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Category: UK

  • Britain’s visa rules are a mess

    Britain’s visa rules are a mess

    uk passport
    According Mary Dejevsky at the Chatham House, entry rules to the UK are a mess.
    Mary Dejevsky is a columnist for The Independent, February 2014
    The World Today, Volume 70, Number 1

    Simple for the wealthy, a source of anger and resentment for the rest

     

    At least all those non-EU citizens wanting to live and work in the European Union now know where Malta stands. If they have a spare €650,000, plus more for dependents, they will be able to treat the whole family to Maltese passports. In so doing, they will effectively buy full access to all 28 EU countries – and the right to visit many others visa-free.

    However Malta’s move is viewed – and Brussels is not happy, but currently has no mechanism to prevent it – there is virtue in clarity.

    According to Chatham House for a brief period, a limited number of rich people will be able to obtain citizenship of an EU country by contributing to a Maltese development fund. Such paid-for provisions are not unheard of: Britain and others already offer a path to citizenship for £1 million-plus investors.

    But Malta’s scheme, as originally concieved, differs in having no residence requirement. It really is offering a passport of convenience.

    Some might reasonably object that the fuss about Maltese passports ignores the ease with which members of the global elite – aside from those expressly blacklisted – are already able to cross borders. It is the rest, including the new middle classes of the emerging economies, for whom visa restrictions are burdensome. And frustrated applicants reserve some of their most bitter complaints for Britain.

    The point was made pithily a few years ago by the Russian liberal politician, Grigory Yavlinsky, when he spoke at Chatham House. After making a plea for Britain to relax visa restrictions on Russians, he remarked with heavy sarcasm that there were some Russians, including those with dubious pasts, for whom entry to the UK was no problem.

    To judge by my inbox, the ill-feeling generated by the British visa system has only increased. Many complaints are about delays, costs and carelessness with crucial documents. But recurrent themes are the supercilious attitude of officials and a perception that the rules are applied both inflexibly – formulaic box-ticking – and arbitrarily.

    In recent months, I have learnt of several individuals from former Soviet states whose applications to visit relatives for a short stay have been turned down, even though they have visited regularly over several years. I have also attended conferences where featured speakers have received their visas late or not at all.

    Unfavourable comparisons are made with other EU countries in the Schengen zone – the 22 EU members which have abolished passport controls at their common borders – or even with the United States.

    Part of the explanation may be the ambivalence and sheer muddled thinking that often seems to prevail at the very top. On the one hand, the British Government has an electoral mandate for a sharp reduction in immigration. Yet its toughest talk concerns prospective new arrivals from Romania and Bulgaria – about whom it can actually do nothing.

    On the other hand, it is keen to attract ever more overseas (non-EU) students, while refusing them the right to stay after graduation.

    Looking enviously across at France, it also wants many more tourists, especially those, such as high-spending Chinese, of whom France attracted six times more than Britain last year.

    To this end, the Chancellor, George Osborne, recently proposed simplifying the visa rules for Chinese business people and tour groups if they were also applying for a visa from one of the Schengen countries. France has since gone one better by providing a 48-hour service. The race for the Chinese yuan is on.

    However, Britain’s efforts to be competitive have only introduced more inconsistencies. Membership of Schengen has been rejected by successive UK governments on the grounds that it would mean contracting out border security to other EU countries. Yet, as is now tacitly acknowledged, nonmembership puts Britain at a disadvantage in the tourism stakes. So it has come close to accepting the Schengen visa process in practice, but only for well-heeled Chinese.

    One consequence could be resentment on the part of others, including those from the Commonwealth and the former Soviet Union. Individual visitors – relatives, artists, performers or academics – already feel they receive short shrift. Positive discrimination for Chinese business people and shoppers could only make matters worse.

    UK visas are a particularly sore point among Russians, with the British authorities stressing security concerns, and Moscow insisting that any liberalization be reciprocal. It would be facetious to suggest that the new arrangements for Chinese could be extended to others – by requiring, say, sponsoring organizations, to include generous shopping vouchers with their invitations.

    But should the way to a British visa really lie through Harrods? There must be a more equitable, less mercenary, way.

    Mary Dejevsky is a columnist for The Independent

  • GCHQ chief to step down by year’s end following Snowden leaks

    GCHQ chief to step down by year’s end following Snowden leaks

    Iain Lobban the director of GCHQ (Reuters/UK Parliament via REUTERS TV)
    Iain Lobban the director of GCHQ (Reuters/UK Parliament via REUTERS TV)

     

    The head of GCHQ, Britain’s electronic intelligence agency, will step down by year’s end, the Foreign Office said. Officials denied his departure was linked to public outrage over mass surveillance revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

    Iain Lobban, 53, has served as GCHQ’s director since June 2008. His departure was officially described as a long-considered move, but comes just a few weeks after he was summoned to answer MPs’ questions about surveillance operations in an unprecedented televised open session of the UK parliament’s intelligence and security committee, along with the heads of MI5 and MI6.

    “Iain Lobban is doing an outstanding job as director of GCHQ,” a spokesperson said. “Today is simply about starting the process of ensuring we have a suitable successor in place before he moves on, planned at the end of the year.”

    Officials dismissed suggestions his decision was influenced by revelations made by Snowden, a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, whose leaks revealed details of a massive global surveillance network run by the NSA and other members of the so-called Five Eyes alliance – the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

    Despite accounting for the bulk of Britain’s three intelligence agencies’ combined budget of £2 billion, GCHQ had previously attracted far less public attention than MI5 or MI6.

    It was damaging media revelations regarding wide-scale collaboration between GCHQ and the NSA that resulted in Lobban being called to appear before the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee alongside the heads of MI5 and MI6 in November.

    At the hearing, Lobban accused Snowden’s disclosures of seriously damaging Britain’s counter-terrorism efforts, saying extremists had discussed changing their communication methods following the revelations.

    Critics, however, have accused GCHQ of working hand-in-hand with the NSA in massively intruding on the private communications of millions of citizens.

    In June, the Guardian reported the NSA had secretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world’s phone calls and internet traffic, and, by 2010, was able to boast the “biggest internet access” of any member of the Five Eyes alliance.

    According to media reports, the NSA and GCHQ had a particularly close relationship, sharing troves of data in what Snowden called “the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history.”

    Around 850,000 NSA employees and contractors with top secret clearance had access to the GCHQ databases, allowing them to view and analyze information garnered from such subtly titled programs as ‘Mastering the Internet (MTI)’ and ‘Global Telecoms Exploitation (GTE).’

    Lobban, who first joined GCHQ in 1983, insisted in November that GCHQ did not spend its time “listening to the telephone calls or reading the e-mails of the majority” of British citizens.

    Sir Iain’s counterpart at the NSA, General Keith Alexander, alongside his deputy, John Inglis, are also stepping down later this year.

    There is also an ongoing campaign pushing for Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to resign for lying under oath by telling Congress the NSA did “not wittingly” collect data on hundreds of millions of Americans.

    RT, 29.01.2014

  • Computer pioneer Alan Turing pardoned

    Computer pioneer Alan Turing pardoned

    Punished under British law for homosexuality in the 1950s, code breaker Turing has now been pardoned.

    Turing's work on artificial intelligence still informs the debate over whether machines can think, [AFP]
    Turing’s work on artificial intelligence still informs the debate over whether machines can think, [AFP]
    Queen Elizabeth II has pardoned  Alan Turing, the father of modern computing, who was convicted of “gross indecency” for being gay, 61 years after he poisoned himself.

    The Queen granted Turing, whose theories laid the foundation for the computer age and who broke the code which helped the Allies outfox the Nazis, an official pardon on Tuesday.

    Turing, whose work on artificial intelligence still informs the debate over whether machines can think, was punished by Britain in the 1950s, when homosexuality was still a criminal offence.

    “Turing was an exceptional man with a brilliant mind,” Justice Secretary Chris Grayling said in a prepared statement released on Tuesday.

    Describing Turing’s treatment as unjust, Grayling said the code breaker “deserves to be remembered and recognised for his fantastic contribution to the war effort and his legacy to science.”

    Turing’s contributions to science spanned several disciplines, but he is perhaps best remembered as the architect of the effort to crack the Enigma code, the cypher used by Nazi Germany to secure its military communications.

    Turing’s groundbreaking work, combined with the effort of cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park, near Oxford, and the capture of Nazi code books, gave the Allies the edge across half the globe, helping them defeat the Italians in the Mediterranean, beat back the Germans in Africa and escape enemy submarines in the Atlantic.

    Even before the war, Turing was formulating ideas that would underpin modern computing, ideas which matured into a fascination with artificial intelligence and the notion that machines would someday challenge the minds of man.

    When the war ended, Turing went to work programming some of the world’s first computers, drawing up  one of the earliest chess games,  among other initiatives.

    Turing made no secret of his sexuality, and being gay could easily lead to prosecution in post-war Britain.

    In 1952, Turing was convicted of “gross indecency” over his relationship with another man, and he was stripped of his security clearance, subjected to monitoring by British authorities, and forced to take estrogen to neutralise his sex drive – a process described by some as chemical castration.

    S. Barry Cooper, a University of Leeds mathematician who has written about Turing’s work, said future generations would struggle to understand the code breaker’s treatment.

    “You take one of your greatest scientists, and you invade his body with hormones,” he said in a telephone interview. “It was a national failure.”

    Turing committed suicide in 1954.

    Turing’s legacy was long obscured by secrecy.

    “Even his mother wasn’t allowed to know what he’d done,” Cooper said.

    Then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued an apology for Turing’s treatment in 2009, but campaigners kept pressing for
    a formal pardon.

     

    Source: Agencies

     

     

    You take one of your greatest scientists, and you invade his body with hormones. It was a national failure.S. Barry Cooper, University of Leeds mathematician, on Turing’s forced chemical castration
  • ‘The near future of Iraq is dark’: Warning from Muqtada al-Sadr – the Shia cleric whose word is law to millions of his countrymen

    ‘The near future of Iraq is dark’: Warning from Muqtada al-Sadr – the Shia cleric whose word is law to millions of his countrymen

    In a rare interview at his headquarters in Najaf, he tells Patrick Cockburn of his fears for a nation growing ever more divided on sectarian lines
    In a rare interview at his headquarters in Najaf, he tells Patrick Cockburn of his fears for a nation growing ever more divided on sectarian lines

    Patrick Cockburn

    The future of Iraq as a united and independent country is endangered by sectarian Shia-Sunni hostility says Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia religious leader whose Mehdi Army militia fought the US and British armies and who remains a powerful figure in Iraqi politics. He warns of the danger that “the Iraqi people will disintegrate, its government will disintegrate, and it will be easy for external powers to control the country”.

    In an interview with The Independent in the holy city of Najaf, 100 miles south-west of Baghdad – the first interview Mr Sadr has given face-to-face with a Western journalist for almost 10 years – he expressed pessimism about the immediate prospects for Iraq, saying: “The near future is dark.”

    Mr Sadr said he is most worried about sectarianism affecting Iraqis at street level, believing that “if it spreads among the people it will be difficult to fight”. He says he believes that standing against sectarianism has made him lose support among his followers.

    Mr Sadr’s moderate stance is key at a moment when sectarian strife has been increasing in Iraq – some 200 Shia were killed in the past week alone. For 40 years, Mr Sadr and religious leaders from his family have set the political trend within the Shia community in Iraq. Their long-term resistance to Saddam Hussein and, later, their opposition to the US-led occupation had a crucial impact.

    Mr Sadr has remained a leading influence in Iraq after an extraordinary career in which he has often come close to being killed. Several times, it appeared that the political movement he leads, the Sadrist Movement, would be crushed.

    He was 25 in 1999 when his father, Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, a revered Shia leader, and Mr Sadr’s two brothers were assassinated by Saddam Hussein’s gunmen in Najaf. He just survived sharing a similar fate, remaining under house arrest in Najaf until 2003 when Saddam was overthrown by the US invasion. He and his followers became the most powerful force in many Shia parts of Iraq as enemies of the old regime, but also opposing the occupation. In 2004, his Mehdi Army fought two savage battles against American troops in Najaf, and in Basra it engaged in a prolonged guerrilla war against the British Army which saw the Mehdi Army take control of the city.

    The Mehdi Army was seen by the Sunni community as playing a central role in the sectarian murder campaign that reached its height in 2006-7. Mr Sadr says that “people infiltrated the Mehdi Army and carried out these killings”, adding that if his militiamen were involved in the murder of Sunnis he would be the first person to denounce them.

    For much of this period, Mr Sadr did not appear to have had full control of forces acting in his name; ultimately he stood them down. At the same time, the Mehdi Army was being driven from its old strongholds in Basra and Sadr City by the US Army and resurgent Iraqi government armed forces. Asked about the status of the Mehdi Army today, Mr Sadr says: “It is still there but it is frozen because the occupation is apparently over. If it comes back, they [the Mehdi Army militiamen] will come back.”

    In the past five years, Mr Sadr has rebuilt his movement as one of the main players in Iraqi politics with a programme that is a mixture of Shia religion, populism and Iraqi nationalism. After a strong showing in the general election in 2010, it became part of the present government, with six seats in the cabinet. But Mr Sadr is highly critical of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s performance during his two terms in office, accusing his administration of being sectarian, corrupt and incompetent.

    Speaking of Mr Maliki, with whom his relations are increasingly sour, Mr Sadr said that “maybe he is not the only person responsible for what is happening in Iraq, but he is the person in charge”. Asked if he expected Mr Maliki to continue as Prime Minister, he said: “I expect he is going to run for a third term, but I don’t want him to.”

    Mr Sadr said he and other Iraqi leaders had tried to replace him in the past, but Mr Maliki had survived in office because of his support from foreign powers, notably the US and Iran. “What is really surprising is that America and Iran should decide on one person,” he said. “Maliki is strong because he is supported by the United States, Britain and Iran.”

    Mr Sadr is particularly critical of the government’s handling of the Sunni minority, which lost power in 2003, implying they had been marginalised and their demands ignored. He thinks that the Iraqi government lost its chance to conciliate Sunni protesters in Iraq who started demonstrating last December, asking for greater civil rights and an end to persecution.

    “My personal opinion is that it is too late now to address these [Sunni] demands when the government, which is seen as a Shia government by the demonstrators, failed to meet their demands,” he said. Asked how ordinary Shia, who make up the great majority of the thousand people a month being killed by al-Qa’ida bombs, should react, Mr Sadr said: “They should understand that they are not being attacked by Sunnis. They are being attacked by extremists, they are being attacked by external powers.”

    As Mr Sadr sees it, the problem in Iraq is that Iraqis as a whole are traumatised by almost half a century in which there has been a “constant cycle of violence: Saddam, occupation, war after war, first Gulf war, then second Gulf war, then the occupation war, then the resistance – this would lead to a change in the psychology of Iraqis”. He explained that Iraqis make the mistake of trying to solve one problem by creating a worse one, such as getting the Americans to topple Saddam Hussein but then having the problem of the US occupation. He compared Iraqis to “somebody who found a mouse in his house, then he kept a cat, then he wanted to get the cat out of the house so he kept a dog, then to get the dog out of his house he bought an elephant, so he bought a mouse again”.

    Asked about the best way for Iraqis to deal with the mouse, Mr Sadr said: “By using neither the cat nor the dog, but instead national unity, rejection of sectarianism, open-mindedness, having open ideas, rejection of extremism.”

    A main theme of Mr Sadr’s approach is to bolster Iraq as an independent nation state, able to make decisions in its own interests. Hence his abiding hostility to the American and British occupation, holding this responsible for many of Iraq’s present ills. To this day, neither he nor anybody from his movement will meet American or British officials. But he is equally hostile to intervention by Iran in Iraqi affairs saying: “We refuse all kinds of interventions from external forces, whether such an intervention was in the interests of Iraqis or against their interests. The destiny of Iraqis should be decided by Iraqis themselves.”

    This is a change of stance for a man who was once demonised by the US and Britain as a pawn of Iran. The strength of the Sadrist movement under Mr Sadr and his father – and its ability to withstand powerful enemies and shattering defeats – owes much to the fact it that it blends Shia revivalism with social activism and Iraqi nationalism.

    Why are Iraqi government members so ineffective and corrupt? Mr Sadr believes that “they compete to take a share of the cake, rather than competing to serve their people”

    Asked why the Kurdistan Regional Government had been more successful in terms of security and economic development than the rest of Iraq, Mr Sadr thought there was less stealing and corruption among the Kurds and maybe because “they love their ethnicity and their region”. If the government tried to marginalise them, they might ask for independence: “Mr Massoud Barzani [the KRG President] told me that ‘if Maliki pushes on me harder, we are going to ask for independence’.”

    At the end of the interview Mr Sadr asked me if I was not frightened of interviewing him and would not this make the British Government consider me a terrorist? Secondly, he wondered if the British Government still considered that it had liberated the Iraqi people, and wondered if he should sue the Government on behalf of the casualties caused by the British occupation.

    independent.co.uk, 29 November 2013

  • Dame Stella Rimington: MI5 and MI6 must convince public they are working for them and not against them

    Dame Stella Rimington: MI5 and MI6 must convince public they are working for them and not against them

    mi6The British intelligence services must persuade public they are working on their behalf and not against them, revealing Julian Assange and Edward Snowden as the “self-seeking twerps” they are, Dame Stella Rimington has said.

    Dame Stella, the former head of MI5, said openness about the role of the intelligence services would help public trust, after revelations about how information is gathered.

    Speaking at the Henley Literary Festival, she added it may now be time for more “oversight” of the issue to reassure the public that the interception of communication was in their best interests, The Telegraph stated.

    She said the “main issue” which now needed to be addressed is the “question of intrusion by our security services into everybody’s lives”, which the likes of Assange and Snowden use as an excuse to share secrets.

    “It’s very important for our intelligence services to have a kind of oversight which people have confidence in,” she said.

    “So that we can be quite sure that in giving them these powers we know they are being properly supervised in the way they are using them.

    “I think that it may mean it is now the time to look again at the oversight. I have every confidence that the oversight is good and they’re not trying anything of the things they’re not supposed to.

    “But it may be that we need something more complex to convince the nation our intelligence services are actually acting on their behalf and not acting against them.

    “Assange and Snowden would be seen to be what I believe they are, which is self-seeking twerps.”

    She added the service was now facing one of its most difficult periods ever, with “spreading extremism that is sucking in young people and providing them with some kind of ethic and ethos that is difficult for all of us to understand”.

    Dame Stella, 78, also spoke of the difficulties of combining her former role with motherhood, disclosing she had feared for the safety of her daughters after her identity was revealed.

    Speaking of the nature of state surveillance, she added: “My own opinion on this is that intelligence, in an increasingly complex and sophisticated world, has to be able to go where the threat is,” she said.

    “In that the people who are seeking to harm us are increasingly sophisticated and are using more sophisticated ways of communicating in order to conceal their plans.

    “Our intelligence services have to be given the tools to go there too in order to react.”

  • The Troodos Conundrum

    The Troodos Conundrum

    troodos

    Craig Murray

    The GCHQ listening post on Mount Troodos in Cyprus is arguably the most valued asset which the UK contributes to UK/US intelligence cooperation.  The communications intercept agencies, GCHQ in the UK and NSA in the US, share all their intelligence reports (as do the CIA and MI6).  Troodos is valued enormously by the NSA.  It monitors all radio, satellite and microwave traffic across the Middle East, ranging from Egypt and Eastern Libya right through to the Caucasus.  Even almost all landline telephone communication in this region is routed through microwave links at some stage, picked up on Troodos.

    Troodos is highly effective – the jewel in the crown of British intelligence.  Its capacity and efficiency, as well as its reach, is staggering.  The US do not have their own comparable facility for the Middle East.  I should state that I have actually been inside all of this facility and been fully briefed on its operations and capabilities, while I was head of the FCO Cyprus Section in the early 1990s.  This is fact, not speculation.

    It is therefore very strange, to say the least, that John Kerry claims to have access to communications intercepts of Syrian military and officials organising chemical weapons attacks, which intercepts were not available to the British Joint Intelligence Committee.

    On one level the explanation is simple.  The intercept evidence was provided to the USA by Mossad, according to my own well  placed source in the Washington intelligence community.  Intelligence provided by a third party is not automatically shared with the UK, and indeed Israel specifies it should not be.

    But the inescapable question is this.  Mossad have nothing comparable to the Troodos operation.  The reported content of the conversations fits exactly with key tasking for Troodos, and would have tripped all the triggers.  How can Troodos have missed this if Mossad got it?  The only remote possibility is that all the conversations went on a purely landline route, on which Mossad have a physical wire tap, but that is very unlikely in a number of ways – not least nowadays the purely landline route.

    Israel has repeatedly been involved in the Syrian civil war, carrying out a number of illegal bombings and missile strikes over many months.  This absolutely illegal activity by Israel- which has killed a great many civilians, including children – has brought no condemnation at all from the West.  Israel has now provided “intelligence” to the United States designed to allow the United States to join in with Israel’s bombing and missile campaign.

    The answer to the Troodos Conundrum is simple.  Troodos did not pick up the intercepts because they do not exist.  Mossad fabricated them.  John Kerry’s “evidence” is the shabbiest of tricks.  More children may now be blown to pieces by massive American missile blasts.  It is nothing to do with humanitarian intervention.  It is, yet again, the USA acting at the behest of Israel.

    craigmurray.org.uk