You are being snooped on, Malaysia views US-NSA spying seriously!

Asia being snooped on, too 

Spying by foreign intelligence agencies is also prevalent in Malaysia and other regional countries via the Internet or spying equipment located in embassies.

SO last week it was the turn of Asians to learn that their region was also the subject of foreign spying.

This was no surprise. If American intelligence is spying on Americans, on Latin Americans, and on Europeans (including its top political leader, Angela Merkel of Germany), it is a foregone conclusion that Asia would not be left out.

There is no revelation yet that Asian prime ministers and presidents have had their personal mobile phones and e-mails tapped.

But it is also a foregone conclusion that these things are happening. Be prepared, therefore, to read in the coming weeks about famous Asian leaders, opposition stalwarts, journalists and celebrities being the subjects of snooping.

Nevertheless, the news that American and Australian embassies are being used to snoop on Asian countries justifiably caused outrage in our region. The Australian surveillance is reportedly in cooperation with the United States.

Malaysia is one of the places where Australian intelligence operates to spy, according to reports in the Der Spiegel and Sydney Morning Herald. They revealed that the spying takes place from the Australian High Commission in Kuala Lumpur.

Other Asian countries where the intelligence collection is conducted is the Australian embassies in China, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, Timor Leste and Papua New Guinea.

The news reports also revealed that the US embassies have also been conducting surveillance activities in many Asian countries including Malaysia, Indonesia, China, Thailand, Cambodia and Myanmar.

Malaysia last Friday registered its protests in official notes handed to the Australian High Commissioner and the US Deputy Chief of Mission who were summoned to Wisma Putra. The notes warned that surveillance of close friends could severely damage relations.

Indonesia warned the United States and Australia that the continuation of surveillance facilities inside their embassies threatened to derail years of trust built up between countries.

China also responded to the report that the American embassy in Beijing and consulates in Shanghai and Chengdu operated special spying facilities.

Its Foreign Ministry has demanded an explanation from the United States, saying that “foreign entities must not in any form engage in activities that are incompatible with their status and that are harmful to China’s national security and interest”.

Also last Friday, Brazil and Germany introduced a draft resolution to a United Nations General Assembly committee calling for an end to excessive surveillance.

The press reports on spying in Asian countries are based on information leaked by Edward Snowden, a former contractor with the US National Security Agency.

Newspapers and magazines had previously revealed that the personal phones of the German chancellor and the Brazilian president had been tapped. Both leaders have registered protests directly to US President Barack Obama.

Last week also saw revelations by the Washington Post that the US and British intelligence agencies had found a way of intercepting communications from Google as well as Yahoo as the data were being passed between their data centres.

“We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone,” said Google’s chief legal officer.

The Internet giant companies have found that their encryptment system protecting e-mail and other information flowing through its data centres is not secure after all.

The technology companies are worried that their millions of customers will no longer trust that their privacy will be protected.

How will this affect the use of browsing, e-mail, Facebook and other facets of the Internet technology?

US companies and entities currently dominate the global Internet business. Much of the world’s flow of data go through Internet companies based in the United States.

The US administration had projected itself as an honest host of the Internet centres, respecting the rights and privacy of the world’s Internet and e-mail users, and a champion of Internet freedom.

That image has been shattered by the series of revelations emerging from Snowden’s leaked files. The opposite image has replaced it, of a government that has used high technology to gather billions of bits of data on practically all Internet users.

If counter-terrorism was the official reason, this now seems to be only a pretext for also spying on any important person, including one’s closest allies.

Now that they have lost confidence that the United States or other countries will respect privacy of the politicians, companies and citizens of their countries, some governments are now planning to limit the reach of American-based Internet companies.

The Financial Times reported that Brazil is planning regulations that would force technology companies to retain information on the Internet about its citizens and institutions within Brazil itself.

It also said that European officials are discussing the need to have stronger cloud computing capabilities in Europe to protect their citizens’ privacy.

Brazil is also planning to bring up in various UN agencies and fora the need for a global framework to respect and protect privacy on the Internet.

Contributed by Global Trends Martiin Khor
The views expressed are entirely the writer’s own.

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Malaysia views spying seriously

KLUANG: Spying activities on Malaysia by its allies is a serious matter, says Defence Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein.

This is because it can cause relations between Malaysia and these countries, long established based on trust and sincerity, to be tense.

“I believe if this (spying) is not fully explained, our long-established good relations can be adversely affected. Therefore, we need a full explanation on the extent of the spying activities and for what purpose.

“Tensions can be avoided if the allies involved uphold the trust and sincerity in their relations with Malaysia,” he said.

Hishammuddin said this to reporters after attending a Deepavali open house hosted by Johor Unity and Human Resources Committee chairman R.Vidyanathan here yesterday.

The spying issue arose following media reports on the claim made by intelligence informant Edward Snowden that the United States had 90 electronic surveillance facilities throughout the world, including at its embassy in Kuala Lumpur.

In light of this, Hishammuddin wanted a detailed explanation on the matter as such activities could threaten Malaysia’s security and its other interests.

The US ambassador to Malaysia, Joseph Y. Yun, was reported to have explained on the spying claim to Wisma Putra.

Foreign Minister Datuk Seri Anifah Aman said Yun had stated that all surveillance activities by the United States throughout the world were specifically for security, to detect threats of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

On his trip to China last month, Hishammuddin said it was aimed at enhancing cooperation in the area of defence, especially through joint exercises, exchange programmes involving navy and other military officers, establishing cooperation between the defence industries of both countries, and efforts to combat terrorism and transnational crime.

Meanwhile in Yan, Inspector-General of Police Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar said they would arrest any foreign diplomat found to be involved in spying activities.

“We will not hesitate because spying is a threat to the country’s sovereignty. In the 1980s, we have arrested foreign diplomats involved in spying activities.

“We will do the same again if there is proof of such activities,” he told newsmen after a briefing on the Sungai Limau by-election at the Yan police headquarters yesterday.

- The Star/Asia News Network Monday Nov 4, 2013

NSA secretly hacks, intercepts Google, Yahoo daily

The United States’ National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers worldwide. That’s according to documents released by former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, The Washington Post reports.

Video: NSA intercepts Google, Yahoo traffic overseas report | The Nationalhttp://www.thenational.ae/article/2013110
 http://shar.es/IxZIJ



According to the documents, the agency and its British counterpart GCHQ, through a project called MUSCULAR, collected data stored on Google and Yahoo servers. That allowed both governments access to hundreds of millions of user accounts from individuals worldwide.

“From undisclosed interception points, the NSA and GCHQ are copying entire data flows across fiber-optic cables that carry information between the data centers of the Silicon Valley giants,” RT cites the Post’s Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani.

A January 9th document says that in the preceding 30 days, collectors had processed over 181 million pieces of information, including both metadata and the actual contents of communications.

The government can already request information from phone or data through the FISA Amendments Act but this data collection would ostensibly take place without Google and Yahoo even being aware of it.

When you send email or store files with an internet company, that data is regularly shared among servers around the world, in order to ensure quick access to your information from wherever you happen to be. Google and Yahoo run customized private networks to shuttle that information around, passing between and within countries, as the Post indicates in a graphic. To move that information, the companies use fiber optic connections, light-speed networks running over thin glass cables. According to the Post, it’s those connections that the NSA is able to monitor. None of Yahoo’s inter-server traffic is encrypted. Not all of Google’s is either.

The MUSCULAR program, according to Wednesday’s leak, involves a process in which the NSA and GCHQ intercept communications overseas, where lax restrictions and oversight allow the agencies access to intelligence with ease.

“NSA documents about the effort refer directly to ‘full take,’ ‘bulk access’ and ‘high volume’ operations on Yahoo and Google networks,” the Post reported. “Such large-scale collection of Internet content would be illegal in the United States, but the operations take place overseas, where the NSA is allowed to presume that anyone using a foreign data link is a foreigner”.

The Post points out that company staffers were surprised and angry to hear that their their networks had been compromised. Google said that it was “troubled by allegations of the government intercepting traffic between our data centers”.

The report comes amid a storm of protest about NSA surveillance both at home and overseas of phone and Internet communications.

On Tuesday, US officials said reports that American spy agencies snooped on millions of Europeans were false.

Alexander told lawmakers that in many cases European spy agencies had turned over phone records and shared them with US intelligence.

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5.US building new spy wing to focus on Asia 

USA Spying, the Super-Snooper !

The United States is running clandestine communications intelligence facilities at its embassies in Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Bangkok, Phnom Penh and Yangon.

The country is doing so by tapping telephones and monitoring communications networks from electronic surveillance facilities in US embassies and consulates across east and south-east Asia, according to information disclosed by intelligence whistleblower Edward Snowden.A top secret map dated August 13, 2010 lists nearly a hundred surveillance facilities worldwide, the map however, shows no such facilities are located in Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Japan and Singapore – the US’s closest allies.

Snoopy the Snooper

According to the map published by Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine today, a joint Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – National Security Agency (NSA) group known as ” Special Collection Service” conducts the sweeping surveillance operation, as well as clandestine operations against specific intelligence targets.The map, which was initially published in full on Der Spiegel‘s website but subsequently replaced with a censored version, lists Special Collection Service facilities at 90 locations worldwide, including 74 manned facilities, 14 remotely operated facilities and two technical support centres.

The map confirms the global reach of US signals intelligence operations with special collection facilities located in most major capitals on every continent.Read the full story here

http://en.harakahdaily.net/index.php/headline/8057-us-embassy-in-kl-and-elsewhere-conducting-clandestine-operations-.html

By Hanin Fadiyah@www.harakahdaily.com

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Brazil attacks US over spying issue

The UN General Assembly opened last week with an electrifying speech by President Dilma Rousseff who slammed US cyber-snooping activities with President Barack Obama in the audience.

INTERNET spying by the US government became a major issue at the United Nations General Assembly last week when political leaders heard a blistering attack by the Brazilian president who was visibly angry about how her country and her own office have been targets of cyber-snooping activities.

She called the US action a breach of international law, a grave violation of human rights and civil liberties, and a disrespect for national sovereignty.

It was condemnation in the strongest terms at the highest political forum in the world, with UN and commercial TV stations beaming the speech live.

The surveillance issue, which has caused ripples with continuous revelations in the media emerging from whistle-blower Edward Snowden’s files, has now reached the UN.

And in the most spectacular fashion. It was an extraordinary scene when President Dilma Rousseff gave the opening speech among the government leaders gathered for the annual General Assembly.

Traditionally, Brazil’s president speaks first, followed by the US president. Thus, Barack Obama could not avoid hearing her speech.

Many had expected Rousseff to touch on the Internet spying issue, since she had strongly criticised the US when the media broke the news on specific instances of US Internet surveillance on the Brazilian President’s office, other departments, including the Brazilian Mission to the UN, and the national oil company Petrobas. She recently cancelled a state visit to Washington.

But her speech and performance was far beyond what was anticipated. With the atmosphere electrifying in the packed hall of leaders, the Brazilian president cut out the usual diplomatic niceties while addressing one of the most sensitive issues to have emerged globally in recent years.

She called it “a matter of great importance and gravity ... the global network of electronic espionage that has caused indignation and repudiation in public opinion around the world.”

Rousseff described the Internet spying as creating “a situation of grave violation of human rights and of civil liberties; of invasion and capture of confidential information concerning corporate activities, and especially of disrespect to national sovereignty”.

She started by laying the foundation of her argument: “A sovereign nation can never establish itself to the detriment of another sovereign nation.

“The right to safety of citizens of one country can never be guaranteed by violating fundamental human rights of citizens of another country. The arguments that the illegal interception of information and data aims at protecting nations against terrorism cannot be sustained.”

She said she fought against authoritarianism and censorship, and thus has to uncompromisingly defend the right to privacy of individuals and the sovereignty of her country.

“In the absence of the right to privacy, there can be no true freedom of expression and opinion, and therefore no effective democracy. In the absence of the respect for sovereignty, there is no basis for the relationship among nations,” she added.

Her speech touched on three actions. First, Brazil had asked the US for explanations, apologies and guarantees that such procedures will never be repeated.

Second, Brazil is planning actions to defend itself from the spying. It will “adopt legislation, technologies and mechanisms to protect us from the illegal interception of communications and data”.

Third, she proposed international action, saying: “Information and telecommunication technologies cannot be the new battlefield between states. Time is ripe to create the conditions to prevent cyberspace from being used as a weapon of war, through espionage, sabotage, and attacks against systems and infrastructure of other countries.”

Stating that the UN must play a leading role to regulate the conduct of states with regard to these technologies, she called for the setting up of “a civilian multilateral framework for the governance and use of the Internet and to ensure the effective protection of data that travels through the web”.

She proposed multilateral mechanisms for the worldwide network, based on the principles of freedom of expression, privacy and human rights; open, multilateral and democratic governance; universality; cultural diversity; and neutrality of the network, guided only by technical and ethical criteria, with no restrictions allowed on political, commercial, religious grounds.

Delegates who hoped that Obama would respond were disappointed. He did not refer to the Brazilian president’s address made only a few minutes before.

He made only a passing reference to the issue, saying: “we are reviewing the way we gather intelligence.”

Rousseff’s speech came at the right time and venue, since people worldwide have been increasingly troubled or outraged by the extent of cyber-spying revealed by the media.

The issue is even more serious for developing countries. Media reports indicate that there are double standards, with the US spying programme requiring a special court procedure for opening data on individual US citizens, while there is no such procedure for residents outside the US, and thus the surveillance is comprehensive for the world outside the US, with the citizens, companies and government offices all being targets.

Moreover, the media reports show that the US actions do not stop at surveillance. There are also schemes to engage in cyber actions or attacks.

Rousseff’s speech at the UN indicates Brazil plans follow-up moves in the UN for setting up a multilateral system to regulate the use and misuse of the Internet. This would be a timely international response to the recent revelations.

Contributed by Global Trends, MARTIN KHOR
The views expressed are entirely the writer’s own.

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Abusing intelligence is stupid

Governments that deliberately pervert their spy agencies are shooting themselves in the head.

ALL countries operate spy agencies, so some of their practices and experiences are universal.

Governments deem intelligence services to be useful, even necessary, in evaluating and anticipating events – so they are earnestly nurtured and cultivated. However, whether and how far these services actually contribute to policymaking depends on a multitude of variable factors.

The capacity of a “secret service” derives from the scale of its available resources – human, financial, technical, etc.

The richer a country the greater the means for developing its intelligence service, and the more powerful a country the greater its need or purpose for doing so.

Yet that need not mean that a richer or more powerful country would have a more competent intelligence service.

Unlike conventional institutions such as the armed forces, the critical criteria cannot be the strength of numbers or the expanse of field coverage.

Since the quality of information handled is key, spy agencies perform like a scalpel where other security institutions act like meat cleavers.

At the same time, all of them need to be coordinated and concerted through optimised complementarity.

Conceptually, the intelligence services are highly professional institutions performing specialised tasks in the national interest.

In discharging their duties, they must observe laws and conventions that guide and limit their clandestine activities.

In practice, however, they are often politicised in the perceived interests of specific administrations.

This compromises their credibility, debases their status and subverts their effectiveness.

Another universal experience, regardless of a country’s developed or developing status, is that the intelligence services are boosted in times of great national distress.

Trying times are also the best times to stretch and test their capacities.

Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), for example, originated in the Secret Service Bureau established in 1909.

This was a joint effort of the War Office and the Admiralty, with a focus on Imperial Germany.

The impetus for the service developed with the exigencies of two world wars.

In the United States, the demands of wartime intelligence in the early 1940s resulted in the creation of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) to coordinate information streams from the armed forces.

The OSS would later morph into the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), technically the first US spy agency.

The United States until then did not have a centralised intelligence agency, so the CIA emerged to fill the gap.

As it was with the SIS, the existence of the CIA was not officially acknowledged until decades later. But what began as a fledgling effort requiring British inputs soon ballooned into a US intelligence community comprising no less than 16 spy agencies.

Intelligence agencies tend to have a civilian (police) or military character depending on the needs of the state at the time. Nonetheless, their constant is the primary purpose of protecting the state.

The early Soviet Union felt it needed to guard against counter-revolution, and so established the Cheka secret police under the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

The Cheka then underwent several transformations to become the NKVD, which in turn experienced further transformations to become the KGB of Cold War lore, in the process picking up military elements in the world wars.

The Malayan Emergency (1948-60) was a domestic insurgency that exercised the resources of the police force.

The police department that focused on vital intelligence gathering was the Special Branch, evolving under British tutelage during the colonial period and developing further upon Malayan independence.

Currently, all national intelligence agencies combine human (Humint) and signals (Sigint, or telecommunications interceptions) intelligence.

The latter comprises communications between individuals (Comint) and electronic intelligence (electronic eavesdropping, or Elint) that favour countries with bigger budgets because of the costs incurred in technology and expertise.

However, while a common strength lies in surveillance or information-gathering, analysis and interpretation of the information so gathered often fail to keep pace.

Where analytical deficits occur, political interests often exploit these spaces to pervert the course of intelligence gathering.

At the same time, the quality of intelligence is sometimes patchy where official links are weak.

Britain’s SIS was thus handicapped in Germany during the First World War, just as US intelligence services are now hampered in Iran and Syria as they were in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

The problem is compounded when governments refuse to acknowledge their inadequacies and prefer to give their own dubious capacities the benefit of the doubt.

The mistake often lies in equating overwhelming military superiority with operational success requiring sound intelligence.

And so regime change in Iraq was described as a “cakewalk” and a “slam dunk”, with unanticipated difficulties emerging once the plan was operationalised.

A similar development almost occurred in Syria upon underestimating President Bashar al-Assad’s effective control.

Hyper-intelligence combines the prowess of two or more ally countries’ intelligence services, taking spying to a whole new level.

The US-British “special relationship” is one such example, only that it is more than bilateral collaboration.

What began as a post-war agreement between London and Washington in 1946 soon encompassed the other English-speaking countries of Canada, Australia and New Zealand in the UKUSA (United Kingdom – United States of America) Agreement.

Focusing on but not limited to Sigint, this “Five Eyes” pact formalises the sharing of intelligence on other countries that any of the five spies upon.

Earlier this month, a leak by former US intelligence operative Edward Snowden revealed that the UKUSA Agreement goes further than these five Western countries. It effectively and routinely includes Israel as well.

The National Security Agency (NSA) reputedly runs the most extensive intelligence gathering operation for the United States.

Its global reach is shared with the largest unit in the Israel Defense Force, the NSA-equivalent Unit 8200 (or ISNU, the Israeli Sigint National Unit), in unfiltered form.

That means anything and everything that the United States and/or the other “Five Eyes” countries knows about the rest of the world from spying are known by Israel as well.

It explains Washington’s determination to “get Snowden” – not only are the leaks embarrassing, they discourage other countries from engaging the United States in security cooperation.

The other problem is no less serious: politicisation, which corrupts and perverts otherwise professional and competent intelligence services.

This amounts to blowback, a CIA-originated term meaning self-inflicted policy injury.

It (in)famously occurred when the US-British axis that invaded Iraq built its rationale on the lie that Saddam had stockpiled “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs) – even when whatever little intelligence there was had indicated that Iraq had dismantled WMD facilities years before.

It happened again when Washington insisted that Assad was responsible for chemical weapons attacks in civilian areas.

Not only had Russian intelligence and UN inspectors found anti-Assad rebels culpable instead, but both German and Israeli intelligence had privately cleared Assad of those charges.

The inside information available to diplomats had cast such doubt on the US allegations that US-friendly countries such as Singapore refused to accept Washington’s version at the UN.

Politics had dictated that the United States stick with its allegations, just as politics had dissuaded Israeli policymakers from correcting misinterpretations of intelligence data wrongly blaming Assad.

Fiddling with intelligence for some passing gratification such as attacking an adversary may seem tempting, but dumbing down vital strategic data is a dangerous and costly exercise. It is also an act of singular and self-defeating stupidity.

Contributed by  Behind The Headlines: Bunn Nagara
> Bunn Nagara is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies (ISIS) Malaysia.
>The views expressed are entirely the writer's own.

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No privacy on the Net !

Revelations about PRISM, a US government program that harvests data on the Internet, has sparked concerns about privacy and civil rights violations. But has there ever been real privacy and security on the WWW?

 Demonstrators hold posters during a demonstration against the US Internet surveillance program of the NSA, PRISM, at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, Germany, ahead of US President Barack Obama’s visit to the German capital.

IMAGINE a time before email, when all your correspondence was sent through the post. How would you feel if you knew that somebody at the post office was recording the details of all the people you were corresponding with, “just in case” you did something wrong?

I think quite a few of you would be upset about it.

Similarly, some Americans are furious over revelations made about a system called PRISM. In the last few weeks, an allegation has been made that the US government is harvesting data on the Internet by copying what travels through some of its Internet Service Providers.

The US Director of National Intelligence has said that PRISM “is not an undisclosed collection or data mining program”, but its detractors are not convinced that this doesn’t mean no such program exists.

I think there are mainly two kinds of responses to this revelation: “Oh my God!” and “What took them so long?”.

The Internet has never really been secure. Because your data usually has to travel via systems owned by other people, you are at their mercy as to what they do with it. The indications are that this is already being done elsewhere.

Countries such as China, India, Russia, Sweden and the United Kingdom allegedly already run similar tracking projects on telecommunications and the Internet, mostly modelled on the US National Security Agency’s (unconfirmed) call monitoring programme. For discussion, I’ll limit myself for the moment to just emails – something that most people would recognise as being private and personal.

I find many people are surprised when I tell them that sending email over the Internet is a little bit like sending your message on a postcard. Just because you need a password to access it, doesn’t mean it’s secure during transmission.

The analogy would be that your mailbox is locked so only you can open it, but those carrying the postcard can read it before it reaches its final destination. Of course, there are ways to mitigate this. One has to be careful about what one put in emails in the first place. Don’t send anything that would be disastrous if it were forwarded to someone else without your permission.

You could also encrypt your email, so only the receiver with the correct password or key could read it, but this is difficult for most end users to do. (For those interested in encrypting emails, I would recommend looking at a product called PGP.)

The analogy holds up for other Internet traffic. It’s easy to monitor, given enough money and time. And as easy as it is for the Good Guys to try to monitor the Bad Guys, it’s just as easy for the Bad Guys to monitor us hapless members of the public.

But who do we mean by the Bad Guys? Specifically, should the government and law-enforcement agencies be categorised as ‘Bad Guys’ for purposes of privacy? Generally, the line oft quoted is “if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to worry about”.

Yet, I think we all accept that there should be a fundamental right to privacy, for everybody from anybody. An interesting corollary to being able to express your thoughts freely is that you should also be able to decide when and how you make them public.

The fault in relying on organisations that say “trust us” isn’t in the spirit of their objectives, but in how the humans in them are flawed in character and action.

An example quoted regularly at the moment is how the FBI collected information about Martin Luther King because they considered him the “most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country”.

One way of defining the boundaries are by codifying them in laws. For example, the Malaysian Personal Data Protection Act prohibits companies from sharing personal data with third parties without the original owner’s consent.

However, this law explicitly does not apply to the federal and state governments of Malaysia. Another clause indicates that consent is not necessary if it is for the purpose of “administration of justice”, or for the “exercise of any functions conferred on any person by or under any law”.

In relation to the revelations of PRISM, several questions come to mind: Can Internet traffic (or a subset of it) be considered “personal data”? Is it possible for government agencies to collect and store such data without your consent?

And if so, what safeguards are there to ensure that this personal data is accurate, is used correctly and is relevant for storage in the first place?

This should be a sharp point of debate, not just in terms of which of our secrets the government can be privy to, but also of which of the government’s information should be readily accessible by us.

True, there is so much data out there that analysing it is not a trivial task. However, companies such as Google are doing exactly that kind of work on large volumes of unstructured data so that you can search for cute kittens. The technology is already on its way.

Perhaps I am being over-cautious, but it seems a bit fantastical that people can know your deepest and darkest secrets by just monitoring a sequence of 1’s and 0’s. But, to quote science fiction author Phillip K. Dick, “It’s strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then”.

Contradictheory
By DZOF AZMI

> Logic is the antithesis of emotion but mathematician-turned-scriptwriter Dzof Azmi’s theory is that people need both to make sense of life’s vagaries and contradictions. Speak to him at star2@thestar.com.my.

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