Daily Archives: May 16, 2021

Uganda is experiencing its worst wave of political oppression in decades. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of supporters of opposition parties to President General Yoweri Museveni have been abducted, detained and tortured in recent months. Like many, I bear the scars of the baton, have felt the sting of teargas and endured unlawful detention. But I know that this is not personal. It isnt about me.

Many others, whose only offence is to exercise constitutionally entrenched rights and freedoms, have been clobbered, abducted, tortured and put on show trial. The atrocities are numerous: the unresolved carnage of the Kayunga shootings in 2009 that saw 40 left dead, the massacres in Rwenzururu where police and military killed more than 150, or the November 2020 killings in which more than 50 protesters lost their lives. Not to mention the shooting of my driver, Yasin Kawuma, by police forces on 13 August 2018 at a political rally. He was only 27, and left behind a widow and children. A personal tragedy, but also just another incident in the brutal crackdown under way on supporters of opposition parties in Uganda.

Before I was a politician, I was a musician. I have been dubbed Africas Ghetto President. I stood earlier this year as the main opposition challenger to Musevini. At 39 years old, I hope to represent a new face for Ugandan politics that the population, which is the second youngest in the world, can get behind. I want to see Uganda enjoy the same opportunities that countries governed by more sustainable, equal democratic processes enjoy.

Many in my generation were too young or not yet born to comprehend what was happening in the early years of Musevinis National Resistance Armys takeover. The mass dislocation of livelihoods as a result of IMF-backed austerity measures, the withdrawal of the state from basic service provision and the war between the NRA and Joseph Konys Lords Resistance Army in northern Uganda brought home the glaring contradiction between the lofty speeches of Museveni and prevailing realities. Viewed through our eyes as millennials, it has been a lifetime of broken promises, unfulfilled dreams and dashed hopes.

This disenchantment shows in the age of the majority of arrested people, not least Kenny Kyalimpa (18), Lookman Mwijukye (20), Stanley Kafuko and Saphina Nansove (both 22), Shakira Namboozo (24), Joy Strong (25) and Dan Magic (27), all of whom were repeatedly harassed and are still locked up for expressing divergent political opinions in recent months. And then theres my music partner, Nubian Li, and my childhood friend Eddie Mutwe.

Against this backdrop, its not difficult to see why every passing day of Musevenis incumbency stirs even more opposition to his rule. Yet the establishment does not seem to appreciate the fact that you cannot indefinitely detain 40 million people in an airtight cage of poverty presided over by nepotistic ruling elites. Suffice to say that even if I hadnt personally indulged in elective politics and direct activism, other Ugandans would have emerged as they have to challenge years of misrule and mismanagement of our public affairs.

A reader who is not familiar with Ugandas situation might wonder how all the above has been possible. Years of personalised rule create a blanketing malaise whose effect is that neither the judicial system nor any other arm of government, as currently constituted can be trusted to deliver justice. The very parliament I sit in has been rendered powerless as a check to executive overreach.

Court orders are disregarded with dazzling alacrity, as the civilian courts get ousted by the general courts-martial, whose remit is soldiers. Media houses are besieged, in the literal and figurative senses, with editorial independence hampered by the ever-present threats of suspension, revocation of broadcasting licenses, and/or prosecution. In such an environment, alternative thought is frowned on while dissent is criminalised. Active opposition is a cardinal sin. Laws including the Computer Misuse Act, the Public Order Management Act and the Anti-Money Laundering Act provide legal cover for the persecution of opponents and muzzling of citizen voices.

At the start of this year, compelled by these circumstances, I submitted a filing to the international criminal court. As signatories to various instruments including the Rome Statute, we must uphold the values that inspired the creation of the ICC. In lockstep with citizens elsewhere who have sought justice in international courts and tribunals, our complaint seeks a measure of redress for Ugandans whose national institutions are incapable and, in many cases, unwilling to dispense justice fairly and impartially.

We have enumerated the myriad violations and excesses that were meted out on Ugandans in the runup to, during, and in the aftermath of the botched 2021 elections. Ugandan lives remain unaccounted for following the November 2020 shootings, as do numerous detainees who are yet to be arraigned before a competent and civilian court of law. Its critical that the weight of personal accountability is brought to bear by naming individual commanders and officers who have participated in crimes and atrocities against Ugandans.

It must be clear to the world that these actions do not represent the character of Ugandans. Such brazen lawlessness cannot be our identity as a member of the global community of states. Its in the enlightened self-interest of the international community to rein in the regime in Uganda because of the regional economic and security implications that the current posture portends for stability and progress. The apparent stability in Uganda is cosmetic and deceptive. Washington, London, Berlin, and Paris should stop looking at stalemate as stability especially where autocrats like Museveni dangle their readiness to do their bidding in regional politics.

An unstable Uganda makes for a dangerous regional climate and as such a threat to an already precarious Great Lakes region. The contemporary history of eastern and central Africa attests to this fact. The west should end the duplicity and realise the threat that its inaction poses to its own national interests. As Ugandans, we have spoken repeatedly at elections in 2001, 2006, 2011, 2016 and 2021 about the kind of leadership we desire and the vision we hold for our country, only for our will to be subverted by the ruling junta.

If for no other reason than for breathing life into the dreams of those such as Yasin Kawuma, who died in pursuit of democratic ideals, we are determined to prosecute this mission and bring it to its logical conclusion.

Link:

Young Ugandans are being brutally oppressed. They must be allowed a voice - The Guardian

Tamils and their supporters are planning protests in cities around the world to commemorate May 18 Tamil Genocide Day and to remember the Mullivaikkal massacre. In Australia, the Tamil Refugee Council has called demonstrations in Melbourne and Sydney for Sunday, May 16.

In March of this year, Australia backed a UK-led resolution at the UN Human Rights Council that expressed deep concern at the deteriorating situation in Sri Lanka. The resolution noted the accelerating militarization of civilian government functions [and] the erosion of the independence of the judiciary, and the increased marginalization of Tamil and Muslim communities.

However, just one month later, the Australian government gave Sri Lankas police force five aerial surveillance drones. The drones were previously owned by the Operation Sovereign Borders Joint Agency Task Force, part of Australias military-led border security operation whose primary responsibility is to deter and disrupt asylum seekers trying to reach Australia.

Australia claims that the drones will be used to support crime-fighting activities. But past experience makes it perfectly clear that the Sri Lankan authorities are likely to use the drones for surveillance of Tamil refugees fleeing the island and government officials in Canberra know it.

This is not the first time the Australian government has supplied Sri Lankan state forces with military hardware. Twelve years ago, as the countrys military committed one of the largest mass killings so far witnessed in the twenty-first century, Australia provided similar aid that was intended to stop people fleeing.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had once administered three-quarters of the territory of the islands Northeastern Province. By May 2009, they were confined to a small piece of coastland near Mullivaikkal, in the Mullaitivu District. When the Sri Lankan military launched its final offensive, it ordered the 330,000 Tamil civilians behind LTTE lines to shelter in designated no-fire zones. Despite having declared these to be safe areas, the Sri Lankan authorities ordered the evacuation of all media and UN personnel.

The Sri Lankan military then proceeded to shell the no-fire zones, targeting hospitals, food distribution routes, and Red Cross ships. The army had already defeated the LTTE the purpose of this offensive was to destroy the civilian population that had sustained it.

Footage later emerged documenting systematic crimes, including rape, the killing of civilians, and summary executions of surrendering combatants. A 2012 UN report noted that over 70,000 people still remained unaccounted for. The real death toll is certainly higher than this figure. The most precise estimate, based on local census figures, is that 146,679 people died.

On May 13, 2009, as the killings in Mullivaikkal were reaching their peak, the Australian government announced a new aid package for Sri Lanka. With hundreds of thousands of people displaced or held in internment camps around the island, Australia promised to spend $15.1 million over four years establishing posts in Sri Lanka and Malaysia, in an effort to strengthen regional co-operation on people-smuggling. Like this years gift of drones, the 2009 package was intended to stop people escaping the island.

In October 2009, Brendan OConnor, the Australian minister for home affairs, met with Sri Lankan defense secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa. He promised that the Australian Federal Police (AFP) would provide training and logistical aid for the Sri Lankan police. A spokesperson for the minister described the meeting as especially productive, reaffirming Australias commitment to provide resources to help the Sri Lankan authorities to combat people smuggling.The AFP opened an office in Sri Lanka that year.

It didnt take long for the cooperation to bear results. On October 28, 2009, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that Sri Lankan authorities had arrested twenty-nine people in Colombos airport. They were mostly Tamils trying to escape, and had been identified thanks to closed-circuit cameras installed by the AFP.

On November 25, 2009, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd told the Australian parliament that Australia would provide more than $35 million in development assistance to Sri Lanka between 2009 and 2010. Rudd boasted that the funds had already assisted some 15 disruptions [of people leaving Sri Lanka] already, involving some 260 individuals. Meanwhile, Australian immigration authorities recognized 90 percent of people arriving by boat from Sri Lanka between 2009 and 2010 as refugees in need of protection.

Australias interest in Sri Lanka extends beyond stopping Tamil refugees attempting to flee. It also helped undermine the possibility of a peaceful resolution to the conflict. Moves toward a peace process began in the late 1990s, when the European Union declared itself to be strongly in favor of a negotiated political solution for Eelam Tamils. The EU backed an agreement between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE to explore the option of shared sovereignty between Tamil-speaking and Sinhalese people on the island.

With UK backing, the United States successfully pressured the EU to proscribe the LTTE in May 2006. In the context of the US-led war on terror, branding an organization as terrorist meant placing it beyond the political pale. This gave the Sri Lankan government carte blanche to resume hostilities less than two months later, permanently scuttling the peace process.

Australia supported these efforts, having already introduced a partial ban on the LTTE in 2001. As former Australian deputy high commissioner Bruce Haigh has argued, this helped to whitewash war crimes and state terrorism committed by the Sri Lankan government.

In a 2013 session, the Permanent Peoples Tribunal a continuation of the Russell Tribunal on Vietnam found that the United States was complicit in the Mullivaikkal massacre. As the tribunal argued, Washingtons responsibility

arises not only from its sustained efforts to increase the power and effectiveness of the Sri Lankan military . . . but perhaps even more significantly from its role in blocking and even reversing political and diplomatic initiatives to implement the peace process.

When Sri Lankan forces destroyed the de facto Tamil state in Tamil Eelam in 2009, they also destroyed hopes for self-determination or shared sovereignty between Tamils and the islands Sinhalese majority. Today, Sri Lankas Tamil population lives under one of the heaviest military occupations in the world, and is subject to attacks, racism, and insecurity. Its little wonder that Tamils would flee the island, seeking asylum in Australia.

Australian aid to Sri Lanka is partly aimed at stopping refugees from reaching Australias mainland, in line with a long history of xenophobia. However, as a diplomatic exchange published by WikiLeaks suggests, Australia also recognizes the immense strategic significance of the island and sees good cooperation with Sri Lanka on people smuggling as an entre to deepen relations.

A 2011 article by US and Sri Lankan army officers and officials stated that no other nation in the South Asian region can claim the importance Sri Lanka has in terms of its geography. As the authors argue, the defeat of the Tamil Tigers in 2009 reopened the possibility of the United States using the strategic Trincomalee Harbour, previously held by the LTTE, as a naval base.

Since the arrival of Portuguese colonizers in 1505, great powers have seen Sri Lanka as a prized conquest. Control shifted first to the Dutch, from 1658 to 1796, and then to the British. Before the island gained its independence in 1948, these successive colonial powers used Trincomalee Harbour as local naval and military headquarters. During World War II, the British established a naval headquarters there following the fall of Singapore. Today, in addition to its proximity to the Middle East, the northern coast of Sri Lanka adjoins an important maritime corridor used in 60 percent of the worlds shipping.

Since 2009, Trincomalee has become a hub of activity for Australia and other members of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD), hosting vessels from the United States, India, and Japan. In May 2017, the Australian Border Forces largest patrol vessel, the ABFC Ocean Shield, arrived in Trincomalee for the Border Forces first-ever overseas port visit.

In 2019, Sri Lanka joined the Australian-led Indo-Pacific Endeavour, the largest ever overseas military exercise in which the country had taken part. As part of the exercise, the Royal Australian Navy ships Success and Parramatta docked in Trincomalee for four days of training with Sri Lankan forces.

Western NGOs, such as Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group (ICG), as well as the UN, have recognized the 2009 mass killings as war crimes committed in the context of a civil war. However, they have rejected calls from the Tamil community to recognize the massacres as acts of genocide, carried out with the aim of destroying Eelam Tamils, in whole or in part.

Despite this, the ICG has recognized the Sri Lankan states anti-Tamil agenda. In 2012, under the leadership of former UN human rights commissioner Louise Arbour, the ICG issued a report:

With the massive number of troops in the north have come various forms of Sinhalization. The almost entirely Tamil-speaking north is now dotted with Sinhala signboards, streets newly renamed in Sinhala. . . . Sinhala fishermen and businessmen are regularly given advantages not accorded to Tamils. These developments are consistent with a strategy known to be supported by important officials to change the facts on the ground . . . and make it impossible to claim the north as a Tamil-majority area deserving of self-governance.

Tamil resistance to this project continues. In February 2021, at least 50,000 Tamils and Muslims marched 700 km over five days as part of the Pottuvil to Polikandy (P2P) protest, demanding that the military withdraw from majority-Tamil areas and that the Sri Lankan government stop seizing land from Tamils and giving it to Sinhalese settlers. The protesters also called for an end to the destruction of Tamil cultural and religious sites, the preservation of Tamil forest lands and collective grazing lands, and a halt to the killings of cattle owned by Tamil and Muslim farmers. The marchers braved tear gas and multiple arrests.

The Sri Lankan authorities subject Tamils who protest against this treatment to heavy surveillance and intimidation. Shortly after the P2P march, the public security minister, Sarath Weerasekara, warned the protesters:

Now we have their photos and we have their vehicle numbers, we know who these individuals are. We can sue them and confiscate all their vehicles and put them in prison.

The International Truth and Justice Project has documented many cases of torture committed by Sri Lankan police, often involving sexual violence. This draconian treatment is enshrined in laws such as the 1979 Prevention of Terrorism Act, which allows authorities to arrest suspects without a warrant and permits detention for up to eighteen months without pretrial.

Despite overwhelming evidence that they continue to face persecution, Eelam Tamils seeking asylum in Australia face some of the lowest acceptance rates. The Australian authorities have deported many to danger. As Shanmuganathan Nagaveeran, a Tamil refugee in Australia, recently recounted:

I know of Tamils who have been deported from Australia back to Sri Lanka. They are in hiding and are still in fear of their lives. They are not free.

Tamil refugees also remain imprisoned in Australian-run onshore and offshore detention centers.

To justify the refoulement of refugees, the Australian government claims that any abuses against Tamil civilians took place as part of a legitimate struggle against a terrorist organization and are now firmly in the past. As then prime minister Tony Abbott remarked in 2013:

Obviously the Australian Government deplores any use of torture. . . . But we accept that sometimes in difficult circumstances, difficult things happen.

In 2019, to justify the deportation of a Tamil family from Biolela, Defence Minister Peter Dutton claimed:

The civil war in Sri Lanka is now over and Tamils from around the world have returned to their country and have been accepted back by a democratically elected inclusive Government.

The Left must reject this cynical cover-up and stand in solidarity with Eelam Tamils, recognizing both the genocide committed against them and their right to self-determination. In Australia, this means fighting the deportation of Eelam Tamils to Sri Lanka, freeing all refugees in onshore and offshore detention, and demanding an end to all military aid to the Sri Lankan state.

Visit link:

Australia Is Supporting the Oppression of Tamils in Sri Lanka - Jacobin magazine

As an Israeli citizen who is promoting the vision of a democratic world federation, I often encounter the following challenging question: Your country holds millions of Palestinians under military rule, oppression and discrimination; shouldnt you struggle to bring about real democracy at your local level first, and only then talk about the global level?

My honest reply is that to the best of my understanding, the lack of democracy and rule of law at the global level is, in fact, the most fundamental underlying cause of this conflict, and that therefore it must be addressed with the highest priority if we are serious about ending it.

To understand why, it is useful to consider the rationale of the Zionist movement, whose turn to Palestine ignited the conflict. With all due respect to the ancient longing of religious Jews to return to the biblical promised land, the main reason that so many (mostly secular) Jews turned to Zionism and immigrated to Palestine since the late 19th century, was the fact that as a minority in Europe they were too often prone to persecution and oppression. This experience led many of them believe the nationalist creed that only a nation-state of their own could guarantee their survival. Had there been in the past or today a world federation holding both the power and the democratic legitimacy to defend all humans in the world, it is unlikely that Zionism and many other national movements would have become so popular and powerful.

A world federation to defend all human beings

It is true that in a democratic world federation Israeli Jews would return to be just a small minority and would lack the legal sovereignty that they enjoy today. But that would not be a problem for them as rather than having to defend themselves they will be protected by the far stronger government that represents all humans. In such a world, all other religious, national or ethnic groupings would similarly turn into small minorities. When considering the nearly 8 billion of potential world citizens, we can see that even the largest groupings that we know such as Christians, Muslims, Chinese or Indian would be only large minorities: ~31%, ~24%, ~16%, ~15% respectively. And since these groupings are highly heterogeneous and divided internally, all people will belong to far smaller minorities, and that would be just fine.

Unlike nation-states, which by design are obsessed with maintaining a national majority in the country, in a global federation the people would be composed entirely of minorities. This inherent diversity of the population means that the only social contract that such a polity could be based on would be one that enshrines and protects the basic rights and freedoms of all people and their groups, through effective constitutional and institutional checks and balances and with a democratically elected world parliament at the center.

In such a federation, Jews and Palestinians alike will not be restricted from settling in any part of the Earth.

No land would belong exclusively to any group, and people would be free to live wherever they choose, as is customary within democratic federations.

The vision of a global welfare state

For those who fear that such global freedom of movement would open up the gates for a gigantic wave of global immigration from poor to rich countries, I would say that their fears are ill-founded. Just as national borders are indeed successful today at preventing such immigration, the divisions they create between national legal systems are even more successful at preventing national tax authorities from getting their hands on the wealth of the worlds super-rich. In a world federation, in contrast, whose tax authority would span every corner of the planet, there will be a gigantic wave of redistribution not only of political but also of financial power from the global super-rich to the global super-poor. In such a global mixed economy or welfare state the global poor will suddenly be able to make a decent living in local jobs, providing necessary services and infrastructures to their own communities. Having that option, it is clear that the vast majority will remain in their homelands with their loved ones, rather than tear themselves from their families, friends and cultures, as so many are forced to do today.

Coming back to the narrower question of Israel and Palestine, some people insist and rephrase their question as follows: though a world federation is a noble vision to aspire to in the long run, they say, in the meantime the Palestinians are suffering enormously from atrocious injustices, and cannot wait for global democracy to emerge. The colonialist project of Zionism continues to deprive them of their basic human rights, in flagrant violation of international law, and it is our moral duty to help and protect them first.

To explain the flaws in that argument, it is useful to start with a simple analogy: imagine an armed group that bursts into a conference hall and takes all the attendants as hostages. In our domestic national systems, we know it would take much less than 50 minutes before the place would be surrounded with police cars and special forces coming to liberate the captives. Yet in our anarchic international system, Palestinians can live under occupation for well over 50 years and no police force are rushing to help them.

There is no global authority to protect people

The lesson of this analogy is that while our natural reaction to Israels occupation is to condemn Israel and Zionism, the more basic problem is with the international system, that has no real mechanisms for protecting victims and restoring justice. For this reason anyone who really cares for humans in general, and the Palestinians in particular, cannot ignore this aspect of the problem, or postpone it until after the conflict has been resolved. This systemic problem can be addressed and must be addressed as a precondition, or at least alongside any effort to find a local or particular solution. Yet today it is mostly ignored.

Whether one thinks that the conflict should end by dividing the land into two nation-states, or by turning it into one democratic state, one must recognize the necessity of an external authority equipped with sufficient force and democratic legitimacy to intervene when necessary to enforce such a solution, and protect it. In the current international order such authority does not exist and it will surely not just emerge if we continue to postpone the discussion about it.

The United Nations clearly does not possess the necessary power for such intervention, as the budget of Israels ministry of defence alone is several times bigger than the combined budget of all the UN agencies. As the UN does not have any state power and cannot collect taxes from of the global rich and their corporations, it is completely dependent on the voluntary contributions of the richer member governments, who give very little.

But more importantly, the UN does not possess the democratic legitimacy to intervene, as rather than belonging democratically to the worlds nations it belongs exclusively to the governments who rule over them. It is this characteristic of the UN, more than anything else, which shows the greatest weakness of the movement for Palestinian independence: in todays world there is nothing really unique about the fact that they are oppressed by a government that does not represent them. Openly oppressive governments are perfectly standard, both legally and normatively, in the current international order. One does not need to look far beyond Israel-Palestine to see this plague extending over most countries in the Middle East, across much of Africa and much of Asia.

So we should not be surprised by the experience of many decades, that has shown that repeating cliches about violations of international law and human rights did little to bring an end to the conflict. Thinking of international law: how can it be seriously called a law if no-one is responsible to enforce it? At the most, surely, it should be called only a norm.

Human rights are a privilege of national citizenship

The term human right is similarly misleading and unhelpful. Unlike my Palestinian friend, I enjoy almost all the rights detailed in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But what many observers miss about the true nature of these rights, is that I enjoy them not because I am a human but only because I live under the jurisdiction of a national government that gives me those rights. That difference is much more than semantic, and it means that what I enjoy, in fact, are not human rights but only national rights, or to be more precise: national privileges.

When understood this way, it flows that not I nor anyone else in the world enjoys human rights, and that therefore while many atrocities have surely occurred and continue to occur in the conflict, there havnt been any violations of human rights. One cannot violate something that does not exist. To truly institute human rights we need more than a declaration and more than national governments we need a universal federal government that will be responsible and accountable for providing these rights to all human beings. Until then, and as long as the existing international order allows only national privileges and not any human rights, there is nothing surprising at the great support that nationalist parties enjoy.

It is too easy to direct the blame at this player or the other for following their narrow interests, but it is far more important to point to the lack of a global justice system that belongs to us all and protects us all. Our basic choice, in other words, is not between a one-state or a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine, but between a federal state system of the entire world, and two-hundred sovereign governments that will continue to divide us.

For me, it is high time we recognized the Earth as our true homeland, and that it is high time that we, humans, had a state.

Realizing the vision of a world federation can be promoted in many ways, and one of the most promising is the creation of a Parliamentary Assembly at the UN that eventually could transform into a world parliament. Such an assembly, whose creation in legal terms is relatively easy as it does not require a UN charter reform, will bring together elected representatives from both coalition and opposition parties from many states. Following the example of the European Parliament, it can be expected that these representatives will form transnational groups who will push forward many other necessary reforms and further democratization at the global level.

Read more from the original source:

World federation and the Israel-Palestine conflict - Democracy Without Borders

from the aiding-and-abetting dept

Anything the Chinese government can weaponize against its Uighur Muslim population, it will. And has. Further details about an iPhone exploit discovered by Chinese hackers show the Chinese government got into the bug bounty program solely to find vulnerabilities to wield against the government's least-liked residents.

Patrick Howell O'Neill's article for MIT Technology Review points out Chinese hackers used to participate in popular hacking competitions like Pwn2Own, providing invaluable assistance to tech companies and tech users by finding vulnerabilities that could be patched before they were exploited by malicious hackers.

In 2017, Chinese participation in international competitions came to a halt. The founder and CEO of tech giant Qihoo 360 publicly criticized Chinese hackers for helping foreign tech companies find and patch security flaws. The CEO suggested this talent should stay at home and help the government find vulnerabilities to exploit.

That's exactly what has happened. The Chinese government banned participation in foreign hacking competitions and started its own. The first homegrown event was won by a researcher working for Qihoo 360, who found an exploit that allowed malicious actors to take control of even the latest iPhones simply by steering the iPhone user to a webpage containing malware.

This was patched two months later by Apple, quietly and with little attention drawn to it. But incidents occurring in the two months between the discovery and the patch didn't go unnoticed. Google's security researchers observed unusual activity and wrote about it.

[I]n August of [2019], Google published an extraordinary analysis into a hacking campaign it said was exploiting iPhones en masse. Researchers dissected five distinct exploit chains theyd spotted in the wild. These included the exploit that won Qixun [of Qihoo 360] the top prize at Tianfu, which they said had also been discovered by an unnamed attacker.

Now, more details about that string of attacks has been revealed. And it shows the Chinese government took the winning exploit and weaponized it against its Uighur population.

Shortly after Googles researchers noted the attacks, media reports connected the dots: the targets of the campaign that used the Chaos exploit were the Uyghur people, and the hackers were linked to the Chinese government. Apple published a rare blog post that confirmed the attack had taken place over two months: that is, the period beginning immediately after Qixun won the Tianfu Cup and stretching until Apple issued the fix.

This has now been confirmed by another source: the US government. Its surveillance agencies also picked up on the malicious hacking efforts and noted their targeting of China's favorite target of oppression. And it was the government's intervention that sped up Apple's response to the exploit.

The US quietly informed Apple, which had already been tracking the attack on its own and reached the same conclusion: the Tianfu hack and the Uyghur hack were one and the same. The company prioritized a difficult fix.

This is the sort of cooperation one prefers to see. The federal government has often portrayed Apple as an enemy -- not just of agencies like the DOJ, but of the American public. In this case, the government worked with Apple to stop attacks on foreign citizens by a foreign government. The Chinese government made the most of this exploit for two months -- one it obtained through a homegrown hacking competition that appears to exist solely to create offensive tech weapons for state-ordained hacking.

Meanwhile, the hacker who discovered the exploit and collected the cash (all while working for the company whose CEO called for Chinese hackers to stop helping foreign companies and start helping The Man stick it to locals and foreign adversaries) is trying to distance himself from the damage his exploit has wrought.

When we contacted Qixun Zhao via Twitter, he strongly denied involvement, although he also said he couldnt remember who came into possession of the exploit code. At first, he suggested the exploit wielded against Uyghurs was probably used after the patch release.

Both of these claims are untrue. And both have been debunked by both independent research and US government surveillance. While it's unwise to tangle with the Chinese government by refusing to hand over discovered vulnerabilities, it's probably a little easier to sidestep that obligation by sitting out government-sponsored hacking competitions. In the end, this isn't the researcher's fault. The government chose to use it this way. But anyone entering a Chinese government-sponsored hacking competition is likely well aware any discoveries they make will be weaponized by an extremely oppressive government.

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Filed Under: china, exploits, hackathon, hackers, hacking competition, surveillance, uighursCompanies: apple

See original here:

Chinese Government's Hacker Competition Is Being Used To Find Exploits To Wield Against Uighur Citizens - Techdirt