Takeo Shibata and his wife, Chieko, both 74, live in a temporary housing camp for nuclear evacuees in Iwaki, Fukshima prefecture. (Ian Munroe/CBC)

CBCNews.ca

As Japan prepares to mark the anniversary of last year’s devastating natural and nuclear disaster, many of the evacuees in a city near the ruined Fukushima Daiichi plant wonder how long they will have to continue waiting before they can move on with their lives.

At least a quarter of the 80,000 residents who were displaced by the nuclear meltdowns now live in Iwaki, a sprawling patchwork of communities that lies roughly 40 kilometres south of the ruined nuclear plant. Most of them live in temporary camps scattered across the city that resemble sterile trailer parks, or in private housing rented at premium prices.

Among the evacuees are Takeo Shibata and his wife, Chieko, both 74, who on March 12 of last year left the house in Naraha they had lived in, and and had run a small farming operation from, for nearly three decades.

Shortly after lunch on that day, Chieko Shibata recalls, a loudspeaker began blaring a message urging people to leave. The warning didn’t give residents any explanation.

Not far up Japan’s eastern coast, workers at the Fukushima Daiichi plant had begun venting radioactive steam from two reactors in an attempt to avert an explosion. Unit 1 blew up hours later, the first in a series of explosions that has left this part of Japan blanketed with potentially dangerous radioactive particles.

The Shibatas drove south, unaware of the nuclear crisis and assuming they would be able to return within a day or two. In the year since, they’ve lived in a smorgasbord of accommodations, from a small piece of floor space in a junior high school classroom to a hotel room with no heater or bathroom.

Search for better housing

Like most of the evacuees who are from a rural area of Japan, the Shibatas are elderly, and hop-scotching between less-than-ideal accommodations has hit them particularly hard. Takeo Shibata’s health declined in the months after the evacuation and he began to have more problems getting around.

Eventually the couple applied and were accepted into a temporary camp in Iwaki that was set up for residents of their abandoned town. They now live alone in part of a trailer furnished with donated appliances and enough room for a small kitchen, a living room where they sleep, and a bathroom.

“It doesn’t feel like home, but it’s a much better place,” Chieko Shibata said.

“The disaster took everybody’s life and hope,” she added. “We are retired and were enjoying the rest of our lives growing plants. Now everything is gone.”

Cleanup efforts

The Japanese government has begun the daunting task of decontaminating communities poisoned by the nuclear fallout, part of a decade-long reconstruction plan that is expected to cost 23 trillion yen ($278 billion).

In the case of Naraha, which sits just inside the 20-kilometre evacuation zone, there is a chance residents will be able to return soon if the work goes well. But for residents of communities closer to the Fukushima Daiichi plant it could be years, even decades. before officials deem it safe for them to go home.

Nuclear evacuee Miko Endo reads a haiku poem at his new rented home in Iwaki, Fukushima. (Ian Munroe)

Mikio Endo, 80, and his wife Kiiko, 75, used to live in Tomioka, about 10 kilometres from the now-infamous plant. Today they share a small rented house in Iwaki with three other relatives, where they plan to live until they’re allowed to return home.

“I’m getting used to it,” says Mikio, before reading a Haiku poem to express how much he misses the cherry blossoms in Tomioka.

Like the Shibatas, the Endo family has applied for compensation from the Tokyo Electric Power Company, which ran the Fukushima Daiichi plant and is in the process of paying out billions of dollars as a result of the disaster. Their applications have yet to be settled.

Nuclear worries persist

Mikio Endo’s great niece, Yuriko Tanaka, has lived in Iwaki for years and says the destruction of the Fukushima Daiichi plant has changed the city.

Vacant hotel rooms have been booked up by employees who commute to the nuclear plant or who have found work with the government’s decontamination program. Local traffic is heavier, and it’s more difficult to find a vacant apartment.

Tanaka, 38, says the radiation problem has also left the city divided. While many people say they’re unfazed by the health threat of living with elevated radiation levels, others are concerned about its potential effects and are angry with the government’s handling of the crisis.

She falls into the latter camp, and pulled her 5-year-old daughter, Haruna, out of kindergarten after she said the school’s principal failed to take enough precautions against the radiation, which poses more of a threat to children.

Tanaka now owns a radiation detector and cleans up “hot spots” when she finds them. The radiation is particularly high in local pine trees.

She has also decided to emigrate from Japan, and hopes to find a home in Canada one day.

“People who don’t care about radiation, they treat you like ‘if you don’t like it, move somewhere else,’” she said. “But if we can’t protect kids, there is no future for Fukushima anymore.”

www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2012/03/09/f-munroe-japan-fukushima-evacuees.html

Canadian soldiers walk through a poppy field west of Kandahar City on July 9, 2006. (Pierre Gazzola)

CTVNews.ca

A month after leading seaman Scott Murphy returned from Kandahar, he’s able to visit his local Wal-Mart without having to scan the crowd for suspected insurgents.

In his case, the symptoms of post-traumatic stress were mild, he says. After leaving Afghanistan, mental health experts with the military had warned him about signs of psychological stress.

“There were certain things that could happen and they did, but my symptoms are all but gone now,” he said in a phone interview from Lower Sackville, N.S. “I’m rather relaxed.”

Murphy, 34, is based on HMCS Athabaskan but volunteered to fight in the landlocked Asian country, where he spent six months doing intelligence work for the military convoys that snake their way across Afghanistan’s treacherous desert roads.

At Kandahar Airfield he faced sporadic rocket attacks, which picked up after Ramadan. On one September day, he said the base was struck 14 times.

Like many soldiers who have returned home after Canada ended its combat mission in Afghanistan, Murphy is now getting accustomed to life away from the intensity of that conflict.

“The hardest part would be coming down from the high of being in a war zone, where you’re always being shot at, you’re always cognizant of what’s going on around you,” he said in a phone interview.

“You have to come home and readjust yourself to being the husband and the dad, and you have to be much more patient and understanding with the way things work in civilian life. It’s a much slower pace.”

Since leaving the war, he has visited everyone from doctors to dentists to psychiatrists, part of the military’s drive to ensure its soldiers are healthy — physically and mentally — after they arrive home.

While Murphy is one of the lucky ones, at least 1,859 members of the Canadian Forces had been injured in Afghanistan by the end of 2010, according to the latest government numbers.

But Senator Romeo Dallaire, who was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after commanding the United Nations peacekeeping operation to Rwanda in the 1990s, said he believes the number of soldiers wounded in Afghanistan may be significantly higher.

In his opinion, the criteria used by the Department of National Defence and Veterans Affairs to diagnose “invisible” psychological injuries may be too stringent, and the actual casualty rate among Canadian forces could be as high as 20 per cent.

Part of the problem is the chaotic nature of the Afghan war, which it makes stress injuries more common.

“The enemy could be anyone, and coming from any angle and with no compunction about killing their own to achieve their aim,” Dallaire said by phone.

“So the impact on the psychology of the soldier is extensive — and there is an incredible proportion of those operational stress injuries compared to physical injuries.”

Since Canada sent troops to Afghanistan, the number of veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress has multiplied from 2,000 to at least 13,000, according to Veterans Affairs.

To help cope with the influx, the department now runs 10 clinics across the country to treat veterans with stress-related injuries. The Department of Defence operates another five such clinics.

According to a spokesperson for Veterans Affairs Minister Steven Blaney, the department does “recognize the seriousness” of post-traumatic stress and offers medical services accordingly.

However, veterans’ rights advocates like Sean Bruyea say the federal government has been doing too little to help soldiers disabled by psychological wounds.

“They don’t have proper rehabilitation programs. They don’t employ enough research,” Bruyea said. “They haven’t built in wheelchair ramps to help them navigate the bureaucracy.”

He’s also angry that Veterans Affairs is facing a projected budget cut of $226 million over the next two years, “when we’re at the point of having a large influx of people using disability programs and rehabilitation programs.”

The growing popularity of Veterans Affairs’ 24-hour crisis line might hint at the demand for those programs. Calls to the line, which is manned by professional counselors, have increased by 50 per cent over the past four years.

The issue of stress injuries could even shape decisions about Canada’s military operations post-Afghanistan, according to security expert Mark Sedra.

“This war has inflicted different types of psychological trauma on veterans and I think that’s something to watch,” said Sedra, who’s a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, Ont.

“In the short- to medium-term, I don’t think there’s going to be a lot of enthusiasm to deploy again to a foreign war.”

Plain clothed police surround a vehicle that was damaged at the site of an explosion in the Dadar area of Mumbai on July 13, 2011. (Facebook)

CTV.ca

India has been reticent to point the finger at its western neighbour as investigators probe the deadly triple bombing that struck Mumbai earlier this week. But analysts say it may be difficult to rule out links to Pakistani militants in the terrorist attacks.

Wednesday’s bombings killed 17 people and injured 131 others, making them the deadliest on Indian soil since the November 2008 siege of Mumbai, in which 166 people died.

Investigators have descended on the three neighbourhoods where near simultaneous blasts erupted in the country’s financial capital Wednesday evening, reviewing video from surveillance cameras and searching for forensic evidence as monsoon rains washed down the city’s streets.

No group has claimed responsibility for the attacks, and Indian officials have refused to speculate on who may be behind them.

“All angles will be examined without any predetermination,” Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said at a news conference in Mumbai on Thursday. “All groups hostile to India are on the radar.”

Terrorist bombings are nothing new in the world’s second most populous nation, where a number of radical groups — including Maoist rebels, Kashmiri separatists and Islamic militants — are active.

Speculation about who might have carried out the attacks has focused on “homegrown” Islamic militants in India. But that may not mean they were operating without assistance from groups based elsewhere on the subcontinent.

“From my point of view, any Islamist militant actor in India is likely to have some sort of relationship with Pakistan-based entities,” said Kamran Bokhari, an analyst with global intelligence firm Stratfor.

Bokhari said Pakistani militants have a particular interest in stoking tensions between India and Pakistan to divert attention from their activities, and to shift Islamabad’s focus away from the war in Afghanistan.

“The bottom line is, what will the Indians determine — is there a Pakistani link or not?” he told CTVNews.ca. “That’s the million-dollar question.”

Tensions rose between India and Pakistan after the 2008 Mumbai attacks, which Islamabad eventually admitted had been planned partly on its territory.

But speculation about who carried out Wednesday’s bombings has focused on the Indian Mujahideen, which has claimed responsibility for a number of attacks in the country since 2007.

Counterterrorism officers in Kolkata have been hunting for a suspected member of that group who disappeared days before the bombing, The Times of India reported early Saturday.

While the investigation goes on, reluctance on the part of Indian officials to level accusations suggests that “the government is especially concerned over jumping to any conclusion which is not evidence-based,” said Rahul Roy-Chaudhury, a senior fellow with the International Institute for Strategic Studies who has served on India’s National Security Council Secretariat.

Indian authorities need to consider “all options” including Pakistan-based groups, Roy-Chaudhury said by phone from London, England.

“But I tend to think we need to look inwards more,” he added.

New Delhi took a number of steps to shore up its counterterrorism apparatus in the wake of the 2008 Mumbai attacks, better equipping and training police, and creating institutions to more quickly respond to and investigate terrorist attacks.

But it hasn’t been enough, Roy-Chaudhury said. For instance, “there is no excuse” for India’s police, military and intelligence agencies failing to share information.

“What the heck has been going on for the past two-plus years here?” he asked. “I think there needs to be introspection really to see what went wrong.”

www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20110715/questions-over-pakistan-loom-in-mumbai-terror-probe-110716

A view of Gaza City from the harbour on Sept. 8, 2009. (Flickr / Olly Lambert)

CTV .ca

More than 30 Canadian activists are preparing to sail for the Gaza Strip as part of a controversial international flotilla protesting Israel’s blockade of the Palestinian territory, a year after nine people were killed in a similar undertaking.

A group called The Canada Boat to Gaza says it’s raised more than $300,000 and has purchased a ship — dubbed the Tahrir, after the uprising in Egypt — which is docked at an eastern Mediterranean port they will not disclose.

At least 10 such ships are planning to set sail for Gaza later this month, carrying aid supplies and around 1,500 protesters from dozens of countries, according to organizers.

Ehab Lotayef, a spokesman with the Canadian group, said that several protesters from Australia, Belgium and Denmark will also be onboard the Tahrir, along with between $30,000 and $50,000 worth of medical supplies they hope to deliver to Palestinian doctors.

“Our main objective is that Israel should not have jurisdiction over the waters of Gaza,” Lotayef said from Montreal. “This is the least we can do to try peacefully to break the blockade they’re living under.”

When six ships carrying pro-Palestinian activists, humanitarian aid and construction supplies attempted to travel to Gaza last year they were boarded by Israeli commandos in international waters. Clashes erupted onboard one vessel, the Mavi Marmara, in which eight Turkish nationals and a Turkish-American were killed.

The incident damaged relations between Israel and Turkey and deepened international pressure on Israel to lift its naval blockade.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said his government hopes to head off the new flotilla through diplomatic means, but will resort to force again if protesters disobey orders from the Israeli navy and try to reach Gaza’s shore.

Border controls

At issue is an embargo that Israel imposed on Gaza after Hamas seized power in a 2007 gun battle. Hamas had unseated Fatah in elections there a year earlier, but a number of countries including Canada, the United States and members of the European Union consider Hamas a terrorist group.

Last year, the International Committee of the Red Cross said the blockade violated international law due to its impact on Gaza’s 1.5 million residents. Israel says the blockade is necessary because it prevents Hamas from obtaining weapons with which it could attack Israeli troops or civilians.

In the wake of the Mavi Marmara raid last year Israel eased its embargo on Gaza, allowing in things like biscuits and soft drinks. Last month Egypt announced it was reopening its border crossing with Gaza, further loosening the embargo.

Kevin Neish, a retired marine engineer from Victoria who has been fundraising across Canada for the Tahrir, said he doesn’t believe those developments go far enough toward improving living conditions in the Palestinian territory.

The protesters want the blockade lifted so that more aid can flow into Gaza and its dense population can trade freely with other countries, Neish said.

“If the people of Gaza have the blockade lifted then they won’t be firing rockets at Israel,” he said from Vancouver. “They’ll have a normal life.”

Neish, 54, was onboard the Mavi Marmara when Israeli troops boarded it in the last flotilla and he witnessed the deadly clashes that ensued. He was taken into Israeli custody and says he was subjected to “brutality” before being released a few days later.

Israel has banned Neish from visiting the country for a decade, but he intends to return to Gaza onboard the Mavi Marmara again this month.

Controversial strategy

The new flotilla has gained a number of high-profile supporters including three Nobel Peace Prize laureates, author Alice Walker, a former Israeli Air Force captain and a Holocaust survivor.

But the protesters have drawn criticism from officials in Canada and abroad. In a statement last month Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird called the flotilla “provocative” and “unhelpful.”

“I strongly urge those wishing to deliver humanitarian goods to the Gaza Strip to do so through established channels,” Baird said, citing “Israel’s legitimate security concerns.”

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has indicated he would like governments to discourage activists from staging flotillas bound for Gaza because they could “escalate into violent conflict.”

The Canadian group is also reportedly the focus of a million-dollar lawsuit, filed by a dual Canadian-Israeli citizen in an Ontario court, which claims that it is providing material support to Hamas.

Lotayef would not comment on the lawsuit. But he said medical supplies the Tahrir will transport, such as baby aspirin and blood pressure medicine, are intended for hospitals and clinics in Gaza that aren’t associated with Hamas.

Organizers will provide non-violence training to those who will sail on the Tahrir, he said, and are seeking an independent organization to inspect the boat before it leaves port to show that it’s carrying no weapons.

Emanuel Adler, an expert on Israel at the University of Toronto, said the protesters’ strategy is to court international support for Gazans on humanitarian grounds, by prompting Israel to confront the flotilla.

He believes the best way for Israel to respond is by inspecting the ships for weapons and allowing them to proceed to Gaza’s shore.

“If the other side wants a response, the logical thing is not to respond,” Adler said from Tel Aviv.

But he’s afraid that domestic pressures in Israel, including from the country’s formidable military, may lead to a different outcome.

“There’s always an aspect of deterrence, that if we don’t stop the flotilla this time, they’ll send one three times as large.”

www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20110611/canadians-sailing-in-gaza-flotilla-110611/

A pedestrian walks along Queen Street West in Toronto on Sept. 7, 2010. (Flickr / latigi project)

OpenFile

Vint Cerf, one of the pioneers of the Internet and a vice president at Google, at a meeting of the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers in Los Angeles, October 2007. (Joi Ito)

CTV.ca

Officials from 18 countries held an impromptu, late-night meeting earlier this month at the United Nations office in Geneva, and made a decision that rattled Internet technocrats around the world.

Autocratic governments like China and Iran attended the meeting, as did several democratic ones. Despite protests by Portugal and the United States, they voted to staff a working group on the future of the Internet Governance Forum — an important theatre of discussion on matters of cyberspace — by governments alone.

The seemingly arcane move reverberated through a community of technical experts, academics and civil society groups who felt they had been unfairly excluded.

Fourteen technical organizations that help oversee how cyberspace runs wrote an open letter asking the UN Commission on Science and Technology for Development (UNCSTD) to reverse its decision. Meanwhile the Internet Society, an umbrella group that helps manage technical standards online, posted a petition to its website in protest.

“A significant fuss has been kicked up about it,” said Byron Holland, president and CEO of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, which manages the .ca domain.

Even Google waded into the fray. Vint Cerf, a vice-president at the online behemoth and one of the pioneers of the Internet, added his name to the petition, alongside 2,600 others. He also attacked the UN decision in a Dec. 17 blog post on Google’s website.

“We don’t believe governments should be allowed to grant themselves a monopoly on Internet governance,” Cerf wrote. “The current bottoms-up, open approach works — protecting users from vested interests and enabling rapid innovation. Let’s fight to keep it that way.”

Eleven days later the UNCSTD buckled under the pressure, according to the Internet Society, and agreed to include up to 20 non-governmental groups.

The episode underscored what has become an uneasy relationship between organizations that have helped gently steer the Internet since its infancy, and UN bodies that came to focus on Internet governance during the 2000s as cyberspace continued to unfurl across the brick-and-mortar world.

“The root of the debate here is a philosophical difference between how you approach the future governance of the Internet,” Holland told CTV.ca by phone. “Everything that goes forward from that will have a very different tone or direction.”

Technocrats like Holland have also been hinting at a specific threat: that the UN could become a forum where authoritarian governments who are riled by the free flow of information work to put the breaks on its superhighway.

Cyber peace treaty

A second UN body — the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), which manages the world’s radio frequencies and orbiting satellites — has been debating who should govern the Internet for years.

Its secretary general, Hamadoun Toure, would like to spearhead the creation of a “cyber peace treaty” to prevent the Internet from becoming another domain in which countries wage war against one another, as they do by air or at sea.

“Cyber threats can reach critical infrastructure of any country, the nerve centre of any nation,” Toure said by phone from Geneva. “A sophisticated attack can bring even the most powerful nation to its knees.”

There have been several recent examples of such events. During a dispute with Russia in 2007, Estonia was hit by widespread cyber attacks that knocked out bank, newspaper and government websites. Similar denial-of-service attacks struck Georgian media and government websites a year later as Russian tanks rolled into South Ossetia.

Then last July, the discovery of the Stuxnet worm led to speculation that a foreign government was trying use malicious software to cripple Iran’s nuclear program.

But there are a number of hurdles to creating an international agreement that would discourage such attacks. One is who would forge it.

“If we were to have a roundtable on this, you would see not only governments around it. Are we mentally prepared for that, to have around the same table private sector, civil society, consumer groups and governments?” Toure said. “That is what it will take for meeting the challenges of a cyber peace treaty.”

Risky business

Critics of Toure’s proposal worry that non-governmental groups would not be given an equal seat at the table, and point to the ITU’s plenipotentiary conference in October.

There, delegates discussed a Russian proposal to take over managing Internet domain names. Currently that task falls to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a private organization whose president and CEO was barred from attending the meeting.

Others say the ITU’s government-to-government approach is too slow and clunky to manage something as fast-moving as the Internet, or that it could pave the way for less open regimes to introduce new online controls.

“We have to be careful about what institutions take the lead,” said Ron Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab and the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies at the University of Toronto. “The Chinas, the Irans, the Saudi Arabias of the world want to impose a territorial vision of control over cyberspace — and if the ITU got its wishes, that’s essentially what would happen.”

In future, the debate over who should govern the Internet would do well to bear in mind its success stories like Google and Facebook, said Olaf Kolkman, director of NLnet Labs and chair of the Internet Architecture Board.

If the ease of accessing an unfettered online world helped those billion-dollar corporations evolve from tiny start-ups in garages or university dorm rooms, he suggested, then closing off the Web could lead to stagnation. It might also wall off opportunities for everyone who has yet to set foot in cyberspace.

“If we can preserve the spirit of openness moving forward,” Kolkman wrote in an email, “we will see much of the innovation coming from developing countries, and the billions of people who have yet to come online but who will change the shape of the Internet when they do.”

http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20101228/un-governments-future-of-the-internet-101230/

Internet users at a cafe in China.

CTV.ca

“All stuffs delivery instant after payment,” the cyber-crook has written in broken English. “I dont sell by 1 Card, if you need ask me I will give you some free.”

Below this offer, logos of HSBC, Lloyds and a few other major banks are aligned in a row. Far from acting on behalf of these financial institutions, however, the person who runs this website is selling stolen banking information in bulk to miscreants interested in defrauding their customers.

The prices for credit-card numbers range from $15 to $40 depending on the type. Buyers choose from five payment options, including Western Union. The stolen numbers are then transmitted by instant message or email.

Although they keep a low profile, similar websites abound online. Another offers TD Bank Visa Classic numbers for 10 euros apiece (just add them to your virtual shopping cart and check out). A third stocks “Canada Classic” numbers for $20 and “Canada Platinum/Gold” for $33.

Welcome to the shadowy world of cyber crime, where swindlers face such remote risks that they sell stolen information in plain view on the Web, yet their payoffs can be staggering.

In one recent case, the FBI alleges that more than 100 people in the United Kingdom, Ukraine and the United States stole US$70 million by using a strand of malicious software known as Zeus to uncover Internet users’ banking details.

No wonder business is brisk. By all accounts the industry is big and getting bigger, but exact measurements have proven elusive. Estimates of annual losses from online crime during 2009 ranged anywhere from $100 billion to $1 trillion.

“It dwarfs the size of the illegal drugs market but it’s impossible for anyone to accurately come up with numbers,” said Steve Santorelli, a former detective with Scotland Yard’s computer crime unit who now works with Team Cymru, a non-profit group that monitors Internet security.

“There’s advertising. There’s return on investment. There’s a lot of branding,” he told CTV.ca by phone from Burr Ridge, Illinois. “This is their living.”

Growing threats

Nearly two decades after the Internet’s popularity caught fire, two billion people around the world have moved online. But now there’s talk that cyberspace as we have come to know it — an inclusive, global network of networks — may be in danger from a range of threats including by online criminals and restive governments.

Legitimate Internet users jostle with ever more prolific, tech-savvy crooks. Other culprits launch political cyber attacks at the behest of governments eager to use criminal groups as proxies, according to many experts.

Adm. J. C. Harvey Jr. and Vice Adm. H. Denby Starling II cut a cake commemorating the establishment of the U.S. Navy Cyber Forces on Jan. 26, 2010. (U.S. Navy / Spec. 3rd Class Nina Hughes)

China, Russia, Israel, France and the United States have also developed “advanced” capabilities with which to wage war online, according to a 2009 report from Internet security firm McAfee.

“There’s a general climate of an arms race in cyberspace that I think is a major threat to an open Internet,” said Ron Deibert, co-director of the Citizen Lab and the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies at the University of Toronto.

“Part of that feeds into techniques of cyber crime and encourages privateering,” Deibert said. “You see many more instances of hacking and denial-of-service attacks directed at political targets” such as human rights and opposition groups.

Over the past several years, Deibert and a small clique of colleagues in Toronto, Ottawa and at Harvard have helped expose a global cyber-espionage ring, document Internet filtering around the world and dismantle a Russian criminal group that was making millions off a Facebook advertising scam.

He also advised Google after the company discovered last December that it had been targeted by China-based hackers. The attacks affected at least 20 large American companies, Google said, and allowed the perpetrators to access Gmail accounts belonging to Chinese human-rights activists.

Another major cyber attack came to light in July, when a Belarusian antivirus company discovered a new malicious computer program known as the Stuxnet worm.

It mainly infected computer systems in Iran and appeared to have been designed to target nuclear centrifuges. Those findings led to speculation that a foreign government created the virus, or hired a criminal group to do so, in an attempt to shut down the Islamic republic’s contentious nuclear program.

No silver bullet

Whether such events are driven by profit or by politics, the question of how to discourage them looms large.

“Any new technology can be misused,” said Igor Muttik, a senior architect with McAfee Labs in Slough, England. “It’s such an evolving and rapidly changing thing, governments and legislators are frequently behind.”

A number of fixes are needed, Muttik said, from educating Internet users about online threats, to creating software that will better protect them, to passing new legislation that can keep cyber criminals from stealing with impunity.

Complicating things, many of the governments who would institute those fixes are trying with greater success to rein in the Web.

Sixty countries experienced “some form of Web censorship” in 2009, twice as many as in 2008, according to Reporters Without Borders. The group singled out democratic countries such as South Korea and Australia as well as authoritarian ones like China.

“The World Wide Web is being progressively devoured by the implementation of national Intranets whose content is ‘approved’ by the authorities,” it warned in a report last March.

Similarly, Deibert believes the Internet is entering a dangerous new phase. After growing from a research tool in academic and military circles to a sort of global shopping mall, he’s convinced that a contest is now underway to determine who will control it.

“You’re finding elaborate doctrines now in how to fight and win wars in cyberspace, and proposals that would seek to re-engineer the Internet. These are coming from very powerful actors,” he said.

“People may look back at the 1990s and the 2000s as a brief window where we at least came close to this open, global commons of information and communication,” he added. “But right now we’re headed in a much different direction.”

http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20101228/internet-cybersecurity-hackers-101229/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Lt. Cmdr. Abuhena Saifulislam, a Muslim chaplain in the U.S. Navy, leads prayer in the Washington Navy Yard Chapel, Washington, D.C., on Apr. 19, 2010. (U.S. Navy / Spec. 2nd Class Jhi L. Scott)

CTV.ca

Two soldiers stationed at sprawling military bases in the United States say they have faced persistent harassment due to their Muslim faith, renewing questions about the role of religion in the world’s largest armed forces.

Spec. Zachari Klawonn, 21, is set to file a lawsuit with a group called the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, alleging that there is a “systemic issue” with Islamophobia at Fort Hood, Texas, where he is stationed, and throughout the U.S. army.

The second soldier, 20-year-old Pfc. Naser Abdo, is waiting to hear whether he will be granted conscientious objector status and be honourably discharged from the Army. If his application is denied, he says he will refuse deployment to Afghanistan and may face jail time.

Born in Texas to an American mother and a Palestinian father, Abdo adopted Islam at the age of 17. He enlisted two years later, in April 2009, after attending university in Dubai.

Abdo felt he would be “a great asset” to the Army because he could relate religiously and culturally to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, where more than 150,000 U.S. troops are deployed.

But during basic training at Fort Benning in Georgia, Abdo claims that he was persistently harassed by other soldiers.

He was asked to play the terrorist in training exercises. Soldiers accused him of wanting to kill a Jewish soldier on the base. Meanwhile they told his superiors that he was incapable of killing the enemy, in an effort to have him dismissed from the military, Abdo said.

“F–k you and your God that doesn’t exist. Your profit’s a pedophile. God can’t save you,” he recalls being told by one soldier following a disagreement about which way to trek through the woods on a land navigation drill.

Abdo reported the incident to his superiors and the soldier was disciplined, Abdo said. But the harassment didn’t stop.

“It was a constant thing,” he told CTV.ca.

After completing his training, Abdo was assigned to the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky — the third-largest Army base in the U.S. with some 30,000 troops stationed there and another 17,000 deployed in Afghanistan — where he says the harassment continued.

Facing deployment to volatile northeastern Afghanistan, he applied for conscientious objector status in June, saying that he had embraced a pacifist interpretation of Islam. He also hired a civilian lawyer and sent his Canadian wife to live with family in Ontario in case he faced retribution.

“I started wanting to get on a good footing with God,” Abdo said in a phone interview. “Just making sure that I was ready to die, so that if something happened I wouldn’t burn in hell.”

Earlier this month, he submitted the final paperwork for his application, after an investigating officer recommended that it be approved.

The officer found that Abdo’s initial doubts about the military could be traced back to three things: that he had been unable to fast during Ramadan, that he was prevented from praying five times a day, and that he was harassed by other soldiers for being a Muslim.

A spokesperson at Fort Campbell, where Abdo is stationed, could not confirm details about his case due to federal privacy laws but said the base has received no other complaints of religious discrimination “in recent years.”

“The military doesn’t stand you up in a line and make you state your religious beliefs publicly,” Kelly Dewitt told CTV.ca, adding that a service member’s faith “typically isn’t an issue unless you make it an issue, sort of like in the civilian workplace.”

Similar account

But more than 1,200 kilometres southwest of Fort Campbell, Klawonn described enduring similar mistreatment at Fort Hood.

The largest military installation in the world with some 50,000 service members, Fort Hood was the site of a shooting rampage last November in which 13 people were killed and 30 others were wounded, allegedly by a Muslim soldier named Maj. Nidal Hasan.

Klawonn, whose mother is Moroccan, has experienced “ongoing and constant discrimination from an array of soldiers” at the base, he said by phone.

Like Abdo, he said he was prevented from praying and fasting. He had his Koran torn up. Soldiers hurled bottles at him. In the middle of the night someone banged on the door of his barracks and left a note behind that said, in big black letters, “F–k you raghead burn in hell.”

He reported the incidents to his commanding officers but he said the harassment persisted, and he was relocated to living quarters off-base for his own protection.

“It’s really left me at a crossroads between my faith, my country and my obligation to the United States army,” he said.

In response, Klawonn and the MRFF are set to file a lawsuit in federal court in the coming weeks that will outline complaints they would like addressed.

The goal is to have the U.S. military “use their equal opportunity policy,” Klawonn said, which he believes they are ignoring. Otherwise, he may follow in Abdo’s footsteps and apply to be honourably discharged from the military as a conscientious objector.

Legal campaign

The MRFF has launched several lawsuits in recent years, charging that lines between the secular and the religious are becoming blurred in the American armed forces.

A non-profit group, the MRFF bills itself as “the constitutional conscience of the United States military.” According to its website, more than 18,000 active service members have complained to the organization about what it calls “spiritual rape.”

Mikey Weinstein, the MRFF’s president, is a lawyer who has worked as a judge advocate in the U.S. military and as assistant counsel to President Ronald Reagan. Weinstein decided to establish the organization in 2004 after his son, who was an Air Force Academy cadet at the time, said he was facing harassment because he was Jewish.

In Klawonn’s case, the foundation alleges that “a pernicious pattern and practice of unconstitutional abuse” exists at Fort Hood and in the U.S. army more widely, Weinstein said in a phone interview.

The pending lawsuit follows a number of recent controversies concerning the role of religion in the U.S. military.

In late October, the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs released the results of a survey that said 41 per cent of non-Christian cadets had experienced unwanted evangelizing in the past year.

An official military video that was screened to U.S. troops in 2009, and featured NFL Hall of Fame quarterback Terry Bradshaw, suggested that faith in God would help soldiers afflicted by depression to cope, and avoid suicide.

And last January, the MRFF complained that U.S. troops at home and in Iraq were using so called “Jesus rifles” equipped with sights inscribed with coded references to the New Testament.

But at Fort Hood, Klawonn said he is optimistic his situation will improve.

Although authorities at the base declined to comment on his case, Klawonn said they began informing him of steps being taken to address his concerns after the MRFF announced in May that it would be filing the lawsuit.

Cultural and anti-terrorism training at the base — which had previously conflated Islam with terrorism, according to Klawonn — was overhauled, and an imam was hired to lead Muslim prayers.

“This is even before the lawsuit has been filed,” Klawonn said. “My impression is that things are going to start to change around here.”

“All it takes is a couple of people to stand up and say: ‘You know what? This isn’t right.’”

http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/World/20101120/conscientious-objectors-war-101120/

An image from video of the February 2003 CSIS interrogation of Omar Khadr, six months after he was captured by U.S. troops in Afghanistan at age 15.

CTV.ca

When a pair of federal intelligence agents visited Guantanamo Bay seven years ago, they met Omar Khadr in a small neon-lit interrogation room and said, “I guess we’re the first Canadians you’ve seen in a while.”

“Canadians? Yeah, finally!” replied Khadr, who had been captured and detained by U.S. troops six months earlier, at the age of 15.

One of the interrogators then offered the teenager a Subway sandwich and a Coke, and asked Khadr to describe his life beginning with his earliest memory.

So begins “You Don’t Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantanamo,” a documentary film built around seven hours of grainy surveillance footage depicting Khadr’s February 2003 interrogation by a Canadian Security Intelligence Service agent and another federal intelligence official.

The Supreme Court ordered the video released to Khadr’s lawyers in 2008, but the public has only seen about 10 minutes of the footage until now.

In the full video, the interrogations begin cordially but take an unfriendly turn after Khadr apparently realizes the Canadians have come to gather information rather than help repatriate him. At one point Khadr breaks down in sobs, saying “nobody cares about me.”

The next day, interrogators continue pressing their subject about everything from his relationship with his father, to what he knows about Osama bin Laden, to how he wound up in an Afghan compound on July 27, 2002, as Taliban-linked militants fought to the death against American troops.

“I didn’t do anything,” Khadr says of the battle, in which he was badly injured. “I was in the house when the fighting started, then I didn’t have any choice.”

The U.S. government has accused Khadr of killing an American medic named Sgt. Christopher Speer by throwing a grenade in that firefight, and of supporting terrorism.

Khadr’s lawyers argue that their client’s father, a suspected al Qaeda financier who had ties to bin Laden, indoctrinated his son to take up violent jihad.

‘Bigger picture’

The 99-minute documentary paints a sympathetic portrait of Khadr as a child soldier who has lived in a legal black hole, and has allegedly endured torture by U.S. authorities since his capture in the Afghan mountains eight years ago.

Khadr, now 24, remains the youngest inmate at Guantanamo Bay and the last Western citizen imprisoned there. He is also the first to face trial by U.S. military tribunal since President Barack Obama was elected — and the first person in more than half a century to face war crimes charges for alleged acts committed as a juvenile.

As such, his saga has received ample media attention. But Canadian filmmakers Luc Cote and Patricio Henriquez wanted to pull together different aspects of Khadr’s case in the hopes of generating awareness about what they call a miscarriage of justice.

“Everybody knows a little bit of information here and there,” Cote said in a phone interview. “But when you look at it all together and you have the bigger picture, I think you understand a little bit better what’s going on.”

“We’re just trying to say, ‘Open your mind, open your heart to another point of view and perhaps you’ll learn something here.’”

To do that the film presents evidence, including a photograph of Khadr immediately after the 2002 firefight, which suggests he may have been too badly injured to lob the grenade that killed Speer.

It also scrutinizes international law regarding the case, noting that Canada has ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, under whose terms Khadr would be designated a child soldier because of his age when the gunfight occurred.

Several unexpected characters plead for Khadr’s repatriation to Canada in the film. They include a retired psychiatrist with the U.S. military who assessed Khadr at Guantanamo, and a former American interrogator named Damien Corsetti who was stationed at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan while Khadr was held there.

Former detainees also make appearances, such as Moazzam Begg, who met Khadr while he was imprisoned at Bagram.

“He’s spent his entire adolescence in Guantanamo and clearly knows nothing other than that,” Begg, who now works for a human rights group in Britain, said by phone. “That’s a big stain on the United States of America, but an even bigger one on Canada.”

Political reaction

The film premiered in Montreal earlier this month, and got a strong reaction Wednesday on Parliament Hill when it was screened for MPs from the Bloc Quebecois, the Liberal party and the NDP.

Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe said the federal government “should be ashamed” for not requesting Khadr’s repatriation, while New Democrat MP Wayne Marsten called Ottawa’s treatment of Khadr “appalling.”

“This is one of the most shameful events that we’ve had in this country,” Marsten said later in an interview with CTV.ca. “The government should have been shouting from the rooftops to end this.”

The film will premiere in Toronto this week and will debut internationally next month at the world’s largest documentary film festival in Amsterdam. Amnesty International also hopes to hold screenings as far away as Hong Kong.

But the documentary’s most important audience may take in the film at Guantanamo.

According to reports, Khadr could accept a plea deal with the Pentagon as early as Monday, which would see him serve a year in a U.S. prison and seven more in Canada.

Regardless of whether a deal is struck, his lawyers say they intend to play “You Don’t Like the Truth” at trial or during his sentencing.

They have also shown Khadr the film twice. He was “initially sad at revisiting the painful experience,” Dennis Edney, one of his Canadian lawyers, wrote in an email.

Edney played the film for Khadr a second time this week and wrote that, “he was pleased to hear that people cared for him.”

http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20101023/omar-khadr-documentary-101024/

U.S. President Barack Obama with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari during a meeting at the White House on May 6, 2009. (Pete Souza)

CTV.ca

The imminent reopening of a crucial border crossing in the Khyber Pass has laid bare one of the vulnerabilities NATO forces are grappling with in prosecuting the war in Afghanistan — the uneasy, love-hate relationship between Pakistan and the United States.

After nearly two weeks, the Foreign Ministry in Islamabad issued a statement Saturday stating that it will soon reopen the Torkham border post, which lies on a busy supply route to Kabul.

The Pakistani government shuttered the border crossing on Sept. 30, after three of its soldiers were mistakenly killed in an attack by a U.S. helicopter.

The American ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, apologized for the incident. But the closure has sparked fresh tensions between Washington and Islamabad, partly due to the indispensable role Pakistan plays in supplying the 142,000 coalition troops stationed in Afghanistan, most of whom are American.

The bulk of NATO’s fuel and other non-lethal material crosses Pakistan overland from the port of Karachi. Three-quarters of those goods enter Afghanistan via the Khyber Pass, making the Torkham border crossing logistically vital.

“Afghanistan is a very hard place to fight a war because of its physical geographic location,” said Sunil Ram, a security expert and professor of land warfare at American Military University. “This is one of the strategic bottlenecks.”

Taliban attacks

Aggravating the situation, groups of armed men have attacked tankers laden with NATO fuel on Pakistani soil. The militants are believed to have torched more than 100 tankers in a string of assaults since Oct. 1.

They have targeted fuel trucks that were backed up waiting to cross the Khyber Pass, as well as those making their way to Pakistan’s second border crossing to Afghanistan, near the city of Quetta farther south.

The Pakistani Taliban has claimed responsibility for at least two of the assaults. A spokesperson for the group, Azam Tariq, told CNN the fuel trucks were “logistic support for the NATO forces who killed our innocent sisters and brothers in Afghanistan.”

However, Ram said private contractors, who are tasked with transporting the fuel, may have spurred the attacks by failing to keep up on payments to the Taliban after the Torkham border post closed.

“The bottom line is, it’s about the payoffs,” he said, citing sources in military intelligence on both sides of the border. “In the background, the Taliban are saying, ‘Let’s get our payoffs back in place and we’ll stop blowing your stuff up.’”

The issue of private contractors paying militants has been well documented in Afghanistan. In the latest reported instance, private security forces linked to the Taliban were hired to guard a U.S. base, according to an investigation by the U.S. Senate.

Kamran Bokhari, South Asia director with the global intelligence firm STRATFOR, described the fuel tankers as “a target of opportunity.”

“The supply line is just so long, and it runs through several areas where militants are active, that it’s not hard for them to hit these trucks,” he said. “All you need is a bunch of guys and the ability to torch stuff.”

Uneasy allies

The wayward helicopter attack, the subsequent border-crossing closure and fuel tanker attacks have strained already troubled relations between Islamabad and Washington.

Pakistan’s high commissioner to Britain, Wajid Shamsul Hasan, said Friday that U.S. authorities were acting on “internal political dynamics” relating to the upcoming midterm elections when they issued a travel alert about militants in Pakistan planning to attack European cities.

On Thursday, the Foreign Ministry in Islamabad criticized the U.S. for what it believes is an increase in the frequency of drone attacks. The Pakistani government has also forbidden cross-border raids by foreign forces, seeing them as violations of the country’s sovereignty.

For its part, Washington has accused Islamabad of failing to take action against elements of the Taliban who are keen to fight in Afghanistan but are not hostile to the Pakistani state.

Earlier in the week, a White House report to the Congress warned that Pakistan’s military had made a “political choice” to “avoid military engagements that would put it in direct conflict with Afghan Taliban or al Qaeda forces in North Waziristan,” according to an unclassified version of the report obtained by Agence France-Presse.

Some officials in Washington suspect the recent fuel tanker attacks were encouraged by elements within Pakistan’s intelligence service “to put pressure on the United States not to make incursions into Pakistan,” Bokhari said.

He called the current state of U.S.-Pakistan relations “the most tense period between the two sides since this war began.”

“But that doesn’t mean there will be a breach,” he added. “It’s kind of like a love-hate relationship.”

Pakistan depends on the $2 billion in aid money that flows into its economy from Washington every year. The U.S., in addition to relying on ground supply routes in Pakistan to fuel the NATO war effort, has become increasingly focused on crushing Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

At the heart of the problem, the two governments have failed to agree on “which Taliban groups can be accommodated and which have to be militarily dealt with,” Bokhari said.

“That’s the clash,” he added. “They need to find a middle path, but so far that’s not happening.”