N.S.A. Able to Foil Basic Safeguards of Privacy on Web

The National Security Agency is winning its long-running secret war on encryption, using supercomputers, technical trickery, court orders and behind-the-scenes persuasion to undermine the major tools protecting the privacy of everyday communications in the Internet age, according to newly disclosed documents.s

The agency has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world, the documents show.

Many users assume — or have been assured by Internet companies — that their data is safe from prying eyes, including those of the government, and the N.S.A. wants to keep it that way. The agency treats its recent successes in deciphering protected information as among its most closely guarded secrets, restricted to those cleared for a highly classified program code-named Bullrun, according to the documents, provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor.

Beginning in 2000, as encryption tools were gradually blanketing the Web, the N.S.A. invested billions of dollars in a clandestine campaign to preserve its ability to eavesdrop. Having lost a public battle in the 1990s to insert its own “back door” in all encryption, it set out to accomplish the same goal by stealth.

The agency, according to the documents and interviews with industry officials, deployed custom-built, superfast computers to break codes, and began collaborating with technology companies in the United States and abroad to build entry points into their products. The documents do not identify which companies have participated.

The N.S.A. hacked into target computers to snare messages before they were encrypted. In some cases, companies say they were coerced by the government into handing over their master encryption keys or building in a back door. And the agency used its influence as the world’s most experienced code maker to covertly introduce weaknesses into the encryption standards followed by hardware and software developers around the world.

“For the past decade, N.S.A. has led an aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used Internet encryption technologies,” said a 2010 memo describing a briefing about N.S.A. accomplishments for employees of its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. “Cryptanalytic capabilities are now coming online. Vast amounts of encrypted Internet data which have up till now been discarded are now exploitable.”

When the British analysts, who often work side by side with N.S.A. officers, were first told about the program, another memo said, “those not already briefed were gobsmacked!”

An intelligence budget document makes clear that the effort is still going strong. “We are investing in groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit Internet traffic,” the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., wrote in his budget request for the current year.

In recent months, the documents disclosed by Mr. Snowden have described the N.S.A.’s reach in scooping up vast amounts of communications around the world. The encryption documents now show, in striking detail, how the agency works to ensure that it is actually able to read the information it collects.

The agency’s success in defeating many of the privacy protections offered by encryption does not change the rules that prohibit the deliberate targeting of Americans’ e-mails or phone calls without a warrant. But it shows that the agency, which was sharply rebuked by a federal judge in 2011 for violating the rules and misleading the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, cannot necessarily be restrained by privacy technology. N.S.A. rules permit the agency to store any encrypted communication, domestic or foreign, for as long as the agency is trying to decrypt it or analyze its technical features.

The N.S.A., which has specialized in code-breaking since its creation in 1952, sees that task as essential to its mission. If it cannot decipher the messages of terrorists, foreign spies and other adversaries, the United States will be at serious risk, agency officials say.

Just in recent weeks, the Obama administration has called on the intelligence agencies for details of communications by leaders of Al Qaeda about a terrorist plot and of Syrian officials’ messages about the chemical weapons attack outside Damascus. If such communications can be hidden by unbreakable encryption, N.S.A. officials say, the agency cannot do its work.

But some experts say the N.S.A.’s campaign to bypass and weaken communications security may have serious unintended consequences. They say the agency is working at cross-purposes with its other major mission, apart from eavesdropping: ensuring the security of American communications.

Some of the agency’s most intensive efforts have focused on the encryption in universal use in the United States, including Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL; virtual private networks, or VPNs; and the protection used on fourth-generation, or 4G, smartphones. Many Americans, often without realizing it, rely on such protection every time they send an e-mail, buy something online, consult with colleagues via their company’s computer network, or use a phone or a tablet on a 4G network.

For at least three years, one document says, GCHQ, almost certainly in collaboration with the N.S.A., has been looking for ways into protected traffic of popular Internet companies: Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Microsoft’s Hotmail. By 2012, GCHQ had developed “new access opportunities” into Google’s systems, according to the document. (Google denied giving any government access and said it had no evidence its systems had been breached). 

“The risk is that when you build a back door into systems, you’re not the only one to exploit it,” said Matthew D. Green, a cryptography researcher at Johns Hopkins University. “Those back doors could work against U.S. communications, too.”

Paul Kocher, a leading cryptographer who helped design the SSL protocol, recalled how the N.S.A. lost the heated national debate in the 1990s about inserting into all encryption a government back door called the Clipper Chip.

“And they went and did it anyway, without telling anyone,” Mr. Kocher said. He said he understood the agency’s mission but was concerned about the danger of allowing it unbridled access to private information.

“The intelligence community has worried about ‘going dark’ forever, but today they are conducting instant, total invasion of privacy with limited effort,” he said. “This is the golden age of spying.”

A Vital Capability

The documents are among more than 50,000 shared by The Guardian with The New York Times and ProPublica, the nonprofit news organization. They focus on GCHQ but include thousands from or about the N.S.A.

Intelligence officials asked The Times and ProPublica not to publish this article, saying it might prompt foreign targets to switch to new forms of encryption or communications that would be harder to collect or read. The news organizations removed some specific facts but decided to publish the article because of the value of a public debate about government actions that weaken the most powerful privacy tools.

The files show that the agency is still stymied by some encryption, as Mr. Snowden suggested in a question-and-answer session on The Guardian’s Web site in June.

“Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on,” he said, though cautioning that the N.S.A. often bypasses the encryption altogether by targeting the computers at one end or the other and grabbing text before it is encrypted or after it is decrypted.

The documents make clear that the N.S.A. considers its ability to decrypt information a vital capability, one in which it competes with China, Russia and other intelligence powers.

“In the future, superpowers will be made or broken based on the strength of their cryptanalytic programs,” a 2007 document said. “It is the price of admission for the U.S. to maintain unrestricted access to and use of cyberspace.”

The full extent of the N.S.A.’s decoding capabilities is known only to a limited group of top analysts from the so-called Five Eyes: the N.S.A. and its counterparts in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Only they are cleared for the Bullrun program, the successor to one called Manassas — both names of an American Civil War battle. A parallel GCHQ counterencryption program is called Edgehill, named for the first battle of the English Civil War of the 17th century.

Unlike some classified information that can be parceled out on a strict “need to know” basis, one document makes clear that with Bullrun, “there will be NO ‘need to know.’ ”

Only a small cadre of trusted contractors were allowed to join Bullrun. It does not appear that Mr. Snowden was among them, but he nonetheless managed to obtain dozens of classified documents referring to the program’s capabilities, methods and sources.

Ties to Internet Companies

When the N.S.A. was founded, encryption was an obscure technology used mainly by diplomats and military officers. Over the last 20 years, it has become ubiquitous. Even novices can tell that their exchanges are being automatically encrypted when a tiny padlock appears next to a Web address.

Because strong encryption can be so effective, classified N.S.A. documents make clear, the agency’s success depends on working with Internet companies — by getting their voluntary collaboration, forcing their cooperation with court orders or surreptitiously stealing their encryption keys or altering their software or hardware.

According to an intelligence budget document leaked by Mr. Snowden, the N.S.A. spends more than $250 million a year on its Sigint Enabling Project, which “actively engages the U.S. and foreign IT industries to covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products’ designs” to make them “exploitable.” Sigint is the acronym for signals intelligence, the technical term for electronic eavesdropping.

By this year, the Sigint Enabling Project had found ways inside some of the encryption chips that scramble information for businesses and governments, either by working with chipmakers to insert back doors or by exploiting security flaws, according to the documents. The agency also expected to gain full unencrypted access to an unnamed major Internet phone call and text service; to a Middle Eastern Internet service; and to the communications of three foreign governments.

In one case, after the government learned that a foreign intelligence target had ordered new computer hardware, the American manufacturer agreed to insert a back door into the product before it was shipped, someone familiar with the request told The Times.

The 2013 N.S.A. budget request highlights “partnerships with major telecommunications carriers to shape the global network to benefit other collection accesses” — that is, to allow more eavesdropping.

At Microsoft, as The Guardian has reported, the N.S.A. worked with company officials to get pre-encryption access to Microsoft’s most popular services, including Outlook e-mail, Skype Internet phone calls and chats, and SkyDrive, the company’s cloud storage service.

Microsoft asserted that it had merely complied with “lawful demands” of the government, and in some cases, the collaboration was clearly coerced. Some companies have been asked to hand the government the encryption keys to all customer communications, according to people familiar with the government’s requests.

N.S.A. documents show that the agency maintains an internal database of encryption keys for specific commercial products, called a Key Provisioning Service, which can automatically decode many messages. If the necessary key is not in the collection, a request goes to the separate Key Recovery Service, which tries to obtain it.

How keys are acquired is shrouded in secrecy, but independent cryptographers say many are probably collected by hacking into companies’ computer servers, where they are stored. To keep such methods secret, the N.S.A. shares decrypted messages with other agencies only if the keys could have been acquired through legal means. “Approval to release to non-Sigint agencies,” a GCHQ document says, “will depend on there being a proven non-Sigint method of acquiring keys.”

Simultaneously, the N.S.A. has been deliberately weakening the international encryption standards adopted by developers. One goal in the agency’s 2013 budget request was to “influence policies, standards and specifications for commercial public key technologies,” the most common encryption method.

Cryptographers have long suspected that the agency planted vulnerabilities in a standard adopted in 2006 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and later by the International Organization for Standardization, which has 163 countries as members.

Classified N.S.A. memos appear to confirm that the fatal weakness, discovered by two Microsoft cryptographers in 2007, was engineered by the agency. The N.S.A. wrote the standard and aggressively pushed it on the international group, privately calling the effort “a challenge in finesse.”

“Eventually, N.S.A. became the sole editor,” the memo says.

Even agency programs ostensibly intended to guard American communications are sometimes used to weaken protections. The N.S.A.’s Commercial Solutions Center, for instance, invites the makers of encryption technologies to present their products to the agency with the goal of improving American cybersecurity. But a top-secret N.S.A. document suggests that the agency’s hacking division uses that same program to develop and “leverage sensitive, cooperative relationships with specific industry partners” to insert vulnerabilities into Internet security products.

By introducing such back doors, the N.S.A. has surreptitiously accomplished what it had failed to do in the open. Two decades ago, officials grew concerned about the spread of strong encryption software like Pretty Good Privacy, designed by a programmer named Phil Zimmermann. The Clinton administration fought back by proposing the Clipper Chip, which would have effectively neutered digital encryption by ensuring that the N.S.A. always had the key.

That proposal met a backlash from an unlikely coalition that included political opposites like Senator John Ashcroft, the Missouri Republican, and Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat, as well as the televangelist Pat Robertson, Silicon Valley executives and the American Civil Liberties Union. All argued that the Clipper would kill not only the Fourth Amendment, but also America’s global technology edge.

By 1996, the White House backed down. But soon the N.S.A. began trying to anticipate and thwart encryption tools before they became mainstream.

Each novel encryption effort generated anxiety. When Mr. Zimmermann introduced the Zfone, an encrypted phone technology, N.S.A. analysts circulated the announcement in an e-mail titled “This can’t be good.”

But by 2006, an N.S.A. document notes, the agency had broken into communications for three foreign airlines, one travel reservation system, one foreign government’s nuclear department and another’s Internet service by cracking the virtual private networks that protected them.

By 2010, the Edgehill program, the British counterencryption effort, was unscrambling VPN traffic for 30 targets and had set a goal of an additional 300.

But the agencies’ goal was to move away from decrypting targets’ tools one by one and instead decode, in real time, all of the information flying over the world’s fiber optic cables and through its Internet hubs, only afterward searching the decrypted material for valuable intelligence.

A 2010 document calls for “a new approach for opportunistic decryption, rather than targeted.” By that year, a Bullrun briefing document claims that the agency had developed “groundbreaking capabilities” against encrypted Web chats and phone calls. Its successes against Secure Sockets Layer and virtual private networks were gaining momentum.

But the agency was concerned that it could lose the advantage it had worked so long to gain, if the mere “fact of” decryption became widely known. “These capabilities are among the Sigint community’s most fragile, and the inadvertent disclosure of the simple ‘fact of’ could alert the adversary and result in immediate loss of the capability,” a GCHQ document warned.

Since Mr. Snowden’s disclosures ignited criticism of overreach and privacy infringements by the N.S.A., American technology companies have faced scrutiny from customers and the public over what some see as too cozy a relationship with the government. In response, some companies have begun to push back against what they describe as government bullying.

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook have pressed for permission to reveal more about the government’s requests for cooperation. One e-mail encryption company, Lavabit, closed rather than comply with the agency’s demands for customer information; another, Silent Circle, ended its e-mail service rather than face such demands.

In effect, facing the N.S.A.’s relentless advance, the companies surrendered.

Ladar Levison, the founder of Lavabit, wrote a public letter to his disappointed customers, offering an ominous warning. “Without Congressional action or a strong judicial precedent,” he wrote, “I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.”

Courtesy: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet-encryption.html

In 1964, Isaac Asimov Imagined the World in 2014

But he couldn't have known the consequences of the development he predicted—a planet whose climate is badly destabilized, whose inhabitants face mass extinctions in the years ahead.

In August of 1964, just more than 50 years ago, author Isaac Asimov wrote a piece in The New York Times, pegged to that summer's World Fair.

In the essay, Asimov imagines what the World Fair would be like in 2014—his future, our present.

His notions were strange and wonderful (and conservative, as Matt Novak writes in a great run-down), in the way that dreams of the future from the point of view of the American mid-century tend to be. There will be electroluminescent walls for our windowless homes, levitating cars for our transportation, 3D cube televisions that will permit viewers to watch dance performances from all angles, and "Algae Bars" that taste like turkey and steak ("but," he adds, "there will be considerable psychological resistance to such an innovation").

He got some things wrong and some things right, as is common for those who engage in the sport of prediction-making. Keeping score is of little interest to me. What is of interest: what Asimov understood about the entangled relationships among humans, technological development, and the planet—and the implications of those ideas for us today, knowing what we know now.

Asimov begins by suggesting that in the coming decades, the gulf between humans and "nature" will expand, driven by technological development. "One thought that occurs to me," he writes, "is that men will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better. "

It is in this context that Asimov sees the future shining bright: underground, suburban houses, "free from the vicissitudes of weather, with air cleaned and light controlled, should be fairly common." Windows, he says, "need be no more than an archaic touch," with programmed, alterable, "scenery." We will build our own world, an improvement on the natural one we found ourselves in for so long. Separation from nature, Asimov implies, will keep humans safe—safe from the irregularities of the natural world, and the bombs of the human one, a concern he just barely hints at, but that was deeply felt at the time.

But Asimov knows too that humans cannot survive on technology alone. Eight years before astronauts' Blue Marble image of Earth would reshape how humans thought about the planet, Asimov sees that humans need a healthy Earth, and he worries that an exploding human population (6.5 billion, he accurately extrapolated) will wear down our resources, creating massive inequality.

Although technology will still keep up with population through 2014, it will be only through a supreme effort and with but partial success. Not all the world's population will enjoy the gadgety world of the future to the full. A larger portion than today will be deprived and although they may be better off, materially, than today, they will be further behind when compared with the advanced portions of the world. They will have moved backward, relatively.

This troubled him, but the real problems lay yet further in the future, as "unchecked" population growth pushed urban sprawl to every corner of the planet, creating a "World-Manhattan" by 2450. But, he exclaimed, "society will collapse long before that!" Humans would have to stop reproducing so quickly to avert this catastrophe, he believed, and he predicted that by 2014 we would have decided that lowering the birth rate was a policy priority.

Asimov rightly saw the central role of the planet's environmental health to a society: No matter how technologically developed humanity becomes, there is no escaping our fundamental reliance on Earth (at least not until we seriously leave Earth, that is). But in 1964 the environmental specters that haunt us today—climate change and impending mass extinctions—were only just beginning to gain notice. Asimov could not have imagined the particulars of this special blend of planetary destruction we are now brewing—and he was overly optimistic about our propensity to take action to protect an imperiled planet.

2013 was not the warmest year on record but it will come close. Last month, November, was the warmest since 1880. All of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1998. A video from NASA shows the dramatic shift in recent years. Watch what happens in the decades after Asimov wrote his essay. (Yellow and red represent temperatures warmer than the average for the years from 1951 to 1980.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=TO03ColwxHE

Courtesy: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/in-1964-isaac-asimov-imagined-the-world-in-2014/282728/

How Nelson Mandela won the rugby World Cup

Francois Pienaar receives the rugby World Cup from Nelson Mandela in 1995 

John Carlin

The last time South Africa made the rugby final its new black president congratulated the Springboks' white captain - and the Rainbow Nation was born, recalls John Carlin

By a series of odd coincidences I found myself in Mississippi one evening in June last year sitting in someone's lounge with Morgan Freeman. I said to him, only three-quarters jokingly, "Mr Freeman, I have a film for you."

"Oh yes," he said, "what's it about?"

"It's about an event that distils the essence of Nelson Mandela's genius and the essence of the South African miracle."

"Do you mean the rugby game?" he said.

"Yes, I do," I replied. "The 1995 rugby World Cup final."
In the 16 months since that Mississippi encounter, I have written a book about all this; Freeman has announced he is going to play Mandela in a film based on the book, to be directed in all likelihood by Clint Eastwood; and South Africa have made it to the World Cup final again, with an elderly Mandela hoping to be in attendance – as he was, to sensational effect, in 1995.
Quite why it was so sensational is what my book is about. The short answer is that it was on that day that he captured the hearts of white South Africa. The rugby game was the orgiastic conclusion of the most unlikely exercise in political seduction ever undertaken.
When Mandela was arrested in 1962, he was founder and commander in chief of the military wing of the African National Congress, Umkhonto we Sizwe, regarded by the generality of white South Africans as a terrorist organisation hell-bent on destroying their supremely privileged way of life.
The image of Mandela as the embodiment of white South Africa's worst fears endured during the 27 years he spent in jail – as it did for the rugby-loving Afrikaner rump on February 11, 1990, the day he walked out of prison.
Three and half years later – two years before the rugby World Cup – tens of thousands of Afrikaners were bracing themselves for war. United under the banner of the far right Volksfront, they vowed to stop Mandela from taking power.

They did not succeed, largely because Mandela secretly invited their leaders to his home for tea and persuaded them, over time, to abandon their guns. A good half of the aspirant Boer freedom-fighters did not agree with their leaders, which meant that after Mandela became president in May 1994 the prospect of Boer terrorism remained alarmingly real.
With far more people trained in how to make war than the IRA ever had, they had it in them to undermine the stability of the post-apartheid democracy and do terrible damage to the economy.
That was why Mandela set it as his number one strategic priority during his five-year presidency to cement, as he put it, the foundations of the new South Africa; to reconcile whites with the black majority to whom they had done so much harm.
It was a Herculean political challenge but in the World Cup, to be played in South Africa a year after he came to power, Mandela saw an opportunity not to be missed.
The ANC had spent years using rugby as a stick with which to beat white people (talk to any prominent Afrikaner from those days and they'll tell you how much the international rugby boycott hurt); Mandela said, why not use it now as a carrot? Why not use the Springbok team to unite the most divided nation on earth around a common goal?
So, barely a month after he had taken office, he invited François Pienaar, the Springbok captain, for tea at his office in Pretoria. He wooed him instantly ("I felt like a wide-eyed kid listening to an old man telling stories," Pienaar told me) and, without the big blond son of apartheid quite knowing it yet, recruited him to the new South Africa cause.
Mandela's challenges did not only lie on the white side of the apartheid fence. He had to do some tough political persuasion among his own black supporters too.

They had been brought up to detest rugby. Next to the old anthem and the old flag, there existed no more repellent symbol of apartheid than the green Springbok shirt. That was why the blacks-only pens at rugby stadiums were always full on international match days, cheering the Springboks' opponents.
But Mandela set himself the mission of converting black South Africans to the perplexing notion that "the Boks belonged to all of us now", as he put it to me.
And this even though he knew that the team for the 1995 World Cup would be all white, with the possible exception of a "coloured" wing called Chester Williams.
"They booed me! " Mandela recalled, chuckling only long after the event. "My own people, they booed me when I stood before them, urging them to support the Springboks!"
But eventually, Mandela being a natural-born persuader and black South Africans an amazingly forgiving lot, he achieved his goal. Come the morning of the final, on June 24, 1995, black South Africans were as excited as their white compatriots, and as desperate to see the Amabokoboko (as the Sowetan newspaper dubbed the national team) win.
Pienaar and company deserved much of the credit for this. The clever, politically sharp CEO of the South African rugby union, Edward Griffiths, had come up with a slogan that was brilliant in its simplicity: "One Team, One Country.
" Morné du Plessis, a former Springbok captain and now team manager, had worked hard to make the players see that they had a role to play in helping Mandela unite the country. It was du Plessis who arranged for the players to learn the old song of black resistance, now the new national anthem, Nkosi Sikelele Afrika (God Bless Africa).

At a choir session in Cape Town, the Springbok players belted out the black song with feeling, the vast second-row Boer Kobus Wiese leading the choral charge.
As the World Cup unfolded, following a great inaugural victory by South Africa over Australia, the players as well as the white fans were struck by the growing enthusiasm of the hitherto rugby-illiterate black population.
The sight of those vast Boers singing their song at the start of each game and then winning it was a combination increasingly difficult for black South Africans to resist. This in turn nourished the Afrikaners' budding sense of new South African fellow feeling.
Mandela's coup de grâce, the final submission of white South Africa to his charms, came minutes before the final itself when the old terrorist-in-chief went on to the pitch to shake hands with the players dressed in the colours of the ancient enemy, the green Springbok shirt.
For a moment, Ellis Park Stadium, 95 per cent white on the day, stood in dumb, disbelieving silence. Then someone took up a cry that others followed, ending in a thundering roar: "Nel-son! Nel-son! Nel-son!"
And that was almost it. White South Africa had crowned Mandela king with the fervour black South Africa had done five years earlier at a stadium in Soweto, in the week after his release.
But there was still the matter of a game to be played against a formidable New Zealand team – and, in the view of every sane rugby pundit alive, the Springboks didn't stand a chance.
They were wrong. With Mandela playing as an invisible 16th man, Joel Stransky, the one Jewish player in the Springbok team, kicked the winning drop goal in extra time.
Mandela emerged again, still in his green jersey, and, to even louder cries of "Nel-son! Nel-son!", walked on to the pitch to shake the hand of François Pienaar.
As he prepared to hand over the cup to his captain, he said: "François, thank you for what you have done for our country." Pienaar, with extraordinary presence of mind, replied: "No, Mr President. Thank you for what you have done."



I spoke to a friend, a white, anti-apartheid veteran who was in the thick of the Boer throng at the stadium that day. As he put it: "There wasn't a dry eye in the house." There wasn't a dry eye in the country. Everybody celebrated. Every township, every white suburb: one country at last.
Has the goodwill endured? Of course not. That intensity of Utopian unity would have been impossible to sustain anywhere, much less in a country with a history. But Mandela did succeed in his great presidential mission.
From that day on, the violent Right barely uttered a squeak; the logic of white counter-revolution never materialised; South Africa was more stable than at any point since the arrival of the first white settlers in 1652.
And that remains true today, even if President Thabo Mbeki (wily political operator though he is) is not remotely in Mandela's class as a man, even if South Africa is beset by problems regarding crime, education, housing and health that assail so many other countries like it.
Whether things in South Africa will improve, or over time go the way of Zimbabwe, no one can know. What should last forever (and a film by Clint Eastwood ought to help ensure that it does) is the example of magnanimity that Mandela has left as his legacy for his country and the world.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a lifelong rugby fan who will be hoping the 16th man will work his magic again tomorrow, got it right when I asked him what the significance of that 1995 rugby World Cup final had been. "The lesson is simple and wonderfully encouraging," Tutu said. "If it happened once, it can happen again."
• John Carlin reported on South Africa's transformation in the 1990s as a Johannesburg bureau chief. His book, 'The Human Factor: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Saved South Africa', will be published next year by Penguin Press


Courtesy:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/features/3634426/How-Nelson-Mandela-won-the-rugby-World-Cup.html

Madiba's Rainbow nation policy

The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.

-          Mahatma Gandhi

During the bloody partition, Gandhi advocated forgiveness policy to Indians to save lives from Hindu/Sikhs-Muslim riots. With recent riots in UP, it appears that bitter rivalry between the communities still exists in patches and Indians haven’t accepted fully what Gandhi preached them long back. People of South Africa too exposed to same ‘1947’ situation in 1994 when the Apartheid regime ended. When Mandela was released in 1992, country was in bad shape. Power struggle within African National Congress was visible on the streets of Durban with unabated violent incidents. Sensing the loopholes, apartheid nationalists secretly armed the trouble mongers with guns and money. With the country spiraling into civil war, Mandela gave a pacification speech in front of agitated 100,000 ANC supporters.

“Take your knives, and your guns  ... and your pangas.

… and throw them into sea”

After massive win of ANC in 1994, Whites feared a lot believing the blacks may be in retributive mood to avenge the sufferings they consumed during apartheid rule. Under Apartheid regime, blacks were superimposed with separateness policy. Education, healthcare, public transportation, even voting right appeared taboo for them. With land acquisition policy start happening in countries like Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique, whites argued among themselves that they too will get same treatment.  But with election of Mandela as president, has saved the whites and the new concept called “Rainbow Nation “ had been introduced to fellow South Africans. Mandela himself an Enthusiastic follower of Gandhi, taught the beautiful topic of forgiveness and reconciliation to blacks. The racial bloodbath feared by many had been averted with this concept.

In his first speech as president, below were the words from him in building a nation which was racially disturbed for decades.

"We enter into a covenant that we shall build the society in which all South Africans, both black and white - will be able to walk tall. A Rainbow Nation at peace with itself and the world."

With fellow blacks, questioning Mandela that “How to reconcile with same persons who beaten them, tortured them, grabbed their fundamental rights?”.Mandela replied that

 I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.

Following the footsteps of ‘Abraham Lincoln’, Mandela concentrated more on reconciliation policy than on nation’s crime control,currency crisis issues at that time. Two of his finest moments as a reconciler came when he had tea with the widow of apartheid architect Hendrik Verwoerd and when he donned the Springbok rugby jersey to congratulate the mainly white team's victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup.

In reality after nearly two decades from independence, blacks haven’t achieved the socio-economic status to the expected extent. Yet white South Africans, who account for 8.7 percent of the population of 53 million, on average earn six times more than their black counterparts and still have access to better education, medical care and housing. Still whites own the land farms and blacks work in these farms with very less wages. With death of Mandela, few white scaremongers started to believe that whites will be threatened, rainbow nation policy will be nullified and nation would be returned to dogs. 

Though “rainbow nation” is far from complete, with opportunities for the black majority still limited,  people of south Africa had defied the stereotypes, negative expectations by gradually built their nation in last few decades. With every passing years, generations among whites and blacks are coming closer and closer. It is heartening to see blacks and whites have been singing and dancing together in honor of Mandela in Pretoria streets, which is never seen two decades back. Lets hope that the nation will set example for the people of other nations about reconciliation after decades of conflict.

Remembering the wonderful words of Mandela 

Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another and suffer the indignity of being the skunk of the world.

Bangladesh war: The article that changed history

On 13 June 1971, an article in the UK's Sunday Times exposed the brutality of Pakistan's suppression of the Bangladeshi uprising. It forced the reporter's family into hiding and changed history.

Abdul Bari had run out of luck. Like thousands of other people in East Bengal, he had made the mistake - the fatal mistake - of running within sight of a Pakistani patrol. He was 24 years old, a slight man surrounded by soldiers. He was trembling because he was about to be shot.
So starts one of the most influential pieces of South Asian journalism of the past half century.
Written by Anthony Mascarenhas, a Pakistani reporter, and printed in the UK's Sunday Times, it exposed for the first time the scale of the Pakistan army's brutal campaign to suppress its breakaway eastern province in 1971.
Nobody knows exactly how many people were killed, but certainly a huge number of people lost their lives. Independent researchers think that between 300,000 and 500,000 died. The Bangladesh government puts the figure at three million.
The strategy failed, and Bangladeshis are now celebrating the 40th anniversary of the birth of their country. Meanwhile, the first trial of those accused of committing war crimes has recently begun in Dhaka.

Anthony Mascarenhas

• July 1928: Born in Goa
• 1930s: Educated in Karachi
• June 1971: Exposes war crimes in East Pakistan that alter international opinion
• 1972: Wins international journalism awards
• 1979: Reports that Pakistan has developed nuclear weapons

There is little doubt that Mascarenhas' reportage played its part in ending the war. It helped turn world opinion against Pakistan and encouraged India to play a decisive role.

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi told the then editor of the Sunday Times, Harold Evans, that the article had shocked her so deeply it had set her "on a campaign of personal diplomacy in the European capitals and Moscow to prepare the ground for India's armed intervention," he recalled.
Not that this was ever Mascarenhas' intention. He was, Evans wrote in his memoirs, "just a very good reporter doing an honest job".
He was also very brave. Pakistan, at the time, was run by the military, and he knew that he would have to get himself and his family out of the country before the story could be published - not an easy task in those days.
"His mother always told him to stand up and speak the truth and be counted," Mascarenhas's widow, Yvonne, recalled (he died in 1986). "He used to tell me, put a mountain before me and I'll climb it. He was never daunted."

 

A map of Pakistan before the 1971 war 

 

When the war in what was then East Pakistan broke out in March 1971, Mascarenhas was a respected journalist in Karachi, the main city in the country's dominant western wing, on good terms with the country's ruling elite. He was a member of the city's small community of Goan Christians, and he and Yvonne had five children.

The conflict was sparked by elections, which were won by an East Pakistani party, the Awami League, which wanted greater autonomy for the region.

While the political parties and the military argued over the formation of a new government, many Bengalis became convinced that West Pakistan was deliberately blocking their ambitions.
The situation started to become violent. The Awami League launched a campaign of civil disobedience, its supporters attacked many non-Bengali civilians, and the army flew in thousands of reinforcements.
On the evening of 25 March it launched a pre-emptive strike against the Awami League, and other perceived opponents, including members of the intelligentsia and the Hindu community, who at that time made up about 20% of the province's 75 million people.
In the first of many notorious war crimes, soldiers attacked Dhaka University, lining up and executing students and professors.
Their campaign of terror then moved into the countryside, where they battled local troops who had mutinied.
Initially, the plan seemed to work, and the army decided it would be a good idea to invite some Pakistani reporters to the region to show them how they had successfully dealt with the "freedom fighters".

Bangladesh independence war, 1971

• Civil war erupts in Pakistan, pitting the West Pakistan army against East Pakistanis demanding autonomy and later independence
• Fighting forces an estimated 10 million East Pakistani civilians to flee to India
• In December, India invades East Pakistan in support of the East Pakistani people
• Pakistani army surrenders at Dhaka and its army of more than 90,000 become Indian prisoners of war
• East Pakistan becomes the independent country of Bangladesh on 16 December 1971
• Exact number of people killed is unclear - Bangladesh says it is three million but independent researchers say it is up to 500,000 fatalities

Foreign journalists had already been expelled, and Pakistan was also keen to publicise atrocities committed by the other side. Awami League supporters had massacred tens of thousands of civilians whose loyalty they suspected, a war crime that is still denied by many today in Bangladesh.

Eight journalists, including Mascarenhas, were given a 10-day tour of the province. When they returned home, seven of them duly wrote what they were told to.
But one of them refused.
Yvonne Mascarenhas remembers him coming back distraught: "I'd never seen my husband looking in such a state. He was absolutely shocked, stressed, upset and terribly emotional," she says, speaking from her home in west London.
"He told me that if he couldn't write the story of what he'd seen he'd never be able to write another word again."
Clearly it would not be possible to do so in Pakistan. All newspaper articles were checked by the military censor, and Mascarenhas told his wife he was certain he would be shot if he tried.
Pretending he was visiting his sick sister, Mascarenhas then travelled to London, where he headed straight to the Sunday Times and the editor's office.

Indians and Bengali guerrillas fought in support of East Pakistan

Evans remembers him in that meeting as having "the bearing of a military man, square-set and moustached, but appealing, almost soulful eyes and an air of profound melancholy".
"He'd been shocked by the Bengali outrages in March, but he maintained that what the army was doing was altogether worse and on a grander scale," Evans wrote.
Mascarenhas told him he had been an eyewitness to a huge, systematic killing spree, and had heard army officers describe the killings as a "final solution".
Evans promised to run the story, but first Yvonne and the children had to escape Karachi.
They had agreed that the signal for them to start preparing for this was a telegram from Mascarenhas saying that "Ann's operation was successful".
Yvonne remembers receiving the message at three the next morning. "I heard the telegram man bang at my window and I woke up my sons and I was: 'Oh my gosh, we have to go to London.' It was terrifying. I had to leave everything behind.
"We could only take one suitcase each. We were crying so much it was like a funeral," she says.
To avoid suspicion, Mascarenhas had to return to Pakistan before his family could leave. But as Pakistanis were only allowed one foreign flight a year, he then had to sneak out of the country by himself, crossing by land into Afghanistan.
The day after the family was reunited in their new home in London, the Sunday Times published his article, under the headline "Genocide".
'Betrayal' It is such a powerful piece of reporting because Mascarenhas was clearly so well trusted by the Pakistani officers he spent time with.
I have witnessed the brutality of 'kill and burn missions' as the army units, after clearing out the rebels, pursued the pogrom in the towns and villages.
I have seen whole villages devastated by 'punitive action'.
And in the officer's mess at night I have listened incredulously as otherwise brave and honourable men proudly chewed over the day's kill.
'How many did you get?' The answers are seared in my memory.

Mofidul Huq Liberation War Museum

His article was - from Pakistan's point of view - a huge betrayal and he was accused of being an enemy agent. It still denies its forces were behind such atrocities as those described by Mascarenhas, and blames Indian propaganda.

However, he still maintained excellent contacts there, and in 1979 became the first journalist to reveal that Pakistan had developed nuclear weapons.
In Bangladesh, of course, he is remembered more fondly, and his article is still displayed in the country's Liberation War Museum.
"This was one of the most significant articles written on the war. It came out when our country was cut off, and helped inform the world of what was going on here," says Mofidul Huq, a trustee of the museum.
His family, meanwhile, settled into life in a new and colder country.
"People were so serious in London and nobody ever talked to us," Yvonne Mascarenhas remembers. "We were used to happy, smiley faces, it was all a bit of a change for us after Karachi. But we never regretted it."

Courtesy: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-16207201
 

Deep Space Perils For Indian Spacecraft

There's no turning back. India's Mars Orbiter Mission has left Earth orbit and is heading for the red planet. After a flourish of media coverage before and shortly after launch, attention on this mission is likely to fade for several months. The MOM now has a long journey to reach its destination. It will arrive at Mars in September 2014.
Despite the spotlight moving on, it should not be assumed that this phase of the mission will be uneventful. Hopefully, things will go well, but the risks should not be underestimated. This is the most adventurous space mission ever launched by India, and probably its most hazardous.
What could go wrong? MOM has already had a minor problem with a backup fuel system, but this was not a threat to the mission. The spacecraft seems generally healthy right now, and has survived some of the most stressful parts of its mission already.
Launch, deployment, checkout, engine burns and velocity changes have gone well. Nevertheless, the longer the mission stays in space, the higher the chance that some component will malfunction.
Then there's the environment. Interplanetary space holds dangers that do not always threaten spacecraft that stay close to Earth. There is a higher level of exposure to radiation and particles. Thermal stresses are also potentially higher. There's no shadow of the Earth or magnetic fields to protect the spacecraft. MOM is designed for these conditions but it will still need careful management.
Space is also unpredictable. Solar storms can throw particles into deep space that pose hazards for local satellites. In deep space, it can be even worse. Some deep space missions have been damaged by solar activity. Although we can monitor these outbursts, there is often nothing that can be done to protect a spacecraft from their influence.
The hazards of deep space gave rise to the legend of the Great Galactic Ghoul, a mythical monster that lurks in space and devours spacecraft. The Ghoul has been implicated in the loss of several missions, and seems very eclectic in its tastes. It eats spacecraft from America, Russia, Japan and other nations. Does the Ghoul like Indian food? It's never been tempted this way before. Hopefully it will not bite.
Surviving the journey is just one task now facing MOM. Some of the instruments could be used to measure conditions in deep space even before the spacecraft approaches Mars. This gives controllers practice and confirms the successful operation of the experiments. It also boosts the scientific return. Most of this activity will not grab headlines but it will steadily chalk up the overall performance of MOM.
If the mission attracts little media coverage for the next few months, it will probably be a positive rather than a negative. It will probably mean that no surprises have developed. In the hazardous environment of interplanetary space, no news is usually good news.

Courtesy: http://www.marsdaily.com/reports/Deep_Space_Perils_For_Indian_Spacecraft_999.html
 

Seven financial blunders you should avoid

Everybody makes mistakes. The repercussions of a mistake could be trivial or grave. A financial mistake is one such blunder that can create big problems if they are not resolved immediately.

Lack of goals:Most people don't plan to fail; they just fail to plan. A good percentage of people are still not aware of what is financial planning and how to go about it. In simple words, financial planning is taking a disciplined approach to achieving your pre-determined financial goals. A good financial plan is based on strong goals. Well-articulated goals with a detailed break-up into long-term, mid- term and short-term, specific steps on how to achieve them and checking the progress periodically are basic ingredients of financial planning. As you can see it all starts with a goal.

Lack of life cover:Living without life insurance is just like "flying without a net". A financial plan is incomplete without adequate life cover. One major goal of a financial plan is to maintain the life style of your family whether you are with them or not. A common mistake we make is buying life insurance policies such as endowment plans or money back to save tax, also hoping to reap returns. Remember, returns from such policies are much less compared to traditional investment products such as stocks, mutual funds, gold or real estate. So why not separate investment and insurance completely? Most salesmen will not give you this advice because the commission in plain vanilla term policies is the lowest. Protect yourself with an inexpensive term policy providing sufficient life cover. The thumb rule for your life cover is your annual income multiplied by 10. You can add family floater mediclaim or health insurance policies for self and family members. It's a way of making sure that your family will continue to enjoy the current life standard.

Lack of investments: Start saving as early as possible. Generally, a person should start saving and investing money from the day of getting first salary. By starting your financial plan at the earliest, you are allowing your money to grow by the sheer power of compounding. Don't be over-enthusiastic about it either. Develop a regular and disciplined investment approach. Select a few good equity funds and do a SIP (Systematic Investment Plan). Increase the investment amount as your income increases. Don't wait for a lump sum amount to be accumulated to invest and don't try to time the market.

Too much of loans and debt:Don't stretch yourself too much with a mortgage. Buy within your means. It's not worth the sleepless nights. It's always advisable to resist the temptation and control unnecessary expenses. It includes loans, mortgages and credit card expenditure. House loan and car loan may be necessary but do some analysis about how much you really need and what can you comfortably be able to pay back. Keep a tight leash on personal loans and credit card debt. They can be a drain on your finances as the interest rates are much higher. You must have a plan to reduce the loan and pay off the debt gradually.

Only debt/fixed income instruments:Putting your entire investment amount into the debt instrument is like settling for a bonsai instead of a huge teak wood tree which you could have. It's good to be safe but too much of safety will not make your money grow. There are many among us who keep their money in FDs (fixed deposits), PPF (public provident fund), insurance policies, National Saving Certificates (NSC) etc. It's good to have them but they should not have all your money. You must have a healthy mix of equity and debt in your portfolio. Equity gives you growth and debt gives safety with peace of mind.

Over-indulgence in stocks:By watching too much of business news channel and reading business journals we start believing that we know all about stocks and the way companies work. Listening to equity analysts gives us more encouragement. We think we can beat the market. But the truth is most people fail to make money at the stock market and end up wasting their precious time and wealth. Sit with a certified Financial Planner and chalk out a long term plan for yourself. Remember "slow and steady wins the race".

Owning too many products: "Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing." The unavoidable risk from over diversification clearly articulated in this powerful quote by Warren Buffett. The right portfolio should be built by optimum allocation into different asset classes. A good financial planner should be able to tell you the right proportion as per your profile. Within a particular asset class it's better to do thorough research and put your money in a few select products. For example if you are investing in mutual funds then buying too many of them is not advisable. Similarly if you are an investor in stock market it's advisable to pick the right stocks and stick with them. We keep adding more products to the portfolio because we fall for what the salesmen and advertisements tell us. Do your own research or consult a certified financial planner for such decisions. It's important to own the right ones and not too many.