Camera phone bans seen as aiding privacy

TORONTO, Dec 14: The camera cell phone, one of the hottest items on this year’s Christmas gift list, is a growing privacy issue for both consumers and organisations.

The phones, with their discreet lens, tiny size and ability to immediately transmit images onto the internet or other cell phones, are a Voyeur’s dream.

The phones first appeared on the market in early 2001, and for the last several months, media reports out of Asia have called attention to incidents such as nude photographs of unsuspecting victims turning up on the internet.

Their growing popularity in north America since their debut late last year has sparked similar concerns, prompting fitness centres across North America, from Los Angeles to Toronto, to begin banning or limiting cell phone use on their premises.

With locations including beverly hills and New York, the sports club/la — one of the most luxurious fitness centres in the world —was among the first to ban all cell phones in July, limiting their usage only to the lobby.

Privacy is a priority for the centre, whose high profile clientele include celebrities and other prominent figures, company spokesman Rebecca Harris explained.

Other clubs have outright banned all cell phones because of the difficulty in distinguishing between regular cell phones and camera phones.

But not all clubs are taking such a hard-line stance.

In Calgary, where widespread bans and limitations drew media attention in Canada, the YWCA took a more moderate approach.

"Essentially we’re basing it on the honour system, because we’re not going to ask every single person who walks into the door, ‘do you have a camera cell phone?’ and ‘you need to check it,"’ General Manager Jan Bloemraad said.

The clubs know that members rely on their phones to stay in contact with children or work, and to ban them outright would not be in the members’ best interest. But clubs are keeping a close eye on what goes on in their gyms and say that members are happy they are taking action.

At a number of GYMS, it was recent inquiries by the media that prompted them to consider the issue, rather than any particular incident.

"Certainly the media attention required us to be a little more forward in our approach," Jack Kinch, YMCA spokesman for the seven greater Toronto area centres, said.

Concerns over camera phones have also seeped into businesses as companies fear corporate espionage. South Korea-based Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics have reportedly banned visitors from carrying camera phones, according to South Korean domestic media.

Concerns raised by the camera phones are unlikely to go away as technology improves and sales jump.

The next generation of phones making their way onto Asian markets and trickling into North America are video cell phones, which have the ability to record 15 to 30 second clips.

In North America, analysts project that camera phone sales will more than double next year, while the overall cell phone market will only see a small increase.

Of the 90 million handsets sold in North America this year, camera phones made up 3.3 percent, or three million units.

That’s out of the 65 million camera phones sold worldwide, according to David Kerr, an executive with strategy analytics, a Boston-based consulting firm.

South Korea, which has one of the world’s highest concentrations of cell phone users, is already drafting regulations to protect consumer privacy. Beginning next year, new camera phones will be required to emit a loud sound whenever pictures or videos are taken.

Still, the banning strategy may be an uphill fight, particularly with cameras and videos expected to be standard in half the cell phones available by 2008.

"The evolution, the penetration, the spread of digital capture capabilities in phones is going to be so fast, so wide that it might be a losing battle ultimately," said analyst Alex Slawsby of IDC, a leading technology industry analysis firm. (AGENCIES)

Moroccan King bridges divide on marriage law

RABAT, Dec 14: Just three years ago, proposals to improve women’s rights in marriage and divorce left public opinion divided in Morocco, where Islam is the state religion.

Now, King Mohammed and his advisers appear to have found consensus with a package of reforms which has something for everyone.

Moroccan women’s groups for years lobbied for family law, known as the Moudawana, to be drained of its religious content and treat men and women equally.

But the country’s Islamists vociferously opposed any changes that might distance family law from Sharia, the Islamic Law.

A revised package of reforms, drawn up by a royal commission, has ingeniously side-stepped the most thorny issues.

The new law will spell out that decisions on children and family planning should be taken by both spouses together. A woman will no longer have the legal obligation of "obedience" towards her husband.

Other reforms, likely to pass smoothly into law with the royal stamp of approval, concern a woman’s right to marry without a male relative’s approval, polygamy, property rights, and a divorced women’s right to keep custody of young children on re-marriage.

Forty-year-old King Mohammed has swung the full weight of his monarchical authority behind the proposals, which he has already outlined to Parliament.

Feminists had wanted Polygamy outlawed, along with the husband’s right to verbally divorce a wife without giving a reason.

But both practices are endorsed in the sharia. King Mohammed told politicians: "I cannot, as Commander of the faithful...Forbid what the almighty has permitted."

However, his religious role as Moroccan monarch allowed the king to face down conservative Islamists and propose changes unheard of in most Arab countries.

On the street, most women had heard about the new law.

"If only it had come out earlier" said mother of five Amina Assanki, 36, from the mountainous rif region. Her own husband, complaining that child-bearing had spoilt her looks, had taken a second, younger wife, she said.

Dropping its previous trenchant opposition to change, the justice and development party (PJD), the only Islamists in the Moroccan Parliament, gave its "firm endorsement" to the reforms.

They would "benefit the Moroccan family and all its elements, husband, wife and children," said a PJD communique.

Nadia Yassine, a spokeswoman for the Adl Wal Ihsane (justice and charity) Islamist movement, also approved the revised proposals: "We have often stated that the text of the Moudawana is not sacred," she said.

This new-found flexibility among the Islamists is a sign of the times, wrote Aboubakr Jamai, editor of the independent weekly Le Journal Hebdomadaire.

In May, bombings by young Islamist extremists in Casablanca, Morocco’s largest city, killed 45 people, including the 12 suicide bombers. The more mainstream Islamist groups have been keen to distance themselves from this radical fringe.

"This allowed the monarchy an easy victory," Jamai wrote. But "easy or not, this reform is a revolution."

Some women’s rights activists have reservations about how the changes will pan out in practice. Judges applying family law are currently all male re-training has been promised.

On cafe terraces in the Moroccan capital Rabat, many men were dubious about the reforms, one civil servant dismissing them as a "victory for women’s arrogance".

A bank employee giving his name as Mohammed, said he feared they would "push men into staying single," encouraging "immorality".

The new law "gives the Moroccan woman back her honour," said Abdullah, a taxi driver. "But women have to understand the real meaning of the changes, so they don’t use them to rebel against their husbands."

Moroccan women interviewed, often as outspoken as any western feminist, had no such misgivings. "This new law will set some limits to men’s domination," said student Zehour Machichi. (AGENCIES)

Bootlegger’s paradise in Taliban Pakistan province

PESHAWAR, Dec 14: Business has never been better for the bootleggers of Peshawar.

A year after a conservative Islamic bloc swept to power in northwest Pakistan, clandestine alcohol sellers speak of soaring demand for vodka and whisky which are strictly prohibited.

"Since the mullahs came into power we have been earning a lot of money," said one illicit trader in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP).

Asking not to be identified, he said he was one of 15 dealers working for the largest bootlegging network in Peshawar, the teeming provincial capital.

The group, he added, shifted alcohol worth 400,000 during this year’s Islamic holiday of Eid al-Fitr alone.

He and many others laugh off western media descriptions of the six-party Islamic Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) coalition as the "new Taliban".

While some member parties openly support the ousted Afghan militia, and sometimes preach a hardline form of Islam, people in Peshawar say their bark is worse than their bite.

Life, it seems, has changed little in the past 12 months.

"You can enjoy life even in Peshawar," quipped a local journalist.

The coalition has enforced some changes in its first year in power, with the imposition in June of Islamic Sharia Law the most notable.

Advertisements featuring women have been taken down, music is banned on public transport, the main theatre is largely mothballed except for Islamic events, and the local Government plans a separate university and medical college for women.

The general feeling in Peshawar, close to the Afghan border, appears to be that in a deeply conservative Muslim region the changes have had limited impact.

But the coalition has critics who warn against complacency.

Afghanistan fears an administration sympathetic to Islamic militants along its border will compromise the hunt for Taliban, Al-Qaeda and other rebels believed to be hiding there.

Akram Durrani, the province’s Chief Minister, is used to fielding questions about the "talibanisation" of his province.

"We are a democratic people and we have come to power through the democratic process and we do not subscribe to this (Taliban) ideology," he told in an interview.

Durrani said the province had no role in what happened in Afghanistan, and blamed rising violence there linked to a resurgent Taliban on the presence of foreign troops.

Some do not agree.

Afrasiab Khattak, a leading human rights advocate and opposition politician in the province, said the coalition’s policies were creating an environment in which extremism could flourish.

Durrani said a new female medical college and university would be built soon, a move critics see as the beginning of the end for co-education at university level.

"We don’t say that co-education is a bad thing, and at university level girls and boys can study together," Durrani explained. "But parents are often reluctant to send their daughters to co-educational institutions."

Doctors and surgeons in the city say there is a need for more female doctors since many women, particularly in rural areas, do not want to be examined by men.

While people in Peshawar shrug off perceptions in the west of a repressive, Taliban-style Government in the province, moves to set up small cleric-led groups with the right to dispense justice, settle disputes and enforce Sharia Law have set alarm bells ringing.

Durrani said "Hasba", or "accountability" legislation was designed to make judicial decisions faster, and people had the right to challenge rulings by the new authorities in Court.

Opponents counter the "Hasba" law may lead to religious police units that impose Sharia by force if necessary.

Rahimullah Yusufzai, a newspaper editor and leading Afghan expert, said he feared such groups would abuse their powers, but played down the coalition’s ability to enforce Taliban-style rule within the province.

An estimated 90 percent of provincial revenues come from federal coffers, giving Islamabad leverage over the province’s affairs.

As for prohibition and other restrictions, the feeling, at least for now, is that they are largely symbolic — with alcohol a case in point.

"If you tell your kids not to do something then they will do it," remarked one of the bootlegger’s regular clients. (AGENCIES)

Radical Saudi cleric urges militants to lay down arms

RIYADH, Dec 14: One of three radical Saudi clerics arrested in May for promoting Muslim militancy has become the third to call on militants behind a series of bombings in the Gulf kingdom to lay down their arms.

In an interview broadcast by Saudi state television late last night Sheikh Ahmed Al-Khalidi said there was no just cause for them to fight in Saudi Arabia.

Khalidi’s prime time televised comments, echoing those of two other clerics last month, are part of Saudi Arabia’s battle to crush a wave of militant violence in the world’s biggest oil exporter. None of the clerics have been reported released.

Eighteen people died last month when suspected Al-Qaeda bombers blew up an expatriate compound in Riyadh. Six months earlier 35 people were killed in triple suicide bombings.

Saudi authorities said they foiled another attack barely two weeks after the November 9 bombing and last week the Government published names and pictures of 26 most wanted suspects.

"We tell them (militants) that they must obey God within themselves, that they must lay down their arms and return to society, their brothers and their families," Khalidi said.

"There are no enemies here for them to carry arms against and there is no Jihad here and no fighters. We only have those (non-Muslims) under the protection of the state and Muslims whose blood, wealth and honour should be safeguarded."

Asked about calls by Al-Qaeda’s leader, Saudi-born Osama bin Laden, to rid the Arabian Peninsula of Jews and Christians, Khalidi said it was for the Government, not individuals, to decide the issue.

Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam, is home to around six million foreign workers and their families — around a quarter of the kingdom’s population. The foreign presence, coupled until recently by the stationing of thousands of US troops on Saudi soil, has been a prime grievance of the militants.

"We must first decide whether these people came peacefully or not, and such judgment is not left to individuals or groups but to rulers," Khalidi said.

The Sheikh said he wanted to retract a previous edict which supported attacks against Saudi military, security and intelligence officials.

"We learned from this experience. We made mistakes and ask God for forgiveness and to spare US and all Muslims from strife," he said.

Khalidi was arrested along with Sheikh Nasser Al-Fahd and Sheikh Ali Al-Khodeir after they urged Saudis not to cooperate with security forces trying to track down suspects behind the may bombings in Riyadh.

All three were popular with young Saudis — the prime recruiting targets for militant groups. (AGENCIES)

Bugging row turns sour; UK too accuses
Pak of eavesdropping

ISLAMABAD, Dec 14: In a curious twist to Pak-UK bugging row, London has turned the table on Islamabad by alleging that an attempt was made to bug its High Commission here prior to a botched bid by a British intelligence agency to eavesdrop on the Pakistani mission in London.

As Pakistan pressed the UK hard to come clean on the botched attempt by its internal intelligence agency Mi-5, a newspaper today reported that before the exposure of the alleged attempt of Mi-5 the UK mission here found evidence that the office of its High Commissioner was bugged.

About six months ago the British High Commissioner in Islamabad found a loose device hanging from the side of his desk. Not quite sure what it was, he sent it to his security staff who declared it to be a "bug", `Daily Times’ newspaper reported, quoting a "high-grade" western diplomatic source.

The finger of suspicion pointed to the host government and after satisfying itself that this indeed was an attempt to bug the High Commissioner’s personal office, the British mission quietly lodged a formal protest with the Pakistani Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it said.

To this day, the Pakistan Government has not come up with any response to the British protest. The Pakistan Government neither denied nor admitted the allegation, the report said.

The British Government decided not to go public with the discovery as it did not wish to jeopardise its otherwise good relations with Pakistan, it said.

But Britain reportedly decided to leak it now as Pakistan pressed it hard in public after reports published in British media quoting confession of a part-time Mi-5 operative about his attempts to plant bugs in the Pakistan High Commission.

After the revelation hit the media, Pakistan lodged a protest while its top leadership, including President Pervez Musharraf, asked the British Government to end its silence and confirm or deny whether the operation took place.

The western diplomatic source said "in my book, the two sides are even and should move on without chasing shadows. The British attempt to bug the Pakistan High Commission was shoddy and it was blown sky high first by a British and then a Pakistani newspaper.

"The Pakistani attempt was inept. Perhaps they should use better glue next time so that the bug does not go dangling."

The newspaper said the mutual bugging was the reason why both sides have thus far preferred to stay mum instead of shrieking in self-righteous protest.

British Foreign Minister Jack Straw did not raise the matter of bugging in their Islamabad mission with Pakistani Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri when the latter was in the UK, nor did the head of House of Commons select intelligence committee talk to Kasuri about it when the two met in London.

Apparently, the British were hoping that since they had protested privately to the Pakistan foreign office considering that Pakistan made a similar attempt, they were sanguine that the Pakistan Government would not make a song and dance about the attempted bugging in their mission in London. (PTI)

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