Special Report: How Myanmar punished two reporters for uncovering an atrocity

FILE PHOTO: Reuters journalist Wa Lone departs Insein court after his verdict announcement in Yangon, Myanmar, September 3, 2018. REUTERS/Ann Wang/File Photo

SEPTEMBER 3, 2018

YANGON (Reuters) - Time and again, Myanmar’s government appeared at risk of blowing its prosecution of two young journalists who had exposed a massacre of 10 Muslim men and implicated security forces in the killings.

On April 20, a prosecution witness revealed in pre-trial hearings that police planted military documents on Reuters reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo in order to frame them for violating the country’s Official Secrets Act. That admission drew gasps from the courtroom.

A police officer told the court that he burned notes he made at the time of the reporters’ arrest, but didn’t explain why. Several prosecution witnesses contradicted the police account of where the arrests took place. A police major conceded the “secret” information allegedly found on the reporters wasn’t actually a secret.

And outside the courtroom, military officials even admitted that the killings had indeed taken place.
These bombshells bolstered central assertions of the defense: The arrests were a “pre-planned and staged” effort to silence the truthful reporting of Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo.

On April 20, a prosecution witness revealed in pre-trial hearings that police planted military documents on Reuters reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo in order to frame them for violating the country’s Official Secrets Act. That admission drew gasps from the courtroom.

A police officer told the court that he burned notes he made at the time of the reporters’ arrest, but didn’t explain why. Several prosecution witnesses contradicted the police account of where the arrests took place. A police major conceded the “secret” information allegedly found on the reporters wasn’t actually a secret.

And outside the courtroom, military officials even admitted that the killings had indeed taken place.
These bombshells bolstered central assertions of the defense: The arrests were a “pre-planned and staged” effort to silence the truthful reporting of Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo.

In the end, the holes in the case were not enough to stop the government from punishing the two reporters for revealing an ugly chapter in the history of Myanmar’s young democracy. On Monday, after 39 court appearances and 265 days of imprisonment, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were found guilty of breaching the Official Secrets Act and sentenced to seven years in prison.

Yangon northern district judge Ye Lwin ruled that the two reporters had breached the secrets act when they collected and obtained confidential documents. Delivering his verdict in the small courtroom, he said it had been found that “confidential documents” discovered on the two would have been useful “to enemies of the state and terrorist organizations.”

After the verdict was delivered, Wa Lone told a cluster of friends and reporters not to worry. “We know we did nothing wrong,” he said, addressing reporters outside the courtroom. “I have no fear. I believe in justice, democracy and freedom.”

The prosecution of Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo has become a landmark press freedom case in Myanmar and a test of the nation’s transition to democratic governance since decades of rule by a military junta ended in 2011. The military, though, still controls key government ministries and is guaranteed 25 percent of parliamentary seats, giving it much power in the fledgling democracy.

During the court hearings, U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres and leaders from several Western countries had called for the reporters’ release. After the verdict, Scot Marciel, the U.S. ambassador to Myanmar, said the ruling was “deeply troubling” for everybody who had struggled for media freedom in the country. “I’m sad for Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo and their families, but also for Myanmar,” he said.

Reuters Editor-in-Chief Stephen J. Adler said the two reporters had been convicted “without any evidence of wrongdoing and in the face of compelling evidence of a police set-up.” The verdict, he said, was “a major step backward in Myanmar’s transition to democracy.”

Myanmar government spokesman Zaw Htay did not respond to requests for comment about the verdict.

A week before the ruling, United Nations investigators said in a report that Myanmar’s military had carried out mass killings and gang rapes of Muslim Rohingya with “genocidal intent,” and that the commander-in-chief and five generals should be punished. The report also accused the government of Aung San Suu Kyi of contributing to “the commission of atrocity crimes” by failing to shield minorities from crimes against humanity and war crimes. Myanmar has rejected the findings.

Suu Kyi, the country’s de facto leader who spent some 15 years under house arrest during the junta era, has made few public statements about the case. In a rare comment in June, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate told Japanese broadcaster NHK that the reporters weren’t arrested for covering the violence in western Myanmar. “They were arrested because they broke the Official Secrets Act,” she said.
The act dates back to 1923, when Myanmar - then known as Burma - was under British rule. The charge against the reporters carried a maximum sentence of 14 years. Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were found guilty under Section 3.1 (c) of the act, which covers obtaining secret official documentation that “might be or is intended to be, directly or indirectly, useful to an enemy.”

At the time of their arrest in December, Wa Lone, now 32, and Kyaw Soe Oo, now 28, were working on a Reuters investigation into the killing of 10 Rohingya Muslim villagers during an army crackdown in Rakhine State in the west of the country. The violence has sent more than 700,000 Rohingya fleeing to Bangladesh, where they now live in vast refugee camps.

The United States has accused the government of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya, a Muslim minority who are widely reviled in this majority-Buddhist country. Myanmar says its operations in Rakhine were a legitimate response to attacks on security forces by Rohingya insurgents.

FILE PHOTO: Ten Rohingya Muslim men with their hands bound kneel in Inn Din village September 1, 2017. Handout via REUTERS/File Photo

Reuters published its investigation into the massacre on Feb. 8. An account of the killing of eight men and two high school students in September in the village of Inn Din, the report prompted international demands for a credible probe into the wider bloodshed in Rakhine.

The story and its accompanying photographs provided the first independent confirmation of what took place at Inn Din. Two of the photos obtained by the reporters show the men kneeling, in one with their hands behind their necks and in a second with their hands tied behind their backs. A third picture shows their bodies, some apparently with bullet wounds, others with gashes, in a blood-stained, shallow grave.

SLEEP DEPRIVED

The prosecution of the reporters put Aung San Suu Kyi, winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, in the glare of an uncomfortable global spotlight. Hailed as a champion of democracy for standing up to the junta, Suu Kyi was released from house arrest in 2010. Her party won a general election in 2015 and formed Myanmar’s first civilian government in more than half a century in early 2016. Her cabinet includes three generals, however; in a speech last month, she called these military men “all rather sweet.”

Earlier this year, veteran U.S. politician Bill Richardson said Suu Kyi was “furious” with him when he raised the case of the Reuters journalists with her. Richardson, a former Clinton administration cabinet member, resigned in January from an international panel set up by Myanmar to advise on the Rohingya crisis, saying the body was conducting a “whitewash” and accusing Suu Kyi of lacking “moral leadership.” Suu Kyi’s office said at the time that Richardson was “pursuing his own agenda” and had been asked to step down.

As leader of the opposition, Suu Kyi had criticized the junta’s treatment of journalists. In 2014, she reportedly described as “very excessive” a prison sentence of 10 years with hard labor handed down to four local journalists and their boss. They were found guilty of trespassing and violating the Official Secrets Act, the same law used to prosecute the Reuters reporters. “While there are claims of democratic reform, this is questionable when the rights of journalists are being controlled,” the local Irrawaddy newspaper quoted her as telling reporters in July 2014.

A government spokesman did not answer calls by Reuters seeking comment on Suu Kyi’s statement.
Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were arrested on the evening of Dec. 12. During hours of testimony in July, they described that night and the interrogations that followed. They told the court that their heads were covered with black hoods when they were transported to a police interrogation site. They testified they were deprived of sleep for three days during their grillings. At one point, Kyaw Soe Oo said, he was punished and made to kneel on the floor for at least three hours. A police witness denied that the reporters were deprived of sleep and that Kyaw Soe Oo was forced to kneel.

Describing the night of their arrest, Wa Lone said he and Kyaw Soe Oo were detained almost immediately after being handed some documents at a restaurant by a police lance corporal he had been trying to interview for the massacre story. The policeman had invited Wa Lone to meet and Kyaw Soe Oo accompanied him, Wa Lone testified.

When the two reporters exited the restaurant, they were grabbed by men in plain clothes, handcuffed and shoved into separate vehicles, they both testified. As they were driven to a police station, Wa Lone recalled in court, a man who appeared to be in charge called a senior officer and told him: “We’ve got them, sir.”

The interrogation centered on the journalists’ reporting and their discovery of the massacre, not on the allegedly secret state documents, Wa Lone told the court. One officer, he said, offered “possible negotiations” if the massacre story wasn’t published. Wa Lone said he rejected the overture.

At one point, Wa Lone testified, the police chastised him for reporting on the Rohingya. “You are both Buddhists. Why are you writing about ‘kalars’ at a time like this? They aren’t citizens,” Wa Lone recalled being told. ‘Kalar’ is a slur widely used in Myanmar to describe Muslims, especially Rohingya and people of South Asian origin.

It was two weeks from the time of their arrest before Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were allowed contact with their families and lawyers.

In late December, they were sent to Yangon’s Insein Prison, a colonial-era building that became an emblem of the former military junta’s repressive rule. For decades, dissidents were held alongside murderers, thieves and drug dealers. Suu Kyi spent a brief period there.

“I found out my cell was built in 1865. It was used for the prisoners before they were killed,” Wa Lone told a colleague before one court hearing, amused to have discovered he was living on a Victorian-era death row.

THUMBS-UP SIGN

The first hearing came on Dec. 27, which was overcast with a few specks of drizzle. Some reporters had gathered outside the courthouse before dawn in case police tried to rush through the proceedings. Many from local media wore black T-shirts in solidarity with the Reuters reporters.

Wa Lone’s wife, Pan Ei Mon, mouthed quiet prayers between interviews with journalists. Kyaw Soe Oo’s sister, Nyo Nyo Aye, kept near her side, barely speaking.

Slideshow (19 Images)

When a white Toyota police van swung into the yard, Pan Ei Mon and Nyo Nyo Aye pushed through scrambling photographers and hugged the two men as they were led into the courthouse. Within minutes, the court extended their remand for 14 days. An application for bail was refused on Feb. 1.
After that, the two reporters were put in a pick-up truck almost weekly to make the roughly half-kilometer journey to Yangon’s Northern District Court, a dilapidated two storey red-brick building. Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo would arrive at court handcuffed. Holding his hands clenched and at chest-level, Wa Lone looked like a boxer entering a ring, smiling and giving a thumbs-up sign for the cameras.

If there was a break in proceedings, the men were allowed to join their families in a side room, where they were fed and hugged. Kyaw Soe Oo’s daughter, Moe Thin Wai Zan, now three, would cling to her father. From time to time, he carefully lowered his handcuffs over her head and peppered her face with kisses.

Wa Lone’s wife, Pan Ei Mon, sat as close to her husband as she could during the hearings. She gave birth to a girl, the couple’s first child, on Aug. 10.

The courtroom could hold around 40 people and was invariably packed with family, friends, reporters and foreign diplomats. Sparrows flitted through gaps above the saloon-style doors and nested in the rafters; a cat sometimes wandered through the court. From a nearby room sounded the clacking of an old-fashioned typewriter. Power cuts were routine, and during the humid summer, the room warmed quickly as the single ceiling fan slowed to a halt. In a familiar drill, a court official would hustle spectators aside to fetch a generator and lug it into a hallway, where it chugged until the session was over.

Flanked by policemen, Wa Lone would often make an impassioned statement to the media outside court after hearings. On the day the court charged the reporters, he raised his voice and spoke quickly: “For us, no matter what, we won’t retreat, give up or be shaken by this. I would like to say that injustice will never defeat us.”

Police said Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were caught in Yangon with secret information about the operations of security forces in Rakhine, the state where the Inn Din massacre took place. The reporters, they said, were detained after being searched at a traffic checkpoint by officers who didn’t know they were journalists.

But early in the proceedings, the police version of events began to fray. At a hearing on Feb. 1, a police major, who led the team of arresting officers, conceded that the information in the documents had already been published in newspaper reports. It was one of many inconsistencies to surface during testimony from the 22 witnesses called by the prosecution.

The precise location and circumstances surrounding the arrests emerged as a key point of contention in court. The police said the reporters were stopped and searched at a traffic checkpoint at the junction of Main Road No. 3 and Nilar Road by officers who were unaware they were journalists - not at a restaurant, as Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo testified.
 Reuters reporters sentenced to prison in Myanmar

One prosecution witness, civilian official Kyaw Shein, supported the police on the location of the arrests. Then, in a moment of courtroom drama, defense lawyer Than Zaw Aung reached through the wooden bars of the witness stand and turned over Kyaw Shein’s left hand, which the witness had been glancing at while giving testimony. On it were written the words “Thet Oo Maung” - the official name of Wa Lone - and below it, “No. 3 Road and Nilar Road junction.” (It is common for people in Myanmar to use more than one name, as Wa Lone does.)

Asked if someone had told him to write down the address where police say the arrest took place, Kyaw Shein said no. He wrote on his hand because he was “forgetful,” he said.

‘ENTRAP HIM AND ARREST HIM’

On April 10, in a move that acknowledged the truth of the Reuters report on the Inn Din massacre, the army announced that seven soldiers had been sentenced to “10 years in prison with hard labor in a remote area” for participating in the killings.

Ten days later, the state’s case against Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo appeared to suffer a setback when the court heard the reporters’ version of events - astonishingly, from a prosecution witness. They had in fact been arrested as they left a restaurant still holding in their hands documents they had just been given by police officers as part of a plan to ensnare them, said Captain Moe Yan Naing of the paramilitary 8th Security Police Battalion.

Before the reporters were arrested, Wa Lone had interviewed several members of Battalion 8 about the army crackdown in Rakhine. At least three police officers told him that the unit supported military operations there.

Moe Yan Naing testified that he was interviewed by Wa Lone in November, and had himself been under arrest since the night of Dec. 12. Earlier that day, he said, he had been taken to Battalion 8’s headquarters on the northern edges of Yangon. When he arrived, he said, he found himself among a group of several policemen who were believed to have given interviews to Wa Lone. They were interrogated about their interactions with the Reuters reporter.

Moe Yan Naing told the court that police Brigadier General Tin Ko Ko, who led an internal probe into what the reporters had been told, ordered an officer to arrange a meeting with Wa Lone that night and hand over “secret documents from Battalion 8.”

Brigadier General Tin Ko Ko gave the documents to a police lance corporal “and told him to give them to Wa Lone,” Moe Yan Naing testified. When Wa Lone left the restaurant, the general continued, the local police were to “entrap him and arrest him,” according to Moe Yan Naing. He told the court he witnessed Tin Ko Ko giving these orders.

“Police Brigadier General Tin Ko Ko told the police members, ‘If you don’t get Wa Lone, you will go to jail’,” Moe Yan Naing said.

“This officer spoke based on his own feelings,” police spokesman Colonel Myo Thu Soe told Reuters, referring to Moe Yan Naing.

In the days following his testimony, Moe Yan Naing’s wife and three children were evicted from police housing in the capital city of Naypyitaw, and he was sentenced to one year in prison for violating the Police Disciplinary Act by having contact with Wa Lone. The prosecution sought to have Moe Yan Naing declared an unreliable witness. Nevertheless, Judge Ye Lwin declared he was credible. The captain returned to court two weeks later - this time in shackles and wearing a dark blue prison uniform - to give further testimony.

A police lance corporal, who met the reporters in the restaurant moments before they were arrested, contradicted Moe Yan Naing’s account of a set-up operation. Naing Lin, the lance corporal, denied giving the Reuters reporters secret documents to incriminate them. He also denied calling Wa Lone to invite him to a meeting on Dec. 12. During cross-examination, though, defense lawyer Than Zaw Aung said phone records showed that Naing Lin had called the journalist three times on that day.

In the end, the defense’s ability to punch holes in the prosecution’s case proved to be insufficient ammunition. Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo’s exposure of atrocities against a despised minority had put them on a collision course with Aung San Suu Kyi, the generals and their nation’s Buddhist majority.

Seoul deploys 8,000 workers to inspect public toilets amid ‘spycam’ epidemic

This picture taken on November 14, 2017 shows a woman walking in front of a public toilet at Tongil observation post in the border city of Paju. Source: AFP

3rd September 2018

SOUTH Korea’s capital is mobilising 8,000 workers to carry out daily inspections on all public restrooms for hidden cameras that are used to spy on women.

The Seoul city government announced the ambitious plan on Sunday in wake of growing public anger toward sexual violence and crimes related to voyeurism, Yonhap reported.

Prior to the plan, the city employed only 50 workers to inspect 20,554 public restrooms within city limits.

The city government said the limited manpower means that each restroom is only inspected once a month or at longer intervals.

SEE ALSO: Briton jailed for ‘pornographic’ images of party game in Cambodia 

With 8,000 workers who are already tasked with upkeep of the restrooms, the city government hopes to be able to check the restrooms on a daily basis.

Each day, one government employee would be inspecting 2.5 public restrooms, the government said.

Last year, authorities recorded 6,420 hidden camera crimes, a three-fold increase from 2,400 cases in 2012, the Yonhapreport said.

(File) A woman uses her smartphone at Myeong-dong night market in Seoul, South Korea on February 23, 2018. Source: Shutterstock

According to the Guardian, the country is in the middle of a battle with the “spy-cam porn” epidemic as police have said there were more than 26,000 victims between 2012 and 2016. Real figures, however, are believed to be much higher as many cases go unreported.

In an attempt to prevent unauthorised recordings, many phones sold in the country are required to make an audible sound when taking photos.

SEE ALSO: No more overtime: South Korea shuts off computers to stop people working late 

As an alternative, offenders use an array of other devices such as pens, watches and shoes that come with spycams.

Apart from footage in public toilets, the epidemic also involves revenge porn, much of which is recorded without the consent of the women.

Last month, a record number of 70,000 women attended a monthly protest calling for the government to do more to curb the epidemic.

Critics have also questioned the justice system following the conviction of two female perpetrators, one of which was jailed for sharing a nude photo of a male colleague.

The critics pointed out that most offenders, who were men, were typically fined but women who made the same violation were given tougher sentences.

THE RISE OF THE CYBER-MERCENARIES

What happens when private firms have cyberweapons as powerful as those owned by governments?

BY NERI ZILBER-ILLUSTRATION BY OLIVER MUNDAY-AUGUST 31, 2018,

 

The first text message showed up on Ahmed Mansoor’s phone at 9:38 on a sweltering August morning in 2016. “New secrets about torture of Emiratis in state prisons,” it read, somewhat cryptically, in Arabic. A hyperlink followed the words. Something about the number and the message, and a similar one he received the next day, seemed off to Mansoor, a well-known human rights activist in the United Arab Emirates. He resisted the impulse to click on the links.

Instead, Mansoor sent the notes to Citizen Lab, a research institute based at the University of Toronto specializing in human rights and internet security. Working backward, researchers there identified the hyperlinks as part of a sophisticated spyware program built specifically to target Mansoor. Had he clicked on the links, the program would have turned his phone into a “digital spy in his pocket,” Citizen Lab later wrote in a report—tracking his movements, monitoring his messages, and taking control of his camera and microphone.

But the big revelation in the report wasn’t so much the technology itself; intelligence agencies in advanced countries have developed and deployed spyware around the world. What stood out was that Citizen Lab had traced the program to a private firm: the mysterious Israeli NSO Group. (The name is formed from the first initials of the company’s three founders.) Somehow, this relatively small company had managed to find a vulnerability in iPhones, considered to be among the world’s most secure cellular devices, and had developed a program to exploit it—a hugely expensive and time-consuming process. “We are not aware of any previous instance of an iPhone remote jailbreak used in the wild as part of a targeted attack campaign,” the Citizen Lab researchers wrote in their report.

Israel is a world leader in private cybertechnology, with at least 300 firms covering everything from banking security to critical infrastructure defense. But while most of these firms aim to protect companies from cyberattacks, a few of them have taken advantage of the thin line between defensive and offensive cybercapabilities to provide clients with more sinister services. In the case of Mansoor, the UAE is believed to have deployed NSO tools to conduct surveillance on the country’s most famous dissident. (He is now serving a 10-year prison sentence for publishing “false information” on his social media accounts.) “[T]hese companies apply techniques as sophisticated, or perhaps sometimes more sophisticated, than U.S. intelligence agencies,” Sasha Romanosky, a policy researcher at the Rand Corp., wrote last year.

The privatization of this offensive capability is still in its infancy. But it raises broad concerns about the proliferation of some very powerful tools and the way governments are losing the monopoly over their use. When state actors employ cyberweapons, there is at least the prospect of regulation and accountability. But when private companies are involved, things get more complicated. Israel offers a good test case. It produces a steady supply of highly skilled cyberoperators who learn the craft during their military service in one of the country’s elite signals intelligence units—Unit 8200 is the best known among them—and then go on to work in the private sector. Nadav Zafrir, a retired brigadier general and former commander of Unit 8200, said even soldiers who spend their service defending Israel from cyberattacks end up knowing something about how to attack the other side. “In order to mitigate the gap between defense and offense, you have to have an attacker’s mindset,” he said.

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The Mansoor case was not an isolated one. Up to 175 people have been targeted by the NSO Group’s spyware since 2016, according to Citizen Lab, including human rights workers and dissidents. Other Israeli firms offer similar products. “There’s no way around it: In order to provide network defense, you need to map vulnerabilities,” said Nimrod Koz-lovski, an adjunct professor at Tel Aviv University and a lawyer specializing in cybersecurity. “It’s built from [Israel’s] deep knowledge of these weaknesses and attack methods. We’re deeply familiar with what targets look like.”

Take the most famous of these alleged targets: Iran’s uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, where Unit 8200, in collaboration with the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), reportedly carried out an attack in 2009-2010. They were apparently able to introduce a computer virus—called Stuxnet—into the facility despite it having an air gap in place, meaning that the facility was physically disconnected from the wider internet. The virus targeted the operating system for Natanz’s uranium centrifuges, causing them to speed up wildly and break; the monitoring system was also apparently hacked so that the damage, when it happened, initially went unnoticed by the Iranians.

It’s probably no coincidence that many Israeli cyberdefense firms market products aimed at forestalling Stuxnet-style attacks on critical infrastructure. These firms include Aperio Systems, which is headed by a former intelligence officer named Liran Tancman. Aperio, in fact, has a product that detects data manipulation—a “truth machine,” as Tancman puts it—in sensor readings at industrial plants.

Stuxnet is name-checked repeatedly by experts in the field and with good reason: It was a highly successful cyberattack against a state actor that caused real physical damage. Yet Stuxnet may already be outdated as an analytical touchstone. As Gabriel Avner, an Israel-based digital security consultant, said, “A decade in tech is an eternity.” These days, the attack surface is growing, said Zafrir, the former Unit 8200 commander who now runs Team8, a combination venture capital fund, incubator, and ideas lab. The development that worries him and other experts most is the proliferation of the internet of things.

“Everything is becoming a computer—your phone, your fridge, your microwave, your car,” said Bruce Schneier, an expert on cyber-related issues at Harvard University. The problem is that the internet, which came of age in the 1970s and 1980s, was never designed with security in mind. So everyone is now scrambling to play catch-up, patching holes in both information systems (e.g., software programs) and operating systems (e.g., physical industrial plants) that are outdated, poorly written, or simply insecure. “Attacks always get faster, easier, and better,” added Schneier, the author of Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-connected World.

Does this mean we’re all doomed?

The short answer is no—at least, probably not. Thus far, apart from Stuxnet, the most successful reported instances of a cyberattack causing widespread physical damage have taken place in Ukraine and Estonia. Although these attacks—against power grids, financial institutions, and government ministries—caused real harm, they were nevertheless identified and rectified relatively quickly. None of the doomsday scenarios that experts and pundits like to warn about—such as hackers seizing control of a nuclear weapon or a commercial airliner or malware causing Wall Street to collapse—has materialized.

Part of the explanation is that “state-sponsored hackers will always have more resources,” Tancman said. “The question is how far ahead of the [nonstate actors] you’re running. A ‘cyber-nuke weapon’ today won’t be relevant in a year or two. The issue is the pace of development between attackers and defenders. Always keep running.”

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If part of the danger comes from the blurriness of the line that separates cyberdefense and cyberoffense, another part comes from the almost nonexistent distinction between the private and public spheres online.

In July, for example, Israeli authorities announced multiple indictments against a former employee of NSO Group, alleging that he had stolen sensitive proprietary code on his way out of the firm. But the unnamed employee was also charged with attempting to undermine national security: He had apparently tried to sell the information for $50 million in cryptocurrency to a foreign buyer on the darknet, the vast anonymous hinterland of the internet inaccessible by regular search engines.

This incident, quickly detected by the firm, is just one case among many that shows how intimately the private and public spheres are linked in cyberwarfare. Capabilities that were once the sole province of governments frequently find their way into private—often criminal—hands.

The Stuxnet virus code is now publicly available. In 2013, a cyberweapon developed by the NSA that exploited vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows was stolen by hackers—possibly Russian—and posted online; in May 2017, other hackers—possibly North Korean—then used the tool to launch a worldwide ransomware attack. The attack, called WannaCry, is believed to have infected 200,000 computers in more than 150 countries, including major parts of the British National Health Service, before it was rolled back. In a separate 2013 case, Mandiant, a private U.S. cybersecurity firm, proved that hackers affiliated with the Chinese military were targeting U.S. corporations and government agencies. And in 2015, Unit 8200 reportedly hacked into Kaspersky Lab, a global leader in anti-virus software, and discovered that the private company had been acting as a back door for Russian intelligence into its clients, including two dozen U.S. government agencies.

“In the physical world of warfare, what is public has always been clear: tanks, Iron Dome [missile defense systems], F-16s,” said Rami Ben Efraim, a retired Israeli brigadier general and the founder of BlueOcean Technologies, an offensive cybersecurity firm. “In cyber today, it’s complicated.” Critical infrastructure, such as power utilities or water treatment plants, may be privately owned, as is often the case in the United States, but would cause national damage if its systems crashed. Mobilization messages for Israeli reserve forces in wartime go through privately held telecom networks. And the internet of things—which has connected so many of our consumer products—has also created massive vulnerabilities.

“If you want to take down a plane, if you want to ground air power, you don’t go through the front door, the cockpit,” said Ben Efraim, a former fighter pilot. “You go after the airport. … You go after the logistics systems. You go after the iPads the pilots take home.” There are no “stand-alone entities anymore—everything is part of a network,” Ben Efraim added. As Lithuania’s vice minister of defense, Edvinas Kerza, told me last fall in the capital of Vilnius, alluding to Russia’s actions against other former Soviet states: “The attacks come from within—banks down, government not responsive, general instability. … ‘It’s fine to set up a border,’ they say. ‘We’ll come from the inside.’”

Israel, for one, has chosen to combat the problem on a statewide level by linking the public and private spheres, sometimes literally. The country’s cyberhub in the southern city of Beersheba is home not just to the Israeli military’s new technology campus but also to a high-tech corporate park, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev’s cyber-research center, and the Israel National Cyber Directorate, which reports directly to the prime minister’s office. “There’s a bridge between them—physically,” Avner, the security consultant, said by way of emphasis.

In a world where Israel’s vaunted internal security agency, the Shin Bet, recently launched a private start-up accelerator, such private-public collaboration will only grow. Indeed, it must if it is to keep up with rapid developments in areas such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other breakthroughs in computational power.

Cyberwar has not only blurred the lines between offense and defense; it has also blurred the notion of sovereign property when it comes to technological development—namely what, exactly, constitutes an Israeli (or U.S. or Chinese) company. The internet has eclipsed borders, and cyberwarfare is no exception. As Harvard’s Schneier put it, the “chips are made in X, assembled in Y, and the software is written all over the world by 125 different nationals.” Such fluidity is especially common in Israel, where deep-pocketed foreign firms have established research and development outposts and bought up local start-ups.

While the international nature of computer technology confers many benefits, it also makes it hard to ascertain the origin of a cyberattack. That lack of attribution then makes it harder for governments to respond, and the lack of a threat of reprisal makes deterrence difficult, if not impossible. “That is why cyberweapons have emerged as such effective tools for states of all sizes: a way to disrupt and exercise power or influence without starting a shooting war,” David Sanger wrote in a New York Times article adapted from his book The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age.

While the private sector may be able to pay its people more, drawing talent—and technological prowess—away from public service, the government still holds one trump card: the law. Which brings us back to the NSO Group and Mansoor, the Emirati dissident. In order to legally sell the offensive cyberweapon used to target him, NSO would have needed permission from Israel’s weapons export regulator, which sits in the Defense Ministry. In this way at least, cyberweapons are as tightly regulated as other weapons systems sold by the Israelis to foreign governments. And the clients are solely governments.

“Selling such systems to nongovernments, like a company or oligarch, is completely illegal,” said Yuval Sasson, a partner specializing in defense exports at Meitar, one of Israel’s leading law firms.

“Just like with a drone or assault rifle, the regulator looks at the end user: the identity of the government and what it does. Functionality is a central test.” In the case of the UAE and Mansoor, some officials within the regulator’s office counseled against selling such a system to an Arab state, according to the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth. It reported that the cyberweapon the regulators ultimately approved was weaker than the one proposed by NSO and said some officials in the Defense Ministry opposed the deal because the technology was being sold to an Arab country. “It’s a scandal that they gave a permit like this,” the newspaper quoted a senior official at the ministry as saying.

NSO, for its part, said in a statement that it complies with all relevant laws and that it “does not operate the software for its clients, it just develops it.” That is a disingenuous distinction, perhaps, but it offers another example of the offense-defense and private-public conundrums: The same private cybertools deployed against perceived enemies of the state, such as journalists and dissidents, can be, and are, used to interdict narcos and terrorists as well. Indeed, in 2016 the FBI hired a separate Israeli firm, Cellebrite, to break into the iPhone of one of the terrorists involved in the 2015 San Bernardino, California, attack with a different cybertool (after Apple refused).
Cellebrite reportedly sells its products in more than 100 countries.

While some critics blame Israel for rogue behavior, the country is no outlier; there are few saints in the global weapons trade, even among Western democracies. It is in the interest of Israeli firms to comply with the law, avoid abuses, and prevent technology from falling into the wrong hands. As Avner put it, “There’s a lot of money to be made, and they can do it legally. Why be in the shadows?”

The upshot is that NSO wasn’t operating in the shadows. The Israeli government approved the sale by a private company of an advanced cyberweapon to an Arab government with which it has intelligence and security exchanges. That decision was symbolic of how technology, warfare, and politics have changed dramatically in just a few short years. Espionage, information operations, and military attacks have been with us forever; so have private actors selling weapons all around the world (including, in recent decades, many former Israeli military personnel). The difference now is the reach and speed of these new cybertools and their easy proliferation. A “cyberarms race of historic but hidden proportions has taken off,” according to Sanger—and the race is global. The potential downside is obvious: an arms race with no rules or norms and with no clear front lines. But there is no going back.

“We need to be humble. We’re only starting to understand it,” Ben Efraim said. “But it’s a real revolution. A hundred years ago, there was no air element to warfare. Now it’s a critical component of any military.”

“Cyber is bigger than even that,” he said. “Today, you open your eyes in the morning—you’re in it.”

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2018 issue of Foreign Policy magazine.

 

Neri Zilber is a journalist and analyst on Middle East politics and culture and an adjunct fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He is the co-author, most recently, of State with No Army, Army with No State: Evolution of the Palestinian Authority Security Forces, 1994-2018. @NeriZilber

Artificial intelligence used to predict cancer growth

The ever-changing nature of tumours is one of the biggest challenges in treating cancer

1 September 2018

Scientists have used artificial intelligence to predict how cancers will progress and evolve.

This could help doctors design the most effective treatment for each patient.

A team led by the Institute of Cancer Research London (ICR) and the University of Edinburgh developed a new technique known as Revolver (Repeated Evolution of Cancer).

This picks out patterns in DNA mutation within cancers and uses the information to forecast future genetic changes.

The researchers said the ever-changing nature of tumours was one of the biggest challenges in treating cancer - with cancers often evolving to a drug-resistant form.

Breast tumours

However, if doctors can predict how a tumour will evolve, they could intervene earlier to stop cancer in its tracks before it has had a chance to evolve or develop resistance, increasing the patient's chances of survival.

The team also found a link between certain sequences of repeated tumour mutations and survival outcome.

This suggests that repeating patterns of DNA mutations could be used as an indicator of prognosis, helping to shape future treatment.

With this tool we hope to remove one of cancer's trump cards - the fact that it evolves unpredictably, without us knowing what is going to happen next

Dr Andrea Sottoriva, Institute of Cancer Research London

For example, researchers found that breast tumours which had a sequence of errors in the genetic material that codes for the tumour-suppressing protein p53, followed by mutations in chromosome 8, survived less time than those with other similar trajectories of genetic changes.

The research team developed a new machine learning technique which transfers knowledge about tumours across similar patients.

This method identifies patterns in the order that genetic mutations occur in tumours that are repeated both within and between patients' tumours, applying one tumour's pattern of mutations to predict another's.

Researchers used 768 tumour samples from 178 patients reported in previous studies for lung, breast, kidney and bowel cancer, and analysed the data within each cancer type respectively to accurately detect and compare changes in each tumour.

By identifying repeating patterns and combining this with current knowledge of cancer biology and evolution, scientists could predict the future trajectory of tumour development.

Personalised treatment

If tumours with certain patterns are found to develop resistance to a particular treatment, this novel methodology could be used to predict if patients will develop resistance in the future.

The research is published in the journal Nature Methods.

Dr Andrea Sottoriva, who led the study and is team leader in evolutionary genomics and modelling at the ICR, said: "We've developed a powerful artificial intelligence tool which can make predictions about the future steps in the evolution of tumours based on certain patterns of mutation that have so far remained hidden within complex data sets.

"With this tool we hope to remove one of cancer's trump cards - the fact that it evolves unpredictably, without us knowing what is going to happen next.

"By giving us a peek into the future, we could potentially use this AI tool to intervene at an earlier stage, predicting cancer's next move."

ICR chief executive Professor Paul Workman said: "Cancer evolution is the biggest challenge we face in creating treatments that will work more effectively for patients.

"If we are able to predict how a tumour will evolve, the treatment could be altered before adaptation and drug resistance ever occur, putting us one step ahead of the cancer.

"This new approach using AI could allow treatment to be personalised in a more detailed way and at an earlier stage than is currently possible, tailoring it to the characteristics of each individual tumour and to predictions of what that tumour will look like in the future."

Fragile Hope, Firm Resolve

AMALINI DE SAYRAH HAFSA RAZI AND RAISA WICKREMATUNGE

on 08/30/2018

A puff of wind shifts the piece of cardboard dangling from the tent. ‘541’ it reads.

Over one year later, the tent housing the families of the disappeared in Vavuniya has become a familiar part of the landscape. Not many passersby pause to look into the tent as they go about their daily work. The same photos are pinned to the front of the tent. This time around though, there are more posters. The Office on Missing Persons (OMP) features prominently. Since May 11, the OMP has been holding a series of public consultations – a vital step in the process of operationalisation. How have they been received, and what has changed about the form of protest, given that it is now over a year later?

Groundviews revisited the protest sites in Vavuniya, Kilinochchi and Mullaitivu, and spoke to families in Mannar who had participated in the first round of consultations with the OMP. While some of the sites of protest had shifted, the families’ requests, and their resolve to find answers, remains unchanged.

View the story embedded below, or directly on Microsoft Sway by clicking here.

Floating, Latent and Stagnant: The Northern Predicament

• The people of the North and East were wedged in by war

• Unplanned mechanization of agriculture has had ripple effects

• State support for rural production also increasingly emphasizes production for cash and exports

2018-09-03

For close to three decades, the people of the North and East were wedged in by war, uprooted from their lands by multiple displacements, and shut off from the market, being forced to survive on subsistence production and humanitarian subsidies. Once the war ended, they were thrown without preparation into a monetized and financialised market economy.  
Economic reintegration has been fraught by exploitative loan schemes and unrealistic state or donor-led livelihood programmes. The so-called “livelihoods” on offer, such as raising chickens, tailoring, handicraft production and other problematic modes of self-employment have sucked the population dry with many even losing their meagre emergency assets of gold jewellery to the pawn brokers and micro-finance schemes of the financial industry.  
Thanks to the protests and struggles of mainly rural women from the North and East, the severity of indebtedness has gained national attention, and the flawed character of the micro-finance model for rural development laid bare. Even so, the broader economic situation of these deprived people, their exclusion from economic opportunities, lack of regular incomes, and crippling poverty and malnutrition, remain neglected. In this article, I draw on Karl Marx’s concept of a relative surplus population to analyse the economic predicament of the northern population.  

Relative surplus population

In Capital Volume 1, Marx describes the predicament facing the working population as follows:  
“The relative surplus population exists in all kinds of forms. Every worker belongs to it during the time when he is only partially employed or wholly unemployed. Leaving aside the large-scale and periodically recurring forms that the changing phases of the industrial cycle impresses on it, so that it sometimes appears acute, in times of crisis, and sometimes chronic, in times when business is slack, we can identify three forms which it always possesses: the floating, the latent, and the stagnant.”  
Marx is concerned here about capitalist accumulation and its consequences, and speaks of the relative surplus population in relation to the absolute labour needs of capitalist production. Marx is addressing the economic dynamics facing the proletarian population that was pushed out of the countryside into the towns as a work force, where a section of them were spat out into becoming a stagnant and even pauperized population. In the case of northern Sri Lanka, it is the dynamics that threw a war-torn population into a neo-liberal globalized economy that has made even subsistence difficult.   

Exclusion from production

The stagnant and pauperized population in the North share certain broad characteristics. They are often landless, either absolutely landless without even housing land or lacking utilizable plots of agricultural land in the countryside. They mostly belong to oppressed caste communities and for generations have been excluded from formal employment, better avenues of education and other state services.  
With labour force participation the lowest in the Northern Province, a significant section of the population in the North remains excluded from any meaningful avenues for production and income generation. In particular, women with dependants and youth lack accessible and sustainable economic opportunities.  

"The stagnant and pauperized population in the North share certain broad characteristics. They are often landless, either absolutely landless without even housing land or lacking utilizable plots of agricultural land in the countryside"

For youth, employment and income generation opportunities are limited to the exploitative garment industry and seasonal wage labour. Young women who enter the newly created garment factories in the North find employment is insecure, exploitatively hard on the body and are squeezed out of the jobs before their benefits increase and mature. Youth who take up unskilled day wage labour, find that work is irregular, influenced by seasonal and weather patterns including more recently the long drought, and the whims of market demand for production.  
Unplanned mechanization of agriculture has had ripple effects. Labour used in the past for harvests is no longer needed with the introduction of paddy harvesting machines. Mechanized harvesting has also undermined secondary production relating to hay including the production of cattle feed. While the investment in harvesting machines, including many bought on leasing arrangements, may not be financially feasible due to the small scale of production and leading possibly to the bankruptcy of those who purchase such expensive machinery, the nett impact is one of reducing the demand for and immobilizing of labour.  

Monetisation of the economy

Even possibilities for subsistence production are limited owing to the monetization of the rural economy. Poverty-stricken households in rural Jaffna utilise as much as 15% of their incomes on purchasing firewood for cooking. In other words, there are fewer avenues for the absolute landless and those living on marginal plots of land to forage for firewood, vegetables and green leaves—unlike earlier generations, their economic lives are now increasingly monetised and cash is necessary for survival.  
State support for rural production also increasingly emphasizes production for cash and exports. For example, fisheries development policies focus on aquaculture production including in seaweed and sea cucumber. Such production does not contribute towards subsistence, and ends up transferring the downside risks of production disruption and market fluctuations to rural households who desperately enter these export-oriented rural development schemes. In deprived rural households devoid of subsistence, during difficult seasonal times, they do not even cook their main lunch-time meal of rice.  

Capital, State and alternatives

What will become of the marginalized war-torn population of the North and East? Capital exploits them and spits them out as with the garment industry and dispossesses them through financial mechanisms including pawning and micro-finance. The state also dispossess them by grabbing land and coastal resources for its mega development projects and environmental conservation programmes of the Forest and Wildlife Departments as well as by pushing people into unsustainable self-employment and livelihood schemes. Pauperized or on the brink of poverty, state and donor schemes such as for poverty alleviation pull them up a notch for a period of time, keeping the population in the painful dynamics of floating, latent and stagnant economic life.  

• The war-torn population, inevitably requires local and rural economic alternatives

• The stagnant and pauperized population in the North share certain broad characteristics

The marginalized war-torn population, inevitably requires local and rural economic alternatives. Land for the landless, and the strengthening of communities through the redistribution and granting of land is one such avenue as their pauperisation is directly linked to landlessness. Strengthening producer co-operatives including in fisheries, livestock, crafts such as carpentry and palmyrah-related production is another avenue to strengthen communities of producers and the incomes they earn.
 Avenues for regular incomes, including through re-distributive schemes that also contribute to local rebuilding, such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in India where each household was guaranteed one hundred days of rural work every year, is another possibility. However, the search for such alternatives require recognition of the crippling economic reality facing a section of our citizenry and listening carefully to their long ignored struggles.  

After explosive revelations in Court in Navy 11 youth abduction case : Families of missing boys hope justice is finally within reach

The investigation into a suspected Navy abduction for ransom racket has led to explosive revelations in court and allegations against military top brass, and hope that justice will finally be served, but for families of the 11 youth abducted in September 2008, a decade long search has taken a heavy toll


by Maneshka Borham-2 September, 2018

The Naganathan residence on Shoe Road, Kotahena is dark and dreary. Inside, it is as though time has stood still for the once happy Naganathan family, since the abduction of their son, Rajiv Naganathan, almost 10 years ago by a suspected, organized Navy abduction for ransom gang. Since his disappearance, Rajiv’s parents, especially, his mother Sarojini Naganathan has left no stone unturned in the search for her only child. Her only focus is the return of her child. Splitting her time between caring for her ailing husband and numerous court visits, Sarojini now spends most of her days at kovils and temples, praying for the return of her son, and inviting the fury of the Gods upon those who took him away from her.

Before all this anguish (September 17, 2008, was the last time Sarojini saw her son) those were happier times. The International School educated Rajiv had just been accepted to a University in the United Kingdom and, had left home to spend time with friends before leaving Sri Lanka. The five friends including Rajiv went mysteriously missing that day, in Badowita, Dehiwala on their way to meet a man identified as Mohamed Ali Anwer, later revealed to be the informant of the abductors.
Recalling the day, Sarojini says, it was she herself that withdrew money for her son so he could treat his friends. She wavers between profound emotion when speaking of Rajiv, and shaking anger at the mere mention of his abductors.

A lover of animals and cricket, Sarojini believes if allowed to continue his studies Rajiv would have become an asset to the country. For nearly two years after his abduction, Rajiv kept in touch through several phone calls taken from mobile phones belonging to Navy personnel sympathetic to the boy’s plight. First held at Chaithya Road in a place locally known as ‘Pittu Bambuwa’ after his abduction, the group was later moved to the Trincomalee Naval Command to be held captive at the ‘Gun Side’ underground prison cells. After May 2011 the calls stopped. Sarojini never heard from her boy again. But, even a decade later her hope refuses to fade. Sarojini still believes her son is alive and being held somewhere. “For whatever reason maybe, they are afraid to release them,” she says firmly. “We spend our lives just waiting for our child to be returned to us,” she says.

Rajiv Naganathan’s fearless mother swore to fight for justice a long time ago, refusing to miss a single court date relating to her child’s disappearance.

So, last Wednesday (29) true to her words, Sarojini was among the very few family members of the missing men in courts, while a complex investigation into the Navy abduction racket continues at the Colombo Fort Magistrate’s Court. Following a long manhunt, the recently arrested Lt. Commander Chandana Prasad Hettiarachchi, alias Navy Sampath one of the main suspects of the case was presented before the Colombo Fort Magistrate with the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) telling the judge that the suspected ringleader of the abduction racket was not cooperating during interrogation.

With 11 suspects of the abduction case already identified and nabbed, Navy Sampath’s arrest marks a remarkable moment in the long drawn case. Colombo Fort Magistrate Lanka Jayaratne on the day instructed the Gang Robbery Unit of the CID and its OIC Nishantha Silva to arrest the Current Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), Admiral Ravindra Wijegunaratne if they had sufficient evidence of his alleged involvement in allowing Hettiarachchi to flee overseas when the CID had an open warrant for his arrest. Giving instructions to the CID, the Magistrate said, the next necessary steps should be taken regarding Wijegunaratne, provided the CID has sufficient evidence to prove his connection. The former Commander of the Navy currently serves as the country’s top defence official, and is due to retire tomorrow (3).

The announcement not only brought hope to the families of the missing in this case but to family members of those who disappeared during various periods in the country’s history. While the country marked International Day of the Disappeared just two days after the case was heard, families of the disappeared expressed elation at the impending arrest. They said, after being unable to pursue any legal action against the abductors of their kith and kin, the announcement this week is a sign that the tide has finally changed.

As Wijegunaratne now faces imminent arrest, the CID maintains that it has sufficient evidence to connect the CDS to the case and will, therefore, arrest him shortly. The allegation is that during his tenure as Navy Commander, Wijegunaratne provided protection to Hettiarachchi while also aiding and abetting him to flee the country, even supporting him financially.

According to the CID, Wijegunaratne had protected the main suspect Hettiarachchi known by the alias ‘Navy Sampath’ as the search for him by the CID intensified. Sources within the CID said, it had sent two messages to the administrative branch of the Naval Headquarters, for the attention of Navy Commander Ravindra Wijegunaratne, on March 1 and March 28, 2017, requesting the Navy to produce Navy Sampath at the CID Headquarters on March 2 and 31, respectively. As these requests went unheeded, evidence and witness statements have revealed that Hettiarachchi was being harboured by the Navy with the knowledge of the Commander at the Naval Headquarters in Colombo during the time.

The evidence to support this claim comes from the statement made by Hettiarachchi’s wife, herself. She had told investigators that she visited Hettiarachchi thrice while he was housed at the HQ between March 3 and March 31, 2017, despite the Navy insisting at the time that they had no knowledge of his whereabouts.

Her statement is also backed by Lt. Commander Geethal Laksiri who cooperated with the CID. In his statement to the authorities, Laksiri claimed, Hettiarachchi was housed in the adjacent room to his, in the officers’ mess at the time. Once encountering both Wijegunaratne and Hettiarachchi in the lift, Laksiri was witness to a damning conversation between the two. As he puts it, seeing Hettiarachchi, then Navy Commander Wijegunaratne had inquired as to where he was heading off to, only to be told Hettiarachchi was visiting the Light House to meet his wife. “I will not be held responsible if the Police nab you if you jaunt about” the Commander had retorted.

Following his arrest, however, Hettiarachchi has claimed he was not at the Naval Command when the second CID summons had been delivered to the Navy HQ. The CID was, however, able to dismiss this claim by providing documentation as evidence to prove that food and drink had been dispensed to Hettiarachchi from the Officers’ mess during the time. The CID believes this was an ‘attempt by Hettiarachchi to protect those who once protected him.’

According to the CID, all this is sufficient evidence to prove Wijegunaratne allegedly shielded the suspect known as Navy Sampath from investigations into the abductions, while also misleading the CID by claiming that the Navy did not know his whereabouts.

But, according to CID sources, Wijegunaratne’s alleged support for the accused extends further. According to Laksiri’s statement sometime after the incident in the lift, Hettiarachchi was seen packing a bag hurriedly. He had pointed out a small bag full of money to Laksiri and when asked about it claimed the Commander had provided him with money for expenses. That was the last time Laksiri saw Hettiarachchi at the Naval Base. The CID during a previous court sitting reported that the Sri Lanka Navy had transferred half a million rupees to Hettiarachchi from a special account maintained at the Bank of Ceylon.

The CID says when questioned, Hettiarachchi recently claimed the money was given to him as he had ‘taken care of his seniors well’. Making the connection, the CID therefore, is accusing Wijegunaratne of helping the suspect to flee to Malaysia. “We are now investigating to ascertain if this money was used to obtain visas, flight tickets and necessary forged identification documents,” a CID official told the Sunday Observer. The CID also suspects that the current CDS also allegedly prevented Rear Admiral Ananda Guruge who was the commanding officer of Navy Sampath at the time he left the naval service, to present himself at the CID to provide a statement.

According to the CID, questioning Hettiarachchi since has been far from easy. “As the trend today, he claims he does not remember or know,” OIC of the Gang Robberies Unit of the CID, IP Nishantha Silva reported to the Magistrate claiming he was not cooperating in the investigation. “However he has never denied his involvement yet,” Silva also noted.

Meanwhile, the mother of Dilan Jamaldeen who also went missing with Rajiv Naganathan, Jamaldeen Jennifer Weerasinghe, says, her son went to see his friend because he was leaving the country and was never heard from again. Jennifer Jamaldeen who was at a Disapeparnaces Day event organised by the Office of Missing Persons in Colombo told the Sunday Observer that she would visit the Naganathan home often since the abduction of her son. “I know and feel that my son is alive, perhaps they can’t release him for some reason,” she says, echoing her friend Sarojini Naganathan. Jamaldeen says her family lost all their property in order to finance the ongoing court cases. “For months, I never cooked in my house after my son went missing,” she said.

Things got sinister for the Jamaldeen family as well. Their house was robbed the day after President Maithripala Sirisena was sworn into office. The only thing that went missing from the robbery, were the files relating to her son’s abduction case. Luckily Jennifer Jamaldeen had made copies and kept them safely hidden.

Dilan’s mother believes, CDS Wijegunaratne is not the only senior navy official whose involvement is suspect. “Wasanthan Karannagoda also knows much more than Wijeguneratne about this case – he must reveal what he knows. Just give my child back,” she cries desperately.

The former Navy Commander Wasantha Karannagoda is also in the sights of the CID investigation.
In June 2009, then Minister of Fisheries, Felix Perera wrote to Karannagoda, who was then Navy Commander, informing him about the abductions. The Naganathans were dear friends of his and their boy and his three friends had been abducted one night in September 2008, Minister Perera wrote in the letter written on an official letterhead and seen by the Sunday Observer. The security services had launched an inquiry into the abductions and Rajiv’s father had made inquiries and learned that the three boys were being detained in Naval custody, Perera said in the letter. (See montage). I kindly request you to ensure the release of the three children listed below,” Perera told Commander Karannagoda, going on to list the names of Rajiv Naganathan, Pradeep Vishwanathan and Tilakeswaram Ramalingam.

However, the families say in response to the letter, Karannagoda claimed that he made inquiries from the Trincomalee Naval Command only to be told that no youth were being held hostage at the base, as was claimed.

But subsequently, it was Karannagoda himself who brought the case to the notice of the CID, claiming his Personal Security Officer at the time Navy Lt Commander Sampath Munasinghe was connected to the abductions. CID believes Karannagoda knew of the abductions all along but merely turned a blind eye to them, only going on to report it when a personal dispute arose between him and Munasinghe in 2009.

Listening to the proceedings patiently, Sarojini Naganathan and others leaving the courtroom, appeared to be confident that justice was finally within reach. “This is the time we must all come together,” she said. However, she also had harsh words for Hettiarachchi. “He abducted my child, took him away to Trincomalee and now claims he remembers none of this,” she accused. “As parents themselves, many suspects in the case were protecting and shielding their children,” Sarojini says bitterly, “but how could they have brought so much pain to other parents by taking away their children?”

Pix by Indunil Usgoda Arachchi and Chinthaka Kumarasinghe