The New York Times covered Aung San Suu Kyi's visit to Thailand

This week, The New York Times covered Aung San Suu Kyi's visit to Thailand -- the first foreign trip for Myanmar(Burma)'s opposition leader in 25 years. Many people who have dealt with Suu Kyi and her political entourage over the years say that the Times report, which described a striking lack of organization in the upper ranks of the National League for Democracy (NLD), was spot-on.

Last week, Suu Kyi's staff turned down a request for a meeting from Paul Collier, one of the world's top economists. Their excuse: The Lady was busy. "Perhaps her staffers don't know who Collier is," one source in the opposition told me. "The Myanmar opposition movement has missed the chance to benefit from a great mind." Meanwhile, government newspapers covered have reported that ministers and presidential advisors gave Collier plenty of time.

Prominent experts from the Myanmar exile community, many of them with valuable experience acquired in their years abroad, say that the NLD is ignoring them even while the government is actively soliciting their services. "There is no proper mechanism set up by Suu Kyi for Myanmar researchers to play a contributing role to the opposition movement," says a Myanmar scholar who graduated from a top U.S. university and visited Yangon a few months ago.

The NLD is also having problems with reporters. Lately there have been increasing tensions between the NLD and local journalists. In early May, a member of Suu Kyi's security staff manhandled a local photojournalist who tried to take pictures of the Lady. Local reporters say that the bodyguards abused them, saying: "You media people are doing this for money. We don't make a f---ing penny. We face jail time because we're doing politics."

Many NLD members suffered under the previous regime. But Suu Kyi, who holds to a rigorous moral code, rightly tends to dismiss those who bring this up. She once famously said: "If you choose to do something, then you shouldn't say it's a sacrifice, because nobody forced you to do it." Moreover, since many journalists (and activists-turned-journalists) were also imprisoned by the military regime for their political and professional work, the self-righteousness and arrogance of the NLD members are likely to backfire.

Local reporters have complained in the past few weeks that the NLD no longer issues open invitations to the media to cover important political events, such as Suu Kyi's recent meeting with India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Maung Wuntha, a well-respected veteran journalist and a former leading member of the NLD in 1988, told me that the NLD staffers who are close to Suu Kyi need to learn how to work in a more media-friendly manner: "Many of them tend to see journalists as careerists who do not have any principles and commitment to the interests of the country. This perception is a serious problem. Unless they realize that journalists are doing a public service, we aren't going to see any fundamental improvement in relations between politicians and reporters."

Another public criticism of Suu Kyi and her staff has come from an unexpected source: staunch NLD supporters outside of Myanmar. Eight major Myanmar exile organizations -- including such dedicated and well-connected groups such as the Network for Democracy and Development, the Women's League of Myanmar, and the Human Rights Education Institute of Myanmar in Thailand - asked for some face time with Aung San Suu Kyi during her visit in Bangkok, but to no avail. For perhaps the first time since 1988, many prominent exiled activists came together to express their frustration in the Myanmar-language media. "We feel sad," said Khin Ohmar, NDD chairwoman, told The Irrawaddy, a leading Myanmar-language magazine. "We have worked tirelessly for our country since 1988. We can't go home, so while our leader's visiting us here, we all would like to meet her and exchange views and experiences."

You can find signs of frustration not only on the Thai-Myanmar border, but also in the capitals of the United States and Europe. Several lobbyists who relentlessly advocated on behalf of Suu Kyi and her "principle-centered policy" of economic sanctions for decades are now disoriented by the Lady's apparent lack of coordination and inability to delegate. A dedicated Suu Kyi advocate told me he's been trying to get in touch with the NLD's information department for months to arrange a conversation between Suu Kyi and the president of a newly democratizing Asian country, but his correspondence has gone unanswered.

Of course, it's not fair to blame Suu Kyi for all these problems, given that the party's organization is still weak. Most party activists (including herself) have spent long periods in detention - perhaps the most important among many legitimate excuses for the problem. By now, though, it's high time for Aung San Suu Kyi and her party to step back, practice self-criticism, and think aloud about whether they have burned too many bridges too quickly in this transitional phase. Perhaps what Suu Kyi needs is not just an entourage, but a full-blown chief of staff with a proper team that is capable of strategic planning and management and can support her in the decision-making process. Moral courage and clarity are hugely important in politics, but you also need the capacity to cultivate your base and craft sound policies if you really want to get things done.

cyber-battles raise fears of cyber-blowback

  yawdlao

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is warning American businesses about an unusually potent computer virus that infected Iran’s oil industry even as suspicions persist that the United States is responsible for secretly creating and unleashing cyberweapons against foreign countries.
The government’s dual roles of alerting U.S. companies about these threats and producing powerful software weapons and eavesdropping tools underscore the risks of an unintended, online boomerang.
Unlike a bullet or missile fired at an enemy, a cyberweapon that spreads across the Internet may circle back accidentally to infect computers it was never supposed to target. It’s one of the unusual challenges facing the programmers who build such weapons, and presidents who must decide when to launch them.
The Homeland Security Department’s warning about the new virus, known as “Flame,” assured U.S. companies that no infections had been discovered so far inside the U.S. It described Flame as an espionage tool that was sophisticated in design, using encryption and other techniques to help break into computers and move through corporate or private networks. The virus can eavesdrop on data traffic, take screenshots and record audio and keystrokes. The department said the origin is a mystery.

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The White House has declined to discuss the virus.
Suspicions heightened
But suspicions about the U.S. government’s role in the use of cyberweapons were heightened by



a report in Friday’s New York Times

. Based on anonymous sources, it said President Barack Obama secretly had ordered the use of another sophisticated cyberweapon, known as Stuxnet, to attack the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities. The order was an extension of a sabotage program that the Times said began during the Bush administration.
Private security researchers long have suspected that the U.S. and Israeli governments were responsible for Stuxnet. But the newspaper’s detailed description of conversations in the Oval Office among Obama, the vice president and the CIA director about the U.S. government’s responsibility for Stuxnet is the most direct evidence of this to date. U.S. officials rarely discuss the use of cyberweapons outside of classified settings.
Stuxnet is believed to have been released as early as 2009. It was discovered in June 2010 by a Belarusian antivirus researcher analyzing a customer’s infected computer in Iran. It targeted electronic program controllers built by Siemens AG of Germany that were installed in Iran. The U.S. government also circulated warnings to American businesses about Stuxnet after it was detected.
The White House said Friday it would not discuss whether the U.S. was responsible for the Stuxnet attacks on Iran.
“I’m not able to comment on any of the specifics or details,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said. “That information is classified for a reason, and it is kept secret. It is intended not to be publicized because publicizing it would pose a threat to our national security.”
Uncharted territory
Cyberweapons are uncharted territory because the U.S. laws are ambiguous about their use, and questions about their effectiveness and reliability are mostly unresolved. Attackers online can disguise their origins or even impersonate an innocent bystander organization, making it difficult to identify actual targets when responding to attacks.
Viruses and malicious software, known as malware, rely on vulnerabilities in commercial software and hardware products. But it is hard to design a single payload that always will succeed because the target may have fixed a software vulnerability or placed computers behind a firewall.
On the Internet, where being connected is a virtue, an attack intended for one target can spread unexpectedly. Whether a cyberweapon can boomerang depends on its state of the art, according to computer security experts. On that point, there are deep divisions over Flame.
Russian digital security provider Kaspersky Lab, which first identified the virus, said Flame’s complexity and functionality “exceed those of all other cybermenaces known to date.” There is no doubt, the company said, that a government sponsored the research that developed it. Yet Flame’s author remains unknown because there is no information in the code of the virus that would link it to a particular country.
Other experts said it wasn’t as fearsome.
‘No secret sauce’
Much of the code used to build the virus is old and available on the Internet, said Becky Bace, chief strategist at the Center for Forensics, Information Technology and Security at the University of South Alabama. Flame could have been developed by a small team of smart people who are motivated and have financial backing, she said, making it just as likely a criminal enterprise or a group working as surrogates could have been responsible.
“Here’s the wake-up call as far as cyber is concerned: You don’t have to be a nation-state to have what it would take to put together a threat of this particular level of sophistication,” said Bace, who spent 12 years at the National Security Agency working on intrusion detection and network security. “There’s no secret sauce here.”
Stuxnet was far more complex.
Still, Stuxnet could not have worked without detailed intelligence about Iran’s nuclear program that was obtained through conventional spycraft, said Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure, a digital security company in Helsinki, Finland. The countries with the motivation and the means to gather that data are the United States and Israel, he said.
“This is at the level of complexity that very few organizations in the world would even attempt,” said Hypponen, who has studied Stuxnet and Flame. “Basically you have to have moles. Most of what they needed to pull this off was most likely collected with what we would characterize as traditional intelligence work.”
Collateral damage?
The more intricately designed a cyberweapon is, the less likely it will boomerang. Stuxnet spread well beyond the Iranian computer networks it was intended to hit. But the collateral damage was minimal because the virus was developed to go after very specific targets.
“When some of these super sophisticated things spread, it’s bad but it may not have the same impact because the virus itself is so complex,” said Jacob Olcott, a senior cybersecurity expert at Good Harbor Consulting. “It’s designed to only have its impact when it finds certain conditions.”
Israel is a world leader in cybertechnology and senior Israeli officials did little to deflect suspicion about that country’s involvement in cyberweapons. “Whoever sees the Iranian threat as a significant threat is likely to take various steps, including these, to hobble it,” said Vice Premier Moshe Yaalon, a former military chief and minister of strategic affairs.
A senior defense official involved in Israel’s cyberwarfare program said Friday that, “Israel is investing heavily in units that deal with cyberwarfare both for defense and offense.” He would not elaborate. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not allowed to speak with the media.
Isaac Ben-Israel, an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on cybersecurity issues, declined Friday to say whether Israel was involved with Stuxnet.
It could take years to know who is responsible, which is what is so unsettling about attacks in cyberspace. “We are very good as an industry at figuring out what a piece of malware does,” said Dave Marcus, director of advanced research and threat intelligence at digital security giant McAfee. “But we are less accurate when it comes to saying what group is responsible for it, or it came from this country or that organization.”
More about the battles in cyberspace:

• Red Tape: Was ‘Flame’ created by cyberwarriors or gamers?
• 
  
  
  Video: Inside an Iranian nuclear research facility
  
  
• Israel’s Barak to NBC: Nuclear Iran is unacceptable

Associated Press writers Anne Gearan in Washington and Ian Deitch in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

© 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Article source: http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/47658329/ns/technology_and_science-security/

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Biggest Vein of Gold in the World?

Biggest Vein of Gold in the World?

A rich vein of gold.

The biggest gold vein in the world has been discovered in Burma. The gigantic gold vein is mainly located in the Mae-wai region of Karen State but it reaches Toungoo area in the Pegu District through the Kyaik-htee-yoe region in the Mon State. About ten miles wide at some places and almost 120 miles long?

Above was the gist of what U Soe Thein, a retired Geology Professor from the century-old Rangoon University and the Managing Director of Myanmar Adventure Metal International Mining Ltd based at Pegu in Burma, proudly said of the mineral discovery of his lifetime. The vein doesn’t stop at Burma as it continues under the sea and resurfaces at Indonesia.

According to Soe Thein it took NASA’s LANDSAT-7 satellite at six orbital locations to photo-survey the whole Burma’s part of the massive vein. The conservatively estimated concentration of pure gold is 20 grams per a ton of rock ore.

Mae-wai in the Karen State is the most concentrated part of the gold vein but the location is in the remote jungles of Karen State virtually controlled  by the armed-insurgents from the KNU and the KNU’s licensed miners have been extracting tons of gold from the area last few years. High grade gold presently being extracted in large quantities from Shwe Kyin gold mines are part of that vein.

Maybe the Canadian goldmining conglomerate Ivanhoe will come back to resume their pilot gold mine at Modi-Taung Mount at 150 km southeast of Mandalay in Central Burma. In December 2001 Ivanhoe’s geologists discovered 3,475 Grams/Ton very-high-grade gold at the Block-10 of Modi-Taung Project.

Ivanhoe was forced to abandon the project in 2007 as the relentless pressure from pro-democracy groups like Canadian Friends of Burma finally became unbearable. It basically sold all its assets and projects to Norinco a Chinese weapon manufacturing firm.

Ivanhoe's Modi_taung workers (and one depressed Burmese Elephant).

Maybe Ivanhoe is already back in Burma now because of all the favourable political situations. We just do not know yet!

Underground Gold Vein in Modi-Taung Hills.

                                                           ************************ 

(This latest Burma Mining update was from AFP March 15.)

The Philippines’ largest gold miner said Wednesday it is keen to invest in Burma as the former military-ruled state makes tentative political reforms and tries to lure investors with tax breaks.

Philex Mining Corp. has sent representatives to Burma in recent weeks to look at opportunities and assess the investment climate, company senior vice-president Michael Toledo told AFP.

“Myanmar [Burma] is opening up and a lot of businesses are really looking at that country. We do not want to be left behind,” he said.

He said Philex was eyeing metallic minerals and even natural gas in Burma, but did not disclose which local companies they were dealing with.

“We are looking at the regulatory framework, the political landscape, how business is run there, who are the people to talk to. This is the regular due diligence that companies do,” Toledo said.

The company, which posted a record net income of 5.8 billion pesos ($US136 million) in 2011, is also eyeing investments in gold and copper in Indonesia, Toledo said.

He stressed the talks were exploratory and that no commitments had been made.