(picture taken from the source)

United Nations Department of Safety and Security

un.org/undss/content/risk-management

UNDSS is constantly reviewing security measures and procedures to offer safe working conditions. UNDSS ensures that a full array of security options are available to address security concerns, including crisis management; contingency measures; relocation; evacuation; medical support; mass casualty preparedness; hostage incident management; communications; area security; special events; close protection operations; warden systems and psychosocial response plans; physical security; use of Personal Protective Equipment; tracking; travel advisories; security clearances; and radio room operations.

The implementation of security measures is supported by comprehensive mechanisms to ensure that the necessary logistics, administrative, budget and ICT components are in place to provide for security operations, including rapid emergency response.

>>179397

"Vampire scare prompts U.N. pullout from southern Malawi"

October 9, 2017

reuters.com/article/us-malawi-un-vampires/vampire-scare-prompts-u-n-pullout-from-southern-malawi-idUSKBN1CE25E

LILONGWE (Reuters) - The United Nations said on Monday it has pulled staff out of two districts in southern Malawi where a vampire scare has triggered mob violence in which at least five people have been killed.

Belief in witchcraft is widespread in rural Malawi, one of the world’s poorest countries, where many aid agencies and NGOs work. A spate of vigilante violence linked to a vampire rumors also erupted in Malawi in 2002.

“These districts have severely been affected by the ongoing stories of blood sucking and possible existence of vampires,” the UN Department on Safety and Security (UNDSS) said in a security report on the Phalombe and Mulanje districts that was seen by Reuters.

The Acting UN Resident Coordinator, Florence Rolle, said in an emailed response to questions that based on the report that “some UN staff have relocated while others are still in the districts depending on locations of their operations”.

“UNDSS is continuing to monitor the situation closely to ensure all affected UN staff are back in the field as soon as possible,” Rolle said.

Rolle did not say how many workers had been relocated.

The UNDSS report said at least five people had been killed in the area since mid-September by lynch mobs accusing them of vampirism. It said mobs searching for vampires have been mounting road blocks in the district, raising security concerns.

Malawian President Peter Mutharika said the reports were “distressing and agonizing”.

“This development has been of grave concern to the President and the entire Government,” his office said in a statement.

The UNDSS report said the vampirism rumors appear to have originated in neighboring Mozambique, although it was not clear what had sparked them. It recommended the “temporary suspension of U.N. activities in the area until the situation is normalized”.

It said some NGOs had pulled personnel from the districts and temporarily suspended their programs but did not name the organizations.

>>179495

"UN worker accused of aiding Hamas is arrested"

August 10, 2017

foxnews.com/world/2017/08/10/un-worker-accused-aiding-hamas-is-arrested.html

A group of employees who work for a United Nations agency in Gaza are under investigation for aiding the terrorist group Hamas – and at least one person has been arrested, Fox News has learned.

The acting head of a U.N. office in Gaza was arrested last month while crossing into Israel on what that country’s security service, the Shin-Bet, called “security related offenses.”

The Palestinian official Hamdan Timraz, who according to reports is the acting head of the United Nations Department of Safety and Security (UNDSS) in Gaza, was released Wednesday.

Fox News has learned from sources that while the investigation into Timraz’s case is still active, he's not alone.

"He is not the only person from UNDSS under investigation for aiding and abetting Hamas in Gaza,” said an official with knowledge of the investigation.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it had given reports regarding the official’s activities to U.N. authorities.

>>179523

"Humanitarian actors are failing the world's most vulnerable, new report finds"

June 23, 2017

devex.com/news/humanitarian-actors-are-failing-the-world-s-most-vulnerable-new-report-finds-90528

1. The humanitarian security industry needs to be evaluated

Jackson linked this increasing perception of heightened risk among humanitarians to the growth of the humanitarian security industry since 2011 - including the UN’s Department of Safety and Security (UNDSS), as well as NGOs’ in-house trainers, security personnel, and security managers.

These security staff have become the “gatekeepers controlling and restricting” humanitarian access, she said, and increasingly dictate field staff operations often from a distance in headquarters.

This not only exacerbates the sense of “disconnect” felt by field staff from headquarters, it is an example of “remote management programming” and “bunkerisation,” both of which were criticized in the 2011 report.

“This approach is absolutely counter to the principles of ‘Stay and Deliver’ which call for greater integration rather than separation of programmatic and security decision making,” Jackson said.

Jackson also questioned the appropriateness of having security staff play programmatic decision-making roles since they have a “material and professional interest” in arguing that humanitarians are under attack and should stay in “bunkers,” she said.

Many security staff also lack the requisite training and experience to advise, according to the report’s other author Steven Zyck.

“While we did find case studies and examples of where people felt UNDSS were providing a valuable advice and analysis and a problem solving approach…everywhere else there was an extremely high level of frustration with UNDSS’s ability to enable humanitarian access, people felt they weren’t adding value and they didn’t have the right skill set and attitude,” he said.

The UN’s deputy humanitarian coordinator for Somalia Vincent Lelei said when he first joined the institution 15 years ago, UNDSS “used to lock us away like children who might stray away,” but that things had changed since then. However, he said there is a need for additional change and called for additional investment to find “innovative security management actions.”

>>179589

"UNDSS launches integration project for Safety and Security"

January 14, 2016

un.int/news/undss-launches-integration-project-safety-and-security-0

Your safety. Your security. Our priority. With these words, UNDSS pledges to do their utmost to protect our Organization’s ability to “stay and deliver” on its mandates and, to fulfill its duty of care to each of you.

You may know safety and security colleagues at your duty station, but did you know that the Secretariat’s safety and security personnel number over 6,000 worldwide, financed through seven different budget sources? Did you know that they serve in 123 Countries 14 DPA, 16 DPKO Missions, four DFS missions and service centers, OHCHR, UNHQ, four Offices Away from HQ and four Regional Commissions? They not only perform a full range of regular security duties – like close protection and guarding our premises but also behind the scenes such as risk assessments, hostage negotiation, and critical incident stress counseling.

When UNDSS was created in 2004, the General Assembly sought to entrust one entity, UNDSS, with the authority and accountability for the safety and security of our Organization, its staff, its assets and operations. Over the past decade, the security threats facing our Organization have changed significantly requiring a more flexible, pro-active and responsive UNDSS. To face these challenges, the Secretary-General’s Policy Committee saw the need to realize this initial General Assembly vision with the consolidation of the Secretariat’s safety and security resources, leading to the launch of the United Nations Secretariat Safety and Security Project (UNSSSIP) in August 2015.

This integration will enable UNDSS to place the right staff in the right place at the right time with the right experience and skills to do the right job. Operationally, this will contribute to enhanced security risk assessment and analysis, rapid response to security crises and better use of the workforce (known as SAFETYNET).

For safety and security personnel, UNSSSIP will establish a career development framework that sets out the desired career experiences, skills and education staff need to advance professionally. This framework will contribute to the successful launch of the SAFETYNET roll out as part of the Secretariat Staff Selection and Managed Mobility System.

UNSSSIP is divided into two phases. The first phase established a project governance structure comprising a project team and a Steering Group. The second will see the phased integration of all Secretariat safety and security staff under the authority of UNDSS. Current efforts include the establishment of the necessary delegations of authority, a framework to phase-in a managed mobility programme, and measures enabling rapid response to surge requirements. UNSSSIP aims to achieve these goals by the end of 2016.

"Cyber Week in Review: January 26, 2018"

cfr.org/blog/cyber-week-review-january-26-2018

This week: GDPR compliance, Dutch intelligence, and the woes of being a Russian telecom.

Here is a quick round-up of this week’s technology headlines and related stories you may have missed:

1. It’s crunch time for GDPR compliance. With only four months left until the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect, only Germany and Austria have implemented appropriate legislation to enforce it. The European Commission is urging the remaining twenty-six EU members to enact the domestic legislation necessary to implement the GDPR by May 2018. U.S. companies with EU operations are racing to become GDPR compliant given that violations are punishable by twenty million euros or four percent of a company’s annual turnover. As part of its compliance efforts, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg announced in Brussels that all Facebook users–not only those in Europe–will have access to improved privacy controls to "make it much easier for people to manage their data." That is unlikely to soothe Facebook antagonist Max Schrems, who received the green light from the Court of Justice of the European Union to sue Facebook over its tracking of users around the web and how it provides user data to U.S. intelligence agencies.

1. The thank you cards are in the mail. According to Dutch news outlet de Volkskrant, Dutch intelligence played a critical role in the U.S. intelligence community's attribution of the hack of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in 2016 and State Department in 2015 to the Kremlin. Shortly after the downing of flight MH17 by Russian-backed rebels in Ukraine in 2014, the Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD) managed to compromise the networks used by Cozy Bear, a cyber threat actor believed to be the SVR–Russia's foreign intelligence agency. That compromise gave them full access to Cozy Bear's operations, allowing them to see what its hackers were doing in real time. In 2015, the AIVD tipped off their U.S. counterparts about the targeting of the U.S. State Department, which according to one account led to "hand-to-hand combat." The same thing happened again, sans combat, in 2016 with the compromise of the DNC. This is the third known instance in which a U.S. ally has provided critical information to Washington warning it of Russia's attempts to meddle in the election. According to the New York Times, British intelligence tipped off the United States of Russia's intentions as early as 2015, and an Australian diplomat relayed a conversation he had with a Trump campaign staffer who indicated Russia had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton.

1. The challenges of being a Russian telecom. Russian telecoms are finding it challenging to comply with the Yaravoya law, a suite of counter-terrorism and surveillance legislation passed in 2016. Under the law, Russian telecoms are required to store all user data and traffic for up to six months and make it available to government officials for search purposes. It seems like Moscow is taking a page out of Washington's playbook, learning from the National Security Agency's upstream collection programs, like PRISM, disclosed by Edward Snowden. According to Kommersant, Russian telecoms were unsuccessful in trying to get the Kremlin to pay a portion of the massive infrastructure and storage costs required to comply with the law. Three of the biggest telecoms in Russia have argued that their compliance costs would likely reach $1.8 billion for the first year. The Yaravoya law enters into force in October 2018.

"From GDPR to blockchain, we’re getting more power over our data"

January 27, 2018

wired.co.uk/article/gdpr-personal-data-private-data-accounts

There were significant privacy violations in 2017: DeepMind's controversial data-sharing deal with the NHS; Facebook's €110 million (£98m) fine; Google's €2.4 billion fine; scammers selling personal data. We woke up to the idea that a few big companies, such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and WeChat, had used our data to become near-monopolistic entities.

In 2018, EU regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation and the second Payment Services Directive will give consumers new rights and change their power relationships with these companies. And new technology such as private-data accounts will help us acquire ans use data for our own benefit.

Private-data accounts are like individual bank accounts, but they contain personal information, not money. Hosted by data stores such as people.io, Cozy.io, digi.me and the Hub of All Things, of which I am the founder and chairman, many will let us legally own our own data, bringing it in and pushing it out as we wish, without our having to identify ourselves. And they will do this automatically or at the touch of a button. Inside these accounts, our data will become our asset, one to which we can give specific access rights in return for services. This will flip today's internet (in which we give up all of this data in return for access to services) on its head.

A new generation of apps and websites will arise that use private-data accounts instead of conventional user accounts. Internet applications in 2018 will attach themselves to these, gaining access to a smart data account rich with privately held contextual information such as stress levels (combining sleep patterns, for example, with how busy a user's calendar is) or motivation to exercise comparing historical exercise patterns to infer about the day ahead). All of this will be possible without the burden on the app supplier of undue sensitive data liability or any violation of consumers' personal rights.

It will also be possible to gather future data. For example, organisations and governments will be able to offer benefits for future digital actions such as reducing energy use (future energy data), or taking more exercise (future Fitbit data). Assuming the data can be validated (and there are many blockchain applications ready to do this), the incentivisation of digital action fulfilled through data exchanges will create a internet capability that is as big as the invention of video streaming in the 90s.

Such incentivisation has always been possible at an app level. Fitbit encourages us to work towards our exercise goals. However, the game changer is that private-data accounts will allow this to happen across all data and all apps. New apps are already being built to leverage this new capability. Shape\Influence, a startup on the Hub of All Things' private-data account, enables merchants to directly "buy" influence by offering benefits for tweets, posts and reviews (future data) from all of us, not just celebrities.

The more we share data on our terms, the more the internet will evolve to emulate the physical domain where private spaces, commercial spaces and community spaces can exist separately, but side by side. Indeed, private-data accounts may be the first step towards the internet as a civil society, paving the way for a governing system where digital citizens, in the form of their private micro-server data account, do not merely have to depend on legislation to champion their private rights, but also have the economic power to enforce them as well.

Paradoxically, the internet will become more private at a moment when we individuals begin to exchange more data. We will then wield a collective economic power that could make 2018 the year we rebalance the digital economy.

twitter.com/JPBarlow/status/956369807468736512

"WORST HOUSEWARMING GIFT EVER: Russia Considers Returning Snowden to U.S. to as a gift. to Trump!"