by Robert Whitcomb | Aug 5, 2016 | Initiative
There is no such thing as a safe place in the cyberworld:
Cyber researchers have told Reuters that Iranian hackers have broken into more than a dozen accounts on the Telegram instant messaging service and identified the phone numbers of 15 million Iranian users, the largest known breach — so far — of the encrypted communications system.
Reuters reported that the attacks “jeopardized the communications of activists, journalists and other people in sensitive positions in Iran, where Telegram is used by some 20 million people, said the independent cyber researcher Collin Anderson and the Amnesty International technologist Claudio Guarnieri, who have been studying Iranian hacking groups for three years.”
“Telegram promotes itself as an ultra-secure instant messaging system because all data is encrypted from start to finish, known in the industry as end-to-end encryption. A number of other messaging services, including Facebook’s WhatsApp, say they have similar capabilities.”
But of course none of them are safe.
To read The Guardian’s story on this, please hit this link.
by Robert Whitcomb | Aug 4, 2016 | News
India seems about to launch the biggest economic reform since a huge deregulation program was enacted in 1991.
The upper house of India’s Parliament has passed a bill to streamline and unify taxes on 15 goods and services taxes across the country, which has long had an extremely balkanized tax and regulatory system.
The Washington Post reported:
“Analysts expect the federal goods and services tax rate to be set around 18 percent. That is lower than the current tax rate on many items, such as automobiles and most retail goods. With a lower tax rate, and with hopes for greater transport efficiency, business are expected to lower prices, spurring greater demand. Arun Jaitley, India’s finance minister, has said he hopes that all this will spur GDP growth by an extra 2 percent and create millions of jobs — once it goes into effect, that is”
To read the story on this news, please hit this link.
by Robert Whitcomb | Aug 4, 2016 | News
China is trying to create what it calls an anti-terrorism alliance with Pakistan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, Chinese state media said on Aug. 4. China has faced Islamic terrorism in some of its western region.
China envisions a “four-country mechanism” for intelligence-sharing and training.
To read The Reuters on this, please hit this link.
by Robert Whitcomb | Aug 4, 2016 | News
Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai says that foreign forces should either leave Afghanistan to deal with its civil war, or focus on the Taliban’s foreign backers in Pakistan. And he says that bombing Taliban positions just makes things worse.
He told The Guardian:
Karzai emphasized to The Guardian that he is not “anti-Western”, and that he is “very, very sorry” for Western military lives lost in Afghanistan. But, “he warned that if foreign forces don’t change approach, those soldiers may have died for nothing.”
‘“NATO has been here for 14 years,’ he said, adding that foreign forces are fighting for the same districts as they were when they had 150,000 troops. ‘Are we better off? Do we have more security? No.
“’It means something is wrong. The way things are done, it has been in vain for us.”’
To read The Guardian’s story, please hit this link.
by Robert Whitcomb | Aug 4, 2016 | News
By LLEWELLYN KING
Can Vietnam talk some sense into North Korea, and in so doing make itself the go-to country in Asia for diplomatic fixes? There are those in Hanoi, and quite a few scattered across the foreign policy establishment, who think so.
Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang believes so, and would like to be the intermediary between the United States and North Korea.
Back-channel talks — if they can be called that — have begun. Influential American academics have met with leaders in Vietnam and President Quang has been involved. An idea, however inchoate, is in the air in Hanoi – and the government would very much like to see the concept grow.
For Hanoi, being useful to both Washington and Pyongyang, would help Vietnam gain international stature, as well as accelerate its importance in the region.
Globally, Asian scholars and diplomats are hoping to see strong initiatives, particularly from the United States, to affect the seeming intractability of a number of issues in Southeast Asia, which include North Korea’s adventurism and China’s continued expansion in the South China Sea. An additional irritant is China’s damming of the Mekong River, starving Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia of water.
No one involved believes that a communications channel will cause Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, to abandon his war games with rocket and missile tests. But they do believe that when and if there is a need to have some kind of opening to North Korea, and to speak to its obtuse leadership, Vietnam is uniquely well-placed facilitate a conversation.
Vietnam, like North Korea, has fought the United States. It also knows what it is like to be dependent on China for its survival, as North Korea is and as North Vietnam was. It also knows what it is like when that kind of lifeline of dependence goes wrong. Vietnam fought a war with China in 1979, with intermittent clashes until 1990.
Hanoi’s hopes to become a bigger player in the Asia diplomatic firmament extend beyond helping the United States with Pyongyang. It would like to be a bigger player in general in Asian diplomacy and use its unique history with the United States and with China to make it a valuable go-between with other countries including Myanmar and even Iran.
“Vietnam feels it has come of age among nations and wants to play a role in offering its good offices to the United States and other world powers,” says a Vietnamese academic, who lives in the United States and is involved in these early diplomatic moves. He says Vietnam, after the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the abrogation of the peace treaty in 1975, and the United States have come a long way and enjoy very good relations. Polls show that the United States is favorably regarded by 78 percent of the Vietnamese population of nearly 100 million. President Obama visited a thrilled Vietnam in May. Eight percent of the foreign students studying in the United States are from Vietnam.
But all is not completely rosy. The foreign-policy establishment in Washington, as well as a plethora of civil rights groups, worries about human rights in Vietnam, its authoritarian ways and the treatment of dissidents.
Particularly vexing to those who would like to see Vietnam become a kind of Asian Switzerland, friendly to all and skilled at bringing disputatious parties together is the treatment of journalists, bloggers and others who are imprisoned when they run afoul of the Vietnamese leadership’s sensitivities. Press freedom is high on the list of reforms the West in general would like to see ifVietnam is to realize the role which it seeks.
For its part, Vietnam would like to see the United States take a stronger stand against China’s virtual annexation of the South China Sea and to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. Here, there are real fears that the hostile political climate in the United States will do damage to its relations with Southeast Asia at a critical time.
Still, Vietnam wants ever-closer relations the United States and a bigger diplomatic role in Asia. The feelers are out.
Llewellyn King, a member of The Boston Global Forum’s editorial board, is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His e-mail is[email protected].
