US intelligence warns Kabul could fall within one month

Bill Van Auken

The collapse of US-backed Afghan security forces in the face of a nationwide offensive by the Taliban insurgency has led US military and intelligence officials to warn that the fall of Kabul could come within one month to 90 days, the Washington Post reported Wednesday.

The new estimate represents a change in the already grim projection that the US-backed puppet regime of President Ashraf Ghani could be brought down in six to 12 months after the withdrawal of US and NATO troops, which is to be formally concluded within less than three weeks.

Afghan children on a captured Humvee (Twitter)

“Everything is moving in the wrong direction,” a “person familiar with the military’s new intelligence assessment,” told the Post .

The report of the new assessment came as the Taliban increased to nine the number of provincial capitals under its control. According to Western estimates, in addition to now holding more than one-quarter of the country’s capitals, the insurgency controls 65 percent of its land mass. Taliban forces are already besieging and occupying areas of major cities, including Kandahar and Lashkar Gah in the south, Ghazni in the east and Herat in the west.

On Wednesday, the insurgency captured Faizabad, the capital of Badakhshan province in the far northeast of the country. The province, which shares Afghanistan’s 57-mile border with China, was the only one that the Taliban failed to conquer when the Islamist movement ruled the country from 1996 to 2001. The fall of Faizabad brings seven of Afghanistan’s nine northern provinces under Taliban control.

In the most important of these capitals, Kunduz, with a population of nearly 375,000, remaining Afghan government forces, which were still holding a fortified base near the airport outside the city, surrendered en masse Wednesday. The surrender deal had been brokered with Afghan army commanders by local elders, who asked them not to resist the Taliban.

At least 2,000 Afghan government troops were at the base, the headquarters of the 217th Pamir Army Corps, one of seven army corps in the country, which was responsible for security in the country’s north. The Taliban captured large stocks of US-supplied weapons and Humvee armored vehicles, as well as a helicopter in the surrender.

The continuing rout of the Afghan national security forces came as US-backed President Ghani made an emergency trip to Mazar-i-Sharif, a city of half a million that is one of the last areas still under government control in the north. Ghani used the trip to promote his government’s desperate policy of banking on the arming of so-called “uprising forces,” comprised of militias loyal to local and regional warlords.

In Mazar-i-Sharif, Ghani held meetings with infamous Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum and Tajik warlord Atta Muhammed Noor. While the two men fought each other in the bloody civil war that followed the CIA-orchestrated war in the 1980s against the Moscow-backed government and Soviet forces in Afghanistan, they united in the so-called Northern Alliance that opposed the Taliban after it took power in 1997. Dostum, who carried out some of the worst war crimes during the civil war, was a key US ally following the October 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. Together with US special forces, he organized the massacre of some 2,000 Taliban prisoners, who were suffocated or shot to death after being stuffed into metal shipping containers near Kunduz.

Ghani had previously attempted to sideline figures like Dostum and Noor, both because of their bloody history and the challenge they posed to his government’s authority. Now that he is appealing to them to mobilize forces to defend his regime against the Taliban, it is by no means clear that they can do so.

Both Dostum and Noor have become immensely wealthy off the corruption that is the lifeblood of the Afghan regime. While they had based their authority on their records as “mujaheddin” leaders in the US-backed war against the Soviet-backed government and Soviet troops in the 1980s, they are now seen as collaborators with the US occupation.

The Taliban’s ability to consolidate control over much of the country’s north, which was the center of opposition to their rule in the late 1990s, is a measure of the overwhelming popular hostility to the puppet regime in Kabul and its masters in Washington.

Among the defections to the Islamist insurgency over the past week was that of Asif Azimi, a former senator from Samangan and a major warlord in Jamiat-e-Islami, a predominantly Takij party that was the backbone of the Northern Alliance led by Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was assassinated in 2001.

Explaining his decision to support the Taliban, Azimi told the Wall Street Journal, “We want an Islamic government. This government is a puppet of America. Anyone who stands against it, we will support it.”

The terminal crisis of the puppet government headed by Ghani has found expression in a wholesale reshuffling of the command of its security forces and the sudden resignation Wednesday and flight from the country of its acting Finance Minister Khalid Payenda. He deserted his post as the regime faced the cutoff of fully 50 percent of its revenues as a result of the Taliban seizing control of the majority of the country’s border crossings, taking over the collection of taxes and customs duties. Payenda has also been charged with unreported foreign income, emblematic of the pervasive corruption of the US-backed regime.

Nearly 390,000 Afghans have been internally displaced by the fighting since the beginning of the year, with many of them fleeing to the already seriously overcrowded capital of Kabul. Encampments of these internal refugees have proliferated in parks and city streets, while Kabul’s mosques have been converted into shelters. Refugees have charged that the government has failed to provide them with food and other vital assistance.

The growing crisis in Kabul could lead to social unrest, Qais Mohammadi, a lecturer in economics at Kardan University, told Foreign Policy, pointing to the breakdown of essential services, including electricity, and an inflation rate of between 10 and 20 percent, with gasoline prices doubling since May.

Speaking to reporters in Washington on Tuesday, US President Joe Biden said he did “not regret” his order to withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan by the end of the month.

“We spent over a trillion dollars over 20 years, we trained and equipped with modern equipment over 300,000 Afghan forces, and Afghan leaders have to come together. We lost thousands … of American personnel,” Biden said.

Why the trillion dollars—the training and equipping of 300,000 Afghan troops (a vastly inflated number, given wholesale desertions and commanders’ listing of “ghost soldiers” whose salaries could be pocketed) and the blood spilt by US forces, not to mention the killing of hundreds of thousands of Afghans—have yielded the worst debacle for US imperialism since the fall of Saigon 46 years ago, Biden made no attempt to explain.

Eleven COVID-19 patients die in Russian hospital after oxygen pipe bursts

Clara Weiss

The bursting of an underground oxygen pipe has killed nearly a dozen COVID-19 patients in the ICU unit of a hospital in Russia’s North Ossetia province. While the hospital staff could use two oxygen cylinders to hook up many of the most severely ill patients to a ventilator, it took up to an hour to fully restore oxygen supplies, far too long for nine of the patients.

Two more patients died the following night. It is not clear whether there was a direct relationship between their deaths and the disruption of oxygen supplies the day before. All the patients had reportedly been in serious condition and hooked up to ventilators, with up to 90 percent lung damage. Overall, the hospital in Vladikavkaz had some 71 patients in its ICU unit at the time of the incident.

A medical worker measures the temperature of a homeless man prior to giving a shot of the one-dose Sputnik Light vaccine at a mobile vaccination station in St. Petersburg, Russia, Wednesday, Aug. 11, 2021. (AP Photo/Elena Ignatyeva)

An unnamed source told Interfax that the “deterioration of equipment” had caused the pipe to burst. A preliminary report by local authorities found that technical deficiencies and negligence contributed to the disaster. The oxygen tanks that the hospital received five or six years ago were apparently acquired without the proper legal documentation. As is often the case in such incidents, the hospital’s chief physician has now been made the scapegoat. He was arrested on Tuesday and is awaiting criminal charges.

The horrific incident in Vladikavkaz, a city in the deeply impoverished Caucasus region, gives a sense of the large number of preventable deaths that are the direct result of the disastrously underfunded and run-down social infrastructure. While the official number of COVID-19 deaths in Russia stands at 164,000, the real death toll is believed to be higher by a factor of at least five.

The country has had an official total of more than 6.5 million coronavirus infections. While a summer surge, driven by the Delta variant, peaked in July, there are still well over 20,000 new cases recorded every day. For over a month now, well over 750 people die every day from COVID-19.

Monday’s incident was one of the deadliest in a series of fires and oxygen-supply disruptions at Russian hospitals that have claimed dozens of lives since the beginning of the pandemic. Last May, several people died in Moscow and St. Petersburg hospitals after ventilators went up in flames. The deaths of up to 13 patients at a hospital in Rostov-on-Don have been linked to the explosion of an oxygen tank in October. Three patients died at a hospital in the Moscow region in February after oxygen supplies were cut off. Another fire in June in a hospital near Moscow claimed three lives.

Understaffed and underfunded hospitals in Russia have operated on the brink of collapse for the entire pandemic, with many buildings completely dilapidated and in unhygienic condition.

Speaking on the state of Russia’s hospitals, a doctor at a regional hospital in St. Petersburg angrily stated last October, at the height of the second wave, “There is a constant feeling that there is a shortage of everything: supplies, personnel, even elementary new buildings. Patients are treated in hospitals built in the middle of the last century. You can’t even take a normal shower there. So how can you speak of medical treatment [under these conditions]?”

The disastrous state of Russia’s health care system is a direct result of the restoration of capitalism in the former Soviet Union. Despite the Stalinist degeneration, the Soviet health care system was one of the best in the world, and Soviet scientists contributed significantly to the eradication of diseases such as polio. With the restoration of capitalism, previously suppressed diseases such as tuberculosis made a comeback, while the worst HIV epidemic outside of Africa has ravaged the country for years.

Over the past 20 years, the Putin government has implemented further devastating cuts, under the pretext of the “optimization” of health care. Between 2000 and 2020, the number of hospital beds was cut by 35 percent, from 1.6 million to 1 million. If in 2000, there were 116 beds per 10,000 people, in 2020, there were only 70. The situation is particularly bad in rural areas, where 40 percent of hospital beds were cut. At the height of the COVID surge this summer, images of COVID patients lying on the floors of hospitals that had run out of beds circulated widely on social media.

The number of doctors declined by 8 percent over the past two decades and the overall number of nurses by 14 percent. The exodus of medical personnel has been caused by both layoffs and extremely poor working conditions. Even highly qualified medical personnel often only earn salaries of just a few hundred dollars a month.

Austerity measures have been particularly severe in emergency services, where the number of employees has been cut in half since 2000 to just 9,000 in 2020. A recent investigative report by Istories found that 20 million people in Russia, or one in seven inhabitants, have had to wait over 35 minutes for an ambulance. Some 650,000 people have had to wait for more than two hours. Even an official report recently acknowledged that emergency services provided for the population of 140 million were “insufficient.”

Further cuts were imposed even as the coronavirus pandemic has been mercilessly ripping through the population.

Apple to work with law enforcement to scan personal photo libraries for child abuse content

Kevin Reed

In a significant encroachment on civil liberties, Apple announced on August 5 that it plans to begin scanning the photos on all of its personal computing devices and iCloud storage content for the presence of known images of “sexually explicit activities involving a child.”

In a statement published on its website entitled “Expanded Protections for Children,” Apple said that it wants to “help protect children from predators who use communication tools to recruit and exploit them and limit the spread of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM).”

Source: appleprivacyletter.com

The statement said that Apple had created “child safety features in three areas, developed in collaboration with child safety experts” and that these features would be “coming later this year” in the new releases of its operating systems “iOS 15, iPadOS 15, watchOS 8, and macOS Monterey.”

The three areas where the expanded features will be implemented are in its text messaging app, such that children and their parents will be warned “when receiving or sending sexually explicit photos,” in on-device scanning of images “to detect known CSAM images stored in iCloud Photos” and in expanded guidance in Siri (Apple’s virtual assistant) and Search “to help children and parents stay safe online and get help with unsafe situations.”

Apple’s statement says, “This program is ambitious, and protecting children is an important responsibility. These efforts will evolve and expand over time.” The company also says that the program will be implemented only in the US.

The implementation of the on-device image scanning will be integrated with a reporting system that sends data to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and Apple says that “NCMEC acts as a comprehensive reporting center for CSAM and works in collaboration with law enforcement agencies across the United States.”

Notably, the company says that it will scan the personal photo libraries of iPhone and iPad users “with user privacy in mind.” It claims that on-device matching of images to a “database of known CSAM image hashes provided by NCMEC and other child safety organizations.” The other organizations are not named.

In a strained effort to explain how user privacy will be protected with the new invasive system, the company statement goes into the technical details. It says that Apple transforms the database into “an unreadable set of hashes that is securely stored on users’ devices.” An image hash is a kind of digital fingerprint of a specific photo such that copies of it are easily identifiable.

The explanation says that the matching to the database of image hashes is performed on the device before the images are synchronized with iCloud and “is powered by a cryptographic technology called private set intersection, which determines if there is a match without revealing the result. The device creates a cryptographic safety voucher that encodes the match result along with additional encrypted data about the image. This voucher is uploaded to iCloud Photos along with the image.”

Furthermore, Apple says that another technology called “threshold secret sharing” ensures that the content of the “safety vouchers” cannot be interpreted by Apple “unless the iCloud Photos account crosses a threshold of known CSAM content.” While Apple does not specify what the threshold is, it says it is “set to provide an extremely high level of accuracy and ensures less than a one in one trillion chance per year of incorrectly flagging a given account.”

According to the statement, once the threshold has been breached, Apple then “manually reviews each report to confirm there is a match, disables the user’s account, and sends a report to NCMEC. If a user feels their account has been mistakenly flagged, they can file an appeal to have their account reinstated.”

Apple’s announcement was immediately denounced by technology, cybersecurity and privacy advocates. Matthew D. Green, a cryptography professor at Johns Hopkins University, told the New York Times that Apple’s new features “set a dangerous precedent by creating surveillance technology that law enforcement or governments could exploit.” Green went on, “They’ve been selling privacy to the world and making people trust their devices. But now they’re basically capitulating to the worst possible demands of every government. I don’t see how they’re going to say no from here on out.”

Greg Nojeim, co-director of the Security & Surveillance Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology, told CNN, “Apple is replacing its industry-standard end-to-end encrypted messaging system with an infrastructure for surveillance and censorship, which will be vulnerable to abuse and scope-creep not only in the US, but around the world. Apple should abandon these changes and restore its users’ faith in the security and integrity of their data on Apple devices and services.”

In a lengthy statement, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said, “All it would take to widen the narrow backdoor that Apple is building is an expansion of the machine learning parameters to look for additional types of content, or a tweak of the configuration flags to scan, not just children’s, but anyone’s accounts. That’s not a slippery slope; that’s a fully built system just waiting for external pressure to make the slightest change.”

Whistleblower and former intelligence analyst Edward Snowden tweeted, “No matter how well-intentioned, @Apple is rolling out mass surveillance to the entire world with this. Make no mistake: if they can scan for kiddie porn today, they can scan for anything tomorrow. They turned a trillion dollars of devices into iNarcs—‘without asking.’”

In response to the deluge of opposition and denunciations, Apple issued on Friday a Frequently Asked Questions document that only served to further expose the bundle of contradictions that the tech monopoly is embroiling within. To the question, “Does this mean Apple is going to scan all the photos stored on my iPhone?” the company responded, “No. By design, this feature only applies to photos that the user chooses to upload to iCloud Photos. ... The system does not work for users who have iCloud Photos disabled. This feature does not work on your private iPhone photo library on the device.”

Apparently, Apple is telling customers concerned about privacy invasion that they should not use one of the key features of its platform: the ability to take photos on one device and store them in the cloud such that they can be viewed and accessed by all other devices. In other words, with their CSAM initiative, Apple is destroying its own technology.

Meanwhile, in an internal memo leaked to the news media, Apple defended its plans saying that the widespread opposition was the result of “misunderstandings.” While claiming that there have been many “positive responses,” the memo included a note from the NCMEC that said, “We know that the days coming will be filled with the screeching voices of the minority.”

Beyond the technical and user aspects, the political content of Apple’s invasion of privacy initiative dovetails entirely with a right-wing bipartisan bill introduced by the Senate Judiciary Committee in March 2020 aimed purportedly at stopping “online child exploitation.”

Jointly introduced by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (Republican of South Carolina), US Senators Richard Blumenthal (Democrat of Connecticut), Josh Hawley (Republican of Missouri) and Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein (Democrat of California), the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act (EARN IT Act) demanded that online service providers monitor and censor all content on their systems for CSAM in order to qualify for the Section 230 provisions of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

The going over of Apple to the undemocratic policies of the entire American political and law enforcement establishment is predictable. The massive corporate monopoly and number one entity on Wall Street—with a staggering $2.4 trillion market valuation—is incapable of maintaining even a fig leaf of adherence to democratic rights and defending the Fourth Amendment guarantee against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Sri Lankan president opposes lockdowns, as Delta variant spreads

Sakuna Jayawardana & K. Ratnayake

Sri Lankan President Gotabhaya Rajapakse has rejected increasingly strident calls, by medical experts for lockdowns, to deal with rapidly rising COVID-19 deaths and infections, and an impending breakdown of the health system.

On July 5, Rajapakse removed many coronavirus travel restrictions, and on July 28, directed all state employees working from home to return to their workplaces. The government’s removal of virtually all remaining limited restrictions has added fuel to the pandemic, which is now accelerating, with the highly-infectious Delta variant.

Elderly Sri Lankans queue up to receive their second dose of Covishield, Serum Institute of India's version of the AstraZeneca vaccine during a public vaccination drive against the coronavirus in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Monday, June 28, 2021. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

Addressing the media last Friday, following a high-level meeting to review the health emergency, Army chief General Shavendra Silva declared: “The president is not in favour of [a] countrywide lockdown.” Silva is the head of the National Operation Centre for Prevention of COVID-19.

Rajapakse, who attended the meeting, reportedly only offered advice on how to “solve” hospital congestion. The meeting decided to reduce the number of people allowed to attend weddings and funerals, and postponed state functions.

Rajapakse has flatly rejected urgent appeals by medical experts for lockdowns and stricter safety, amid a rapidly increasing daily death toll, with 656 deaths reported in the past six days. Yesterday, the total number of deaths hit 5,464, up from 3,268 on July 5, and the total number of infections rose to 342,079, an increase by 83,380 during the same period.

These figures, however, are not an accurate reflection of the real situation, because the government has deliberately limited testing and tracing. While medical experts are demanding at least 40,000 daily PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests per day, health officers in the past month have only been able to conduct less than half that number.

Immunologist Dr. Chandima Jeewandara revealed last week that 19.3 percent of those testing positive for COVID-19 in the Colombo district, during the first week of July, were infected with the Delta variant. In the last week of July, the figure increased to 75 percent. In a Twitter message on August 4, he warned that 56 of 94 random samples, analysed from across the island, were infected with the deadly variant.

Last week, Sri Lanka Medical Association President Professor Padma Gunaratne insisted on the urgency of imposing travel restrictions. She is one of many medical experts that have consistently called for lockdowns.

“Two weeks ago, we said that a surge had begun with the Delta variant. Now, after two weeks, we are warning about what could happen in two weeks,” she said. The variant was spreading fast in the heavily-populated Colombo and Gampaha districts, she added, and warned that unless travel restrictions were imposed the situation would escalate out of control.

Sri Lankan hospitals are being overwhelmed. Last weekend, the National Hospital of Sri Lanka in Colombo was treating around 500 patients, up from about 200 the previous week. Additional wards have been allocated to deal with the increase, limiting hospital treatment for other patients.

The bodies of COVID victims placed on stretchers (Facebook)

Colombo South Hospital in Kalubowila is at capacity, with grim images of infected patients sitting in plastic chairs, surrounded by their belongings, on the lawns of the facility and others lying on ward corridor floors.

Colombo South Hospital director Dr. Sagari Kiriwandeniya told Derana TV on Saturday that the facility had stopped routine surgeries, in order to deal with the flood of COVID-19 patients. Asked what would happen if more wards were allocated for coronavirus cases, she bluntly stated: “Then not only COVID-19 patients, but others, will die.”

About 45,000 children under 18 years have been infected, and 14 have died in Sri Lanka since the outbreak of COVID-19 early last year, Dr. Deepal Perera, from the Lady Ridgeway Hospital for children, told the Daily Mirror. The facility, which is being overwhelmed, has been forced to send many of the children to other hospitals.

COVID patients in the crowded corridor of Ragama Hospital (Facebook)

Hospital mortuaries have reached capacity and are storing bodies in outside freezers. The Colombo North Ragama Hospital management told the Director General of Health Services last week that the facility faced an unbearable situation, warning that dead bodies in outside freezers would decay, creating other health problems.

External freezers storing bodies at the Kalutara and Panadura hospitals are also full. Panadura’s mayor told the media that the city had increased its cremations from two to six per day, but did not have the capacity to cremate corpses from Kalutara hospital. Concerns are also being raised that some crematoriums, which are working round the clock, could break down.

Upul Rohana, head of the public health inspectors’ union, told the media that one of the union’s members telephoned to complain that he had spent a whole night near a crematorium. This meant that many health inspectors were not available for contact tracing, because they had to supervise bodies until they were cremated.

Government ministers and parliamentarians, in a desperate attempt to show that the situation was under control, are visiting hospitals, arranging cremations in some areas and asking hospital administrations to allocate more wards for COVID-19 patients. Health authorities have also begun making arrangements for so-called home-based COVID-19 treatment. The result, however, will be more infections and deaths.

Addressing a press conference, Deputy Director General of Health Services Dr. Hemantha Herath denied that the situation in hospitals was dire. He was asked by one journalist to “comment candidly on the situation Sri Lankans would face in the coming days.” He refused to provide any detailed information and, according to a report in the Island, responded that “he might not be allowed to speak to the media again if he spoke candidly about the trajectory of the pandemic in the coming days.”

President Rajapakse, in fact, had previously warned health ministry officials and medical experts not to “panic” people about the pandemic, but directly inform him of any problems.

Parliamentary opposition parties, which from the outset have supported the Rajapakse government’s response to the pandemic, including its reopening of the economy, are now making hypocritical appeals to Colombo to impose a lockdown.

Parliamentarian Tissa Attanayake, from Samagi Jana Balawegaya, the main opposition party, has called on the government to “take proactive measures to lock down” and save lives.

Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) Politburo member Nalinda Jayatissa has called for a two-week lockdown to reduce hospital caseloads “to a manageable level.” Tamil National Alliance MP S.P. Rasamanickam declared, “If the health experts recommend a lockdown, the government should abide and comply.”

These parties are seeking to exploit and derail the growing mass outrage against the Rajapakse regime’s criminal indifference towards the health and safety of millions of Sri Lankans.

Last year, following the outbreak of coronavirus infection on the island, these parties participated in an all-party conference, called by the Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse, and extended their full support. The JVP-controlled trade unions and other unions attended meetings with employers, called by the labour minister to decide on wage and job cuts and extensions of working hours in the name of saving the big companies.

An editorial in last weekend’s Sunday Times reflected the nervous concerns of sections of the ruling elite to the worsening coronavirus catastrophe: “Some hotels are having functions with bands playing and air-conditioning blasting, while other hotels (used by private hospitals as intermediate care centres) are filled with COVID patients carrying saline bottles. It is almost like the sinking of the Titanic, while the band played on: A tale of two cities.”

The editorial blamed the Rajapakse administration for creating a false sense of security and for insisting “that the mass vaccination program will settle the spike of positive.” It concluded by declaring that the government “must act, and act decisively, to ensure the galloping new variant does not reach a tipping point, a point of no return, by its shortsightedness.”

These concerns are not animated by social health considerations, but fears that the policies of the Rajapakse government—for which the entire ruling class is responsible—will produce a social explosion.

Rajapakse’s insistence that “vaccination is the only solution to keep the economy open” is his response to the devastating economic impact of the pandemic, with a collapse of exports, tourist industry earnings and remittances, and $US4 billion in annual foreign debt repayments over the next four years.

The Rajapakse regime, like every government around the world, is sacrificing the lives of workers and the poor to boost big-business profits and maintain its commitments to international finance capital.

Pegasus and the Global Surveillance Business

Mel Gurtov

We have just learned about a powerful spyware known as Pegasus, manufactured and leased by the Israeli company NSO Group and capable of extracting just about every kind of data stored in a smart phone. The Pegasus Project, a consortium of 17 organizations and individuals, mostly journalists, has acquired a leaked list of 50,000 individuals around the world whose phones may have been hacked, though not necessarily penetrated.

Purportedly developed to track criminals and terrorists, Pegasus is also being widely used to hack into the smart phones of human rights activists, journalists, and their political opponents at home and even abroad.

Who is using Pegasus to track enemies? Only a fraction of the 50,000 hacked phone numbers so far obtained have been examined, but that’s enough to reveal that governments from left to right have made use of Pegasus. Among them: Saudi Arabia, India, and Hungary.

The two people closest to the murdered Saudi journalist Jared Khashoggi, including his widow, are among those whose phones were penetrated. The Modi government in India and the Orban government in Hungary have caused uproars over their use of Pegasus to spy on critics.

Pegagus is also being used against current high-level government officials. Among the people on the list: Three presidents, from France, Iraq, and South Africa; three current prime ministers, from Pakistan, Egypt, and Morocco; and one king (Morocco). That means all of them have been tracked and their private messaging probably collected—though exactly what was culled and who is doing the hacking are uncertain. All these officials refused to turn over their phones for forensic analysis.

There’s a connection between the surveillance industry and lobbying, which I examined a few weeks ago. NSO can only sell its technology with Israeli government approval, which means it must lobby Israel’s defense ministry. And that effort extends to the US. For while NSO maintains that Pegasus will never be used “to conduct cybersurveillance within the United States,” why has it retained a prominent Washington, DC law firm to lobby US officials about NSO’s technology?

It is entirely possible that Pegasus has been used or might yet be used against Americans who, for example, write from home about human rights abuses abroad.

The fact that nothing in a smart phone is safe from Pegasus makes it a weapon, another piece of infowar technology, and all the more insidious for being able to hide within the phone and, even if discovered, be difficult to track.

Just think of all the information a smart phone contains: contacts, passwords, text and email messages, videos, pictures. Planting bugs and wiretapping seem ancient by comparison. A technology like Pegasus conceivably can infect millions of phones anywhere, anytime, giving a government or a gang access to potentially lethal information.

We are nearing the point where technology is driving conflict rather than the other way around. Satellites, drones, spyware, malware, and other forms of cyber attacks—all these enable states to compete and fight at a distance, sometimes (as we have seen with Russian and Chinese hacking gangs) using nonstate actors.

They pose very difficult decisions for individuals on the receiving end. Unless they are government officials, there is no way to retaliate. In the case of Pegasus, its discovery may be sufficient this time around to bring that particular technology down. But it may only encourage others to make a new version that is less detectable.

The fairly obvious solution to cyber attacks is to ban the technology, somewhat the way land mines were banned. In that case, and perhaps in this one, citizen action may work better than relying on the technology’s producer or governments.

But at some point an international cyber security agreement will be necessary. Still, as the Pegasus case shows, you can’t prevent a powerful spyware from getting in the wrong hands and causing inestimable damage.

Consider what the CEO of NSO said: “We understand that in some circumstances our customers might misuse the system.” Surely the understatement of the year. Just recall China’s ubiquitous surveillance system. And the fact that democratic governments are fully capable of misusing the technology—recall that in 2013 the US hacked the phone of Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel—means that no government and no private company can really be trusted to prevent large-scale abuse.

About the only good news I can report is that management of the fund that controls NSO Group and therefore Pegasus is now being challenged. As The Guardian reports, “Public investors in the private equity firm that owns a majority stake in the Israeli spyware company NSO Group are in talks to transfer management of that fund to . . . a US consulting firm.” Interestingly, the largest of those public investors is the state of Oregon’s public pension fund. Stay tuned.

Australia’s Lockdown Troubles

Thomas Klikauer

By early August, more than half of all Australians (60%) were in lockdown. It should be clear even to the mathematically challenged in and around Sydney that Covid-19 cases slowly go up every day. And so do hospitalizations and, sadly, deaths – hitting even the unvaccinated young. Meanwhile, on a world-scale, Australia’s just below one thousand Corona deaths are a rather small number. Having a low death rate may well be the upside of what Australians commonly call The Tyranny of Distance. It pays to be a country surrounded by water at the end of the world. Yet this has not protected Australians from home-made and self-inflicted Corona troubles.

As Corona death rates still remain rather low, they are on a recent upward trajectory. Simultaneously, what goes down rather rapidly in Sydney is the government’s ability to trace those people who wandered around carrying the virus and infecting unvaccinated others. In the last week of July, the state of New South Wales had 780 Corona infections where the source of the infection could had been traced to its origin. In a further 384 cases, this was no longer the case.

A week later (early August), the state already had 641 cases where the origin of the Corona virus infection was no longer known – almost double the number. In other words, we increasingly no longer know where Corona infections in NSW’s eight million people (of which 5.4 million live in Sydney) come from.

In recent weeks, all of these numbers have been getting worse. Even more problematic is the fact that Australia’s vaccination rate remains stubbornly low. By early August it was slightly above 20% of the nation’s population. In other words, 80% of all Australians were not fully vaccinated.

Worse, the number of vaccinated people climbs painfully slow. If vaccination numbers do not go up dramatically very soon and Covid-19 case numbers do not go down dramatically, Sydney will have to have several more lockdown extensions. This comes in addition to the already six weeks of lockdown Sydney had been experiencing by early August. All indications are that it will get worse.

For some time, New South Wales neoliberal state Premier Gladys Berejiklian has been talked about a so-called gold standard for months. During the last few days, this gold standard has vanished into thin air very fast. Apart from her public relations talk, the stark reality on the ground contradicts her fiction. Even in Berejiklian’s daily press conferences at 11am every morning, her self-re-assuring announcements are starting to sound more grim every day. Yet some of Sydney’s woes are home-made.

Only a few weeks ago, her government oversaw the vaccination of 163 school boys in an elite boarding school. Even though this was later claimed to have happened ‘by error’, conservative Gladys Berejiklian believes that unfairly favoring her equally conservative constituency – the rich and powerful – at the expense of the not so rich and not so powerful is okay.

This sort of corrupt politics is known as pork barreling. According to Ms Berejiklian’s own assertion she strongly believes that pork barreling is not a crime. Hence very quickly, the vaccination of the 163 elite school boys was framed “an accident” by her government. Of course, the boys were asked accidentally whether they wanted to be vaccinated; their parents accidentally gave approval; the school accidentally checked that all forms were filled in and returned; then the school accidentally set up a date for the vaccination; they accidentally hired busses and the boys were accidentally vaccinated; of course, they accidentally received the Pfizer vaccine – rather than the cheaper AstraZeneca.

While this might sound funny, what was not so funny was that while all this was happening –    accidentally of course – essential workers in Sydney where not vaccinated. Among them was a bus driver who carried not only airline crew into Sydney but also the SARS-CoV-2 virus. As a consequence, Sydney had countless infections and virus transmission rates that were about to overwhelm the government’s contact tracing ability.

By early August, the first signs emerged that all this might overwhelm hospitals that had been deliberately run down by years of successive Liberal governments hooked on the ideology of neoliberalism. To make matters worse, Australia’s neoliberals – federally and at state level – have an almost in-bred obsession against state run institutions like hospitals.

Yet, underfunded hospitals are only one of prime minister Scott Morrison’s worries. Worse for him is the ever-looming party-internal battle. For one, if his approval ratings stay low for too long, other Liberals will put a knife into his back – a recent favorite of the Liberal Party. Like some of his predecessors, Scott Morrison will be cut down and replaced in a split second by his very own party mates.

Beyond all this looms the ideological battle between the Liberal party’s staunchly neoliberal free-market wing and its Christian-fundamentalist wing. To add a bit of spice to this, Scott Morrison’s most recent pork barreling in favor of Sydney not only dismayed people in Melbourne but even offended the more neoliberal Melbourne faction of the Liberal party.

Above and beyond all this, Scott Morrison as well as Berejiklian are not only fighting a political PR battle – never mind rising death rates, infections and hospitalizations – they also fight their own neoliberal ideology. The Coronavirus pandemic has forced Australia’s (neo-)Liberals to do the exact opposite of what their ideology tells them. For one, the much hated public service of the state is in great demand and so are publicly funded hospitals, government funded vaccinations centers and Corona tests facilities.

Worse, the neoliberal belief in the free market has been utterly undermined by the Coronavirus pandemic. Fighting the pandemic means coordinated state action. Leaving this fight to the free market, would leave the virus to do what it does best: infect and kill people on a massive scale.

Even worse is the fact that the much hated “red tape” is also in great demand as those eligible for state support during the lockdown need to be separated from those who are not. In short, the Coronavirus pandemic is a nightmare for the ideology of neoliberalism and its political henchmen and -women (e.g. Miss Berejiklian).

At the same time as Corona infections are on the rise and deaths increased steadily, Australia’s vaccination rate remains at the bottom of comparable OECD countries. By early August, Australia ranked 37 out of 38 OECD countries when it came to the proportion of a country’s population that had been fully vaccinated. Yet in August 2021 Australia was about 1½ years into the Coronavirus pandemic that was detected at the beginning of the year 2020.

In other words, Gold-Standard Scott Morrison – Australia’s neoliberal, conspiracy theories believing, and Christian fundamentalist prime minister – has been sitting on this hands for 1½ years. Morrison, also known as Scotty from Marketing because of his ability to see politics as a PR opportunity, has for months been failing to secure enough Pfizer vaccines to get Australians vaccinated.

Yet Scott Morrison was not totally sitting on his hands. He managed to attend the G7 meeting in 2021 – of which Australia is not a member. Whilst there, he went to a pub, visited a graveyard and had lunch in Paris on the way back to Australia. At the same time, Australians were unable to travel.

Worse, under Scott Morrison’s border security regime, a right-wing English “media personality” (read: I have no skills) was allowed into Australia. Yet the former Holocaust-denier-conference attendee was quickly sent home rather quickly after a public outcry of her mocking the state’s quarantine regulations.

In another instance, Australians wanting to come home where threatened by their very own prime minister Scott Morrison with fines and even prison if they tried to come home. Of course, this does not apply to a G7-holidaying prime minister or British right-wing TV nutcase who believes that the Coronavirus pandemic is just another flu.

Meanwhile, 38,000 Australians cannot come home to their own country. Those 38,000 waiting to come are not right-wing chitchats. They are ordinary Australians. Yet, in Scott Morrison’s worldview, some – elite boys in a private boarding school, right-wing TV ideologues, and of course he himself – are more equal than others – ordinary Australians. Adding insult to injury, Scott Morrison has virtually made no provision to get the 38,000 Australians home. After 1½ years, no quarantine facilities have been constructed to quarantine these returning Australians.

In eighteen months, Scott Morrison and his government have done nothing. In 2020, China constructed a hospital in Wuhan in ten days. Instead of vilifying China and trumping China up as the new super enemy, perhaps warmongering Scott Morrison could learn from China? What an evil and heretic thought.

Just when you think it cannot get any worse, rest assured with Scott Morrison it always does. By early August 2021, Scott Morrison had outright rejected Labor’s proposal to give everyone who is vaccinated $300. The plan is to get as many Australians as possible quickly vaccinated. This is, after all, a highly viable strategy to fight the Coronavirus pandemic – get vaccinated. How wonderful it would be if Scott Morrison would adhere to US President Joe Biden’s advice, “if you are not helping, get out of the way!”

At the same time, the Australian army, who has now been called into Sydney to safeguard the lockdown, thinks that such payments actually work. Surprise, surprise it is working in other countries, in Europe and even in the USA. Incentives do work, just ask Dan Pink. They also work in the case of vaccinations. And they continue to work even though Scott Morrison thinks otherwise.

If Australia spent $300 on every single vaccinated Australian, it would roughly cost $7.5 billion dollar to vaccinate a substantial number of Australia’s 25 million people. $7.5bn is way cheaper than a lockdown until Christmas. Some people say, that the lockdown in Sydney will cost the economy $10bn.

In other words, Labor’s plan would have saved $2.5bn. It would also have made very serious inroads into the fight against the Coronavirus pandemic. Yet, if there is no PR opportunity in all this, it is irrelevant for Scott Morrison. Even worse is the fact that since it is a Labor plan, Scott Morrison will never do it.

Still worse, if the lockdown extends until Christmas, say good night to the Christmas sales which for many businesses are the biggest earner in a year. Ironically, it is often small business owners who vote (neo-)Liberal in Australia – the political party that has, at federal (Scott Morrison) and state (Berejiklian) level, comprehensively failed to deliver in the Coronavirus pandemic.

Yet Labor’s $300 offer to encourage vaccination would have the ability to end or at least cut down the lockdown time. Overall, Labor’s $300 offer is substantially more than Scott Morrison’s skimpy $25 food voucher – a mini-compensation for the economic hardship during the 2020 lockdown. Well, the $25 vouchers were just another PR joke.

While Scott Morrison rejects returning $300 per person of tax-money to Australians, he is very happy to waste “almost $3.4m for each person in offshore detention”. Tormenting the innocent in remote detention centers does not come cheap as the case of the Biloela family shows.

In any case, Labor’s $7.5bn vaccination incentive plan is rather minuscule compared to the $100bn we spent on twelve submarines which, let’s face it, are of no help in a Coronavirus pandemic. Yet each and every one of Australia’s 25 million people will have to fork up $4,000 for the U-boats.

Most obviously, Australia’s conservatives put their money – well, our tax money actually – where their mouth is. Scott Morrison’s right-wing government rejects a comparatively small incentive but is very happy to spend thirteen times as much on militaristic toys-for-the-boys. Meanwhile, Australians are months away from reaching a vaccination rate well above 80% which would allow Australia to end the lockdown in a safe way.

In the end, British philosopher John Stuart Mill might have been right when he said, “Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.” Australia’s conservatives may not only be stupid, they are also trapped in their very own ideology of neoliberalism. As the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno once said, “Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them.”