France needs to abandon its rejection of globalisation, right? Get with the programme? Join the war against terrorism? Or face simply becoming irrelevant? We’ve blogged plenty at AFOE about the bizarre notion that France and the United States are suddenly irreconcilable foes, but here is some definitive refutation. Defensetech.org reports that the USS Enterprise had some French Dassault Rafales over to visit in the Mediterranean recently.
If the EU didn’t exist, would we have to create it? Arguably, one of the best reasons for doing so would be the power it has demonstrated to spread democracy, constitutionalism, peace, and other good stuff through the accession process. Today, we had an excellent example of this. On the 7th of July, the European Commission updated the list of airlines that aren’t allowed to land in the EU. In the wake of the ban, the Moldovan government decided to solve the problem by shutting down a succession of really dodgy operations, revoking the Air Operator’s Certificate that is required by international law and grounding the planes.
The reason for such dramatic action is simple enough – it’s not just flight safety that was at stake. The list of dodgy airlines includes one that was involved in a regrettable incident in which 99 tonnes of assorted firearms were purchased from Bosnian war surplus by the US Government, and flown in a couple of Ilyushin 76s to Iraq for the use of the Iraqi government. However, the guns never arrived, and their fate remains a mystery – perhaps the least disturbing theory being that they were never actually shipped, and the Americans were defrauded. More disturbing options include the suggestion that the weapons were offloaded somewhere else, switched with another cargo, and sold God knows where, or that they were delivered all right, but to the former Iraqi army. The airline which was meant to move the guns, Aerocom, was itself later shut down after a plane was seized in Belize with a load of cocaine – but it actually subcontracted the job to one of the current crop, Jet Line International.
Armscontrolwonk has a seriously unreported scoop about the great Czech radar kerfuffle. Namely, why is the US playing down the capabilities of the one element of the missile defence plan that actually works, and wouldn’t need anything as politically contentious as a new missile base? Defence geeks will already guess what we’re talking about, which is the capability of the US Navy’s Aegis air defence cruiser to shoot at missiles in the boost phase. It seems the Missile Defense Agency isn’t keen on the notion.
There’s a lot going for it. For a start it, ah, works – the problem is much simpler. In the boost phase, the rocket is going up, but not covering much ground towards you, so it’s easier to shoot at. And the enemy ends up with the bits. Ships go to sea, and lurk in international waters – they can move to cover a specific threat, and don’t need to be based very near their patrol areas.
So, a suggestion. ACW mentions a souped-up version of the SM-3 rocket that’s being developed with the Japanese. They, after all, have bought four destroyers equipped with the missiles and the fancy radar and computer systems. Why, then, can’t Europe buy its own? A lot of objections to the whole plan are based on them being “American” bases. After all, we can’t be totally sure that the missiles would hurtle up to intercept nukes inbound to London, Vienna, Toulouse, or Tallinn – can we? So why not have our own? – during the cold war we thought this argument very important with regard to offensive nuclear weapons. Presumably, such a purchase would bring in lucrative workshare for Thales, Astrium, Matra-BAE Dynamics & Co.
And you could even call it a force de défense spatiale tous azimuts. Ships sail, right? Including to the North Atlantic, if need be. There is, however, a probby. Putting ships in the eastern Mediterranean is easy enough. Putting them in the high North and the North Sea is politically and militarily easy, although it’s a tough job in winter. The Baltic? Well, there’s nothing to stop you, and both sides are in friendly hands. The Russians wouldn’t be happy. But then, they wouldn’t anyway. ACW, though, reckons you might need one in the Black Sea.
Special international agreements exist regarding the transit of the Straits, to which Russia is a party. Specifically, you can’t send aircraft carriers through. An Aegis ship is no carrier, but that don’t mean they aren’t going to make a big fuss about it. Update: WSI Brussels Blog has more.
So what exactly happened with the allegedly Russian-orchestrated DDOS attack on Estonian Internet interests? Some people have been talking about the first act of “cyberwar” against a sovereign state, others about a bizarre fuss about nothing. AFOE asked Gadi Evron, a world expert on botnets who runs Israel’s CERT and who took part in the international response effort, exactly what was going on.
How large was the DDOS attack on Estonian interests? How many different sites were targeted?
The DDoS attacks themselves were relatively small compared to some
past attacks we have seen, such as those on the root servers, but it
was significant for them and their infrastructure.
2. EE-CERT was presumably the first responder. How did other CERTS and agencies get involved, and what support did you/they provide?
There were 4 CERTs from Europe (Finland, Germany and Slovenia) who
helped directly with the response outside of Estonia, serving as an
escalation point for reporting attacking sources outside of Estonia.
I was there to help in whatever was needed, and later was also asked
to write a post-mortem of the attacks and defense for the Estonians,
covering preparedness for the next time.
Inside the country what saved the day was close coordination between
the CERT, ISPs, banks, etc. who all responded in semi real-time and
helped each other out.
3. Did the attackers attempt to compromise network infrastructure, or just end hosts?
They mostly left the network infrastructure alone, however, one
misconfigured router was attacked directly and another couldn’t take
the stress.
4. How much disruption was actually caused?
Considering Estonia is more advanced than most of us (they even held
the last elections online) the impact of the attack was significant
with some down-time for the banks, government sites, etc. It could
have been more serious, but while their Internet infrastructure as a
quiet country was not prepared for such an attack, the response and
mitigation worked for them. They stood the risk of losing their
ability to buy gas, for example, and for a short time, they did.
5. How unusual were the mitigation techniques used – just BCP38 etc, or spookier?
The fascinating thing is that in Estonia BCP38 is considered best
practice and implemented widely, which likely prevented some more
mess. As to mitigation, it ranged from basics such as using mitigation
devices to extremes such as blocking connections to certain networks
from abroad. Nothing any of us haven’t done before ourselves, however
mundane or extreme.
6. What fraction of the traffic came from within Russia? Or was it typical botnet activity, globally distributed?
The botnet traffic was distributed globally, with some of the botnets
being bought. However, many of the attacks were not by a botnet, but
rather by a mass of home users using commands such as ping to manually
attack Estonian sites. As they coined in Estonia, this was a riot, and
not just in the streets. Many different Russian-speaking forums and blogs (the Russian
blogosphere?) encouraged people to attack Estonia using crude commands
or simple tools. Others used more advanced techniques.
7. What was the role of ENISA?
“Who?”
8. Did the attack attempt to compromise/darkout other Internet-connected systems?
What other systems? Sorry, I don’t follow.
“Other systems” here was intended to mean such things as telco networks, embedded control systems, and the like.
Telco’s were affected for sure, as they hosted or were transit. There
was no attack on control systems that I know of, but the Internet is
critical infrastructure enough. The civilian infrastructure proved to
be more critical than any SCADA system.
Thanks!
Gideon Rachman of the FT gives a sound thrashing to Mark Steyn and the other participants in a conference on “The Collapse of Europe” somewhere in Florida California. It’s always good to see the racist buffoon Steyn getting fisked, but there’s a deeper point here. What if it was the United States that was threatened by “collapse”?
After all, it is a society that faces some grave problems. Oil-intensity of GDP is surpassed only by China among industrialised economies, meaning that the US has a lot of distance to make up on its competitors on the way towards sustainability. The long-term population shift into Florida and the South-West was famously the result of air conditioning, which doesn’t look such a cracking idea any more. The Western states have always had problems with water, which so far have been coped with. Will they always be, especially with reduced snowpack in the Rockies hitting water supply and hydroelectric generation?
The economy, meanwhile, faces gargantuan twin deficits and a dollar sustained by the conditional support of the People’s Bank of China. In the event of a devaluation, how quickly can resources shift into exporting and import-competing sectors? Gigantic sums – hundreds of billions of dollars – are projected to be necessary to restore the US Army after it finally leaves Iraq.
But perhaps the most worrying feature is the increasingly vicious political polarisation, and its corollary, the increasing efforts each side of the partisan divide makes to withdraw into its own version of reality. We mentioned the re-direction of resources into the tradable sector of the economy, but will those resources be available in a nation of creationist “science” fairs? Solutions like this one aren’t for duffers. More importantly, the same distinction late Pentagon strategists like Thomas Barnett make between the “integrated core” and the “nonintegrating gap” was making itself plain in the US. (What else, after all, does the famous and prescient “United States of Canada/Jesusland” map illustrate?) Can a society include Intel ISEF and the Christian Soda Volcano show without tearing itself apart?
Similarly, exactly the same trends were making themselves felt demographically as in Europe, with a low birth rate among the existing population being masked by immigration, which is bitterly – and violently – resented by some sections of society. Perhaps they realise that, in the long run, immigration only strengthens the remaining outward-looking sections of society. US publicists boasted that Muslim immigrants to the United States were “more integrated” than in Europe, but on closer inspection this simply meant that nothing bad had happened yet.
These problems tested the constitutional fabric to the limit – consider the ugly confrontation between Alberto Gonzales and Thomas Comey by John Ashcroft’s hospital bed. Comey found it necessary to have his FBI security detail ordered to resist Gonzales’s Secret Service guards by force if necessary. By 2007, was it already too late for the United States to avoid its second Civil War? Even though the outbreak of violence on the California-Nevada line was unexpected, the forces that led to it had been around for years, and it is a truism that nobody ever realises it is happening to them until it happens. Hence the scenes of people going about their business as foreign nationals were evacuated on the EU amphibious assault ships.
It is certainly no more ridiculous than “Eurabia.”
“I have today concluded that the evidence sent to us by the police is sufficient to charge Andrei Lugovoy with the murder of Mr. Litvinenko by deliberate poisoning,” [UK] Director of Public Prosecutions Ken Macdonald said, immediately setting off a diplomatic confrontation between London and Moscow.
This of course has gone over like the proverbial heavy-isotope balloon in Moscow, where authorities and lawyers have alternately blustered, denied, denigrated the British court system and pointed to the Russian constitution, which appears to make extradition a dead letter. Still, an EU-wide warrant is likely to follow, and Lugovoy’s travel prospects will surely be limited.
Foreign relations tests will come fast and furious in the early part of Gordon Brown’s term as prime minister…
Over at the Small Wars Journal‘s blog, they’re wondering if part of the problem in dealing with failed states, the aftermath of wars, peacekeeping and the like is that it’s nobody’s job to provide a police force, and specifically a real civilian one that does things like investigating crimes.
This was, of course, a bitter problem in the Balkans, and one that was never really solved. To begin with, the job simply devolved on IFOR (and later, KFOR)’s provost units and whatever troops were nearby. Later, a UN police force was constituted for Bosnia, but the less said, the better – arguably it was the source of more crime than it solved, and it was eventually wound up and replaced by an EU police mission. Kosovo was a similarly bad experience.
However, John Sullivan writes, neither the US nor NATO-as-an-organisation have any answers. He praises the EU for setting up a (putative) rapid reaction police force that can call on member states for up to 5,500 cops. And it certainly seems like a task that the EU is suited to, whilst not touching too many of the constitutional pressure points. It’s not specifically military, it’s not “an EU police” although no doubt the Sun would call it one if any of its editor knew it existed, it doesn’t annoy the Poles or Russians specifically, nor does it touch on the subsidy world. It also fits nicely with the wide variety of governmental tasks the EU can take on, alone among international institutions.
Mind you, I have my doubts. European official circles, institutions, thinktanks and so on have been pushing this around the plate since Maastricht without making many decisions. It used to be fashionable enough that NATO also got in on it – I recall a briefing at NATO SHAPE in late 2000 which concentrated almost entirely on enlargement, policing, and civil operations, something borne out by the fact the briefers included a French gendarmerie colonel, a Polish air force officer, and a British civil servant.
Saw this in the news the other day:
Kosovo official escapes death
13 April 2007 | 09:31 | Source: Reuters
PRIŠTINA — Head of Kosovo Telecommunications Agency (KTA) Anton Berisha was the target of a mortar attack on Thursday, a police source said.“The car was hit by a mortar bomb. A Kosovo police officer is injured. It happened in the village of Loznica 35 km west of Priština,” the source told Reuters…
Anton Berisha has been under close protection since February 28 when gunmen opened fire on his car on the main road from Priština to the western town of Peć.
Berisha was recently involved in the awarding of a second mobile phone license for Kosovo, the breakaway southern province whose ethnic Albanian majority hopes to win independence from Serbia later this year.
I found this interesting, because I know Anton Berisha. Continue reading
Somebody is worried that Slobodan Milosevic might escape from death. And so, they dug up his corpse and drove a stake through his heart.
Seriously. They really did it.
One might also want to read this.
Sometimes it pays to read beyond the front page:
Federal and local law enforcement authorities are investigating a shooting in Prince George’s County that critically injured a prominent intelligence expert who specializes in the former Soviet Union.
Paul Joyal, 53, was shot Thursday, four days after he alleged in a television broadcast that the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin was involved in the fatal poisoning of a former KGB agent in London.
Law enforcement sources and sources close to Joyal, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case, said the motive for the shooting was unclear. But several sources confirmed that FBI investigators are looking into the incident because of Joyal’s background as an intelligence expert and his comments about the Alexander Litvinenko case.
Joyal was shot by two men in the driveway of his house in the 2300 block of Lackawanna Street in Adelphi about 7:30 p.m. Thursday. The shooting was reported yesterday by Channel 4. …
In the “Dateline [NBC, a long-running news magazine program]” interview, Joyal accused the Russian government of being part of a conspiracy to silence its critics.
“A message has been communicated to anyone who wants to speak out against the Kremlin: ‘If you do, no matter who you are, where you are, we will find you, and we will silence you — in the most horrible way possible,’ ” Joyal said. …
He is well-known for his expertise on intelligence and terrorism and for his network of friends in the former Soviet Union, and he published a daily intelligence newsletter for 10 years that offered information on the former Soviet Union. In 1998, he was a lobbyist for the Georgian government in Washington.
Holy shit.
(Thanks to Laura Rozen for bringing this to my attention.)