Global News Journal

Security: Never safer, or close to the civil liberties abyss?

As an air crash survivor I know how long jitters about safety can last. Eighteen years ago I crashed in an old Dakota in a remote corner of Africa, where such tragedies are sadly still not that rare.

The worst moment was when I was trapped for 20 seconds in the burning fuselage before being rescued by a fellow journalist. My physical injuries cleared up within months and I resumed flying, but mentally it was difficult. It took me about four years to recover my composure on planes.

The point about this story is that there was a good reason for my nervousness – even back then, we knew about post-traumatic stress. But these past few years, anxiety has come back into my travelling life. And while there is certainly a reason for this, I’m not sure it’s a good one.

This time the stress is far less intense and less personal but a lot more insidious. And it’s not just related to travel. You could call it security anxiety, a subliminal uneasiness aroused by the messages I am bombarded with day in day out about an array of alleged security risks. My job is reporting on security and counter-terrorism so my inbox is awash with this material.

But it’s not just me. In many countries, anyone with access to a PDA, TV, radio or laptop receives a daily array of stories, Tweets and emails and broadcasts not just about al Qaeda, but also about problems of a bewildering variety — climate change, pandemics, youth delinquency, food shortages, Internet fraud, organised crime, stray nuclear weapons, migration and water crises.

What’s going on? Well, it’s a commonplace that we live in a jittery, tremulous age of rapid social and technological change. More media, greater awareness and the tidal wave of globalisation is driving this hyper-awareness.

But are we over-reacting? What’s not so widely noted is the willingness of some governments to lump a range of hazards together as security risks, to be measured and mitigated by tougher laws or more electronic surveillance. Not surprisingly, civil liberties groups have been pressing the alarm bell.

Other rumbles in the Iran nuclear storm

In the sound and fury following the U.N. nuclear governors’ censure of Iran last week for its cover-up of a second uranium enrichment site, and Tehran’s rejection of a nuclear cooperation deal with world powers, a broader, festering issue was obscured.

That is the question of “alleged military dimensions” to Iran’s nuclear programme — that is, whether Tehran illicitly coordinated projects to process uranium, test high explosives and revamp the cone of a missile to fit a nuclear payload.

 Uranium enrichment can be calibrated to yield fuel either for nuclear power plants or the fissile core of a nuclear bomb.

Resolving whether Iran has sought to “weaponize” enrichment will be one of the biggest challenges for Japan’s Yukiya Amano, new director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who took office on Tuesday ominously referring to “the stormy situation” enveloping the U.N. nuclear watchdog.

Israel’s “Jewish Division”: Northen Ireland redux?

By Dan Williams

A Reuters investigation into how the Israeli domestic intelligence service Shin Bet is tackling threats from Jewish ultranationalists has raised intriguing parallels with Britain’s handling of the sectarian “troubles” in Northern Ireland.

Radical Jewish settlers who might turn to violence in a bid to wreck Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking are, increasingly, the quarry of the Shin Bet’s shadowy “Jewish Division”, whose operatives draw on a range of spying and interrogation tactics.

But a question remains over whether the Shin Bet, criticised internationally for its treatment of Palestinian suspects whose rights are limited under Israeli martial law, is less likely to get rough with Jews.

Such differential doctrines potentially recall Northern Ireland, where for decades British authorities had to tackle both Catholic republicans seeking a united Ireland and rival Protestants loyal to London.

A former top official with MI5, the British counterpart to Shin Bet, told me recently that when sectarian strife erupted in the province in the late 1960s, republicans were generally seen as the main threat to Britain, with the assumption that it was their violence that provoked loyalist counter-attacks.

Al Qaeda and the financial crisis

The  global financial crisis has become a topic of feverish debate for al Qaeda sympathisers on militant Internet forums.

According to  the U.S.-based SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors  al Qaeda-linked propaganda on the Web and translates it for the benefit of security analysts and counter-terrorism officials, the militant chat rooms have been buzzing for weeks with excited comment.

“Now Sheikh Osama bin Laden has an historic opportunity to crash America completely. Al Qaeda, which has caused America to be ruined economically in Iraq and Afghanistan, has an opportunity to deliver the fatal blow,” wrote a member of a Turkish militant forum recently.  “Al Qaeda could bury America into the landfill of history with an operation similar to or greater than September 11.”

In a discussion on al-Hesbah, a password-protected forum linked to al Qaeda,  one participant gloated that the U.S. economy is “on the precipice”, SITE reported.

He continued: ”Now is a golden opportunity and a gift from Allah that we should not lose. If America is hit now, by Allah, it will never survive, until Allah permits it … I can see that victory is closer than expected.”

Such ”chatter” has attracted the attention of Western intelligence officials. Ernst Uhrlau (pictured), head of Germany’s BND foreign intelligence agency, told Reuters in an interview this week that the financial crisis had emboldened some Islamist militants but it was too early to say if it would help them attract new recruits.

“We’re hearing some first voices on this. Some see the fact that the United States has been so shattered by the financial crisis, and that its dominant role in the world is shaken, as confirmation the West can be beaten,” Uhrlau said.

Ex-U.S. spy recalls years on no-fly list

Posted by Randall Mikkelsen

ORLANDO, Fla – Decades of passing lie detector tests and the most stringent background checks count little when it comes to the U.S. no-fly terrorist watch list, the Pentagon’s former spy chief recalled on Monday.

Retired Lt. Gen. Patrick Hughes, once the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and a top Homeland Security Department intelligence official, said after he entered the private sector in 2005 he was denied boarding on a flight because his name was on the no-fly list.  It has taken him ever since to clear up the confusion.

“It happened three years ago, I just got off the list –  Yay!,” Hughes said at a conference of intelligence analysts.

Security screenings were nothing new to Hughes — he said had passed them going back to the 1960s — but he was stopped short when the watch list flagged an Irish Republican Army member with the same name.

“It’s all about the name. I don’t see anything really subversive about Patrick …. Hughes, but it appears there’s an IRA guy out there who has the same name. Probably equally handsome,” he said.

Hughes’s was one of about 50,000 names on the no-fly list, which has mushroomed since the Sept. 11 attacks, when it contained just 16 people considered threats to aviation. Also snagged by similar name mix-ups have been Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and 1960s civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis. Such problems show the watchlist is poorly managed, critics say, but authorities call it a useful tool and say they have tightened procedures against such problems.