Human Rights in Chechnya

They never go out alone, and when they are in their small apartment here in the capital of Chechnya, a flat screen on the wall displays a continuous feed from security cameras in the hall and stairway outside.

When the three men squeeze into their little car, they can activate a video camera and microphone in case of trouble and push a small red button on their dashboard to transmit sound directly to their main office 900 miles away.

“It’s an internal rule,” said Vladislav Sadykov, 46, a lawyer who leads the group. “We always travel together. If you are alone, it is easier to kidnap and torture you. The pictures are for protection, and also in case they kill us it will be recorded.”

The three men make up the current shift in a rotation of visiting human rights investigators called the Joint Mobile Group, which has taken on kidnapping and torture cases in this Russian republic that it considers too dangerous for resident human rights workers to handle.

“All local human rights people here live in danger,” said Dmitri Laptev, 24, a lawyer who has been in Grozny for 45 days on his third rotation. “Their homes can be burned. Their children can be kidnapped.”

The separatist war is mostly over in Chechnya, but kidnappings and extrajudicial killings continue in a more targeted way against people who support the rebels or speak out against the government of the Chechen leader, Ramzan A. Kadyrov, human rights groups say.

“When you talk to ordinary people, you are shocked to see how afraid they are,” Mr. Laptev said.

The human rights group Memorial said its monitors were finding it more difficult to do their work, partly because victims and their relatives have become more frightened than in the past about reporting abuses.

“The kidnapping goes on without fear,” said Mr. Sadykov, who is here on his fourth tour. “They do it openly. They show that they are with law enforcement, and law enforcement leaves them alone.”

He added: “It’s simple work, no investigation, no documents, no legal steps. Just seize someone and take him away.”

The Joint Mobile Group, with its main office in Nizhny Novgorod, recruits lawyers and investigators from human rights organizations around the country to work in teams of three in Chechnya for a month or more.

In May, the group was recognized with the annual Front Line Award for Human Rights Defenders at Risk, awarded in Dublin by the Mary Robinson Foundation — Climate Justice, for its work in bringing human rights abuses to light.

“We work like investigators, looking at pictures, talking to witnesses,” Mr. Sadykov said. “We do all this the way it should be done, though we have no official standing. We get evidence and then we ask official organs to make their own investigation.”

The team’s work sometimes bears fruit, he said, and charges have been brought against some law enforcement officers.

The Joint Mobile Group was founded in 2009 after the abduction and killing of Natalya Estemirova, a local researcher for Memorial who was one of the most persistent and best-known activists in Chechnya.

Two of Ms. Estemirova’s colleagues at Memorial were evacuated and one who worked closely with her moved to Norway.

Since Ms. Estemirova’s death, human rights advocates here have mostly stepped back from confronting the authorities directly with reports of abuses, Mr. Sadykov said. Memorial has at times withdrawn its monitors from Chechnya for periods of several weeks or several months.

In a way, the Joint Mobile Group is carrying on Ms. Estemirova’s work.

“They had the idea that she was causing problems and without her there would be fewer problems,” Mr. Sadykov said. “But who am I? We rotate. They know there are people behind us and that if they kill me someone else will come.”

Among the half-dozen cases the group is currently pursuing is one of Ms. Estemirova’s final ones, the disappearance of a former rebel named Apti Zainalov, 23 at the time, who had turned himself in and served a year in prison. After his release, he disappeared in 2009, reappeared briefly under armed guard in a hospital and then vanished again.

In the days before she was killed, Ms. Estemirova had been demanding information about him from the hospital and the police, and the Joint Mobile Group has continued the pressure.

But Mr. Zainalov’s mother, Aima Makayeva, said she was weary of the pursuit and was ready to abandon the legal case if the authorities would just hand back her son.

“The only thing left is to go to Kadyrov,” she said. It is a view that is often expressed in Chechnya, where Mr. Kadyrov is in firm control of both the government and the security forces.

The tactic might work, Mr. Sadykov said. It would relieve the authorities of the constant pressure being brought by the investigators, and of the possibility that someone might actually be arrested and charged.

But, Mr. Sadykov said, it would run counter to the aim of the advocates to foster the rule of law and would instead demonstrate that it is still the men with guns who have the power to seize and release.

“The system is like a swamp,” Mr. Laptev said. “You throw in a stone and you make some ripples, and then it quiets down and the stone sinks to the bottom.”

Mr. Sadykov had an inside look at the system last year when he was part of a three-person team held overnight in a police station while investigating a report of a human rights violation. The group was released unharmed and has filed its own case charging illegal detention.

In a late-night discussion, he said, the police defended their methods, saying a harsh environment demands harsh tactics. “You have to torture,” he said one officer told him. “Without torture how can you fight terrorism?”

But Mr. Sadykov also observed that the work of human rights monitors seemed at least to be making an impression. When the three were released, he said, an officer asked him to sign a statement confirming that they had not been mistreated.

“Otherwise,” the officer said, “you will say we tortured you.”

Elena Shvarts (RIP)

From My Friend Hillary...

Tomorrow the United States and Russia will sign the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Start) in Prague, reducing the number of strategic nuclear warheads in our arsenals to levels not seen since the first decade of the nuclear age. This verifiable reduction by the world's two largest nuclear powers reflects our commitment to the basic bargain of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) – all nations have the right to seek the peaceful use of nuclear energy, but they all also have the responsibility to prevent nuclear proliferation, and those that do possess these weapons must work towards disarmament.

This agreement is just one of several concrete steps the United States is taking to make good on President Obama's pledge to make America and the world safer by reducing the threat of nuclear weapons, proliferation and terrorism.

Yesterday the president announced the US government's Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), which provides a roadmap for reducing the role and numbers of our nuclear weapons while more effectively protecting the United States and our allies from today's most pressing threats.

Next week President Obama will host more than 40 leaders at a nuclear security summit for the purpose of securing all vulnerable nuclear materials as swiftly as possible to prevent them from falling into the hands of terrorists.

And along with our international partners, the United States is pursuing diplomatic efforts that create real consequences for states such as Iran and North Korea that defy the global non-proliferation regime.

These steps send clear messages about our priorities and our resolve. To our allies and partners, and all those who have long looked to the United States as an underwriter of regional and global security: our commitment to defend our interests and our allies has never been stronger. These steps will make us all safer and more secure.

To those who refuse to meet their international obligations and seek to intimidate their neighbours: the world is more united than ever before and will not accept your intransigence.

Tomorrow's agreement is a testament to our own determination to meet our obligations under the NPT and the special responsibilities that the United States and Russia bear as the two largest nuclear powers.

The New Start Treaty includes a 30% reduction in the number of strategic nuclear warheads the United States and Russia are permitted to deploy and a strong and effective verification regime, which will further stabilise the relationship between our two countries as well as reduce the risks of miscommunication or miscalculation.

And the treaty places no constraints on our missile defence plans – now or in the future.

President Obama's Nuclear Posture Review makes the principles behind this treaty – and our larger non-proliferation and arms control agenda – part of our national security strategy. Today nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism have replaced the cold-war-era danger of a large-scale nuclear attack as the most urgent threat to US and global security. The NPR outlines a new approach that will ensure that our defences and diplomacy are geared towards meeting these challenges effectively.

As part of this new approach, the United States pledges not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear weapons state that is party to the NPT and in compliance with its nuclear non-proliferation obligations. The United States would only consider the use of nuclear weapons in extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States or its allies and partners. There should be no doubt, however, that we will hold fully accountable any state, terrorist group or other non-state actor that supports or enables terrorist efforts to obtain or use weapons of mass destruction.

The NPR also emphasises close co-operation with our allies around the world, and maintains our firm commitment to mutual security. We will work with our partners to reinforce regional security architectures, such as missile defences, and other conventional military capabilities. The United States will continue to maintain a safe, secure and effective nuclear deterrent for ourselves and our allies so long as these weapons exist anywhere in the world.

Nuclear proliferation and terrorism are global challenges, and they demand a global response. That is why President Obama has invited leaders from around the world to Washington for a nuclear security summit and will seek commitments from all nations – especially those that enjoy the benefits of civilian nuclear power – to take steps to stop proliferation and secure vulnerable nuclear materials. If terrorists ever acquired these dangerous materials, the results would be too terrible to imagine.

All nations must recognise that the non-proliferation regime cannot survive if violators are allowed to act with impunity. That is why we are working to build international consensus for steps that will convince Iran's leaders to change course, including new UN security council sanctions that will further clarify their choice of upholding their obligations or facing increasing isolation and painful consequences. With respect to North Korea, we continue to send the message that simply returning to the negotiating table is not enough. Pyongyang must move towards complete and verifiable denuclearisation, through irreversible steps, if it wants a normalised, sanctions-free relationship with the United States.

All these steps, all our treaties, summits and sanctions, share the goal of increasing the security of the United States, our allies, and people everywhere.

Last April President Obama stood in Hradcany Square in Prague and challenged the world to pursue a future free of the nuclear dangers that have loomed over us all for more than a half century. This is the work of a lifetime, if not longer. But today, one year later, we are making real progress towards that goal.

by Hilary Clinton

By George!

Big Boys: Gazprom

The next cold war may well take place in a room that looks oddly like a scene from the last one. Along one wall of a spartan control centre in Moscow, a large map of Europe is projected on computer screens. Visitors have to pass through five rings of security to reach this spot, but the few outsiders who make it through are proudly shown a display of raw power. From underground facilities deep inside Siberia, a series of trajectories are plotted on the computer screens – aiming west toward Europe's largest conurbations. An engineer explains how easy it would be to turn out the lights in a foreign city with the click of a button on his desk.

Fortunately, this is not missile command but the control room of Gazprom, the world's largest gas producer and a flagship of Russian capitalism. The plotted lines show the route of major pipelines – coloured green because they are full of natural gas flowing at more than 30km an hour. Yet the threat of plunging neighbouring states into nuclear winter remains a real one. This time last year, actions taken in this room threw much of Europe into panic. A dispute between Gazprom and Ukraine over unpaid gas bills culminated in a decision to turn off transit pipelines that also feed much of central and eastern Europe – shutting down heating and electricity generation for millions during one of the worst cold snaps for years.

Now, with the continent again in the deep freeze and running low on gas, the power of Russian energy companies is once more in the spotlight. Russia has already sparred with Belarus over oil supplies this winter in a dispute that also threatened to disrupt energy exports to Europe. Gazprom and the Ukrainian government are hoping to avoid a repeat of their 2009 pipeline brinkmanship for now, but critics claim Moscow is never far away from using its energy might to exert political influence over its neighbours.

Even Britain received a taste of how fragile Europe's gas supply infrastructure can be last week when a drop in pipeline pressure from Norway forced authorities to suspend supply to certain designated industrial users to protect homes and offices. Our reliance on imported gas is set to rise rapidly as UK reserves near depletion in less than eight years at current extraction rates.

Increasingly, one company dominates not just existing European supply but, more importantly, its future sources. Gazprom has so much natural gas under the tundra of Siberia that its energy resources are equivalent to all the oil and gas fields owned by western energy companies put together. At 33.1tn cubic metres, its gas reserves are 55 times greater than Britain's North Sea alone. In fact, only the Saudis, with their huge desert oilfields, can match Gazprom's total energy reserves. Even then, oil exports from Russia recently overtook those of Saudi Arabia.

The geopolitics of energy are well rehearsed but relatively little is known about key corporate players such as Gazprom, which rarely grants access to foreign media. Today's Guardian interview is the first in a five-part series published this week, which looks at some of the key international companies likely to shape world affairs over the coming decade. Some, like Gazprom or the mining giant BHP Billiton, control the dwindling raw materials most likely to prove strategic flashpoints.

Tomorrow we turn to China Mobile, straddling the two most powerful global trends: the rise of China and digital communications, while General Electric and Wal-Mart are examples of how powerful multinational corporations have survived the financial crisis to retain their global influence.

Not all are in good shape. 2009 was a torrid time for businesses everywhere. Gazprom has had a particularly bad year as its reputation for reliability plummeted after the Ukrainian shutdown and the recession caused Europeans to consume far less gas.

But as energy prices bounce back fast (oil, which acts as a benchmark for gas, has jumped swiftly to $80 a barrel again) Moscow is recovering the swagger of a city swimming in easy money.

A few miles south of its glitzy ­boutiques, the headquarters of Russia's largest company is more forbidding: a chilly blue neo-Stalinist skyscraper known as "The Candle" houses a bureaucracy that serves as a constant reminder of Gazprom's Soviet past. Still 50.1% owned by the Russian state, its managers are nonetheless at pains to stress its independence from government foreign policy. "We don't do politics," insists Vladimir Mikheev, an executive from the export arm who complains of the west's "Gazpromophobia".

But his boss, Gazprom's official public representative, Sergei Kupriyanov, is blunt about why the state keeps such an iron grip: "Most of the territory of the Russian Federation lies in rather uncomfortable climatic conditions – much of the year it is freezing, which means any rupture of the gas supplies will immediately lead to catastrophe."

Russia knows about energy's strategic importance better than most. Its citizens rely on heavily subsidised gas from Gazprom's monopoly and months of sub-zero temperatures make energy security a matter of life and death.

As last year's clash with Ukraine showed, it also makes for an unusually powerful form of economic weapon. Opinion remains divided over who was really to blame for shutdown, but the show of strength appears to have worked: five years after Ukraine's so-called Orange revolution, both candidates standing for election in next weekend's presidential election are now broadly pro-Moscow.

Gazprom is more than just strategically useful, contributing 20% of ­Russia's total state budget in taxes, and Kupriyanov stresses its benefits to other shareholders too: "We also have private investors who are expecting returns and that means we have to be transparent".

Unfortunately, market rules do not always apply as evenly to foreign investors in Russia, who remain scarred by a series of assets confiscations and forced disposals. Only the vast riches at stake keep overseas money flowing to invest in vital new projects such as the Yamal development scheme in Siberia or Nord Stream pipeline to Germany. Chief executives from two western energy firms who agreed to speak off the record about Gazprom conceded that they faced little choice but to continue dealing with Russia despite misgivings about the reliability of its contract law.

Gazprom's emphasis on "shareholder transparency" does little to clear up questions about its ownership either. Rumours persist that senior government figures have sizeable indirect holdings. "We haven't seen any traces," says Kupriyanov when asked whether Vladimir Putin has a personal economic interest in the company.

To Gazprom's foreign shareholders, close links with the Kremlin are a mixed blessing: protecting their asset but holding back true reform. "The government is only interested in two things: political power and cheap domestic gas," says one Moscow-based fund manager. "There is no incentive to make the business more efficient and profitable so they just take more for themselves."

For the economy as a whole, energy may be too much of a good thing. Roland Nash, head of research at Moscow investment bank Renaissance Capital, warns that over-reliance on booming energy prices may hold back Russia's otherwise strong prospects.: "The economic crisis was just the wrong length of time: long enough to undermine small companies and the emerging middle class but too short to force government into reform. Russia needs to diversify away from oil and gas."

For now though, Gazprom is in the vanguard of Russia's new energy imperialism. British consumers too may see more of "the big G". Gazprom Marketing and Trading, its overseas arm, sells gas to commercial clients such as Chelsea football club and has a target of expanding its UK market share from 2% to 10%. Kupriyanov also reveals ambitions to sell to residential customers one day. "Yes, definitely," he says. "The British market offers ample opportunities of developing downstream operations – we appreciate the fact that it's a liberalised market and all of the infrastructure is in place."

Last time Gazprom made moves on the residential market – by exploring a takeover of Centrica – it prompted intense political suspicion and even the threat of a UK government veto. Now it hopes its softly-softly approach with commercial customers will ease fears. "You all thought there would be bear scratches on the gas pipes but the headlines cried wolf," says Kupriyanov. "Our entry to the UK market was exemplary."

A bigger factor in containing Europe's "Gazpromophobia" is likely to be whether the company cuts off any more pipelines. Will there be another crisis this winter? "We have good reason to believe crisis can be averted but it is never easy to give a 100% guarantee," concludes the man from Gazprom.

Natalia Estemirova (RIP)

The Eagle Has Landed

In the mid-60s, a golden generation of highly trained whizz kids was pouring out of American universities with PhDs in maths, engineering and chemistry. "It was the generation that went on to drive the development of silicon valley in the 1970s," says Dave Parker, director of the British National Space Centre. "And those people made the moon landing happen."

Wernher von Braun, spirited from postwar Germany in Operation Paperclip, designed the mighty Saturn V rocket, as high as St Paul's Cathedral, which was to carry Nasa astronauts to the moon. "The Saturn V was 365ft tall and made from millions of separate parts, and every single time they pressed the go button it worked," Parker says. "Every single time."

Getting off Earth was difficult, but even tougher tasks lay ahead. Colin Pillinger, who led the doomed UK efforts to land the Beagle 2 probe on Mars in 2003, says: "For Kennedy to stand up and say they were going to the moon and then to put a time limit on it was foolhardy. They just didn't have the technology."

Nasa originally intended to send a giant rocket to the moon, where it would land and then return. Instead, it settled on a more complicated plan involving multistage spacecraft, mid-space docking manoeuvres and a heartstopping final descent in a clumsy lunar lander.

"Everything in it was a step further than they had been before, and they had to do them all one after the other," Pillinger says. "There were single points of failures everywhere you looked." A single point of failure is a critical step that will bring the whole system crashing down if something goes wrong. In space, one single point of failure is the difference between life and death.

Getting off Earth was only the beginning. Parker says: "Getting to the moon is twice as hard as getting into orbit, and landing on the moon is twice as hard as getting there. And coming home is twice as hard again." A speech for President Nixon in the event of failure was written before the astronauts even left Earth.

As the Apollo 11 astronauts headed for the moon, their course trajectory was crucial. The moon is a big target, but the rest of the universe is even bigger. Of the dozen or so robot probes sent to explore the moon by the US and the Soviet Union before Apollo 11 took off, enough had missed the moon for Nasa to be concerned. The course could be tracked and corrected mid-flight, but that needed precisely timed firing of the engines.

"That's why the guidance computers were developed, to make sure they got the timing just right," says Doug Millard, senior curator of space technology at the Science Museum in London. But the term "computer" only barely applies to Nasa's primitive processing technology. Pillinger says: "The only calculator available to scientists at the time was the size of a cash register. You put the levers in the right place and wound the handle." Forget Twitter. While Nasa was at the bleeding edge, the 60s was a time when chemists still relied on logarithm tables, and engineers carried slide rules.

Forty years on, Tim Stevenson, chief engineer at Leicester University's Space Research Centre, says the real achievement of Apollo was less tangible than the programme's whizz-bang technology: fuel cells, inertial guidance systems, freeze-dried food, fire retardants and cordless power tools.

"Apollo was the combination of technologies, none of which was particularly dramatic. Combining it was the achievement. This was a bunch of people who didn't know how to fail. Apollo was a triumph of management, not engineering."

Cyberwar

It was the second time of trying to reach Paul Quinn-Judge on his mobile phone. Was there a landline we could use? "The landlines here just don't work. It would involve many hours of pain," said the analyst for the International Crisis Group, an NGO that advises governments on conflict resolution. Quinn-Judge lives in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. From 18 January until last weekend, the country had been pummelled by a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Two of its four ISPs had been hit.

Surfing from inside the country, Quinn-Judge, who says that internet access inside the country is poor at the best of times, hadn't noticed any change. But intelligence experts in the west speaking directly with senior sources in the Kyrgyz ISP community said that the sustained attack had taken as much as 80% of its internet traffic to the west offline.

But who did it, and why? The country, nestled in the mountainous territory between China and oil-rich Kazakhstan, isn't a major player on the world stage. There's little oil or natural gas. It isn't at war with anyone, and its internet infrastructure is limited at best.

Strategic importance

Don Jackson, senior security researcher at the Atlanta-based managed services firm SecureWorks, thinks that the Russian government was behind the attack. Traffic came almost entirely from Russian networks that he says are controlled by former members of the Russian Business Network, which was a St Petersburg-based ISP said to have rented network capacity to cybercriminals without asking questions.

"The RBN, meaning not just the hosting company but its close circle of clients, has been called upon to do this kind of thing by the Russian government in the past," says Jackson. He asserts that the Russian government sanctions such activities at arm's length without wanting to be seen as directly involved.

"The fact that [Russia] allows it gives some kind of consent," agrees Jeffrey Carr, chief executive of GreyLogic, a company providing intelligence on hackers to government clients. "This is a convenient way for any government to include information warfare in their overall operations."

But why would the Russians want to hammer Kyrgyzstan's already underdeveloped network? The two countries have been quietly negotiating potential Russian investments in Kyrgyzstan. "The one thing that the Kyrgyz can bargain about is the American airbase just outside Bishkek at Manas," says Quinn-Judge. Russia wants the US off its doorstep. "The Russians expressed their willingness to write off the Kyrgyz debt to Russia," he says, "and also to look for investments for a major hydro-electric project."

The Kyrgyz president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, visited Moscow on Tuesday to try to hammer out the investment deal for the cash-strapped country, currently in debt to Russia for around $180m. Meanwhile. Nato envoys were in Kyrgyzstan wooing top officials, proving the strategic importance of the Manas base and surrounding territories to its Afghanistan campaign.

Jackson thinks that the Russians are applying pressure to the Kyrgyz opposition, which has been critical of the suggested Manas closure, by silencing its online voice and leaving westerners unaware of its point of view.

An inside job?

Russia is certainly serious about cyberwarfare. The Russian colonel VI Tsymbal warned in 1995 that the country may use nuclear weapons against sources of cyberwarfare in the future, points out Carr. But he doesn't buy Jackson's assertion that the Russian government was behind the recent attack. He thinks that the Kyrgyz leadership hired Russian hackers as a means of quashing its own opposition.

"This is more about silencing internal dissent, and eliminating one of the primary communication channels for any dissenting group, which is the internet," he says. He adds that if the Kyrgyz government - which set up its own cybersecurity initiative earlier in January - really wanted to stop the attacks, it could have.

But Rafal Rohozinski, principal investigator for the OpenNet Initiative, which tries to stop online filtering and surveillance, dismisses both scenarios. "To say who's responsible is very premature," he says, arguing that for Russia, economic leverage is more powerful than a DDoS attack. Similarly, the Kyrgyz leadership has more powerful tools at its disposal, he argues. "These include legal measures that can stop the opposition publishing content on the internet that would be questionable by the Kyrgyz government."

Unknown parties and motives may be at play, argues Rohozinski, who recalls another DDoS attack that he says happened during the 2005 Kyrgyz presidential elections. "It turns out that it may have been a Kyrgyz journalist who sided with the opposition," he claims. "He ordered these DDoS attacks through Ukrainian hackers, as a way of creating a negative feeling around the government by making out they were attacking the opposition."

The disagreement about the perpetrator of the Kyrgyz attack demonstrates both the covert nature of such attacks, and the lack of visibility into the cyberspace of some of the more remote parts of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Yet cyberattacks are a more common trait in that part of the world than in other regions, says Rohozinski.

"It's an interesting combination of political sophistication - a clear understanding of the role of information in politics - and also the fact that you have an awful lot of very tech-savvy people," he says. "If you look at the size of hacker communities - not just script kiddies but those who write original software and exploits - there's a big centre of gravity in Russia."

The area has a long history of cyberwar, says Carr. He also runs Project Grey Goose, a distributed collective of volunteers who gather information from sources as diverse as Russian hacker forums and IP network traffic.

Carr points to Russian cyberattacks on Chechnya in 2002 as the first concrete example. "That was more of a true cyberwar. It combined server attacks with a kinetic force - a military invasion. And that was repeated in the Russian invasion of Georgia, in combination with an early network attack." He contrasts this with the 2007 attacks on Estonia, which were not accompanied by physical aggression.

That's one of the problems with cyberwarfare, says Carr. There isn't a clear, international consensus on what constitutes an act of war in cyberspace. That's pretty important, given that Russian officials have threatened to nuke those that try it.

One thing that's clear is that more cyberwar is being crowd-sourced. Grey Goose investigated hacking activity during Russia's recent conflict with Georgia, which was then fed into analytical software from Palantir Technologies and used for trends analysis. The resulting report, published last October, showed that a hierarchy of hacktivists were responsible for DDoS attacks on Georgia's computer networks.

This happened in the recent Gaza conflict, too. The hacktivist group The Patriot Team released a downloadable tool that launched DDoS attacks against perceived anti-Israeli sites from willing participants' computers.

Mobilising cyber propaganda

But DDoS is just one example of a broader set of information warfare techniques, in which rival groups vie to control the message reaching the rest of the world about a conflict. Another downloadable tool used during the Gaza crisis, called Megaphone, was designed to alert users to anti-Israeli editorials, giving users the chance to send rebuttals, in an effort to sway public opinion through the sheer volume of replies.

"What the use of information effects in this particular conflict achieved is that it created a space in time for freedom of action in the kinetic realm," says Rohozinski of the Gaza conflict. "[Israel] was able to pursue a military operation without being forced to stop before they accomplished its goals."

As the still-nascent cyberwarfare concept emerges, overt battles on the ground are becoming inextricably linked to an often more covert battle of ideologies that play out in the electronic realm. It's tempting to think of this in the same way that we thought of the cold war: another battle in which proxy wars and black ops were used to promote conflicting ideas.

What happens as this cyberwar spreads to the west? And has it already happened? The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a US thinkthank, recently released a set of recommendations on cybersecurity for the Obama administration. The bottom line? No one is currently in charge, and there is much work to be done. Let's hope that they finish it before the cyberwar begins to spread.

by Danny Bradbury

The Wed Picture

Lenin disguised as "Viln", wearing a wig and with his beard shaved off. Finland, August 11, 1917.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

I knew I had it somewhere... and I found it, there it is: The Gulag Archipielago... 660 pages... I bought it in a charity, just for 3.99... and I am sure it's worth more, much more. Here you have the Obituary I found in the BBC, is not impressive but is something.

A look at the life of Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Born into a family of Cossack intellectuals, Alexander Solzhenitsyn graduated in mathematics and physics, but within weeks the Soviet Union was fighting Hitler for its survival.

Solzhenitsyn served as an artillery officer and was decorated for his courage, but in 1945 was denounced for criticising Stalin in a letter.

He spent the next eight years as one of the countless men enduring the gulags. He was one of the lucky ones to survive.

There followed a period of internal exile in Kazakhstan during which Solzhenitsyn was successfully treated for stomach cancer.

Instant celebrity

On his return to European Russia, he was allowed, following Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin, to publish his largely autobiographical One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, in 1962.

This made him an instant celebrity. But with the subsequent fall from power of the reformist Khrushchev, the KGB stepped up its harassment of Solzhenitsyn, forcing him to publish his work abroad.

His novels The First Circle and Cancer Ward were further damning allegories of the Soviet system.

In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. But he refused to attend the award ceremony in Stockholm for fear of not being allowed back home.

In 1973, the first of the three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago was published in the West. He had been hiding the work from the authorities, fearful that people mentioned in it would suffer reprisals.

Branded a traitor

But his former assistant, Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, revealed its location after being interrogated by the KGB after which she hanged herself.

So Solzhenitsyn decided to publish it. The Gulag Archipelago offered a detailed account of the systematic Soviet abuses from 1918 to 1956 in the vast network of prison and labour camps.

Its publication led to a violent campaign against Solzhenitsyn in the Soviet press which denounced him as a traitor.

In early 1974, even Solzhenitsyn's world reputation could not prevent his arrest. But rather than put him on trial, the Soviet authorities stripped him of his citizenship and expelled him from the country.

In exile, he continued to be a source of controversy, notably when he issued a series of documents which cast serious doubt on Mikhail Sholokhov's authorship of the novel And Quiet Flows the Don.

Many of his utterances were discursive and even baffling, and the admiration for him was not entirely uncritical.

Eventually, he settled in Vermont in the USA with his second wife and their three sons. Here, he completed the other two volumes of The Gulag Archipelago.

Return to Russia

Prussian Nights, a long narrative poem about the Red Army's vengeful advance into East Prussia in 1945, was published in 1977. He was said to have composed the poem and committed it to memory 25 years before, during his years in prison.

But Solzhenitsyn also rejected liberalism, dismissing the notion of democracy introduced by Gorbachev and Yeltsin as a myth. He was equally scathing of Western liberalism.

He returned to Russia in 1994 and told the Russian parliament, the Duma, that post-communist Russians were not living in a democracy.

He denounced politicians as being corrupt, and appeared regularly on television to voice his disapproval of the country which had first reviled and then embraced him.

In 2000, his book, Two Hundred Years Together, again covered sensitive ground in exploring the position of Jews in Soviet society.

He denied some charges of anti-Semitism. Gradually, his own people no longer had quite the desire to listen so carefully to his criticisms.

But former President Vladimir Putin courted his approval towards the end of the author's life, personally visiting his home in 2007 to award him the State Prize of the Russian Federation for his humanitarian work.

In 2006, the first Russian film based on one of his novels - The First Circle (V Krugu Pervom) - was shown on Russian state television, four decades after it was published.

The 10-part TV film depicted the terror of Stalin's regime, describing the Soviet Union as a huge prison camp.

Also in 2006, Solzhenitsyn, then 87, castigated Nato, accusing it of trying to bring Russia under its control.

He accused the organisation of "preparing to completely encircle Russia and deprive if of its sovereignty".

By then, Alexander Solzhenitsyn had already secured his place in history as one of the greatest Russian writers of the 20th Century.

Funny Guy of the Day (VI)

"Liberty is so precious that it must be rationed."
Vladimir Ilyich Ulianov "Lenin"