The Reason Review — May 2017
There’s no way to sugar-coat this: May 2017 was a pretty harsh month for world events. In the UK, we had a terrorist attack and got a front-row seat to the biggest ransomware event in history. There was sectarian violence in Egypt, while ISIS stepped up its operations in the Philippines to a dramatic degree.
One positive surprise — for Europe’s left-leaners, at least — arrived in the form of Emmanuel Macron’s claiming of the French Presidency. Meanwhile, in the United States, President Trump swam further into murky political waters. At this point, that feels like consistency more than anything else.
Manchester shows its true character in the face of tragedy
On the 22nd May the United Kingdom suffered its worst terrorist attack since the 7/7 bombings, as a lone attacker detonated a homemade explosive at the Manchester Arena, killing 23 people and wounding a further 116.
Salman Ramadan Abedi set off an IED in the venue’s foyer moments after the end of an Ariana Grande concert. Many of the victims were children and parents waiting to collect them.
Amid the horror of the attack and the chaotic scenes that followed, the rest of Manchester immediately mobilized to help those affected by the attack. As Manchester Victoria station was evacuated and closed in the wake of the blast, many concert-goers were cut off from their route home. Taxi firms offered free rides to get people back to their families, with drivers reportedly travelling from as far away as Liverpool to lend their assistance. Meanwhile other locals opened their homes and places of business to provide shelter to those left stranded, using the hashtag #roomformanchester to reach out to those in need.
Manchester’s Sikh community also made a major effort to help. Four of the city’s Gurdwaras remained open throughout the night, offering food and beds to anyone who needed them.
The day after the attack, the UK’s threat level was raised to critical for the first time in almost 10 years. During the intense media scrutiny that followed, the New York Times published images of almost all the forensic evidence gathered by British police, the result of an apparent leak from US intelligence services. British investigators immediately stopped sharing their findings with their American counterparts, while Theresa May contacted President Trump to officially rebuke the leak — a rare event in UK-US diplomatic relations.
At the time of writing, 17 people have been arrested in connection with the bombing.
Two weeks after the attack, Ariana Grande threw a benefit gig that was estimated to have raised more than £2 million for the victims of the attack.
Le Pen is not mightier than Macron
France elected its youngest-ever leader on May 7th, as independent centrist Emmanuel Macron emerged victorious in the second round of the presidential election.
Macron won by landslide, seizing roughly 66% of the vote. But while many pundits championed this victory as a blow to the wave of populism in Europe, others focussed on the fact that Front National candidate Marine Le Pen had claimed a historically high vote for France’s political far-right.
Even so, Macron was understandably optimistic as he delivered his victory speech to the crowds assembled in front of the Louvre’s iconic glass pyramids.
“Europe and the world expect us to defend the spirit of the enlightenment that is threatened in so many places,” he said, before later acknowledging, “This challenge before us is huge, and it will require us to continue to be brave.”
At 39, Macron will be the youngest leader among the G7 nations. He previously served as France’s economy minister under François Hollande, but quit the Socialist Party in 2015. His own independent, liberal political party, En Marche!, is now in control of France despite being barely more than a year old — it was founded in April 2016.
Macron emerged as the unlikely frontrunner after centre-right candidate François Fillon was embroiled in a scandal that suggested his wife and children had been paid by Fillon’s office — and therefore with public funds — for performing non-existent jobs.
One final surprise in the story of Macron’s election arose on the eve of the final vote, when 9gb of leaked emails from Macron’s party were dumped on Pastebin, an anonymous publishing site regularly used by hacking groups. In yet another sign of the current Cold War tensions, the US National Security Agency suggested Russia might behind the leak, but this claim has subsequently been dismissed by France’s own experts.
In the final event, the leak was curiously ineffective and did seemingly little to change the course of the election. But Europe was soon to face other, more damaging computer woes…
Viral attacks make us want to cry
Ten days before the UK suffered its most serious terrorist attack in a decade, the country was one of many to experienced the smashing of another unhappy record — namely, the biggest ransomware event in history.
The WannaCry cryptoworm is a nasty piece of work that subtly infects a user’s system and encrypts their files to make them inaccessible. At that point it reveals itself via a large, attention-grabbing screen that demands a ransom payment in Bitcoin in order to restore access. For added pressure this screen also features a live, seven-day countdown timer, threatening to delete the locked files if payment isn’t made before the deadline, with the fee increasing at regular intervals.
To make matters worse, WannaCry also attempts to spread itself to other machines on the host’s network — and this infection takes place before the ransomware draws attention to itself. By the time anyone realises what’s going on, the problem has already escalated… which is exactly what happened on May 12.
While it’s hard to pinpoint the exact starting point, the Financial Times suggest that the first infection took place in Europe at around 8.24am UK time, after someone clicked on an email attachment that they really, really should have left alone.
The Spanish mobile operator Telefónica was among the first major victims, and by the end of the morning hospitals in the UK had started to report technical problems. By the end of the day, 48 NHS trusts across the country had been hit by the worm, forcing staff to turn away patients and to work without access to medical records. In total the attack affected 300,000 machines across 150 countries, with other high-profile victims including FedEx and China’s state-controlled oil firm.
The attack was eventually halted thanks to the efforts of Marcus Hutchins, a self-taught 22-year-old tech blogger who stumbled across a kill switch — a secret shutdown mechanism — hidden within the worm’s code. This discovery stopped the infection from spreading further.
It was subsequently learned that the NSA may have inadvertently played a role in the attack. Last August a mysterious hacker group, the Shadow Brokers, announced that it had stolen a set of powerful tools from an NSA hacking team, later making them available online. It is believed that these tools were used to create the WannaCry worm.
Edward Snowden was among those to criticise the NSA for not taking appropriate remedial action in the wake of this theft,
“If @NSAGov had privately disclosed the flaw used to attack hospitals when they *found* it, not when they lost it, this may not have happened,” he tweeted.
To Comey…From Trump, With Love
James Comey, Director of the FBI, became James Comey, former Director of the FBI early this May, when President Trump used his executive powers to fire the New-York-born lawyer from his bureau post. This is the latest twist in a tale that reaches all the way back to the presidential election, when Comey penned an ill-timed letter to congress detailing his intention to investigate congressman Anthony Weiner’s laptop in connection with Hillary’s use of a private server.
Though eventually the investigation found that “no criminal wrongdoing” had taken place, many in the Clinton camp claim that Comey’s decision to make this announcement just 11 days before the election helped to swing the vote in favour of Trump, especially considering million of votes had already been cast early.
Indeed, Trump initially appeared to be thankful of Comey’s intervention — intentional or not — singling him out for praise during a speech in Michigan where he proclaimed that “it took guts for Director Comey to make the move”, in reference to Comey’s announcement. Soon after his victory however, and as the FBI’s investigation into Russian meddling in the election and the possible involvement of Trump staff deepened, Trump’s opinion of Comey deteriorated. Where once he had “guts”, the now-president accused Comey of giving Clinton a “free pass for [her] many bad deeds”.
When Michael Flynn was forced to resign for misleading the government about his conversations with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, President Trump reportedly asked Comey to “let this go” — in what many see as a direct attempt to influence the FBI’s investigation into Trump staffers’ possible connections with Russia.
As the relationship soured, Trump continued to pour water on suggestions of a Russia-Trump connection, tweeting “The Russia-Trump collusion story is a total hoax, when will this taxpayer funded charade end?”. The next day, on May 9th, Trump’s bodyguard delivered a letter to FBI headquarters informing Comey that he was to be relieved of duty, effective immediately.
Many feel a worrying precedent is being set; Trump has now fired 3 officials who were, in some capacity, involved in investigating his campaign and his administration.
Sectarian violence in Egypt intensifies
Over the last few months, Coptic Christians in Egypt have been subject to several highly-coordinated, fatal attacks, the majority of which have been orchestrated by ISIS and other jihadi militant groups based in North Sinai. December saw the detonation of a bomb close to St Mark’s Cathedral — Egypt’s main Coptic Christian cathedral — while just last month in April, two separate suicide bombings at churches in Alexandria and Tanta disrupted Palm Sunday services and left 46 dead.
Despite declaring a three-month state of emergency after the April attacks, President Sisi’s attempts to quell the violence seem to be having little effect. This became painfully apparent when, on the 26th of May, a group of around 8–10 gunmen wearing military uniforms opened fire on a bus travelling to the Monastery of St Samuel the Confessor, just 85 miles south of Cairo.
No group has claimed responsibility for the attack yet. However, as reported by The Atlantic, ISIS has recently undergone an ideological shift of positing that “Christians are to Egypt what the Shia are to Iraq” — treacherous “Polytheists”. As such, many suspect the group of being behind the latest Egyptian tragedy.
Though sectarian strife in Egypt is not necessarily a new phenomena, many Copts who initially supported Sisi feel the divisions are widening under his stewardship, and others question whether the government can provide the “central promise” of “security” that his mandate was built on. Indeed this latest link in what has been a chain of horrific events seems to confirm the “real sense of fear” in the air, as many Copts feel as if they are being actively hunted by Islamist extremists.
ISIS in the Philippines
ISIS operations in the Philippines have escalated dramatically in the last two years, but the conflict between governmental forces and the ISIS-affiliated Maute and Abu Sayyaf groups reached dangerous new highs this month as fighting erupted in the predominantly Muslim city of Marawi, the largest city in the Lanao del Sur province on the island of Mindanao.
The conflict started on the 24th of May when, clad in black and waving flags emblazoned with the words “There is no god but god”, hundreds of Islamist militants stormed the city. In the skirmishes that have flared up since — the largest of which was a fully-fledged government assault to retake the city — 129 people have died, with 89 extremists thought to be amongst the dead. A military spokesman for the Philippine army claimed, as recently as the 30th of May, that close to “90% of the city” has been cleared, though ISIS-designated militant commander Isnilon Hapilon is still at large.
Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte — who has recently attracted strong criticism for his “vicious” war on drugs — cut short his visit to Russia to return to the islands, and has since declared martial law over Mindanao. The administration’s response to the jihadi extremism thus far, much in line with the handling of the country’s narcotics problem, has centred around strong-arm that, whilst effective in the short term, have arguably failed to address the underlying “social, economic and political problems” that have allowed extreme, Islamist ideologies to take root in the Philippines.
Weapons of Reason issue #4: Power, is available to order now.
