He who lives by the sword dies by the sword | Sunday Observer

He who lives by the sword dies by the sword

8 August, 2021

“He who controls others may be powerful, but he who has mastered himself is mightier still” – Lao Tzu

The idea of poetic justice, especially referring to those who live by violence is very old. It usually meant the physical violence. The concept, more often than not, has also been true for political leaders throughout the history. Hitler, Mussolini, Noriega, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi are few such rulers who may have experienced what it really means. For political leaders, ‘living by the sword’ usually meant that the method they hold on to power is primarily one of physical violence rather than unethical political maneuvering and or electioneering or being born into the ruling elite.

New ways of control

Weapon of choice has also gone through an evolutionary process from the sword, guns, bombs, chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons all the way to ICT, factors in market economies, smart weapons, and Artificial Intelligence (AI). One may find enough examples of such rulers who are using different combinations of these weapons and strategies to control citizens of their own countries and the rulers or the governing bodies of other countries which are considered as potential enemies.

One of the main ingredients in the recipes of such controlling procedures is espionage. Methods of espionage have also gone through a rapid evolutionary process from infiltrating communities, governments or enemy forces using human agents to extracting data, information and all digital communications from the devices used by the individuals or organisations that are being controlled by the rulers.

Improvements of science and technology, while helping human advancement, has also proven to be a leading cause of the destruction humans have been experiencing throughout history from nuclear attacks on Hiroshima Nagasaki all the way to cyber-attacks on the Pentagon.

Contact tracing during the Covid-19 pandemic was made much easier by the advanced communication technologies and overwhelming usage of mobile phones. Work from home, teaching and learning, shopping and even medical consultations and spiritual development through meditation all could be done online though the effectiveness of them are subject to interpretation. People are beginning to feel that living online is easier and, in some cases, even cost effective than offline and therefore some of these practices may be continued even after the world comes out of this pandemic.

Most people perhaps didn’t think about the dangers of sharing their information online or felt that the benefits outweigh the risks. Some countries used the help of their military to battle Covid-19 and therefore the military was able to monitor all the activities and movements of all the mobile phones in the country.

World controlled by spyware

Some of the other countries used the opportunity to use the spyware without much of an opposition from the citizens since they could justify the importance of contact tracing. Most of these countries are using spyware created by the NSO Group of Israel.

Recently, Reporters Without Borders (RSF), a non-profit organisation based in Paris, France urged Israel to suspend exporting spyware as they got to know that there have been human rights activists, journalists, judges, lawyers, politicians and even leaders of different countries have been targeted by authoritarian governments using such hacking software sold by the NSO group. Though it was not clear how this information became public, an investigation by a group of leading media organisations of the world has revealed that there have been numbers of business leaders, religious figures, academics, NGO employees, union officials, government officials including Prime Ministers and Presidents of several countries in the list of about 50,000 numbers targeted by respective governments.

They have found the numbers of close family members of the ruler of one country suggesting that the ruler may have instructed the intelligence agency to monitor those relatives. This leaked list contained numbers mainly from ten countries-Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Hungary, India, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Morocco, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The numbers of Imran Khan, the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Rahul Gandhi of India and David Haigh, a British human rights lawyer who was fighting to free Dubai’s Princess Latifa.

The phone number of Cecilio Pineda, a freelance reporter from Mexico was found in the list, which may be of some help towards the investigation of his murder in 2017. NSO, in its defense, has said that even if Pineda’s phone had been targeted, it may not prove that data collected from his phone contributed in any way to his death. Besides, the Government could have discovered his location by other means. A Washington Post investigation has revealed that phones belonging to family members, including the fiancée at the time, of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018, also had the same spyware installed.

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has revealed that himself and about fifty other people close to him have been targeted by the previous government using NSO spyware. Mexico was the first country in the world to buy NSO spyware “Pegasus” and probably the first country to cancel the contract too.

No freedom for anyone

It has been found that NSO spyware can secure a log of a person’s past movements and track their location in real time with pinpoint accuracy. Latest version of the software is capable of penetrating phones with “zero-click” attacks, meaning the user does not have to click on a malicious link or anything of the sort for the phone to be infected.

NSO says that the software is intended for use against criminals and terrorists and is made available to military, law enforcement and intelligence agencies from countries with “good” human rights records and they do not sell it to private citizens. They also said that their product has not been associated with any wrongdoing by any of the government they have sold it to.

In the meantime, the US military has revealed that they successfully completed a string of tests for Global Information Dominance Experiments (GIDE), a combination of AI, cloud computing and sensors that could give them the ability to predict events days in advance.

The machine learning-based system observes real-time data tracking changes in sequence that can predict possible trouble in the near future. The advantages of such predictive AI are very clear. Instead of reacting to an event the military could take proactive steps.

On the civilian front, this could help the rulers to counter the acts of aggression while they are still in the early stages. As the allied forces were able to win the WWII earlier than expected since a team of scientists were able to break the code of encryption the German forces were using in their communications, there will always be more sophisticated software to override any existing spyware in the market that can remove the camouflage of the spy.

The writer has served in the higher education sector as an academic over twenty years in the USA and fourteen years in Sri Lanka and he can be contacted at [email protected]

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