Doing the Numbers

The pandemic is global. Why isn’t the response?

When scarcity butts up against the public good, tears are guaranteed. This year—and for years to come, it seems—COVID-19 will provide ample opportunity to cry.

First, a word of congratulations to the cohorts of ideologues who spent decades grinding the United Nations down from a place to grapple with global crises to an underfunded, slothful, toothless show dog. Great job, gang. It’s not like we needed it.

What we have instead is a creative response to vaccination in a world where governments don’t want to cooperate, let alone play by the same rules. Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance was cobbled together by dozens of different stakeholders about 20 years ago to deal with something that we’ve always known is a problem: eradicating communicable disease in a world with wildly disparate levels of wealth and health.

The good news is that it was a relatively simple (albeit herculean) job to refocus GAVI on COVID-19 and to form COVAX, the global initiative designed to centralise vaccine acquisition, coordinate its delivery and reduce costs for everyone involved.

And it would be working well, if developed countries hadn’t jumped the queue. Sidelining their own contributions to COVAX, 16% of the world’s population has removed 70% of global vaccine production from control of the global consortium.

The already confusing and complex global supply chain has effectively been corralled by the moneyed nations who are intent on vaccinating themselves first.

That’s crazy, when you think about it.

It’s not crazy at first, though. I mean, it’s their vaccine. They can do what they like with it. And a lot of the money is theirs too, so ditto. And they were elected (or self-selected) to protect the interests of their own people. So… yeah. Ok.

Crying about basic injustice is a legitimate response. The fact that people are willing to shove others out of the way in order to secure a place on the first lifeboat out is lamentable, and not very cool. I seem to recall a bit of confusion about that in Titanic.

But let’s be honest. Fairness is a powerful argument, but not a compelling one.

The calculus that should be driving a coordinated global vaccination effort is the desire to see this thing ended decisively and quickly. A globally coordinated response isn’t just the right thing to do. It’s the best thing to do.

The longer the disease lingers in locales with poor health care services and large populations of people facing multiple concurrent health challenges, the more likely it is to mutate and re-emerge.

In short: If you shoot the first zombie, The Walking Dead never gets past the pilot. If you don’t, you… well, you get the show as premised.

A policy paper published a few days ago by The Lancet lays it all out. It recognises the near-miraculous speed with which the first vaccines have been produced, but warns that if production, pricing and allocation aren’t better coordinated, we could end up drowning in a rush to the lifeboats.

Scaling up production to meet global demand is a monumental challenge.14, 15 Before this pandemic, there were no existing networks of contract manufacturers for several of the leading vaccine candidates that feature novel technologies, including those relying on mRNA delivery platforms. Additionally, the volume of vaccines that is needed places pressure on global supply chains for inputs, such as glass vials, syringes, and stabilising agents.

The production of COVID-19 vaccines is limited by the highly concentrated state of global vaccine manufacturing capacity,16 and the relationships established between lead developers and contract manufacturers. A successful solution to the production bottleneck would probably require widespread technology transfer to enable the expansion of manufacturing capacity.

And yet, there’s no appreciable effort ongoing at the moment to move production into the public domain. Cooperative vaccine deals such as that negotiated by the Quad are good, but they’re just working around regional and strategic rivalries that the UN was specifically designed to circumvent.

Yes, millions will benefit from this, and that’s an unadulterated Good Thing. But it’s too small.

The Lancet makes it clear that self-interest is driving up prices for everyone, and contributing to supply shortages that virtually assure a more protracted fight against the vaccine for everyone. Looming over all of this is the spectre of COVID becoming a long-term affliction of the human species, slowing commerce and travel for decades to come, increasing distrust and instability, and punishing the poor.

Delays cost everyone. Eric Feigl-Ding is an epidemiologist with the Federation of American Scientists. He argues, “Delaying the vaccine is a terrible choice. If you were to choose, just take whatever is available because every day for 100,000 vaccinations that are delayed by just one day 15 people will die.”

That’s in the USA. The numbers for Papua New Guinea don’t bear contemplating.

We can’t say we weren’t warned. We knew that if—or more honestly, when—COVID-19 broke out into the community in PNG, it would create a dire threat. One that nobody is equipped to cope with.

Today’s announcement of an urgent effort to guarantee enough vaccines for 20% of Papua New Guineans sound good. Better than the next-to-nothing they’ve got right now, anyway. But 20% of the population in the first year has been the COVAX goal from the start.

That number was based more on market factors than epidemiology. It’s saddening that it takes a crisis of these proportions to raise even the prospect of meeting it.

We now know that vaccines don’t just protect a person from the virus, they also reduce transmission rates vastly, so its possible effective herd immunity may be reached a little shy of the 60% number that’s been bandied about since the beginning of the pandemic.

But here’s the catch: That number only works within discrete populations. We are content to divide ourselves along national boundaries for the moment, so that’s how eradication is going to manifest. The virus will be reduced significantly at first, perhaps even to vanishingly small rates in Europe, North America and large swathes of Asia.

But it only stays eradicated as long as the barriers remain.

And in pockets of the Pacific, in sub-Saharan Africa, remoter parts of Asia and South America, the virus will cling to humanity like a leech, mutating, waiting.

This is Brasil today:

PNG is even less equipped to cope with a runaway virus than Brasil is. We’ve known these were the stakes for a year. It is likely already too late. To his credit, James Marape has been pragmatic about this from the start. Some would say fatalistic.

Some would say that fatalism is an appropriate response.

A million vaccines for PNG isn’t nearly enough. If we’re being fair, the same can be said of every number, for every nation, until the virus is eradicated.

But the way things are going right now, it’s not clear that global eradication going to happen. Because there is no actual global eradication effort. And the odds of success are being driven down right now by wealthy nations getting their own self-interest exactly backwards, because they think there’s a difference between national interest and global interest.

Where they see rivalries, the virus sees opportunities.

COVAX is being undercut by queue jumpers. According to the Lancet, it is facing a multi-billion dollar shortfall, and it’s being outbid by developed nations. It has no long-term funding, and is ill-equipped to build any formal frameworks and supply chains in a marketplace that isn’t just short of vaccines, but also needles, vials, gloves, masks, protective gear—in short, every single thing it needs.

The Lancet policy paper argues convincingly for a global approach to vaccination. But there’s a difference between convincing and compelling. What we need now is the latter. We need world leaders to realise that they’re not protecting themselves if they don’t protect us all.

This is a critical moment in human history, and thus far, we’ve reacted with historic rapidity. But there’s a good chance that we won’t succeed unless we put our differences aside and tackle this global challenge on a truly global scale.

The long road home

Originally published by the Pacific Institute of Public Policy, this 2013 appreciation of Andy Ayamiseba’s life of activism in exile is one of the few narratives of the compelling story of the Black Brothers and their seminal role the formulation of a modern Melanesian identity, and in keeping the West Papuan independence movement alive in Melanesia.

Andy died a few days ago. While he was loved, admired and supported in Vanuatu, he fought tirelessly to win a home he could return to. He died before the dream was achieved.

In 1983, Andy Ayamiseba and the rest of the Black Brothers band descended from their flight to Port Vila’s Bauerfield airport, to be greeted by the entire cabinet of the newly fledged government of Vanuatu. They were, by Melanesian standards, superstars. They had come to assist Father Walter Lini’s Vanua’aku Pati in its first re-election campaign, and to pass on the message of freedom for West Papua. So began a relationship that would span a lifetime of activism, a liberation dream long deferred, and ultimately, a first glimmer of hope for political legitimacy for the West Papuan liberation movement.

The Black Brothers were already widely known and loved in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. Touring PNG in the late 1970s, the band members first met Vanuatu independence figures, including Hilda Lini, Kalkot Mataskelekele and Silas Hakwa. Students at the University of Papua New Guinea at the time, they returned to Vanuatu to play key roles in Vanuatu’s move to independence.

A generation later, it’s hard to imagine the immediacy, the passion and the dynamism of the time. Kalkot Mataskelekele, who would later serve as Solicitor General and on the Supreme Court bench before becoming the republic’s 6th president, was a young firebrand operating a pirate radio service from the bush north of the capital. Hilda Lini, sister to two prime ministers and the first woman elected to Vanuatu’s parliament, was a tireless organiser, working behind the scenes to promote what would become the Vanua’ku Pati.

In hindsight, it seems almost inevitable that the dynamism of this callow young political leadership would mesh and meld with the creative iconoclasm of the Black Brothers. But it had to wait before it reached its full fruition. In 1980 the Indonesian government expelled Ayamiseba and the other band members. Stateless, they sought shelter in the Netherlands. Hilda Lini had contacted them in 1980 during a visit to Europe, but it wasn’t until 1983 that they obtained refugee status and official residency. Finally able to travel again, their first destination was Vanuatu.

It was a triumphal entry. They were welcomed by Father Walter Lini’s government and a large crowd of adoring fans. Likewise, on their first visit to Solomon Islands, the roads were so packed that it took the group two hours to get from the airport into town. Their concert the next day was attended by 28,000 fans.

This week’s [2013] visit to Honiara will be somewhat more low-key, and yet perhaps more epochal than the original Black Brothers crusade. With funding and official support from the government of Vanuatu, independence leaders John Ondawame and Andy Ayamiseba are continuing their tour of Melanesian Spearhead Group members, soliciting support for membership in the sub-regional organisation. The West Papua National Coalition of Liberation, or WPNCL, is an amalgam of two previously divergent wings of the OPM (in English, the Organisation for Papuan Freedom) and a number of political groups advocating for West Papuan independence.

Having met already with the Fijian and Vanuatu prime ministers as well as the incoming chair of the MSG and head of the FLNKS, Andy and John are hopeful that their meetings with Solomon Islands prime minister Darcy Lilo will be equally fruitful. In an interview last week, Ayamiseba explained that he had met and befriended Lilo during his sojourn in Honiara in the mid-90s.

Should Solomon Islands decide to voice its support for WPNCL membership in the MSG, most of the political hurdles will have been cleared for what might prove to be the first crack of light through the doorway of political legitimacy for the cause.
Arguably, the critical opening came weeks before, when Sir Michael Somare voiced the opinion that the MSG is not an intergovernmental organisation, but an organisation of peoples, joined by culture and geography. The statement, made during a celebration of the MSG 25th anniversary, came as a surprise to some. In 2008, it was Somare who flatly blocked a motion to consider West Papuan membership in the MSG. (Admittedly, the motion was ill-timed and ill-prepared. Ayamiseba himself admits that his group had no prior knowledge, and were caught by surprise when it was tabled.)

Political legitimacy for West Papuan independence in the Pacific has long been subject to the vicissitudes of Melanesian politics. While Ayamiseba’s group were the darlings of the Vanua’ku Pati, and by extension the government of Vanuatu, the association came at a price. They were expelled from the country following the party’s schism in 1989, forcing Andy to seek asylum, first in Australia, then in Solomon Islands. His friendship with then-PM Mamaloni notwithstanding, efforts to further the independence movement stalled.

Progress elsewhere in the world was also stymied by realpolitik. In 1986, even nations such as Ghana, which had objected to the manner in which West Papua was brought under Indonesian rule, were less than responsive to overtures by John Ondawame, who had officially joined the independence movement’s leadership following its reunification the year before in Port Vila.

Despite the fact that it clearly flouted international law in its annexation of the territory, no country outside of Melanesia offered significant criticism of Indonesia’s actions in West Papua. Not, at least, until new media and the internet began to break down the wall of silence that had been erected around the territory. But even in the face of clearly documented torture, assassination and political oppression, many nations are still loth to legitimise the independence movement.

In Vanuatu, arguably the home of West Papuan independence, the road to freedom has been a long one, as full of pitfalls and obstacles as Port Vila’s physical thoroughfares – and sometimes, just as poorly managed. When Barak Sope became prime minister in 2000, he brought together nine members of the West Papuan leadership and brokered an accord that would finally bring all independence efforts under one roof. Later that year, his delegation to the UN General Assembly included three West Papuans, two OPM members and one from the Presidium. There, in an alarming example of fervour trumping political savvy, they met with the Cuban delegation.

For all of his energy, support and contributions to Melanesian identity, Barak Sope’s political ineptitude soon brought his government down. His failure even to produce a budget caused significant domestic turmoil, which effectively forced West Papua onto the back burner. It wasn’t until 2003 that foreign affairs minister Serge Vohor welcomed back the Black Brothers, and facilitated the opening of the West Papuan People’s Representative Office, a front for the OPM.

International awareness and support were limited. Vanuatu continued to fumble the issue, balking at formal political support while continuing to express public sympathy and tacit approval. Elsewhere, tribal leader Benny Wenda’s escape from Indonesian custody and flight to the UK opened another front in the campaign. Indonesia did itself no favours when it abused the INTERPOL red list by issuing a warrant for Wenda’s arrest.

For several years, the movement seemed paralysed, unable to organise itself, beset by legal constraints and barely able to manage its own processes. Vanuatu politicians proved fickle, with VP president Edward Natapei voicing support but doing little. Ham Lini, whose personal commitment to the cause remains strong, was unwilling to expend more political capital on the effort after the 2008 MSG debacle. Sato Kilman, the next prime minister in line, wilfully ignored the advice of his own cabinet, supporting Voreqe Bainimarama’s move to allow Indonesia observer status at the organisation.

Quietly persistent, Ayamiseba and Ondawame continued their efforts. Its moral cause made clearer by stark images of torture and brutality circulated by West Papua Media and others, the leadership (under the auspices of the WPNCL) organised an international tour for Benny Wenda, whose travel restrictions were lifted following legal and media campaigns against Indonesia’s INTERPOL warrant. Even Wenda’s rebuff by the New Zealand parliament only fanned the flames of support. His invitation to speak to MPs inside Vanuatu’s parliament was the first of a series of small but significant breakthroughs. Notably, soon-to-be prime minister Moana Carcasses’ attendance at the event was the first public sign of his political break with Kilman.

A naturalised citizen of Tahitian descent, Carcasses perhaps felt the need to placate the nativist inclination common among Ni Vanuatu. Nonetheless, allowing himself to be photographed holding the Morning Star flag (a key symbol of West Papuan independence) symbolised a shift from sympathy to overt political support for the movement. In one of his first acts as prime minister, Carcasses met with Ayamiseba and Ondawame, personally assuring them of his government’s support in their MSG membership bid, and promising the creation of a West Papua desk in the department of foreign affairs.

Arriving as it did on the heels of a surprisingly warm and supportive reception by Bainimarama and other Fiji government officials, the independence movement appeared finally to be seeing the light of day. Outspoken and unambiguous support for membership from the Kanaky leadership was not nearly as surprising; they’ve formally supported independence since the 1990s. Nonetheless, with the FLNKS assuming the group chair shortly, Kanaky support could prove crucial.

At the risk of counting chickens, it seems that the only remaining piece to fall into place is Papua New Guinea. Wenda’s visit to PNG earlier this year did manage to cement some amount of popular support, but achieved few tangible political results. The tea leaves are few and hard to read, but it’s hard to imagine that Somare’s rather startling shift away from outright opposition would have been made were it to cause discomfort in the PNG political establishment.

One of the more popular songs Ayamiseba wrote for the Black Brothers is ‘Liklik Hope Tasol’, a ballad written in Tok Pisin whose title translates to ‘Little Hope At All’. Its narrator lies awake in the early morning hours, the victim of despair. Only the vision of the morning star and the first birds breaking the pre-dawn hush provide the impetus to survive another day. The song, with its clear political imagery and simplistic evocation of strength in adversity, is clearly autobiographical. It is, arguably, the anthem which has animated Ayamiseba’s lifelong pursuit of freedom.
Andy Ayamiseba is old now. While his encroaching frailty complements his unassuming, soft-spoken manner, it masks a dynamism and fervour that only appear after numerous conversations. Once lit, however, that spark provides a glimpse of the man that was, the jazz-funk rebel, walking in his exile hand in hand with equally youthful –and equally naïve– leaders, themselves burdened with defining their respective societies.

What beggars description, though, is the determination required for Ayamiseba and his West Papuan brethren to spend their entire adult lives in pursuit of legitimacy, with only the slightest glint of light to show for that effort. May 1st marks the 50th anniversary of West Papua’s original declaration of independence. Barring any more political missteps or forays into ill-considered revolutionary activity, the coming year might be the one in which its political aspirations begin to be fulfilled. Says Ayamiseba, “You cannot stay blind and deaf for 50 years.”

Post Scriptum. Andy Died February 21 2020. He lived to see the formation of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua, the umbrella organisation representing the chief members of the independence movement. He looked on proudly as its members march triumphantly into the MSG headquarters to lodge their membership application. He was there when Foreign Minister Ralph Regenvanu and Prime Minister Charlot Salwai opened the official ULMWP office in Port Vila.

But he never went home.

HTTPS Everywhere – what is it good for?

There’s a growing chorus of voices in infosec these days, calling for the effective deprecation of unencrypted traffic over the web. The only useful purpose port 80 serves these days, they argue, is to redirect to port 443.

Their arguments tend to run along these lines:

HTTPS is the right way to handle encryption on your website (and other services, too). That’s true. It’s a well-established, well-understood standard that has gone through some awkward moments, but has emerged from the process as a robust and easy-to-use security layer on your web server.
HTTPS protects you from unethical ISPs/states/actors who like to inject your traffic with unwanted ads and other nasties. That’s somewhat true, but requires a little unpacking, because there are some notable edge cases:
1. Many corporations install their own certificate authority on approved devices, and use their own certificates to intervene in communications between you and other secure sites. This allows them to sit in the middle of your communication with your bank, for example.
2. Anyone who can get access to either of the end points can simply watch the unencrypted traffic on either end, rendering any security measures in the communications protocol moot.
3. Setting up and breaking down a secure session is an extremely difficult process that is well-understood by a very few people. The theory is clear enough, but applying it in practice can get hairy. The 2016 WPAD exploit is a prime example. It was demonstrated that you could use a near-obsolete, insecure method of discovering your network’s proxy settings to eavesdrop on secure communications. (Of course, if you could manipulate that setting, you could pretty much do what you want to the browser anyway. The point here is that there are ways for people to eavesdrop on your secure communications and leave you none the wiser, with or without HTTPS.)
4. Establishing the identity of remote sites is still a bit fraught. It’s better today than it was in the past, but an SSL cert on its own is insufficient in the absence of a broader, systematic web of trust. These things require international cooperation, protocols and standards. Not all parties want the same thing, and few indeed are focused only on what’s best for the end user’s privacy. HTTPS Everywhere doesn’t move the markers in this part of the debate.
5. Cross-site tracking cookies are a much more pernicious and troubling way for unscrupulous commercial actors to inject themselves into your day to day web traffic.

None of these are arguments against the use of HTTPS. You should use it when you can. Just because the other guy’s going to win doesn’t mean you shouldn’t at least make him work for it. But these are considerations that have to be borne in mind when people start suggesting that a web with HTTPS everywhere is a safer, more private place for everyone.

HTTPS is growing in use. Get on board! That’s an argumentum ad populum. It’s a useful observation—and a Good Thing—but not reason to move in and of itself.
Plain old HTTP is insecure, and untrustworthy. The first part is true, and people should know it. Google Chrome’s recent decision to mark all plain text websites as insecure is a good move. But the question of trust is more a practical than a technical issue. In other words, you can communicate securely with an untrustworthy information source, and you can communicate insecurely with a trustworthy source. Trust between end points needs to be distinguished from trust in the communications medium. Technical experts who advocate for HTTPS everywhere sometimes confuse the two. Non-technical people often do. Which means we have to be extremely circumspect about what we promise when we talk about making things more secure for them.
HTTPS is secure and will protect you from eavesdropping. Yes it is, and no it will not. Yes, the protocol is solid. It’s really easy to do right (which is incredibly important for security), and it works for the purpose intended. But it’s only one part of a much, much bigger picture. As Bruce Schneier is fond of saying, the bad guys only need to find one way to win. Most systems have more than one way in. Many systems allow state-sanctioned eavesdroppers in through the front door.
Encrypting even normal traffic means that you’re protected from state surveillance across the board. If they can’t differentiate your traffic, it makes it harder for them to single out the things they object to. Sad to say, the real world doesn’t work that way.

If a state wants to watch what you’re accessing over the web, they will find a way. At very least, they will know the end points you’re connecting to. If they’ve singled you out for observation, you’re going to face issues even if you use TOR, VPNs and other tools. Between compromised devices, networks and information providers, your options are quite limited if people decide to watch you individually.

If you’re not being singled out, they probably don’t care what you’re looking at. They might care about individual sources, but in cases like that, they’ll just block the site sources.

But wait—what about someone who’s not yet been targeted, and doesn’t want to be? Good question. There’s a marginal case there, but again, using HTTPS Everywhere is probably not going to be the decisive factor. It sure isn’t in China.

There are very good reasons to support the spread of HTTPS. Anybody who tells you otherwise is just… wrong. You should use it when you’re doing anything that involves your personal information. That includes everything from chatting with friends about what movies are good to transferring millions into your superyacht fund.

But to conclude from this that ‘the only purpose for port 80 these days is to redirect to HTTPS’ is a bit naïve, sad to say. It assumes that there are technical solutions to social/political problems. That’s not necessarily true:

We’d be vastly better off with regulatory/legislative intervention to stop ISPs and others from messing with your web traffic. The reason for this is that removing the mandate to inject gunk into your web traffic is a far more effective way of circumscribing what ISPs are allowed to do. Let’s call it (part of) Net Neutrality. With or without HTTPS, we still need this regulation. Politically, cynical ISPs can point to HTTPS Everywhere and use it as an argument against net neutrality regulation. It’s not entirely rational, but that’s not to say the argument would be ineffective.
When changing collective behaviour, it’s often better to proscribe the behaviour rather than prescribe the technical cure. People will always seek ways to fulfil the letter of the law and still achieve their own selfish ends. So an emphasis on better law is generally more effective than emphasising better tech.
State actors and other surveillance groups generally don’t care that you’re looking at public access websites. When they do care, they just block the site at the ISP level. Yes, there are edge cases where you can get in before they know it matters, but that’s true with and without HTTPS. Encryption does add a slight advantage when it comes to internet whack-a-mole, but it’s only slight. And it’s likely to be ephemeral.
If someone really wants to track you, they will compromise your end points, not the network layer. This is what China does. They just sit people inside the offices of the main online services. Law enforcement and signals intelligence agencies do much the same thing. They’ll either compromise your devices, or they’ll compromise the other end-point, often with the assistance of the service provider. The FBI attempted this with TOR, with partial success.
HTTPS is easy, yes, but easy is not the same as simple. Just because you’ve got your cert properly set up doesn’t mean you’re safe. Focusing on HTTPS to the exclusion of other considerations or overselling its benefits could create a false sense of security. It’s far easier to designate something ‘untrusted’ than it is to determine that the same thing is ‘trusted’. We need to be careful about what we’re selling when we say that HTTPS Everywhere makes us more secure.

Widespread use of HTTPS is a Good Thing, and should be encouraged. But mandating its use everywhere is of limited additional utility where your practical security is concerned.

In a nutshell, universal HTTPS alone is insufficient to change or curb malicious human behaviour; and the additional measures that are necessary don’t require HTTPS everywhere to succeed.

HTTPS everywhere would achieve only a marginal and possibly ephemeral gain. In practical terms, people who are most vulnerable to unwanted collective or individual surveillance by state actors gain very little from this.

But let’s keep perspective: Opposing HTTPS Everywhere is a foolish waste of time and effort. We should encourage its spread. What we should NOT do, though, is pretend that the end of port 80 is the end of our privacy concerns, or even a particularly notable win. It’s a marginal improvement at best.

My beef is with people who think this is a big win for privacy. It’s emphatically not.

SHAME

People’s attitudes toward women are ruining lives, and it’s sickening

A few days ago, I heard news about someone whom I’ve known for almost as long as I’ve been in Vanuatu. She was tied by her hair to a post and beaten senseless by her partner.

Save your anger. I don’t want to hear it. Your outrage is meaningless to me.
You did this. Every single one of you.

Admit it: you loved it when they posted a false report that a local woman had been arrested for prostitution. She was framed and shamed simply because she’d had more than one partner. And you automatically believed she was guilty.

You loved it when a local man was wrongly accused of sexual assault and consorting with prostitutes. He was outed because he refused to lie about someone else. The threat could only work because you were willing to believe the woman was a whore.

You downloaded and shared copies of the intimate photos taken of a young professional who was tricked into sharing them with a man who swore that he was single. His wife takes him back, and the woman he lied to is the one who’s punished. Every time she walks into a meeting, she has to ask herself, ‘have they seen them?’

Yes, she was naïve. Do you think that justifies years of anguish?

You blamed her. You blamed her for being treated cruelly by others.

Blame yourself. You heard your neighbours fighting. You heard that woman cry out. You saw her tears.

You. Not someone else. Not someone down the road or in the next yard.

You’re reading this and thinking I’m talking about everyone else. I am talking about you.

For months, you did nothing after your neighbour buried his wife under a nakatambol tree. You didn’t even ask where she was.

You let a girl jump to her death from a moving bus. You let her death go unpunished. And then to add insult to injury, you warned young women not to travel at night.

You didn’t lift a finger when that faith healer groped and sexually assaulted your daughter. Just changed churches and warned your daughter to look after herself. You were the one who sent her to him.

You let a pastor—a pastor—beat a woman in broad daylight in the main street of town, and you did nothing but stand around gawping.

Stop shifting the blame. Stop pretending that it’s not all men. Because it is all men. It’s all of us. Every single one of us. Yes, me too.

And you.

Not the other readers: YOU

When is it going to dawn on you that the way we treat our women is our national shame? What is it going to take?

My shame is real. I’ve known this woman for over a decade, and when we were neighbours, I made sure nothing happened to her. But I moved on and she didn’t. And I said nothing last week when she showed up with a black eye. I didn’t want her to feel bad. Now this happens, and I’m ashamed of my cowardice. I did nothing to support her.

No longer.

But anything I do won’t make one bit of difference if the rest of you continue being the callous, uncaring people that you’ve been. Don’t deny it. There is not an adult in Vanuatu who hasn’t turned a blind eye toward abuse. If you think you’re not part of the problem, then you’re a bigger part of it than you know.

You read that clickbait smear. You read that post, and you believed it. Even now, you’re twisting around, trying to find a way to defend your prejudice. You can’t. It was a pack of lies.

But you believed it because that’s what you think women are like.

I can’t even bring myself to care whether I’ve changed your mind any more. All I have to say is shame. Shame on me for letting a friend hurt so much. For letting so many suffer. Shame on me for letting you get away with it.

I don’t know how I’m going to sleep tonight. But to my shame, I know I will.
And shame on you. It could all change tomorrow. But it won’t. Because of you.

If you really are sincere about wanting to make things better, read this again, and accept in your heart of hearts that I am talking about you. And for once in your life, feel a bit of shame for your role in this suffering.

Then do something about it. Every day. Until the job is done, and the shame is gone.

Outside Influences

Something that’s been bothering me about ‘outside’ influences….

One of the common refrains that you hear whenever someone advocates for change–here in Vanuatu, and throughout the world–is that these are foreign ideas imposed by radically different cultures. In other words, they’re incompatible with the way of life we’ve enjoyed since we were created according to our particular culture’s creation story.

But most progressive ideas are not foreign ideas. They’re not ‘western’, and they certainly are not incompatible.

How do I know? Because I know my own culture. I come from a deeply conservative Irish background, and there is nothing in my heritage that drove me to protest nuclear proliferation, to oppose government corruption, to advocate for environmental causes, or to oppose violence against women and children.

I learned all those things on my own. Yes, I am happy and grateful to be able to stand on the shoulders of giants in all of these things. The people who pioneered these concepts in Vanuatu–Marc Neil-Jones, Wan Smolbag, Merelyn Tahi, Grace Molisa, Florence Leingkon, and now Stephanie Ephraim–are not western dupes. They are all the opposite of easily led.

People who have the strength to campaign for justice, who have the courage to belief that we owe our children a better world… they’re not stooges of the New World Order. They are your brother, your sister, your auntie, your dad.

Respect for kastom? Yes. Absolutely. As long as kastom means peace and harmony FOR ALL.

But when ‘respect’ means sit down and shut up and wait your turn (which will never come, because it’s always my turn), that’s not kastom. That’s just plain old wrong.

Our culture should stand strong against outside influences? Well… I don’t know. Culture–all culture, everywhere–is changing every day, every moment. Kastom and culture are who we are today. They are who we are yesterday, too. And tomorrow.

And each of those is different.

Oppose change if you must. But if you do, at least to honest enough to attack the idea on its merits, not merely because it’s ‘not ours’.

Nobody told Flo she didn’t have to take it any more. Nobody told Steph to get cussing mad. Nobody told Grace to denounce injustice. Nobody told Merelyn to devote herself to saving lives.

Their experience, their insight, and their activism is born out of the blood and soil of Vanuatu just as much as Independence was.

Did Russia ‘hack the election?’ Yes and No

Here’s a quick summation of where we stand, based on public domain analysis and reporting, vis-à-vis the purported Russian ‘hack’ of the US Presidential election.

Anyone who claims that the Podesta emails were not real is delusional. There’s no real dispute over that.

Anyone who believes that Julian Assange isn’t biased against Hilary Clinton is also delusional. Mr Assange also shows a disturbingly willful blindness to find any problems with the state of civil liberties and human rights in Russia—this, again, is not really subject to controversy.

Anyone who believes that Assange can be certain about the origin of the Podesta emails doesn’t understand chain of custody. His de facto imprisonment in the Ecuadorian Embassy makes it physically impossible for him to objectively, empirically verify any claims of provenance. If this were evidence for the courts, he wouldn’t be allowed to testify as to the provenance of the emails.

Anyone who has examined the pattern of overt and covert activities as already detailed by public domain sources that has been judged with a high or a moderate level to confidence to originate from the Russian state would be foolish to deny that there isn’t a strong preponderance of evidence that yes, Russia conducted an anti-Clinton (dis)information campaign.

On-the-record print and TV interviews with avowed state-paid Russian trolls who profess a strong preference for Donald Trump constitute probitive evidence of a classic old-school dezinformatsiya effort. It’s something that both sides used frequently in the Cold War. RT’s overt anti-Clinton editorial slant is obvious, and strongly contributory. Assange’s frequent appearances on the channel are evidence of nothing more than a bit of narcissism on his part.

The fact that the APT28 modus operandi is consistent with well-documented spying activities against the Bundestag as well as the TV5 cyber-attack is a substantive plank in the circumstantial case. The fact that APT28 code was almost exclusively developed in a Russian language build environment, in the Moscow time zone is damning. The fact that that they used of bit.ly as an URL-obfuscator—and then committed a rooky OPSEC slip-up that allowed investigators to see what other individuals were targeted by the same account—is compelling. The fact that APT28 source has been found in the wild doesn’t diminish the likelihood that this particular use of it originated from the Russian state. The use of encryption keys and certs (e.g. the way the software ‘phones home’ securely) pretty much makes it impossible for third parties to use the code without significant—and obvious—re-engineering. There is no evidence of such changes. In fact, at least one cert used in the Bundestag hacks was re-used in this effort.

The evidence suggesting that Guccifer 2.0 is almost certainly not Romanian (as ‘he’ claimed), and is probably a Russian speaker, is not probitive, but it’s strongly contributory to a conclusion that the account is a sock puppet, probably linked to a Russian source.

The USA intelligence community lacks credibility. It has relied far too much on its own much-sullied authority to make its arguments. But its credibility is laughable, and its patent insincerity and systematic dishonesty is demonstrated by a mountain of evidence. The fact that their assertions are consistent with open-source evidence indicates, however, that they’re not lying about everything—this time. That does nothing to diminish the fact that they’re driving a clear agenda, possibly because they don’t trust Donald Trump and they feel he’s compromised, or at least willing to put personal interest before national interest.

Conclusion: It’s not necessary to believe the CIA/NSA/FBI to conclude that there is a concerted Russian effort to subvert the integrity of key aspects of American democratic institutions, including the US Presidential election. The Russian state has motive, means, opportunity and there is sufficient evidence to suggest that, in absence of any more compelling explanation, they have probably been at it for quite some time. Did they ‘hack the election’? No. Did they sway it? They certainly put a lot of time and resources into the effort. Did they change the outcome? Probably not. The single event that correlates most closely with an actual swing in the electorate is James Comey’s letter to Congress concerning the Weiner laptop. Did they help swing it? Almost certainly, yes. There’s a compelling argument to be made that if countless sources—with Russian actors prominent among them—hadn’t worked so hard to poison the Clinton well, the Comey announcement wouldn’t have been so decisive.

Continue reading →

Don’t argue as if the world were sane

Glenn Greenwald, in every respect a reputable, diligent and ferociously smart gadfly, continually forgets to remember that few people are as sane and as willing to be led by evidence as he is. It’s his great failing.

Nowhere is it more visible than in his incredulity toward the CIA and the rest of the US state security apparatus concerning their claims of Russian tampering in the election process. He is dead right to mistrust the CIA’s every utterance. Lying, after all, is a large part of what they do for a living. Likewise, a politicised and partisan FBI is not a useful source for agenda-free commentary on Russia’s disinformation campaign.

But none of the above provides a sufficient basis to say that Russia has not played a direct and active role in the subversion of the American democratic process. Using the espionage establishment’s lack of credibility to refute the claim of Russian meddling is completely illogical.

We discount or discard the CIA’s claims precisely because we know that they’ve done far, far worse countless times in the past. We know they’ve planted or spun innumerable stories. To people living in vulnerable parts of the world, it’s simply axiomatic that Voice of America and USAID are tools of American influence. We also know they regularly use economic leverage to bring about certain policies, and they regularly plant stories to tarnish the image of any government that doesn’t toe their line.

Yes, they’re hypocrites and liars. Nobody disputes that. Yes, they’re guilty of exactly the sins of which Russia stand accused. But if anything, that realisation should reinforce the suspicion that Russia might be giving back as good as it gets. (Or better, depending on where you stand and how you feel about the success of the campaign to tarnish Hillary Clinton’s reputation.)

The sins of which the Russians stand accused are exactly the things that powerful countries do. They do it continually, shamelessly and cynically. It’s what they do. Continue reading →

Advisors were never the problem

It’s always someone else’s fault. Even when we were kids, it was always little brother or sister who stole the cookies, spilled the milk or woke the baby. Then you went to school, and it was the kid at the desk behind you.

Then you began to work, and it was anyone but you. Now you’re on the national stage, and it’s not Vanuatu’s fault; it’s some insidious foreigner whose life is devoted to subverting your country.

It ain’t that simple. It never was that simple.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: foreign technical advisors are just that—advisors. They have no executive power, they do not make policy, and they perform their work at the pleasure of the administration of the day.

When we start blaming technical advisors for our problems, we’re no better than a child blaming a sibling for something they both did. Nobody is forcing us to take advice. Continue reading →

THE SCRIPTORVM

Collected essays, columns, etc. by Dan McGarry

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