Yemen's Multilayered War: Southern Secessionist Movement
Publisher
Global Views 360
Publication Date
August 6, 2020
URL
Official Logo of Southern Transitional Council | Source: Alyazedi via Wikimedia
This is the 5th part of a short explainer article series on the current crisis in Yemen. To read the earlier parts of the series click on the link.
To read the 1st part of the series click on the link.
To read the 2nd part of the series click on the link.
To read the 3rd part of the series click on the link.
To read the 4th part of the series click on the link.
Since the unification of Yemen in 1990 the political, economic and military leadership was dominated by the Northerners which resulted in continuous conflicts. It was the fight against Al Qaeda linked elements and the Houthis that the political and military forces continued to work together.
A formidable coalition of UAE and Saudi Arabia, led by Mohammed Bin Zayed (MBZ) and Mohammad Bin Salman (MBS), the Crown Princes of respective countries, backed the deposed President of Yemen Mansour Al Hadi in his fight against Houthis. The Houthi forces were supported primarily by Iran which is the geopolitical rival of Saudi Arabia.
The coalition forces used heavy aerial bombardment and naval blockades, but contrary to their expectation, Houthis proved to be formidable opponents and were able to withstand the assaults. President Hadi was confined to Aden and his forces, in spite of massive backing, couldn't dislodge the Houthis from Sana’a. Iranian help in the form of military hardware and trainers enabled the Houthis to launch some spectacular attacks deep inside the Saudi Arabian territory as well.
The failure of President Hadi led forces against Houthis along with the increasing activities of Al Qaeda in Arabiam Peninsula (AQAP) encouraged the revival of a long suppressed secessionist movement in Southern Yemen, Al-Hirak al-Janoubi commonly called Hirak.
Al-Hirak al-Janoubi :
During the rule of President Abdullah Saleh’s rule in 2007, another movement for promoting the secession of Southern Yemen was launched. It was known as Al Hirak and its objective was to revert to the pre-unification status of Yemen. This movement could not garner much support but was lying dormant for a long time.
In 2017 a faction of Al-Hirak movement formed Al-Hirak al-Janoubi or The Southern Transitional Council (STC). Its current members consist of governorates in the southern part of Yemen. It is headed by a former governor of Aden, Aidarus al-Zoubaidi.
Zoubaidi was dismissed as governor of Aden by Hadi in 2017 for his close ties to the UAE. As a governor Zoubaidi was quite popular in Aden, and his dismissal was met with protests against President Hadi. With support from the UAE he went on to form the STC, also known as the Separatists.
In 2018, the Separatists occupied the government at Aden in a coup d’état against the Hadi government, leading to 38 deaths. The Hadi government called this a UAE backed-coup. Since the UAE and Saudi Arabia are part of the same Arab coalition, they agreed to sit down for talks regarding the Yemen issue.
Despite this, the Separatists took over Aden in 2019, leading to much confusion over who controls the basic services and administrative duties (such as payment of civil servants) in the city.
The BBC reported that “In April 2020 the STC declared self-rule in Aden, breaking a peace deal signed with the internationally recognised government, saying it would govern the port city and southern provinces.”
So in effect Yemen is now governed by three separate entities, Houthis in North Yemen, STC and Hadi faction in Southern part of Yemen. Apart from this in parts of tribal hinterland, Al Qaeda is running its writ. There is a real danger that Yemen is now on the path to disintegration.
To read the 6th part of the series click on the link.
Subscribe to the Global Views 360 mailing list for the weekly updates.
Support us to bring the world closer
To keep our content accessible we don't charge anything from our readers and rely on donations to continue working. Your support is critical in keeping Global Views 360 independent and helps us to present a well-rounded world view on different international issues for you. Every contribution, however big or small, is valuable for us to keep on delivering in future as well.
WhatsApp's New Privacy Policy: Collecting Metadata and Its Implications
According to WhatsApp’s new privacy policy, the app is set to collect “only” user’s Metadata. Metadata can reveal a lot more than merely the app usage of a person. Former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker stated, “Metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata you don’t really need content.”
This article explores the ways in which WhatsApp is underselling the true estimation of the significance of Metadata.
Facebook owned WhatsApp recently announced the update of its privacy policy terms. 8th of February, 2021 was initially set as the deadline for users to either accept the new privacy policy or delete their account. By this time, most of us have already witnessed or been a part of the backlash that WhatsApp is experiencing. LocalCircles conducted a survey and the results indicated that 15% of India’s users are likely to move away entirely from the app while 36% will drastically reduce the usage and 67% of users are likely to discontinue chats with WhatsApp business accounts.
To reinstall trust in its users, WhatsApp released a clarification stating that the new policy update doesn’t compromise privacy of messages with friends and family. Furthermore, it explains that the update includes changes related to WhatsApp business accounts are optional too.
However, owing to severe backlash, WhatsApp has pushed the deadline to May 15 while they further clarify their policy updates.
It is true that WhatsApp cannot read our messages as it is end-to-end encrypted which implies that only a message’s sender and receiver can read it. The updated privacy policy intends to alert users that some businesses would soon be using Facebook-servers to store messages with their customers. By accepting the new privacy policy, users will be allowing WhatsApp to reserve all rights to collect your data and share it with the expansive Facebook and Instagram networks ‘regardless of whether you have profiles on those apps.’
By using WhatsApp, you may now be sharing your usage data, your phone’s unique identifier, your location when the location service is enabled, among several other types of metadata. A culmination of all your metadata is linked to your identity.
The value of metadata has been underestimated since the term isn’t clearly understood. Metadata is data about our data. For instance, in a cell phone conversation, the conversation itself isn’t metadata but everything except that is metadata. Data regarding who you called, how long you spoke for, where you were when you placed the call, where the other person on the line was and the time you placed the call. Consider a situation when every time you made a call to someone, you had to inform a particular person about who you called, how long you spoke for, when and where and all other details except the content spoken. This applies for every single call and everyone else’s metadata is also being recorded. The person owning the metadata can analyze and tell a lot about your personal life. Who you work with, who you spend time with, who you are close to, where you are at particular times and so on…
Kurt Opsahl, in his post in the Electronic Frontier Foundation, gives an example of how companies and governments collect intimate details about your life with the disguised use of the word called metadata. The following examples are an excerpt of his article:
“They know you rang a phone sex service at 2:24 am and spoke for 18 minutes. They know that you called suicide prevention hotline from the Golden Gate Bridge.
They know you spoke with an HIV testing service, then your doctor, then your health insurance company in the same hour.
They know you called a gynaecologist, spoke for a half hour, and then called the local Planned Parenthood's number later that day. But nobody knows what you spoke about.”
Metadata provides more than required context to know some of the most intimate and personal details of your lives. When this data is correlated with the records of other phone calls, one can easily obtain a lot more data and track our daily routines. This is merely about phone calls. WhatsApp includes a lot more features and will collect metadata of chats, businesses and money transactions.
In WhatsApp’s words:
“We collect service-related, diagnostic, and performance information. This includes information about your activity (such as how you use our Services, how you interact with others using our Services, and the like), log files, and diagnostic, crash, website, and performance logs and reports.”
In addition to this, WhatsApp also collects information about IP address, OS, browser information and phone number.
Stanford’s computer scientists conducted an analysis to understand the extent of intrusion of privacy using metadata. The scientists built an app for smartphones. The app was developed to retrieve metadata of calls and text messages from more than 800 volunteers’ phone logs. The researchers received records of more than 250,000 calls and 1.2 million texts. Their inexpensive analysis revealed personal details of several people like their health records. Researchers were also able to learn that one of their participants owned an AR semi-automatic rifle with only metadata.
Gen. Michael Hayden, the former head of the National Security Agency once stated that “the U.S. government kill[s] people based on metadata.”
In 2016, Facebook was involved in the infamous data privacy scandal which centered around collection of personal data of over 87 million people by Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting and strategic analyst firm. The organization harvested user data for targeted advertising, particularly political advertising during the 2016 U.S. election. While the central offender was Cambridge Analytica, the apparent indifference for data privacy to Facebook facilitated Cambridge Analytical and several other organizations.
In June 2018, Facebook confirmed that it was sharing data with at least 4 Chinese companies, Huawei, Oppo, Lenovo and TCL. Facebook was under scrutiny from the U.S. intelligence agencies on security issues as they claimed that the data with the Chinese telecommunication companies would provide an opportunity for a foreign espionage.
In September 2019, there were reports that the Indian government contemplated making it mandatory for companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, to share the public data of users.
The Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) was planning on issuing new guidelines under the Information Technology Act which according to which tech giants would have been required to share freely available data or the public information that they collate in the course of their operations, including traffic, buying and illness patterns.
Europe is exempted from WhatsApp’s new privacy policy as EU antitrust authorities fined Facebook 110 million euros for misleading the regulators during the takeover of WhatsApp in 2014. EU’s strict privacy laws empowers regulators to fine up to 4% of global annual revenue of the companies that breach the bloc’s rules.
Your Metadata is extremely personal. By giving WhatsApp the authority to access it, you are giving access to several other organizations, businesses and it also makes you more vulnerable to third-party hackers and trackers. WhatsApp has given multiple assurances about its updated privacy policy being noninvasive. However, most of these assurances are cleverly worded and misleading statements. It is important to read through the fine print of the new policy before accepting it.
