A view from Dubai and WTSA

I am just back from the World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly (WTSA) in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The conference itself sets terms and work plan for the standardization sector of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) for the next four years. This was a political conference, where much jockeying for position ahead of the World Conference on International Telecommunication will occur this week.

There were debates over seemingly innocuous definitions and terms, like ICT or Operating Authority versus Recognized Operating Authority. I was part of the delegation from ISOC as the IETF liaison manager, which meant I mostly observed the proceedings, occasionally speaking with representatives from various countries.

Dubai itself is a lovely city with many activities. While I’m not sure I could get used to its summer temperatures, in November we enjoyed a pleasant 27°C, with a bit of a breeze.

Our hosts were quite generous and made us feel welcome. I didn’t get a chance to do much sight seeing, but what you are looking at below is my colleague Tony with a friend Mahmoud from Oman, in front of the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, one of the most beautiful structures I have ever seen. It is rounded and terraced every 10-15 floors. We were by the Dubai fountains which themselves are an enjoyable spectacle.

Why is Hamas Attacking Now? It’s All About One Man

Egyptian President Morsi is the one man that Hamas is looking toward to start a war with Israel, and that is why there are rockets flying back and forth.

While there has been very little news of formal progress between the Israelis and the Palestinians, until this week there had been modest informal improvements day to day in the West Bank, at least. Why now, then, did Hamas decide to escalate in southern Israel? The answer can be found in the protests occurring in Egypt, and the new government of President Mohamed Morsi, who is aligned through the Muslim Brotherhood with Hamas.

President Mohamed Morsi By escalating the violence, Hamas hopes to elicit a reaction from Israel that would stoke people in Egypt to press Mr. Morsi to abrogate Egypt’s treaty with Israel. Mr. Morsi previously signaled that the treaty is not inviolate, by stating that the Camp David Accords had envisioned a permanent solution long ago.

This fits a pattern that the Palestinians have been attempting for the last year: rather than come back to the table, they would prefer to see international pressure exerted on Israel, and the more the better. Firing rockets toward Jerusalem has therefore pushed the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into a corner: the Israeli response against such attacks has always been robust, if not aggressive. If the the rocket attacks into Gaza that demonstrate this point have caused as many Egyptians to protest, imagine what the result of a ground offensive would be.

In the meantime, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has had to cut short his world tour, where he has pushed the countries to elevate the status of Palestine to observer state. This has many implications in both political terms and International legal terms, and would represent an attempt at an end run around a bilateral solution. It would provide Palestinians legal claims to sovereignty of their territory. Those claims would do the Palestinians little good in the short term, as Israeli tanks roll across Gaza, and all for the veiled hope that they will somehow come out better (and Israelis worse) thanks to Egypt coming into a war on their side, perhaps bringing others with them.

It all hinges on how President Morsi responds to this crisis, and there is reason to be concerned that he will not respond well. Either the Palestinians have grossly misread his support, or he has failed to communicate his position clearly to them, or he is willing to go to war for them in the right conditions. The first two possibilities would seem naïve. If Israel is perceived by enough people to have not responded proportionally, the matter will escalate beyond its borders. This is what Hamas is hoping for. It is a very high stakes game, that involves live ammo and the deaths of both Palestinians and Israelis. Americans who think this won’t involve our military are being equally naïve.

Benjamin Netanyahu now joins the ranks of prime ministers of Israel who have advocated strength and ended up seeing Israelis attacked. Good one, Bibi.

Is it us or is it all of the Middle East that needs fixing?

There is a great interview in the New York Times with Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, and I encourage everyone to read it. Egypt has a very complicated and pivotal role in the region, and with the United States. Since their treaty with Israel, the U.S. has given Egypt over $1 billion a year in financial aid, and either in turn or simply by happy coincidence they have been a moderating influence in the region. Of course, we were giving money to a government that was not democratically elected, and whose policies towards Israel were not popular.

President Morsi takes America to task. He says that we need to change, and that we need to not ignore the suffering of Palestinians. I agree. We have not done a good service to the Palestinians. Mr. Morsi views that the promise of the Camp David Accords has not been fulfilled. He further accuses us of interfering with the region with our foreign aid polices, while at the same time noting our support for the Arab Spring. This man is clearly positioning himself as the spokesman for the region, and he has pretty good street creds to do it. Furthermore, he is the democratically elected leader of a region where previously the only country to have one was Israel.

On the other hand, we are not the only ones who need to change. Each society in that region needs to recognize Israel’s right to exist, and that American values preclude us from prosecuting someone for their views about Islam, whether or not we like their views. Mr. Morsi does not address this. His failure to immediately condemn the invasion of our embassy as well as his failure to call out problems within the region, means that he himself must come to terms with what it means to be a leader. In the immortal words of Albus Dumbledore, it’s easy to stand up to your enemies, but standing up to your friends takes true courage. Furthermore, there are some regional values that we ought not stand for, and one of them is the poor treatment of women. On the one hand, he says that woman should be allowed to run for public office, but on the other hand, being a product of the Muslim Brotherhood, he implies that he himself wouldn’t vote for one. For the region, this is radically liberal.

The question for The Obama Administration is how to deal with this man of contradictions. It seems to me that the U.S. should make clear two things:

First, what conditions need to exist for the Palestinians to achieve their goal, and that Hamas’ violent views do not meet those conditions. Egypt has an especially important role to play here. While they are in a good position to support the Palestinians’ aspirations, Mr. Morsi can say, “you have us until you are violent.”
Second, our fundamental freedoms as articulated in our Constitution are not negotiable, and we will not treat with people or their representatives who threaten Americans or our diplomats, simply because someone said something they didn’t like.

Honesty in a relationship demands that divisions need to be exposed before they can be healed. The biggest question we should be asking ourselves is what the American aid we are giving is going to. Mr. Morsi clearly resents the aid we gave to his predecessors. What, then, does it mean to provide Egypt aid today?

Finally there must be follow-through on our part. If we say we’re going to do something, we must do it. If Palestinians meet the conditions to create their own state, we must support this position. Mr. Morsi is pointing out that at this time, nobody in the Middle East views the U.S. as an honest broker between Israel and the Palestinians, and that needs to be corrected – both the perception and the underlying reasons.

WCIT and the ITU?

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is making the news these days, in part because there is about to be a treaty conference called the World Conferences on International Tariffs (WCIT). What is the ITU? and what do they do?

The ITU is a specialized agency of the United Nations that focuses on telecommunications. It has four components:

A general secretariat;
A standardization sector or ITU-T;
A radio coordination sector or ITU-R; and
A development sector or ITU-D;

The radio sector coordinates spectrum allocation and so-called “orbital satellite slots”. It also is responsible for standardization of time. The development sector focuses on the special needs of developing countries. The standardization sector has over 150 years set international standards for telecommunications, starting with the telegraph. The general secretariat manages logistics of the three sectors, and represents the ITU to other international fora, and to the U.N.

How has the ITU been relevant to you? There are several key standards that are worth taking note of:

E.164 specifies pretty much what a telephone number looks like, starting with the international dialing code.
G.711, G.719 and others specify how voice is encoded into data.
X.509 is the basis for the public key infrastructure that is in use on the World Wide Web.
D.50 specifies accounting standards by which international carriers bill each other, or so-called settlement rates. There’s real money involved in this one.

This is some pretty important stuff.

The ITU-T was formed out of the CCITT, which was a coordination committee, primarily made of European governments. These days, its membership spans 193 countries. Only governments may vote, although civil society and paying sector members may have some influence.

So what is WCIT? WCIT is a treaty-level conference in which all those lovely accounting rates are agreed upon. But they’re not stopping there. The ITU-T has had a very limited role in the Internet’s development. Standardization and governance over the Internet falls to several classes of entities:

National governments with their own sets of laws;
Standards organizations such as the IEEE, IETF, W3C, and 3GPP; and
Not-for-profit organizations such as ICANN and Internet Registries.

This latter group focuses on what I call “internals”. That is- how do you get an IP address or a domain name? The Internet has grown over 1.25 billion users with very limited involvement of the ITU-T.

Now governments want to take a firmer hand in areas such as how addresses and names are allocated and cybersecurity. That is what WCIT is about.

More about the ITU and WCIT in the future.

Freedom of Speech means something

I don’t blog often these days, in part because of my role. However, I am taking a moment to do so to pay tribute to U.S. Ambassador Chris Stephens and Career Foreign Service Officer Sean Smith, who were killed this week at their posts in Libya, alongside two other Americans. All four served their country for the purpose of furthering not only the interests of the United States, but also those of Libya.

Members of the U.S. foreign service do not get paid well, in comparison to those of us in industry. They do the job out of a sense of duty and service to humankind, with the idea that dialog between peoples is the best way to avoid conflict, that all of our interests are served when differences are resolved peacefully. These people prevent wars, saving not only American lives, but the lives of those who would be lost or irrevocably harmed through conflicts.

Many people in the Middle East are upset over an “anti-Muslim” film. I have not seem this film. While words matter (whatever they are), they are no excuse for violence, especially violence against people who have probably not even seen or heard of the movie! But many outside the U.S., and perhaps even many inside the U.S., don’t understand the meaning of the freedom. It’s is easy listen when one isn’t saying something controversial. Nobody cares about a freedom when we’re all saying nice things.

Freedom of speech is needed by those who speak that which everyone else might find repugnant, outrageous, or simply rude. It’s the only way to insure in a free society that nobody has the right to judge, in an effort to control a political outcome, what should be spoken and what shouldn’t.

This freedom is not universally agreed to nor is it absolute. In the United States, you cannot yell “Fire!” in a movie theater, and in Germany you can’t go around espousing the views of Hitler. But even when people do espouse such views, you have the right to tell them where to go – but peacefully. You also have the right to ignore kooks and wingnuts, and sometimes that is the best response.