Jugoinfo
* "RADIO FREE EUROPE": LA GUERRA FREDDA NON E' FINITA!
* SUL CONTROLLO DI INTERNET
---
Belgrade Rejects Registration Of U.S.-Funded Radio
BELGRADE, Jul 21, 2000 -- (Reuters) The Yugoslav
information ministry on Thursday rejected a request by
U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe to register its Belgrade
office, accusing it of airing "dirty propaganda".
Yugoslav Information Minister Goran Matic was quoted
by the official Tanjug news agency as saying any
possible activities of the office would be considered
"illegal and unlawful".
"The office of Radio Free Europe, as a mouthpiece of
American official policy, promotes its colonial aims
using means unsuited to principles of objective
reporting," Matic said in a letter to the radio
station.
He said Radio Free Europe tried to "influence the
Yugoslav public by using dirty propaganda with the aim
of realizing these aims."
The letter was addressed to director Nenad Pejic of
the radio station's programme for South Slav
languages, based in Prague, which had filed the
registration request.
Yugoslav officials have accused NATO states of
plotting to destabilize the country, and have
denounced opposition leaders and independent media as
their lackeys.
The West and the Serbian opposition have in turn
accused the Belgrade authorities of clamping down on
non-government media in a bid to stifle dissent.
The Belgrade office of Radio Free Europe said it had
not received any official notification about the
decision and declined to comment.
> FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF YUGOSLAVIA
>
> YUGOSLAV DAILY SURVEY
>
> BELGRADE, 21 July 2000 No. 3115
>
>
> YUGOSLAV INFORMATION MINISTER: RADIO FREE EUROPE
> REGISTRATION DEMAND GROUNDLESS
> BELGRADE, July 20 (Tanjug) Yugoslav Information Minister Goran
> Matic on Thursday informed the director of the SouthSlav program of Radio
> Free Europe, Nenad Pejic, that there are no grounds for the registration
> and legalization of the correspondence offices of this radio in Belgrade.
> Matic said in a letter that the correspondence offices of Radio
> Free Europe have the sole task, as the exponent of the official U.S.
> policy, to promote that country's colonial aims by using means contrary to
> the principles of objective reporting and with the aim of influencing the
> Yugoslav public through propaganda and thus realize its own goals.
> Since the registration request says that the founder of the
> Praguebased Radio Free Europe is the U.S. Congress, Matic recalled that the
> current U.S. administration, which spearheads the policy of economic and
> other sanctions against Yugoslavia, is grossly interfering into the
> internal affairs of a sovereign and independent state through media and
> diplomatic pressures.
> The culmination of this brutal policy erupted last year, contrary
> to all international legal norms, via the armed and criminal NATO
> aggression on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Matic said.
> He pointed out that the Yugoslav property in the United States,
> despite U.S. claims about the inviolability of property, has been frozen
> and that this is in fact a robbery which represents a special form of
> economic and political pressure on Yugoslavia.
> Based on such a standpoint of the U.S. administration and
> Congress, expressed through permanent efforts to threaten the territorial
> integrity and constitutional order in Yugoslavia and to forcefully topple
> its legally elected government and establish a puppet one, Matic said that
> there are no grounds for the registration of the correspondence offices of
> the U.S. propaganda media Radio Free Europe.
> He warned that in the future all possible activities of that radio
> would be considered illegal and that legal measures would be implemented
> against all who carry out such activities unlawfully.
VOICE OF RUSSIA ON BAN OF RADIO FREE EUROPE IN YUGOSLAVIA
MOSCOW, July 26 (Tanjug) The attempts of the west to present
Yugoslavia as an allegedly nondemocratic country because its organs had
refused to register a Belgrade office of Radio Free Europe are just an
extension of the old campaign ultimately aimed at bringing servants to
the
Serbian and Yugoslav political and media scenes and having them work
strictly in the interests of foreign power centers, Voice of Russia
radio
said in a commentary on Wednesday.
In refusing the registration of Radio Free Europe, the Yugoslav
Ministry of Information had in mind that this radio station is not an
objective media organization, but a propaganda instrument of NATO whose
activities are directed against Yugoslavia, Voice of Russia said.
Western mass media immediately reacted with a volley of new
statements about the alleged nondemocratic and totalitarian nature of
the
authorities in Belgrade, and the director of the Sloboda Radio Free
Europe
radio station even accused the Yugoslav government of violating norms of
international law, the Russian radio said.
This and other similar false advocates of the free word do not
consider as violations of norms of international law the west's constant
media war against Yugoslavia or the troublemongering interference in its
internal affairs, Voice of Russia warned.
They do not see any violations of this law, either, in the
bombing
of the Serbian Radio Television RTS during the NATO aggression on
Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999, which caused huge destruction and
casualties among the press, the Russian radio said.
-
http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/pubaffairs/releases/1299radiofree.html
HOOVER INSTITUTION
December 17, 1999
Hoover Institution to House Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Archives
The Hoover Institution will house the broadcast archives and corporate
records of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty under an agreement worked out
between the two and approved by the U.S. Broadcasting Board of
Governors.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Pentagon's Info Wars
CounterPunch
Published: July 1-15, 2000 (vol 7, no. 12)
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair
Jim Redden reports that the US government is laying
the groundwork to knock inconvenient voices off line
during the next international military confrontation.
You can’t blame the folks over at Antiwar.com for
feeling paranoid these days. The libertarian-oriented,
anti-military website hosted its second annual
conference on March 24 and 25. Held at the Villa Hotel
in San Mateo, , the theme of the conference was
“Beyond Left & Right: The New Face of the Antiwar
Movement”. Among the speakers was Alexander Cockburn
who gave an account of the event to CounterPunchers
shortly thereafter.
A short time later, Antiwar.com founder Eric Garris
was startled to learn that his site had been added to
a list of “militia-related” websites maintained by
Mark Pitcavage, research director for the
federally-funded State/Local Anti-Terrorism Training
(SLATT) program. CounterPunch reported on Pitcavage’s
curious operation in its May 1-15 issue. Then in late
May, the software for counting the number of visitors
to Antiwar.com crashed two days in a row. The reason?
An unusually high number of hits from a single
visitor.
When columnist Justin Raimondo tracked down the
curious party, he discovered it was a Pentagon-funded
unit of cyber-soldiers known as the Army Computer
Emergency Response Team. The counter crashed after
recording 2,000 hits from ACERT on the first day
alone. Every file on the website was visited at least
once. CounterPunch contacted ACERT headquarters and
reached public affairs assistant Shirley K. Startzman
who confirmed the military had prowled Antiwar.com.
She said ACERT uses commercially available web search
tools to “continuously research for websites on the
Internet that may have information relating to
potential cyber threats.” Startzman claimed that this
work is “defensive in nature”, intended to “protect
Army computer systems from hackers or denial of
service attacks”.
As Startzman put it, “The Antiwar website was one of
many on the publicly accessible Internet the tool
identified as having information potentially related
to cyber defense. The high numbers of hits reflect
this automated search tool.” Later she added that “the
commercially available tool we used in this particular
case is called Themescape. Its website is
www.cartia.com.” Garris and Raimondo aren’t buying
this explanation.
Despite Startzman’s insistence that ACERT is
“defensive in nature”, it is part of a much larger
military system. Cyber-warfare is a relatively new
idea. It first surfaced as a public issue in 1988 when
the Morris Worm computer virus disabled approximately
10 per cent of all computers connected to the
Internet. Fearful of the vulnerability of the
government’s vast computer networks to such attacks,
the Pentagon turned to the Software Engineering
Institute, a federally-funded research center based at
Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania.
By the end of the year, SEI was officially designated
as the Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination
Center (CERT/CC), providing research and assistance to
the government and anyone else wanting to prevent
viruses and other attacks from crippling their
computers. The Pentagon soon decided to concentrate
its emerging cyber-warfare operations under the United
States Army Intelligence and Security Command
(INSCOM), which was created in 1977 to coordinate all
of the military’s intelligence-gathering operations.
INSCOM moved to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, in the summer
of 1989.
Then the Pentagon began to plan its own Internet
attacks. The idea was first fleshed out in a 1996
paper published by the National Defense University
Press called “Information Terrorism: Can You Trust
Your Toaster?” It was written by Matthew G. Devost of
the Information Systems and Technology Group, and
Brian K. Houghton and Neal A. Pollard, of the Science
Applications International Corporation’s Strategic
Assessment Center.
The authors created a scenario, a war story set in the
Internet, pitting “information terrorists” against
heroic cyber-warriors in the service of Uncle Sam. By
an amazing coincidence, the bad guys in the fictional
story maintain a website which sounds a lot like a
government version of what Antiwar.com was doing at
the time: “The Web page was dramatic and rife with
propaganda and claims against American, NATO, and
Croatian imperialism and atrocities in the Balkan
region, and included questionable allegations of
illegal arms transfers between NATO governments and
Bosnian Muslims and Croats.”
To counter this sinister abuse of the First Amendment
the authors said the U.S. military should create a
“specialized and integrated counter information
terrorism group”, which they called DIRT (Digital
Integrated Response Team). As the authors excitedly
put it, “These highly trained information warriors
would be the national security equivalent of
Carnegie-Mellon University’s Computer Emergency
Response Team, but with an offensive capability”.
After studying this scenario, the Pentagon duly
created ACERT the following year. An article on the
ribbon-cutting ceremony titled “Protecting Electronic
Borders” appeared in the March-April 1997 issue of the
Journal of INSCOM. “Information dominance took a giant
leap into the future March 17, when the United States
Army Intelligence and Security Command ceremoniously
opened the Army Computer Emergency Response Team
Coordination Center at Fort Belvoir, Va. Its mission
is to re-write the books on how the Army handles the
newest threat in the field manuals - computer
hackers.” The INSCOM Journal reported that “A hacker
demonstration was conducted as part of the
ribbon-cutting ceremony. An ACERT/CC computer security
expert conducted the demonstration, saying that you
have to ‘think like a hacker and try to break into a
system’”.
That’s what Garris and Raimondo think ACERT is
preparing to do -- to hack into Antiwar.com and
disable it, along with other sites that excite the
displeasure of the National Security apparat.
---
http://www.vny.com/cf/news/upidetail.cfm?QID=104916
Tuesday, 25 July 2000 20:45 (ET)
Serbian authorities take control of Internet
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia, July 25 (UPI) -- The Serbian government has
taken
control of Internet providers under a law on public enterprises, which
means
it will have access to all e-mail traffic, independent Belgrade radio
B2-92
reported, quoting well-informed sources.
The radio said the law came into force Tuesday.
The law envisages that private firms operating in the field of
telecommunications and information will have to conclude contracts with
the
government giving it powers to approve or reject the statutes, tariffs
and
all other decisions of these firms, the radio said.
It quoted its sources as saying that this also implies that lists of
all
users and copies of all e-mail messages will be accessible to the
authorities. The government will be able to raise charges for Internet
services and force into bankruptcy all firms that make large
remittances to
foreign countries.
In this way, the Internet will fall entirely into the hands of firms
subservient to the authorities, the radio predicted.
"We have tried to get statements from Internet providers but none of
their
owners and directors wanted to comment publicly on possible
consequences of
this law," the radio said.
"Still we have been told unofficially that this is the usual practice
in
developed countries, but that a thing like this in Serbia has a
completely
different implication."
The government has already taken over some major print and electronic
media and is starving independent newspapers of newsprint, saying it is
in
short supply at home but refusing to allow them to buy it abroad.
The radio quoted the comment on the Internet takeover from an
anonymous
private provider's firm: "There were underground rumors about this
during
(last year's NATO) bombing raids, and here you are, they've done it
now.
They want to shut up our last door into the world and to reduce our IQ
to
score 30."
Copyright 2000 by United Press International.
All rights reserved.
---
Subject: Fw: privacy attenzione alle spie della rete
Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2000 18:58:34 +0200
From: "red*ghost" <red-ghost@...>
To: <Undisclosed-Recipient:;>
Questo programmino trova e rimuove i file advert.dll e affini, programmi
che
spiano informazioni dai nostri pc, ripulendo il registro.
Salvaguardiamo la nostra privacy!
lo trovate all'indirizzo:
http://www.tmcrew.org/csa/spzk/optout.exe
--------------------------------------------------------------------
RED GHOST
materiali per la controinformazione e la lotta
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Email: red-ghost@...
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Web: http://www.ecn.org/estroja/
--------------------------------------------------------------------
----- Original Message -----
From: "Spazio Kamino" <spzkostia@...>
To: <spzkostia@...>; <tacticalmedia@...>;
<movimento@...>
Sent: Thursday, July 20, 2000 1:59 PM
Subject: privacy attenzione alle spie della rete
> Si piazza sul pc scaricando numerosi software da Internet
> Chi li distribuisce nega ogni abuso. Ma gli esperti...
>
> Advert.dll, la spia
> venuta dalla Rete
>
>
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
------
> ROMA (g.mol.)- Fate un piccolo esperimento: cercate sul disco rigido del
> vostro computer un file denominato "advert.dll". Probabilmente ne
ignoravate
> l'esistenza, né sapete come sia arrivato lì. E soprattutto a cosa serva.
> Ecco le risposte: quel file si piazza sull'hard disk quando installate
> alcuni dei più popolari software gratuitamente scaricabili dalla Rete (la
> lista ne contiene centinaia). E ogni volta che vi connettete a Internet
> invia alla società che distribuisce i programmi - a vostra insaputa - una
> lunga serie di informazioni su vostro conto.
>
> Quali? Qui la faccenda si complica. Perché la Radiate, questo il nome
> dell'impresa, tende a minimizzare, definendo "false" le voci che da tempo
> circolano sul suo conto. Nella nota che spiega la politica della privacy
> dell'azienda si legge infatti che i dati trattati sono estremamente
> limitati: "Noi mandiamo messaggi pubblicitari sul vostro computer,
riceviamo
> informazioni sui banner che voi vedete e studiamo le risposte alle domande
> che vi abbiamo posto".
>
> Ma non tutti la pensano così. Numerosi hacker ed esperti di sicurezza
> telematica si sono infatti presi la briga di studiare "advert.dll", che
> tecnicamente è una libreria dinamicamente collegata (dynamic link
library),
> cioè un pezzo di software che contiene funzioni utili per altri programmi.
> Il primo a farlo è stato AcidBurn, un pirata americano. Ma poi ci hanno
> lavorato anche italiani. Scoprendo cose molto interessanti.
>
> "Quando ci si connette a Internet, advert.dll crea una finestra
invisibile,
> che si mette in comunicazione con il server della Radiate", spiega
> 'Quequero', un giovane hacker abruzzese. "Poi gli invia una serie di dati:
> il nome dell'utente, il suo Ip, la lista dei programmi installati sul
> computer e di tutto quello che si è scaricato dalla Rete, i siti e i
banner
> visitati durante la navigazione, e molto probabilmente, lo stiamo
> accertando, anche la password con la quale si entra in Rete".
>
> L'elenco fa un po' impressione. Perché l'intrusione nel privato del
> cybernauta è tanto spinta quanto impalpabile. E la sproporzione tra ciò
che
> viene ammesso e ciò che si sospetta è grande. Nel dubbio però la "cimice"
si
> attacca stabilmente al computer. E dall'altra parte, in ogni caso, c'è
> qualcuno che ascolta. Non è una bella sensazione, quando lo si viene a
> sapere.
>
> (20 luglio 2000)
>
>
>
> Il cybernauta non è mai solo quando va su Internet
> Ecco come può essere seguito ogni suo movimento sul web
>
> I mille occhi puntati
> sulle vite telematiche
>
>
> di GIANCARLO MOLA
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
------
> ROMA - Mille, centomila, milioni di occhi ci scrutano mentre navighiamo su
> Internet. Sanno come ci chiamiamo e quali itinerari percorriamo. Conoscono
i
> nostri gusti, se ci piace il gelato alla fragola o al pistacchio, se
> preferiamo il mare o la montagna. Ed elaborano, elaborano tutto. Macinano
le
> informazioni che hanno su di noi, le confrontano, fino a raggiungere
> l'intimità dei nostri conti correnti o delle nostre abitudini sessuali.
> Passano al setaccio nomi, numeri e dati, sfornano analisi di mercato di
> massa così come profili consumatore tagliati con precisione
infinitesimale.
> Sono occhi sconosciuti, nascosti, a volte invisibili. E quasi mai
riusciamo
> a capire a chi appartengono.
>
> Detta così sembra la trama della versione hi-tech di "1984", il capolavoro
> di George Orwell che per la prima volta presagiva l'esistenza di un Grande
> Fratello. In realtà è l'inquietante rischio dei milioni di cybernauti
sparsi
> per il mondo. Un puzzle di intrusioni piccole e grandi nella privacy della
> gente. Che non è ancora possibile ricomporre nella sua interezza. Ma del
> quale, con fatica, si può trovare qualche tessera. Eccone alcune.
>
> Quasi tutti i siti web ospitano ormai immagini pubblicitarie, che in gergo
> si chiamano banner. Chi li vede ha l'impressione che facciano parte della
> pagina che si sta guardando. Ma è solo un'apparenza: si tratta infatti di
> oggetti che risiedono fisicamente altrove rispetto al sito che li
contiene.
> Dove? Generalmente sul server della concessionaria di pubblicità, che ne
> gestisce tutte le funzioni. Ebbene, una serie di informazioni (dall'Ip,
cioè
> la "targa" del computer, alle pagine visitate, al nome e alla e-mail) che
> per diverse ragioni sono state date al proprietario del sito spesso vanno
> scorrettamente a finire anche nelle mani di chi controlla il banner.
>
> Ma il web è pieno anche di banner invisibili. Si tratta di immagini grandi
> appena un pixel (il punto base in cui è diviso lo schermo) e senza alcun
> colore. Gli informatici le chiamano web bug. Anche loro hanno lo scopo di
> passare informazioni sui movimenti in Rete di chi naviga a chi li
gestisce,
> cioè a terze persone rispetto a quelle che controllano il sito visitato.
> Solo che nessuno può vederle.
>
> "Non ci sono limiti a invasioni di questo tipo", spiega Claudio
Manganelli,
> esperto di informatica e membro dell'ufficio del garante per la Privacy.
"La
> tecnologia di Internet è sconosciuta ai più. E spesso si tratta di
strumenti
> molto sofisticati anche per chi con queste cose ha a che fare
> quotidianamente". Eppure qualcosa non torna. Chi accetta di mettere un
> banner o un web bug nella sua pagina non dovrebbe sapere che cosa fa il
suo
> "ospite"? "Di norma sì - prosegue Manganelli - perché le funzioni dei
banner
> sono oggetto di contrattazione fra le aziende. Ma non si può mai dire".
Nel
> caso di società che offrono spazio web per le home page personali degli
> utenti è prassi mantenere il controllo esclusivo di alcuni elementi della
> pagina ospitata. Che quindi può essere disseminata di banner o, peggio,
web
> bug a piacimento.
>
> Ma ci sono anche altre forme di invadenza della cyberprivacy. Nei
newsgroup,
> soprattutto quelli dedicati alla pornografia o ai videogame, sono
abbastanza
> frequenti messaggi accompagnati da piccoli segni grafici. Che sono il
> cavallo di Troia di spie digitali, che segnalano a chi li ha messi in
linea
> se e quando il testo è stato letto e se alla lettura è seguita la
> consultazione del link consigliato.
>
> Attenzione anche ai programmi che si prendono in Rete. Spesso la loro
> installazione sul computer porta con sé spiacevoli conseguenze. Così
qualche
> tempo fa una gruppo di hacker italiani ha scoperto che decine di software
> gratuitamente scaricabili da Internet piazzano sul disco rigido
dell'utente
> un bizzarro file chiamato "advert.dll". Che abbia a che vedere con la
> pubblicità lo si capisce anche dal nome. Ma che consegni alla società che
ha
> sviluppato i programmi i dati personali del navigatori (fino alla lista
> degli altri software installati e, pare anche alla password di connessione
a
> Internet) in pochi lo avevano immaginato. La Radiate - che produce i
> programmi "incriminati" - ovviamente nega di fare un uso illegittimo del
> materiale raccolto. Ma la presenza di uno 007 digitale sulla propria
> macchina non è per questo meno inquietante.
>
> Il bello - o il brutto - è che poco si può fare per impedire che qualcuno
> metta il naso negli affari telematici (ma non solo) della gente. "Le
> autorità nazionali che tutelano la privacy - spiega infatti Manganelli -
> hanno difficoltà oggettive a fronteggiare questi pericoli. E poi c'è un
> problema di leggi. Che sono impotenti di fronte ad un fenomeno
> transnazionale come Internet. È da tempo che con i nostri colleghi
> discutiamo della questione. Ma ogni volta che il problema viene posto agli
> Stati Uniti ci si scontra con un muro di gomma. Lì la riservatezza vale
> poco. Quasi niente confronto alle esigenze del mercato e del business".
>
> (20 luglio 2000)
>
>
> Una dimostrazione pratica di come terze persone possono raccolgiere
> informazioni sugli utenti. E seguirli
>
> Basta che tu clicchi
> e io saprò chi sei
>
>
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
------
> ROMA (g.mol.)- Ma sì, clicchi pure dove vuole. Per cortesia, potrebbe
darci
> il suo nome? Anzi, perché non ci lascia anche la sua e-mail? No, non si
> preoccupi. È solo per il nostro database, per fornirle servizi migliori.
> Sono decine i siti e i portali che chiedono informazioni personali ai loro
> utenti. E le ottengono, magari sulla base della loro credibilità. Ma
> qualcuno potrebbe venire a conoscenza di quei dati. L'inserzionista per
> esempio, attraverso il banner pubblicitario posto sulla pagina in
questione.
> E ad un cookie, un sempice file di testo che viene inviato sul computer
> quando ci si collega per la prima volta a un sito. E che stabilisce una
> specie di ponte permanente di collegamento con chi lo ha inviato.
>
> Una dimostrazione pratica di come funzioni la tracciatura del traffico web
> tramite i banner pubblicitari è quella allestita da Privacy.net il sito
> dell'americana Consumer Information Organization. Che porta per mano il
> cybernauta alla scoperta di tutto quello che terze persone potrebbero
sapere
> di lui, a sua totale insaputa.
>
> Passaggio 1.
> Il monitoraggio.
> I banner pubblicitari si trovano ovviamente su più siti. La società che li
> controlla (cioè l'inserzionista) può sapere quanti siti di questo network
> trasversale il singolo utente ha visitato. Privacy.net riproduce quindi
una
> serie di siti (fittizi, nell'esempio) sui quali compare lo stesso banner.
>
> Visitando i siti indicati nell'elenco ecco che immediatamente l'advertiser
> traccia il percorso compiuto, registrando l'Ip, l'orario della visita, e
la
> pagina visitata. Preciso, come si può vedere, al secondo.
>
> Passaggio 2.
> Il nome utente.
> È sufficiente che il sito chieda una qualsiasi forma di registrazione
perché
> i dati inseriti siano recepiti anche dall'inserzionista. Tra le
informazioni
> normalmente richieste ci sono indirizzo e numero di telefono, e-mail e
> interessi vari.
>
> Ed ecco il risultato: alle pagine visitate si aggiunge ora anche
l'identità
> dell'utente. Gli (apparentemente) anonimi numeri identificativi del
personal
> computer di provenienza hanno un profilo ancora più preciso.
>
> Passaggio 3.
> Le e-mail.
> Il massimo dell'intrusione si ottiene quando al cybernauta viene richiesto
> l'indirizzo di posta elettronica. La casella di e-mail a questo punto può
> essere bombardata di informazioni pubblicitari non richieste. Ma molto
> mirate a soddisfare i gusti che si sono espressi durante la navigazione.
>
> Passano pochi secondi e infatti arriva un messaggio. Che nel caso di
specie
> contiene solo un'immagine rotta. Ma che potrebbe avere al suo interno link
> ad altri siti o proposte di acquisto. L'utente decide di aprirlo per
vedere
> cosa contiene.
>
> Ma qualcun altro, proprio in quel momento si accorge se il messaggio è
stato
> letto o meno. E se ha avuto conseguenze. Lo stratagemma tecnico lo spiega
> Elf Qrin, un hacker italiano esperto di sicurezza: "Per ottenere questo
> risultato basta includere nel messaggio, inviato in forma html invece che
in
> puro testo, un'immagine, che funziona un po' come una miscrospia. Allo
> stesso modo, l'indirizzo del sito da visitare ha una pagina differente per
> ogni mail. È così possibile sapere chi ha deciso di visitare quel sito
dopo
> aver ricevuto una mail".
>
> A questo punto l'identità digitale del navigatore è senza veli. Nella
> migliore delle ipotesi i dati restano nei database di chi li ha raccolti.
Ma
> potrebbero essere venduti a società specializzate, che li integrano con
> altre informazioni in loro possesso. E magari li rivendono. Una semplice
> navigata privata è diventata in pochi minuti un fatto di dominio pressoché
> pubblico. Se qualcuno non ci crede può seguire personalmente la demo
> consultando il sito www.privacy.net.
>
> (20 luglio 2000)
>
> Si chiamano web bug, sono nascosti tra le pagine Internet
> e servono a raccogliere informazione. Ecco come scovarli
>
> Un baco invisibile
> a caccia di dati
>
>
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
------
> ROMA (g.mol.) - Minuscoli quanto un pixel, vale a dire quanto di più
piccolo
> possa essere messo sullo schermo di un computer. Ma potenzialmente capaci
di
> penetrare nell'intimo delle abitudini dei cybernauti. Si chiamano web bug,
> pochi ne conoscono l'esistenza, e praticamente nessuno può vederli a
occhio
> nudo. Però ci sono, disseminati in milioni di pagine galleggianti per il
> web. E sono l'equivalente digitale delle telecamere nascoste, contro le
> quali di recente si è scagliato il Garante per la privacy Stefano Rodotà.
>
> Dal punto di vista tecnico un web bug corrisponde a un banner
pubblicitario.
> Nel senso che può tracciare i movimenti di un navigatore con precisione
> scientifica, come abbiamo già spiegato. Solo che la loro presenza è
occulta,
> così come è ignoto chi li gestisca. A meno che non si conosca alla
> perfezione il linguaggio html, utilizzato per disegnare le pagine
Internet.
>
> Qualcuno però, si è divertito a cercare i bachi spioni per la Rete. E a
> vedere a chi appartengono. L'americano Robert Smith, per esempio. Che
nella
> sua home page personale ha inserito una lista dei web bug controllati
dalle
> principali Internet company d'oltreoceano. Ma non solo: ha anche avuto
> l'idea di sottoporre il codice che individua il bug a un motore di
ricerca.
> Il risultato (vedere per credere) è sorprendente: perché ci si accorge che
> il baco di DoubleClick (una della maggiori società di pubblicità in Rete)
si
> trova su 59.750 pagine, che quello del libraio virtuale Barnes & Nobles
> appare su 108.104, e quello di Yahoo addirittura su 16.542.290, cioè su
> tutti siti personali degli utenti di Geocities, la società controllata dal
> motore di ricerca che ha fatto le sue fortune offrendo spazio web
> gratuitamente a (inconsapevoli?) utenti.
>
> Questo non significa certo che ad ogni web bug corrisponda una sbirciata.
Il
> dubbio però è legittimo: perché le importanti società Internet dovrebbero
> far inserire nelle pagine altrui (e pagare) oggetti che altrimenti non
> servirebbero assolutamente a niente?
>
> (20 luglio 2000)
>
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
http://www.egroups.com/group/crj-mailinglist/
------------------------------------------------------------
* SUL CONTROLLO DI INTERNET
---
Belgrade Rejects Registration Of U.S.-Funded Radio
BELGRADE, Jul 21, 2000 -- (Reuters) The Yugoslav
information ministry on Thursday rejected a request by
U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe to register its Belgrade
office, accusing it of airing "dirty propaganda".
Yugoslav Information Minister Goran Matic was quoted
by the official Tanjug news agency as saying any
possible activities of the office would be considered
"illegal and unlawful".
"The office of Radio Free Europe, as a mouthpiece of
American official policy, promotes its colonial aims
using means unsuited to principles of objective
reporting," Matic said in a letter to the radio
station.
He said Radio Free Europe tried to "influence the
Yugoslav public by using dirty propaganda with the aim
of realizing these aims."
The letter was addressed to director Nenad Pejic of
the radio station's programme for South Slav
languages, based in Prague, which had filed the
registration request.
Yugoslav officials have accused NATO states of
plotting to destabilize the country, and have
denounced opposition leaders and independent media as
their lackeys.
The West and the Serbian opposition have in turn
accused the Belgrade authorities of clamping down on
non-government media in a bid to stifle dissent.
The Belgrade office of Radio Free Europe said it had
not received any official notification about the
decision and declined to comment.
> FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF YUGOSLAVIA
>
> YUGOSLAV DAILY SURVEY
>
> BELGRADE, 21 July 2000 No. 3115
>
>
> YUGOSLAV INFORMATION MINISTER: RADIO FREE EUROPE
> REGISTRATION DEMAND GROUNDLESS
> BELGRADE, July 20 (Tanjug) Yugoslav Information Minister Goran
> Matic on Thursday informed the director of the SouthSlav program of Radio
> Free Europe, Nenad Pejic, that there are no grounds for the registration
> and legalization of the correspondence offices of this radio in Belgrade.
> Matic said in a letter that the correspondence offices of Radio
> Free Europe have the sole task, as the exponent of the official U.S.
> policy, to promote that country's colonial aims by using means contrary to
> the principles of objective reporting and with the aim of influencing the
> Yugoslav public through propaganda and thus realize its own goals.
> Since the registration request says that the founder of the
> Praguebased Radio Free Europe is the U.S. Congress, Matic recalled that the
> current U.S. administration, which spearheads the policy of economic and
> other sanctions against Yugoslavia, is grossly interfering into the
> internal affairs of a sovereign and independent state through media and
> diplomatic pressures.
> The culmination of this brutal policy erupted last year, contrary
> to all international legal norms, via the armed and criminal NATO
> aggression on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Matic said.
> He pointed out that the Yugoslav property in the United States,
> despite U.S. claims about the inviolability of property, has been frozen
> and that this is in fact a robbery which represents a special form of
> economic and political pressure on Yugoslavia.
> Based on such a standpoint of the U.S. administration and
> Congress, expressed through permanent efforts to threaten the territorial
> integrity and constitutional order in Yugoslavia and to forcefully topple
> its legally elected government and establish a puppet one, Matic said that
> there are no grounds for the registration of the correspondence offices of
> the U.S. propaganda media Radio Free Europe.
> He warned that in the future all possible activities of that radio
> would be considered illegal and that legal measures would be implemented
> against all who carry out such activities unlawfully.
VOICE OF RUSSIA ON BAN OF RADIO FREE EUROPE IN YUGOSLAVIA
MOSCOW, July 26 (Tanjug) The attempts of the west to present
Yugoslavia as an allegedly nondemocratic country because its organs had
refused to register a Belgrade office of Radio Free Europe are just an
extension of the old campaign ultimately aimed at bringing servants to
the
Serbian and Yugoslav political and media scenes and having them work
strictly in the interests of foreign power centers, Voice of Russia
radio
said in a commentary on Wednesday.
In refusing the registration of Radio Free Europe, the Yugoslav
Ministry of Information had in mind that this radio station is not an
objective media organization, but a propaganda instrument of NATO whose
activities are directed against Yugoslavia, Voice of Russia said.
Western mass media immediately reacted with a volley of new
statements about the alleged nondemocratic and totalitarian nature of
the
authorities in Belgrade, and the director of the Sloboda Radio Free
Europe
radio station even accused the Yugoslav government of violating norms of
international law, the Russian radio said.
This and other similar false advocates of the free word do not
consider as violations of norms of international law the west's constant
media war against Yugoslavia or the troublemongering interference in its
internal affairs, Voice of Russia warned.
They do not see any violations of this law, either, in the
bombing
of the Serbian Radio Television RTS during the NATO aggression on
Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999, which caused huge destruction and
casualties among the press, the Russian radio said.
-
http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/pubaffairs/releases/1299radiofree.html
HOOVER INSTITUTION
December 17, 1999
Hoover Institution to House Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Archives
The Hoover Institution will house the broadcast archives and corporate
records of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty under an agreement worked out
between the two and approved by the U.S. Broadcasting Board of
Governors.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Pentagon's Info Wars
CounterPunch
Published: July 1-15, 2000 (vol 7, no. 12)
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair
Jim Redden reports that the US government is laying
the groundwork to knock inconvenient voices off line
during the next international military confrontation.
You can’t blame the folks over at Antiwar.com for
feeling paranoid these days. The libertarian-oriented,
anti-military website hosted its second annual
conference on March 24 and 25. Held at the Villa Hotel
in San Mateo, , the theme of the conference was
“Beyond Left & Right: The New Face of the Antiwar
Movement”. Among the speakers was Alexander Cockburn
who gave an account of the event to CounterPunchers
shortly thereafter.
A short time later, Antiwar.com founder Eric Garris
was startled to learn that his site had been added to
a list of “militia-related” websites maintained by
Mark Pitcavage, research director for the
federally-funded State/Local Anti-Terrorism Training
(SLATT) program. CounterPunch reported on Pitcavage’s
curious operation in its May 1-15 issue. Then in late
May, the software for counting the number of visitors
to Antiwar.com crashed two days in a row. The reason?
An unusually high number of hits from a single
visitor.
When columnist Justin Raimondo tracked down the
curious party, he discovered it was a Pentagon-funded
unit of cyber-soldiers known as the Army Computer
Emergency Response Team. The counter crashed after
recording 2,000 hits from ACERT on the first day
alone. Every file on the website was visited at least
once. CounterPunch contacted ACERT headquarters and
reached public affairs assistant Shirley K. Startzman
who confirmed the military had prowled Antiwar.com.
She said ACERT uses commercially available web search
tools to “continuously research for websites on the
Internet that may have information relating to
potential cyber threats.” Startzman claimed that this
work is “defensive in nature”, intended to “protect
Army computer systems from hackers or denial of
service attacks”.
As Startzman put it, “The Antiwar website was one of
many on the publicly accessible Internet the tool
identified as having information potentially related
to cyber defense. The high numbers of hits reflect
this automated search tool.” Later she added that “the
commercially available tool we used in this particular
case is called Themescape. Its website is
www.cartia.com.” Garris and Raimondo aren’t buying
this explanation.
Despite Startzman’s insistence that ACERT is
“defensive in nature”, it is part of a much larger
military system. Cyber-warfare is a relatively new
idea. It first surfaced as a public issue in 1988 when
the Morris Worm computer virus disabled approximately
10 per cent of all computers connected to the
Internet. Fearful of the vulnerability of the
government’s vast computer networks to such attacks,
the Pentagon turned to the Software Engineering
Institute, a federally-funded research center based at
Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania.
By the end of the year, SEI was officially designated
as the Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination
Center (CERT/CC), providing research and assistance to
the government and anyone else wanting to prevent
viruses and other attacks from crippling their
computers. The Pentagon soon decided to concentrate
its emerging cyber-warfare operations under the United
States Army Intelligence and Security Command
(INSCOM), which was created in 1977 to coordinate all
of the military’s intelligence-gathering operations.
INSCOM moved to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, in the summer
of 1989.
Then the Pentagon began to plan its own Internet
attacks. The idea was first fleshed out in a 1996
paper published by the National Defense University
Press called “Information Terrorism: Can You Trust
Your Toaster?” It was written by Matthew G. Devost of
the Information Systems and Technology Group, and
Brian K. Houghton and Neal A. Pollard, of the Science
Applications International Corporation’s Strategic
Assessment Center.
The authors created a scenario, a war story set in the
Internet, pitting “information terrorists” against
heroic cyber-warriors in the service of Uncle Sam. By
an amazing coincidence, the bad guys in the fictional
story maintain a website which sounds a lot like a
government version of what Antiwar.com was doing at
the time: “The Web page was dramatic and rife with
propaganda and claims against American, NATO, and
Croatian imperialism and atrocities in the Balkan
region, and included questionable allegations of
illegal arms transfers between NATO governments and
Bosnian Muslims and Croats.”
To counter this sinister abuse of the First Amendment
the authors said the U.S. military should create a
“specialized and integrated counter information
terrorism group”, which they called DIRT (Digital
Integrated Response Team). As the authors excitedly
put it, “These highly trained information warriors
would be the national security equivalent of
Carnegie-Mellon University’s Computer Emergency
Response Team, but with an offensive capability”.
After studying this scenario, the Pentagon duly
created ACERT the following year. An article on the
ribbon-cutting ceremony titled “Protecting Electronic
Borders” appeared in the March-April 1997 issue of the
Journal of INSCOM. “Information dominance took a giant
leap into the future March 17, when the United States
Army Intelligence and Security Command ceremoniously
opened the Army Computer Emergency Response Team
Coordination Center at Fort Belvoir, Va. Its mission
is to re-write the books on how the Army handles the
newest threat in the field manuals - computer
hackers.” The INSCOM Journal reported that “A hacker
demonstration was conducted as part of the
ribbon-cutting ceremony. An ACERT/CC computer security
expert conducted the demonstration, saying that you
have to ‘think like a hacker and try to break into a
system’”.
That’s what Garris and Raimondo think ACERT is
preparing to do -- to hack into Antiwar.com and
disable it, along with other sites that excite the
displeasure of the National Security apparat.
---
http://www.vny.com/cf/news/upidetail.cfm?QID=104916
Tuesday, 25 July 2000 20:45 (ET)
Serbian authorities take control of Internet
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia, July 25 (UPI) -- The Serbian government has
taken
control of Internet providers under a law on public enterprises, which
means
it will have access to all e-mail traffic, independent Belgrade radio
B2-92
reported, quoting well-informed sources.
The radio said the law came into force Tuesday.
The law envisages that private firms operating in the field of
telecommunications and information will have to conclude contracts with
the
government giving it powers to approve or reject the statutes, tariffs
and
all other decisions of these firms, the radio said.
It quoted its sources as saying that this also implies that lists of
all
users and copies of all e-mail messages will be accessible to the
authorities. The government will be able to raise charges for Internet
services and force into bankruptcy all firms that make large
remittances to
foreign countries.
In this way, the Internet will fall entirely into the hands of firms
subservient to the authorities, the radio predicted.
"We have tried to get statements from Internet providers but none of
their
owners and directors wanted to comment publicly on possible
consequences of
this law," the radio said.
"Still we have been told unofficially that this is the usual practice
in
developed countries, but that a thing like this in Serbia has a
completely
different implication."
The government has already taken over some major print and electronic
media and is starving independent newspapers of newsprint, saying it is
in
short supply at home but refusing to allow them to buy it abroad.
The radio quoted the comment on the Internet takeover from an
anonymous
private provider's firm: "There were underground rumors about this
during
(last year's NATO) bombing raids, and here you are, they've done it
now.
They want to shut up our last door into the world and to reduce our IQ
to
score 30."
Copyright 2000 by United Press International.
All rights reserved.
---
Subject: Fw: privacy attenzione alle spie della rete
Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2000 18:58:34 +0200
From: "red*ghost" <red-ghost@...>
To: <Undisclosed-Recipient:;>
Questo programmino trova e rimuove i file advert.dll e affini, programmi
che
spiano informazioni dai nostri pc, ripulendo il registro.
Salvaguardiamo la nostra privacy!
lo trovate all'indirizzo:
http://www.tmcrew.org/csa/spzk/optout.exe
--------------------------------------------------------------------
RED GHOST
materiali per la controinformazione e la lotta
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Email: red-ghost@...
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Web: http://www.ecn.org/estroja/
--------------------------------------------------------------------
----- Original Message -----
From: "Spazio Kamino" <spzkostia@...>
To: <spzkostia@...>; <tacticalmedia@...>;
<movimento@...>
Sent: Thursday, July 20, 2000 1:59 PM
Subject: privacy attenzione alle spie della rete
> Si piazza sul pc scaricando numerosi software da Internet
> Chi li distribuisce nega ogni abuso. Ma gli esperti...
>
> Advert.dll, la spia
> venuta dalla Rete
>
>
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
------
> ROMA (g.mol.)- Fate un piccolo esperimento: cercate sul disco rigido del
> vostro computer un file denominato "advert.dll". Probabilmente ne
ignoravate
> l'esistenza, né sapete come sia arrivato lì. E soprattutto a cosa serva.
> Ecco le risposte: quel file si piazza sull'hard disk quando installate
> alcuni dei più popolari software gratuitamente scaricabili dalla Rete (la
> lista ne contiene centinaia). E ogni volta che vi connettete a Internet
> invia alla società che distribuisce i programmi - a vostra insaputa - una
> lunga serie di informazioni su vostro conto.
>
> Quali? Qui la faccenda si complica. Perché la Radiate, questo il nome
> dell'impresa, tende a minimizzare, definendo "false" le voci che da tempo
> circolano sul suo conto. Nella nota che spiega la politica della privacy
> dell'azienda si legge infatti che i dati trattati sono estremamente
> limitati: "Noi mandiamo messaggi pubblicitari sul vostro computer,
riceviamo
> informazioni sui banner che voi vedete e studiamo le risposte alle domande
> che vi abbiamo posto".
>
> Ma non tutti la pensano così. Numerosi hacker ed esperti di sicurezza
> telematica si sono infatti presi la briga di studiare "advert.dll", che
> tecnicamente è una libreria dinamicamente collegata (dynamic link
library),
> cioè un pezzo di software che contiene funzioni utili per altri programmi.
> Il primo a farlo è stato AcidBurn, un pirata americano. Ma poi ci hanno
> lavorato anche italiani. Scoprendo cose molto interessanti.
>
> "Quando ci si connette a Internet, advert.dll crea una finestra
invisibile,
> che si mette in comunicazione con il server della Radiate", spiega
> 'Quequero', un giovane hacker abruzzese. "Poi gli invia una serie di dati:
> il nome dell'utente, il suo Ip, la lista dei programmi installati sul
> computer e di tutto quello che si è scaricato dalla Rete, i siti e i
banner
> visitati durante la navigazione, e molto probabilmente, lo stiamo
> accertando, anche la password con la quale si entra in Rete".
>
> L'elenco fa un po' impressione. Perché l'intrusione nel privato del
> cybernauta è tanto spinta quanto impalpabile. E la sproporzione tra ciò
che
> viene ammesso e ciò che si sospetta è grande. Nel dubbio però la "cimice"
si
> attacca stabilmente al computer. E dall'altra parte, in ogni caso, c'è
> qualcuno che ascolta. Non è una bella sensazione, quando lo si viene a
> sapere.
>
> (20 luglio 2000)
>
>
>
> Il cybernauta non è mai solo quando va su Internet
> Ecco come può essere seguito ogni suo movimento sul web
>
> I mille occhi puntati
> sulle vite telematiche
>
>
> di GIANCARLO MOLA
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
------
> ROMA - Mille, centomila, milioni di occhi ci scrutano mentre navighiamo su
> Internet. Sanno come ci chiamiamo e quali itinerari percorriamo. Conoscono
i
> nostri gusti, se ci piace il gelato alla fragola o al pistacchio, se
> preferiamo il mare o la montagna. Ed elaborano, elaborano tutto. Macinano
le
> informazioni che hanno su di noi, le confrontano, fino a raggiungere
> l'intimità dei nostri conti correnti o delle nostre abitudini sessuali.
> Passano al setaccio nomi, numeri e dati, sfornano analisi di mercato di
> massa così come profili consumatore tagliati con precisione
infinitesimale.
> Sono occhi sconosciuti, nascosti, a volte invisibili. E quasi mai
riusciamo
> a capire a chi appartengono.
>
> Detta così sembra la trama della versione hi-tech di "1984", il capolavoro
> di George Orwell che per la prima volta presagiva l'esistenza di un Grande
> Fratello. In realtà è l'inquietante rischio dei milioni di cybernauti
sparsi
> per il mondo. Un puzzle di intrusioni piccole e grandi nella privacy della
> gente. Che non è ancora possibile ricomporre nella sua interezza. Ma del
> quale, con fatica, si può trovare qualche tessera. Eccone alcune.
>
> Quasi tutti i siti web ospitano ormai immagini pubblicitarie, che in gergo
> si chiamano banner. Chi li vede ha l'impressione che facciano parte della
> pagina che si sta guardando. Ma è solo un'apparenza: si tratta infatti di
> oggetti che risiedono fisicamente altrove rispetto al sito che li
contiene.
> Dove? Generalmente sul server della concessionaria di pubblicità, che ne
> gestisce tutte le funzioni. Ebbene, una serie di informazioni (dall'Ip,
cioè
> la "targa" del computer, alle pagine visitate, al nome e alla e-mail) che
> per diverse ragioni sono state date al proprietario del sito spesso vanno
> scorrettamente a finire anche nelle mani di chi controlla il banner.
>
> Ma il web è pieno anche di banner invisibili. Si tratta di immagini grandi
> appena un pixel (il punto base in cui è diviso lo schermo) e senza alcun
> colore. Gli informatici le chiamano web bug. Anche loro hanno lo scopo di
> passare informazioni sui movimenti in Rete di chi naviga a chi li
gestisce,
> cioè a terze persone rispetto a quelle che controllano il sito visitato.
> Solo che nessuno può vederle.
>
> "Non ci sono limiti a invasioni di questo tipo", spiega Claudio
Manganelli,
> esperto di informatica e membro dell'ufficio del garante per la Privacy.
"La
> tecnologia di Internet è sconosciuta ai più. E spesso si tratta di
strumenti
> molto sofisticati anche per chi con queste cose ha a che fare
> quotidianamente". Eppure qualcosa non torna. Chi accetta di mettere un
> banner o un web bug nella sua pagina non dovrebbe sapere che cosa fa il
suo
> "ospite"? "Di norma sì - prosegue Manganelli - perché le funzioni dei
banner
> sono oggetto di contrattazione fra le aziende. Ma non si può mai dire".
Nel
> caso di società che offrono spazio web per le home page personali degli
> utenti è prassi mantenere il controllo esclusivo di alcuni elementi della
> pagina ospitata. Che quindi può essere disseminata di banner o, peggio,
web
> bug a piacimento.
>
> Ma ci sono anche altre forme di invadenza della cyberprivacy. Nei
newsgroup,
> soprattutto quelli dedicati alla pornografia o ai videogame, sono
abbastanza
> frequenti messaggi accompagnati da piccoli segni grafici. Che sono il
> cavallo di Troia di spie digitali, che segnalano a chi li ha messi in
linea
> se e quando il testo è stato letto e se alla lettura è seguita la
> consultazione del link consigliato.
>
> Attenzione anche ai programmi che si prendono in Rete. Spesso la loro
> installazione sul computer porta con sé spiacevoli conseguenze. Così
qualche
> tempo fa una gruppo di hacker italiani ha scoperto che decine di software
> gratuitamente scaricabili da Internet piazzano sul disco rigido
dell'utente
> un bizzarro file chiamato "advert.dll". Che abbia a che vedere con la
> pubblicità lo si capisce anche dal nome. Ma che consegni alla società che
ha
> sviluppato i programmi i dati personali del navigatori (fino alla lista
> degli altri software installati e, pare anche alla password di connessione
a
> Internet) in pochi lo avevano immaginato. La Radiate - che produce i
> programmi "incriminati" - ovviamente nega di fare un uso illegittimo del
> materiale raccolto. Ma la presenza di uno 007 digitale sulla propria
> macchina non è per questo meno inquietante.
>
> Il bello - o il brutto - è che poco si può fare per impedire che qualcuno
> metta il naso negli affari telematici (ma non solo) della gente. "Le
> autorità nazionali che tutelano la privacy - spiega infatti Manganelli -
> hanno difficoltà oggettive a fronteggiare questi pericoli. E poi c'è un
> problema di leggi. Che sono impotenti di fronte ad un fenomeno
> transnazionale come Internet. È da tempo che con i nostri colleghi
> discutiamo della questione. Ma ogni volta che il problema viene posto agli
> Stati Uniti ci si scontra con un muro di gomma. Lì la riservatezza vale
> poco. Quasi niente confronto alle esigenze del mercato e del business".
>
> (20 luglio 2000)
>
>
> Una dimostrazione pratica di come terze persone possono raccolgiere
> informazioni sugli utenti. E seguirli
>
> Basta che tu clicchi
> e io saprò chi sei
>
>
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
------
> ROMA (g.mol.)- Ma sì, clicchi pure dove vuole. Per cortesia, potrebbe
darci
> il suo nome? Anzi, perché non ci lascia anche la sua e-mail? No, non si
> preoccupi. È solo per il nostro database, per fornirle servizi migliori.
> Sono decine i siti e i portali che chiedono informazioni personali ai loro
> utenti. E le ottengono, magari sulla base della loro credibilità. Ma
> qualcuno potrebbe venire a conoscenza di quei dati. L'inserzionista per
> esempio, attraverso il banner pubblicitario posto sulla pagina in
questione.
> E ad un cookie, un sempice file di testo che viene inviato sul computer
> quando ci si collega per la prima volta a un sito. E che stabilisce una
> specie di ponte permanente di collegamento con chi lo ha inviato.
>
> Una dimostrazione pratica di come funzioni la tracciatura del traffico web
> tramite i banner pubblicitari è quella allestita da Privacy.net il sito
> dell'americana Consumer Information Organization. Che porta per mano il
> cybernauta alla scoperta di tutto quello che terze persone potrebbero
sapere
> di lui, a sua totale insaputa.
>
> Passaggio 1.
> Il monitoraggio.
> I banner pubblicitari si trovano ovviamente su più siti. La società che li
> controlla (cioè l'inserzionista) può sapere quanti siti di questo network
> trasversale il singolo utente ha visitato. Privacy.net riproduce quindi
una
> serie di siti (fittizi, nell'esempio) sui quali compare lo stesso banner.
>
> Visitando i siti indicati nell'elenco ecco che immediatamente l'advertiser
> traccia il percorso compiuto, registrando l'Ip, l'orario della visita, e
la
> pagina visitata. Preciso, come si può vedere, al secondo.
>
> Passaggio 2.
> Il nome utente.
> È sufficiente che il sito chieda una qualsiasi forma di registrazione
perché
> i dati inseriti siano recepiti anche dall'inserzionista. Tra le
informazioni
> normalmente richieste ci sono indirizzo e numero di telefono, e-mail e
> interessi vari.
>
> Ed ecco il risultato: alle pagine visitate si aggiunge ora anche
l'identità
> dell'utente. Gli (apparentemente) anonimi numeri identificativi del
personal
> computer di provenienza hanno un profilo ancora più preciso.
>
> Passaggio 3.
> Le e-mail.
> Il massimo dell'intrusione si ottiene quando al cybernauta viene richiesto
> l'indirizzo di posta elettronica. La casella di e-mail a questo punto può
> essere bombardata di informazioni pubblicitari non richieste. Ma molto
> mirate a soddisfare i gusti che si sono espressi durante la navigazione.
>
> Passano pochi secondi e infatti arriva un messaggio. Che nel caso di
specie
> contiene solo un'immagine rotta. Ma che potrebbe avere al suo interno link
> ad altri siti o proposte di acquisto. L'utente decide di aprirlo per
vedere
> cosa contiene.
>
> Ma qualcun altro, proprio in quel momento si accorge se il messaggio è
stato
> letto o meno. E se ha avuto conseguenze. Lo stratagemma tecnico lo spiega
> Elf Qrin, un hacker italiano esperto di sicurezza: "Per ottenere questo
> risultato basta includere nel messaggio, inviato in forma html invece che
in
> puro testo, un'immagine, che funziona un po' come una miscrospia. Allo
> stesso modo, l'indirizzo del sito da visitare ha una pagina differente per
> ogni mail. È così possibile sapere chi ha deciso di visitare quel sito
dopo
> aver ricevuto una mail".
>
> A questo punto l'identità digitale del navigatore è senza veli. Nella
> migliore delle ipotesi i dati restano nei database di chi li ha raccolti.
Ma
> potrebbero essere venduti a società specializzate, che li integrano con
> altre informazioni in loro possesso. E magari li rivendono. Una semplice
> navigata privata è diventata in pochi minuti un fatto di dominio pressoché
> pubblico. Se qualcuno non ci crede può seguire personalmente la demo
> consultando il sito www.privacy.net.
>
> (20 luglio 2000)
>
> Si chiamano web bug, sono nascosti tra le pagine Internet
> e servono a raccogliere informazione. Ecco come scovarli
>
> Un baco invisibile
> a caccia di dati
>
>
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
------
> ROMA (g.mol.) - Minuscoli quanto un pixel, vale a dire quanto di più
piccolo
> possa essere messo sullo schermo di un computer. Ma potenzialmente capaci
di
> penetrare nell'intimo delle abitudini dei cybernauti. Si chiamano web bug,
> pochi ne conoscono l'esistenza, e praticamente nessuno può vederli a
occhio
> nudo. Però ci sono, disseminati in milioni di pagine galleggianti per il
> web. E sono l'equivalente digitale delle telecamere nascoste, contro le
> quali di recente si è scagliato il Garante per la privacy Stefano Rodotà.
>
> Dal punto di vista tecnico un web bug corrisponde a un banner
pubblicitario.
> Nel senso che può tracciare i movimenti di un navigatore con precisione
> scientifica, come abbiamo già spiegato. Solo che la loro presenza è
occulta,
> così come è ignoto chi li gestisca. A meno che non si conosca alla
> perfezione il linguaggio html, utilizzato per disegnare le pagine
Internet.
>
> Qualcuno però, si è divertito a cercare i bachi spioni per la Rete. E a
> vedere a chi appartengono. L'americano Robert Smith, per esempio. Che
nella
> sua home page personale ha inserito una lista dei web bug controllati
dalle
> principali Internet company d'oltreoceano. Ma non solo: ha anche avuto
> l'idea di sottoporre il codice che individua il bug a un motore di
ricerca.
> Il risultato (vedere per credere) è sorprendente: perché ci si accorge che
> il baco di DoubleClick (una della maggiori società di pubblicità in Rete)
si
> trova su 59.750 pagine, che quello del libraio virtuale Barnes & Nobles
> appare su 108.104, e quello di Yahoo addirittura su 16.542.290, cioè su
> tutti siti personali degli utenti di Geocities, la società controllata dal
> motore di ricerca che ha fatto le sue fortune offrendo spazio web
> gratuitamente a (inconsapevoli?) utenti.
>
> Questo non significa certo che ad ogni web bug corrisponda una sbirciata.
Il
> dubbio però è legittimo: perché le importanti società Internet dovrebbero
> far inserire nelle pagine altrui (e pagare) oggetti che altrimenti non
> servirebbero assolutamente a niente?
>
> (20 luglio 2000)
>
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
http://www.egroups.com/group/crj-mailinglist/
------------------------------------------------------------
Lettera inviata al "Manifesto" il 19/6/2000:
Osservo con molte perplessita' lo schierarsi di associazioni di
volontariato per un impegno, di per se nobile, in favore dello sviluppo
democratico in Jugoslavia, chiedendomi quanto tale impegno non abbia a
che fare, in realta', con l'ossimoro "Guerra Umanitaria". Quanto, cioe',
la guerra non sia frutto di un albero nato dal seme dell'ingerenza
umanitaria, fatta apparentemente in buona fede e per solidarieta' ma, in
realta', pericolosa perche' va ad innescare un processo incontrollabile
di effetti e reazioni a catena. Se la guerra e' stato il suo frutto
velenoso, non bastera' potarlo, quell'albero!
Vedere poi come, in modo parallelo ed ufficiale, l'Italia sposi il
progetto UNHOPS, organismo delle Nazioni Unite per aiuti allo sviluppo
delle citta' jugoslave rette dall'opposizione, cioe' quasi tutte (altro
"ossimoro", perche' e' difficile capire come in un paese governato da un
novello "Hitler" possano esistere giunte di opposizione...), fa un po'
pensare.
Perche' quando ci si muove in quel senso, ci sono miliardi da gestire e
da spendere ma dietro suggerimento di chi, in realta', la guerra l'ha
fatta e ha causato il dramma che si tenta di arginare. E allora, dove
sta la contro-informazione, la denuncia, la ferma opposizione alla
guerra e alle politiche espansioniste se poi, di contro, si sta al gioco
della perdizione-distruzione con relativa redenzione-ricostruzione? E
perche', allora, non si fa la stessa cosa in Iraq? Forse, in Iraq, non
ci sono citta' rette dall'opposizione? Forse, laggiu', il novello Hitler
e' un po' piu' Hitler dell'altro? E in Kosovo, terra UCK, e' stato
raggiunto un livello accettabile di democrazia e di convivenza
multietnica? Li' televisioni e radio e giornali sono esempi di
obbiettivita'?
Credo che un'associazione che lavori nel campo della solidarieta'
internazionale debba chiedersi se il proprio impegno non serva, qualche
volta, a celebrare l'opportunismo di chi andrebbe, in realta',
processato per crimini contro l'umanita'. Le scelte sono anche politiche
e sono fondamentali.
Fra i partecipanti UNHOPS c'e' il governo italiano e con le associazioni
tratta un certo Umberto Ranieri, ex sottosegretario agli Esteri durante
la guerra NATO e suo energico sostenitore. Vagliera' i progetti da
finanziare... Qualcuno se lo ricorda ancora, o e' meglio per tutti
dimenticare?
Alessandro Di Meo, Roma
-
Lettera inviata al "Manifesto" il 23/7/2000:
FARE DEL BENE A CHI?
Lo spunto di questa lettera è l'intervento di Marcello Cini pubblicato
in
ultima sul manifesto di giovedì 20 luglio dal titolo "Perché no?
Facciamoci
del bene", in cui l'eminente teorico della scienza discetta sulla
opportunità che un gruppo di suoi amici tornino a rappresentare
l'alleanza
di centrosinistra nella malaugurata previsione di una vittoria
elettorale
della destra.
Sarebbe oltremodo opportuno che qualcuno (magari un giornalista
vero)
voglia oggi ricordare ai lettori che tra i poveri "orfani dell'alleanza
di
centro sinistra" figurano nomi che hanno sostenuto a pieno titolo, come
partecipanti al governo D'Alema, ovvero come silenti spettatori
dell'evento, l'aggressione bellica alla Jugoslavia dello scorso anno,
che
nelle colonne di questo giornale è stata compiutamente descritta e
condannata. Perciò non sto qui a ricordare le conseguenze ecologiche,
sanitarie ed economiche di questa guerra, visto che molti partecipanti
al
"salotto" si considerano ecologisti formati. E' tuttavia spiacevole e
deludente che tali "protagonisti" cerchino ancora credibilità nella
confusione della disinformazione o nel segreto dell'urna, ma è
soprattutto
offensivo per chi è stato e sarà ancora colpito da questa e da altre
guerre, senza neppure il barlume di un riscatto di umana giustizia.
Un consiglio, invece, per molti di coloro che sono passati al
centro o che
non riescono più a rifarsi una verginità politica a sinistra: sarebbe
più
opportuno che, perduti dietro ai compromessi, se non riescono più a fare
il
lavoro per cui si sono un dì qualificati, si dirigessero direttamente
all'indirizzo di Berlusconi, come altri hanno già fatto in un recente
passato; oggi, infatti, se ci sono cose di cui ha bisogno la sinistra,
queste sono ancora la chiarezza e completezza dell'informazione e la
reale
solidarietà, che ci permettono di collaborare tra "diversi"; il resto
predicato da Cini lo si può considerare "un furbetto giochetto di
Ermete"...
Mauro Cristaldi, Roma
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
http://www.egroups.com/group/crj-mailinglist/
------------------------------------------------------------
Osservo con molte perplessita' lo schierarsi di associazioni di
volontariato per un impegno, di per se nobile, in favore dello sviluppo
democratico in Jugoslavia, chiedendomi quanto tale impegno non abbia a
che fare, in realta', con l'ossimoro "Guerra Umanitaria". Quanto, cioe',
la guerra non sia frutto di un albero nato dal seme dell'ingerenza
umanitaria, fatta apparentemente in buona fede e per solidarieta' ma, in
realta', pericolosa perche' va ad innescare un processo incontrollabile
di effetti e reazioni a catena. Se la guerra e' stato il suo frutto
velenoso, non bastera' potarlo, quell'albero!
Vedere poi come, in modo parallelo ed ufficiale, l'Italia sposi il
progetto UNHOPS, organismo delle Nazioni Unite per aiuti allo sviluppo
delle citta' jugoslave rette dall'opposizione, cioe' quasi tutte (altro
"ossimoro", perche' e' difficile capire come in un paese governato da un
novello "Hitler" possano esistere giunte di opposizione...), fa un po'
pensare.
Perche' quando ci si muove in quel senso, ci sono miliardi da gestire e
da spendere ma dietro suggerimento di chi, in realta', la guerra l'ha
fatta e ha causato il dramma che si tenta di arginare. E allora, dove
sta la contro-informazione, la denuncia, la ferma opposizione alla
guerra e alle politiche espansioniste se poi, di contro, si sta al gioco
della perdizione-distruzione con relativa redenzione-ricostruzione? E
perche', allora, non si fa la stessa cosa in Iraq? Forse, in Iraq, non
ci sono citta' rette dall'opposizione? Forse, laggiu', il novello Hitler
e' un po' piu' Hitler dell'altro? E in Kosovo, terra UCK, e' stato
raggiunto un livello accettabile di democrazia e di convivenza
multietnica? Li' televisioni e radio e giornali sono esempi di
obbiettivita'?
Credo che un'associazione che lavori nel campo della solidarieta'
internazionale debba chiedersi se il proprio impegno non serva, qualche
volta, a celebrare l'opportunismo di chi andrebbe, in realta',
processato per crimini contro l'umanita'. Le scelte sono anche politiche
e sono fondamentali.
Fra i partecipanti UNHOPS c'e' il governo italiano e con le associazioni
tratta un certo Umberto Ranieri, ex sottosegretario agli Esteri durante
la guerra NATO e suo energico sostenitore. Vagliera' i progetti da
finanziare... Qualcuno se lo ricorda ancora, o e' meglio per tutti
dimenticare?
Alessandro Di Meo, Roma
-
Lettera inviata al "Manifesto" il 23/7/2000:
FARE DEL BENE A CHI?
Lo spunto di questa lettera è l'intervento di Marcello Cini pubblicato
in
ultima sul manifesto di giovedì 20 luglio dal titolo "Perché no?
Facciamoci
del bene", in cui l'eminente teorico della scienza discetta sulla
opportunità che un gruppo di suoi amici tornino a rappresentare
l'alleanza
di centrosinistra nella malaugurata previsione di una vittoria
elettorale
della destra.
Sarebbe oltremodo opportuno che qualcuno (magari un giornalista
vero)
voglia oggi ricordare ai lettori che tra i poveri "orfani dell'alleanza
di
centro sinistra" figurano nomi che hanno sostenuto a pieno titolo, come
partecipanti al governo D'Alema, ovvero come silenti spettatori
dell'evento, l'aggressione bellica alla Jugoslavia dello scorso anno,
che
nelle colonne di questo giornale è stata compiutamente descritta e
condannata. Perciò non sto qui a ricordare le conseguenze ecologiche,
sanitarie ed economiche di questa guerra, visto che molti partecipanti
al
"salotto" si considerano ecologisti formati. E' tuttavia spiacevole e
deludente che tali "protagonisti" cerchino ancora credibilità nella
confusione della disinformazione o nel segreto dell'urna, ma è
soprattutto
offensivo per chi è stato e sarà ancora colpito da questa e da altre
guerre, senza neppure il barlume di un riscatto di umana giustizia.
Un consiglio, invece, per molti di coloro che sono passati al
centro o che
non riescono più a rifarsi una verginità politica a sinistra: sarebbe
più
opportuno che, perduti dietro ai compromessi, se non riescono più a fare
il
lavoro per cui si sono un dì qualificati, si dirigessero direttamente
all'indirizzo di Berlusconi, come altri hanno già fatto in un recente
passato; oggi, infatti, se ci sono cose di cui ha bisogno la sinistra,
queste sono ancora la chiarezza e completezza dell'informazione e la
reale
solidarietà, che ci permettono di collaborare tra "diversi"; il resto
predicato da Cini lo si può considerare "un furbetto giochetto di
Ermete"...
Mauro Cristaldi, Roma
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
http://www.egroups.com/group/crj-mailinglist/
------------------------------------------------------------
IN THE INFORMATION WAR, A VICTORY FOR PEACE
Reflections on the one year anniversary of the US/NATO bombing of
Yugoslavia
Text of a speech given to Dayton Peace Action, Dayton, Ohio, 3/21/00
By Geoff Berne
It's a privilege to have been asked by Dayton Peace Action to speak
regarding this past year of war in Yugoslavia.
An organization like yours that's dedicated to peace is a rare one in
the landscape of today's geopolitics in which stronger countries like
ours are said to have "national interests" that justify going to war. A
person who is for peace signals that he most likely does not have a
multinational investment portfolio and probably doesn't care whether the
bulk of Americans who invest in foreign enterprises and ventures prosper
or not. If you reject the notion that nations such as ours have the
right to send troops to protect the investment of capital in a foreign
country like Kuwait or Yugoslavia, you'll be looked on as a clueless
individual who somehow hasn't gotten the message that investment in the
economies of foreign countries is the life's blood of our American
system, a thing that Americans who own stocks are ready to die for, or
kill for, even if you are not. May you, notwithstanding, continue to
carry the peace banner.
I have spent the past year being one of a chorus of people that has
raised an outcry about the Balkan war on the internet, and has refused
to let the matter die as the media and our national leadership try to
move on to other things. What anybody who has followed the war on the
web has quickly realized is that it has caused a crisis of consistency
for people of every political inclination: from so-called Democratic
Socialists (many of whom vigorously supported the bombing of a socialist
country) to conservative libertarians (who supposedly believe in a free
market economy but defended Yugoslavia - a country bombed for its
refusal to adopt a free market economy).
Somehow through the confusion of seeing right and left trade their
traditional positions on the justness of war an antiwar computer
consensus emerged that demanded to be heard and became a factor that had
to be reckoned with. Within mere months, the war opposition that had
taken root among the public bubbled to the surface in the House of
Representatives last May in a tie vote registering no-confidence in the
administration's war policy, 213-213, a vote followed just a few weeks
later by an abrupt halt in the bombing. Can one recall a more dramatic
triumph of democracy than in this affirmation of the goal of peace by
the representatives of the people?
The Pentagon fought the information war in the Balkans using the old
media: newspapers and TV. They failed to stir the traditional pro-war,
patriotic fervor, however, because, increasingly, public opinion is
being shaped today not by TV but by computer.
As compared with their support for action against the Ayatollah Khomeini
in Iran and against Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the public's reaction to
this war was to sit on its hands and turn away from the kiddie cartoon
version of a war in Yugoslavia that the video media crafted with the
help of military and CIA psychological operations specialists who
literally occupied CNN newsrooms and production facilities. Even in
spite of all that effort, like a big budget Hollywood movie that nobody
went to see, "Operation Allied Force" was a disaster at the box office.
Does anybody even remember that corny name?
As we approach the one year anniversary of the start of NATO bombing of
Yugoslavia three days from now, let's take satisfaction that the war has
been such an embarrassing subject that not a single presidential
candidate from the two major parties has so much as mentioned it! Given
the fact that the war was undeclared and indeed that the word "war" was
not even used to describe an operation that involved 40,000 Western
bombing sorties, the uprooting of a million people, ten thousand
civilian deaths, and the destruction of 1,500 towns and 40 per cent of
the buildings in Kosovo alone by the NATO bombing - to the point that
1.2 billion dollars would now be needed to rebuild housing in Kosovo
alone - given the fact that even with all that bloodshed and destruction
NATO was able to destroy only 13 Yugoslavian tanks, and is it any wonder
"Kosovo" is a war regarding which no major political candidate has dared
speak its name?
Odds are, however, that this issue will not stay quiet very much longer
because, for one thing, the war is still going on and in fact heating up
with every passing day, and furthermore those who originally set it in
motion had grandiose goals that are still far from being achieved, goals
that can only be achieved by a confrontation with Yugoslavia's
unyielding regime.
As far as the war still going on is concerned, indications are that
another call by the United States for a resumption of bombing and
perhaps ground operations will be made in the very near future. A
blockade of the Republic of Montenegro set up early this month by the
Milosevic government seems to set the stage for yet another U.S./NATO
rescue mission. This time it would be on behalf of the government of
Montenegro President Milo Djukanovic, the king of European cigarette
smuggling, who is expected to follow in the footsteps of Slovenia,
Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and (soon to be added to this
list, Kosovo), and stage a secession from the Yugoslav federation.
Also indicative that the war is recharging is the renewal of Albanian
aggressive acts, not only against Serb civilians but this time even
against NATO/UN peacekeeping personnel. Persecution, bombings, and
killings of Serbs by revenge-minded Albanians have taken place under the
nose of and with the apparent protection of the greatly overmatched UN
international peacekeepers. In a sign of the underwhelming international
support that there is for the Balkan mission, the UN countries who
supposedly pledged to provide a total of 5,000 troops to police the
streets of Kosovo instead only provided 2500. In the past few weeks,
everyone in a position of authority in relation to Kosovo, from UN
Secretary General Kofi Annan on down, has proclaimed the area to be out
of control. Either a mono-racial Albanian state entirely "cleansed" of
Serbs will emerge in Kosovo, a republic that NATO at war's end had
agreed would remain as a territorial part of the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia, or Kosovo will be partitioned as in Bosnia and Cold War
Berlin.
Incredible as it may seem, NATO had gone to war without first having in
place a game plan for postwar occupation of a country that it invaded
and occupied. Now that it has total authority, it's making up a new
script each day as it goes along. Ten years is the minimum forecast I
have read for how long this travesty of an occupation will last, and
some have said fifty. Its mission compromised to the core, its authority
mocked by their having served as protectors to the gangland violence of
its Kosovo Albanian dependents, the UN occupation and security force has
reduced retiring NATO commander Clark to putting out desperate calls for
more troops - and caused NATO's own field officers and monitors to warn
that troops may now be needed to quell these same Albanians that we
embraced and set up as a fighting force in the first place.
On February 13th, in the city of Mitrovica where 50,000 of the remaining
100,000 Serbs who have not yet been driven out of Kosovo still live, UN
personnel were overmatched by sniper fire and crowds throwing rocks and
grenades in a march on the city that's known for its prized Trepca
mineral mines. Wresting control of the mines and their 17 billion tons
of coal reserves, plus lead, zinc, cadmium, silver, and gold treasures
from the government in Belgrade has been seen as a goal not just of the
Albanian insurgents of Kosovo but also of the international industrial
and investment interests who stand poised to reap major benefits from
NATO dominion over the area.
The mines have been called "the most valuable piece of real estate in
the Balkans." Many of Kosovo's pro-secession Albanians who had worked in
the mines were weeded out and replaced with Poles, Czechs, and Serbs by
the Milosevic administration in the 1980's after having committed a
spate of strikes, sabotage incidents, and violence against
fellow-Albanian miners who remained loyal to the government in Belgrade.
The guns of insurgents who fought for the KLA and for secession of
Kosovo from Yugoslavia are still targeted on these fellow -Albanians
"traitors" who remain pro-Belgrade and whom they would like to oust from
the mines. The 70,000 Albanians who rallied in Mitrovica have plainly
lost patience with the UN occupation which they had expected would
re-establish employment in the mines for Albanians who are pro-KLA.
Obviously the mines are not just a flashpoint, they are the flashpoint
for any future hostilities in Kosovo.
The Trepca mines first attracted notice in the early days of the war
when NATO spokesmen alleged that they held one thousand bodies of
Albanian victims of Serb ethnic murders. The Mirror of London wrote
that the name Trepca would "live alongside those of Belsen, Auschwitz
and Treblinka, etched in the memories of those whose loved ones met a
bestial end in true Nazi Final Solution fashion." But in the aftermath
of the bombing ceasefire investigators for the International Criminal
Tribunal on the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) found no human remains there at
all!
If the name Trepca continues to live in infamy it will be as a symbol
not of genocide but of the official invention of a fake genocide to
justify war against a nation that had committed no offense other than a
refusal to allow the major Western nations to plunder it.
Along with Trepca all other evidence of Serb genocide has collapsed, the
100,000 ethnic murders of which "Mr." Milosevic was accused by Defense
Secretary Cohen were pure invention as admitted even by hardliner Adem
Demaci of the KLA who put the figure at closer to seven thousand.
However, the ICTY forensic teams who were sent to look for bodies wound
up actually finding remains of only a few hundred persons and even these
bodies were conceded to have been likely insurgent combat troops rather
than innocent civilians. At the very most, the ICTY teams estimated
that the total count of bodies found would be something like 2,000. No
less an authority than KLA "minister" Hashim Thaci has himself now
admitted that the notorious so-called "massacre" at Racak, the incident
that outraged the world and gained world support for NATO action, was
the result of a bald-faced provocation by KLA terrorists who used the
photographed bodies of their own snipers as "proof" of a Serbian ethnic
bloodbath.
While this is not news on the television media, which refuse to report
these revelations, it's big news on the internet where official lies and
disinformation are routinely deflated in a matter of hours after being
proclaimed. Indeed, in spite of NATO's seeming media advantage, the
winners of the information age's first internet war have been the forces
of peace! A determined information-gathering resistance movement on the
internet has grown in influence over this past year to such a point that
it has succeeded in stripping away the humanitarian fig leaf that NATO
wore when the war first started and with it all credibility of the
governments of nineteen of the most powerful countries in the world.
That is a big, big accomplishment.
Hence while a new war, even an expanded war, has perhaps never been so
close, the power of those who seek peace has never seemed greater,
either.
The next time this country goes to war, whether in the Balkans or
against some small, defenseless country elsewhere on the planet, how can
our pretense of humanitarian motive be believed now that internet
researchers have exposed our hidden intentions in Yugoslavia and forced
revisions of the official spin on that war to be made in the historical
record?
The entrance of the U.S. into the Balkans was shocking when it happened
because of our trampling of international war codes, treaties, and rules
of conduct taken for granted for decades, and even centuries. The UN
Security Council - out of business. The Geneva Convention prohibiting
aggression against civilian populations - null and void. The War Powers
Act forbidding foreign military intervention without Congressional
authorization - never heard of it. I even read that we had violated the
Treaty of Westphalia of 1648! The internet revolution broke down the
mystique of foreign affairs expertise, allowing citizens like ourselves
to have technical information such as this. Now we have an opportunity
to sort through the sheer mountain of data, and, if we stay the course,
to find out exactly what goes on inside the Leviathan of the war
machine, and exactly how a nightmarish war such as we have seen in
Yugoslavia is made from drawing board through fait accompli.
It's exactly appropriate that among the most influential sources of
truth about this war have been two websites, the absolutely essential
antiwar.com and one entitled The Emperor's New Clothes - www.tenc.com.
Here are just some of the revelations with which that latter website and
others have succeeded in tearing away the aura of righteous purpose in
which the makers of the NATO war on Yugoslavia have vainly struggled to
clothe themselves.
By the time the bombing was two weeks old it was clear to anybody
following it on the internet that restoring ethnic harmony in Kosovo was
not the reason we were in Yugoslavia. Now a year later a consensus has
grown that what the U.S. had sought for Kosovo is for it to be a
permanent colonial protectorate, a launching pad for America to move
into the former Soviet bloc countries. Prior to the war, America had
military bases in 100 countries around the world but not Yugoslavia.
Yugoslavia was the very the last country in Europe without an American
base. Now, thanks to the war the largest American base in Europe is in
Kosovo.
Emperor's Clothes has published many entries by writer Diana Johnstone.
She characterizes Yugoslavia as "a testing ground and a metaphor for the
Soviet Union." In other words, American orchestration of the downfall of
Yugoslavia (by abetting the breakaway of its member republics) is only a
dress rehearsal for future usage of the same dismemberment strategy
against Russia. Supporting the idea that America is positioning itself
to revive the Cold War struggle against Russia are several articles on
Emperor's Clothes including a 1996 paper by Sean Gervasi which asserts
that America wants to have the status of a "European power," and to
expand eastward, eventually taking over the running and economic
exploitation of former east bloc countries such as the Ukraine, Georgia,
and Azerbaijan.
As long as four years ago Gervasi was proclaiming that far from being a
tightly knit partnership, the western alliance is falling apart. In his
analysis, fearing that the emergence of the European Union, of which the
U.S. is not a member, would make Germany rather than ourselves the
supreme power in Europe, the U.S. sought war in the Balkans to carve out
a post-Cold War domain for NATO, of which we are a member, and a way to
make NATO be the supreme power in Europe.
Gervasi's theory is as follows: worried that our fellow NATO countries
had only weakly supported American action in the Gulf War (with our
so-called allies relying almost wholly on American manpower and
firepower), the U.S. cooked up a Balkan crisis in order to lift NATO out
of its doldrums and establish American supremacy by dazzling our allies
with American high tech firepower. Implicit in this theory is that
America had acted in the hope that Europe would see that this country
sets the standard for military manufacture and would have to buy
American military goods.
As early as the 1980's American strategists were plotting ways that NATO
intervention against "rogue nations" would give the U.S. and its fellow
members of NATO a new cause. Just as the old empires of Europe
conquered whole continents in the name of a "civilizing mission," NATO
would roam the planet as protectors of human rights and as humanitarian
rescuers.
Another contributor to Emperor's Clothes (and other antiwar websites),
Michael
Chossudowsky, documents the way the U.S. used the American-controlled
International Monetary Fund, with its power of foreclosure as financial
lender, to smash the Yugoslavian economy, render that country helpless
against foreign takeover, and create such outrageous social and economic
conditions that military intervention by outside countries would seem
like the only solution.
Finally, once again from Emperor's Clothes, on March 12th we were
privileged to get the first American posting of investigations by the
major London newspapers and BBC television that show how America's CIA
created the pro-Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army to spread terror against
Serbia and the government in Belgrade. When Belgrade acted to stop the
shootings, burnings, and kidnappings by the KLA Western media portrayed
Belgrade's law & order measures as racial genocide against Albanians.
In such way the impression was created of a humanitarian crisis that
NATO used as cover for a military aggression.
Now one year after the initial bombing of Yugoslavia, America has
installed itself as an occupying power in Kosovo. Like Korea, like
Berlin and the two Germanies during the Cold War, Yugoslavia is now a
divided country with two republics (Bosnia and Kosovo) that are
protectorates run by outside international bodies mainly staffed by
Americans.
Is the United States simply getting carried away with its own
self-righteous sense of a mission to save mankind, as many anti-war
conservatives who hate the idea of governments acting on the basis of
paternalistic compassion, such as Pat Buchanan, charge, or is the U.S.
committing itself to interventionism because of some more practical and
self-interested motive?
We do not read much about it or hear about it in the major media, but
the internet has carried dozens of articles about the economic benefits
that the U.S. stands to reap from its presence in Kosovo: first of all
the U.S. seeks to build an oil pipeline from Azerbaijan in the former
Soviet Central Asia right across Kosovo and Croatia. With its domination
of Kosovo the U.S. would have control over the future main supply of oil
to the European continent.
And in Kosovo as in many other countries before it, America has sided
with factions that reap huge profits from the drug trade thus
implicitly suggesting that our government has a stake in that trade that
has become a vital form of military financing. First Afghanistan, then
the Nicaraguan contras, then Panama, and now it's our latest client,
Albania. 80 percent of Europe's heroin supply comes from Albania, which
has used drug sales to fund KLA expansion into Kosovo and made Kosovo an
indispensable link in the Albanian drug trade. Our armed forces are
being readied for an expedition to stop the drug trade in Colombia. Has
one word been said to suggest that the military in Kosovo might want to
stop the drug trade in Kosovo as well?
It's been hard for anyone who knows the truth about the KLA and drugs to
watch TV personalities such as Geraldo Rivera go to Albania and stand
side by side in solidarity with these anti-Serb rebels whom they
characterize as freedom fighters. Only on the internet do we discover
that these brave patriots are funded almost entirely by profits from
heroin and other major-scale organized crime activity including
prostitution.
Give credit to the internet resistance, then, for exposing truths such
as these about the war in Yugoslavia. In today's information wars,
computer truth forces are the modern day successors of the war
resistance of Yugoslavian partisans and chetniks who stood up to Hitler
during World War II.
In just three days we will mark the one year anniversary of NATO's air
invasion of Yugoslavia on March 24, 1999. It so happens that that date
coincides with another anniversary, the birth of Yugoslavian resistance
to Adolf Hitler on March 26-27, 1941. On that date after Hitler had
struck a deal with Yugoslavia's Prince Regent, Yugoslavia's armed forces
rose up and overthrew his government, as crowds spat on the German
minister's car. Allow me to quote from William L. Shirer's classic
account of the years of the Third Reich:
"The coup in Belgrade threw Adolf Hitler into one of the wildest rages
of his entire life. He took it as a personal affront and in his fury
made sudden decisions which would prove utterly disastrous to the
fortunes of the Third Reich. Yugoslavia (he said) would be crushed with
'unmerciful harshness.' He ordered Goering to 'destroy Belgrade in
attacks by waves' with bombers operating from Hungarian air bases." He
then postponed his invasion of Russia by four weeks thus guaranteeing
that it would end in failure and the snows of the Russian winter.
The bombing of Belgrade by the Luftwaffe began on April 6, 1941, razing
the city to the ground and killing 17,000 civilians. In an eerie
forshadowing of today's tradition of giving each war its own
action-movie title such as "Operation Desert Storm" in Iraq and
"Operation Allied Force" in Kosovo, Hitler's air attack on Yugoslavia
was called "Operation Punishment." On April 13, 1941, Yugoslavia was
overwhelmed by the German blitz, and the army surrendered at Sarajevo.
Under the occupation industrialist Alfried von Krupp and Reichsmarshall
Hermann Goering personally divided up the spoils of Yugoslavia's
precious mines. However the Yugoslavian partisans, consisting primarily
of Serbs, fought on, resisting all foreign domination including, after
the war, that of the Soviet Union.
Of all the countries that were overrun by Hitler's armies, Yugoslavia
set a unique example in fighting back and offering armed resistance.
The heroic resistance to military aggression demonstrated by the Serbs
of Yugoslavia, which started with Serbia's declaration of independence
after World War I and has now withstood three invasions including
NATO's, should not only not be forgotten, but should inspire us today.
Yugoslavia is once again being eyed as an outpost for the west in
Central Europe, a fortified American emplacement in readiness for war
with Russia. The stubborn Serbs of that country have shown that they
will endure any suffering to prevent their land from being used for such
a scenario. We must find the strength to match the Serbs in their
heritage of resistance to war, and it looks as though we will be called
upon to do so if, as appears likely, NATO's war against Yugoslavia
intensifies in the very near future.
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
http://www.egroups.com/group/crj-mailinglist/
------------------------------------------------------------
Reflections on the one year anniversary of the US/NATO bombing of
Yugoslavia
Text of a speech given to Dayton Peace Action, Dayton, Ohio, 3/21/00
By Geoff Berne
It's a privilege to have been asked by Dayton Peace Action to speak
regarding this past year of war in Yugoslavia.
An organization like yours that's dedicated to peace is a rare one in
the landscape of today's geopolitics in which stronger countries like
ours are said to have "national interests" that justify going to war. A
person who is for peace signals that he most likely does not have a
multinational investment portfolio and probably doesn't care whether the
bulk of Americans who invest in foreign enterprises and ventures prosper
or not. If you reject the notion that nations such as ours have the
right to send troops to protect the investment of capital in a foreign
country like Kuwait or Yugoslavia, you'll be looked on as a clueless
individual who somehow hasn't gotten the message that investment in the
economies of foreign countries is the life's blood of our American
system, a thing that Americans who own stocks are ready to die for, or
kill for, even if you are not. May you, notwithstanding, continue to
carry the peace banner.
I have spent the past year being one of a chorus of people that has
raised an outcry about the Balkan war on the internet, and has refused
to let the matter die as the media and our national leadership try to
move on to other things. What anybody who has followed the war on the
web has quickly realized is that it has caused a crisis of consistency
for people of every political inclination: from so-called Democratic
Socialists (many of whom vigorously supported the bombing of a socialist
country) to conservative libertarians (who supposedly believe in a free
market economy but defended Yugoslavia - a country bombed for its
refusal to adopt a free market economy).
Somehow through the confusion of seeing right and left trade their
traditional positions on the justness of war an antiwar computer
consensus emerged that demanded to be heard and became a factor that had
to be reckoned with. Within mere months, the war opposition that had
taken root among the public bubbled to the surface in the House of
Representatives last May in a tie vote registering no-confidence in the
administration's war policy, 213-213, a vote followed just a few weeks
later by an abrupt halt in the bombing. Can one recall a more dramatic
triumph of democracy than in this affirmation of the goal of peace by
the representatives of the people?
The Pentagon fought the information war in the Balkans using the old
media: newspapers and TV. They failed to stir the traditional pro-war,
patriotic fervor, however, because, increasingly, public opinion is
being shaped today not by TV but by computer.
As compared with their support for action against the Ayatollah Khomeini
in Iran and against Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the public's reaction to
this war was to sit on its hands and turn away from the kiddie cartoon
version of a war in Yugoslavia that the video media crafted with the
help of military and CIA psychological operations specialists who
literally occupied CNN newsrooms and production facilities. Even in
spite of all that effort, like a big budget Hollywood movie that nobody
went to see, "Operation Allied Force" was a disaster at the box office.
Does anybody even remember that corny name?
As we approach the one year anniversary of the start of NATO bombing of
Yugoslavia three days from now, let's take satisfaction that the war has
been such an embarrassing subject that not a single presidential
candidate from the two major parties has so much as mentioned it! Given
the fact that the war was undeclared and indeed that the word "war" was
not even used to describe an operation that involved 40,000 Western
bombing sorties, the uprooting of a million people, ten thousand
civilian deaths, and the destruction of 1,500 towns and 40 per cent of
the buildings in Kosovo alone by the NATO bombing - to the point that
1.2 billion dollars would now be needed to rebuild housing in Kosovo
alone - given the fact that even with all that bloodshed and destruction
NATO was able to destroy only 13 Yugoslavian tanks, and is it any wonder
"Kosovo" is a war regarding which no major political candidate has dared
speak its name?
Odds are, however, that this issue will not stay quiet very much longer
because, for one thing, the war is still going on and in fact heating up
with every passing day, and furthermore those who originally set it in
motion had grandiose goals that are still far from being achieved, goals
that can only be achieved by a confrontation with Yugoslavia's
unyielding regime.
As far as the war still going on is concerned, indications are that
another call by the United States for a resumption of bombing and
perhaps ground operations will be made in the very near future. A
blockade of the Republic of Montenegro set up early this month by the
Milosevic government seems to set the stage for yet another U.S./NATO
rescue mission. This time it would be on behalf of the government of
Montenegro President Milo Djukanovic, the king of European cigarette
smuggling, who is expected to follow in the footsteps of Slovenia,
Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and (soon to be added to this
list, Kosovo), and stage a secession from the Yugoslav federation.
Also indicative that the war is recharging is the renewal of Albanian
aggressive acts, not only against Serb civilians but this time even
against NATO/UN peacekeeping personnel. Persecution, bombings, and
killings of Serbs by revenge-minded Albanians have taken place under the
nose of and with the apparent protection of the greatly overmatched UN
international peacekeepers. In a sign of the underwhelming international
support that there is for the Balkan mission, the UN countries who
supposedly pledged to provide a total of 5,000 troops to police the
streets of Kosovo instead only provided 2500. In the past few weeks,
everyone in a position of authority in relation to Kosovo, from UN
Secretary General Kofi Annan on down, has proclaimed the area to be out
of control. Either a mono-racial Albanian state entirely "cleansed" of
Serbs will emerge in Kosovo, a republic that NATO at war's end had
agreed would remain as a territorial part of the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia, or Kosovo will be partitioned as in Bosnia and Cold War
Berlin.
Incredible as it may seem, NATO had gone to war without first having in
place a game plan for postwar occupation of a country that it invaded
and occupied. Now that it has total authority, it's making up a new
script each day as it goes along. Ten years is the minimum forecast I
have read for how long this travesty of an occupation will last, and
some have said fifty. Its mission compromised to the core, its authority
mocked by their having served as protectors to the gangland violence of
its Kosovo Albanian dependents, the UN occupation and security force has
reduced retiring NATO commander Clark to putting out desperate calls for
more troops - and caused NATO's own field officers and monitors to warn
that troops may now be needed to quell these same Albanians that we
embraced and set up as a fighting force in the first place.
On February 13th, in the city of Mitrovica where 50,000 of the remaining
100,000 Serbs who have not yet been driven out of Kosovo still live, UN
personnel were overmatched by sniper fire and crowds throwing rocks and
grenades in a march on the city that's known for its prized Trepca
mineral mines. Wresting control of the mines and their 17 billion tons
of coal reserves, plus lead, zinc, cadmium, silver, and gold treasures
from the government in Belgrade has been seen as a goal not just of the
Albanian insurgents of Kosovo but also of the international industrial
and investment interests who stand poised to reap major benefits from
NATO dominion over the area.
The mines have been called "the most valuable piece of real estate in
the Balkans." Many of Kosovo's pro-secession Albanians who had worked in
the mines were weeded out and replaced with Poles, Czechs, and Serbs by
the Milosevic administration in the 1980's after having committed a
spate of strikes, sabotage incidents, and violence against
fellow-Albanian miners who remained loyal to the government in Belgrade.
The guns of insurgents who fought for the KLA and for secession of
Kosovo from Yugoslavia are still targeted on these fellow -Albanians
"traitors" who remain pro-Belgrade and whom they would like to oust from
the mines. The 70,000 Albanians who rallied in Mitrovica have plainly
lost patience with the UN occupation which they had expected would
re-establish employment in the mines for Albanians who are pro-KLA.
Obviously the mines are not just a flashpoint, they are the flashpoint
for any future hostilities in Kosovo.
The Trepca mines first attracted notice in the early days of the war
when NATO spokesmen alleged that they held one thousand bodies of
Albanian victims of Serb ethnic murders. The Mirror of London wrote
that the name Trepca would "live alongside those of Belsen, Auschwitz
and Treblinka, etched in the memories of those whose loved ones met a
bestial end in true Nazi Final Solution fashion." But in the aftermath
of the bombing ceasefire investigators for the International Criminal
Tribunal on the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) found no human remains there at
all!
If the name Trepca continues to live in infamy it will be as a symbol
not of genocide but of the official invention of a fake genocide to
justify war against a nation that had committed no offense other than a
refusal to allow the major Western nations to plunder it.
Along with Trepca all other evidence of Serb genocide has collapsed, the
100,000 ethnic murders of which "Mr." Milosevic was accused by Defense
Secretary Cohen were pure invention as admitted even by hardliner Adem
Demaci of the KLA who put the figure at closer to seven thousand.
However, the ICTY forensic teams who were sent to look for bodies wound
up actually finding remains of only a few hundred persons and even these
bodies were conceded to have been likely insurgent combat troops rather
than innocent civilians. At the very most, the ICTY teams estimated
that the total count of bodies found would be something like 2,000. No
less an authority than KLA "minister" Hashim Thaci has himself now
admitted that the notorious so-called "massacre" at Racak, the incident
that outraged the world and gained world support for NATO action, was
the result of a bald-faced provocation by KLA terrorists who used the
photographed bodies of their own snipers as "proof" of a Serbian ethnic
bloodbath.
While this is not news on the television media, which refuse to report
these revelations, it's big news on the internet where official lies and
disinformation are routinely deflated in a matter of hours after being
proclaimed. Indeed, in spite of NATO's seeming media advantage, the
winners of the information age's first internet war have been the forces
of peace! A determined information-gathering resistance movement on the
internet has grown in influence over this past year to such a point that
it has succeeded in stripping away the humanitarian fig leaf that NATO
wore when the war first started and with it all credibility of the
governments of nineteen of the most powerful countries in the world.
That is a big, big accomplishment.
Hence while a new war, even an expanded war, has perhaps never been so
close, the power of those who seek peace has never seemed greater,
either.
The next time this country goes to war, whether in the Balkans or
against some small, defenseless country elsewhere on the planet, how can
our pretense of humanitarian motive be believed now that internet
researchers have exposed our hidden intentions in Yugoslavia and forced
revisions of the official spin on that war to be made in the historical
record?
The entrance of the U.S. into the Balkans was shocking when it happened
because of our trampling of international war codes, treaties, and rules
of conduct taken for granted for decades, and even centuries. The UN
Security Council - out of business. The Geneva Convention prohibiting
aggression against civilian populations - null and void. The War Powers
Act forbidding foreign military intervention without Congressional
authorization - never heard of it. I even read that we had violated the
Treaty of Westphalia of 1648! The internet revolution broke down the
mystique of foreign affairs expertise, allowing citizens like ourselves
to have technical information such as this. Now we have an opportunity
to sort through the sheer mountain of data, and, if we stay the course,
to find out exactly what goes on inside the Leviathan of the war
machine, and exactly how a nightmarish war such as we have seen in
Yugoslavia is made from drawing board through fait accompli.
It's exactly appropriate that among the most influential sources of
truth about this war have been two websites, the absolutely essential
antiwar.com and one entitled The Emperor's New Clothes - www.tenc.com.
Here are just some of the revelations with which that latter website and
others have succeeded in tearing away the aura of righteous purpose in
which the makers of the NATO war on Yugoslavia have vainly struggled to
clothe themselves.
By the time the bombing was two weeks old it was clear to anybody
following it on the internet that restoring ethnic harmony in Kosovo was
not the reason we were in Yugoslavia. Now a year later a consensus has
grown that what the U.S. had sought for Kosovo is for it to be a
permanent colonial protectorate, a launching pad for America to move
into the former Soviet bloc countries. Prior to the war, America had
military bases in 100 countries around the world but not Yugoslavia.
Yugoslavia was the very the last country in Europe without an American
base. Now, thanks to the war the largest American base in Europe is in
Kosovo.
Emperor's Clothes has published many entries by writer Diana Johnstone.
She characterizes Yugoslavia as "a testing ground and a metaphor for the
Soviet Union." In other words, American orchestration of the downfall of
Yugoslavia (by abetting the breakaway of its member republics) is only a
dress rehearsal for future usage of the same dismemberment strategy
against Russia. Supporting the idea that America is positioning itself
to revive the Cold War struggle against Russia are several articles on
Emperor's Clothes including a 1996 paper by Sean Gervasi which asserts
that America wants to have the status of a "European power," and to
expand eastward, eventually taking over the running and economic
exploitation of former east bloc countries such as the Ukraine, Georgia,
and Azerbaijan.
As long as four years ago Gervasi was proclaiming that far from being a
tightly knit partnership, the western alliance is falling apart. In his
analysis, fearing that the emergence of the European Union, of which the
U.S. is not a member, would make Germany rather than ourselves the
supreme power in Europe, the U.S. sought war in the Balkans to carve out
a post-Cold War domain for NATO, of which we are a member, and a way to
make NATO be the supreme power in Europe.
Gervasi's theory is as follows: worried that our fellow NATO countries
had only weakly supported American action in the Gulf War (with our
so-called allies relying almost wholly on American manpower and
firepower), the U.S. cooked up a Balkan crisis in order to lift NATO out
of its doldrums and establish American supremacy by dazzling our allies
with American high tech firepower. Implicit in this theory is that
America had acted in the hope that Europe would see that this country
sets the standard for military manufacture and would have to buy
American military goods.
As early as the 1980's American strategists were plotting ways that NATO
intervention against "rogue nations" would give the U.S. and its fellow
members of NATO a new cause. Just as the old empires of Europe
conquered whole continents in the name of a "civilizing mission," NATO
would roam the planet as protectors of human rights and as humanitarian
rescuers.
Another contributor to Emperor's Clothes (and other antiwar websites),
Michael
Chossudowsky, documents the way the U.S. used the American-controlled
International Monetary Fund, with its power of foreclosure as financial
lender, to smash the Yugoslavian economy, render that country helpless
against foreign takeover, and create such outrageous social and economic
conditions that military intervention by outside countries would seem
like the only solution.
Finally, once again from Emperor's Clothes, on March 12th we were
privileged to get the first American posting of investigations by the
major London newspapers and BBC television that show how America's CIA
created the pro-Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army to spread terror against
Serbia and the government in Belgrade. When Belgrade acted to stop the
shootings, burnings, and kidnappings by the KLA Western media portrayed
Belgrade's law & order measures as racial genocide against Albanians.
In such way the impression was created of a humanitarian crisis that
NATO used as cover for a military aggression.
Now one year after the initial bombing of Yugoslavia, America has
installed itself as an occupying power in Kosovo. Like Korea, like
Berlin and the two Germanies during the Cold War, Yugoslavia is now a
divided country with two republics (Bosnia and Kosovo) that are
protectorates run by outside international bodies mainly staffed by
Americans.
Is the United States simply getting carried away with its own
self-righteous sense of a mission to save mankind, as many anti-war
conservatives who hate the idea of governments acting on the basis of
paternalistic compassion, such as Pat Buchanan, charge, or is the U.S.
committing itself to interventionism because of some more practical and
self-interested motive?
We do not read much about it or hear about it in the major media, but
the internet has carried dozens of articles about the economic benefits
that the U.S. stands to reap from its presence in Kosovo: first of all
the U.S. seeks to build an oil pipeline from Azerbaijan in the former
Soviet Central Asia right across Kosovo and Croatia. With its domination
of Kosovo the U.S. would have control over the future main supply of oil
to the European continent.
And in Kosovo as in many other countries before it, America has sided
with factions that reap huge profits from the drug trade thus
implicitly suggesting that our government has a stake in that trade that
has become a vital form of military financing. First Afghanistan, then
the Nicaraguan contras, then Panama, and now it's our latest client,
Albania. 80 percent of Europe's heroin supply comes from Albania, which
has used drug sales to fund KLA expansion into Kosovo and made Kosovo an
indispensable link in the Albanian drug trade. Our armed forces are
being readied for an expedition to stop the drug trade in Colombia. Has
one word been said to suggest that the military in Kosovo might want to
stop the drug trade in Kosovo as well?
It's been hard for anyone who knows the truth about the KLA and drugs to
watch TV personalities such as Geraldo Rivera go to Albania and stand
side by side in solidarity with these anti-Serb rebels whom they
characterize as freedom fighters. Only on the internet do we discover
that these brave patriots are funded almost entirely by profits from
heroin and other major-scale organized crime activity including
prostitution.
Give credit to the internet resistance, then, for exposing truths such
as these about the war in Yugoslavia. In today's information wars,
computer truth forces are the modern day successors of the war
resistance of Yugoslavian partisans and chetniks who stood up to Hitler
during World War II.
In just three days we will mark the one year anniversary of NATO's air
invasion of Yugoslavia on March 24, 1999. It so happens that that date
coincides with another anniversary, the birth of Yugoslavian resistance
to Adolf Hitler on March 26-27, 1941. On that date after Hitler had
struck a deal with Yugoslavia's Prince Regent, Yugoslavia's armed forces
rose up and overthrew his government, as crowds spat on the German
minister's car. Allow me to quote from William L. Shirer's classic
account of the years of the Third Reich:
"The coup in Belgrade threw Adolf Hitler into one of the wildest rages
of his entire life. He took it as a personal affront and in his fury
made sudden decisions which would prove utterly disastrous to the
fortunes of the Third Reich. Yugoslavia (he said) would be crushed with
'unmerciful harshness.' He ordered Goering to 'destroy Belgrade in
attacks by waves' with bombers operating from Hungarian air bases." He
then postponed his invasion of Russia by four weeks thus guaranteeing
that it would end in failure and the snows of the Russian winter.
The bombing of Belgrade by the Luftwaffe began on April 6, 1941, razing
the city to the ground and killing 17,000 civilians. In an eerie
forshadowing of today's tradition of giving each war its own
action-movie title such as "Operation Desert Storm" in Iraq and
"Operation Allied Force" in Kosovo, Hitler's air attack on Yugoslavia
was called "Operation Punishment." On April 13, 1941, Yugoslavia was
overwhelmed by the German blitz, and the army surrendered at Sarajevo.
Under the occupation industrialist Alfried von Krupp and Reichsmarshall
Hermann Goering personally divided up the spoils of Yugoslavia's
precious mines. However the Yugoslavian partisans, consisting primarily
of Serbs, fought on, resisting all foreign domination including, after
the war, that of the Soviet Union.
Of all the countries that were overrun by Hitler's armies, Yugoslavia
set a unique example in fighting back and offering armed resistance.
The heroic resistance to military aggression demonstrated by the Serbs
of Yugoslavia, which started with Serbia's declaration of independence
after World War I and has now withstood three invasions including
NATO's, should not only not be forgotten, but should inspire us today.
Yugoslavia is once again being eyed as an outpost for the west in
Central Europe, a fortified American emplacement in readiness for war
with Russia. The stubborn Serbs of that country have shown that they
will endure any suffering to prevent their land from being used for such
a scenario. We must find the strength to match the Serbs in their
heritage of resistance to war, and it looks as though we will be called
upon to do so if, as appears likely, NATO's war against Yugoslavia
intensifies in the very near future.
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
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------------------------------------------------------------
THE FATAL FLAWS UNDERLYING NATO'S INTERVENTION IN YUGOSLAVIA
By Lt Gen Satish Nambiar (Retd.)
(First Force Commander and Head of Mission of the United Nations Forces
deployed in the former Yugoslavia 03 Mar92 to 02 Mar 93. Former Deputy
Chief of Staff, Indian Army. Currently, Director of the United Services
Insitution of India.)
My year long experience as the Force Commander and Head of Mission of
the
United Nations Forces deployed in the former Yugoslavia has given me an
understanding of the fatal flaws of US/NATO policies in the troubled
region.
It was obvious to most people following events in the Balkans since the
beginning of the decade, and particularly after the fighting that
resulted
in the emergence of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the former
Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, that Kosovo was a 'powder keg' waiting
to
explode. The West appears to have learnt all the wrong lessons from the
previous wars and applied it to Kosovo.
(1) Portraying the Serbs as evil and everybody else as good was not only
counterproductive but also dishonest. According to my experience all
sides were guilty but only the Serbs would admit that they were no
angels
while the others would insist that they were. With 28, 000 forces under
me and with constant contacts with UNHCR and the International Red Cross
officials, we did not witness any genocide beyond killings and massacres
on all sides that are typical of such conflict conditions. I believe
none
of my successors and their forces saw anything on the scale claimed by
the
media.
(2) It was obvious to me that if Slovenians, Croatians and Bosniaks had
the right to secede from Yugoslavia, then the Serbs of Croatia and
Bosnia
had an equal right to secede. The experience of partitions in Ireland
and
India has not be pleasant but in the Yugoslavia case, the state had
already been taken apart anyway. It made little sense to me that if
multiethnic Yugoslavia was not tenable that multiethnic Bosnia could be
made tenable. The former internal boundaries of Yugoslavia which had no
validity under international law should have been redrawn when it was
taken apart by the West, just as it was in the case of Ireland in 1921
and
Punjab and Bengal in India in 1947. Failure to acknowledge this has led
to the problem of Kosovo as an integral part of Serbia.
(3) It is ironic that the Dayton Agreement on Bosnia was not
fundamentally
different from the Lisbon Plan drawn up by Portuguese Foreign Minister
Cuteliero and British representative Lord Carrington to which all three
sides had agreed before any killings had taken place, or even the
Vance-Owen Plan which Karadzic was willing to sign. One of the main
problems was that there was an unwillingness on the part of the American
administration to concede that Serbs had legitimate grievances and
rights.
I recall State Department official George Kenny turning up like all
other
American officials, spewing condemnations of the Serbs for aggression
and
genocide. I offered to give him an escort and to go see for himself
that
none of what he proclaimed was true. He accepted my offer and
thereafter
he made a radical turnaround.. Other Americans continued to see and
hear
what they wanted to see and hear from one side, while ignoring the other
side. Such behaviour does not produce peace but more conflict.
(4) I felt that Yugoslavia was a media-generated tragedy. The Western
media sees international crises in black and white, sensationalizing
incidents for public consumption. From what I can see now, all Serbs
have
been driven out of Croatia and the Muslim-Croat Federation, I believe
almost 850,000 of them. And yet the focus is on 500,000 Albanians (at
last count) who have been driven out of Kosovo. Western policies have
led
to an ethnically pure Greater Croatia, and an ethnically pure Muslim
statelet in Bosnia. Therefore, why not an ethnically pure Serbia?
Failure to address these double standards has led to the current one.
As I watched the ugly tragedy unfold in the case of Kosovo while
visiting
the US in early to mid March 1999, I could see the same pattern
emerging.
In my experience with similar situations in India in such places as
Kashmir, Punjab, Assam, Nagaland, and elsewhere, it is the essential
strategy of those ethnic groups who wish to secede to provoke the state
authorities. Killings of policemen is usually a standard operating
procedure by terrorists since that usually invites overwhelming state
retaliation, just as I am sure it does in the United States.
I do not believe the Belgrade government had prior intention of driving
out all Albanians from Kosovo. It may have decided to implement
Washington's own "Krajina Plan" only if NATO bombed, or these expulsions
could be spontaneous acts of revenge and retaliation by Serb forces in
the
field because of the bombing. The OSCE Monitors were not doing too
badly,
and the Yugoslav Government had, after all, indicated its willings to
abide by nearly all the provisions of the Rambouillet "Agreement" on
aspects like cease-fire, greater autonomy to the Albanians, and so on.
But they insisted that the status of Kosovo as part of Serbia was not
negotiable, and they would not agree to stationing NATO forces on the
soil
of Yugoslavia. This is precisely what India would have done under the
same circumstances. It was the West that proceeded to escalate the
situation into the current senseless bombing campaign that smacks more
of
hurt egos, and revenge and retaliation. NATO's massive bombing intended
to terrorize Serbia into submission appears no different from the
morality
of actions of Serb forces in Kosovo.
Ultimatums were issued to Yugoslavia that unless the terms of an
agreement
drawn up at Rambouillet were signed, NATO would undertake bombing.
Ultimatums do not constitute diplomacy. They are acts of war. The
Albanians of Kosovo who want independence, were coaxed and cajoled into
putting their signatures to a document motivated with the hope of NATO
bombing of Serbs and independence later. With this signature, NATO
assumed all the legal and moral authority to undertake military
operations
against a country that had, at worst, been harsh on its own people. On
24th March 1999, NATO launched attacks with cruise missiles and bombs,
on
Yugoslavia, a sovereign state, a founding member of the United Nations
and
the Non Aligned Movement; and against a people who were at the forefront
of the fight against Nazi Germany and other fascist forces during World
War Two. I consider these current actions unbecoming of great powers.
It is appropriate to touch on the humanitarian dimension for it is the
innocent who are being subjected to displacement, pain and misery.
Unfortunately, this is the tragic and inevitable outcome of all such
situations of civil war, insurgencies, rebel movements, and terrorist
activity. History is replete with examples of such suffering; whether
it
be the American Civil War, Northern Ireland, the Basque movement in
Spain,
Chechnya, Angola, Cambodia, and so many other cases; the indiscriminate
bombing of civilian centres during World War Two; Hiroshima and
Nagasaki;
Vietnam. The list is endless. I feel that this tragedy could have been
prevented if NATO's ego and credibility had not been given the highest
priority instead of the genuine grievances of Serbs in addition to
Albanians.
Notwithstanding all that one hears and sees on CNN and BBC, and other
Western agencies, and in the daily briefings of the NATO authorities,
the
blame for the humanitarian crisis that has arisen cannot be placed at
the
door of the Yugoslav authorities alone. The responsibility rests mainly
at NATO's doors. In fact, if I am to go by my own experience as the
First
Force Commander and Head of Mission of the United Nations forces in the
former Yugoslavia, from March 1992 to March 1993, handling operations in
Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Macedonia, I would say that reports put
out in the electronic media are largely responsible for provoking this
tragedy.
Where does all this leave the international community which for the
record
does not comprise of the US, the West and its newfound Muslim allies?
The
portents for the future, at least in the short term, are bleak indeed.
The United Nations has been made totally redundant, ineffective, and
impotent. The Western world, led by the USA, will lay down the moral
values that the rest of the world must adhere to; it does not matter
that
they themselves do not adhere to the same values when it does not suit
them. National sovereignty and territorial integrity have no sanctity.
And finally, secessionist movements, which often start with terrorist
activity, will get greater encouragement. One can only hope that good
sense will prevail, hopefully sooner rather than later.
Lt General Satish Nambiar Director, USI, New Delhi
6 April 1999
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
http://www.egroups.com/group/crj-mailinglist/
------------------------------------------------------------
By Lt Gen Satish Nambiar (Retd.)
(First Force Commander and Head of Mission of the United Nations Forces
deployed in the former Yugoslavia 03 Mar92 to 02 Mar 93. Former Deputy
Chief of Staff, Indian Army. Currently, Director of the United Services
Insitution of India.)
My year long experience as the Force Commander and Head of Mission of
the
United Nations Forces deployed in the former Yugoslavia has given me an
understanding of the fatal flaws of US/NATO policies in the troubled
region.
It was obvious to most people following events in the Balkans since the
beginning of the decade, and particularly after the fighting that
resulted
in the emergence of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the former
Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, that Kosovo was a 'powder keg' waiting
to
explode. The West appears to have learnt all the wrong lessons from the
previous wars and applied it to Kosovo.
(1) Portraying the Serbs as evil and everybody else as good was not only
counterproductive but also dishonest. According to my experience all
sides were guilty but only the Serbs would admit that they were no
angels
while the others would insist that they were. With 28, 000 forces under
me and with constant contacts with UNHCR and the International Red Cross
officials, we did not witness any genocide beyond killings and massacres
on all sides that are typical of such conflict conditions. I believe
none
of my successors and their forces saw anything on the scale claimed by
the
media.
(2) It was obvious to me that if Slovenians, Croatians and Bosniaks had
the right to secede from Yugoslavia, then the Serbs of Croatia and
Bosnia
had an equal right to secede. The experience of partitions in Ireland
and
India has not be pleasant but in the Yugoslavia case, the state had
already been taken apart anyway. It made little sense to me that if
multiethnic Yugoslavia was not tenable that multiethnic Bosnia could be
made tenable. The former internal boundaries of Yugoslavia which had no
validity under international law should have been redrawn when it was
taken apart by the West, just as it was in the case of Ireland in 1921
and
Punjab and Bengal in India in 1947. Failure to acknowledge this has led
to the problem of Kosovo as an integral part of Serbia.
(3) It is ironic that the Dayton Agreement on Bosnia was not
fundamentally
different from the Lisbon Plan drawn up by Portuguese Foreign Minister
Cuteliero and British representative Lord Carrington to which all three
sides had agreed before any killings had taken place, or even the
Vance-Owen Plan which Karadzic was willing to sign. One of the main
problems was that there was an unwillingness on the part of the American
administration to concede that Serbs had legitimate grievances and
rights.
I recall State Department official George Kenny turning up like all
other
American officials, spewing condemnations of the Serbs for aggression
and
genocide. I offered to give him an escort and to go see for himself
that
none of what he proclaimed was true. He accepted my offer and
thereafter
he made a radical turnaround.. Other Americans continued to see and
hear
what they wanted to see and hear from one side, while ignoring the other
side. Such behaviour does not produce peace but more conflict.
(4) I felt that Yugoslavia was a media-generated tragedy. The Western
media sees international crises in black and white, sensationalizing
incidents for public consumption. From what I can see now, all Serbs
have
been driven out of Croatia and the Muslim-Croat Federation, I believe
almost 850,000 of them. And yet the focus is on 500,000 Albanians (at
last count) who have been driven out of Kosovo. Western policies have
led
to an ethnically pure Greater Croatia, and an ethnically pure Muslim
statelet in Bosnia. Therefore, why not an ethnically pure Serbia?
Failure to address these double standards has led to the current one.
As I watched the ugly tragedy unfold in the case of Kosovo while
visiting
the US in early to mid March 1999, I could see the same pattern
emerging.
In my experience with similar situations in India in such places as
Kashmir, Punjab, Assam, Nagaland, and elsewhere, it is the essential
strategy of those ethnic groups who wish to secede to provoke the state
authorities. Killings of policemen is usually a standard operating
procedure by terrorists since that usually invites overwhelming state
retaliation, just as I am sure it does in the United States.
I do not believe the Belgrade government had prior intention of driving
out all Albanians from Kosovo. It may have decided to implement
Washington's own "Krajina Plan" only if NATO bombed, or these expulsions
could be spontaneous acts of revenge and retaliation by Serb forces in
the
field because of the bombing. The OSCE Monitors were not doing too
badly,
and the Yugoslav Government had, after all, indicated its willings to
abide by nearly all the provisions of the Rambouillet "Agreement" on
aspects like cease-fire, greater autonomy to the Albanians, and so on.
But they insisted that the status of Kosovo as part of Serbia was not
negotiable, and they would not agree to stationing NATO forces on the
soil
of Yugoslavia. This is precisely what India would have done under the
same circumstances. It was the West that proceeded to escalate the
situation into the current senseless bombing campaign that smacks more
of
hurt egos, and revenge and retaliation. NATO's massive bombing intended
to terrorize Serbia into submission appears no different from the
morality
of actions of Serb forces in Kosovo.
Ultimatums were issued to Yugoslavia that unless the terms of an
agreement
drawn up at Rambouillet were signed, NATO would undertake bombing.
Ultimatums do not constitute diplomacy. They are acts of war. The
Albanians of Kosovo who want independence, were coaxed and cajoled into
putting their signatures to a document motivated with the hope of NATO
bombing of Serbs and independence later. With this signature, NATO
assumed all the legal and moral authority to undertake military
operations
against a country that had, at worst, been harsh on its own people. On
24th March 1999, NATO launched attacks with cruise missiles and bombs,
on
Yugoslavia, a sovereign state, a founding member of the United Nations
and
the Non Aligned Movement; and against a people who were at the forefront
of the fight against Nazi Germany and other fascist forces during World
War Two. I consider these current actions unbecoming of great powers.
It is appropriate to touch on the humanitarian dimension for it is the
innocent who are being subjected to displacement, pain and misery.
Unfortunately, this is the tragic and inevitable outcome of all such
situations of civil war, insurgencies, rebel movements, and terrorist
activity. History is replete with examples of such suffering; whether
it
be the American Civil War, Northern Ireland, the Basque movement in
Spain,
Chechnya, Angola, Cambodia, and so many other cases; the indiscriminate
bombing of civilian centres during World War Two; Hiroshima and
Nagasaki;
Vietnam. The list is endless. I feel that this tragedy could have been
prevented if NATO's ego and credibility had not been given the highest
priority instead of the genuine grievances of Serbs in addition to
Albanians.
Notwithstanding all that one hears and sees on CNN and BBC, and other
Western agencies, and in the daily briefings of the NATO authorities,
the
blame for the humanitarian crisis that has arisen cannot be placed at
the
door of the Yugoslav authorities alone. The responsibility rests mainly
at NATO's doors. In fact, if I am to go by my own experience as the
First
Force Commander and Head of Mission of the United Nations forces in the
former Yugoslavia, from March 1992 to March 1993, handling operations in
Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Macedonia, I would say that reports put
out in the electronic media are largely responsible for provoking this
tragedy.
Where does all this leave the international community which for the
record
does not comprise of the US, the West and its newfound Muslim allies?
The
portents for the future, at least in the short term, are bleak indeed.
The United Nations has been made totally redundant, ineffective, and
impotent. The Western world, led by the USA, will lay down the moral
values that the rest of the world must adhere to; it does not matter
that
they themselves do not adhere to the same values when it does not suit
them. National sovereignty and territorial integrity have no sanctity.
And finally, secessionist movements, which often start with terrorist
activity, will get greater encouragement. One can only hope that good
sense will prevail, hopefully sooner rather than later.
Lt General Satish Nambiar Director, USI, New Delhi
6 April 1999
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
http://www.egroups.com/group/crj-mailinglist/
------------------------------------------------------------
