ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

Share Tweet Email   2 Don't panic! Don't panic! BBC The UK's Ministry of Defence saw a significant spike in security breaches last year, the government has confirmed. Figures released in Parliament on Friday revealed that security incidents—including "cyber attacks"—had rocketed almost 40 percent in 2015. Defence minister Mark Lancaster said that the MoD had recorded 2,145 breaches last year, compared with 1,547 in 2014. Enlarge / Table shows number of security breaches at the UK's Ministry of Defence, sans breakout figures for "cyber attacks." MoDLabour MP Kevan Jones asked the under-secretary of state, in a written parliamentary question, to disclose unauthorised entries to military bases, thefts or losses of classified material, other security breaches, and successful Internet-based attacks on the Whitehall department. However, on that final request, the minister declined to offer a breakdown. "I am withholding the informatio

By Dan Seitz It’s popular, in media, to depict governments as vast machines that know exactly what they’re doing. The truth, though, is a government is just a group of people, with the same weaknesses and fallacies of people. The NSA is no different, whether it’s making AT&T do all the work or blatantly violating your privacy for laughs . And that would be fine if one of the NSA’s methods of blowing off work wasn’t using what amounts to a marketing algorithm to decide who’s getting killed by drone strikes. And it’s a badly engineered one, to boot. Ars Technica has a detailed breakdown of the NSA’s SKYNET program . Which is an apt name, because SKYNET is a “big data” application that pulls metadata from cell phones, like where you called and who you talked to, and puts it to a machine-learning algorithm. It’s built on some questionable assumptions, as well: If you turn off your phone or let your buddy borrow it, the algorithm marks it as an attempt to avoid surveillance. Ba

In an article in a British newspaper Russia's ambassador to the UK reveals the Russians were told by the Western powers that after the US proclaimed a no-fly zone ISIS would capture Damascus By Alexander Mercouris Alexander Yakovenko, Russia’s ambassador to Britain, dropped something of a bombshell on Monday, though one that has gone completely unnoticed. In a piece in the print edition of the London Evening Standard defending Russian policy in Syria he made the following extraordinary disclosure: “Last summer we were told by our Western partners that in October Damascus would fall to IS (ie. the Islamic State - AM). What they were planning to do next we don’t know. Probably, they would have ended up painting the extremists white and accepting them as a Sunni state straddling Iraq and Syria”. The summer - when these conversations between the Western powers and the Russians allegedly took place - was the time when the US was in discussions with Turkey and Jordan about setting up a

Kurdish fighters fire shells towards what they said were ISIL strongholds in Tel Abyad of Raqqa governorate after they said they took control of the area in this June 15, 2015 photo. (Photo: Reuters) The Kurdish-backed Syria Democratic Forces (SDF) took control of around 70 percent of the town of Tal Rifaat on Monday, seizing territory close to the Turkish border and pushing east towards Islamic State-held territory, conflict monitors said. The move means the SDF -- which include the Kurdish YPG militia -- has further consolidated recent gains around the rebel-held Syrian town of Azaz, the last before the border with Turkey. Turkey, which considers the YPG to be a terrorist group, has warned Kurdish fighters in northern Syria they would face the "harshest reaction" if they tried to capture Azaz and has been shelling SDF forces for the past few days. But YPG fighters appear now to be moving eastwards rather than north, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group

I have long nursed the suspicion that Taliban units, Isis and government militias are not fighting about religion or government at all, more about mafia power By Robert Fisk If anyone wants to understand the shame of Afghanistan - the yearly cull of civilians, the beheadings, the execution by single shots, the kidnapping of women - they have only to read the shocking UN report just published in Kabul. It is laced with fearful eyewitness descriptions of brutality. Isis features in its 87 pages with its usual depravity (in Afghanistan, of course, not in Iraq or Syria) and the report’s statistics show clearly that, last year, there were more civilians killed or wounded in the country than in any year since 2009. In 2015 alone, 3,545 civilians were killed and 7,457 injured. Since 2009, the total civilian dead – not soldiers, militiamen or Taliban – comes to 21,323 dead. And this, remember, is the graveyard of empires into which we blithely trod after 9/11 on the basis that we would not “fo

By Tyler Durden Update : The following video depicts the aftermath of the shelling, which has reportedly claimed the lives of at least two civilians. (as  RT reports , "a video released by the Syrian Kurdish news agency ANHA and obtained by Ruptly shows damaged buildings and people rushing to take care of the wounded in the village of Maryamayn near the town of Afrin") Update : Reports indicate the Turkish army has crossed the border into Syria. " The Syrian government says Turkish forces were believed to be among 100 gunmen it said entered Syria on Saturday accompanied by 12 pick-up trucks mounted with heavy machine guns, in an ongoing supply operation to insurgents fighting Damascus ,"  Reuters reports . "The operation of supplying ammunition and weapons is continuing via the Bab al-Salama crossing to the Syrian area of Azaz," the Assad government says. Meanwhile, since all that would take to unleash a full-blown war is for some Russian

Week Eighteen of the Russian Intervention in Syria The Saker The situation in Syria has reached a watershed moment and a dramatic escalation of the war appears imminent. Let’s look again at how we reached this point. During the first phase of the operation, the Syrian armed forces were unable to achieve an immediate strategic success. This is rather unsurprising. It is important to remember here that during the first weeks of the operation the Russian did not provide close air support to the Syrians. Instead, they chose to systematically degrade the entire Daesh (Note: I refer to *all* terrorist in Syria as “Daesh”) infrastructure including command posts, communication nodes, oil dumps, ammo dumps, supply routes, etc. This was important work, but it did not have an immediate impact upon the Syrian military. Then the Russians turned to two important tasks: to push back Daesh in the Latakia province and to hit the illegal oil trade between Daesh and Turkey. The first goal was needed for

Deir Ezzor, SANA – A mass grave was uncovered in Mrat town in the eastern countryside of Deir Ezzor province containing tens of bodies of people who were killed by ISIS terrorists. The grave, which was found by the town’s locals, consists of a trench in the “7th kilometers” area near Mrat town. Local sources told SANA reporter that the remains of more than 100 people shot dead, including children, were buried in the mass grave. A similar grave was found by the locals of al-Kishkiyeh town in the eastern Deir Ezzor in December 2014 that contained the remains of tens of people from al-Shei’tat tribe who were shot dead by ISIS terrorists. M. al-Frieh/H. Said