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Apolloemma

History Will Pardon Manning, Even If Obama Doesn't

Posted by John Cassidy

Sometimes things that are fully expected still have the capacity to shock. That’s certainly the case with the news that the former Army private Bradley Manning has been sentenced to thirty-five years in military prison for leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks. My colleague Amy Davidson, who has been writing about the Manning story since the beginning, has a post on the verdict, which contains more details. I’ll confine myself to three points:
1. Make no mistake, the sentence is draconian.
Judge Denise Lind, an Army colonel, didn’t give Manning the full sixty years in prison that the prosecution wanted, but the whistle-blower still faces the same sort of prison term handed out to murderers and gangsters. Assuming he follows the rules, he will be eligible for parole after eight years (a third of the sentence minus three and a half years, for time served). Even if he is released then, he will have been in prison for well over a decade.
Military justice is meant to be harsh: it’s designed to maintain discipline on and off the battlefield. But this isn’t a case of a solider deserting his post or handing secrets over to the enemy. The government’s attempts to show that Manning’s leaks aided Al Qaeda were almost laughable, although nothing about this case is amusing. As Amy notes in her post, the stated intent of the Pentagon was to frighten other would-be leakers. “There is value in deterrence, Your Honor,” one of the military prosecutors told Lind. “This court must send a message to any soldier contemplating stealing classified information.”
But was it just a matter of deterrence? From the beginning, the Pentagon has treated Manning extremely harshly, holding him in solitary confinement for almost a year and then accusing him of aiding the enemy—a charge that carries the death penalty. (Thankfully, Lind found Manning not guilty on this count.) It certainly looked like an instance of powerful institutions and powerful people punishing a lowly private for revealing things that they would rather have kept hidden.
2. Much of the wrongdoing that Manning exposed hasn’t been dealt with nearly as harshly as he has.
Amid all the discussion of the rights and wrongs of whistle-blowing and WikiLeaks, it’s easy to forget what exactly Manning revealed. In an article last month calling for him to be pardoned, the New Republic’s John Judis provided a useful reminder of some of the incidents captured in the battleground reports that Manning released:

American troops killing civilians, including women and children, and then calling in an airstrike to destroy evidence; the video of an American Apache helicopter gunship shooting civilians, including two Reuters reporters; American military authorities failing to investigate reports of torture and murder by Iraqi police; and a “black unit” in Afghanistan tasked to perform extrajudicial assassinations of Taliban sympathizers that killed as many as 373 civilians.

What has happened to those responsible for these acts? In most cases, not much. For example, no charges have been brought against the U.S. military personnel who were in the Apache helicopter when it opened fire in Baghdad, in July, 2007—an incident that my colleague Raffi Khatchadourian wrote about at length in his 2010 article on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. “When a soldier who shared information with the press and public is punished far more harshly than others who tortured prisoners and killed civilians, something is seriously wrong with our justice system,” the A.C.L.U.’s Ben Wizner said in a statement. Could anybody disagree with that?
3. Even if President Obama doesn’t pardon Manning, history will.
Well before the sentence came down, supporters of Manning were busy campaigning to get him freed. There were demonstrations in Washington and elsewhere, bumper stickers, and online petitions—one of which Daniel Ellsberg, the former Department of Defense official who leaked the Pentagon Papers, helped to organize. In the wake of the verdict, more protests were planned, including a rally outside the White House on Wednesday night. Amnesty International asked President Obama to release Manning and called on the U.S. government  to “turn its attention to investigating violations of human rights and humanitarian law” he helped to uncover.
It seems unlikely in the extreme that these efforts will lead anywhere. Obama has insisted all along that Manning’s case was a matter for the military authorities, and that he wasn’t going to intervene. “We’re a nation of laws,” the President said at a fundraising breakfast, in 2011. “We don’t individually make our own decisions about how the laws operate …. He broke the law.”
In helping to reveal that the U.S. authorities had repeatedly misled the public about the war in Vietnam, Ellsberg also broke the law, of course. So do most whistle-blowers who are employed by the government. But history tends to be kinder to them than the courts, and I doubt that this case will be an exception. In fifty years, people will look on the Manning case as another blot on a dark era for the United States and the values that it claims to hold dear. As for Manning himself, future historians will surely agree with Ellsberg, who, speaking to the A.P. yesterday, described him as “one more casualty of a horrible, wrongful war.”
Courtroom sketch: Bill Hennessy/Reuters

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我的转帖越来像那么一回事了。

Apolloemma

A Lack of Vision

Posted by Matt Buchanan

In 1995, the year Microsoft reached its pop-cultural peak with the release of Windows 95, Bill Gates appeared on “The Late Show with David Letterman.” “What is the essence of Microsoft?” Letterman asked. “What is the vision?” Gates, still the C.E.O. of the company, casually shrugged and replied, “Well, a computer on every desk, and in every home.” When Gates announced his plans to leave the company entirely, in 2006, his original mission for Microsoft had been largely fulfilled: over ninety per cent of the world’s personal computers used Microsoft software. Microsoft was losing both its founder and its vision.
Today, under Steve Ballmer, its outgoing C.E.O., Microsoft’s mission statement is “to help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential.” The animating vision for the company is not to build a brand new world; it is, most simply, to build Microsoft. Which makes a certain kind of sense: Ballmer is not what most would consider a visionary; he’s a businessman. He was hired in 1980 as Microsoft’s thirtieth employee and first business manager. Before becoming C.E.O., he was its president, in 1998, and, prior to that, an executive vice-president of sales and support. It is hard to imagine anyone loving a company as much as Steve Ballmer loves Microsoft. It animates every fibre of muscle in his body; it shreds his vocal chords; it comes through his pores.

Ballmer’s vision, whatever it may have been, was clouded by his company, and this “Microsoft as vision” is what created its music players, PlaysForSure and the Zune, in response to Apple’s iPod. It’s what made Bing, in response to Google search; Windows Phone 7, in response to the iPhone; and Surface, in response to the iPad. It’s what led Microsoft to protect its Office and PC businesses at all costs; the latter now is in decline as computing shifts to increasingly mobile devices. Microsoft’s greatest consumer success under Ballmer, the Xbox—its risky entry into the video-game market, and still its most innovative product line—was engineered while Gates was still the C.E.O.
Microsoft isn’t devoid of visionaries, though. Ballmer employed many of them, like J. Allard, the former chief technology officer for Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices division, who convinced Bill Gates in 1994 that the Internet would be important, created the Xbox, and developed the breakthrough, but cancelled, Courier tablet, before leaving in 2010. And Microsoft still has brilliant employees like Bill Buxton, a legendary interaction designer and futurist; Ilan Spillinger, who, before taking over Xbox hardware, led the team at Intel that built its first decent mobile processor; and Jaron Lanier, who was the subject of a 2011 Profile in The New Yorker as a pioneer in virtual reality.
Yet under Ballmer, Microsoft has shrunk, in that it is no longer the dominant technology company in most people’s lives. Instead, people talk about companies like Amazon and Facebook and Google as standard-bearers in technology—companies that continue to be motivated by a real sense of vision. Amazon exists so that “people can find and discover anything they want to buy online,” while Facebook wants “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected,” and Google aims “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
These companies are massive, sprawling enterprises that often appear to move not in a single direction but in every direction at once. Yet they each have a clear mission statement that expresses a definite vision. And in the context of their mission statements, nearly everything they do makes some sort of sense: Amazon is now the world’s largest online retailer, Facebook is the world’s largest social network, and Google is, well, Google. Though it can seem like the most scatterbrained company in the world, with projects like Loon, its plan to distribute Internet access via stratospheric balloons, even Google’s most ludicrous ideas fit within the scope of its simply defined (if virtually unattainable) goal. Google Glass presents and records information in wholly new contexts; driverless cars are another way of converting the physical world into information; and balloons provide the Internet to people who don’t have it.
What these companies have in common, beyond their shared affection for sweeping, barely possible goals, is that they all continue to be led by their founders. Every time Amazon announces a new way to distribute its content to customers, it’s Jeff Bezos, eyes burning, holding a Kindle aloft. Whenever Facebook plans to annoy its users by exposing their information in some radical new way, it’s Mark Zuckerberg stiffly gesturing onstage. When a man skydives out of an airplane to demonstrate the possibilities of Google Glass, either Sergey Brin or Larry Page is on the roof of a convention center to greet him. The lesson may be that having visionaries scattered among the ranks simply isn’t enough; there needs to be one on top, too.
Photograph by Justin Sullivan/Getty.

Apolloemma

What Has Changed Since Lehman Failed?

Posted by John Cassidy

A week from Sunday, it will be five years since Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, sparking the biggest financial crisis since the nineteen-thirties and a seven-hundred-billion-dollar bank bailout. In a recent interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin, of the Times and CNBC, Hank Paulson, the man who, as Treasury Secretary, was primarily responsible for the rescue of Wall Street, expressed outrage—or at least misgivings—about the fact that many of the bankers whom the taxpayers rescued promptly turned around and gave themselves huge bonuses. “To say I was disappointed is an understatement,” Paulson said. “My view has nothing to do with legality and everything to do with what was right, and everything to do with just a colossal lack of self-awareness as to how they were viewed by the American public.”
Set aside for a moment the irony of a former chief executive of Goldman Sachs lecturing the rest of Wall Street on ethics. Paulson has always played the role of an old-school investment banker in the Felix Rohatyn mold. A soft-spoken Midwesterner, he emerged alone atop the “giant vampire squid” in 1998, primarily because many of his colleagues had had their fill of his co-C.E.O. at the time, Jon Corzine. Banking is “not only a very honorable profession,” he told Ross Sorkin, “it’s a very necessary profession.”
Nobody could disagree with the latter statement: financial intermediation is an essential part of capitalism. The problem with the Wall Street banks, or most of them, is that in recent decades they have gone far beyond traditional intermediation, which involves channelling funds from depositors and investors to capital-investment projects, and turned themselves into trading houses on steroids, marketing and dealing in all manner of securities. During and after the great financial crisis, the consequences of this transformation were plain for all to see—from the demise of Lehman Brothers, which was leveraged more than thirty to one, to the ABACUS scandal at Goldman and the huge losses by the so-called London Whale at JPMorgan Chase.
What has changed in the past five years? In his published comments to Ross Sorkin, Paulson was more concerned with defending the 2008 bailout than with answering this question. That’s a pity. According to some metrics, the U.S. banking system looks a lot more solid than it was in 2007-08. But in other ways it’s almost as dysfunctional as ever, and possibly more so.
The problems going into 2007-08 can be summarized under four headings: excessive borrowing, flawed compensation structures, weak regulation, and moral hazard. In each of these areas, some necessary reforms have been introduced, but they haven’t gone far enough. As a result, there’s still the potential for another crisis, another bailout, and another angry populace.
The Treasury and the Fed often point out that the banks are not as highly leveraged as they were five years ago, and that’s true. But compared to most other industries, and to American banks a generation or two ago, they still borrow huge sums of money, much of which is used to purchase securities rather than being lent out to businesses and households. In recent months, Citigroup, Bank of America, and other banks have been boasting that they will soon have a dollar in equity for every twenty dollars in assets on their balance sheet: a leverage ratio of twenty to one. But how safe does that make a bank? In a Times Op-Ed that appeared the day before the interview with Paulson, Anat Admati, a financial economist at Stanford, pointed out that “even a tiny loss of 2 percent  of its assets could prompt, in essence, a run on the bank” by its creditors. And “if too many banks are distressed at the same time, a systemic crisis results.”
It’s a similar story with compensation reform. In 2008-09, there was widespread agreement that paying traders huge bonuses and loading up senior executives with stock options incentivized banks to take on too much risk. Some significant changes have since been introduced. Under pressure from regulators, for example, Goldman and Morgan Stanley have implemented “clawback” provisions in their employment contracts, which enable them to force traders and managers to give back some of their remuneration if they go beyond the firms’ risk guidelines and generate big losses. But most traders are still evaluated on a quarterly basis, which gives them an incentive to focus all their efforts on generating short-term gains, even if that involves taking on significant risks in the longer term.
There have also been changes at the tops of the banks. These days, people like Lloyd Blankfein, the chairman and C.E.O. of Goldman, and Jamie Dimon, his counterpart at JPMorgan Chase, tend to get most of their hefty bonuses in the form of cash and stock, rather than stock options, which have little downside. But big grants of options haven’t been phased out entirely. Last year, Dimon received about five million dollars’ worth of options. James Gorman, the chief executive of Morgan Stanley, got $3.5 million. And, to some extent, whether or not the money comes in the form of stock or options is immaterial. Either way, the recipient has an incentive to ramp up the firm’s stock price before he quits or gets fired—and, in banking, that usually involves finding ways to take on more leverage and risk.
Down in Washington, regulators, legislators, and bank lobbyists are still squabbling over how the Dodd-Frank Act, which represents the principal political response to the banking crisis, will be converted into detailed rules that traders and C.E.O.s alike have to follow. Predictably enough, the banks are pressuring the government to soften the law’s impact. On Wednesday, industry lobbyists won a significant victory when the Federal Reserve agreed to change a new set of rules that was designed to force banks to eat some of their own cooking, making them keep books on some of the mortgage securities that they manufacture and market to investors. The details of the Fed’s concession are complicated, but it greatly expanded the types of mortgages, and the securities constructed from them, that are exempt from the new rule.
Finally, there is the issue of “too big to fail,” which practically everybody, including Paulson, agrees is an abomination. In a new prologue to his book about the financial crisis, which was originally published in 2010, he writes, “No bank should be too big or too complex to fail, but almost any bank is too big to liquidate quickly, particularly in the midst of a crisis.” Left unsaid is the uncomfortable fact that the bank takeovers engineered by Paulson and other government officials during the crisis, because they had no choice, have left the survivors bigger and more powerful than ever—and thus even less likely to be allowed to collapse without a bailout. An industry that was once greatly scattered is now dominated by six behemoths: Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo.
It’s possible, of course, that bigger means better and safer. But does anybody really believe that? Huge banks are notoriously difficult to run, even for someone like Dimon, who is widely regarded as a first-rate manager. Moreover, they tend to copy each other like young siblings, with the result that when one gets into a pickle they all do. From their perspective, acting like sheep makes a weird kind of sense. If they get into trouble together, it’s practically certain that the government will bail them out, regardless of how unpopular such a move might be. What else can it do? Allow the entire banking system to collapse?
If you know you’ve got an ironclad insurance policy with a low deductible, you have an incentive to drive faster and be less careful parking. The logic of the banks is practically identical. As long as they know the taxpayers will bail them out if they get into trouble, they have an incentive to take too much risk. Economists call this problem a “moral hazard,” and the consolidation of the banking system has made it worse. A couple of years ago, Andy Haldane, a senior official at the Bank of England, gave it another name. Referring to the increasingly common sight of banks going for growth, coming a cropper, and getting bailed out,  Haldane wrote, “In evolutionary terms, we have had survival not of the fittest but the fattest. I call this phenomenon the ‘doom loop.’ ”
Paulson isn’t that kind of wordsmith. In his interview with Ross Sorkin, he patted himself on the back for having acted quickly in the fall of 2008. That’s fair enough. The bailout worked well on its own terms, and the banks quickly repaid the government for the capital it invested in them. As I’ve said all along, Paulson deserves credit. But he and his successors in the Obama Administration haven’t done enough to preclude the possibility of a repeat performance. And next time around, the outcome could be even worse.
Above: Henry Paulson testifies before the Financial Inquiry Crisis Commission May 6, 2010. Photograph by Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP.
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我看这篇文章，心情很糟糕。就想我看到一些事情一样，明明觉得这样不对，但是它的存在是那么的有它的道理。所以，我选择学着不愤怒（真的很难）
1. Nobody could disagree with the latter statemetn: financial intermediation is an essential part of capitalism. The problem with the Wall Street banks, or most of them, is that in recent decades tjeu have gone far beyond traditional intermediation.
2.The problem going into 2007-2008 can be summarized under four headings: exercise borrowing, flawed compensation structures, weak regulation, and moral hazard. In each of these areas, some necessary reforms have been introduced, but they have not gone for enough as a result there is still the potential for another crisis, another bailout, and another poplace.
3. In recent months, Citigroup, Bank of America, and other banks have been boasting that they will soon have a dollar in equity for every twenty dollars in assets on their balance sheet: a leverage ratio of twenty to one.
4. Even a tiny loss of 2% of its assets could promt, in essence, a run on the bank by its creditors.
5. Goldman and Morgan Stanly have implemented "clawback" provisions in their employment contracts, which enable them to force traders and managers to give back some of their remuneration if they go beyond the firm's risk guidlines and generate big loses.
6.An industry that once greatly scattered is now dominated by six behemothes: Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Stocks, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Well Fargo. It is possible of course, that bigger means better and safer. But does anythone really believe that?
7. As long as they know the taxpayers will  bail them out if they get into trouble, they have in incentives to take too much risk. Economists call this problem as "Moral Hazard" and the consolidation of the banking system has made it worse.
8. In evolutionary terms, we have had survival not of the fittest but the fattest. I call this phenomenon the "doom loop."(Maybe the fattest is the fittest.)

Apolloemma

Syria’s Other Army: How the Hackers Wage War

Posted by Matt Buchanan

At 5:41 P.M. on Tuesday, a tweet from the account of the hacker collective known as the Syrian Electronic Army, which supports the regime of Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad, said, “Media is going down…” It had been a couple of hours since the Web site of the Times had gone offline for the second time this month. Roughly forty-five minutes later, the account asked Twitter, “Are you ready?” Some users had noticed that the backgrounds of their Twitter profiles had been transformed to Syria-related pictures. While Twitter quickly recovered, the Times continued to be inaccessible to some users for a day; as of 6:20 P.M. on Wednesday, the Times’s Twitter account was still advising those readers to use an alternate Web address.
The S.E.A.’s attacks on media organizations and journalists have been remarkably successful—in terms of collecting trophies, if nothing else. In 2012, it struck Al Jazeera several times, breaking into its English Web site, its Twitter accounts, and the network’s S.M.S. text service, which the S.E.A. used to broadcast multiple fake news alerts. This past March, it gained control of several BBC Twitter accounts. In April, it hijacked the Twitter account of the Associated Press, and tweeted, “Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured,” sending the Dow down around a hundred and fifty points that afternoon. It also defaced NPR’s Web site, and commandeered the Twitter accounts of “60 Minutes” and the Guardian. In May, it compromised the Twitter account of the Onion, tweeting vaguely Onion-ish headlines like “UN’s Ban Ki Moon condemns Syria for being struck by israel: ‘It was in the way of Jewish missiles’ onion.com/104PKAs.” That same month, it hacked the Financial Times’s Web site and several associated Twitter accounts, as well as the account of E! News. Then it took over the Reuters Twitter feed. And earlier this month, it broke into Outbrain, a third-party service that recommends stories on news sites, allowing the S.E.A. to vandalize the Web sites of Time, CNN, and the Washington Post “in a single strike.” And it redirected Post readers to one of its own sites; that attack had been its most sweeping to date.
On Tuesday, the S.E.A. did not hack the Times or Twitter directly. Rather, it breached Melbourne IT, a domain-name registration service that the Times and Twitter both used to manage their Web addresses. Once it had access to Melbourne IT, it altered the domain records of the Times and Twitter. In the Times’s case, it sent some users who went to the newspaper’s Web site to one controlled by the S.E.A.; for Twitter, it listed itself as the owner of twitter.com, and redirected one of the company’s addresses, twimg.com, which Twitter uses to host backgrounds for profiles, to one of the S.E.A.’s addresses. As the networking company CloudFlare explained in a detailed post about the attack, the Times suffered a prolonged outage because the changes made by the S.E.A. resulted in a chain reaction, breaking things at multiple levels.
The chief information officer of the New York Times Company told the paper that compared to previous attacks, the assault on the Times and Twitter through Melbourne IT was like “breaking into Fort Knox. A domain registrar should have extremely tight security because they are holding the security to hundreds if not thousands of Web sites.” Formed in 1996, Melbourne IT is the largest domain name registrar in Australia, and one of the oldest and largest globally; it manages millions of domain names. It did, moreover, “have a reputation of being one of the more secure, business-oriented registrars,” said Jaeson Schultz, a threat-research engineer at Cisco Systems who has been following the S.E.A.’s activities, which is one of the reasons the registrar counts the Times, Twitter, and other large organizations among its customers.
But the S.E.A.’s method, though its execution was sophisticated, was rather simple conceptually: it began by gaining access to Melbourne IT’s system using the log-in of a U.S.-based domain reseller, which it obtained using a technique known as spearphishing. This is as much an exploitation of human weakness as it is a technical accomplishment: it’s a gambit designed to trick people into voluntarily revealing information in response to what appears to be a message from a legitimate Web site or service. For example, a link in an e-mail transports a user to what looks like Google’s log-in page, and then captures the user’s Google name and password.
Spearphishing through e-mail has consistently been the S.E.A.’s tactic of choice, Schultz said in a phone call. The S.E.A.’s attempts can be “tough to spot” for the average user because they’re so carefully crafted. It’s not just that the fake log-in screens are well executed; Schultz notes that, at this point, “they’ve broken into several different media organizations’ inboxes, and there’s probably a lot of good info in there,” like names and places that can be used to make e-mails seem legitimate. For instance, in the attack on the Onion, one of the booby-trapped e-mails purported to be from Elizabeth Mpyisi at the U.N. Refugee Agency—a real person—and the one on the A.P. used the name of an A.P. staffer, according to Jim Romenesko. Still, Schultz does believe the S.E.A. will “face diminishing returns” if it continues to use the same kind of attacks. After the latest breach, for instance, Domain Name System providers—which do the work of translating the recognizable Web address you type into a browser to its actual address (nytimes.com translates to 170.149.168.130, for example)—could hunt for addresses used by the S.E.A. to re-register domains, and prevent further damage from occurring. Moreover, it’s likely that organizations will put in place additional measures to secure their domains—requiring, for instance, any change to the domain record to be authorized by one of a small number of individuals. “They’re going to have to adapt,” Schultz said.
The S.E.A. already has adapted in a way that makes its attacks more punishing: while previous assaults focussed on media organizations directly, the S.E.A. has recently begun targeting third-party services and infrastructure that the media rely on, allowing it to hit multiple targets at once. The widespread use of third-party services for things like commenting or content recommendations makes each site only as secure as its weakest service. Last week, the S.E.A. compromised the GoDaddy domain account of ShareThis, a content-sharing company whose widget is on more than two million Web sites, and changed its domain records. Its occupation of Outbrain a couple of weeks ago is another example, as was its incursion into SocialFlow, a social-media management service used by a number of publishers.
Few concrete facts are known about the S.E.A., but it has the appearance of a loose hacker collective. It formed in 2011, in the midst of the Syrian uprisings, and it is assuredly pro-Assad. It has targeted Web sites and services associated with dissidents and organizations it believes are aligned with rebels, as well as media organizations. It said, of Tuesday’s attack, that it “placed twitter in darkness as a sign of respect for all the dead #Syria-ns due to the lies tweeted it.” In what it called “an anti-war message” posted on Pastebin, the group stated, “The Syrian army, which has lost tens of thousands of soldiers who were defending their homeland with nothing more than a rifle, would never have been the one to use chemical weapons.”
Whether the S.E.A. is under the control of the Syrian government is unclear. The Times notes that Syrian rebels and some security researchers consider the S.E.A. to be the “outward-facing campaign of a much quieter surveillance campaign focused on Syrian dissidents,” and note that Assad has publicly touted the group as “a real army in a virtual reality.” Moreover, the Syrian Computer Society, which regulates the Internet within Syria—and was headed by Assad before he became President—at one pointed hosted the group’s Web site at the address sea.sy, after its original domains were seized by a U.S.-based domain registrar. In May, the S.C.S. cut the group off, and in interviews, self-proclaimed leaders of the group have claimed to have no direct ties to the government, monetarily or otherwise. (While the S.E.A.’s Web sites are currently down, the security researcher Brian Krebs notes that the domains are now hosted in Russia.) In a recent interview with the Daily Beast, a supposed leader of the group, calling himself “SEA the Shadow,” said that the S.E.A. is made up of nine college students living in Syria. While Motherboard and Brian Krebs each claim to have unmasked a member of the group, the S.E.A.’s Twitter account has mocked them and called the Motherboard article “false.” (E-mails sent to the group have so far gone unreturned.)
Regardless, it’s clear that the individuals who make up the S.E.A. are not simply technically savvy in a rote way. They are fully native products and producers of Internet culture. They use English, both on social media and in their phishing attacks, in the manner of young people who’ve spent their entire lives online; they deploy well-known memes when they hijack accounts; they crack jokes about Justin Bieber; and, of course, they relentlessly broadcast all of their doings on social media. (Their current Twitter account, @Official_SEA16, is, as the number implies, their sixteenth consecutive account, as previous ones were suspended. A Twitter spokesperson explained in an e-mail that the account remains active because “Our Trust and Safety team takes action only after someone reports a violation of our Rules and the report is investigated.”) Most profoundly, the S.E.A.’s campaign reflects the vigilantism of young aggressors steeped in the Web: it’s conducted not simply on widely viewed media sites or on social media itself but for them; the SEA knows how to capture a precise kind of attention from a particular kind of audience. This is in part, one suspects, because they are that kind of audience, one who lives on Facebook and Twitter. That’s what ultimately makes this group so remarkable: it has shifted the battleground from a single place to an infinite number of them, because it’s battling for attention, not power—even if it can be hard to tell the difference.

Apolloemma

John Kerry’s Case For Bombing Syria

Posted by John Cassidy

Two memorable images dominate perceptions of John Kerry. The first of them, taken from the Fulbright hearings, in April, 1971shows a lanky twenty-seven-year-old Navy veteran, hair below his ears, medals pinned to his military fatigues, testifying to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about alleged war crimes and atrocities carried out by his fellow soldiers in Southeast Asia. The second image, less flattering to Kerry, emerged during his abortive 2004 Presidential campaign, and it showed him windsurfing off NantucketNow, there is a third image: a somber, gray-haired Secretary of State standing behind a podium and talking about rows of Syrian children “lying side by side, sprawled on a hospital floor, all of them dead from Assad’s gas and surrounded by parents and grandparents who had suffered the same fate.”
Kerry’s task was to present to the public the case for bombing Syria. He did it without apology and with some passion, combining specific details about the August 21st attack in Ghouta, an area east of Damascus, with sweeping claims about the nature of the Syrian regime:

The United States government now knows that at least one thousand, four hundred and twenty-nine Syrians were killed in this attack, including at least four hundred and twenty-six children. Even the first responders—the doctors, nurses, and medics who tried to save them—they became victims themselves. We saw them gasping for air, terrified that their own lives were in danger. This is the indiscriminate, inconceivable horror of chemical weapons. This is what Assad did to his own people.

As Kerry spoke, the White House released a four-page intelligence assessment that said the U.S. government had “high confidence that the Syrian government carried out the attack” with some sort of nerve agent. In support of this assessment, the document cited several types of evidence, including intercepted communications between senior Syrian officials that, it said, showed the officials knew about the attacks and worried that evidence of them might be discovered by United Nations inspectors.
Inevitably, there will be comparisons with Colin Powell’s infamous 2003 presentation to the United Nations about Saddam Hussein’s chemical-weapons program, which turned out to be largely bogus. Until Kerry’s claims are subjected to further inspection, it is probably wise to avoid reaching any definitive conclusions. But Kerry himself obliquely referred to the Powell fiasco, saying that the intelligence community had “reviewed and re-reviewed” the evidence about the attack, adding, “And I will tell you, it has done so more than mindful of the Iraq experience. We will not repeat that moment.”
If Kerry harbors any doubts about the evidence, he kept them well hidden. Speaking unhurriedly, and occasionally gesticulating with his arms, he presented the gas attack as a carefully planned assault carried out by chemicals-weapons units of the Syrian army:

We know that the regime was specifically determined to rid the Damascus suburbs of the opposition, and it was frustrated that it hadn’t succeeded in doing so. We know that, for three days before the attack, the Syrian regime’s chemical-weapons personnel were on the ground in the area, making preparations. And we know that the Syrian regime elements were told to prepare for the attack by putting on gas masks and taking precautions associated with chemical weapons.
We know that these were specific instructions.
We know where the rockets were launched from, and at what time. We know where they landed, and when. We know rockets came only from regime-controlled areas and went only to opposition-controlled or contested neighborhoods. And we know, as does the world, that just ninety minutes later all hell broke loose…

One thing Kerry didn’t say was that the U.S. government would wait for the weapons inspectors to complete their work and issue a factual report before raining down bombs on Syrian targets. He all but dismissed the U.N. investigation, saying that it wouldn’t determine who had fired the chemical weapons but merely confirm that they had been used. “By the definition of their own mandate, the U.N. can’t tell us anything that we haven’t shared with you this afternoon or that we don’t already know,” Kerry insisted.
The actual evidence, which is presumably classified, wasn’t published in the report. Also conspicuously lacking was any direct evidence showing that Assad himself, or the people in his immediate circle, ordered the attack. What the document says is that the U.S. has intercepted evidence “that leads us to assess that Syrian chemical weapons personnel—including personnel assessed to be associated with the SSRC”—the Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Center, an arm of the Ministry of Defense that manages Syria’s chemical-weapons program—“were preparing chemical munitions prior to the attack”:

Syrian chemical weapons personnel were operating in the Damascus suburb of Adra from Sunday, August 18 until early in the morning on Wednesday, August 21 near an area that the regime uses to mix chemical weapons, including sarin. On August 21, a Syrian regime element prepared for a chemical weapons attack in the Damascus area, including through the utilization of gas masks. Our intelligence sources in the Damascus area did not detect any indications in the days prior to the attack that opposition affiliates were planning to use chemical weapons.

Having made the moral case for striking at Assad’s regime and military forces, Kerry moved on to the broader, strategic rationale for U.S. action, which appears to be what is really driving the Administration’s thinking: protecting the credibility of the U.S. government at a time when it faces other acute problems in the Middle East and possible nuclear showdowns with Iran and North Korea. “Our choice today has great consequences,” Kerry said, and he went on:

It is directly related to our credibility, and whether countries still believe the United States when it says something. They are watching to see if Syria can get away with it, because then maybe they, too, can put the world at greater risk…
It is about whether Iran, which itself has been a victim of chemical-weapons attacks, will now feel emboldened, in the absence of action, to obtain nuclear weapons. It is about Hezbollah and North Korea and every other terrorist group or dictator that might ever again contemplate the use of weapons of mass destruction. Will they remember that the Assad regime was stopped from those weapons’ current or future use? Or will they remember that the world stood aside and created impunity?

Not surprisingly, Kerry didn’t dwell on the argument that it was his boss, President Obama, with his loose talk of “red lines” and “game changers,” who brought into question U.S. credibility. Nor did he give any indication of when a U.S. attack on Syria would begin, or what it might consist of. When the President spoke at the White House shortly after Kerry’s presentation, he also avoided committing to any timetables. Instead, he described what is to come as “a limited, narrow act” designed “to make sure that we maintain the norm against the use of chemical weapons.”
Both Obama and Kerry acknowledged the war-weariness of the American public and the widespread skepticism about any military action post-Iraq. But doing nothing in response to the gas attack would send the wrong message to potential aggressors, the President said, and that would constitute “a danger to our national security.” This, though, was Kerry’s moment. From anti-war protestor to public defender of a prospective U.S. bombing raid, he has come a long way. History would, he said, “judge us all extraordinarily harshly if we turned a blind eye to a dictator’s wanton use of weapons of mass destruction.”

Apolloemma

Crossing the Line                                   
                                                                                    by Steve Coll   September 9, 2013                                                                                                                                                

Early in 1987, Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi President, decided to clear out scores of Kurdish villages, in order to undermine separatist rebels. He asked Ali Hassan al-Majid, a general and a first cousin, to lead the project. In tape recordings later produced by Iraqi prosecutors, Majid told Baath Party colleagues that the novelty and the terror of chemical weapons would “threaten” the Kurds and “motivate them to surrender.” On April 16th of that year, Iraq became the first nation ever to drop gas bombs on its own citizens; the gassing campaign lasted two years and killed thousands of people. “I will kill them all with chemical weapons!” Majid told his colleagues. “Who is going to say anything? The international community? Fuck them! The international community and those who listen to them!”

Two weeks ago, on August 21st, a poison-gas attack killed more than fourteen hundred civilians in the suburbs of Damascus, Syria’s capital. President Obama, in fashioning a response, has been burdened by the United States’ recent history with Iraq. The Administration of Ronald Reagan stood by as “Chemical Ali” waged his campaign against the Kurds. Fifteen years later, to justify an invasion of Iraq, the Administration of George W. Bush infamously claimed that Saddam Hussein still possessed chemical and biological arms. It soon became apparent that Saddam had abandoned them. That tragic war has rightly raised the standards of proof that Obama must meet to credibly propose military action in the Middle East, particularly if the casus belli concerns unconventional arms.
The Obama Administration, Britain, and France say there is little doubt that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is responsible for the recent slaughter, although they concede that the evidence is not airtight. The video imagery of the aftermath is indelible: unbloodied corpses, including toddlers’, in white shrouds; hospital patients choking and drooling. The chances that rebels were responsible seem slim to nonexistent. Yet last Thursday Britain’s Parliament, citing the West’s failures in Iraq, voted to reject an attack on Syria for now, because a majority did not judge the available evidence of Assad’s guilt to be definitive.
Last year, President Obama said that he would consider the use of chemical arms during Syria’s civil war a “red line” that, if crossed, would require American action. Last week, the President and his Secretary of State, John Kerry, sounded as though they had decided to strike against Assad. The dilemma they confront is a mercifully rare one. Since the First World War, there have been fewer than a dozen wars or acts of terrorism involving chemical arms. Before Syria, the last such attack occurred in 1995, when Aum Shinrikyo, a millenarian cult, released sarin gas into Tokyo’s subway because its leaders believed that mass killing would catalyze the apocalypse.
It is hard to grasp why any rational person would use chemical weapons, even amid the terrible exigencies of war. Gas weapons cannot be aimed in order to spare children or other noncombatants. They cause fear and prolonged suffering in victims, and cripple some survivors. They can contaminate the environment with poisons that last beyond a war’s end. And, because gases travel unpredictably on the wind, the weapons’ utility on a battlefield is limited.

Yet Saddam saw great value in chemical arms during the nineteen-eighties, and his twisted logic bears examination in the light of Syria’s deteriorating conflict. Saddam first used gas bombs to thwart Iran’s zealous swarms of “human wave” infantry. Chemical terror broke the will of young Iranian volunteers, a lesson that informed Majid’s subsequent Kurdish campaign. The Reagan Administration’s decision to tolerate Saddam’s depravities proved to be a colossal moral failure and strategic mistake; it encouraged Saddam’s aggression and internal repression, and it allowed Iraq to demonstrate to future dictators the tactical value of chemical warfare.
The consequences of similar passivity in Syria now are unknowable. After more than two years and a hundred thousand deaths, the war has descended into a miasma of kidnappings, executions, and indiscriminate attacks. It would not be surprising if Assad or his henchmen seized upon selective gassings as a way to break the opposition’s will, or to flush rebels from strategic neighborhoods. Obama has said that his aim in Syria is to prevent more gassings, not to overthrow Assad. Since the costs of even a limited Western military intervention in Syria might be very high, in diplomatic standing and in lives, it is reasonable to ask whether the cause of punishing and deterring the use of chemical weapons is worth the risks.
Assad’s forces have already killed tens of thousands of civilians with conventional weaponry. But chemical warfare is a step beyond. Since the Second World War, governments and armies have gradually forsworn weapons that do not distinguish between soldiers and civilians. These include nuclear, biological, and chemical arms, and also land mines and cluster munitions. The treaties that ban such arms are building blocks in a decades-long campaign by human-rights activists to insist that warfare be subordinated to international law, that soldiers attack only other soldiers, and that generals be held accountable for where they aim their weapons.
International laws and informal warnings of retaliation are designed to dissuade dictators and terrorists from using weapons of mass destruction under any circumstances. A failure to enforce such norms in Syria would likely lower the threshold for chemical use in this and future wars. Obama’s deliberateness about military action in Syria is understandable. The consequences of intervention may be difficult to control; the Syrian opposition is fractured and influenced by jihadi fighters. As Iraq has shown, the public requires transparency, accountability, and democratic deliberation when war crimes become a basis for more war.
In Iraq, starting in 2006, Chemical Ali went on trial for mass murder and other crimes against humanity. The proceedings were undeniably flawed. Yet they put Majid’s murderous arrogance on full display to his countrymen, and guaranteed that the record of his guilt can never be obscured. He was hanged in 2010. The prospect of even such rough justice for Syria’s chemical bombers looks elusive. Yet Obama’s original instincts were sound. There are red lines even in a war as devoid of clarity as Syria’s. The best available evidence is that on August 21st Bashar al-Assad’s forces crossed to the other side. ♦
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1.Obama gas said that his aim in Syria is to prevent more gassings, not to overthrow Assas. Since the costs of even a limited western military intervention in Syria might be very high, in diplomatic standing and in lives, it is resonable to ask wether the cause of punnishing and dettering the use of chemical weapons is worth the risks.
2. International laws and informal warnings of retailiation are designed to dissuade dictators and terrorist from using weapons of mass destruction under any circumstances.

Apolloemma

今天转一篇<Economist>

Russia and the West
Cold climateAs relations with Europe and America freeze over, Vladimir Putin looks to China      Aug 31st 2013              | MOSCOW               |From the print edition      

WHEN Vladimir Putin plays host to Barack Obama and other world leaders at the G20 summit in St Petersburg next week, mutual resentment and dislike will be ill-concealed. The American president recently likened the Russian leader’s body language to that of a “bored kid in the back of the classroom”. Mr Obama has cancelled a planned bilateral meeting in Moscow, choosing to visit Sweden instead.

The last straw was Russia’s sheltering of Edward Snowden, a fugitive American spook. But the spat over that only crystallised something apparent since Mr Putin returned to the Kremlin in 2012: that the “reset”, launched with much fanfare in 2009, is not just dying, but dead.

Dmitry Trenin of the Moscow Carnegie Centre, a think-tank, says the aborted summit marks the end of a 25-year cycle which started in Mikhail Gorbachev’s glory days. Now the assumption of shared goals and values is over. Russia does not pretend to be moving towards the West. Rather than responding to Western criticism with irritated pleas for patience and understanding of national specifics, it simply ignores it.

An earlier crisis came with the Russia-Georgia war in 2008. But Mr Obama revived the relationship, taking seriously Dmitry Medvedev, who stood in for Mr Putin for four years. People still argue about whether Mr Medvedev’s affability was sincere, or a stunt.

The frost started biting over Libya. Russia backed a UN resolution to protect civilian lives, but felt duped when this resulted in the military overthrow of Muammar Qaddafi. The image of Gaddafi’s “revolting slaughter—not just medieval but primeval”, stayed with Mr Putin. “No one should be allowed to employ the Libyan scenario in Syria,” he wrote in 2012.

Having convinced himself that the West was behind revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia, Mr Putin also blamed America for a wave of protests in Moscow in December 2011: proof positive that enemies were at the Kremlin’s gate. Mr Putin responded by attacking charities and campaign groups who have funding from abroad, branding them “foreign agents”.

To shore up his core support, Mr Putin has filled Russia’s ideological vacuum with nationalism and anti-Americanism. The main thesis is of two conflicting civilisations, with the West exemplifying economic decline, international recklessness and moral depravity. Russia must shield itself from this harmful influence and preserve its own traditional values, based on Orthodoxy and past glory. This was behind a recent law against gay “propaganda”, and a ban on officials from having bank accounts and property abroad.

With business, it is a different story. Even vehement anti-Westerners embrace big foreign companies as partners and investors (they also use them as lobbyists for their political interests in the West). This double-track approach is not new. Joseph Stalin said in 1934: “Those who seek a business relationship with us will always find our support. And those who try to attack our country will be dealt a deadly blow, to deter them from sticking their snouts into our Soviet backyard.”

As an alternative to the West, Mr Putin points to the East, hailing China’s rise as a colossal chance to catch its “wind in the sails of our economy”. China and Russia, he has argued, each need the other to be strong and prosperous. Neither lectures the other on human rights. China sees Russia as a safe resource-base which would be strategically important in case of escalating tension between China and America. To prove the point, Xi Jinping, China’s new leader, made Moscow his first port of call.

On Syria, Russia has repeatedly wielded its UN security-council veto against sanctions and blocked international oversight of Syrian chemical weapons. But it does not seek a confrontation. Perhaps thanks to tough talk from Israel and other countries, it seems not to have delivered advanced air-defence systems to the regime there, or provided personnel to train Syrians. Igor Malashenko, a veteran observer of Russia-American relations, says that unlike the Soviet Union, Russia does not participate in big international affairs largely because it is not prepared to take responsibility for big decisions.

But Russia has drawn a “red line” on the issue of Ukraine’s association agreement with the European Union. It has launched a fusillade of trade sanctions to press the case for its rival outfit, the Eurasian Economic Union. Fyodor Lukyanov, the editor of Russia in Global Affairs, a periodical, says the main point is anchoring former Soviet republics in Russia’s sphere of influence rather than promoting trade. (And having Ukraine in the customs union would be “a guaranteed headache”, like Britain in the EU, he adds.)

But bullying Ukraine is likely to alienate it further and will stoke tension with the EU, which like America has been appalled by Russia’s anti-gay law. Germany, once Russia’s cheerleader, is now its most vocal critic. That will be bad for business (the EU is by far Russia’s biggest trading partner). It may also doom the regime’s aim, stoked by self-interest, of persuading the EU to offer visa-free entry for holders of official passports.

Whatever the Kremlin says, members of Russia’s educated and affluent middle class continue to look West. Russia’s rulers' greatest weakness is the lack of anything positive that could attract their own people or outsiders. For all his talk of outfitting Russia for a changing world, Mr Putin chiefly conveys a deep fear of disturbing the fragile status quo. That is pushing the country backwards.

From the print edition: Europe

1. To shore up his core support, Mr. Putin has filled Russia's Ideological vaccum with nationalism and Anti-Americanim. The main thesis is of two conflicting civilization, with west examplifying economic decline, international recklessness and moral depravity.
2. Mr. Putin points to the East, hailing China's rise as a colossal chance to catch its "winds in the sail of our economy."

Apolloemma

Eisenhower 1954, Obama 2013
Posted by Jeffrey Frank
  

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  In April, 1954, President Eisenhower was being pressured to take military action in Vietnam, where the French were losing a symbolically important battle at Dien Bien Phu and were about to be driven out of what was then their colony. At a press conference that month, Eisenhower acknowledged the “falling domino” principle—the idea that if one land were to fall to Communism others would follow. John Foster Dulles, his Secretary of State, declared that a Communist political system imposed on Southeast Asia by means of the Marxist and nationalist guerrilla forces fighting the French “would be a grave threat to the whole free community,” and Vice-President Richard Nixon, in a talk to newspaper editors that April, dropped hints about dispatching American troops. Eisenhower never used a phrase like “red line,” as President Obama did when he warned the Syrian regime that the use of chemical weapons would be punished, but he did say that the defense of the Southeast Asia region was of “transcendent importance.” He sounded determined to act.
  Yet Eisenhower, much like Obama, sometimes appeared to be acting in ways that ran counter to his words. Historic parallels are risky, but the conflict in Korea had ended the previous summer, with an armistice that gave victory to no one. That divisive war, fought at a cost of nearly thirty thousand American lives and more than eighty thousand wounded, left Ike and most Americans with no appetite for a return engagement. The divisive Iraq war and its murderous aftermath still shadow every mention of involvement in the Middle East. When Eisenhower in 1954 said that his Administration would need to consult legislators, he was pretty sure that the 83rd Congress had no wish to endorse intervention, and it is not unreasonable to think that Obama, despite his strong words and his mini-summit with Senator John McCain, suspects that the 113th Congress may be no more inclined. Eisenhower stressed the importance of working with American allies, particularly Great Britain, and he sent a cable to Prime Minister Winston Churchill saying that a “new, ad hoc grouping or coalition of nations” was needed to help the French: “We face the hard situation of contemplating a disaster brought on by French weakness and the necessity of dealing with it before it develops.”
  Eisenhower supposed—and was soon informed by Admiral Arthur Radford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—that Churchill had no desire to help the French, possibly because of a fear, as Ike’s press secretary, James Hagerty, noted in his diary, “that if they move in Indochina the Chinese Reds will move against Hong Kong and could take it easily.” Eisenhower, in any case, did not have much respect for the French: “They are very volatile. They think they are a great power one day and they feel sorry for themselves the next day.”
  Like those in the current White House, Ike and his advisers discussed at length what form intervention might take, and to what degree it should be carried out. The hardest line came from Admiral Radford, about whom the Times’s C. L. Sulzberger wrote, “He scares the hell out of me,” and who favored using three tactical atomic weapons to effectively end the fighting at Dien Bien Phu. (This plan was called Operation Vulture.) Dulles and Nixon favored non-nuclear air strikes, sort of a “shot across the bow,” to borrow Obama’s language, to, at the very least, let the Communists know that Vietnam wasn’t going to be easy pickings. Nixon was troubled by Eisenhower’s ambivalence and, sounding not unlike the recent McCain, wrote in his diary that “it was quite apparent that the President had backed down considerably from the strong position he had taken”:
  

He seemed resigned to doing nothing at all unless we could get the allies and the country to go along with whatever was suggested and he did not seem inclined to put much pressure on to get them to come along.

All of this succeeded in keeping the United States out of the French colonial war, though Eisenhower eventually favored giving financial support and military advice to South Vietnam, a relatively small commitment that, under three successors—Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon—turned into a seemingly unending national tragedy.
Eisenhower’s calculated indecisiveness—what looked like spinelessness to those who wanted unequivocal action—in fact offers an excellent precedent for Obama. Like any President, Obama must know that a military strike against another country, whether a major attack or a shot across the bow—whether undertaken by one nation or by a coalition—is an act of war, just as if another country had fired on Washington. Ike’s hesitations went to the very heart of any military engagement. As Hagerty recorded in his diary, “The President said that if we were to put one combat soldier into Indochina, then our entire prestige would be at stake, not only in that area but throughout the world.”
Eisenhower understood, as Obama surely does, how America’s role can change indelibly in a moment: that sending a single air strike, or soldier or, as happened with later Administrations, thousands of soldiers, binds us to the outcome. The Eisenhower-era military did not have the capacity to launch a cruise missile from a Navy ship, but Eisenhower, a retired five-star general who could brush off political bullying, understood the consequences and purposes of war, the fragility of national prestige, and that, in the midst of emotions that can lead to ill-considered actions, indecisiveness may sometimes be the best first response.

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1. Eisenhower acklowledge the "falling domino" principle—the idea that if one land were to fall to communism others would follow.
2.He (Ink) seemed to resigned to doing nothing at all unless we could get the allier and the country to get along with whatever was suggested and he did not seem inclined to put much pressure to get them come along(develop).
3. Like any president, Obama must know that a military strike against another country, whether a major attack or a shot across the bow—wether undertaken by one nation or by a coaliation—is an act of war, just as if another country had fired on Washington. Ike's Hestitations went to the very heart of any military engagement. As H recorded in his diary, "The president said that if we were to put one combat soldier into Indochina, then our prestige could be at stake, not only in that area, but throughout the world."
4. Indecisiveness many sometimes be the best first response.