Before UN Covered Up and
Spins Hack in Geneva It Gave Activists Names
To China Then Retaliated
By Matthew
Russell Lee, Patreon
BBC
- Guardian
UK - Honduras
- CJR -
PFT
UN GATE, Jan 29 –
Amid the belated interest in
the UN covering up having been
hacked, it is important to
note that the UN has in the
past not waited to cover up a
hack but instead straight up
gave information about
activists to China - and at
least one of the activists was
killed.
Then the retaliation
began, against the
whistleblower and against
Inner City Press which
reported on it. So when you
see complicit UN in-house
scribes suddenly concerned,
ask what they did about any of
this?
In 2018,
just before being ousted from
the UN by Guterres and UN Lt
Ronald E. Dobbins, Stephane
Dujarric and now Melissa
Fleming, Inner City Press
published this,
and later in 2019 from the UN
Gate, this
and this.
On the
morning of January 29 Inner
City Press emailed questions
to Dujarric, Fleming, Guterres
and others including "what did
SG Guterres do about the
hacking of the UN servers in
Europe? Relatedly, what has he
done about the UN having given
the names of activists to the
Chinese government as alleged
by whistleblowers?" No answer
at all.
Later on
January 29, from UN Human
Rights, this spin which we
publish in full: "The UN Human
Rights Office would like to
clarify some details in light
of news reports today about a
cyber-attack on the UN which
involved our
office.
Although hackers accessed a
self-contained part of our
system in July 2019, the
development servers they
accessed did not hold any
sensitive data or confidential
information.* The hackers did
manage to access our Active
User Directory, which contains
the user IDs for our staff and
devices. However, they did not
succeed in accessing
passwords. Nor did they gain
access to other parts of the
system.
Once we became aware of the
attack, we took action to shut
down the affected development
servers.
The UN Human Rights Office
takes breaches of security
extremely seriously. We are
very aware of the potential
effects should people gain
unauthorised access to our
data, and the responsibility
we have, both online and
offline, to protect victims,
staff, partners and any
individuals and groups who
collaborate with us. We want
to assure all concerned
parties that this hacking
attempt did not compromise
sensitive information within
this
Office.
Like many other institutions
and companies, we face
frequent attempts to access
our computer systems, and our
IT team is constantly further
reinforcing existing
multifaceted safeguards to
preserve the integrity of our
systems and the data they
hold.
* Development servers are
systems on which new software
is written by programmers
using dummy data. They are not
connected to our regular
systems." Yeah.
The now-quoted by
The New Humanitarian David
Kaye - after wanly raising to
the UN questions abou its
ouster of Inner City Press,
what follow up did he
do?
The explanation
of all of this shameful
lassitude is that those few
who want to cover and enter
the UN will do anything for
access, and when they see that
a vindictive access controller
like Antonio Guterres will not
change position, they just let
the issues go.
Profiles in
Cowardice, and the continuing
decline of the UN. We'll have
more on this.
***
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