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Thursday, August 26, 2010

U.S. Military Computer Attack Confirmed

On Wednesday August 25, 2010, 5:20 pm EDT

WASHINGTON — A top Pentagon official has confirmed a previously classified incident that he describes as "the most significant breach of U.S. military computers ever," a 2008 episode in which a foreign intelligence agent used a flash drive to infect computers, including those used by the Central Command in overseeing combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Plugging the cigarette-lighter-sized flash drive into an American military laptop at a base in the Middle East amounted to "a digital beachhead, from which data could be transferred to servers under foreign control," according to William J. Lynn 3d, deputy secretary of defense, writing in the latest issue of the journal Foreign Affairs.

"It was a network administrator's worst fear: a rogue program operating silently, poised to deliver operational plans into the hands of an unknown adversary," Mr. Lynn wrote.

The incident was first reported in November 2008 by the Danger Room blog of Wired magazine, and then in greater detail by The Los Angeles Times, which said that the matter was sufficiently grave that President George W. Bush was briefed on it. The newspaper mentioned suspicions of Russian involvement.

But Mr. Lynn's article was the first official confirmation. He also put a name — Operation Buckshot Yankee — to the Pentagon operation to counter the attack, and said that the episode "marked a turning point in U.S. cyber-defense strategy." In an early step, the Defense Department banned the use of portable flash drives with its computers, though it later modified the ban.

Mr. Lynn described the extraordinary difficulty of protecting military digital communications over a web of 15,000 networks and 7 million computing devices in dozens of countries against farflung adversaries who, with modest means and a reasonable degree of ingenuity, can inflict outsized damage. Traditional notions of deterrence do not apply.

"A dozen determined computer programmers can, if they find a vulnerability to exploit, threaten the United States's global logistics network, steal its operational plans, blind its intelligence capabilities or hinder its ability to deliver weapons on target," he wrote.

Security officials also face the problem of counterfeit hardware that may have remotely operated "kill switches" or "back doors" built in to allow manipulation from afar, as well as the problem of software with rogue code meant to cause sudden malfunctions.

Against the array of threats, Mr. Lynn said, the National Security Agency had pioneered systems — "part sensor, part sentry, part sharpshooter" — that are meant to automatically counter intrusions in real time.

His article appeared intended partly to raise awareness of the threat to United States cybersecurity — "the frequency and sophistication of intrusions into U.S. military networks have increased exponentially," he wrote — and partly to make the case for a larger Pentagon role in cyberdefense.

Various efforts at cyberdefense by the military have been drawn under a single organization, the U.S. Cyber Command, which began operations in late May at Fort Meade, Maryland, under a four-star general, Keith B. Alexander.

But under proposed legislation, the Department of Homeland Security would take the leading role in the defense of civilian systems.

Though the Cyber Command has greater capabilities, the military operates within the United States only if ordered to do so by the president.

Another concern is whether the Pentagon, or government in general, has the nimbleness for such work. Mr. Lynn acknowledged that "it takes the Pentagon 81 months to make a new computer system operational after it is first funded." By contrast, he noted, "the iPhone was developed in 24 months."

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Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Flooded Pakistan’s ‘Royal’ Minister In New York

 
 

·       'Royal' FM's Fundraiser Costs National Kitty Heavily

·       US$20,000 at NYC hotel to raise funds for flood victims!

·       Options ignored: cheaper hotels, the residences of the Pakistani Consulate

·       Why Amb. Haqqani failed to convince his boss this time to donate the expense to flood victims

·       Upscale hotel because the minister is a 'blue blooded Pakistani politician' or because he's a foreign minister?

 
 

By: Kaswar Klasra | Published: August 25, 2010

The Nation


 

ISLAMABAD – While thousands perished and millions were forced to flee from the floods that swept Pakistan this month, Pakistan's Foreign Minister, who came to New York City with a begging bowl in hand for foreign aid, was spending thousands of dollars per night at cushy five-star hotels in the US.


'Beggars cannot be choosers' evidently is an adage never heard by our honorable leaders. Be it a visit to the flood victims' camps or a trip abroad to collect aid for the badly devastated country of ours by the unprecedented flash floods. Their style and status never appears to change.


To the shock and surprise of the entire nation, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, the foreign minister of this unfortunate country spent as many as $20,000 from the national kitty during his stay in a luxury hotel in New York City.

 
 

[This hotel is normally the top choice for those interested in shopping and sightseeing. Here's how one reviewer describes the hotel: "For those travelers who prefer luxurious accommodations in the heart of one of the most exciting cities in the world, the Inter-Continental The Barclay is ideal. The Barclay is just minutes from many of the attractions that make New York City such a vibrant and unique place to visit. Located in midtown Manhattan's East Side, the hotel boasts such famous and beloved neighbors as the exclusive shops of Fifth Avenue, Rockefeller Center, Broadway theaters and New York City's bustling business district."]


The total expenditure of Qureshi's visit including the spending on his six-member entourage may be much more.


Interestingly, when UK Prime Minister David Cameron came to NYC to attend a meeting (Qureshi went there to attend the same meeting) recently, he stayed at the British consulate residence. Qureshi proved to be more Royal than the Royal servants of her Majesty!


According to sources, Shah Mehmood Qureshi and his delegation of six assistants who were in NYC recently to beg the world for aid, stayed at Barclay Continental Hotel, one of the most expensive hotels of the city, which cost the national kitty thousands of dollars. It is pertinent to mention here that it is the same hotel where President Asif Zardari has been staying as president whenever he is in New York City.


In comparison, Pakistan Air Force  Chief Qamar Suleman forced Ambassador Hussain Haqqani to cancel a lavish dinner in his honor during his recent visit there. Ironically, following the rejection by the Air Chief, Haqqani is said to have spun the rebuff and released a story to the official APP news agency that he himself had cancelled the dinner and donated the expense to flood victims.

 
 

Interestingly, the Foreign Minister's hotel reservation was also managed by the same ambassador, who avoided hurting his own personal relationship with his boss (Foreign Minister) by suggesting the minister save money and stay at the ambassador's residence, or at least at a less expensive hotel.


When contacted, Spokesperson of Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that the figures regarding expenditure incurred on Qureshi's stay at the hotel were far less than those mentioned by this correspondent ($20,000).


Such stories are not new for the Pakistanis. The National Assembly was told on April 24, 2008 that President General Pervez Musharraf and his wife had spent Rs1.5 billion from the national kitty on their foreign trips during his five-year tenure.


It was Foreign Minister Qureshi who disclosed that the former president had taken at least 1,325 visitors along with him in 37 trips since February 2003-2008. Musharraf's visit to the USA to attend the book launching ceremony of his autobiography "In the Line of Fire" turned out the most expensive trip, as it cost Rs227 million.

 
 

Likewise, President Asif Zardari and his associates were busy in spending huge money from the national kitty on their stay in luxury hotels abroad, while thousands of people here in Pakistan were facing shortage of food and safe drinking water.

 
 

This report was published by TheNation under title, 'Royal' FM's fundraiser costs the national kitty heavily.

 
 

2007-2010. All rights reserved. 


Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

 
 

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Tuesday, August 24, 2010

US clutches at flood relief opportunities

By M K Bhadrakumar

The humanitarian situation resulting from the unprecedented floods in Pakistan has been turned into a playground of regional geopolitics. The responsibility for this primarily lies with the United States, which fashioned its response to the crisis in a needlessly competitive spirit.

The needs of Pakistan are of stupendous proportions. Even cold statistics bring this out. One fifth of the landmass of Pakistan is inundated and the lives of 20 million people have been affected. Nothing further needs to be said about the enormity of the human sorrow.

The fact that the United Nations launched an initial appeal for US$460 million for the immediate relief underscores the magnitude of the crisis – although, according to the Pakistani foreign minister, that amount "will only cater to about 6 to 8 million people for 90 days only".

Yet, Pakistan's crisis presents itself as a theater of public diplomacy for the United States to burnish its image among Pakistani people, of whom 59% regarded America as an enemy country, according to a July 29 Pew Global Attitudes Project poll.

A flood of opportunities 
The window of opportunity opens in other directions, too. The areas of Pakistan where the extremists and terrorists have been most active also happen to be the most affected. The expectation in Washington seems to be that US marines will be working in the field closely with the Pakistani military, and that a sort of rank-and-file camaraderie is expected to develop that could have useful fallouts for the war in Afghanistan.

Indeed, the marines will likely come across the relief workers of the Islamist charity organizations affiliated to rabidly "anti-American" groups, especially the banned Lashkar-e-Taiba (which figures in the US' list of terrorist groups) and the political party Jamaat-e-Islami, which takes pride – publicly at least – in berating the US regional policies. The US operatives could make useful contacts with the Islamist elements involved in relief work and these could be followed up.

Again, the US is a global power and, unsurprisingly, it has begun linking the floods in Pakistan with the problem of climate change, one of the lead items on the foreign policy agenda of the BarackObama administration.

Richard Holbrooke, the US special representative for AfPak, openly wondered: "I know we don't have a definitive answer, but to what extent is there some connection between the [Pakistani] floods, the Russia fires, global warming, the Himalayan [glacier] runoff, what is the preliminary best sense of that?"

Another senior US official, Rajiv Shah, Administrator of the US Agency for International Development added: "I think we all can recognize … that we should expect to have more large-scale, erratic weather events … that trend is leading to a greater number of large-scale hurricanes, a greater number of floods, hotter and dryer growing conditions … and it's making it very hard for the least resilient, the most lower income communities in the world to survive."

How the US links these "ink-spots" in climate change – Pakistan's floods, Russia's fires and the glacier melt up north of Kashmir in the contested region of Siachen – on the geopolitical plane and transfers the impulses to its regional and global diplomacy in the coming period will bear watching.

Then, there are the profound implications of the Pakistani floods from the strategic and political angles, which are uniquely important to the US's war effort in Afghanistan at the present time. First, there is the lurking possibility that the Taliban might take advantage of the crisis in Pakistan.

The noted Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid wrote recently in the British Daily Telegraph: "Large parts of the country that are now cut off will be taken over by the Pakistani Taliban and affiliated groups, and governance will collapse." The scary scenario may seem far-fetched – and somewhat propagandistic – but the possibility remains that tepid response by the Pakistani government to the massive reconstruction task would alienatepublic opinion.

War spirit dampened 
However, the bigger danger lies elsewhere: to what extent would the crisis be seized by the Pakistani military to fob off any continuing US pressure to crack down on the so-called Haqqani network affiliated with al-Qaeda which is ensconced in the North Waziristan?

The Pakistani military can claim that its hands are full with the priority tasks of relief and reconstruction work and that leaves hardly any surplus capacity for attending to unfinished business on the Afghan-Pakistan border region.

Clearly, the floods may have helped washed away to some extent from the public perceptions the stigma of the recent WikiLeaks disclosures. But the well-established ground reality, which Washington quietly acknowledges, cannot be wished away – the Pakistani security establishment and the military continue to keep an unholy alliance with the Haqqani network.

All in all, therefore, the Obama administration, which is gearing up for the latest troop "surge" aimed at an intensification of counter-insurgency operations inside Afghanistan, need not expect a simultaneous thrust by the Pakistani military from its side of the border. This disconnect imparts urgency to the search for a political settlement with the Taliban, which will also be precisely what the Pakistani military is seeking.

Significantly, John Kerry, the chairman of the US senate foreign relations committee and who visited Kabul and Islamabad last week, has been quoted as saying on his return to Washingtonthat there is a "very active" effort under way to reach a negotiated political settlement with the Taliban. Kerry told National Public Radio: "I can report without being specific that there are efforts under way. They are serious and I completely agree with that fundamental premise – and so does General [David] Petraeus and so does President Obama – there is no military solution. And there are very active efforts now to seek an appropriate kind of political settlement."

The Obama administration's best hope is that Pakistan will reciprocate the robust US support – financially, materially and politically – by helping out on the Afghan front. Quite obviously, US officials are bending over backward to create goodwill with Pakistan.

All this is linked to a much bigger question as well: to what extent will the 2010 floods turn out to be a game changer for Pakistan'spolitical economy? Will the civilian leadership grab the opportunity to seize the political high ground in its shadow-boxing with the military?

The signs available so far are that, on the contrary, the Pakistani civilian leadership stands tarnished by its handling of the crisis. This means the military retains the upper hand vis-a-vis the embattled civilian government in the calculus of power for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, aid politics is likely to become a divisive issue among the civilian politicians as the blame game begins, and the smaller provinces are bound to harbor grievances of discrimination in aid allocation by the Punjabi-dominated establishment. Political corruption will most certainly take its toll too.

Finally, geopolitics has already descended on the Pakistani flood situation. In an extraordinary outburst to the media, Holbrooke mocked China for being allegedly tight-fisted in helping Pakistan. "I think the Chinese should step up to the plate. They always say that Pakistan is their closest ally, and vice versa." He was rubbing in that China's assistance to Pakistan so far amounts to only 5% of the $150 million the US has pledged.

Holbrooke remarked that the US suffers from "famously low popularity" in Pakistan. "And although other countries' popularity is greater, including China's, the US is first and foremost" in aid to Pakistan. The Faustian tone patently laid claim to the Pakistani soul. Beijing refrained from joining issue.

Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.

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Wednesday, August 18, 2010

I dislike fake 'Dislike Button' scams on Facebook

There are a lot of things to dislike on Facebook: status updates about weird online games and those that parrot the already-discredited lies of politicians, to name two. So the ability to vote against this content by clicking a "Dislike" button must be mighty appealing -- or so you'd have to conclude from the popularity of the latest "Dislike" button scam.

The whole thing came and went yesterday. My first tip-off came when a friend who usually writes crisp, clear sentences posted an update that morning bragging that she could now "dislike all of your dumb posts lol!!"

Not long after, I came across a post on the site of security-software vendor Sophos. That explained that I had seen yet another scam preying on the distracted and the unwary.

Falling for any of these scams (which promise some lurid or eye-popping or exclusive content) typically trick you into giving a rogue Facebook application permission to access your profile, posting spam messages from your account and asking you to complete an online survey.

The only interesting twist about this con job -- which, according to the Sophos post, aimed to make money by getting users to fill out those surveys -- was its use of a legitimate Mozilla Firefox browser add-on as bait.

As you can see from the screenshots in that blog post, the pitches for this had all the other trademarks of scams: EXCESSIVE capitalization and too many exclamation points!!!

And yet people fell for it anyway. Just as they have for older Facebook scams designed to spread virally on the site -- like, say, the "get your free iPad" event another friend invited me to just this morning.

(You-must-have-memorized-these-by-now disclaimers: Post Co. Chairman and chief executive Donald E. Graham sits on Facebook's board of directors, while the newspaper and an increasing number of Post staffers, myself included, use Facebook for marketing purposes.)

Unfortunately, the official Facebook Security page didn't note the fake-Dislike-button issue until late yesterday afternoon. It did so by pointing to a CNN story published some six hours earlier.

That CNN piece explained that to clean up the mess, you should click the "Account" link at the top-right corner, select "Application Settings" and click the "X" next to the phony "Dislike" application -- although Facebook may have removed it for you already.

I'd suggest that the Palo Alto, Calif., company appease the masses by adding a legitimate "Dislike" button, but you know that in a month we'd see scams offering people the ability to add "Resent," "Ignore" and "Misunderstand" buttons to comments. Plus, Facebook probably has business reasons to withhold such an option.

So if you want to express your disregard for somebody else's contribution to the Facebook conversation, you'll have to employ a little prose instead of just clicking a button. I hope there aren't too many of you who dislike that thought.

By Rob Pegoraro  |  August 17, 2010; 8:09 AM ET

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Check Indian, Afghan Dams For Floods In Pakistan



· Indian company controls dam on Kabul River, tens of dams control flow of Kashmir water into Sindh, Punjab, Balochistan

· Flood gates of Afghan Sarobi Dam, Indian Baglihar Dam were opened to drown Pakistani plains

· Two US allies, the puppet regime in Kabul and the 'strategic ally' in New Delhi, declare water war on Pakistan

· The tragedy one again raises question marks on the US double game against Pakistan in the region

· Melting glaciers have nothing to do with this tragedy; it also doesn't explain why Kabul river surged


It's not as if the clouds dodged borders and focused on Pakistan only. Pakistan's water flows from Indian-occupied Kashmir and from US-occupied Afghanistan. A natural deluge should have shown some spillover effect into Indian and Afghan regions adjoining Pakistan. It is interesting that a second and a third wave of floods is expected in Pakistan when there's no rain to justify it. Where is the water coming from? Here's a perspective by Mr. Zaid Hamid, a security analyst at BrassTacks, and Ms. Gulpari Mehsud, a researcher at PakNationalists.com.


By ZAID HAMID & GULPARI MEHSUD

Tuesday, 17 August 2010.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—There is a very sinister aspect to the floods in Pakistan that no one is discussing in the media. While there were rains and flooding in some rivers of the country, the size, scale and the gush of water suddenly pumped into these rivers defies logic. This is especially true considering that rains have slowed down since the breakout of the floods on 29 July.

It is two weeks since the rains stopped but water continues to rise in the rivers Indus and Chenab. There was no flooding in India or in Afghanistan. Never before have rivers in all the provinces of Pakistan flooded at the same time without a similar act affecting the upstream, the source. While some parts of the country, like some areas of Khyber Pakhtun Khwa saw flooding in 1929, the simultaneous floods covering all of Pakistan and in all of the rivers flowing in from Afghanistan and Indian-occupied Kashmir is something truly unprecedented.

This speed and quantity of the gushing water and the short span of time in which it picked momentum preclude the possibility that water from melting glaciers are solely responsible for the floods.

There is no evidence that suggests that glaciers decided to melt at a faster speed just in time for the heavy monsoon rains.

There is every likelihood that what we are seeing today is that the Indians and the US-backed regime in Kabul are using water as a weapon for the first time to deluge Pakistan. There is no doubt about it.

From an initial look at the data, it seems that a natural spill of heavy rain was exploited by releasing water reservoirs in Indian-occupied Kashmir and on river Kabul. Let's remember that the Met Office in Pakistan had already forecast heavy rains almost ten days before the first downpour. Different people received this news in different ways. Pakistani politicians, inept and incompetent as usual, slept over it. The anti-Pakistan terrorists based on Afghan soil and supported by several countries used this information to exacerbate terror against Pakistani citizens in the southwestern province of Balochistan, knowing that the State machinery would be distracted.

Interestingly, even when it comes to water, it is Indians where are sitting to the left and right of Pakistan's borders. The dam on Kabul river is handled by Indian personnel, while tens of dams choke Pakistan from the side of occupied Kashmir.


RIVER KABUL

In February, the Obama administration organized a meeting for senior government officials in Kabul and Islamabad who handle agricultural issues. The meeting was strangely held in Doha, Qatar, on US request. The agenda was to force the Pakistanis to grant agricultural concessions to the US-propped government in Kabul, without Pakistan getting anything in return.

But in the meeting, Mr. Zahoor Malik, a senior Pakistani bureaucrat leading the Pakistani delegation, raised the issue of an Indian company with close links to the Indian government building a dam on river Kabul near the border with Pakistan. It is not clear what the Americans and Karzai's officials had to say about this. There is a track record, however, that the incumbent pro-US government in Islamabad has often swept such issues under the carpet in order not to jeopardize Washington's support for the Zardari government.

All major rivers flowing into Pakistan including the Indus are blocked by Indian-built dams.

US and British officials often defend India and dismiss Pakistani concerns as 'conspiracy theories.' Some Pakistani analysts accuse elements within US government and intelligence of using Afghan soil against Pakistan.

But imagine this: India, a country that faces a debilitating conflict over Kashmir with Pakistan, goes to build tens of small and medium sized dams on all the rivers flowing down to Pakistan, and everything is supposed to work out smoothly? Not possible, even theoretically. But luckily Indian actions on the ground more than strengthen Pakistani concerns.

After the first wave of floods, the other rivers were flowing normally and no extraordinary rains followed. But suddenly Chenab and Indus Rivers overflowed and the flow picked up speed, turning into a flood. India's Baghliar Dam in occupied Kashmir opened its flood gates to cause a tragedy in the plains of Pakistan [Sindh and Punjab]. While Sarobi Dam – the Indian-maintained dam near Kabul – controls the flow of Kabul River entering Pakistan. The same thing happened here. Monsoons did not lash Afghanistan and there was no flooding there of any magnitude. But again, strangely, water flowing from river Kabul into Pakistan dramatically picked up speed as water levels increased turning into a flood. The speed with which this transformation occurred could have happened only because of one of two reasons: massive rains in Afghanistan or because Sarobi Dam released large amounts of water over a sustainable period of time.

PAKISTANI POLITICIANS

ANP, a US-allied party with strong links to Kabul and New Delhi and ruling the Pakistani northwestern province, has always opposed the construction of the Kalabagh Dam which would have saved thousands of lives and property had it been there. The ANP has argued that building the dam would drown the city of Nowshehra. Ironically, ANP's lie was exposed when not only Nowshehra but also Charsadda drowned without the Kalabagh Dam being there and thanks to the artificial floods created in Kabul River by ANP's Indian and Afghan patrons.

[Earlier this year, Washington and New Delhi came to ANP's defense on the Kalabagh Dam project by lobbying the World Bank to refuse Islamabad's request for funding the dam. The Bank obliged and said it can't fund the project due to Indian objections.]


OUR RESPONSE

How Pakistan responds to this latest Indian water war and aggression is something that remains to be seen. What is confirmed is that the incumbent pro-US government in Islamabad is useless when it comes to defending the Pakistani interest. To be fair to this government, this unusual situation in Islamabad started under former President Musharraf and continues with the current 'elected' government with amazing continuity. This water aggression has proved more lethal than the TTP [so-called Pakistani Taliban] and the BLA insurgencies, both of which were started from the Afghan springboard to punish Pakistan.

Pakistan has taken another serious hit, more from its corrupt rulers than external enemies. These Indian Dams now need to be destroyed. India has declared war on us by exploiting and orchestrating these floods.


Mr. Hamid can be reached at info@brasstacks.biz and Ms. Mehsud can be reached at info@paknationalists.com Research associates contributed to this report.


2007-2010. All rights reserved.

Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.


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Monday, August 16, 2010

Pakistan Flood Relief Fund Donor Info For US and Europe

ROUTING – PAKISTANI RUPEE

All branches of ASKARI COMMERCIAL BANK IN PAKISTAN

Army Flood Relief Fund

A/C # 0028010121825-8, Askari Bank Ltd., GHQ Branch, Rawalpindi, Pakistan

 
 

 
 

ACCOUNT NUMBER 0028010121825-8

ROUTING – US DOLLAR

Please remit proceeds to JP MORGAN CILASE BANK,NEW YORK USA.SWIFT BIC CODE:CHASU33 for the credit of Askari Bank Limited, Karachi Branch, Account number: 001-1-1678273 SWIFT BIC CODE : ASCMPKKA for onward credit to Askari Bank Limited, GHQ Branch, Rawalpindi, Pakistan

 
 

A/C # 28-FAVOURING

 ROUTING – POUND STERLING

Please remit proceeds to : STANDARD CHARTERED BANK , 37 GRACE CHURCH STREET ,LONDON, EC3V ORX , U.K. VIA SWIFT BIC CODE : SDBLGB2L for credit ofAskari Bank Limited , Karachi Branch Pound Sterling  

Account number :01-249443401 SWIFT BIC CODE : ASCMPKKA for onward credit to Askari Bank Limited , GHQ Branch , Rawalpindi , Pakistan  

 
 

A/C # 28-

ROUNTING – EURO

Please remit proceeds to : DRESDNER BANK AG , CORPORATE AND INTERNATIONAL DIVISION, ASIA/ AUSTRALIA DEPARTMENT , FRANKFURT 60301 AM MAIN GERMANY for credit of Askari Bank Limited , Karachi Branch EURO Account number 812781500 SWIFT BIC CODE : ASCMPKKA for onward credit to : Askari Bank Limited , GHQ Branch Rawalpindi , Pakistan A/C # 28

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Sunday, August 15, 2010

Donate for Flood Victims of Pakistan in Pakistan Army’s Account

Donate for Flood affectees in Army's A/C :

Army Relief Fund for IDPs, A/C 0028-01-012-1825-8, Askari Bank, GHQ, Rawalpindi. Pakistan


 


 

To donate from Abroad, BIC code is ASCMPKKA

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Saturday, August 14, 2010

Global Warming and the Pakistani Flood

By Matthew Rothschild, August 13, 2010

It's impossible to look at the images coming out of Pakistan and not shake your head at the brutality of Mother Nature.

But is it Mother Nature's fault—or our own?

Is this just a freak occurrence, or the result of global warming?

I was speaking with Brian Tokar this morning. He's the director of the Institute for Social Ecology and the author of "Perspectives on the Climate Crisis and Social Change," and he believes that the flood, along with recent freak weather like Russia's drought and fires, can be traced back to our destruction of the environment.

"The weather is noticeably more chaotic," he writes in his book, "corresponding rather closely to climate scientists' longstanding predictions."

In one of those predictions from 2007, the IPCC said global warming will cause "increased deaths, disease, and injury due to heat waves, floods, storms, fire, and drought."

And while pinning any one event on global warming is tricky,

Qamar-uz-Zaman Chaudhry, director-general of the Pakistan Meteorological Department, told Reuters: "The only explanation can be the link to climate change. Because that area very rarely receives monsoon rains."

Other stories in the mainstream media have made the same connection, including one in the Telegraph of London and one from AP.

If global warming is the culprit, we'll need to send more than helicopters and international aid teams to Pakistan.

We'll need nothing less that "a sweeping ecological transformation of society," Tokar says in his book. "Our survival is imperiled by the overconsumption of the world's affluent minority."

We need to get off fossil fuels, he says.

We need to pay the Third World a "climate debt" or "climate reparations," since it is the United States, along with other industrialized countries, that have done almost all of the environmental destruction, while at the same it is the people of the Third World who are suffering the most from it, he says.

And we need to explore the "positive, even utopian, possibilities for a post-petroleum, post-mega-mall world."

"It is clear today that the past two centuries of capitalist development," Tokar writes, "have created the conditions that threaten everyone's future."

That sure seems to be the case in Pakistan right now.

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Every Click You Make

By Kevin Drum

August 13, 2010 "
Mother Jones" -- Last week the Wall Street Journal ran a terrific series of stories called "What They Know." The general subject was personal privacy—or the lack of it—in the digital world, and the first article in the series explained how websites routinely track your movements on the web and collect a genuinely astonishing amount of personal information about you in the process. The Journal examined 50 sites using a test computer and discovered that these sites collectively installed a total of 3,180 tracking files—an average of 63 tracking files per site:

The state of the art is growing increasingly intrusive, the Journal found. Some tracking files can record a person's keystrokes online and then transmit the text to a data-gathering company that analyzes it for content, tone and clues to a person's social connections. Other tracking files can re-spawn trackers that a person may have deleted.

....Some of the tracking files identified by the Journal were so detailed that they verged on being anonymous in name only. They enabled data-gathering companies to build personal profiles that could include age, gender, race, zip code, income, marital status and health concerns, along with recent purchases and favorite TV shows and movies.

A full list of the sites they examined is here. The most intrusive were dictionary.com and msn.com, which installed over 200 tracking files each. The least intrusive were craigslist.org and wikipedia.org.

What to do about this? Europe, which generally has better rules than the U.S. regarding the collection and use of personal data, actually has tighter regulations about how long online data should be stored. After all, the local police might want to use it someday. The Christian Science Monitor reports that this is finally provoking a reaction:

Across Europe, a backlash against the storage of private data is growing. Civil society groups like the European Federation of Journalists have criticized the practice, and in Germany almost 35,000 people, including Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, sued their own government over the issue.

"There is a real problem in Europe today. It is a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights, which says that everyone has the right to a private life. That fundamental right has to extend into digital life," says Christian Engström, a member of the European Parliament for Sweden's controversial Pirate Party, elected on a platform of digital rights.

This tension means that governments aren't always eager to restrict the collection of personal data online. Beyond that, though, there are technical difficulties for those who want to prohibit the practice. When Congress passed the Do Not Call law in 2003, their job was easy: everyone has a telephone number, and all you have to do is put those numbers into a database and tell solicitors not to call them. But there's no equivalent of a phone number in the digital world. Your computer's ID is its IP address, but most IP addresses change regularly. There's no way of creating a "Do Not Track" database and telling online solicitors to keep their tracking files away from everyone who signs up.

Alternatively, as Harlan Yu wrote recently, we could adopt the opposite approach: instead of asking users to register, we could require solicitors to register and then rely on browser settings that would prevent their domains from installing tracking files. Unfortunately, this has technical drawbacks as well, so Yu suggests instead a new standard that would allow your browser to notify every site you visit that you don't wish to be tracked:

The browser could enable x-notrack for every HTTP connection, or for connections to only third party sites, or for connections to some set of user-specified sites. Upon receiving the signal not to track, the site would be prevented, by FTC regulation, from setting any persistent identifiers on the user's machine or using any other side-channel mechanism to uniquely identify the browser and track the interaction.

This would, of course, require legislation that requires online sites to honor the x-notrack request. That's the bad news. The good news is that whatever the eventual solution, the problem itself is finally getting some attention on Capitol Hill: Politico reported last week that Sen. Mark Pryor (D–AR) is writing a bill "aiming to give consumers more control over their online data....The focus of the bill, which is still in rough draft form, will be giving consumers the ability to opt out of being tracked across the Web." So stay tuned.

In the meantime, the Journal's full package of privacy articles is here, and they're well worth browsing through. It includes pieces that explain web tracking, cell phone monitoring, how much these tracking services know about you, the role of big companies like Google and Microsoft, and even advice on how to avoid tracking. You can't avoid it all, but there are things you can do to minimize it.

Kevin Drum is a political blogger for Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here.

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National Anthem of Pakistan

The National Anthem of Pakistan approved by the Government in August 1954, is a harmonious rendering of a three-stanza composition with a tune based on eastern music but arranged in such a manner that it can be easily played by foreign bands.
The Anthem is evocative in spirit, extolling Pakistan as the centre of faith and freedom, a land of beauty and strength drawn from the people and the country. The words touch upon the various facets of national life, with an invocation for integrity of Pakistan.

The Verses of the Anthem have been composed by a renowned poet of Pakistan, Abul Asar Hafeez Jullundhri; while the tune has been composed by Ahmed G. Chagla, the well known musician and composer.

The Anthem written in Urdu is a unique poetical composition, as in spite of its brevity it is a lyrical exultation for the quintessence of Pakistan its Islamic foundation, ideology, ethos, aspirations and its intrinsic strength.

Listen to the Anthem

Following is the Urdu Anthem:


Following is the Urdu Transliteration:

Pak sarzamin shad bad 
Kishware haseen shad bad 
Tunishane azmealishan arze Pakistan 
Markazeyaqin shadbad.

Pak sarzamin ka nizam quwate akhuwati awam 
Qaum, mulk, Sultanat 
Painda ta binda bad shad, bad man zele murad.

Parchame sitarao hilat 
Rahbare tarraqio ka mal 
Tarjumane mazishane hal jane istaqbal 
Sayyai, khudae zul jalal.

Following is the English Wording:

Blessed be the sacred Land
Happy be the bounteous realm
Symbol of high resolve
Land of Pakistan
Blessed be thou citadel of faith

The order of this sacred land
Is the might of the brotherhood of the People
May the nation, the country, and the state
Shine in glory everlasting
Blessed be the goal of our ambition

This Flag of the Crescent and Star
Leads the way to progress and perfection

Interpreter of our past, glory of our present
Inspiration of our future
Symbol of Almighty's protection

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The National Flag of Pakistan

The Pakistani Flag was designed by Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan.

The National Flag of Pakistan is dark green in colour with a white bar, a white crescent in the centre and a five-pointed star. The significance of the colour and symbols used in the Pakistan Flag is as follows:

  • The white and dark green field represents Minorities & Muslim majority, respectively.
  • The crescent on the Flag represents progress.
  • The five-rayed star represents light and knowledge.

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Sunday, August 1, 2010

10 Best Intelligence Agencies in the World

Intelligence Agency is an effective instrument of a national power. Aggressive intelligence is its primary weapon to destabilize the target. Indeed, no one knows what the intelligence agencies actually do so figuring out who the best intelligence service is can be difficult. The very nature of intelligence often means that the successes will not be public knowledge for years, whereas failures or controversial operations will be taken to the press. It's a thankless situation. Still, from what little has emerged, one can have an idea of some of the better intelligence services out there, with the understanding that this is based on incomplete data.

10. ASIS – Australia


Formed

13 May 1952

Headquarters

Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia

Annual budget

$162.5m AUD (2007)

Minister responsible

The Hon. Stephen Smith MP, Minister for Foreign Affairs

Agency executive

Nick Warner, Director-General

Australian Secret Intelligence Service is the Australian government intelligence agency responsible for collecting foreign intelligence, undertaking counter-intelligence activities and cooperation with other intelligence agencies overseas. For more than twenty years, the existence of the agency was a secret even from its own government. Its primary responsibility is gathering intelligence from mainly Asian and Pacific interests using agents stationed in a wide variety of areas. Its main purpose, as with most agencies, is to protect the country's political and economic interests while ensuring safety for the people of Australia against national threats.

9. RAW – India


Formed

21 September 1968

Headquarters

New Delhi, India

Agency executive

K. C. Verma, Secretary (R)

Parent agency

Prime Minister's Office, GoI

Research and Analysis Wing is India's external intelligence agency. It was formed in September 1968, after the newly independent Republic of India was faced with 2 consecutive wars, the Sino-Indian war of 1962 and the India-Pakistani war of 1965, as it was evident that a credible intelligence gathering setup was lacking. Its primary function is collection of external intelligence, counter-terrorism and covert operations. In addition, it is responsible for obtaining and analyzing information about foreign governments, corporations, and persons, in order to advise Indian foreign policymakers. Until the creation of R&AW, the Intelligence Bureau handled both internal and external intelligence.

8. DGSE – France


Formed

April 2, 1982

Preceding agency

External Documentation and Counter-Espionage Service


Minister responsible

Hervé Morin, Minister of Defence

Agency executive

Erard Corbin de Mangoux, Director

Directorate General for External Security is France's external intelligence agency. Operating under the direction of the French ministry of defence, the agency works alongside the DCRI (the Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence) in providing intelligence and national security, notably by performing paramilitary and counterintelligence operations abroad. The General Directorate for External Security (DGSE) of France has a rather short history compared to other intelligence agencies in the region. It was officially founded in 1982 from a multitude of prior intelligence agencies in the country. Its primary focus is to gather intelligence from foreign sources to assist in military and strategic decisions for the country. The agency employs more than five thousand people.

7. FSB – Russia


Formed

3 April, 1995

Employees

350,000

Headquarters

Lubyanka Square

Preceding agency

KGB

The Federal Security Service of Russian Federation (FSD) is the main domestic security agency of the Russian Federation and the main successor agency of the Soviet-era Cheka, NKVD and KGB. The FSB is involved in counter-intelligence, internal and border security, counter-terrorism, and surveillance. Its headquarters are on Lubyanka Square, downtown Moscow, the same location as the former headquarters of the KGB. All law enforcement and intelligence agencies in Russia work under the guidance of FSB, if needed. For example, the GRU, spetsnaz and Internal Troops detachments of Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs work together with the FSB in Chechnya. The FSB is responsible for internal security of the Russian state, counterespionage, and the fight against organized crime, terrorism, and drug smuggling. The number of FSB personnel and its budget remain state secrets, although the budget was reported to jump nearly 40% in 2006.

6. BND – Germany


Formed

1 April 1956

Employees

6,050

Agency executive

Gehlen Organization

Parent agency

Central Intelligence Group

The Bundesnachrichtendienst is the foreign intelligence agency of the German government, under the control of the Chancellor's Office. The BND acts as an early warning system to alert the German government to threats to German interests from abroad. It depends heavily on wiretapping and electronic surveillance of international communications. It collects and evaluates information on a variety of areas such as international terrorism, WMD proliferation and illegal transfer of technology, organized crime, weapons and drug trafficking, money laundering, illegal migration and information warfare. As Germany's only overseas intelligence service, the BND gathers both military and civil intelligence.




5. MSS – China


Jurisdiction

People's Republic of China

Headquarters

Beijing

Agency executive

Geng Huichang, Minister of State Security

Parent agency

State Council

Ministry of State Security is the security agency of the People's Republic of China. It is also probably the Chinese government's largest and most active foreign intelligence agency, though it is also involved in domestic security matters. Article 4 of the Criminal Procedure Law gives the MSS the same authority to arrest or detain people as regular police for crimes involving state security with identical supervision by the procuratorates and the courts. It is headquartered near the Ministry of Public Security of the People's Republic of China in Beijing. According to Liu Fuzhi, Secretary-General of the Commission for Politics and Law under the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and Minister of Public Security, the mission of the MSS is to ensure "the security of the state through effective measures against enemy agents, spies, and counter-revolutionary activities designed to sabotage or overthrow China's socialist system." One of the primary missions of the MSS is undoubtedly to gather foreign intelligence from targets in various countries overseas. Many MSS agents are said to have operated in the Greater China region (Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan) and to have integrated themselves into the world's numerous overseas Chinese communities. At one point, nearly 120 agents who had been operating under non-official cover in the U.S., Canada, Western and Northern Europe, and Japan as businessmen, bankers, scholars, and journalists were recalled to China, a fact that demonstrates the broad geographical scope of MSS agent coverage.

4. CIA – America


Formed

September 18, 1947

Employees

20,000

Agency executive

Leon Panetta, Director

Parent agency

Central Intelligence Group

CIA is the largest of the intelligence agencies and is responsible for gathering data from other countries that could impact U.S. policy. It is a civilian intelligence agency of the United States government responsible for providing national security intelligence to senior United States policymakers. The CIA also engages in covert activities at the request of the President of the United States of America. The CIA's primary function is to collect information about foreign governments, corporations, and individuals, and to advise public policymakers. The agency conducts covert operations and paramilitary actions, and exerts foreign political influence through its Special Activities Division. It has failed to control terrorism activities including 9/11, Not even a single top level Al-Queda leader captured own its own in the past 9 years – 'they missed 1 Million' Soviet troops marching into Afghanistan'. Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction, Have the found them yet? -Number of defectors/ double agents numbers close to a thousand. On 50th anniversary of CIA, President Clinton said "By necessity, the American people will never know the full story of your courage. Indeed, no one knows that what CIA really does". Highly funded and technologically most advanced Intelligence set-up in the world.

3. M1-6 – United Kingdom


Formed

1909 as the Secret Service Bureau

Jurisdiction

Government of the United Kingdom

Headquarters

Vauxhall Cross, London

Minister responsible

The Rt Hon. William Hague MP, Foreign Secretary

Agency executive

Sir John Sawers KCMG, Director General

Parent agency

Foreign and Commonwealth Office

The British have had a long public perception of an effective intelligence agency (due to the success of the unrealistic, yet entertaining, James Bond movies). This perception matches reality. MI6, the British equivalent to the CIA, has had two big advantages in staying effective: The British Official Secrets Act and D notices can often prevent leaks (which have been the bane of the CIA's existence). Some stories have emerged. In the Cold War, MI6 recruited Oleg Penkovsky, who played a key part in the favorable resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Oleg Gordievski, who operated for a decade before MI6 extracted him via Finland. The British were even aware of Norwood's activities, but made the decision not to tip their hand. MI6 also is rumored to have sabotaged the Tu-144 supersonic airliner program by altering documents and making sure they fell into the hands of the KGB.

2. Mossad – Israel


Formed

December 13, 1949 as the Central Institute for Coordination

Employees

1,200 (est)

Agency executive

Meir Dagan, Director

Parent agency

Office of the Prime Minister

The Mossad is responsible for intelligence collection and covert operations including paramilitary activities. It is one of the main entities in the Israeli Intelligence Community, along with Aman (military intelligence) and Shin Bet (internal security), but its director reports directly to the Prime Minister. The list of its successes is long. Israel's intelligence agency is most famous for having taken out a number of PLO operatives in retaliation for the attack that killed eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic games in Munich. However, this agency has other success to its name, including the acquisition of a MiG-21 prior to the Six-Day war of 1967 and the theft of the plans for the Mirage 5 after the deal with France went sour. Mossad also assisted the United States in supporting Solidarity in Poland during the 1980s.

1. ISI – Pakistan


Formed

1948

Jurisdiction

Government of Pakistan

Headquarters

Islamabad, Pakistan

Agency executive

Lieutenant General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, PA Director General

With the lengthiest track record of success, the best know Intelligence so far on the scale of records is ISI. The Inter-Services Intelligence was created as an independent unit in 1948 in order to strengthen the performance of Pakistan's Military Intelligence during the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947. Its success in achieving its goal without leading to a full scale invasion of Pakistan by the Soviets is a feat unmatched by any other through out the intelligence world. KGB, The best of its time, failed to counter ISI and protect Soviet interests in Central Asia. This GOLD MEDAL makes it rank higher than Mossad. It has had 0 double agents or Defectors through out its history, considering that in light of the whole war campaign it carried out from money earned by selling drugs bought from the very people it was bleeding, The Soviets. It has protected its Nuclear Weapons since formed and it has foiled Indian attempts to attain ultimate supremacy in the South-Asian theatres through internal destabilization of India. It is above All laws in its host country Pakistan 'A State, with in a State'. Its policies are made 'outside' of all other institutions with the exception of The Army. Its personnel have never been caught on camera. Its is believed to have the highest number of agents worldwide, close to 10,000. The most striking thing is that its one of the least funded Intelligence agency out of the top 10 and still the strongest.


Source : © Smashinglists.

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