Post-Mortem Shows Russian Tycoon Died from Hanging

breitbart

By SYLVIA HUI
Associated Press
LONDON
A post-mortem examination found that self-exiled Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky died by hanging, and there was nothing pointing to a violent struggle, British police said.

Thames Valley Police said Monday that further tests, including toxicology examinations, will be carried out. The force did not specify whether the 67-year-old businessman hanged himself, but they have said there was no evidence to suggest anyone else was involved in the death.

Once one of Russia's richest men and a Kremlin powerbroker, Berezovsky fled to Britain in 2001 and claimed political asylum after a bitter falling out with Russian President Vladimir Putin. He became a vocal critic of the Kremlin.

Berezovsky had survived several assassination attempts in Britain and Russia, including a car bomb in 1994 that killed his driver.

Berezovsky's body was found by an employee on the bathroom floor at his upscale England home on Saturday. The employee called an ambulance after he forced open the bathroom door, which was locked from the inside. Police said the employee was the only person in the house when Berezovsky's body was discovered.

A forensic examination of Berezovsky's home will continue for several days, police said Monday.

A mathematician-turned-Mercedes dealer, Berezovsky built up his wealth during Russia's chaotic privatization of state assets in the 1990s following the breakup of the Soviet Union. In return for backing Russian President Boris Yeltsin, he gained political clout and opportunities to buy state assets like oil and gas at knockdown prices.

Berezovsky helped build Putin's power base but fell out of favor when the new president moved to curb the ambitions of the oligarchs. The tycoon was charged in Russia with fraud and embezzlement.

Berezovsky later associated himself with ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, another Kremlin critic. Litvinenko died after ingesting polonium in his tea at a London hotel in 2006.

In recent years, Berezovsky's fortunes declined with numerous expensive court cases.

Last year, Berezovsky lost a huge legal battle against former business partner and fellow Russian tycoon Roman Abramovich, which left him with legal bills of at least 35 million pounds ($53.3 million.)

Berezovsky had said that Abramovich, the billionaire owner of Chelsea Football Club, cheated him out of his stakes in the oil group Sibneft, arguing that he blackmailed him into selling the stakes vastly beneath their true worth after he fell out of Putin's favor.

But a judge threw out the case in August, ruling that Berezovsky was a dishonest and unreliable witness, and rejected Berezovsky's claims that he was threatened by Putin and Alexander Voloshin, a Putin ally, to coerce him to sell his Sibneft stake.

In 2010 Berezovsky also took a hit with his divorce from Galina Besharova, paying a settlement estimated to be as high as 100 million pounds. 

Russian tycoon’s mysterious death: Home to be sealed off for days

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Read at worldnews >>

Monkey Trap Nation

cluborlov

Lukas Brezek

Dmitry Orlov

A few weeks ago I flew back to Boston from St. Petersburg. Nine time zones is a lot to fly through in a day, especially when flying west. It all adds up to a single very long day that just won't end. When I had left Boston, I set up the boat to stay above freezing using a minimum amount of electric heat, so I expected to find a cold boat, but not a frozen one, in spite of the freezing cold and the snow, which was coming down quite heavily when I landed. But it turned out that while I was away the shore power cable's connection to its socket aboard the boat started arcing and burned, leaving the boat without power. (I was lucky; the boat could have burned down.) I spent an interesting couple of hours finding tools and supplies by flashlight, then stripping and splicing cables to restore power. As I finally went to sleep that night, wrapped in an electric blanket aboard a slowly defrosting boat, I thought to myself: “What have I done?” Sure, I flew to Boston because that's where my boat is, but there has got to be a better reason than that!

The next day I wandered out toward the center of town, and on the way saw an apartment building which had burned down, it turned out, the day before. The building had been heated badly, and the fire was caused by an electric space heater. Windows had plywood nailed over them, there were blooms of soot over many of them, and the doors were boarded up and posted “Danger, keep out!” The whole structure seemed to be sagging and caving in on itself. The displaced residents stood around wondering what to do. Ironically, this building happens to be across the street from the local fire station, but you see, the fire station doesn't happen to have any windows on the side that faced it, and so the firemen were quite unaware of the blaze right next door and slow to stir to action. I later found out that the fire got so out of hand that they had to call in help from the neighboring town.

Heat, house fires... see, living in Russia, I almost forgot about these things. In St. Petersburg, apartment buildings are heated using waste heat from power plants. Steam is distributed throughout the city using a network of buried pipelines which provide both heat and hot water. Their cost is just the cost of distribution (which is, at this point, mostly a matter of upkeep) since the energy would otherwise be wasted. The buildings are so warm that nobody wears sweaters indoors, and it is usually warm enough to lounge around in lingerie. On day one of a cold spell it can get a bit chilly indoors, but then somebody somewhere gives a giant steam valve a quarter turn, and things are again toasty. On the first day of a warm spell it can get positively sweltering indoors, and people start cracking windows open even though it's still below freezing outside, until somebody somewhere gives that valve a quarter-turn in the opposite direction. If you find this arrangement inefficient, then you must be sketchy on the concept of waste heat. Power plants are heat engines, subject to thermodynamic limits which cause 2/3 to ½ of the energy consumed to be released as waste heat. Now, there is enough heat wasted by all the power plants in the US to heat every single inhabited structure in the entire country, but instead that heat is vented to the atmosphere or used to heat the rivers and the ocean, and then quite a bit of the electricity they generate is wasted using electric space heaters. In turn, these space heaters cause a lot of house fires.

During my stay in St. Petersburg I did not see a single fire or fire engine, or hear a single fire engine siren. Buildings in St. Petersburg do not have fire exits or fire escapes; they don't need them. The place does not burn. The Emergencies Ministry publishes weekly statistics for things such as fires, and they bear out my casual observation. The reason for this is that houses in St. Petersburg are made of nonflammable materials: masonry and, more recently, reinforced concrete, insulated with hard plaster. If you proposed building something out of flammable materials, such as wood or vinyl siding, your project would not be approved. The walls tend to be thick—5 courses of brick or more—to provide both insulation and the thermal mass to hold in heat. Doors are made with a core of steel plate. Thus, the worst that can happen there is an isolated apartment fire.

Here in Boston, however, houses are made of flammable sticks covered in flammable plastic, the walls are kept thin to waste as much heat as possible, and the windows... you see, windows are like doors in that they need to both open and to close tightly to avoid leaking heat, with the additional requirement of letting through light. And so, Russian windows are basically doors with glass panes in them, that swing open on hinges. But not in the US, all because of some loon of an Englishman who—back in that country's dim and miserable past when the English were so poor that they couldn't even heat their houses and just sat shivering around a fireplace—decided that windows should consist of two empty glass picture frames (square ones) that slide up and down and rattle around in loose-fitting slots, letting through as much air as possible even when shut. The English then started calling normal windows “French windows,” to signal that such continental tendencies would not be tolerated. This curse of an invention then spread to all the other English-speaking countries, including the US.

And so the Russians heat with waste heat from power plants, build well-insulated houses out of nonflammable materials and sit around in their lingerie even as mercury freezes solid and snow-dunes drift slowly past, while the Americans heat their flammable, badly insulated stick-built houses with oil, gas and electricity, do their best to battle hypothermia and are often forced to choose between turning up the heat and being able to pay for food. Does this mean that the Russians are smart and the Americans stupid? I don't think so. People are people. But there is a cultural difference that's worth pointing out, and it comes down to just one thing: short-term thinking. Historically, the Russians seem to have been less susceptible to the short-termism that afflicts so many Americans. This may be less true now, with the recent hectic pace of development in Russia, but still there is plenty of social inertia causing people to continue to ask and re-ask the same inconvenient question over and over again: “And then what?” (“Ну а потом что?”)

Wouldn't it be nice if short-term decisions had short-term consequences and long-term decisions had long-term consequences? Well, too bad; it's the other way around. Short-term decisions have long-term consequences because they tend to lock you into an arrangement that is beneficial in the short term but detrimental in the long-term. Long-term decisions have short-term consequences because planning for the long term incurs short-term expenses. For example: in the short term, it is cheaper to nail houses together out of sticks and put them up in places far removed from the power plants that could heat them for free, but in the long term the heating bills, the house fires and the expense of keeping up a temporary structure tend to get out of hand. On the other hand, in the long-term, it is cheaper to build houses next to steam mains supplied free of charge by a power plant, out of solid masonry, and with steel plate doors and insulated double-windows (saving on fire alarms, fire escapes and fire departments) but in the short term this is more expensive.

What's worse, the consequences of short-term decision-making are cumulative over time: the long-term consequences of short-term decisions just keep piling up. But people are loathe to admit the errors of their ways, and can rarely be made to accept the consequences of their decisions. Instead, the tendency is to regard these consequences as new, entirely unexpected short-term problems to be solved with more short-term thinking. The result is a tendency to double down on every bad bet, and beyond a certain point the consequences magnify and feed on each other until they add up to an intractable, systemic crisis where no more short-term solutions can be found.

* * *

The monkey trap is, as the name suggests, a device for trapping monkeys. It is ingenuous in its simplicity, and also in the fact that it does not actually trap the monkey at all: it is the monkey that does the trapping. The trap consists of a hollowed-out gourd tied to a tree using a vine. The gourd has an opening just big enough to admit a monkey's paw when it isn't clenched into a fist. Inside is a banana. The monkey reaches inside, grabs the banana, but cannot withdraw it. Even as the hunter approaches to collect it, it cannot bring itself to unclench its fist, let go of the banana and escape. What traps the monkey is the monkey's own internal cost/benefit analysis, which is slanted toward the short term, coupled with its inability to consider the long-term effect of its short-term decisions. It is a perfect metaphor for what has caused the US to go off the rails.

Let us take another look at Russia. St. Petersburg now has a standard of living that compares favorably to many places in the US, including some of its more prosperous cities. Salaries are still considerably lower, but then so are the costs. In Russia, many consumer products, such as clothes, electronics, furniture and all of the other things that can cost almost arbitrary amounts of money, are quite expensive, and few people can afford to own closets full of clothes they hardly ever wear. On the other hand, necessities are quite reasonably priced: housing, education, heath care, communications, transportation and all the other basics are far more affordable. The US is the polar opposite. Here, all sorts of consumer items can be had for next to nothing, but when it comes to the necessities (housing, education, health care, communications and transportation) the norm seems to be to bleed people dry.

With housing, the major issue is that incomes have been falling for decades, but housing prices have only gone up. Housing is a cost, not an investment, because a residence is not a productive asset but a place to eat, sleep and recreate. The obvious long-term solution is to crash the real estate market, bulldoze unpromising suburban subdivisions and revert them to farmland, then build non-flammable apartment buildings next to power plants to provide affordable housing. Next thing you know, everybody suddenly has plenty of disposable income and the economy takes off. But that's long-term thinking, you see; short-term thinking is to prop up ridiculous real estate valuations by buying up defaulted mortgages at face value and hiding them inside the Federal Reserve. And so that's what's being done.

With education, the monkey trap was assembled in stages. First, the value of a college education was inflated to the point where only college graduates could get the remaining good jobs. Next, college education was pronounced a birthright, and financial aid was extended to make it universally accessible, on terms that amount to a lifetime of indentured servitude. Next, the price of higher education was inflated out of all proportion to its value, to cash in on the bonanza of free government-guaranteed money. And so now we have a ridiculously overpriced higher education system that is considered mandatory even though for most people earning a degree no longer guarantees an income sufficient to repay the loans. The obvious solution is to do away with the now meaningless college degrees and fall back on certificates, licenses, apprenticeships and other ways of getting people directly into the workplace. But that's long-term thinking, you see; short-term thinking is to make higher education even more mandatory, but somewhat more affordable, by automating it: instead of an actual lecture hall, students are now treated to a virtual experience of listening to a talking head robo-prof over the Internet from the comfort of their parents' basement. The only two subjects that can be taught using this method are test-taking and masturbation.

I could make a similar argument with respect to health care, communications and transportation. Perhaps I will do so next week. Or perhaps you've caught on already. I hope that this will be enough to make you allergic to short-termism.

* * *

But who, you might ask, are the monkeys? Well, that's the funny bit (at least to me). The real monkeys are the people running the system: the people who think they have it made. You see, they can't let go of the banana inside the gourd, because holding onto it gives them power. They are all the people who benefit outlandishly from the current system of bleeding the system dry: the college administrators, the health care administrators, the various managers who make six figures and beyond, and who are all lavishly rewarded for bringing in good quarterly and year-end results, a.k.a. short-term thinking. They think that holding onto that banana inside the gourd for another round will make them even better off. But I believe they are wrong.

Their prize “banana,” expressed in financial terms, consists of stocks (propped up by endless quantitative easing), bonds (issued by a bankrupt government drowning in debt), real estate (which will have to be protected by a private army as the land lapses into chaos), and cash (fiat currency, subject to sudden bouts of hyperinflation). Where are they going to escape to with all this loot? Costa Gringa? El Gringador? The fabled kingdom of Abu Gringadabi? Once the abovementioned pieces of paper all turn out to be worthless, they may not get too far beyond “¡Sus papeles, por favor!” You destroyed your own country; what do you plan to do with ours? Or are they going to construct a luxury artificial island anchored on some shoal in the middle of the ocean and live there? If so, whose navy is going to protect them from the pirates who will show up and say: “What nice island you have! You want something bad to happen to it?” (They only watched the dubbed version of that movie, and something got lost in translation.)

You see, their short-term thinking is... short-termist, enough said, while their long-term thinking is mostly a work of fantasy. You don't want to be like them, do you? In that case, stop thinking for the short term! Oh, and if you do get stuck in a monkey trap: let go the banana, withdraw your paw, hold the gourd hole-down and shake out the banana, grab the banana, run up a tree and eat the banana while, optionally, making eye contact with the hunter. Got that?

The REAL Obama Agenda – the Destruction of US Nuclear Defense – the Long Overdue Fightback Begins

NewZeal

By Trevor
At a meeting in Seoul Korea, March 2012, with then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, US President Barack Obama leaned toward Medvedev, thinking he was off mike and said, “On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this can be solved, but it’s important for him [Prime Minister Vladimir Putin] to give me space.” He added, “This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.”

That was the single most important statement made by Obama in his entire first term of office.

The destruction of the US nuclear deterrent and the American military has been Moscow’s, Beijing’s and Havana’s number one dream for decades.

It is what Obama’s communist mentors such as Frank Marshall Davis, Alice Palmer and Bill Ayers, have always worked relentlessly towards. Now their protege has the power to make that hellish fantasy a reality.

At last some in Washington seem to be taking the US’ looming national suicide seriously.

NATIONAL SECURITY LEADERS TO PRESIDENT OBAMA: STOP THE UNILATERAL DENUCLEARIZATION OF THE UNITED STATES

February 22, 2013

(Washington, D.C.): A group of former senior military and civilian national security professionals today called on President Barack Obama to abandon his reported intention to make further, deep and apparently unilateral reductions in the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

Press accounts indicate that the President was planning on announcing a cut of as much as one-third of the American deterrent during his State of the Union address on February 12th. He evidently decided to postpone the unveiling of this initiative, however, when North Korea conducted on that same day it latest nuclear test – an event that underscored the fact that only the United States is, under his administration, engaging in denuclearization.

The authors, who include two former members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and eighteen others with “decades of experience with national security policy and practice,” declare:

“It is now clear that, as a practical matter under present and foreseeable circumstances, this agenda will only result in the unilateral disarmament of the U.S. nuclear deterrent. That will make the world more dangerous, not less.

In our professional judgment…America’s “Triad” of nuclear-armed land-based and submarine-launched missiles and bomber-delivered nuclear weapons have promoted strategic stability and discouraged proliferation. Steps that raise uncertainty about the viability, reliability and effectiveness of our deterrent will have the opposite effect.”

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., the President and CEO of the Center for Security Policy which facilitated this letter, observed:

“As President Obama meets today with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, he is expected to emphasize the United States’ commitment to its most important Asian ally at a time when the threat to Japan from China and North Korea is growing by the day. The single most tangible thing Mr. Obama could do to give substance to such rhetoric would be to eschew further weakening of the U.S. nuclear arsenal – and the extended deterrent or “nuclear umbrella” it has constituted for nearly seventy years. The signers of this letter have rendered an incalculably important service by challenging the myth that doing otherwise in pursuit of a “world without nuclear weapons” is either achievable or desirable under present and foreseeable circumstances.”

Signers of the letter were:

• Adm. Thomas B. Hayward, USN (Ret.), Former Chief of Naval Operations
• Gen. Carl E. Mundy, Jr., USMC (Ret.), Former Commandant, U.S. Marine Corps
• Adm. Jerry Johnson, USN (Ret.), Former Vice Chief of Naval Operations
• Adm. James “Ace” Lyons, USN (Ret.), Former Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet
• Vice Adm. Robert Monroe, USN (Ret.), Former Director, Defense Nuclear Agency
• Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, USAF (Ret.), Former Deputy Chief of Staff, U.S. Air Force
• Hon. R. James Woolsey, Former Director of Central Intelligence
• Hon. John R. Bolton, Former U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
• Hon. Douglas J. Feith, Former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy
• Dr. William R. Graham, Chairman, General Advisory Committee on Arms Control, 1981-1985; Director, Office of Science and Technology Policy, Executive Office of the President, 1986-1989
• Lt. Gen. E.G. “Buck” Shuler, USAF (Ret.), Former Commander of the Eighth Air Force (Strategic Air Command)
• Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely, USA (Ret.), Former Deputy Commanding General, U.S. Army, Pacific
• Rear Adm. Robert H. Gormley, USN (Ret.), Former Chief of Studies, Analysis and War Gaming, Joint Chiefs of Staff
• Hon. Kathleen Bailey, Former Assistant Director, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
• Hon. Henry F. “Hank” Cooper, Former Director of the Defense Strategic Initiative (SDI); Former U.S. Representative to the Defense and Space Talks
• Hon. Samantha Ravich, Former Deputy National Security Advisor, Office of the Vice President
• Hon. Troy Wade, Former Director, Defense Programs, Department of Energy
• Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., Former Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy
• David J. Trachtenberg, Former Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy
• Fred Celec, Former Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Defense Programs

Drugs, bribes: $49 billion left Russia illegally in 2012

worldnews

By Douglas Busvine and Katya Golubkova, Reuters

MOSCOW - Nearly $50 billion was transferred out of Russia illegally in 2012 and more than half this sum may have been controlled by a single group of people, the country's central bank said on Wednesday. 

Sergei Ignatyev [photo], chairman of the Bank of Russia, was citing the findings of a study that the bank said it would publish later on Wednesday. 

"You get the impression that they (half the transfers) are all controlled by one well-organized group of people," Sergei Ignatyev, chairman of the Bank of Russia, told the Vedomosti daily in an interview.

Ignatyev, who is due to retire in June, declined to identify the group in response to a reporter's question at the Federation Council, the upper house of parliament, where he was due to deliver an address.

But the central bank analysis appears to be an indictment of President Vladimir Putin's brand of state capitalism, which critics say has allowed official corruption to flourish on a huge scale.

'Bribes and kickbacks'It also marks an unusually strong intervention by Ignatyev, who during his 11-year tenure has kept a generally low profile, seeking to preserve the central bank's policy autonomy without pushing for full, Western-style independence from politics.

Putin is due to nominate a successor to him in March, but no front runner has yet emerged.

The central bank study found that $49 billion, or around 2.5 percent of gross domestic product, was spirited illegally out of Russia last year.

"It can be payment for narcotics ... 'grey' imports ... bribes and kickbacks to officials (and) managers making large-scale purchases," Ignatyev told Vedomosti. "It can be schemes to avoid tax."

Of the total, the central bank estimates that $14 billion is related to trade operations, with the remainder made up of $35.1 billion in "dubious" capital transfers.

The latter represents 60 percent of last year's officially reported total net capital outflows of $56.8 billion, according to the study.

Expert: US in cyberwar arms race with China, Russia

openchannel

Rick Wilking / Reuters file

First Lt Michael Newman examines a server rack that is isolated from the Internet at the Air Force Space Command Network Operations & Security Center at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colo., in July 2010.

By Robert Windrem, Senior Investigative Producer, NBC News

The United States is locked in a tight race with China and Russia to build destructive cyberweapons capable of seriously damaging other nations’ critical infrastructure, according to a leading expert on hostilities waged via the Internet.

Scott Borg, CEO of the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, a nonprofit institute that advises the U.S. government and businesses on cybersecurity, said all three nations have built arsenals of sophisticated computer viruses, worms, Trojan horses and other tools that place them atop the rest of the world in the ability to inflict serious damage on one another, or lesser powers.

Ranked just below the Big Three, he said, are four U.S. allies: Great Britain, Germany, Israel and perhaps Taiwan.

But in testament to the uncertain risk/reward ratio in cyberwarfare, Iran has used attacks on its nuclear program to bolster its offensive capabilities and is now developing its own "cyberarmy," Borg said.

Borg offered his assessment of the current state of cyberwar capabilities Tuesday in the wake of a report by the American computer security company Mandiant linking hacking attacks and cyber espionage against the U.S. to a sophisticated Chinese group known as “Peoples Liberation Army Unit 61398.

In today’s brave new interconnected world, hackers who can defeat security defenses are capable of disrupting an array of critical services, including delivery of water, electricity and heat, or bringing transportation to a grinding halt. U.S. senators last year received a closed-door briefing at which experts demonstrated how a power company employee could take down the New York City electrical grid by clicking on a single email attachment, the New York Times reported.

U.S. officials rarely discuss offensive capability when discussing cyberwar, though several privately told NBC News recently that the U.S. could "shut down" the electrical grid of a smaller nation -- Iran, for example – if it chose to do so.

Borg echoed that assessment, saying the U.S. cyberwarriors, who work within the National Security Agency, are “very good across the board. … There is a formidable capability.”

“Stuxnet and Flame (malware used to disrupt and gather intelligence on Iran's nuclear program) are demonstrations of that,” he said. “… (The U.S.) could shut down most critical infrastructure in potential adversaries relatively quickly.”

China, Russia have different prioritiesBorg said China and Russia have similar capacity to cause mayhem, but have different priorities and skill sets.

“Russia is best at military espionage and operations,” he said. “That's what they have focused on for a long time. China is looking for crucial business information and technology. China's main focus is stealing technology. These things quite separate. You use different tools on critical infrastructure than you use for military espionage and different tools again on stealing technology."

Borg said that each has its strong suit. "The Russians are technically advanced. The Chinese just have more people dedicated to the effort, by a wide margin,” he said. “They are not as innovative or creative as the U.S. and Russia. China has the greatest quantity, if not quality."

Borg said the group featured in Mandiant’s report, the People’s Liberation Army Unit 61398, may be one of the most important groups working in China, but not necessarily the most important.

"There are at least two dozen groups carrying out aggressive operations against the U.S.,” he said. “They get in each other’s way and trip over one another, but they are all operating with the tacit approval of the Chinese government.

"They're not cooperating with each other because they don’t share capabilities," he added. "One group has good programming, but is bad at access or targeting." 

The Chinese hacking efforts are so broad, Borg said, that the highest-ranking Chinese officials “almost certainly do not know what all the groups are doing,” or the consequences. As a result, he added, they have been embarrassed by reports like the one in Tuesday’s New York Times, which first reported on the Mandiant assessment.

China is the most likely of the superpowers to leave a calling card, making their work the easiest to track. "China is very arrogant in its authorship of cyberweapons,” Borg said. “It does little to conceal its identity."

That’s in sharp contrast to the Russians, who he noted are not above writing code in Chinese to throw off investigators.

While the U.S. could respond to ongoing cyberattacks from China and Russia by shutting down the power grid of "any of its adversaries” and causing severe physical damage, Borg said it is encumbered by several factors.

One is its vulnerability to cyberwarfare as the world’s most networked nation, he said.

And from a geopolitical standpoint, Borg said, the U.S. would not want to badly damage the economy of either China or Russia. In fact, he said, the U.S. would almost certainly have to incorporate protections for critical systems like the power grid in any cyberattack.

Also, detecting the source of hostilities is not always easy, Borg said, as cybertracks are not as easy to follow as missile tracks. That means “mutually assured destruction,” the main strategic tenet of the Cold War, is problematic at best when talking about cyberwar, he said.

"It might be difficult to determine proportionate response,” he said. “It might not be simple to attack the attacker.”

For example, policymakers may think an attack has been carried out by the Chinese, when it was actually the work of the Russians or a rising power in the cyber world, like Iran. That is why intelligence -- getting insight into these operations -- is more important in a crisis than cyberforensics, which can take longer and not be as certain.

"There is no MAD in the Cold War sense," he said, "You can’t be 'assured' of attribution. The attack can be anonymous. It can be spoofed," or disguised as coming from another source. 

Iran developing 'serious capability'The U.S. first began to develop its own offensive capabilities 20 years ago when several strategic thinkers, particularly at the Naval Post-Graduate School, began to see the possibilities. It was not so much a strategic priority, but more "people familiar with electronics and hackers exercising their imagination." (Borg says one of those thinkers, Winn Schwartau, used fiction to discuss the threat and the possibilities, in a 1991 book, "Terminal Compromise.")

While the U.S. has the means to respond and to defend itself, Borg notes that some countries have no recourse. He cited the Russian invasion of the Republic of Georgia in August 2008, when the Georgian government and media infrastructure was quickly compromised.

What was particularly interesting, Borg said, was that the Russian military and intelligence services weren’t directly involved.

"The first wave was carried by organized crime," he noted. "The second wave was carried out by a (hacker) group organized though social media.” He said Russian hackers could download the attack software from a variety of popular sites, including dating and gun-collecting websites.

In both cases, Borg concluded, the organizers apparently were tipped off early about the timing of Russian military operations, he said.

The attack on Georgia also illustrated another aspect of cyberwarfare, Borg said, noting that Georgia, Estonia and Lithuania afterward formed a cyberalliance, leaving them in a better position to deal with future assaults.

That also appears to be the case with Iran, which recently announced that it decided to establish cyber army and claimed to have 4,000 to 5,000 military personnel involved in defensive and offensive operations. That isn’t all bluster, Borg said, noting that when the U.S. leveled new sanctions on Iranian banks last year, U.S. banks suddenly came under attack.

"Iran is developing a serious capability," said Borg. “It's exaggerating the present capabilities, but it’s working toward the future."

That’s especially troubling because the risk of smaller nations waging cyberwar against one other may be higher than with the online superpowers, he said.

He cited reports indicating that Iran may have been behind what he called one of the more serious cyberattacks to date -- an assault last August on the Saudi Aramco computer network that disabled more than 30,000 computers used to control the flow of Saudi oil. The Saudi Interior Ministry blamed "foreign countries" for the attack.

Borg said he believes the attack was an "Iranian fundamentalist attack ... at some point loosely the under auspices of Iran, and blessed by Iran. The fundamentalist group made a claim of responsibility. ... “Based on technical analysis, the claim has credibility."

For that reason, Borg says he is less worried about the possibility of China or Russia launching a catastrophic attack against the U.S. than he is about the emerging cyberpowers.

“What I’m really concerned about isn’t Russia or China, but attacks from Iran or terrorist groups working with state actors,” he said.

Video: Huge hole as Russian meteor smashes into icy lake

RussiaToday

An aerial meteorite explosion has wreaked havoc in Russia's Urals. The video shows a tremendous hole in Chebarkul Lake made by meteorite debris.

Videos of meteor fireball screams across the sky in Russia

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Read on cosmiclog >>

Iran gives stealth drone secrets to Russia

WND/ By Reza Kahlili

Russia has helped decode an American stealth drone that was captured by Iran 14 months ago in exchange for its secrets, a source has told WND.

Last week, Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards air and space division, announced the decoding of the drone, while Islamic regime media aired aerial footage below from the drone showing some of its operational capabilities.

“Some (Guards officers) believed that America would send its commando unit to destroy (the drone) while others were of the opinion that the U.S. would not risk having its forces get caught by us, creating a bigger problem for themselves, and that they might just do an air raid to destroy it,” Hajizadeh said. “We gave it a 10 to 15 percent chance on the air raid, and because of that we ordered an alert at all our missile bases to be ready to launch against all U.S. bases (in the region) if they did take any action.”

When the drone was captured, President Obama said, “We’ve asked for it back. We’ll see how the Iranians respond.”

According to Hamidreza Zakeri, a former intelligence officer of the regime who has defected to Europe, Iran and Russia had long been working on trapping a U.S. drone.

A Russian military team from its air and space division had secretly entered Iran days after a strategic agreement between the two countries in 2007 and was stationed at Revolutionary Guard bases to help the Guards with its weapons program and access to modern U.S. technology.

Get the inside story in Reza Kahlili’s “A Time To Betray” and learn how the Islamic regime “bought the bomb” in “Atomic Iran.”

After studying the stealth drone’s travel routes and its surveillance of Iran’s skies, the Russians successfully hacked into the system of one of the RQ170s and forced it to land in Iran Dec. 4, 2011.

With this collaboration, all the information of the stealth drone is now in the hands of the Russians, and much has been given to Iran’s Defense Ministry. Russia in turn provided Iran with the information on its anti-air defense system S300. Russia, because of international sanctions against Iran, could not deliver the actual S300 system.

Other information passed to Iran included technology on the American fighters F35 and X36, which eventually resulted in the Defense Ministry publicly unveiling its new jet fighter, the Qaher 313, with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad boasting of the advanced features of this super stealth fighter.

However, according to the source, the fighter shown by Iranian media was merely a shell model and not operational and that the regime has only tested the smaller size. The project originally was scheduled to be completed in 2016, but due to the sanctions and economic problems, the regime has had problems following through with the timetable.

Russian-Iranian collaboration goes back many years. After the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and the formation of the new republics, oil reserves in the Caspian Sea became an issue among the neighboring countries, resulting in disputes with Iran, which claimed half of the reserves.

Russia worried about the impact of the increased importance of this new market and the possible decrease in value of its Siberian oil fields, where over 40 percent of its income is based on its export of gas and oil. Vladimir Putin made a special trip to Iran in 2007 over the issue.

Because the Caspian-Caucasus region could play a significant role in the world economy and world policy, Putin in his meeting with Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was able to significantly expand Russia’s collaboration with the Islamic regime. He also got an agreement on the division of Caspian oil reserves and a bigger Russian role in transporting the oil out of that area.

The 10-year agreement called for the expansion of commerce between the two countries of up to $200 billion and military and secret projects totaling $350 billion.

It was the first time a Kremlin chief visited Iran since Josef Stalin’s trip in 1943.

Russian collaboration extends to the regime’s missile, nuclear and even bio-weapons programs. Sources in the Islamic regime previously have revealed exclusively to WND the existence of secret bio-weapons site in Iran, where, with the help of Russia, Iran has mastered production of eight microbial agents, arming its missiles with biological warheads, and a nuclear site at which, with Russian help, laser technology is enriching uranium.

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/02/iran-gives-stealth-drone-secrets-to-russia/#UyJLOG7EKGeIEv1m.99

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Russian couple accused of spying in Germany

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By Gareth Jones, Reuters

BERLIN -- A married couple went on trial in Germany on Tuesday accused of handing hundreds of sensitive NATO and European Union documents to Russia during a two-decade spying career that continued well beyond the end of the Cold War. 

Federal prosecutors accuse Andreas Anschlag and his wife Heidrun -- suspected Russian citizens whose names are aliases -- of entering West Germany in 1988 with forged Austrian passports and fabricating a suburban middle-class existence to cover their espionage. 

So perfect was the subterfuge that even their own daughter did not know of their spying, German media reported. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin worked for the Soviet intelligence agency the KGB in East Germany in the 1980s when the couple are accused of having started their career. 

"This is a case of treason that has been going on for more than 20 years, involving the entire range of intelligence activity, from trying to recruit new sources to instructing others, all the way to writing their own reports on political and military matters," federal prosecutor Rolf Hannich said. 

"These are documents and evaluations on NATO's policies which are of course of high interest to the other side because they can then adapt their own behavior." 

The couple said nothing at Tuesday's court hearing. In Germany, the accused are not required to submit a plea. 

The indictment said one of the sources for the secret documents procured by the Anschlags was a person working for the Dutch foreign ministry. 

German special forces arrested them in separate raids on their family home in Marburg, central Germany, and on an apartment near the southwestern city of Stuttgart in the early hours of October 18, 2011. 

According to reports, Heidrun Anschlag was at home in the process of receiving radio messages from Moscow when the Marburg raid took place at what they described as a typical, middle-class suburban family house. 

Hannich said the prosecution's task had been rendered more difficult because the couple had already been preparing their return to Russia and had destroyed many documents from before 2008. 

Documents obtained by the couple related to such matters as NATO's political and military affairs, the EU's military, police and civil missions, political negotiations on EU bodies and the situation in eastern European and Central Asian countries. 

Economic ties between Russia and Germany are booming but Chancellor Angela Merkel, who grew up in former communist East Germany, has also criticized Moscow's human rights record and clampdown on political dissent. 

In Germany, spying can be punished by up to 10 years in jail.

Canciller ruso: La marcha de Assad como precondición para el diálogo es imposible

Putin entrega pasaporte ruso a Depardieu

seguramente la'bana ya estara buscando sus celebridades francesas para emular a putin.

Russia Sends Marines, Warships To Syria To Back Assad

Pat Dollard

Excerpted from The Jerusalem Post: Russia has concentrated five landing ships in the eastern Mediterranean in a show of force meant to deter Western nations from intervening militarily in Syria, The Sunday Times quoted a Russian diplomat as saying.

According to the report, the ships are carrying military vehicles and hundreds of Russian marines, and are being accompanied by combat vessels.

While officially Russia has claimed the ships have been deployed to partake in an exercise to “improve the management, maintenance and testing of the interaction of naval forces,” the Times quoted the diplomat as saying the marines were meant to deter the West from deploying ground forces in the uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad.

“Russia should be prepared for any developments, as it believes the situation in Syria might reach its peak before Easter,” the Times quoted the diplomatic source as saying.

The report came as Assad was set to make his first public speech on the uprising against his rule in months.

With insurgents fighting their way closer to the seat of his power, state media said in a statement that Assad would speak on Sunday morning about the “latest developments in Syria and the region”, without giving details.

Since Assad’s last public comments, in November, rebels have strengthened their hold on swathes of territory across northern Syria, launched an offensive in the central province of Hama and endured weeks of bombardment by Assad’s forces trying to dislodge them from Damascus’s outer neighborhoods.

Syria’s political opposition has also won widespread international recognition. But Assad has continued to rely on support from Russia, China and Iran to hold firm and has used his air power to blunt rebel gains on the ground.

The United States military said US troops and equipment had begun arriving in Turkey on Friday to oversee the deployment of US and European Patriot surface-to-air missile batteries to the Turkish-Syrian border.

Turkey and NATO say the missiles are a safeguard to protect southern Turkey from possible Syrian missile strikes. Syria and allies Russia and Iran say the deployments could spark an eventual military action by the Western alliance.

Depardieu el "ruso"

cuando le metan un microfono en el trasero mantecoso saldra corriendo para punto uno.

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elpais/

El presidente de Rusia, Vladímir Putin, ha concedido la ciudadanía rusa al actor Gérard Depardieu, quien había expresado su deseo de renunciar al pasaporte francés por la decisión del Gobierno galo de aumentar al 75% los impuestos sobre la renta de los más ricos. Según informa hoy el Kremlin, Putin firmó el decreto de concesión del pasaporte ruso a Depardieu, nacido en Francia en 1948 y que ha dado vida a personajes como Obelix, Cyrano de Bergerac o Martin Guerre, en virtud del artículo 89 de la Constitución rusa.

Putin ya había garantizado en diciembre pasado la expedición de un pasaporte ruso al artista francés si este decidía definitivamente renunciar a su ciudadanía original, aunque destacó que "él (Depardieu) se considera francés". "Él se considera europeo y ciudadano del mundo. Pero quiere mucho a su país, su cultura y la vive. Estoy seguro de que ahora no está atravesando un buen momento, pero esto acabará", apuntó. Putin subrayó que los artistas son personas con "un espíritu especial" y que "es fácil herir sus sentimientos". "Estoy convencido de que los máximos dirigentes (de Francia) no querían herir a Depardieu, pero como cualquier funcionario de alto o medio rango siempre defendemos nuestra política y las decisiones tomadas", dijo.

El Kremlin se había tomado en un principio a broma las afirmaciones de Depardieu quien, según el diario Le Monde, dijo que el presidente ruso le había enviado un pasaporte. El actor, de 64 años, anunció hace unas semanas el traslado de su residencia fiscal a la localidad belga de Néchin, a apenas un kilómetro de la frontera francesa. Su decisión fue tachada de "lamentable" por el primer ministro francés, Jean-Marc Ayrault, lo que indignó a Depardieu, quien reaccionó anunciando su voluntad de renunciar la nacionalidad francesa.

Continuar leyendo en El Pais >>

A Life of Integrity: Vladimir Bukovsky at 70

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Vladimir Bukovsky, 1977
Photo Paul Babeliowsky iisg.nl

Vladimir Kara-Murza

Yesterday, on Sunday, December 30, Vladimir Bukovsky – writer, scientist, human rights campaigner, and one of the founders of the dissident movement in the USSR – celebrated his 70th birthday. IMR Senior Policy Advisor Vladimir Kara-Murza recalls the milestones in Bukovsky’s life – and urges the present-day Russian opposition to heed his advice.

Vladimir Bukovsky does not like to be called a politician, preferring to be known as a neurophysiologist, writer or, at the very least, civic activist. In truth, he never engaged in politics: he merely realized, at an early age, that he could not reconcile himself to live quietly with a criminal and mendacious regime that sought to make millions of people its silent accomplices. Bukovsky’s protest was a moral one. “We did not play politics, we did not draft programs for the ‘people’s liberation,’” he recalls in his memoirs, To Build a Castle (a must-read for anyone interested in Russian history). “Our only weapon was glasnost (openness). Not propaganda, but glasnost, so that no one could say ‘I did not know.’ The rest is a matter for each person’s conscience.”

“I did not know” was a popular answer among members of the older generation when asked by the youngsters of the 1950s about Stalin’s times. The public condemnation of Stalinist crimes at the 1956 Communist Party congress and (almost immediately) the brutal suppression of the Hungarian revolution, which showed that the nature of the regime has not changed, were formative events for Bukovsky. His protest activity began literally during his school days: he joined a clandestine anti-Soviet group and published an underground satirical journal. In response, he was expelled from school, summoned to a dressing-down by the Moscow City Communist Party Committee, and barred from studying at university (he nevertheless won admission to Moscow State University, only to be discovered and expelled a year later.)

Vladimir Bukovsky is one of the founders of the Soviet dissident movement, which was born in the fall of 1960 on Moscow’s Mayakovsky Square. There, a group of yet-unknown young activists, poets, and actors (including Yuri Galanskov, Eduard Kuznetsov, Vladimir Osipov, Ilya Bokshtein, and Vsevolod Abdulov) held public readings of banned poetry – Akhmatova, Pasternak, Mandelshtam, Tsvetaeva. They also read from their own works and the works of their contemporaries, which would soon be disseminated as samizdat (literally “self-publications,” the clandestine reproduction and distribution of banned literature). Samizdat, too, was born on Mayakovsky Square. The authorities responded in their usual manner: with dispersals of the meetings by bulldozers and snow ploughs; provocations by Komsomol (Young Communist League) operatives; beatings and arrests. Yet the “seditious” meetings continued in the heart of the Soviet capital for almost two years:

“That amazing community, which would later be called a ‘movement’, was being born. It had no leaders or followers…. Each of us, like a nerve cell, participated in this amazing orchestra without a conductor, compelled only by his or her sense of self-respect and personal responsibility for what was happening.” (Vladimir Bukovsky, To Build a Castle)

Vladimir Bukovsky was one of the organizers of the unofficial poetry readings on Moscow’s Mayakovsky Square, the birthplace of the Soviet dissident movement.

The Mayakovsky readings were only the beginning: one can study the history of dissent in the Soviet Union by reading Bukovsky’s biography. He was involved in organizing the December 1965 “Glasnost Rally” on Pushkin Square (Moscow’s first opposition demonstration in four decades); the January 1967 rally against political arrests (also on Pushkin Square;) and, probably his most important endeavor, the public campaign against “punitive psychiatry” used by the KGB against dissenters. After his first arrest in 1963 for “possession of anti-Soviet literature,” Bukovsky (then 20 years old) was brought to the office of Lieutenant-General Mikhail Svetlichny, the head of the Moscow KGB. “Svetlichny said a very simple thing,” Bukovsky recalls in the documentary They Chose Freedom. “‘Here is the arrest warrant. If you honestly tell us everything – where you got this book, who gave it to you, to whom you gave it [to read], I will not sign it, and you will go home. If you refuse, I will sign it, and you will go to jail.’ …  I found such a formulation insulting, and cursed at him. He did not say anything, just shook his head, signed the warrant, and said ‘Take him away.’”

Vladimir Bukovsky paid for his refusal to go along with the regime’s lies with 12 years in prisons, labor camps, and “special psychiatric hospitals.” Not once did he admit his guilt, ask for clemency, disown his words, or betray his friends. “We fought desperately against this regime of scoundrels. We were a handful of unarmed people in the face of a mighty state with the world’s most monstrous machine of repression. And we won. The regime had to retreat. And even in prisons we proved too dangerous for them.” (Vladimir Bukovsky, To Build a Castle) On December 18, 1976, a handcuffed Bukovsky was driven to Chkalovsky military airfield and, accompanied by a convoy from the KGB’s elite Alpha unit (that was its first operation), was flown to Zurich’s international airport. Communist Party Central Committee documents referred to this as “measures relating to the liberation of Comrade L. Corvalan¹.” In the end, the regime was unable to defeat its enemy inside the country.

In the early 1990s, Vladimir Bukovsky and Member of Parliament Galina Starovoitova tried to convince the Russian leadership to conduct a trial of the Communist regime and the KGB in order to help the country comprehend its past and avoid repeating it.

The next time Vladimir Bukovsky came to Russia was at the invitation of Boris Yeltsin in 1991, before the attempted August coup d’état – and again just after the coup, when barricades were still being dismantled near the Moscow White House, and when the empty pedestal from the toppled statue of KGB founder Felix Dzerzhinsky was still hand-painted with a swastika and hammer-and-sickle – with an equal sign between them. “Let us not flatter ourselves – the dragon is not yet dead. He is mortally wounded, his spine is broken, but he still holds human souls in his clinging paws,” Bukovsky said at a rally on Mayakovsky Square in September 1991. “The Lubyanka [KGB] archives, seized by the Russian government, contain secrets of dreadful crimes. Only by making them public, by handing them over to an objective international commission, will we be able to cleanse ourselves from this filth.” Unfortunately, Bukovsky’s call was not heeded. The new Russian authorities, unwilling to “rock the boat,” refrained from fully opening the archives, from officially condemning the Communist Party and the KGB for their crimes, and from introducing lustrations for those who had participated in the crimes. A genuine moral renewal of society never took place. Russia’s young democracy was not protected from a comeback by the ideological successors of Yuri Andropov and Vladimir Kryuchkov. This comeback came just eight years after the democratic victory of August 1991. As Bukovsky had warned, “it is like dealing with a wounded beast – if you do not finish it off, it will attack you.”

Today, Bukovsky is not retiring or leaving public life – and his upcoming 70th birthday will do nothing to change that. His experience in fighting the KGB system is too relevant; his advice too valuable; his standing among the leaders and supporters of the present-day Russian opposition too high. During the frozen (in all senses of the word) winter of 2007, at the height of Putin’s power, Bukovsky was nominated for president by the democratic opposition as a symbol of moral protest. The line of people wishing to sign his nomination papers extended for seven hours; the Sakharov Center could not accommodate everyone, and people had to wait outside in Moscow’s freezing temperatures.

In December 2007, Vladimir Bukovsky (center) was officially nominated for president of Russia by an assembly of voters in Moscow. The Central Electoral Commission headed by Vladimir Churov denied him access to the ballot.

“The opposition needs a candidate for president – strong, uncompromising, decisive, with irreproachable political and, more importantly, moral authority,” read the statement of the Initiative Group that nominated Bukovsky, “Russia needs its own Vaclav Havel, not a new successor from [the KGB].”

¹ Vladimir Bukovsky was exchanged for Chilean Communist Party leader Luis Corvalan, who had been jailed by General Augusto Pinochet.

There are few people like Vladimir Bukovsky in any society – let alone Russian society, which has been wrecked by decades of Soviet dictatorship, and by 13 years of Putin’s cynical authoritarianism. It is likely that the coming years will bring significant changes to Russia. During this critical period, Bukovsky’s words will be very important. This time, they must be heard.

Russia launches fraud, money laundering probe against opposition leader Navalny

Andrey Smirnov / AFP - Getty Images

Russian opposition activist and blogger Alexei Navalny (center) is detained by the police on Oct. 27 during a protest over a wave of arrests and allegations that an opposition leader was tortured.

By Reuters

MOSCOW -- Russia has opened a criminal investigation against opposition leader Alexei Navalny on suspicion of fraud and money laundering, the federal investigative committee said Friday.

Navalny, an anti-corruption blogger who has organized protests in the past 12 months against President Vladimir Putin, already faces charges of theft that he says are politically motivated and part of a Kremlin clampdown on dissent. More >>

Physicist: Obama Chosen By The Russians 20 Years Ago To Be POTUS

Birther Report:

68Truthseeker: Physicist claims he was told in 1992 'The USA will have a black, Soviet agent as president soon' Interview with Physicist Thomas Fife by Geopolitical Analyst, Jeff Nyquist. - Hat tip SA.