s shared by many.

A company that should be named, shamed and shunned (via the Sydney Morning Herald):

Cisco, one of the world’s largest technology companies, is being sued by Chinese political prisoners for allegedly providing the technology and expertise used by the Chinese Communist Party to monitor, censor and suppress the Chinese people.

Dan Ward, of US law firm Ward & Ward, has brought the case on behalf of Du Daobin, Zhou Yuanzhi, Liu Xianbin and ten unnamed others. He compared Cisco’s actions to “IBM’s behaviour in Nazi Germany”.

Cisco has rejected the allegations as baseless but has failed to respond to serious questions stemming from an internal company presentation.

“Cisco has, for years now, knowingly aided and abetted the Chinese Communist Party’s ongoing efforts to stifle the free speech and discourse of its citizenry,” Mr Ward told Fairfax Media.

“Dating back to the early 2000s, Cisco competed for contracts with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to help design, develop and implement the ‘Golden Shield Project’ – a rather Orwellian euphemism for the Chinese Communist Party’s ongoing effort to monitor, track and censor all internet traffic into and out of China.”

According to court documents, Mr Du spent three years in jail, Mr Zhou is currently a prisoner in his own home and Mr Liu has served two months of a 10 year sentence. All three claim to have been tortured and abused over articles they published online.

In 2008 my second book, The Blogging Revolution, was released. It told the story of the internet in repressive regimes.

Now, post the Arab uprisings, I’ve updated the title and it’s been released globally this week as an e-book via Melbourne University Press:

Smart:

S. Pandiyarajan was fiddling around with his shortwave radio set one hot summer evening at Villupuram, Tamil Nadu, when he stumbled upon a strange station.

At first listen, it was a language he couldn’t identify. It sounded like Tamil, but spoken in an accent he could not recognise. He listened on, straining his ears. To his surprise, he discovered that the voices were coming from faraway China.

“I could hear two Chinese people speaking in perfect Tamil!” he said. “And this was Sentamizh [classical Tamil], which you never hear anywhere, anymore, even in Tamil Nadu.”

That evening, Mr. Pandiyarajan became the latest member of China Radio International’s fast-growing overseas fan base. The station, run by the Chinese government, has, for more than six decades, been tasked with carrying news from China — from politics to arts and culture — to boost the country’s image overseas.

With humble beginnings in the civil war-torn China in the 1940s, CRI today is at the centre of a massive multi-billion dollar effort to boost rising China’s “soft power” overseas, sending out daily broadcasts in 63 languages, 24 hours a day, from its expansive multi-storey headquarters in west Beijing.

Remarkably, CRI’s Tamil station enjoys the widest reach of all its channels. Its popularity underscores the quiet success China’s “soft power” push is having in unlikely locations. The Tamil station, which broadcasts every day from a modest 12th floor office, has more than 25,000 registered listeners — besides thousands of others who tune in casually every day — in Tamil Nadu and the rest of India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, South Africa, Germany, the United States and Japan.

Leaking is not the same as hacking. And they’re not all created equal.

Bradley Manning allegedly leaked hundreds of thousands of US documents to Wikileaks showing a litany of criminality in the “war on terror”. His act, should it be proven true, was a noble attempt to alert the world of wrong-doing and violence.

Cyber hacking, however, is rather different. And hacktivism is growing as a way to challenge corporate and political power:

Cyber attacks used to be kept quiet. They often went undiscovered until long after the fact, and countries or companies that were hit usually declined to talk about attacks. That’s changed as a steady flow of brazen incursions has been exposed. Last year, for example, Google (GOOG) accused China of spying on the company’s workers and customers. It said at the time that at least 20 other companies were victims of the same attack, nicknamed Operation Aurora by the security firm McAfee (INTC). The hacked included Adobe Systems (ADBE), Juniper Networks (JNPR), and Morgan Stanley (MS). Joel F. Brenner, the head of U.S. counterintelligence until 2009, says the same operation that pulled off Aurora has claimed many more victims over several years. “It’d be fair to say that at least 2,000 companies have been hit,” Brenner says. “And that number is on the conservative side.”

Dozens of others, ranging from Lockheed Martin (LMT) and Intel (INTC) to the Indian Defense Ministry, the International Monetary Fund, and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, have suffered similar assaults. Earlier this year hackers raided the computer networks of RSA (EMC), a marquee security firm that protects other companies’ computers. They stole some of the most valuable computer code in the world, the algorithms behind RSA’s SecureID tokens, a product used by U.S. government agencies, defense contractors, and major banks to prevent hacking. It was like breaking into a heavily guarded locksmith and stealing the master combination that opened every vault in every casino on the Las Vegas Strip. This month the Pentagon revealed that it, too, had been hacked: More than 24,000 files were stolen from the computers of an unnamed defense contractor by “foreign intruders.”

Is there any nation on earth the Jewish state won’t sell weapons to? Unlikely:

Israel’s defense industry racked an unprecedented $7.2 billion in exports in 2010, up on the $6.9 billion achieved in 2009.

That put the Jewish state among the world’s top four arms exporters but declining military budgets around the world are likely to reduce sales over the coming years.

“We recognize the challenges but we’re working hard to maintain the level we’re currently at and even to increase it,” said Reserve Brig. Gen. Shmaya Avieli, head of the Defense Ministry’s Foreign Defense Assistance and Defense Export Department.

The Israelis are hoping to secure big-ticket deals at the Paris Air Show, a major international defense industry showcase next week at the Le Bourget exhibition center.

Government figures indicate Israeli defense companies sold military hardware worth $9.6 billion in 2010, $2.4 billion of it to Israel’s military.

But meantime, China, once a promising market for Israeli weapons and electronic systems, remains off-limits, largely because of Israel’s ally, the United States.

His comments are fair and yet I can’t help but wonder about Google’s complicity with a range of autocratic regimes to censor some of its content, from search returns to YouTube clips:

The use of the web by Arab democracy movements could lead to some states cracking down harder on internet freedoms, Google’s chairman says.

Speaking at a conference in Ireland, Eric Schmidt said some governments wanted to regulate the internet the way they regulated television.

He also said he feared his colleagues faced a mounting risk of occasional arrest and torture in such countries.

The internet was widely used during the so-called Arab Spring.

Protesters used social networking sites to organise rallies and communicate with those outside their own country, such as foreign media, amid tight restrictions on state media.
‘Completely wired’

Mr Schmidt said he believed the “problem” of governments trying to limit internet usage was going to “get worse”.

In most of these countries, television is highly regulated because the leaders, partial dictators, half dictators or whatever you want to call them understand the power of television”

“The reason is that as the technology becomes more pervasive and as the citizenry becomes completely wired and the content gets localised to the language of the country, it becomes an issue like television.”

“If you look at television in most of these countries, television is highly regulated because the leaders, partial dictators, half dictators or whatever you want to call them understand the power of television imagery to keep their citizenry in some bucket,” he added.