Iraq Must Decide Within Weeks if U.S. Troops Will Stay Past 2011, Top Official Says

The official, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said there were “irrevocable logistics and operational decisions” that had to be made by the United States before the withdrawal of forces was scheduled to accelerate.

“For the withdrawal, there’s what I call a physics problem,” Admiral Mullen said at a news conference at Camp Victory, the sprawling American base here. “We have 47,000 troops here, lots of equipment, and physically it just takes time to move them.”

He said, “Time is running short for any negotiations to occur.”

Admiral Mullen made his statements after meeting with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and high-ranking Iraqi military officials on Thursday. He said that there had been no formal discussions about United States forces remaining here.

“Should the Iraqi government desire to discuss the potential for some U.S. troops to stay, I am certain my government will welcome that dialogue,” he said.

The United States and Iraq agreed in 2008 that all American U.S. forces would leave by the end of this year.

Since the agreement, violence has decreased significantly, and Iraqi security forces have taken over patrolling the streets. But the Iraqis still lack the capacity to defend their borders and airspace, and they rely heavily on the American forces for intelligence sharing and training.

Independent military analysts and officials of both countries believe that if all American forces leave as scheduled, it could threaten security in Iraq, where there are daily explosions and where ethnic tensions remain high. A continued American military presence could also serve as a counterbalance to Iran, which has significant influence here.

Complicating matters are plans for the State Department to have a huge presence in Iraq after the end of this year. There are many questions among policymakers in Washington about whether the State Department can operate here without the logistical support and protection of the American military. The State Department is planning to roughly double its size in Iraq, to about 16,000 people, and it will require an army of private contractors to protect its personnel.

When the leaders of the United States and Iraq negotiated the agreement in 2008, the timetable was primarily created so that Iraqi political leaders could show their constituencies that they were taking a stand against the long-term presence of American troops. It was understood by both parties at the time that Iraq’s security forces would not be ready to defend the country by 2011, and that a new deal would be needed.

But since then, domestic politics in both countries have made it difficult for American troops to stay on beyond this year, even as military leaders on both sides acknowledge that Iraq’s security forces are not ready to defend the country on their own.

President Obama rose to national prominence opposing the Iraq war, and in his recent public comments, like his State of the Union address and his recent speech on Libya, he has emphasized that American troops will be leaving Iraq.

In Baghdad, Mr. Maliki has to contend with constituencies and coalition partners who oppose the United States’ presence. Moktada al-Sadr, the radical and anti-American Shiite cleric, for one, has vowed to renew insurgent warfare if American soldiers stay.

Mr. Sadr, whose Mahdi Army twice fought significant battles with American and coalition forces, became a prominent political player in Iraq after candidates loyal to him won 39 seats in last year’s parliamentary election.

“Sadr has been a significant complicating factor in Iraq for a long period of time,” Admiral Mullen said.

Referring to Mr. Sadr’s threat against American forces if they remain beyond this year, Admiral Mullen said: “Iraq has seen more than its fair share of violence and death. So I think a statement like that is irresponsible in terms of taking care of Iraqi citizens in the future.

“And obviously it will take the political leadership here in Iraq from every single party to come together to make sure that Iraq is stable and better for the Iraqi people and not return to the violence, which has been so devastating in recent years.”

 

In Japan, Aftershocks Are Also Felt From Within

 

Doctors here say they are seeing more people who are experiencing such phantom quakes, as well as other symptoms of “earthquake sickness” like dizziness and anxiety.

And it is no wonder. As if the threat of radiation from a crippled nuclear power plant were not enough, Tokyo and the region to its northeast have been under a constant barrage of aftershocks since the magnitude 9.0 earthquake that set off a devastating tsunami on March 11. Two earthquakes were felt in Tokyo on Wednesday morning, three on Tuesday, a large one on Monday and a very large one of magnitude 7.1 last Thursday.

Over all, there have been 400 aftershocks of magnitude 5.0 or greater in northeastern Japan since March 11. That is as many sizable quakes in one month as Japan typically experiences in two and a half years, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency.

The quakes are complicating efforts to control the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. For instance, the quake on Monday knocked out cooling at the Fukushima plant for nearly an hour.

Every time a sizable quake occurs, the first question on many people’s minds is whether the nuclear plant has been further damaged and whether a new cloud of radiation is on the way. A spokesman for the Tokyo Electric Power Company, the plant’s owner, is then hustled onto television to reassure viewers.

Government officials are becoming concerned that in the rush to cool the reactors and prevent hydrogen explosions, the plant’s vulnerability to another tsunami has been overlooked.

“A week ago we thought the major risk was a hydrogen explosion,” a senior official in the office of the prime minister said Tuesday. “I think the major risk at the moment is an aftershock and tsunami.”

Hidehiko Nishiyama, the deputy director general of Japan’s nuclear regulator, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said at a news conference on Wednesday evening that three measures are being considered that would allow electricity and cooling at the plant to remain intact even after a tsunami measuring 15 meters, or 49 feet. Right now the site can withstand a tsunami of only about 18 feet, he said. One measure is to interconnect the external power lines that have been built to the power plant, so that if one power line is broken, the others can still carry electricity to the various reactors.

A second measure is to put a generator on a small hill inside the plant site, and the third is to place a fire pumper engine on the hill that could send water into the reactors and spent fuel pools even if electricity was interrupted.

Japan, which sits atop four colliding tectonic plates, has a long history of earthquakes and some sophisticated technology to deal with them.

A detection system transmits warnings of some pending quakes a few seconds in advance to television broadcasters and to many cellphones. In recent weeks it has not been unusual to see nearly all the people in a restaurant or a train suddenly look at their cellphones at the same time.

Yurekuru, a free app for the iPhone that delivers such warnings (its name might be translated as “the shaking is coming”), now has 1.5 million users, compared with only 100,000 before the March 11 quake, according to RC Solution, the app’s developer.

Geologists say the frequency of the aftershocks has declined since March 11 and will continue to decline, but will still remain higher than normal for a long time. “There is an increased frequency and it will last for at least five or ten years,” said Ross S. Stein, a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif., who has studied the situation in Japan.

The March 11 quake was so strong that a Japan Coast Guard monitoring instrument on the floor of the Pacific Ocean near the epicenter moved 24 meters, or about 79 feet, eastward. The city of Sendai, whose airport was inundated by the tsunami, moved about 13 feet, according to Shinji Toda, a professor at Kyoto University.

Such large movements have shifted stresses in the earth, increasing the likelihood of quakes on some fault lines while reducing the likelihood on others, including the one involved in the 1923 Tokyo earthquake.

But over all, Dr. Stein said, the risks have increased. “There’s this very broad turn-on of seismicity that extends 300 miles from the rupture zone,” he said.

Satoko Oki, an assistant professor at the University of Tokyo’s earthquake research institute, said that an aftershock of the March 11 quake could reach magnitude 8.0.

There is some precedent. The 2004 quake of magnitude 9.1 near Sumatra, Indonesia, which spawned a tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people, was followed three months later by one measuring 8.6 and later by four more huge ones.

But the 8.8 magnitude earthquake in Chile in early 2010 has not yet produced an aftershock larger than 7.1, Dr. Stein said.

To be sure, the spate of earthquakes has not caused the same panic and mass exodus as the fears of radiation in the first week after the nuclear crisis began. Still, with levels of radiation in the Tokyo air having sharply fallen since then, some people interviewed on the street said they worried about the aftershocks more than radiation.

Dr. Hideaki Sakata, director of the Mejiro University Clinic, who is treating Ms. Suzuki, said that feeling the ground shaking when it is not is similar to the continued feeling of swaying when one first gets off a boat onto solid ground.

Dr. Kazuhiro Soeda, an ear, nose and throat specialist in Utsunomiya, outside Tokyo, who also treats patients having trouble dealing with the aftershocks, said: “People are getting too sensitive. This is something we’ve never experienced before.”

Makiko Inoue, Kantaro Suzuki and Ken Ijichi contributed reporting.

 

The enemy within

5 April 2011 Last updated at 21:24 ET By Mark Ward Technology correspondent, BBC News Wikileaks has got many companies thinking about how to monitor data movements Whistle-blowing website Wikileaks does not just spell trouble for the US government, Bank Julius Baer and the other companies, organisations and individuals that feature on the site.
Its mere existence and the appearance of many copycat sites is starting to occupy the minds of those who oversee security in every large company.
Why?
"Simple," said Philippe Courtot, founder and chief executive of security firm Qualys, "because every company has something to hide."
In most cases, he said, those secrets are just details of deals that are about to be signed, products under development or strategy changes. But also, he said, many firms have "dirty laundry" that would damage their reputation if it became public.
Wikileaks is tricky to defend against, said Mr Courtot, because the threat it poses is very diffuse and it comes from the inside. Before now, he said, corporates have put most of their time and money into defending themselves against external attack.
Spam filters, firewalls, anti-virus programs and intrusion detection systems are all about stopping the bad guys getting in. This makes sense because there are many millions of malicious programs and legions of cyber thieves endlessly trying to subvert employees and networks for profit.
Attack profile
Those defences are not entirely useless against the threats that Wikileaks pose, said Alex De Joode, security officer at hosting firm LeaseWeb.
They can come into play if supporters of Wikileaks take action in its name.
"What Wikileaks does is not really cyber crime," said Mr De Joode, "The acts of the individuals who tried to make companies accountable for their actions against Wikileaks using denial of service attacks, that's cyber crime."
In Operation Payback, many Wikileaks supporters joined forces to bombard well-known web firms such as Paypal, Amazon and Visa with data in an attempt to knock them offline. The targets were chosen because the firms, in the eyes of those supporters, had not done enough to support Wikileaks.
At such times, said Mr De Joode, established defences work because they are designed to defend against precisely those types of attack.
Not all defences point outwards. Inside corporate networks there are also tools available to watch what employees are doing.
Mohan Koo, managing director of security firm Dtex, said it was possible to monitor every mouse click and key press employees make, no matter the size of the company.
Security systems can defend against attacks carried out by Wikileaks supporters
"But," he said, "no-one is going to do that because there's just too much data."
Equally wrong-headed, he said, was for a company worried by Wikileaks to clamp down on what their employees do online.
"A company might think they have locked it down and there's nothing going on," he said. "but all they have done is make people look for ways around the blocks."
The statistics gathered by strict intranet monitoring tools might suggest that nothing nefarious was going on, he said.
In reality, security was likely to be compromised more because employees are using subterfuge to do the things they are used to doing, such as updating Facebook, while at work.
Having an unmonitored channel over which company information is flowing is a real problem, he said, given the increasing need to gather data to satisfy industry regulations; the scrutiny of bodies such as the Information Commissioner and the potential damage a brand would suffer in the wake of a leak.
Even worse, he said, a crackdown on web use during work hours might dissolve the bond of trust that should exist between a worker and their employer.
That relationship would suffer, said Mr Koo, if firms use technology in an adversarial manner.
Trusting times
Far better, he said, was to show employees why security matters to their personal lives as well as in the workplace.
"Remind them that security is about looking after their interests as well as those of the company," he said.
"A lot of users and employees are not aware of the implications of their day-to-day actions," he said.
Showing how unprotected phones, laptops or desktops could lead to lost data would help them at home and at work, he said.
"The whole objective here is to build trust," he said. "You need to get those employees to buy into the reasons you are doing this."
More trust, he said, meant a workforce that was less likely to leak or feel motivated to expose internal secrets.
Good habits can help keep data safe at home and at work
One radical way to avoid the risk of having secrets exposed is to have no internal secrets.
Indian technology firm HCL took this approach as part of a re-working of the company that began in 2005.
The need for change was driven by the realisation that although the company was still growing, the market for outsourcing was growing faster and it was getting left behind.
At the heart of the change, said HCL director Bindi Bhullar, was the decision to put employees, rather than their managers, in charge of the business.
"Those that understand the business the best are the employees," he said. "The value for the company is created between employees and customers."
Managers at HCL now work to ensure that employees get the support they need to do their job better. Part of that, said Mr Bhullar, involved sharing information about how the company is organised, details of employee reviews, who gets paid what and details of contracts and customer contacts.
"Internally we share a lot of sensitive data," he said, adding that the approach has not been without its problems.
But, he added, sharing that information, sent a strong signal about how much the company trusted its employees and helps to get them more engaged.
"If someone is engaged then you are going to lower the risk of someone blowing the whistle," he said. "Trust and transparency insulate you from issues like leaks."
View the original article here

The enemy within

在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。
在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。
5 April 2011 Last updated at 21:24 ET By Mark Ward Technology correspondent, BBC News Wikileaks has got many companies thinking about how to monitor data movements Whistle-blowing website Wikileaks does not just spell trouble for the US government, Bank Julius Baer and the other companies, organisations and individuals that feature on the site.

Its mere existence and the appearance of many copycat sites is starting to occupy the minds of those who oversee security in every large company.

Why?

"Simple," said Philippe Courtot, founder and chief executive of security firm Qualys, "because every company has something to hide."

In most cases, he said, those secrets are just details of deals that are about to be signed, products under development or strategy changes. But also, he said, many firms have "dirty laundry" that would damage their reputation if it became public.

Wikileaks is tricky to defend against, said Mr Courtot, because the threat it poses is very diffuse and it comes from the inside. Before now, he said, corporates have put most of their time and money into defending themselves against external attack.

Spam filters, firewalls, anti-virus programs and intrusion detection systems are all about stopping the bad guys getting in. This makes sense because there are many millions of malicious programs and legions of cyber thieves endlessly trying to subvert employees and networks for profit.

Attack profile

Those defences are not entirely useless against the threats that Wikileaks pose, said Alex De Joode, security officer at hosting firm LeaseWeb.

They can come into play if supporters of Wikileaks take action in its name.

"What Wikileaks does is not really cyber crime," said Mr De Joode, "The acts of the individuals who tried to make companies accountable for their actions against Wikileaks using denial of service attacks, that's cyber crime."

In Operation Payback, many Wikileaks supporters joined forces to bombard well-known web firms such as Paypal, Amazon and Visa with data in an attempt to knock them offline. The targets were chosen because the firms, in the eyes of those supporters, had not done enough to support Wikileaks.

At such times, said Mr De Joode, established defences work because they are designed to defend against precisely those types of attack.

Not all defences point outwards. Inside corporate networks there are also tools available to watch what employees are doing.

Mohan Koo, managing director of security firm Dtex, said it was possible to monitor every mouse click and key press employees make, no matter the size of the company.

Security systems can defend against attacks carried out by Wikileaks supporters

"But," he said, "no-one is going to do that because there's just too much data."

Equally wrong-headed, he said, was for a company worried by Wikileaks to clamp down on what their employees do online.

"A company might think they have locked it down and there's nothing going on," he said. "but all they have done is make people look for ways around the blocks."

The statistics gathered by strict intranet monitoring tools might suggest that nothing nefarious was going on, he said.

In reality, security was likely to be compromised more because employees are using subterfuge to do the things they are used to doing, such as updating Facebook, while at work.

Having an unmonitored channel over which company information is flowing is a real problem, he said, given the increasing need to gather data to satisfy industry regulations; the scrutiny of bodies such as the Information Commissioner and the potential damage a brand would suffer in the wake of a leak.

Even worse, he said, a crackdown on web use during work hours might dissolve the bond of trust that should exist between a worker and their employer.

That relationship would suffer, said Mr Koo, if firms use technology in an adversarial manner.

Trusting times

Far better, he said, was to show employees why security matters to their personal lives as well as in the workplace.

"Remind them that security is about looking after their interests as well as those of the company," he said.

"A lot of users and employees are not aware of the implications of their day-to-day actions," he said.

Showing how unprotected phones, laptops or desktops could lead to lost data would help them at home and at work, he said.

"The whole objective here is to build trust," he said. "You need to get those employees to buy into the reasons you are doing this."

More trust, he said, meant a workforce that was less likely to leak or feel motivated to expose internal secrets.

Good habits can help keep data safe at home and at work

One radical way to avoid the risk of having secrets exposed is to have no internal secrets.

Indian technology firm HCL took this approach as part of a re-working of the company that began in 2005.

The need for change was driven by the realisation that although the company was still growing, the market for outsourcing was growing faster and it was getting left behind.

At the heart of the change, said HCL director Bindi Bhullar, was the decision to put employees, rather than their managers, in charge of the business.

"Those that understand the business the best are the employees," he said. "The value for the company is created between employees and customers."

Managers at HCL now work to ensure that employees get the support they need to do their job better. Part of that, said Mr Bhullar, involved sharing information about how the company is organised, details of employee reviews, who gets paid what and details of contracts and customer contacts.

"Internally we share a lot of sensitive data," he said, adding that the approach has not been without its problems.

But, he added, sharing that information, sent a strong signal about how much the company trusted its employees and helps to get them more engaged.

"If someone is engaged then you are going to lower the risk of someone blowing the whistle," he said. "Trust and transparency insulate you from issues like leaks."

View the original article here