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Contents contributed and discussions participated by Pedro Gonçalves

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Pedro Gonçalves

The Coming Cyber Wars - Harvard - Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs - 0 views

belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/...coming_cyber_wars.html

Cyber Command Cyber Warfare US

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 01 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Congress should demand answers to questions like: What is the role of cyber war in US military strategy? Is it acceptable to do "preparation of the battlefield" by lacing other countries' networks with "Trojan horses" or "back doors" in peacetime? Would the United States consider a preemptive cyber attack on another nation? If so, under what circumstances? Does US Cyber Command have a plan to seize control and defend private sector networks in a crisis? Do the rules of engagement for cyber war allow for military commanders to engage in "active defense" under some circumstances? Are there types of targets we will not attack, such as banks or hospitals? If so, how can we assure that they are not the victims of collateral damage from US cyber attacks?
Pedro Gonçalves

China will implode if it doesn't change its authoritarian ways | Will Hutton | Comment ... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...will-hutton-china-must-change

China

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 01 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • when the People's Daily, the party's mouthpiece, declares that China can no longer generate "blood-smeared" GDP, a rubicon has been crossed.
  • The internet is proving an instrument that not even the authoritarian Chinese can control.
  • China, as I once was memorably told by a group of lawyers in Beijing, is a volcano waiting to explode. It is difficult for those not familiar with the country to comprehend the scale of corruption, the waste of capital, the sheer inefficiency, the ubiquity of the party and the obeisance to hierarchy that is today's China. The mass of Chinese are proud and pleased with what has been achieved since Deng Xiaoping began the era of the "socialist market economy". But there is a widespread and growing recognition that the authoritarian model has to change, a fact that every disaster dramatises.
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  • Productivity, efficiency and safety are secondary to two overwhelming needs: to complete the network fast, so creating crucially needed jobs, and to be able to boast that China's capability is cheaper than anybody else's.
  • China is discovering that a sophisticated knowledge economy operating at the frontiers of technology is incompatible with an authoritarian one-party state.
  • There will be a Chinese Spring. And sooner than anyone expects.
Pedro Gonçalves

Europe's Sovereignty Crisis - Joschka Fischer - Project Syndicate - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...English

EU Europe

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 31 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • the EU must combine greater stability, financial transfers, and mutual solidarity if the entire European project is to be prevented from collapsing under the weight of the ongoing sovereign-debt crisis.
  • For a long time, Merkel fought this new EU tooth and nail, because she knows how unpopular it is in Germany – and thus how politically dangerous it is to her electoral prospects. She wanted to defend the euro, but not to pay the price for doing so. That dream is at an end, thanks to the financial markets.
  • The markets issued an ultimatum to Europe: either embrace more economic and financial integration on a federal basis, or face the collapse of the euro and thus the EU, including the Common Market. At the last moment, Merkel chose the sensible option.
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  • Other crisis countries in the eurozone have not been stabilized, because Germany – fearing a domestic political backlash – has not dared to embrace a community of liability by issuing Eurobonds, even if the European Financial Stability Facility’s new role means that virtually 90% of the path has already been traveled
  • The agreement at the most recent European Council will be more expensive, both politically and financially. Despite doubling financial aid and lowering interest rates, the agreement will neither end the Greek debt crisis and that of other countries on the European periphery, nor stop the EU’s associated existential crisis. It will only buy time – and at a high cost. Further aid packages for Greece may seem impossible to avoid, because the losses imposed on Greek debt holders have been too modest.
  • Had the European Council’s heads of state and government taken this foreseeable decision a year ago, the euro crisis would not have escalated to the extent that it has, the total bill would have been lower, and European leaders would have been rightly praised for a historic feat.
  • the bail-in of private investors, much applauded in Germany, is of secondary importance, and is intended only for the German public and the MPs of the country’s government coalition; indeed, upon close inspection, it turns out that banks and insurance companies have made a decent profit. Their losses will remain minimal.
  • the single currency’s collapse was avoided, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy was right to laud the establishment of a “European Monetary Fund” as a real achievement. But this bold move has huge political consequences that have to be explained to the public, because the move toward establishing such a fund – and, with it, a European economic government – amounts to an EU political revolution in three acts.
  • the two-speed Union, which has been a reality since the first rounds of enlargement, will divide into a vanguard (euro group) and a rearguard (the rest of the 27 EU members). This formalized division will fundamentally change the EU’s internal architecture. Under the umbrella of the enlarged EU, the old dividing lines between a German/French-led European Economic Community and a British/Scandinavian-led European Free Trade Association re-emerge. From now on, the euro states will determine the EU’s fate more than ever, owing to their common interests.
  • this jump into a monetary fund and economic government will lead to further massive losses of sovereignty for the member states, in favor of a European federal solution. For example, within the monetary union, national budget laws will be subject to a European supervisory body.
  • If the euro is to survive, genuine integration, with further transfers of sovereignty to the European level, will be unavoidable. This historic step cannot be taken through the bureaucratic backdoor, but only in the bright light of democratic politics. The EU’s further federalization enforces its further democratization.
Pedro Gonçalves

The last thing Norway needs is illiberal Britain's patronising | Simon Jenkins | Commen... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...-illiberal-britain-patronising

Norway

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 29 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • In 2004 Norway celebrated a century of independence, not with fireworks and self-congratulation but a voluminous study of its constitution's health. It took five years and yielded 50 books, forming an astonishing Domesday survey of democracy in one country. Like apiarists round a beehive, scholars studied every minute facet of political life and party affiliation, every local association, newspaper, lobby and minority group.
  • Pedro Gonçalves on 29 Jul 11
     
    In 2004 Norway celebrated a century of independence, not with fireworks and self-congratulation but a voluminous study of its constitution's health. It took five years and yielded 50 books, forming an astonishing Domesday survey of democracy in one country. Like apiarists round a beehive, scholars studied every minute facet of political life and party affiliation, every local association, newspaper, lobby and minority group.
Pedro Gonçalves

Monetary union, always unworkable, has set in train a European disaster | Simon Jenkins... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...ion-european-eurozone-sceptics

EU Europe

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 24 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Only a fool could want Europe to return to the divisive feuds and nationalist horrors of the 19th and early-20th centuries. Any student of the Balkans knows that such horrors are never far below the surface. But a monetary union that denies nations the freedom to breathe and adjust their economies in their own way over time runs just this risk of regressive reaction.Each step towards "ever-closer union" has brought reaction nearer
  • The Greeks are rebelling in their humiliation, and the Germans are rebelling in their generosity.
  • The Greeks are rebelling in their humiliation, and the Germans are rebelling in their generosity.
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  • Across Europe the old pro-EU consensus is evaporating.
  • The latest Euro-barometer of public opinion shows for the first time that overall distrust of the EU outstrips trust, predominantly so in Britain, Germany and France. Polls show ever fewer countries regarding membership as a good thing, with opposition strongest the farther north we go. It is ominous that the politics of euroscepticism is fusing along old historical lines. When the EU was a sound trading union it was backed in Protestant northern Europe. As it slid into institutional orthodoxy and heavy cross-border transfers, its appeal shifted to the Counter-Reformation south. The high-flown language of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's first draft of the Lisbon treaty was that of a papal encyclical.
  • The attempt to impose fiscal union on all Europe will bring its demise.
Pedro Gonçalves

IDF Civil Administration pushing for land takeover in West Bank - Haaretz Daily Newspap... - 0 views

www.haaretz.com/...takeover-in-west-bank-1.374564

Israel Palestine West Bank Israeli Settlements

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 22 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • the scope of land in question thwarts the possibility of exchanging areas in a peace settlement, according to the formula presented by U.S. President Barack Obama on May 19. This is because on the western side of the Green Line there is not enough open land to compensate the Palestinians for such an extensive annexation, according to examinations carried out during previous talks between Israel and the Palestinians.
  • the work procedures of the administration's team, dubbed "Blue Line," for demarcating state lands in the West Bank. He writes that the team's major task is to examine the state's declarations of ownership on lands mainly in the 80s and 90s. But the team, which has been working since 1999, is also examining the possibility of declaring lands with undefined ownership as state lands.
  • The document says the team gives priority to territories whose ownership is subject to a court debate or to dispute between settlers and Palestinians and between Palestinians and the state. The team also gives priority to advancing building public institutions, schools, parks and "other matters classified as urgent by the authorized bodies."
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  • The document says the Blue Line team is not required to examine and ascertain land ownership where the ownership has already been determined de facto by illegal construction.
  • The document also says the government's decision of 1979, saying that extending West Bank settlements and building new ones would only be carried out on state-owned land, must be adhered to.
  • Despite the document, dozens of settlements and outposts have been built, with the authorities' knowledge and assistance, on private, Palestinian-owned lands. These include Ofra, Beit El and Eli and the outposts Amona, Givat Asaf and Migron, to name just a few.
  • Dror Etkes, a left-wing activist monitoring construction in the settlements, has found that the administration's team included at least 26 outposts in territories it defines as state lands. This means the state has started a process to legitimize these outposts.
  • In an overwhelming majority of cases the team recommended classifying the examined lands as state lands, but in some cases the team accepted Palestinians' appeals, after appelants produced documents proving their ownership of the land.
Pedro Gonçalves

Rudderless EU: Chancellor Merkel's Dangerous Lack of Passion For Europe - SPIEGEL ONLIN... - 0 views

www.spiegel.de/...0,1518,775085,00.html

EU Germany

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 21 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Kohl believes his political legacy -- the euro and European unity -- is in danger, and he is not just blaming the policies of the Greeks and Portuguese, but Merkel as well. What the chancellor is doing is "very dangerous," Kohl recently complained, according to one visitor. Then Kohl added: "She's destroying my Europe."
  • Kohl reacted to the original, German version of this article by stating in an interview with Bild newspaper published on Monday that the comments ascribed to him were "totally fabricated." In the interview, he went on to say Merkel's predecessor, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, was partly to blame for the crisis because he had agreed to a softening of the Stability Pact on fiscal discipline in the euro zone, and had allowed Greece to join the euro in the first place.
  • No CDU government leader has been cooler towards Brussels than Angela Merkel. To her, Europe isn't a question of war and peace but of euros and cents. Her policy so far has consisted of cheerless repair work, of plugging holes and putting out fires.
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  • The chancellor's indecisiveness is infuriating her party. First she declares Germany's fate is tied to the survival of the euro. Then she claims the Spaniards and Greeks don't work hard enough and complains that the German taxpayer has to bail them out. It's unclear whether she's trying to be stateswoman or queen of the tabloids.
  • Finance Minister Schäuble is particularly skeptical about the chancellor's actions in this respect. He refrains from uttering a word of criticism in public. But he allows himself to be feted in Brussels as the German government's "last European" -- that in itself amounts to hidden criticism of the chancellor.
  • For Schäuble, the euro crisis is an opportunity to finally realize his plan for a political union. "Europe is like a bicycle. If you stop it, it will fall over," he said in a keynote speech in Paris in December, quoting the great European Jacques Delors.
  • Merkel's actions show she doesn't want to pull Europe towards a political union.
  • Merkel is also afraid of German voters. Rarely has Europe been as unpopular with German citizens as it is now, and getting people to accept the need for unpopular policies has never been Merkel's strong point. Her background growing up in East Germany is a further factor -- the European euphoria of her western CDU colleagues has always been alien to her.
  • The CDU's Bavarian allies share the chancellor's objections. CSU party leaders have been warning against passing too much power to Brussels, just like they did in the 1990s, when then-CSU leader Edmund Stoiber tirelessly railed against the introduction of the euro. But that amounted to little more than beer hall talk which had no impact because Kohl remained faithful to European integration.
  • Merkel's lack of vision for Europe allows the CSU's euroskepticism to resonate more strongly. The pro-Europeans in the CDU are worried that the CSU's rhetoric could soon become government policy, and are pleading with the Bavarians to drop their populist stance in EU affairs. Ironically, they are getting help from Edmund Stoiber, of all people. The former Bavarian governor has become a staunch European since 2007 when he was appointed to head a unit tasked with reducing bureaucracy on behalf of the Commission.
  • Stoiber recently warned against a "renaissance of nationalism" and uttered a sentence that can be read as criticism of Merkel. "At the moment there is no one who has an overall European perspective," he said.
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