By Parvez Fatteh, Founder of http://sportingummah.com, sports@muslimobserver.com

Early in the year, before his string of successful doubles outings, Pakistan’s Aisam-Ul-Haq Qureshi made a goal of breaking into the top 20 of the Association of Tennis Professionals Men’s Doubles rankings by the end of the year. Well, that goal has now been reached. Qureshi is now up to number 19 in the doubles rankings as of this week. And, he and his partner, India’s Rohan Bopanna, remain at number 6 in the team doubles rankings.

In addition, a photograph of the duo has been nominated for the Peace and Sport Award by the Peace And Sport Organization. The photo is that of Qureshi and Bopanna speaking with the Indian and Pakistani ambassadors to the United Nations after their semifinal victory at the U.S. Open last month in New York City. The ambassadors had been invited by the ATP. The winner of the award will be announced on December 2nd.

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By Nora Barrows-Friedman, t r u t h o u t

Israel has recently sealed a deal to purchase 20 brand-new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jets made by US defense and aerospace corporation Lockheed Martin in a contract that, at $2.75 billion, is one of the largest arms purchases ever made by the state. The entire contract is paid for by an ongoing US military aid package under the auspices of the US government’s Foreign Military Sales program.

Israel had originally attempted to purchase 75 jets, a plan that was discussed in meetings between Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Israeli Defense Ministry Director-General Udi Shani, US Pentagon officials and Lockheed Martin representatives in September 2008.

According to an August 16 report in Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz,  the deal stalled when the Israeli Air Force (IAF) demanded that Israeli-made systems be installed “for specialties such as electronic warfare and communications.” The IAF also wanted to modify the jet’s capacity to carry Israeli-made missiles. Lockheed declined, saying that the deal was a “closed package.”

“They agreed that Israel would begin by buying a first squadron of 20 F-35 jets from the first production series,” reported Haaretz. “[Lockheed] would only install a few Israel-made systems. The Americans, meanwhile, have agreed that if Israel buys more F-35 squadrons from later production series, the installation of more Israeli-made systems will be allowed.”

“To sweeten terms of the deal,” Haaretz continued, “Lockheed Martin agreed to buy more component parts for the [Joint Strike Fighter jets] from Israeli firms; at a price of around $4 billion.”

Israeli Defense Ministry Director-General Shani said, “apart from the jet’s operational capacity, a significant factor in closing the deal included previous agreements on integrating Israeli defense contractors in producing the jet for other clients,” reported Haaretz.

The first fleet of jets – valued at over $96 million each – are expected to arrive in Israel in 2015.

Preceding the October 7 signing of the Lockheed contract, Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, told The Washington Post on October 6 that “incentives” were offered to Israel to extend its so-called moratorium on the illegal settlement colonies in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem to keep the Palestinian Authority in direct talks. Oren told the Post that the Obama administration had come up with “a number of suggestions, incentives if you would, to the Israelis that would enable the government to maybe pass a limited extension of two or three months.”

It was unclear whether the Lockheed contract was specifically offered as one of the incentives, but Oren added that the purchase agreement was “an event of great strategic and historic significance,” and that it would “serve the common interests” of the US and Israel.

Oren said that the purchase of US arms and military technologies create “thousands of more jobs, both [in the US] and Israel.”

In late July 2010, the US House Appropriations Sub-Committee on Defense increased funding for Israeli missile defense programs to its highest level ever – approving $422.7 million for next year’s budget – and adding $95.7 million to the original White House funding request for the long-range Arrow interceptor project and the medium-range David’s Sling, according to sources quoted by the Jerusalem Post. “The lion’s share – $108.8m. – will go to the Arrow 3 system, which the US signed off on after some initial hesitation,” the Jerusalem Post reported. The funding also includes $205 million for the short-range missile interceptor program (dubbed “The Iron Dome”) initially approved by President Barack Obama last Spring.

This defense spending package is more than double that of last year’s. Since 2006, US taxpayers have funded approximately $1 billion in joint US-Israel missile defense programs such as the Arrow 3 and Iron Dome projects. The Arrow project, for example, is jointly produced by the US’s Boeing corporation and Israel Aerospace Industries.

Last year, as Truthout reported, President Obama signed over $2.775 billion to Israel, the first installment of a ten-year, $30 billion agreement for an expanded military aid package to the Israeli government. “The package is earmarked completely for Israel’s military budget instead of the prior allocation to both civilian and military infrastructure,” reported Truthout. “This massive military package is over and above the annual $3.1 billion in loan guarantees to Israel that the Obama administration plans to continue … As a part of the ten-year agreement, Israel is required to contract 75 percent of the package toward the purchase of American-made military equipment and ammunition, intended to further subsidize US weapons manufacturers.”

Additionally, in December 2009, the Obama administration doubled a Bush-era arms contract with Israel to store $800 million worth of military equipment, technology and ordnance inside the state. Included in this program is the caveat that the United States could have immediate access to the weapons cache in the event of a military “emergency,” though the definition and parameters of such an emergency were unclear.

Dr. Francis Boyle, professor of international law and the author of the forthcoming book, “The Palestinian Right of Return Under International Law,” told Truthout that it’s not surprising that these weapons contracts are being signed during the tenuous, but continuing US-brokered direct talks between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority. “The talks are not going anywhere,” Boyle told Truthout. “and these incentives are sweeteners to get [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu to go along with the talks. The Americans are allowing Israel to gobble up the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It’s a public relations exercise, a dog and pony show. The main act is going on somewhere else.”

“Israel is buying their weapons from us,” Boyle continued. “And the people who gain are the US weapons contractors. The Israelis get the weapons, but all the profits go to our war contractors. Everyone’s making money, and the American people are getting ripped off. This is nothing new.”

Boyle said that by amassing weapons and military supremacy in the region, Israel is actively “preserving” an option to attack neighboring countries.

“They’re moving large amounts of weapons into the region, and it’s a very dangerous thing,” Boyle said. “But it’s not only the US that is doing this. The French and the British are also moving weapons into the region to be used if they decide to use them.”

The US-Israeli F-35 fighter jet deal came on the heels of Washington’s announcement in September that it plans to sell $60 billion worth of weapons and military equipment – including 84 F-15 fighter jets – to the government of Saudi Arabia, making it the largest arms deal in history.

An unnamed senior US official was quoted in The New York Times as saying that the enormous weapons deal could be described as a counterthreat toward Iran: “We want Iran to understand that its nuclear program is not getting them leverage over their neighbors, that they are not getting an advantage,” the official claimed. “We want the Iranians to know that every time they think they will gain, they will actually lose.” The sale, according to this official, is “mainly intended as a building block for Middle East regional defenses to box in Iran.”

Along with the fleet of F-15 fighter jets, the Saudi-US deal includes 70 Apache attack helicopters, 72 Black Hawk troop-transport helicopters and 36 “Little Bird” surveillance helicopters and the possibility of ships and antimissile defenses if the deal goes forward. Congress is set to approve the plan in a vote this month.

Stephen Walt, writing in Foreign Policy magazine on September 21 , commented on the supposed Iranian “threat,” saying “it seems like an awful lot of weaponry to ‘contain’ a country whose entire defense budget, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, is only $10 billion.”

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On a Wing and a Prayer – An American Muslim Learns to Fly from Unity Productions Foundation on Vimeo.

How to Protect Your Child

By Doug Gross

Texting is one of the ways teens and younger kids can be bullied. Parents can help by being quietly engaged.

October is bullying awareness month. Stay involved and remain engaged in the life of your children. They are challenged in myriad ways inside and outside school. Please avail online resources to educate yourself and your children about bullying and the scars it leaves behind. Stop bullying now from classrooms to neighborhoods and save lives.

As cyber bullying emerges as a nasty and easy supplement to traditional schoolyard taunts, a raft of online tools have come on the market to help parents prevent it or respond to it.

But experts say common sense parenting and simple awareness about the potential for trouble might be some of the most valuable tools to prevent damaging electronic harassment.

The most simple way to start? Get involved in your child’s online life. Then stay out of the way.

Michael Fertik is CEO of ReputationDefender, which offers free and paid online tools designed to monitor what’s being said about you, or your child, on the Web.

As children are first showing interest in social networking sites like Facebook, parents should ask for their passwords before giving permission, he said.

“It’s very much age-dependent,” he said. “There’s a narrow window of about two years in which most kids are willing to give their parents their passwords. Younger than that they’re not really on the social net and older than that they’re going to find a way to get it done without sharing a password.”

As they move into their early teens, kids are going to balk at password-sharing, he said. So parents should look to become their “friend” on the sites — then, importantly, stay quiet about it.

Because, honestly, what teen wants mom making a chipper comment about their angst-ridden status update or dad spamming their wall to remind them to take out the trash.

“If parents are letting their kids play on a playground with a bunch of other kids, they aren’t going to want their parents right in there playing with them,” said Justin Patchin, a criminal justice professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eu Claire and co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center. “But knowing they’re at arm’s reach, or watching over them in kind of a hidden way, is not that bad.”

October is National Bullying Prevention Month.

In a sad but poignant coincidence, it comes this year as headlines are focused on Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old Rutgers University freshman who apparently committed suicide after his roommate allegedly broadcast a Web video of him having a same-sex sexual encounter.

Patchin agreed that being engaged with your children is the best bullying prevention.

“I talk to a lot of parents whose kids are on Facebook but they don’t know what Facebook is,” he said. “They have all these preconceived notions or opinions about Facebook, but they’ve never been on the site.”

In June, Facebook and the PTA teamed up to create what they called a long-term project to teach children, parents and teachers about proper online behavior.

Paid services like ReputationDefender offer tools that scour the Web for references to someone. They market them as ways for parents to keep tabs on what’s being said about their children.

AOL offers a similar paid service called SafeSocial that shows parents sites where their child is a member, displays the pictures the child is tagged in and shows who they are friends with online.

GoGoStat and SocialShield are among the other for-profit products on the market.

“Seventy-five percent of the problem is in surfacing the incidents,” Fertik said. “When parents are aware of incidents that are affecting their kids, then they often are able to … talk to the school or talk to the neighbor down the street and solve it.”

Patchin said those tools can be helpful when parents are looking to monitor an existing problem. But he said his group doesn’t recommend them for parents who just want to keep an eye on their children.

“We don’t think it’s a good idea for parents to spy on their kids surreptitiously, because eventually they’re going to find something they have to confront them about, and it’s going to destroy the other lines of communication,” he said.

Susan Limber, a professor and bullying researcher at Clemson University, said in a presentation last year that parents and schools need to take time to make it clear that cyber bullying is just as wrong as face-to-face bullying.

Many students who know it’s wrong to pick on a classmate in person may not realize that something done online can be just as hurtful, she said in the webcast for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“What we’ve learned is that we really need to define cyber bullying as a form of bullying since many of the students in our focus groups did not make that connection initially,” she said.

If a child reports being bullied online, the response of many parents is to take away the child’s internet access as a way to protect them. This is the wrong approach, Limber said.

“In the children’s eyes, this can be seen as punishment, so it’s another reason they tell us they don’t report it,” she said.

Patchin chalks that up to the way many children use computers for games and other recreation. For many of them, anything they do on the computer just doesn’t seem as real.

“The nature of technology sort of distances our behavior from the consequences,” he said. “We kill people all the time in a game and it’s not a big deal.

“But [with cyber bullying] we’re messing with real lives.”

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By Brad Friedman, The Brad Blog

A University of Michigan computer scientist and his team were not the only ones attempting to hack the Internet Vote scheme that Washington D.C. had planned to roll out for actual use with military and overseas voters in this November’s mid-term election.

According to testimony given to a D.C. City Council committee last Friday by J. Alex Halderman, asst. professor of electrical engineering and computer science at University of Michigan, hackers from Iran and China were also attempting to access the very same network infrastructure, even as his own team of students had successfully done so, taking over the entirety of the Internet Voting system which had been opened for a first-of-its-kind live test.

[See our report last week on details of what had already been disclosed about Halderman’s startling hack prior to last Friday’s hearing.]

“While we were in control of these systems we observed other attack attempts originating from computers in Iran and China,” Halderman testified. “These attackers were attempting to guess the same master password that we did. And since it was only four letters long, they would likely have soon succeeded.”

In his stunning public testimony — before a single member of the D.C. Board of Ethics and Elections (BoEE), and a nearly empty chamber — Halderman explained how the team had, by the time they discovered their fellow intruders, already gained complete control of the system, it’s encryption key and its passwords. The system was developed as part of an Internet Voting pilot program with the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation.

As The BRAD BLOG reported last week, Halderman’s team was able to take over the system within 36 hours after it had gone live for testing. After having “found and exploited a vulnerability that gave [them] almost total control of the server software,” his team was able to steal the encryption key needed to decode “secret” ballots; overwrite every single ballot cast on the test system; change the votes on those ballots to write-in candidates; discover who had already been voted for and the identities of the voters; install a script that would automatically change all votes cast in the future on the same system; install a backdoor to allow them to come back later; and then leave a “calling card” — the University of Michigan fight song — which was programmed to play in the voter’s browser 15 seconds after each Internet ballot had been cast.

But the new disclosures offered before the committee on Friday, including the hack attempts by computers in China and Iran, may have been as explosive, if not more so, than the previous revelations. They certainly illustrate and underscore a grave national security threat present in electronic voting systems such as the one D.C. had planned to use, as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories computer scientist and cyber-security expert Dr. David Jefferson told me during an interview last Friday night on the nationally syndicated Mike Malloy Show which I was guest hosting last week.

The hack of the system forced the D.C. election administrators to shut down their plans for the pilot program which was to have gone live in days, as encouraged and partially funded by the federal Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act, which allocated millions of dollars for such Internet Voting pilot programs.

The revelations of the intrusion attempts from China and Iran, however, would not be the only new, previously unreported bombshells Halderman offered during his Friday testimony…

Defending the Network…

“We gained access to this equipment because the network administrators who set it up left a default master password unchanged,” Halderman explained to Councilwoman Mary Cheh. “This password we were able to look up in the owner’s manual for the piece of equipment. And once we did, we found it was only a four-letter password.”

The University of Michigan team made short order of hacking that simple password, aided in no small part by the team having also taken over the security camera apparatus inside the election board’s actual data center where the servers were located.

“Once we gained control of this equipment, we could watch in real time on my desktop in Michigan as the network operators configured and tested the equipment,” he told the committee. “We could also watch them on camera because we found a pair of security cameras in the data center were on the same network as the pilot system and were publicly accessible with no password at all.”

When they’d discovered the foreign intrusions from Iran and China, the “white hat” hackers from the U.S. actually took measure to protect the D.C. system.

“We decided to defend the network by blocking them out, by adding rules to the firewall, and by changing the password to a more secure one,” he explained during his testimony to a stunned Cheh.
“You changed the password of the BoEE system?” she interrupted him to ask.

“Of the pilot system, yes,” Halderman responded.

“You changed it?!” Cheh asked incredulously.

“We did, yeah, to something so that the Chinese and Iranian attackers wouldn’t get it,” he said.

As if That’s Not All Bad Enough…

Halderman also made another dramatic disclosure during his testimony. As his team was looking through the BoEE Internet Voting server, they made another alarming discovery which he revealed rather dramatically by pulling out some 937 pages printed out from a file the team had found and downloaded from the system.

The team had discovered that the local election administrators appeared to have conducted their own tests at some point by sending files to the system that were either longer or shorter than the PDF-formatted ballots that the system would have been expecting, in order to see if those incorrect files were properly rejected in the event that a voter had sent the wrong file instead of their ballot.
Those rejected test files remained on the server, however, where the Michigan team of “hackers” were able to rifle through them.

“Some of the files were just a page with one sentence, ‘This is a blank ballot.’ Others were much bigger. … But one of the files, which I have here,” Halderman explained as he pulled out hundreds of pages to place on the table, “one of the files was a 937-page PDF document.”

“It appears to be the 937 invitation letters that BoEE sent to registered voters. Each page contains the name and voter ID number of a real voter along with the 16-character PIN that is the only password a voter needs in order to use the system in the real election.”

“We found the document on the test bed server, a system that BoEE invited the world to break into, and that we showed could be broken into very easily,” he continued. “We have no way of knowing who else has access to this. The PINs in this document are the most critical secret to protecting the whole voting system.”

Livermore Labs’ Jefferson, who has advised the last five CA Secretaries of State on voting system security and represents VerifiedVoting.org as one of their Internet Voting experts, explained the importance of this revelation during my interview with him on Friday night.

“This was stunning,” he told me. “This file is, in a sense, the holy grail of voter security in the general election if this system were to be used in the general election. Of course, it’s now not going to be. But had an adversary had a copy of that file, they would have been able to cast votes for the legitimate voters, and if they’d cast them ahead [of the actual voters], their votes would be accepted as legitimate and the actual legitimate voters, when they tried to vote, would be denied because of course you can’t vote twice.”

Halderman believes the use of that particular file as part of the BoEE’s testing procedures suggests that the administrators of the system are not up to the task of securing such an important system. That same concern has been expressed by critics of e-voting for years, given that local elections supervisors, many of them with no computer science or security experience at all, are often enabled with the task of keeping complicated, sensitive, easily manipulated computer systems secure from both outsider and insider attacks.

“I’m just deeply concerned that BoEE does not take security seriously and that it fails to appreciate the security challenges that are faced by any Internet voting system,” Halderman said at the conclusion of his prepared testimony.

“All the Votes Had Disappeared…”

Jefferson found yet another very serious flaw in the D.C. Internet Voting system on his own — one that had not yet been publicly reported until my live interview with him on the Malloy Show Friday night.

He participated in the same open test the week before last, by casting his own vote using D.C.’s test-bed system and closely following the instructions he was given. After viewing and filling in the PDF version of the ballot he was offered during the voting process, he saved the file to his system, and sent it back in to the election server — cast his “vote” over the Internet — as directed by the system.
Later, however, he made a startling discovery:

“After submitting the vote back, the ballot was still on my desktop as a file so I opened it. And I discovered that all the votes had disappeared. I had a blank ballot. Which means that I had sent a blank ballot back to the District of Columbia, not the choices that I had made.”

“I investigated further and discovered that anyone who used certain combinations of browsers and what we call PDF plug-ins would have the same problem,” he told me on air. “In fact, unless you used a [stand-alone] Adobe Reader — which many people are familiar with and many people use, but many don’t — unless you used that [versus the web browser’s internal PDF plug-in], you were pretty much guaranteed that your votes would be erased the moment you saved them and you would be disenfranchised.”

“It was a very serious problem because I actually did follow directions. I did not do anything wrong, and many voters would have had this same problem,” Jefferson explained. “a large proportion of them would have cast, unknowingly cast, blank ballots. And once you do that there’s no recovery because you can’t vote twice and the election officials are not supposed to be able to find your ballot and fix it.”

Had the system actually gone live, under the circumstances, hundreds of ballots (the pilot program was to be done with the participation of some 900 overseas and military voters from D.C.) would likely have been returned over the Internet completely blank to the BoEE for this November’s mid-term election.

That is, of course, presuming the Iranians, Chinese, or anybody else who might have had an interest in the election, not changed all of the ballots to anything they wanted, or kept all of the voters from being able to cast their ballots at all by using the PIN numbers the BoEE had left on the server.

A Matter of US National Security…

“Many of us have been arguing that election security is a matter of U.S. national security,” Jefferson, who has worked for more than a decade on this issue, told me. He has done so as an adviser to both Republican and Democratic Secretaries of State in California, testified to countless official bodies about his concerns, and most recently worked on CA Sec. of State Debra Bowen’s landmark, 2007 “Top-to-Bottom Review” of all of the state’s electronic voting systems (all of which were found to have been easily penetrated and quickly manipulated during the first-of-its-kind public hack testing by an official state commission).

“Oftentimes the difference between one or another candidate for United States Senator, say, you know, is only a few hundred votes. So it’s really important that it not be possible for foreign governments or crazy self-aggrandizing hackers in other countries — or in our own — to be able to modify votes and get away with it.”

“But usually this warning that I have given many times, that this is a national security issue, goes, well, people are somewhat skeptical about it. It goes under-appreciated,” Jefferson explained diplomatically during our conversation.

“So here we have a case where not even a real election, just a test election, but announced as open to all comers to try to hack, Alex Halderman finds that not one but two teams from national rivals of the United States, Iran and China, are already trying to probe around inside it,” he warned.

During his testimony, Halderman explained that he didn’t “believe” the Iranian and Chinese “attackers were specifically targeting the D.C. voting system,” but, he added, “this is a large part of why Internet voting is so dangerous. The servers are going to face attacks from powerful adversaries anywhere in the world.”

A number of election and computer experts had warned the D.C. BoEE against going live with their Internet Voting scheme in the days just prior to the hack. The open tests proceeded nonetheless until administrators finally discovered the University of Michigan fight song was playing on web browsers after ballots had been cast.

Even though the system had been violated almost as soon as it had gone up, “the attack was not detected by the officials for several days, despite the fact that they were looking for such attacks (having invited all comers to try) and despite the fact that the attackers left a ‘signature’ by playing the Michigan Fight song after every vote was cast!” wrote Jefferson in a blog item at Verified Voting last week, just after Halderman publicly revealed in his own blog item that he and his team had been the “culprits.”

“Let there be no mistake about it,” Jefferson wrote, “this is a major achievement, and supports in every detail the warnings that the security community have been giving about Internet voting for over a decade now.”

“After this there can be no doubt that the burden of proof in the argument over the security of Internet voting systems has definitely shifted to those who claim that the systems can be made secure. … This successful demonstration of the danger of Internet voting is the real deal,” he said.

“This Isn’t a Solvable Problem”…

During his testimony last Friday, Halderman, and the others who testified with him, made the same point as Jefferson, very clearly arguing that existing computer technology and security safeguards simply do not allow Internet Voting to be carried out securely at this time. They testified that it could possibly revisited in the future, but not for a decade’s time.

Unlike banking on the Internet or via ATM, they explained, a process which is open to oversight before, during, and after by all involved parties, the secret ballot system used in U.S. elections — where it’s impossible to verify the accuracy of the “transaction” after it’s been made and the identity of the voter must be kept forever a secret — cannot be done safely at this time on the Internet.

“The scientific consensus is that Internet Voting is just too dangerous today based on the limits of today’s security technology,” Halderman testified. “Indeed, it will probably be decades, if ever, before the technology is at a level where we can perform voting safely, purely over the Internet.”

Jeremy Epstein, a computer security and voting systems expert working with Verified Voting who also testified on the same panel with Halderman, said the history of computer security illustrates the problem faced in devising a system that is secure enough for the task of Internet Voting. He testified that he hopes the BoEE takes the right lesson from what happened during this landmark event.

“What we found in forty years of experience is you can penetrate and patch, and then you penetrate again and you patch again, and you penetrate again and you patch again and you penetrate again and you patch again and it never ends. If it ended, Microsoft would have succeeded. We wouldn’t all be having to reboot our computer and install patches once a month for the past ten years. This is not something that we can just say ‘Please, BoEE, fix the problems and then we can do it.’ This isn’t a solvable problem that way.”

Indeed, even local, precinct-based computerized voting and vote counting offers a storied history of disasters and meltdowns (scores of them documented in thousands of pages over the years here at The BRAD BLOG), including a number of infamous hacks of both paper-based and touch-screen e-voting systems, some of which were bullet-pointed in our initial article on the D.C. Internet Vote hack, in which we had speculated Halderman was likely behind it. Just weeks earlier, in late August of this year, Halderman succeeded in implanting Pac-Man onto a touch-screen voting system made by Sequoia without disturbing the machines “tamper-evident” seals. And even D.C. elections have had their own share of precinct-based e-voting disasters, such as their 2008 primary election when thousands of “phantom votes” for write-in candidates were produced on their paper-based optical-scan voting systems made by Sequoia Voting Systems.

Epstein lauded the D.C. BoEE for allowing this extraordinary test to happen. An open invitation of this type, inviting hackers to try and access an electronic voting system in the U.S., has never been done before. He “saluted” the Council on their “experiment.”

“For the first time, what computer scientists have been warning could happen in an election, we know that, in fact, it really could happen. It isn’t just a theoretical problem. It’s a practical problem. So nobody has ever assessed an Internet Voting election before this one. So that’s why it’s wonderful what you did. And now we’ve learned it. So let’s move on and come back in ten years.”

“Let me ask you this, from a legislative perspective,” Cheh asked of each of the panelists as the hearing was winding down, “should the Council, by legislation, just shut this down?”

The answer from each one of those testifying was an unambiguous “Yes.”

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By Maggie Michael (AP)

The sun sets behind a minaret in the centre of Riyadh March 1, 2008.  Home to Islam’s holiest cities of Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia regards itself as the guardian of Islam and is often closed off to foreigners. Even though it receives more than five million Muslim pilgrims a year, they are not allowed to travel within the country. Tourist visas are rarely issued and come with many restrictions but this is due to change as Saudi Arabia adopts a new strategy to tap into a niche market of conservative tourism. Picture taken March 1, 2008.  REUTERS/Ali Jarekji

CAIRO — The ideology that reigns in Saudi Arabia comes into plain view on the website of the Council of Senior Religious Scholars, where boys and girls sharing a swimming pool causes “mischief and evil” and bringing flowers to a hospital patient is to be discouraged because it’s a foreign custom that “imitates Allah’s adversaries.”

And those fatwas, or religious rulings, come from the government-appointed body of clerics who are the guardians of the kingdom’s ultraconservative Wahhabi school of Islam. But there’s also a whole other world of independent clerics issuing their own interpretations, often contradictory, through the Web, TV stations and text messages.

Now King Abdullah is moving to regain control over this abundance of fatwas. Under a royal decree issued in mid-August, only the official panel may issue the fatwas that answer every question of how pious Saudis should live their lives.

The result: In recent weeks, websites and a satellite station where clerics answered questions have been shut down or have voluntarily stopped issuing fatwas. One preacher was publicly reprimanded for urging a boycott of a supermarket chain for employing female cashiers.

The question on the minds of some Saudis is whether any of this points the way to a more liberal code. Saad Sowayan, a Saudi historian and columnist, thinks it does. “The state wants to take the lead in shaping public opinion and this serves the issue of secularism and modernity,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press.

But many of the powerful clerics on the 21-member council are themselves hard-liners. Beyond strict edicts on morality, they reinforce a worldview whereby non-Muslims and even liberal or Shiite Muslims are considered infidels, and their stances on jihad, or holy war, at times differ only in nuances from al-Qaida’s.

The website has thousands of fatwas, some dating back more than a decade, and dozens more are added each month.

A far stricter interpretation than is followed in most Muslim countries, Wahhabism is known most for its near obsessive segregation of the sexes, its insistence on ideological purity and its harsh punishments of beheadings and hand amputations for some crimes. It is also the law in Saudi Arabia, where clerics sit as judges in courts, religious police prevent unmarried or unrelated men and women from mixing, and women are banned from driving.

King Abdullah has taken a few incremental steps toward modernization. In a move last year that angered some Wahhabis, for example, he inaugurated the first university where male and female students share classes.

But tinkering with the system is risky, because of the grand trade-off that lies at the heart of modern Saudi Arabia: The governing Al Saud family supports the clerics, and the clerics support the family’s rule.

Theoretically at least, the council’s new fatwa monopoly could help Abdullah if his aim is to enact further reforms by seeding the commission with clerics who are more liberal and are willing to give him religious cover. The king seemed to give a hint of that last year when for the first time he appointed four clerics from non-Wahhabi schools of Islam, including one Sufi — a notable step given Wahhabi hatred of the Sufi movement.

On the other hand, some of the now-barred independent sheiks have issued fatwas that are more moderate than those of official clerics — men like Sheik Adel al-Kalbani, who challenged the Wahhabi ban on music by saying it was permitted provided the lyrics didn’t promote sin.

Saudi media have speculated that the king’s resolve may have been hardened by a recent fatwa that provoked particular public uproar. Sheik Abdul-Mohsen al-Obeikan ruled that if a woman needs to appear without her veil in front of an adult, unrelated male, she has the option of breast-feeding him, because it establishes a mother-son bond in Islamic tradition. That reasoning has been heard in a few fatwas by other sheiks, but is rejected by most scholars.

Saudi political analyst Turk al-Hamed says limiting fatwa rights to the official panel isn’t enough. “The state must intervene. The religious establishment enjoys complete freedom. This is not acceptable,” al-Hamad said in an interview.

He noted the council clerics’ rulings on jihad, some of which are vague enough to be interpreted on pro-al-Qaida websites as approval of violence in the cause of Islam.

“If you endorse jihad, it means you are searching for a war with the rest of the world,” al-Hamad said.

Even amid a state counterterrorism effort that followed a series of al-Qaida attacks on Saudi territory from 2003-2005, council clerics have balked at issuing a clear rejection of waging “holy war.” In 2007, the council’s head, Grand Mufti Abdel Aziz Al Sheik, urged young Saudis not to join jihad in Iraq or other countries, saying it could embarrass the kingdom. Still, some criticized him for not outright prohibiting it.

Fatwas on the official website also reinforce a deep intolerance that critics say fuels militancy. Apart from the rulings on swimming pools and hospital flowers, there are injunctions against movie theaters that “promote lewdness and immorality,” and against relationships of “mutual affection, love and brotherhood” with non-Muslims — or even initiating an exchange of greetings with them.

Islamic clerics around the world issue opinions regularly. They can vary widely, and individuals can choose which ones to follow. Fatwas from other parts of the Middle East tend to be more moderate, but the Saudi council is influential, as the kingdom is home to Islam’s holiest sites and its oil wealth amplifies its voice.

Council members are appointed by the king to four-year terms. The leadership has generally not intervened in clerics’ opinions, but a council member was dropped in 2009 after he criticized the mixed-gender university, Abdullah’s pet project.

Sheik Saleh al-Lihedan was removed as chief of the Supreme Judiciary Council, the kingdom’s top court, after a 2008 fatwa in which he said it was permissible to kill the owners of satellite TV stations that show “immoral” content. Several popular TV channels are owned by influential Saudi billionaires.

On the other hand, one of the kingdom’s most hard-line independents is still issuing fatwas on his website, openly flouting the ban without reprisals so far. Sheik Abdul-Rahman al-Barrak endorses jihad and in February raised controversy by ruling that those who advocate easing gender segregation should be put to death.

“This is not reforming the clerical establishment,” Christopher Boucek, an expert on Saudi Arabia at the U.S.-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said of the royal decree, “but rather a process to institutionalize and bureaucratize the state.”

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By Kim Zetter, Wired Magazine

Photo courtesy Yasir Afifi

A California student got a visit from the FBI this week after he found a secret GPS tracking device on his car, and a friend posted photos of it online. The post prompted wide speculation about whether the device was real, whether the young Arab-American was being targeted in a terrorism investigation and what the authorities would do.

It took just 48 hours to find out: The device was real, the student was being secretly tracked and the FBI wanted its expensive device back, the student told Wired.com in an interview Wednesday.

The answer came when half-a-dozen FBI agents and police officers appeared at Yasir Afifi’s apartment complex in Santa Clara, California, on Tuesday demanding he return the device.

Afifi, a 20-year-old U.S.-born citizen, cooperated willingly and said he’d done nothing to merit attention from authorities. Comments the agents made during their visit suggested he’d been under FBI surveillance for three to six months.

An FBI spokesman wouldn’t acknowledge that the device belonged to the agency or that agents appeared at Afifi’s house.

“I can’t really tell you much about it, because it’s still an ongoing investigation,” said spokesman Pete Lee, who works in the agency’s San Francisco headquarters.

Afifi, the son of an Islamic-American community leader who died a year ago in Egypt, is one of only a few people known to have found a government-tracking device on their vehicle.

His discovery comes in the wake of a recent ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals saying it’s legal for law enforcement to secretly place a tracking device on a suspect’s car without getting a warrant, even if the car is parked in a private driveway.

Brian Alseth from the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington state contacted Afifi after seeing pictures of the tracking device posted online and told him the ACLU had been waiting for a case like this to challenge the ruling.

“This is the kind of thing we like to throw lawyers at,” Afifi said Alseth told him.

“It seems very frightening that the FBI have placed a surveillance-tracking device on the car of a 20-year-old American citizen who has done nothing more than being half-Egyptian,” Alseth told Wired.com.

Afifi, a business marketing student at Mission College in Santa Clara, discovered the device last Sunday when he took his car to a local garage for an oil change. When a mechanic at Ali’s Auto Care raised his Ford Lincoln LS on hydraulic lifts, Afifi saw a wire sticking out near the right rear wheel and exhaust.

Garage owner Mazher Khan confirmed for Wired.com that he also saw it. A closer inspection showed it connected to a battery pack and transmitter, which were attached to the car with a magnet. Khan asked Afifi if he wanted the device removed and when Afifi said yes, Khan pulled it easily from the car’s chassis.

“I wouldn’t have noticed it if there wasn’t a wire sticking out,” Afifi said.

Later that day, a friend of Afifi’s named Khaled posted pictures of the device at Reddit, asking if anyone knew what it was and if it meant the FBI “is after us.” (Reddit is owned by CondeNast Digital, which also owns Wired.com).

“My plan was to just put the device on another car or in a lake,” Khaled wrote, “but when you come home to 2 stoned off-their-asses people who are hearing things in the device and convinced it’s a bomb you just gotta be sure.”

A reader quickly identified it as an Orion Guardian ST820 tracking device made by an electronics company called Cobham, which sells the device only to law enforcement.

No one was available at Cobham to answer Wired.com’s questions, but a former FBI agent who looked at the pictures confirmed it was a tracking device.

The former agent, who asked not to be named, said the device was an older model of tracking equipment that had long ago been replaced by devices that don’t require batteries. Batteries die and need to be replaced if surveillance is ongoing so newer devices are placed in the engine compartment and hardwired to the car’s battery so they don’t run out of juice. He was surprised this one was so easily found.

“It has to be able to be removed but also stay in place and not be seen,” he said. “There’s always the possibility that the car will end up at a body shop or auto mechanic, so it has to be hidden well. It’s very rare when the guys find them.”

He said he was certain that agents who installed it would have obtained a 30-day warrant for its use.

Afifi considered selling the device on Craigslist before the FBI showed up. He was in his apartment Tuesday afternoon when a roommate told him “two sneaky-looking people” were near his car. Afifi, already heading out for an appointment, encountered a man and woman looking at his vehicle outside. The man asked if Afifi knew his registration tag was expired. When Afifi asked if it bothered him, the man just smiled. Afifi got into his car and headed for the parking lot exit when two SUVs pulled up with flashing lights carrying four police officers in bullet-proof vests.

The agent who initially spoke with Afifi identified himself then as Vincent and told Afifi, “We’re here to recover the device you found on your vehicle. It’s federal property. It’s an expensive piece, and we need it right now.”

Afifi asked, “Are you the guys that put it there?” and the agent replied, “Yeah, I put it there.” He told Afifi, “We’re going to make this much more difficult for you if you don’t cooperate.”

Afifi retrieved the device from his apartment and handed it over, at which point the agents asked a series of questions – did he know anyone who traveled to Yemen or was affiliated with overseas training? One of the agents produced a printout of a blog post that Afifi’s friend Khaled allegedly wrote a couple of months ago. It had “something to do with a mall or a bomb,” Afifi said. He hadn’t seen it before and doesn’t know the details of what it said. He found it hard to believe Khaled meant anything threatening by the post.

“He’s a smart kid and is not affiliated with anything extreme and never says anything stupid like that,” Afifi said. “I’ve known that guy my whole life. “

The agents told Afifi they had other agents outside Khaled’s house.

“If you want us to call them off and not talk to him we can do that,” Afifi said they told him. “That was weird. […] I didn’t really believe anything they were saying.”

When he later asked Khaled about the post, his friend recalled “writing something stupid,” but said he wasn’t involved in any wrongdoing. Khaled declined to discuss the issue with Wired.com.

The female agent, who handed Afifi a card, identified herself as Jennifer Kanaan and said she was Lebanese. She spoke some Arabic to Afifi and through the course of her comments indicated she knew what restaurants he and his girlfriend frequented. She also congratulated him on his new job. Afifi recently got laid off from his job, but on the same day was hired as an international sales manager of laptops and computers for Cal Micro in San Jose.

The agents also knew he was planning a short business trip to Dubai in a few weeks. Afifi said he often travels for business and has two teenage brothers in Egypt whom he supports financially. They live with an aunt. His U.S.-born mother, who divorced his father five years ago, lives in Arizona.

Afifi’s father, Aladdin Afifi, was a U.S. citizen and former president of the Muslim Community Association here, before his family moved to Egypt in 2003. Yasir Afifi returned to the United States alone in 2008, while his father and brothers stayed in Egypt, to further his education he said. He knows he’s on a federal watchlist and is regularly taken aside at airports for secondary screening.

Six months ago, a former roommate of his was visited by FBI agents who said they wanted to speak with Afifi. Afifi contacted one agent and was told the agency received an anonymous tip from someone saying he might be a threat to national security. Afifi told the agent he was willing to answer questions if his lawyer approved. But after Afifi’s lawyer contacted the agency, he never heard from the feds again until he found their tracking device.

“I don’t think they were surprised that I found it,” he told Wired.com. “I’m sure they knew when I found it. […] One of the first questions they asked me was if I was at a mechanics shop last Sunday. I said yes, that’s where I found this stupid device under my car.”

Afifi’s attorney, who works for the civil liberties-focused Council on American Islamic Relations, said this kind of tracking is more egregious than the kind her office usually sees.

“The idea that it escalates to this level is unusual,” said Zahra Billoo. “We take about one new case each week relating to FBI or law enforcement visits [to clients]. Generally they come to the individual’s house or workplace, and there are issues that arise from that.”

However, she said that after learning about Afifi’s experience, other lawyers in her organization told her they knew of two people in Ohio who also recently discovered tracking devices on their vehicles.

Afifi’s encounter with the FBI ended with the agents telling him not to worry.

“We have all the information we needed,” they told him. “You don’t need to call your lawyer. Don’t worry, you’re boring.”

They shook his hand and left.

By Allen Sykora of Kitco News; asykora@kitco.com

(Kitco News) – Goldman Sachs has raised its 12-month forecast for gold to $1,650 an ounce, citing expectations for further quantitative easing in the U.S. and prospects for long-term interest rates to continue falling.

“With U.S. real interest rates pushing lower off the slowdown in the pace of the U.S. economic recovery and the growing prospect of another round of quantitative easing, we expect gold prices to continue to climb,” said the Goldman report, authored by David Greely and Damien Courvalin. “Despite the rebound in net speculative length, it remains well below levels consistent with the current low U.S. real interest rate environment.”

Goldman said the decline in U.S. real interest rates is likely to persist, and rates could push even lower in the near term should the Federal Reserve undertake quantitative easing measures. Thus, Goldman said it is raising its gold price forecasts to $1,400, $1,525 and $1,650 on a three-, six- and 12-month horizon. Goldman said its updated forecasts point to an average of $1,575 an ounce in 2011, which is $175 higher than it previously expected.

“The return to quantitative easing will likely be a strong catalyst to drive gold prices higher, and we expect the gold price rally to continue until U.S. monetary policy begins to tighten,” Goldman said.
The bank’s economics team expects the Fed to return to quantitative easing with purchases of U.S. Treasury securities of $1 trillion, which in turn should keep U.S. bond yields depressed. Furthermore, the bank said it expects the announcement at the Federal Open Market Committee’s Nov. 2-3 meeting.

Goldman said the rally since August came as the yield on 10-year U.S. Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities plummeted, with the yield now closer to the 0.50% than the 1.0% imbedded in prior forecasts. It also cites stronger demand for the metal for gold exchange-traded funds and from central banks.

However, while Goldman said gold could rally for an “extended period,” it also sees a “considerable downside risk” in the longer term, should the Fed eventually tighten monetary policy earlier than expected.

For now, Goldman said, its U.S. economists suggest that it could take until 2015 or longer before a rate hike becomes “appropriate,” although they emphasize this is not a “formal forecast.”

“While they do not expect tightening to happen before 2012 at the earliest, we view an earlier-than-expected tightening of U.S. monetary policy as the primary downside risk to our gold price forecasts,” Goldman said.

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Staten Island Pakistanis raise funds for flood victims

STATEN ISLAND,NY–The Pakistani Civic Association of Staten Island donated $10,000 to the EDHI International Foundation.

The check was presented at the Staten Island Advance’s Grasmere office by Association President Dr. Mohammed Khalid to Mohammad Chaudhary, head of EDHI International Foundation, Queens regional office. Also on hand were, Irshad Sheikh, Shams Syed, and Javaid Syed, all board members with the Pakistani Civic Association.

Formed in 1989, The EDHI International is a charity organization which provides disaster and emergency assistance to the people of Pakistan. Its services include medical care, emergency services, air ambulances, burial services, mental habitats, child welfare services, abused women safe houses and training facilities for the disadvantaged.

Funding will be used to assist the victims of the July flood in Pakistan that swept through the northwest region claiming 1,900 lives, damaging 1.9 million homes and affecting approximately 20 million people. The flood also damaged critical infrastructure and destroyed $3.27 billion worth of rice, sugar and cotton crops.

American Islamic college to reopen

CHICAGO,IL–Chicago’s American Islamic College is all set to reopen again. The college located on a prime property near the city’s famed lake shore has opened and closed many times in the past. Administrators say that this time it will remain open for good.

The college will be  offering  courses in Islamic history, arts and theology. Administrators said they hope to attract a diverse student body and earn accreditation that will eventually allow the college to become a four-year degree-granting institution.

“The whole of America needs an Islamic institution of Islamic thought,” said Ali Yurtsever, a former research scholar at Georgetown University, who is overseeing the effort. “If you don’t have Islamic colleges, then people are misled, they’ll easily be deceived and the clash will continue to grow.”

The college has been associated with the Organization of Islamic Conference and has been instrumental in leading the interfaith effort including active participation in the World Parliament of Religions. But apart from that it has little to show. For several years a day care facility was being run on its premises.

Muslim, Jewish families raise funds for Pakistan flood victims

NEW HAVEN– Farhan and Shahida Soomro became American citizens on Friday. Originally from the Sindh Province in Pakistan, they have lived in the U.S. for ten years. Two days after becoming Americans, they held an event with their friends Ron Miller and his wife Cathie Miller to raise money and awareness about the floods which have ravaged their province in Pakistan. “It’s been a busy weekend!” said Shahida Soomro in an interview to the New Haven Independent.

The event—“An Evening to Support Pakistani Flood Relief at the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven”—was held Sunday night at the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven on Audubon.’

The Soomro family is Muslim; the Miller family, of Westville, is Jewish. The idea for the event, a “Jewish-Muslim collaboration,” came about over a dinner with old friends, Cathie Miller said. The Millers then sought the support of the Social Action Committees of the Temple Emanuel of Greater New Haven and the Congregation Mishkan Israel of Hamden, which were instrumental in the organization of the event.

After guests Sunday night enjoyed a wide spread of ethnic foods, Farhan Soomro opened the presentation by relaying the severity of the crisis. While the Soomro family was not present during the flooding, they have stayed in constant contact with their relatives in the region. With a fifth of Pakistan underwater, 20 million people displaced, and two million homes destroyed, Soomro explained, farmers have lost two seasons of crops and the Pakistani government cannot meet the food and shelter demands the disaster has triggered.

The event raised about $3,000.

Cambridge schools to close for ‘Eid

CAMBRIDGE, MA–In a move that officials believe is the first of its kind in Massachusetts, Cambridge will close its schools for one Muslim holiday each year beginning in the next school year.The school committee voted unanimously on the idea in December. School officials announced Sunday that the change would begin in 2011.

City officials said the schools will either close for Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan, or Eid al-Adha, known as the Festival of Sacrifice.

“People recognize three major religions in this country, Christianity, Judaism and Islam. It didn’t seem right that we would close for two of those religions but not the third,” School Committee Chairman Marc McGovern said.

Cambridge Ridge and Latin students from varying religious backgrounds made the request last school year. They had been pushing for the holiday for so long that a few are now in college. Some said they were ecstatic about the move.

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