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| Apple shares up on tablet rumour Apple shares rise by more than 1% in early trading on Wednesday amid further speculation over new products. news.bbc.co.uk |
Jordan embarrassed as bombing reveals CIA link Death of Jordanian agent in attack on American base has put quiet collaboration into the public domainKing Abdullah of Jordan looked suitably solemn at the funeral for Captain Sharif Ali bin Zeid, the intelligence officer killed in Afghanistan by his own agent-turned-suicide-bomber. But signs are the king has been badly discomfited by the unprecedented public exposure of his country's role working with the CIA.It is no secret that Jordan is the most pro-western country in the Arab world. Squeezed uncomfortably between Iraq in the east and Israel to the west, it has always been pragmatic about both – while remaining a close and loyal US ally.The late King Hussein was even reported to be on the CIA payroll, while his intimate relations with successive British governments have continued under his son. The Jordanian capital, Amman, served as a base for western intelligence operations against Iraq during the long years of sanctions against Saddam Hussein – after the king's uncharacteristic recklessness in publicly backing Baghdad after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait.Jordan's General Intelligence Department (GID) – universally known as the Mukhabarat – is admired by professionals and is sometimes compared to Israel's Mossad secret service. Having its own website provides a veneer of modernity but it has a reputation for ruthlessness that has brought harsh criticism from human rights groups. It plays a key role monitoring Jordan's domestic politics.The GID became a big player in the post-9/11 effort by western intelligence agencies – spearheaded by the CIA – to penetrate jihadist groups. Jordan's best-known coup was providing the information for the US missile strike that killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian man from Zarqa, north-east of Amman, who became leader of al-Qaida in Iraq and who was responsible for the videotaped beheadings of hostages including Briton Ken Bigley.Jordanian intelligence officers work with their US counterparts interrogating suspected terrorists and have co-operated with renditions to and from Guantánamo Bay. CIA officers are stationed inside the GID's sprawling Amman HQ. That, it seems likely, was the home to the operation involving Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, the al-Qaida agent who killed seven CIA staff and Bin Zeid, his handler, in Khost, Afghanistan.Blowback from the war in Iraq erupted spectacularly in Jordan in 2005 when three Iraqi al-Qaida suicide bombers slaughtered 60 people, many of them wedding guests, in co-ordinated attacks on three Amman hotels. It was the worst terrorist atrocity the country had suffered.Since then the GID has developed a successful western-style anti-terrorist strategy that combines the use of intelligence with elite special forces. Its Fursan al-Haq (Knights of Justice) unit has operated inside Iraq, exploiting cross-border tribal links in Anbar province.The discreet relations between the CIA and Jordan have long been familiar to intelligence aficionados – and were described in Body of Lies, a thriller by the American author David Ignatius that was turned into a Hollywood film starring Russell Crowe and Leonardo di Caprio. But these close relations were not widely known – until now."The CIA connection … has now been put out in the public sphere for all to see – especially the Arab street," wrote one Jordanian blogger. "The Jordanian government will likely go on as if nothing ever happened, believing that Jordanians have no access to information, but [as] practically every Jordanian household has al-Jazeera and a million other channels, this is one piece of information that isn't going to be kept quiet."Jordanian officials and the official media reported on Bin Zeid's death and funeral, but described his role as part of a previously unknown "humanitarian mission" in Afghanistan. Nor has there been any mention of co-operation with the CIA. Islamist opposition groups were quick to attack the Afghan deployment as illegal under Jordanian law.The line from Amman is that Balawi was a simple informant rather than a triple agent who had been recruited and handled by the Mukhabarat – a clear effort to limit the damage caused by this shadowy affair. But Balawi's family in Zarqa have been warned not to discuss him with the media. That's hardly surprising considering the profoundly embarrassing implications.JordanCIAMiddle EastUnited StatesIan Blackguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Baidu Say Hackers Hit Web Site China's top search engine said hackers disabled its Web site. Some Internet users suspect an Iranian group in the attack. online.wsj.com |
Playing the wall game Google's experiences in China show that even the most powerful western companies have to accept its rulesAfter last week's Google face-off with the Chinese government should western media companies be worried that they don't have a hope in the world's most populous country? It's quite simple, according to Siva Yam, the president of the US-China Chamber of Commerce, which principally represents the interests of American companies in China. "As long as you aren't involved in politics, the media or pornography, the government will leave you alone."His words come after Google and 30 other western companies were targeted by hackers who tried to obtain program codes and access the emails of political activists. Google has declined to say 'one way or the other' whether it believes the attacks were sponsored or supported by the state.Eric Schmidt, the chairman and chief executive of Google, had insisted that the company should set up inside the country in order to get the maximum benefit and to open up the regime there, and accept the compromise of self-censorship or government blocking – which it did in 2006.Sergey Brin, its Russian-born co-founder, disliked the compromise, according to a report last week in the Wall Street Journal. After the latest series of attacks, Brin has clearly prevailed.Finger-pointingSome have suggested that Google wasn't making enough money in China – it trailed far behind Baidu, the domestic leader – and that its post about censorship and hacking was a cover for an entirely business-based withdrawal. But Nick Carr, whose book The Big Switch details how our lives are moving online, says that it is key for Google's long-term strategy that people trust the net completely, and that anything which undermines that endangers Google, long term. Hence its finger-pointing at China for the hacking: the Chinese market is less valuable to Google than the rest of the world market. The likely consequence is that Google will be kicked out for failing to censor its content.Yet some echo Yam's view, and are confident that China is not a quagmire for western media companies. Dan Serfaty, the chief executive and founder of Viadeo – which owns what it claims is China's largest social network, Tianji.com (which has about 2 million users) – says: "The future for digital media in China is still bright. It's a huge economy with a huge population and increasing global influence. Will Google stay? Who knows, but it won't really affect the country's online development."With 450m TV sets and 300 million people online, China is a very juicy-looking media target. Added to which, its government is very gradually altering its media landscape: it is cutting down the subsidies it pays to home-grown media companies, meaning that to expand rapidly they have to bring in western partners.And there are still plenty of western media companies there. Yahoo, Microsoft's Bing search engine and Hotmail email, along with MySpace, are all accessible in China; Microsoft and MySpace have offices there. (Though there is a Facebook.cn page – suggesting it is registered in China – it reroutes back to the main Facebook.com site, based in the US. Similarly Twitter.cn has been registered by Twitter, but isn't active.)The most visible presence though is Rupert Murdoch's Star TV, the Hong Kong-based company that he bought in 1993 – though at the time, with Hong Kong still in British hands, he declared that satellite TV networks posed "an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere". China's leaders clearly took note and ordered the removal of the BBC's TV feed from the Star TV menu. The alternative for Murdoch was having the signal blocked and Star TV frozen out of the Chinese domestic market. News Corporation has made repeated concessions in the rest of the world to keep China happy, with the benefit that would-be western rivals have been kept out: Disney, which has been trying to get its content on to Chinese TV screens for years, is still limited to a few blocks of programmes on local TV stations. It did announce last November that it will set up an amusement park – though it will only own 40% of it."Local knowledge is imperative," says Serfaty. "Google is a US firm and history has proven that foreign businesses in China always struggle. If [Tianji] wasn't Chinese, run by Chinese staff with Chinese ethics and etiquette, then it would have struggled too."But another opinion, repeatedly heard, is that China does not want to open itself up to western influence or ownership. Mark Kitto's recent book China Cuckoo describes how he built up a successful listings magazine business with a turnover of £2.5m – only to lose it all to his former partner, a state-run firm. "What Google has gone through sounds awfully familiar," he says. "A lot of people tell me that since my problem – or personal disaster – it's much better and it wouldn't happen now. I think it's got much worse and Google is a perfect example. The fundamental problem is that the Chinese government is never going to allow any kind of free market economics to operate within the media. Ever."Jeremy Goldkorn of Beijing-based danwei.org, a partner of the Guardian, has had his media website blocked in China since July last year. (Within China, the letters "danwei.org" in any URL lead to a page saying "Connection Reset".) So is coming to China a doomed endeavour for media firms?"I don't think it's doomed," says Goldkorn. "I do think it's handicapped, castrated and crippled. It doesn't matter whether it's print, TV, internet or movies – foreign companies can make money but it's very difficult. There are enough regulations in China that potentially anything you do is illegal. If you annoy anybody, a competitor or a regulatory body, they can take you down. The environment is terrible here."He notes, however, that Pearson, the owner of the Financial Times, and Condé Nast, the owner of Vogue, are both doing well; Google had been "making a go of it – they weren't tremendously successful by their global standards but they weren't failing". The most successful, he thinks, is the publisher IDG: "If anyone has made a ton of money it's probably them. They've been here since the 80s."Strategic reasonsKaiser Kuo, a Beijing-based technology watcher, says: "Commercial success is possible if you keep your heads down and play by the rules." But "there hasn't been a single unequivocal success I can point to. There are a combination of regulatory and commercial and strategic reasons. I wouldn't say abandon hope all ye who enter here."There are also the problems of adapting to a very different market. The News Corporation-owned social network MySpace, Kuo points out, struggled to figure out what its "animating idea" was, given that the indie music scene which first propelled it to fame in the US doesn't exist in the same way in China.The reality is that media companies operating in China have either to self-censor – or they will be censored. In the past year YouTube, Facebook and Twitter – and their users – have reported that access to their sites has been blocked within China, notably after the riots in Xinjiang last July. It didn't matter whether the companies had servers inside China or not; the government, which controls the internet there, shut off access.As a tip for those looking to invest in China, the classic business book Beijing Jeep (subtitled The Short, Unhappy Romance of American Business in China) points out that people pressured by the Chinese authorities may mistakenly see the manoeuvrings against them as monolithic – when in fact they may just be getting squeezed between government bodies that are jockeying for position.Quite possibly the attacks against Google and other western companies have dismayed some part of the Chinese administration, but it is overshadowed by those parts which see benefit from hacking. But the problem with media is that ultimately they are about information. And as Kitto notes: "Information is power and Google's business is giving information. The Communist Party of China wants to keep power. So you have a contradiction." The outcome of Google's Chinese business may show us how the contradiction is resolved. But the answer is probably clear already.GoogleSergey BrinChinaMicrosoftMySpaceYahooTelevision industryFacebookEric SchmidtTwitterRupert MurdochBBCNews CorporationPearsonConde NastCharles ArthurTania Braniganguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
China has 'open mind' on climate China's lead climate change negotiator says he has an "open attitude" on whether global warming is man-made or natural. news.bbc.co.uk |