“We are a uniquely destructive species, and the only one on the planet capable of pushing another one to extinction.”
So says Vigliotti, in his book, Before It’s Gone”.
Later, when talking about bad land management whilst the huge expansion of farming tore up the balanced ecosystem and resulted in the Dust Bowl tragedy of the 1930s, he quotes Dr. Hugh Bennett, born 1881 whose research led him to say:
“Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people, barbaric or civilized. “
With Hugh at the helm of the newly created “Operation Dust Bowl,” he enlisted farmers and ranchers, backed by federal assistance, to plant rows of trees and grasses to form wind brakes. People were trained in soil retention and crop rotation techniques (which Native Americans practised long before the settlers drove them off this precious land).
Americans don’t tend to appreciate Hugh now and so bad practices have returned, disrespecting caring for the earth beneath their feet.
And when it was fashionable to sport a beaver hat, hunters eradicated the beavers with an insane eagerness. Yet the beavers were an asset to the land, controlling water and preventing extensive flooding as they worked so hard in waterways in wild land.
We humans have built hydroelectric dams which are yet another ecological disaster. We seem to pride ourselves in finding ways to thwart Nature.
Vigliotti sought out knowledgeable people to answer vital questions:
“How are beaver dams better than, say, hydroelectric dams that provide clean energy?” I wondered. “That energy comes at a cost,” Emily said. “Hydro dams are walled-off concrete fortresses that can cut off the entire flow of a river, leading to droughts downstream and disrupting species migration and freshwater biodiversity. I think of beaver dams as speed bumps,” she said. “Beaver dams are nature’s way.” As Emily explained, when a beaver builds a dam, the structure slows rainwater and snowmelt from rapidly draining down rivers into oceans. The result is a natural reservoir capable of storing water for years while still supporting wildlife migration. “When the beavers move in here and they slow this water down, a lot of it goes into recharging the groundwater, and that’s what we’re pumping for irrigation. That’s what we use for our food, that’s what we use for our lawns. And these beavers are recharging it for us. So they’re sort of depositing water into the bank that we take out at a later date.” The drier an area is, the more critical dams are because soil, over extended periods of time without water, becomes too brittle to retain water when it eventually arrives. It’s like watering parched soil in a potted plant. The water simply flows right out of that hole at the bottom, not giving the roots time to hydrate. But if you obstruct that hole, the water sticks around, replenishing the soil and the roots. The results in the natural world are wetlands, which are breeding grounds for about 80 percent of animal species in the American West. According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, California’s wetlands have shrunk by 90 percent since the 1800s, around the time beavers started vanishing from the landscape. “The desertification of California aligns with the loss of our beaver population. The science isn’t clear, but I think it’s safe to assume wildfires wouldn’t be as bad as they are today if we had more beavers,” Emily said. “And if we can keep vegetation alive and prevent fires, we can also prevent other related environmental disasters like mudslides and extreme flooding.”
Nick is the head of the Beaver Ecology and Relocation Center based out of Salt Lake City, Utah, and oversees a team of volunteers who travel across the West building “starter dams,” what’s technically known in the emerging industry as beaver dam analogues. That’s how I found myself waist deep in a babbling creek on a mountainous ranch in Coalville, Utah, slinging handfuls of mud over layers of tree branches and sticks. The landowner had heard about Emily Fairfax’s research and Nick’s relocation project and wanted in. “Too much water can be a bad thing, but when there’s none of it and crops are dying and ranchers are selling off their cattle and there’s no end in sight, well, that’s enough to change people’s opinions,” Nick said as he grabbed a pile of mud from the bank of the creek. “Beavers, what they do is they get in here and they scoop the mud up, they just come and grab a whole bunch, push it with their chest and hand and it into the crevasses. I would get on my belly and push it in, but I don’t want to do that yet,” he chuckled.
More than one thousand beaver dam analogues have been successfully resettled in the West, with hundreds of more requests coming in from farmers and ranchers. “At some point in history people just accepted beavers were commodities and pests and never stopped to ask what removing them would mean for the environment and our own lives. We trapped and killed them out of some kind of necessity and now we’re working twice as hard to reintroduce them because we’ve run out of all other ways of restoring our planet,” Nick said.
As we invest in the future by cutting back greenhouse gasses, we can also invest in strategies that have near immediate impact. As I watched our two beavers bob in the water of their new home like they had lived there all their lives, it was clearer than ever that restoring the land and learning to coexist with nature could be the fastest, most cost-effective, and lasting way to make our communities—our ecosystems—resilient to failure.”
After wildfires destroyed homes across California, innovative, but expensive, intensely fire-resistant homes have been designed. Some are already in place in the still sparsely rehomed community of Paradise.
These are modular, pre clad built homes and 12 month round produce protecting units. So you can live and farm remotely, protected from Nature’s ravages.
When Yellowstone Park suffered a catastrophic sudden snow melt during a storm and unleashed boulders as the violent waters cut through the land below, the assessment of the situation by engineers left many heads shaking with anxiety that maybe solutions were out of reach.
In a section of the book entitled “Hwy 89”, Vigliotti says:
The NPS is now drafting ways to adapt their hardest-hit parks to climate change, and they’ve had help from the federal government. For all the criticism President Trump’s environmental policies have received—and most of it is well deserved—in 2020, he flooded the National Park Service with money. The Great American Outdoors Act allocated $900 million a year to the Land and Water Conservation Fund and provided up to $9.5 billion over five years to help maintain the country’s national parks. President Joe Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure bill, passed in late 2021, set aside an additional $1.7 billion to specifically help upgrade roads and bridges and support environmental adaptations. It all sounds like a lot of money, until you do the math. According to National Park Service records, the agency manages more than 12,600 miles of roads nationwide, 40 percent of which were in need of repairs according to a 2019 park study. In Yellowstone, the price tag for roadwork in 2019 was $1 billion. That was before the flood hit. Highway 89, the one that would cost an estimated $1 billion to repair, wasn’t even on the park’s to-do list. In 2020, after the first round of funding was approved, John Garder, the senior director of budget and appropriations at the National Parks Conservation Association, a nonpartisan advocacy group for the NPS, said the money was “helping stem the tide, but certainly not enough.” Similar financial hurdles are also hitting America’s concrete forests. In New York City, erosion from floods and inadequate drainage led to a 38 percent spike in sidewalk and street sinkholes in 2021 compared to the previous year, according to the mayor’s office. City leaders linked the problem directly to climate change and said repairing the sunken holes to last another fifty to one hundred years would be expensive but save taxpayers money in the end. They pointed to a report from the National Institute of Building Sciences that found that, for every dollar a community invests on climate adaptation, they save six dollars on needing to rebuild again. But as our extreme elements outpace humanity’s ability to adapt to them, not all problems can be solved by throwing money at them. While asking for more funding for sinkhole repairs, Rohit Aggarwala, NYC’s chief climate officer and the commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection, warned money would only help so much because they were quickly exhausting all available engineering solutions. “The issue right now is we don’t know exactly what we would do with more money that would systematically reduce the likelihood of sinkholes,” Rohit said at a city council meeting on the topic in 2022. Protecting modern-day Rome and places like Yellowstone (Mother Nature’s Notre Dame) from ecosystem collapse will require more than just dollars. Fortunately, there is another lifeline, but it too has started to fray. The Clean Air Act (CAA) was passed in 1970 and is considered by legal experts to be the most powerful environmental law in the world. Overseen by the EPA, which was established around the same time, the CAA monitored and restricted harmful air pollution in American cities. The act initially targeted gasses including carbon monoxide, lead, and nitrogen dioxide, but expanded over time to include carbon dioxide as concerns over global warming grew. The act gave the EPA the power to place hefty fines on companies that emitted these gasses at toxic levels and is partly credited with keeping annual emissions in the United State’s relatively stable since the 1990s, despite the nation’s population growing by nearly 80 million people. Even so, there’s still plenty of room for progress.
And what did Vigliotti explain about the clipping of the wings of the Environmental Protection Agency by the Supreme Court? He tells us here:
The U.S. remains one of the highest emitters of CO2 per capita in the world, and collectively, the global community emits around 36 billion tons annually, according to Global Carbon Project. That’s a more than 200 percent spike since the 1960s. While the CAA was seen as a blueprint for developing nations, the landmark policy hit its own major roadblock in 2022 when the Supreme Court limited the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants, which alone are responsible for around 25 percent of the United States’s total CO2 output each year. The vote was 6 to 3, with the courts three liberal judges in dissent saying the majority had stripped the EPA of “the power to respond to the most pressing environmental challenge of our time.” They weren’t exaggerating. Our air controls everything from summer highs to winters lows and has the power to throw Earth’s natural cycle into a tailspin of extreme and unpredictable reactions. The same radicalized air that caused a freak spring snowstorm followed by a freak steamy downpour in Yellowstone was also linked to a series of heat waves that killed 339 people in Arizona. The summer of 2022 was the state’s deadliest on record, and the summer of 2023 was the hottest, with temperatures in Phoenix exceeding 110 degrees for an entire month. Overnight lows never dropped below 95. ER doctors showed me how they treated a wave of patients suffering from heatstroke by slipping them into body bags full of ice and water. My team and I also rode along with paramedics who were injecting patients with ice-cold IV to rapidly cool them off. It’s not just heat. This destabilized air is also responsible for transforming a typical blizzard in Buffalo, New York, into an apocalyptic winter storm that entombed entire neighborhoods in walls of ice and snow. Dozens of people died, and many of the victims were found trapped in their cars. The deep freeze quickly engulfed the city like a fast-moving wildfire, and you could almost hear the crackle of ice forming when looking at the pictures of the frozen still life.
Anyone left doubting the challenges ahead of finding resilience solutions fast enough, must surely be persuaded by now….for it is “events, dear boy, events” (as said by Harold Macmillan, PM of UK, 1957 – 63).
In the UK, Scotland has been building resilience against flooding, spending millions on future proofing towns such as Hawick, Scottish Borders. The progress report is shown in the image above. The Hawick community have been kept informed by detailed construction reports like these posted to residents in the surrounding area over the years. The project is nearing completion and it has added aesthetic walks, cycle ways and gardens to the picturesque tourist town.
Our power grids are so supportive to our human existence that we cannot afford to ignore future proofing them against extreme demands or attacks from cyber warfare. Sadly, weapons of war can destroy these infrastructures in minutes, no matter how much investment we have ploughed in. However, where research exists to point to resilience being designed in to old grid networks to cope with extreme weather, there is no time to be lost.
Here is an extract from one area of research which governments will use to help them plan infrastructure upgrades:
The rise of power outages caused by extreme weather events and the frequency of extreme weather events has motivated the study of grid resilience. This paper presents a state-of-the-art review of existing research on the study of grid resilience, which focuses on the point of view of power system engineering with respect to extreme weather events. Firstly, it investigates confounding terminologies used in the study of grid resilience, such as the definitions, the differences with grid reliability, the extreme weather events, and their extreme impact on the power systems. Secondly, it presents a grid resilience framework as a general provision to understand the subjects in the study of grid resilience. Thirdly, it describes several methodologies of grid resilience assessment and some quantitative indices. Finally, various grid resilience enhancement strategies implementations are discussed.
In the US First Responders are exhausted and are operating at 65%. There is an urgent need to train and hire more.
And as countries lose their freshwater supply and watch their crops fail and livestock die, the funds must be focused on these drought areas to rescue them, especially using modern, tried and tested techniques such as:
In the book, ‘Before It’s Gone’ by Jonathan Vigliotti, I read of the consequences of extensive loss of whole communities in Western States of America, plus the memorable loss of the old community of Lahaina in Hawaii, due to out of control wildfires.
I live in a Scottish Glen, high in the fells of the Scottish Borders. The fells were over grazed by sheep and cattle when we first moved here. In Autumn the grasses yellowed and in sunshine they looked golden. In winter they were often covered in snow, and in Spring and Summer they sprang to life with multitudes of grass types and wildflowers. Wildlife consisted of deer, wild goats, mountain hares, beavers, badgers, rodents of all types. Fish swam in the clean burns and the ecology was as pure and devoid of poisons as could be.
But the landowner of the estate took up a lucrative offer from the Forestry Commission to cover a percentage of his land in mostly Sitka Spruce. These have grown into a dense forest and killed off the natural flora as no light penetrates the forest floor. The process of planting damaged the hydrology so, as we are on the Watershed, rainfall rushes faster down the slopes, especially when an older forest was felled not long after the new forests were in sapling stages. Many wild animals and birds were displaced when the old forest was logged.
Then a new landowner arrived and planted hardwood forest wherever it was still possible to plant trees. These are most welcome and consist of a variety of trees native to Britain, but avoiding Ash, as these were already dying across Britain due to a fungus infection on imported saplings from Asia. These had been planted by the previous landowner as ‘screen’ of the pine forest and have since died.
I looked up related documents to help me understand the threat to Scotland of wildfires:
Climate change is leading to warmer, drier weather conditions in spring and summer, and more frequent, prolonged droughts, which increases the risk of wildfires startingandspreading.
Wildfire risk also increases with disease outbreaks, windthrow damage, and changes to climatic suitability affecting vigour, which increase the level of standing and fallen deadwood and litter. According to the UK Climate Risk CCRA3 Wildfire Briefing, the risk of wildfire could double in a 2 °C global temperature-increase scenario and quadruple in a 4 °C scenario.
Threats to forests and woodland
Wildfires are a semi-natural hazard, with most started accidentally from recreational or land management activities, or deliberately. Wildfires can start within forests or spread in from adjacent areas, such as grassland, heathland or moorland. Wildfires start more frequently in areas with high visitor numbers, near areas of socio-economic deprivation, and in areas close to public rights of way. Potential ignition sources include campfires, BBQs, hot oil or particles from machinery and vehicles, or power lines.
There are two periods of high wildfire risk: late winter-spring when there is dead-dry ground vegetation present (e.g., grass, bracken), overnight-frosts, dry periods with low daytime relative humidity; and summer, with hot and dry weather, including heatwaves and droughts. Wildfires during the latter are usually more intense and more damaging. The changing climate is likely to increase the risk of wildfires in both the late winter-spring and summer periods, and may extend the high-risk season into the autumn.
There are three main types of wildfires: surface fires, ground fires and crown fires. The most common is the surface fire, burning fuels such as heather, grass, bracken and gorse. Surface fires can burn fiercely, spread fast with long flames and at high fire intensity. There can be substantial growth of these fuels along roads and rides, before canopy closure, and after woods have been thinned. Ground fires consume peat and soil organic matter and threaten carbon stores. Smouldering peat fires are hard to extinguish and can re-kindle frequently.
Crown fires occur less frequently, during hot and dry summers, but are the most dangerous. They spread from surface fires, with ladder fuels, including tall shrubs, low tree canopies, standing deadwood and trees in poor health, and leaning windblown trees increase the risk of canopy fires.
Where I live we have ample heather, grass, bracken – and now gorse, imported with the forestry activity. There are large peatlands in these fells.
I deliberately planted hardwood trees in what had been the sheep dowsing area which was attached to a bothy and pens – the bothy had been rebuilt as a well insulated small cottage. All the sheep facilities were made available as potential garden once we arrived to live here.
I love trees. I can’t get enough of them. Over the time we have lived here, I have watched our garden trees mature, along with the surrounding estate forests.
But we have had some serous drought periods over recent years.
Last year the Scottish government issued a fire warning for all the country. Indeed the BBC ran a shocking piece about a wildfire in the Highlands:
Local councillor Chris Ballance said the community of Cannich had been “traumatised” by the incident and praised the efforts of firefighters.
Image caption,The fire affected a large area of moor and woodland near Cannich
In a letter to the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, Mr Ballance, said: “Thirty square miles of moor and woodland, 25 years-worth of conservation work destroyed. I smelt the smoke 12 miles away, and it was visible from space.
“On behalf of the City of Inverness area committee, and in particular my ward of Aird and Loch Ness, I have to thank you, and ask you to give our thanks to all your team, for your work in overcoming the fire at Cannich.
“As the earth burns, I can think of no better definition of the word ‘hero’ than ‘firefighter’.”
RSPB Scotland said it was still assessing the full-scale of the fire’s impact on its Corrimony reserve.
A spokeswoman said: “But it is clear that it is extensive and will cost hundreds of thousands of pounds and take many years to restore.”
So many people had invested their money, labour and much of their lives in ecological restoration of this conservation area….see
The need for carbon capture has been the underlying motivation to plant trees, preserve wetlands and peat bogs wherever we can. To conserve and rewild with flora and fauna to regain an ecological balance which supports life on Earth.
It was about hope that we could reduce the impact of carbon emissions and save living things from extinction. But global temperatures have exceeded the limit of 1.5 degrees above recommended levels. Fossil fuels are still being mined and they drive world trade and economic growth, whilst their emissions from use rapidly trap heat creating the greenhouse effect. It is a vicious circle ultimately tipping the balance away from a habitable world.
As fast as we try to conserve land and use the trees to capture carbon, we see our efforts go up in smoke in an even faster moment. As the fire burns, so the trapped carbon is released, adding to the greenhouse effect, especially as these fires have consumed vast acres of land globally over the past few years. Indeed, it is, sadly, the new normal.
The burning of natural vegetation emits huge quantities of released carbon which once were captured by the trees and plant life. Those global fires simply increased the temps past the limit in a vicious circle, intensifying year on year.
Methane, the main ingredient in natural gas, has been shown to produce roughly 80 times the climate-warming power of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. The gas is released from pipelines, storage tanks and energy facilities. It also wafts from landfills and the cattle industry. Scientists say a substantial reduction in the emissions is among the changes that could make the swiftest impact on climate change.
For those hoping to rebuild their homes in Lahaina, they have been advised to use no combustible building materials. They must create defensible space around their home – so no grass, trees or plant life which could dry out and catch fire.
I don’t know about you, but if my view from inside my home lacked the lush greenery I now see this summer, I could not endure a single day there.
Vigliotti tells us about John Mercer, who, back in 1968 focused on Antarctica, and was first to realise over his lifetime research:
that human activity was driving CO2 levels to rates not seen in millions of years, so fast there was no time for Mother Nature or humanity to adapt to the unintended consequences.
In Vigliotti’s book, ‘Before it’s gone’ he describes looking into the Helheim Glacier, being informed by Dr. Gordon Hamilton* of University of Maine. He was told of the rapid change the data they collected had revealed. “My colleague almost fell out of his chair. It’s that alarming.” The scientist was obviously greatly troubled as they saw a line in a rock where the surface ice used to reach. Helheim had thinned by more than 300ft in just over a decade and the glacier had retreated by more than 4 miles. Trackers showed one part of Greenland’s ice sheet was moving at 8.7 miles a year with insufficient snowfall to rebuild what was lost. Hamilton commented,”Humans have never witnessed this scale of loss before, and not enough people are worried as they should be.”
Vigliotti was also told by Hamilton that warmer air and water were melting the icebergs at both ends. “We’re witnessing the possible collapse of a critical regulator of our planet,”Hamilton told him.
Vigliotti points out the oceans are now 1.5 degree warmer after absorbing 90 percent of excess heat trapped by the greenhouse effect. More heat reduces oxygen for marine life living to a depth of 700 metres. In the Arctic the ocean temperature has increased by 3 degrees.
The arctic is losing control of its rhythm of holding freshwater in a frozen reservoir that helps regulate ocean temperature and salinity. But now the freshwater escapes in a flood, decreasing salinity, reducing the density of the Atlantic, and thus slowing the conveyor belt of underwater currents that circulate colder arctic water and vital nutrients to the warm south. It is estimated this rapid melting of Antarctica and Arctic major icebergs will shut down this critical conveyor belt by 2050.
And politically we are failing:
My second beef is with the epic failure of Green politicians in Germany and elsewhere to target and tax the continent’s Big Bad Polluters – the top 10% – corporations, private jet and superyacht owners included. If the top 10% of global emitters were required to slash their annual carbon emissions to that of the average EU citizen, other things being equal, that would cut global emissions by around 1/3 – and would be FAIR.
Instead, the Greens and other policy-makers imposed the cost and delivery of decarbonisation on to the shoulders of millions of insecure, low-paid Europeans enduring a cost-of-living crisis.
From Substack, Ann Pettifor, on Europe failing to finance cutting emissions, June 2024
*Dr Gordon Stuart Hamilton of Maine University, died in 2016 carrying out his dangerous research which showed us all we have no time to debate the issue, he found the evidence:
Gordon Hamilton was a glaciologist at the University of Maine. (Laure Noualhat)
In the US, after WWII, the way to peaceful coexistence between North and Southern States was to exclude any benefit to African Americans, despite their contribution during World War II.
The Republican Right had been opposed to Franklyn D Roosevelt’s “socialist” programs, from Social Security to marginal tax rates above 90 percent (See reference in Fareed Zakaria’s book ‘Age of Revolutions’), but Dwight Eisenhower supported almost all of his predecessor’s programs. These enabled democracy plus markets plus the welfare state.
The polarization of left vs right, so apparent today, was avoided by Roosevelt’s policies. Government involvement in the economy, after the war and Great Depression, was welcomed. The result was white supremacy, minimising Black voting rights to 4 percent.
All non white and southern European immigrants were banned.
The Southern states interpreted the New Deal legislation to exclude domestic and farm workers (largely Black) from joining unions or obtaining Social Security benefits. In 1936, Roosevelt won 97 percent of the vote in Mississippi and 99 percent in South Carolina.
This harmonious North/South utopian American Dream continued into the 1950s as legal segregation led to the Black communities being marginalised, so they could not benefit from booming economic growth.
The Right and Left concepts were meaningless in politics, all whites were enjoying increasingly improved lives and, in 1952, the Black novelist Ralph Ellison wrote “I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me.”
The plight of Palestinians might also be equated to a refusal to see them as when the League of Nations mandates were enacted, purported to ensure a path to peace in the region.
In 1920 the Conference of San Remo in Italy created two mandates; one, over Palestine, was given to Great Britain, and the other, over Syria, went to France. This act effectively separated the area now occupied by Israel and Jordan from that of Syria. In November 1920 Abdullah, Faisal’s brother, arrived in Maʿān (then part of the Hejaz) with 2,000 armed supporters intent on gathering together tribes to attack the French, who had forced Faisal to relinquish his newly founded kingdom in Syria. By April 1921, however, the British had decided that Abdullah would take over as ruler of what then became known as Transjordan.
Effectively, Turkish rule in Transjordan was simply replaced by British rule. The mandate, confirmed by the League of Nations in July 1922, gave the British virtually a free hand in administering the territory. However, in September, the establishment of “a Jewish national home” was explicitly excluded from the mandate’s clauses, and it was made clear that the area would also be closed to Jewish immigration. On May 25, 1923, the British recognized Transjordan’s independence under the rule of Emir Abdullah, but, as outlined in a treaty as well as the constitution in 1928, matters of finance, military, and foreign affairs would remain in the hands of a British “resident.” Full independence was finally achieved after World War II by a treaty concluded in London on March 22, 1946, and Abdullah subsequently proclaimed himself king. A new constitution was promulgated, and in 1949 the name of the state was changed to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
Throughout the interwar years Abdullah had depended on British financial support. The British also assisted him in forming an elite force called the Arab Legion, comprisingBedouin troops but under the command of and trained by British officers, which was used to maintain and secure the allegiance of Abdullah’s Bedouin subjects.
On May 15, 1948, the day after the Jewish Agency proclaimed the independent state of Israel and immediately following the British withdrawal from Palestine, Transjordan joined its Arab neighbours in the first Arab-Israeli war. The Arab Legion, commanded by Glubb Pasha (John [later Sir John] Bagot Glubb), and Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese, and Iraqi troops entered Palestine. Abdullah’s primary purpose, which he had spelled out in secret discussions with Jewish envoys, was to extend his rule to include the area allotted to the Palestinian Arabs under the United Nationspartition resolution of November 1947. Accordingly, he engaged his forces in the region of Palestine now popularly known as the West Bank (the area just west of the Jordan River) and expelled Jewish forces from East Jerusalem (the Old City). When the Jordan-Israel armistice was signed on April 3, 1949, the West Bank and East Jerusalem—an area of about 2,100 square miles (5,400 square km)—came under Jordanian rule, and almost half a million Palestinian Arabs joined the half million Transjordanians. One year later, Jordan formally annexed this territory. Israel and Britain had tacitly agreed to Abdullah keeping the area, but the Arab countries and most of the world opposed the king’s action; only Britain and Pakistan recognized the annexation. The incorporation into Jordan of the West Bank Palestinians and a large refugee population that was hostile to the Hashemite regime brought severe economic and political consequences. On the other hand, Abdullah gained such Muslim shrines as the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem’s Old City, which compensated for his father’s loss of Mecca and Medina to Ibn Saud a generation earlier.
Abdullah was assassinated at Al-Aqṣā Mosque in Jerusalem on July 20, 1951, by a young Palestinian frustrated by the king’s hostility toward Palestinian nationalism. In August 1952 the parliament declared Abdullah’s son and successor, Ṭalal, mentally unfit to rule, and he abdicated in favour of his eldest son, Hussein ibn Talal, who was crowned king on his 18th birthday, May 2, 1953.
For interest here is a 1917 map, the importance of the Suez Canal was uppermost in the minds of the Allies.
Description English: Map of the Northern and Central Sinai area in World War I. Date 1917 Source “The Times History of the War” Volume X, page 368. Author British Government
As humans we struggle to find a consensus to gain peace as reactionaries trigger war all too often. Yet in the 1800s Kant had a vision of peace which is possible if we all put away our brutal measures. In Fareed Zakaria’s latest book (see above reference) he presents Kant’s vision:
the paradigmatic Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, writing amid the bloodshed of the French Revolution, published an essay titled “Toward Perpetual Peace.”11 Kant described what was needed to achieve the conditions of permanent peace, not just the temporary absence of war. His ideas sound strikingly contemporary. He argued for a world of economically interdependent republics, where citizens preferred trading to fighting and had the power to determine policy. He sought a federation of free nations governed by law rather than might, a precursor to the idea of international organizations like the UN. Kant envisioned a future that was rooted in the rights of human beings as opposed to the self-interest of states.
I have reproduced this article written on this day.
The Tragic Death of Palestinian Journalists
Over 120 journalists have lost their lives in G since 7 October. Credit: Unsplash/Engin Akyurt
OPINION by Alon Ben-Meir (New York)
Wednesday, May 01, 2024
Inter Press Service
World Press Freedom Day 2024
NEW YORK, May 01 (IPS) – It is only fitting, against the backdrop of World Press Freedom Day, to recount the horror being inflicted on journalists and reporters around the world, which is increasing day by day. To tell the story of the mounting death of journalists in Gaza, it is essential to put into perspective the plight of journalists around the world.
The random imprisonment of journalists is rampant in many countries; more than 800 journalists have been incarcerated, and nearly 550 marked the beginning of 2024 from prison; hundreds have been killed, and countless others are harassed to prevent them from decimating information deemed unfavorable to their respective governments.
More than half of these journalists are detained in just four countries – China, Myanmar, Belarus, and Vietnam. Other than these four countries, others do not lag much behind, including Turkey, Russia, China, Afghanistan, and Mexico, which is one of the deadliest countries for journalists. In this regard, it is also important to point out the danger and death that journalists are facing in another war zone in Ukraine.
According to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), since the start of the war in February 2022, Russian forces have reportedly killed 11 journalists and wounded at least 35; 12 others were detained, and two journalists are currently missing, while 233 media outlets were ordered to close down.
Regardless of how egregious these violations are against journalists, tragically, these statistics pale in comparison to what has and still is taking place in the Israel-Hamas in Gaza.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported that 97 journalists and media workers were confirmed dead in Gaza: among them, a staggering 92 Palestinian journalists, which has by far exceeded the death toll of journalists in any other war zone in recent memory.
In comparison, only two Israelis and three Lebanese journalists were killed. Overall, according to CPJ, 16 journalists were reported injured, four are still missing, and 25 journalists were arrested. On top of that, there are routine assaults, threats and intimidation, cyberattacks, crippling censorship, and even the killing of family members to prevent journalists from doing their job.
The question is why such a disproportionate number of Palestinian journalists were killed in Gaza, and if there is anything that can be done to minimize this inexcusable death that transcends reason and even the horrific reality of a war that crossed the threshold of inhumanity. There are four reasons behind the astounding number of Palestinian journalists who were killed in particular.
First, many Palestinians who were embedded in civilian communities were killed by the initial Israeli bombing that leveled dozens of buildings, killing hundreds of civilians and, among them, many journalists.
Second, many journalists who were trying to report from the front line of the battles between Israel and Hamas were killed in the crossfire. Sadly, they threw caution to the wind and ended up paying with their lives.
Third, many other Palestinian journalists were killed as collateral damage for being in the wrong place and at the wrong time.
Finally, several journalists were deliberately targeted to prevent them from reporting on the scene. There is no definitive number of journalists in this category, as Israel vehemently denies the deliberate killing of Palestinian journalists.
Sadly, other than the need for Palestinian journalists to exercise extra caution, it is critically important to increase the pressure on both Israel and Hamas to take every precautionary measure to prevent journalists from being killed simply because they are dedicated to reporting on what they see and hear.
This is, of course, easier said than done. Nevertheless, RSF and CPJ should leave no stone unturned to expose the culprits behind this atrocious murder of journalists. The UN and the EU should also take every measure at their disposal to prevent the undue death of Palestinian journalists.
The freedom of the press is the heart and soul of any true democracy, and Western democracies must answer the call.
Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a retired professor of international relations, most recently at the Center for Global Affairs at New York University. He taught courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies.
Of the 50,000 phone numbers in the data, we had been able to verify, with multiple sources for each, the identities of more than 1,000 people from fifty countries. The count included more than 600 politicians and government officials, including 3 presidents, 10 prime ministers, and 1 king. There were 65 businessmen, 85 human rights activists or attorneys, and 2 Emirati princesses. Craig Timberg’s last-minute addition of an American reporter working in Saudi Arabia pushed our count of journalists to 192.
‘Pegasus’, Laurent Richard, S Rigaud
The location of where Pegasus attack vectors originated was updated for the final report which produced the undeniable evidence of this military-grade cyberweapon being deployed by high risk clients:
The Security Lab crew was also making the final editorial changes to their Forensic Methodology Report, which had a lot of moving parts. The list of countries hosting the most servers where Pegasus attack vectors originated had to be updated with raw numbers. The UK, Switzerland, France, and the US were high on that list, but Germany stood atop it. “Some of the biggest hosting companies are in Germany, as well as some of the cheaper ones,” Claudio says. “Pretty common destination when you want to set up infrastructure on a large scale.” Claudio and Donncha were also able to report that NSO had recently—and ill-advisedly—started using Amazon WebServices as a host for at least seventy-three of their servers.
When the report became global it led to the demise of NSO, but UAE employed a number of ex NSO coders, plus some mercenary former agents from the world’s premier signals intelligence organisation, the United State’s National Security Agency. As a result, the high risk (poor human rights record) UAE, having been a customer of NSO, created its own in-house spyware, Dark Matter.
No democratic country has called out UAE, Morocco, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the worst of them, Azerbaijan, for use of spyware against their citizens who oppose their vicious repressive governments.
As NSO goes down, more private companies spring up to fill the gap. This is capitalism at its worst.
And remember how human rights are the least of concerns when insurers/bankers see a chance to make big returns when loaning Israeli settlers funds to disposses Palestinians so they can extend their settlements:
And now we have learned about Project Nimbus which Google and AWS has devised for Israel, a cloud computing system. Specifically, Project Nimbus sees Google’s Cloud division, along with partner Amazon Web Services (AWS), providing AI and cloud computing infrastructure to the Israeli government.
The lucrative contract requires direct support to weapons corporations and to a quasi-governmental body tasked with expanding illegal settlements. Google has not been honest about the crucial role it has been playing against Palestinians.
Journalists at The Intercept have an official Israeli government document which proved that Google’s statement that the contract is “not directed at highly sensitive , classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services” is untrue.
Protesters, now growing in number, demand Google drop the project immediately.
Albeit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons maker, has seen it shares divested by such banks as JPMorgan Chase. However, UBS increased its shares by 875%!!
UBS was founded in Switzerland, but the Swiss always give the impression they stand neutral when it comes to war. But they are making money out of the Israeli company at War with Hamas, but leaving no safe place for Palestinians in their own country.
Many of us remember how Jamal Kashoggi was tortured to death in the most slow and medically precise way by a top Saudi surgeon with a team of assistants. It is believed MBS instructed this manner of death to the team who carried it out. But it reflects how hatred mixed with intense fear can become so intense over time that it can twist the mind of a human being to actually take pleasure in such sadistic acts.
The history of humankind is littered with facts of horrific cruelty to our fellow man. In the 21st century we add the menace of Spyware to track down our prey.
What did Jamal do to instil such fear and hatred?
It is a good moment to reflect on the duty to speak out against authoritarian rule. Our late colleague wrote on Sept. 18, 2017, that he hadn’t protested initially when some friends in Saudi Arabia were wrongly arrested, but then decided he must. “I am raising my voice. To do otherwise would betray those who languish in prison. I can speak when so many cannot.” For his principled stand, Khashoggi was drugged and dismembered by a Saudi hit squad.
And how was the trap laid? Jamal had fled to Washington, DC to protect his wife and family. He felt isolated and depressed that he could not tell the world about the unsettling events now happening in his beloved country.
He met a friend who supported him. She was a stewardess on Egyptian airlines. She suggested Jamal write for the Washington Post, thinking, no doubt, he would be safe working for such a prestigious news outlet.
He took up her advice and felt now he could help his country by exposing the deteriorating situation he considered was taking place under the new regime in Saudi.
She became his wife and, unknown to her, her phone was infected with Pegasus spyware. This enabled Jamal’s murderers to lure him to his place of execution, much to the outrage of the Turkish president once he learned his country had been used for such a horrific act of barbarity.
In reading the Pegasus book by Richard and Rigaud, the methodology to prove how this happened is described, and it took the courage, skill, determination and high risk endeavour to bring the facts about NSO spyware to light.
2023: The stunning Amnesty International Security Lab work published 2021, reappears in India:
And as fast as the Security Lab team raced to keep up with NSO intricate concealment of their spyware presence, the Security Lab still produced the evidence which was so profound and clear and could not be denied.
Jamal, like many journalists who try to free their country of oppressive and corrupt regimes, risk their lives because they love their country and, by speaking truth to power, hope to bring freedom to their people.
And what do we learn about the ‘white hat washing’ NSO carried out whilst in full knowledge its spyware was in the hands of well known human rights abusers such as in Azerbaijan, where the Aliyev government ranks in the bottom 15 percent of countries in the World Bank’s Control of Corruption in 2019? This was the year Pegasus was unleashed on victims such as Khadija, an Azeri journalist.
On September 10, 2019, three days after an attack on Khadija’s iPhone, NSO Group trumpeted its new corporate governance regime. This updated policy was designed to bring the company into “alignment with the UN Guiding Principles of Human Rights,” read the press release, “cementing the company’s existing industry-leading ethical business practices.” NSO announced the formation of a “Governance, Risk and Compliance Committee,” as well as a separate set of outside experts who could offer the company guidance on human rights issues: one former secretary and one former assistant secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security, as well as a French diplomat who had been first secretary at the embassy in Tel Aviv and an ambassador to the US. NSO also announced the hiring of a new general counsel, Shmuel Sunray. Sunray went in with eyes wide open, he would tell reporters. “We understand the power of the tool, and we understand the impact of misuse of the tool,” he said not long after he started at NSO. “We’re trying to do the right thing . . . to find the right balance.” The newly announced policy and personnel were merely a codification of protocols already in place, according to NSO. There would still be a rigid vetting of all potential end users of NSO’s weapons-grade cybersurveillance system. Key to the process was a case-by-case risk analysis to determine the likelihood of misuse by any country seeking a license to deploy Pegasus. NSO’s attorneys and its compliance committee always took into account the country’s record on human rights, rule of law, freedom of the press and expression, and corruption. (NSO said it was aware of the “very strong relations between issues of corruption and the issues of human rights.”) The compliance team had a very good place to start their vetting procedure, which was the annual rankings assigned by at least seven different international indexes, including the World Bank’s Control of Corruption report and Freedom House’s Freedom in the World report.
‘Pegasus’, Laurent Richard, S Rigaud
Contrast the ‘oh so clean NSO human rights declaration’ with what happened to two Azeri citizens, one a journalist, the other a blogger:
To illustrate the ongoing threat to those who expose, even through satire, the wrongdoings of their government, Richard and Rigaud, in their Pagasus book, share the following:
news reports about the case of Mahammad Mirzali, a twenty-seven-year-old Azeri blogger who had fled Baku and settled in Nantes, France, 5,000 kilometers away. Mahammad thought he would be safe enough in France to continue to post messages critical of President Aliyev’s financial corruption and the bloody war in Armenia on his YouTube channel, Made in Azerbaijan. But the distance had not put Mahammad or his family beyond the reach of Azerbaijan. His parents also fled to France after his father and brother-in-law were threatened and encouraged to stifle Mahammad. His sister had suffered the indignation of having an illegal recording of one of her intimate moments circulated online, a shrill echo of the blackmail attempt on Khadija Ismayilova. Mahammad himself was shot at while sitting in a parked car in October 2020, and in March 2021, he was attacked in Nantes and stabbed ten to fourteen times—the medical reports released to the public were uncertain. (Aliyev has publicly stated that there is not enough evidence for him to deign to respond to what he called “groundless and biased accusations” that his government was responsible for the attacks on Mahammad. Three of the four men charged with the crime a year later, however, were Azeri nationals.) Mahammad Mirzali survived, after a six-hour surgery, only to receive a text a week later. “This is the last warning,” it read. “We can kill you without any problem. You’ve seen that we’re not afraid of anyone. . . . We’ll have you killed with a bullet to the head fired by a sniper.” The threats had continued into June, according to the latest reporting, and Donncha suspected they were probably ongoing. So when Amnesty International offered to relocate Claudio and Donncha from their homes to undisclosed safe houses for the week leading up to publication, both of them accepted. The attacks on the Azeri dissident were in Donncha’s head. “He’s writing satire about the [Aliyev] government, and the government is going to try to kill him, twice, in France,” Donncha says. “If the Azerbaijanis know that [the Pegasus Project] is going to come out, are they going to do anything to try to stop us? And it’s not just Azerbaijan.”
‘Pegasus’, Laurent Richard, S Rigaud
Let us not forget Armenian philanthropist, Ruben Vardanyan:
The Pegasus book (by Richard and Rigaud) describes the Kafkaesque experience of a young Moroccan investigative journalist, Omar Radi.
June 22, 2020: Forbidden Stories posted a story of the Pegasus attack on Omar Radi…..2 days later, Omar was summoned to the BNJP offices in Casablanca…..accused of working with foreign intelligence agencies.
Radi’s family have repeatedly expressed concerns about his health as he has asthma and Crohn’s disease and protested over his 2022 transfer to Tiflet from Casablanca, where he was receiving treatment for his digestive condition and visits from family based in the city……
……..After his arrest in 2020, Radi was given a six-year prison sentence in 2021 for undermining state security and sexual assault. Press freedom advocates in Morocco told CPJ they believed the charges were unfounded and in retaliation for his investigative work.
Morocco hit the international news when it suffered a serious earthquake in 2023 in the Atlas Mountains, where many of the indigenous people live. It has been a popular tourist magnet due to its magnificent landscape, where the Amazigh have lived for thousands of years. The Indigenous land of Imazighen is a region called Tamazgha, encompassing Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Western Sahara, Mauritania, the Canary Islands, and parts of Egypt, Mali, and Niger.
The Romans called these people Barbarians, from which the name Berber derives. Needless to say, they prefer to be called Amazigh.
Amazigh man
Deep in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, the ancient Berbers live on, defying a harsh environment, and remaining loyal to their traditions and way of life in some of the most hard-to-reach parts of the African continent. Indomitable and proud, they call themselves the Amazigh, which is believed to mean “free people” or “noble men,” and trace their origins as an indigenous people in western North Africa to at least 10,000BC
As with many indigenous people, the Amazigh have been protesting the commandeering of their lands for industrial exploitation for a very long time:
the longest protests in Africa— led by the Indigenous Amazigh community in southeast Morocco against the highly exploitative extractive mining industry. Although it concluded around 2020, after a nearly decade-long protest, this movement was preceded by the historical struggle for recognition of the Amazigh identity, culture and language.
Omar Radi took an interest in writing about their protests to defend their lands, and he was silenced, and it would seem, so were they. There has been no reported protests since 2020.
In Israel the cybersurveillance industry was thriving, as Apple had built a centre of excellence just round the corner to NSO, back in 2015:
“When CEO Tim Cook and his gurus were deciding where to situate Apple Inc.’ s largest R& D facility outside the United States, they had few limits. The company’s annual net profits were around $ 40 billion a year and climbing, as was the global market share of its mobile phone. Cook and company had the planet to choose from, and they picked a midsize suburb pinched between sea and desert, 7,500 miles from their headquarters in Cupertino, California, in a country with less than nine million inhabitants and a gross domestic product in the vicinity of Norway’s and Nigeria’s. Apple erected a gleaming twenty-first-century glass box of an eco-friendly building in that faraway spot and reserved 180,000 square feet of office space for seven hundred of its employees—with room to grow. The talk in that building and beyond was that this new facility would be the launchpad for future versions of Apple’s signature product, the iPhone. If anybody at Apple had an inkling that a few dozen NSO cyber-researchers right around the corner from the new digs were spending their days and nights hunting for weaknesses to exploit in the iPhone operating software, they didn’t show it. NSO was barely known at the time and not really on Apple’s threat radar. So the relatively small spyware company’s presence certainly didn’t shake the conviction that the business district of Herzliya, just north of Tel Aviv, was the place to be. “Apple is in Israel,” Tim Cook said on his visit to inaugurate the new R& D center in February 2015, “because the engineering talent here is incredible.” Talent in Herzliya was hard to miss; an air of ambition and confidence permeated the restaurants and bars catering to the thousands of cybersecurity specialists and coders and software engineers working at dozens of neighborhood tech firms. The talk at table was often loud and learned and argumentative, whether debating the merits of the latest dating app or the latest job listings—must possess “a deep knowledge of radical Islam”—or the latest elections. This cohort was among the brightest 1 percent in Israel (the government had the test scores to prove it), working in the most lucrative and most glamorous field in the country. These young men and women were, quite literally, the Chosen People—identified as schoolchildren as possessors of uncommon intelligence, then encouraged to pursue math, physics, and computer science and to prepare for their extraordinary personal destinies.”
Pegasus’ Laurent Richard, Sandrine Rigaud
Amnesty International let it be known Omar Radi was hoping his investigation might lead to a change of mind regarding the treatment of these indigenous people.
June 22, 2020
Omar Radi: the Moroccan journalist who won’t be silenced
Moroccan journalist Omar Radi has learned to assume that he is always under surveillance. He is tailed as he investigates stories, his computer has been hacked and his phone has been targeted by sophisticated spyware
………
phone hacking and old-fashioned street surveillance.
A new Amnesty investigation has revealed that his phone was repeatedly targeted using Pegasus spyware from Israeli company NSO Group between January 2019 and January 2020. The tool silently gives an attacker complete access to messages, emails, media, microphone, camera, calls and contacts.
It is with mounting horror the world watches the US continue to supply Israel’s war on Palestinians. So I add the voice here of elderly statesman, Ralph Nader, who expresses so well how how so many feel in his recent letter.
Bomber Biden Doesn’t Wage Peace, Save Civilians or Listen to American Antiwar Crimes Advocates
Joe Biden has long had a problem with PEACE – as in “ceasefires,” “serious peace negotiations,” and conditioning the transfer or sale of major weapons systems as required by five U.S. criminal statutes. From one side of his mouth, Biden urges futilely Israeli compliance with international law while on the other side he supports the daily shipment of weapons of mass destruction to the Israeli government. These weapons are being used in the genocidal killing of Palestinians in Gaza.
A majority in Congress is even more hawkish and lets Biden do whatever he wants in making war abroad. The cornerstone of our Constitution – the separation of powers – has been demolished in area after area. (See, our open letter of November 28, 2023, to the members of the U.S. Congress).
By contrast, American public opinion has turned against U.S. arms shipments to Israel and the annihilation of Palestinian civilians from infants to the elderly. Whole extended families are being wiped out by American-made bombs and missiles. The homeless survivors are injured, starving and suffering from untold illnesses.
The Israeli state terror is producing a Palestinian Holocaust. Netanyahu’s violent anti-semitism against the Arabs of Palestine is out of control. Many courageous Israeli human rights groups protest, to no avail, (See, the December 13, 2023, open letter to Biden that appeared in the New York Times) as Netanyahu and his extremist coalition reveal their long-time objective of driving millions of Palestinians out of what is left of their Palestine.
As for the Hamas raid on October 7th, and the total collapse of the highly touted Israeli border security, a World War II Holocaust survivor told the New York Times, “It should never have happened…” Yet, Netanyahu has blocked an official investigation of this unexplained multi-tiered technological and human intelligence debacle.
Meanwhile, public dissatisfaction with the dictatorial decision-making by the White House and the absence of Congressional action is growing rapidly. More and more labor unions are now opposing Biden’s bombings, Jewish Americans working with Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now are brilliantly organizing demonstrations. Veterans for Peace’s 27 chapters around the country are in the streets peacefully demanding a ceasefire, cessation of weapons shipments and major increases in humanitarian aid. They are mostly ignored by the corporate media, NPR and PBS.
Religious groups are beseechingly calling for peace. This week in the latest public letter, 140 Global Christian Leaders, organized by Churches for Middle East Peace (CMEP) called on President Biden “…to have the moral courage to end U.S. complicity in the ongoing violence and, instead, do everything in [his] power to…” stop the “death and destruction” in Palestine.
The CMEP receives little or no coverage by the mainstream media even though this organization represents millions of people.
But then look who is not taking a pro-peace stand, staying silent or actively backing the Israeli war machine. The American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars are on the sidelines. The AFL-CIO Labor Federation finally came out tepidly for a ceasefire but has exerted very little of its muscle on Capitol Hill.
AIPAC, the “pro-Israeli government can do no wrong lobby” has been cultivating relationships with these U.S. organizations and others like them for decades.
The worst abdications have come from the legal profession in the form of State Bar Associations and the American Bar Association (ABA) – the largest organization of lawyers in the world. These lawyers are all “officers of the court” instructed to stand for the rule of law. Except for a brief time in 2005-2006 (https://nader.org/2013/04/19/aba-white-papers/ ) the ABA has idled while Presidents regularly have violated our Constitution and all kinds of laws – domestic and international – with impunity, facilitated by a supine Congress.
Bruce Fein and I have asked 50 State Bar Associations to be first responders in challenging the ongoing breakdown of the rule of law due to their professional duties and knowledge. None have responded.
As for the healthcare professionals watching Israel raining death and destruction directly on Gaza’s hospitals and health clinics, inundated with desperate patients, their endangered physicians and assistants without the means to devote their care, the response is overwhelmingly silent. The American Public Health Association and the American Medical Student Association are among the few to have condemned Israel’s atrocities.
Yet, the desperate pleas by their wounded professional colleagues have failed to register with the likes of the American Medical Association, the American College of Surgeons, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma and many others. (See the letter of March 1, 2024, which has gone unanswered).
What can turn our country around? An organized citizenry of less than one percent of the voters in Congressional Districts, giving voice to the voiceless majority, can free Congress from its captivity imposed by the forces of greed, power and violent Empire, draining resources from our dire domestic needs.
As I wrote in the Capitol Hill Citizen (February/March 2024 issue), Congress has become a weapon of mass destruction with multiple warheads. Only the people can recover their sovereign power, under the Constitution, now delegated to a Congress that sells out to the highest corporatist bidders.
On the Israeli slaughter of Gaza’s people, a small but growing number of Democrats in Congress are standing tall. They need your active backing to expand their numbers. (See, Ceasefire Tracker: https://workingfamilies.org/ceasefire-tracker/).
As for the cruel, vicious, genocidal, maniacal Republicans, they remain disgraced in their full-throttled support for Netanyahu, who is fighting for his job, trying to escape Israeli prosecutors and is hugely unpopular in Israel.
The GOP position was expressed by Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton – a lawyer no less – who said last October, for posterity’s eternal damnation: “As far as I’m concerned, Israel can bounce the rubble in Gaza.” This is exactly what the massacring Israeli juggernauts have done with the weapons, taxpayers’ money and diplomatic cover enabled by corrupt outlaws like Tom Cotton. Ralph Nader
I present here extracts from the Pegasus book to introduce the software/malware birth story:
Yet building the case to prove the use of NSO Pegasus, the bribery by cartels to locate their opponents using the malware, took decades…..
First of all, these particulars were very hard to check in 2019. The head of Felipe Calderón’s war on the cartels was just then being publicly accused of taking bribes from the drug lords he claimed he was trying to eradicate, so the former Mexican president wasn’t picking up his phone to talk to reporters. NSO employees were effectively muzzled. No European police official was willing to go on the record admitting that they licensed and operated Pegasus spyware. Then, too, Shalev’s recounting of the NSO story was filigreed with fine little narrative gems—and they were exclusive! Which meant that while the stories were often too good to be true, they were also too good to leave entirely untold, or to leave for another writer to tell instead. So even really good and well-informed reporters such as Bergman and a few others would just put them in quotes and add a clause or two of their own to serve as the written equivalent of an arched eyebrow. The already harried NSO press team did have to occasionally do some cleanup in the aftermath of a Shalev interview. The boss was not well versed in the technical specs of the Pegasus system, or the intricacies of high finance, or the fine points of the laws and regulations that governed the cybersurveillance industry in Israel and abroad. But he did exhibit a genius for controlling the narrative. Shalev Hulio, it must be admitted, tells a very good story. His story of the origins of NSO may be his best. It starts out as a kind of buddy movie: starring him and his best pal, Omri Lavie. They were both born around 1980, into the false hopes that followed the Camp David Accords and the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty, and raised with the whiff of peril always in the air. (Between 1993 and 1995 alone, there were fourteen separate suicide bombings in Israel, leaving eighty-six dead.) They were similar boys. Smart enough but undisciplined. Shalev and Omri met in the mid-1990s while both were studying arts and theater at a high school in Haifa (after Shalev washed out of a program for gifted students because of congenital misbehavior)……….
Shalev and Omri, founders of NSO…. by the spring of 2011, Shalev and Omri had a product to take to market. They called it Pegasus, Shalev says, “because what we built was actually a Trojan horse we sent flying through the air to devices.”……Claudio Guarnieri ……internet security researcher trying to identify new cybersurveillance tools and to call out their purveyors……..“I think NSO was the first company that was solely focused on one thing and one thing only, which was mobile,” says Claudio, looking back a decade later. “At the time that was a bit premature. But I think that they were seeing that that’s where the market really was going to be……..If a start-up spyware company wished to go bowling for dollars in 2011, there was no better place than Mexico. The lights in the alley were on twenty-four hours a day, and there were plenty of open lanes, because President Felipe Calderón was already five years into a ferocious battle with the Mexican drug cartels.
‘Pegasus’ Laurent Richard, Sandrine Rigaud
The Pegasus book goes on to describe the timing of Calderon acquiring Pegasus malware:
in December 2006. The new president of Mexico sent 6,500 troops into the fight and quickly expanded the combatants to include more than 20,000 soldiers and federal police. Calderón did not waver, even as the death toll mounted—almost 7,000 Mexicans were killed in 2008 alone. That was the same year the United States decided to join its neighbor’s fight, sending military and law enforcement agents to Mexico to help coordinate. Better than that, the Americans poured money over the border and into the newly minted “Merida Initiative.”
The US Congress appropriated $1.5 billion to aid Calderón and his fighters over the next three years, which meant that even after the Mexican military and police forces upgraded their weaponry and hardware, there was plenty left over for the latest in digital technology: malware capable of monitoring and tracking the cartels and their abettors. Procurement officers from Mexican military, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies had real money to spend on cutting-edge spyware tools. NSO was a little late to the first frame of the contest. A handful of Israeli tech companies had already closed deals for spyware in Mexico, as had Gamma Group, based in the UK or Germany or the British Virgin Islands (it was hard to tell). Hacking Team, the presumed world leader in this blossoming field of cybermercenaries, headquartered in Claudio’s hometown of Milan, Italy, also had its sights on this spectacular, and spectacularly complicated, market. For a new and uninitiated private cybersurveillance vendor like NSO, simply deciphering the tangle of Mexican government acronyms could be head spinning.
Book, Laurent Richard, Sandrine Rigaud
Then the link to the vital middle man:
The NSO team was fortunate to find just the right guide through the maze of la Plaza del Mercado Vigilancia Cibernética: a man known as “Mr. Lambo” (he favored expensive Italian roadsters) or “El Chino” (he was of Japanese descent, but close)—Jose Susumo Azano Matsura…….Azano saw the potential of NSO, this new entrant into the “Intrusion as a Service” industry, right away. STDi reportedly paid NSO $500,000 for the exclusive right to resell its Pegasus technology, and Shalev armed Azano and his team with a set of talking points to take to potential customers in the Mexican government. That document is a perfect little snapshot of the promise of NSO’s earliest technology, which was ambitious right from the start. The Pegasus system, according to this document from 2011, provided a “tactical active approach” for breaking through the wall of encryption built into the most common mobile phones on the market, BlackBerrys and Androids.
These devices, the NSO talking points lamented, had become “a secure and convenient method for communication for all kinds of criminal activities, which is difficult to monitor today.”
Book, Laurent Richard, Sandrine Rigaud
Then the first real deployment of Pegasus:
The Pegasus system offered a soup-to-nuts solution. The first step was injection: finding a vulnerability in the phone’s operating system that opened the door for Pegasus users to surreptitiously plant the spyware on the phone. Step two was configuring the software so it could successfully monitor, collect, and prepare all data for retrieval. This data included all contacts and calendar entries, all email, voicemail, and instant messages, all system files, as well as current and past geolocation. The earliest Pegasus system, according to the talking points anyway, had the ability to remotely turn on the microphone to monitor “environmental voice interception”—which is to say any live conversation within earshot of the phone. It could also remotely activate the mobile phone’s camera for capturing snapshots. Step three was data retrieval, wherein Pegasus would exfiltrate the contents of the phone and place them in one of the end user’s servers, ready for archiving, mining, and analysis. The Pegasus system, as offered, included NSO-provided hardware, software, maintenance, and training for the various sorts of operators needed across the platform. There was an array of “infection vectors” to choose from, each tailored to a target’s device and operating system; “front-end consoles,” where government-paid operatives executed the initial infection and configured the Trojan horse malware for monitoring and the exfiltration; “anonymizers” to hide the end user’s real IP address and “camouflage” its activities on the internet; firewalls and virtual private networks (VPN) for added security and convenience; and “rackable servers” for storing the growing mass of data retrieved from the targets. As a rule, NSO figured 2 terabytes was a good starting point, enough to monitor four hundred different mobile phones—at 50 megabytes of data retrieved per target per day—for an entire year. But NSO also encouraged Azano and his team at STDi to assure potential buyers that “this cluster of servers can grow with the Customer future needs seamlessly.” NSO technicians would do the entirety of the initial setup, maintain the hardware, upgrade the software as needed, monitor the system in real time for any malfunction, and be available to troubleshoot. They would also train the ops who worked on the front-end consoles. For the “attack” and “configuration” agents, NSO recommended local people with degrees in criminology, anthropology, or psychology, an “ability to provide unique insight into target psyche” and to “work under pressure, in non-standard hours.” End users could count on up to six weeks of dedicated time from NSO talent to get the system up and running and the operators properly schooled. NSO looked good to Azano, another sluicing river of income for STDi. Azano, meanwhile, looked good to Shalev and Omri. NSO’s new reseller provided instant intelligence in Mexican commercial traditions. Mr. Lambo, for instance, was schooled in the operative custom of mordida (the bite); knew which officials in the chain had to get a cut of any big sale, what size cut would be deemed acceptable, and how to make sure it was safely and secretly dispersed. Azano also provided connections; he knew the generals who made the final decisions at SEDENA, the admirals at SEMAR, the supervisors at CISEN and the PF, and the top prosecutors at the PGR. Azano’s contacts apparently went all the way to the top, to the Office of the President, to Felipe Calderón himself. On May 25, 2011, just weeks after Azano signed on to market NSO’s spyware system, Shalev Hulio got an email from one of his NSO operatives: “Mr. Azano notifies me that the demo to the Secretary of Defense and the President will take place next Friday. They called me after confirmation, and they asked me to do my best to be there on Tuesday, since the Secretary of Defense requested a demonstration the day before (Thursday) and for the President on Friday.” Neither Calderón, nor his SecDef, nor Azano himself has confirmed that the scheduled demo actually happened, but six weeks later, in July, STDi closed a deal with SEDENA—the first major sale in the history of NSO. The contract was reportedly worth a little over $15 million, which more or less launched NSO as a viable company. When Shalev finally told the story of that first deal, not long before Forbidden Stories and the Security Lab got access to the leaked data, he didn’t dwell on Azano (who was at the time in a US prison) and STDi. He talked about the general he met in Mexico City, and the assurances the military man gave Shalev and Omri about the way their powerful new cybersurveillance tool would be used and all the good it would do. “The country had decided to establish a separate new body—a branch of the military—to deal with the drug issue,” Shalev remembered, in another of his uncheckable stories. “This body would include spotless individuals with no history of corruption who would undergo a polygraph test. Then we met with the general, the head of that branch. He said: ‘You fit us like a glove. We will base our entire drug-fighting apparatus on your new technology. This is how the biggest situation room—not just in the region but one of the biggest in the world—will fight crime and drugs.’ And to them, we agreed to sell.”
borderslynn 
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