Contributing Writers: Azad Ali, Tangerine Clarke,
George Alleyne, Nelson King,
Vinette K. Pryce, Bert Wilkinson
GENERAL INFORMATION (718) 260-2500
Caribbean L 10 ife, January 17-23, 2020
By David Lipton
David Lipton* is First
Deputy Managing Director
at the International Monetary
Fund (IMF), a position
he has held since 2011.
WASHINGTON DC, Jan.
14, 2020 (IPS) — Last
March, Operation Taiex led
to the arrest of the gang
leader behind the Carbanak
and Cobalt malware attacks
on over 100 financial institutions
worldwide.
This law enforcement
operation included the
Spanish national police,
Europol, FBI, the Romanian,
Moldovan, Belarusian,
and Taiwanese authorities,
as well as private cybersecurity
companies. Investigators
found out that hackers
were operating in at least 15
countries.
We all know that money
moves quickly around the
world. As Operation Taiex
shows, cybercrime is doing
the same, becoming increasingly
able to collaborate rapidly
across borders.
To create a cyber-secure
world, we must be as fast and
globally integrated as the
criminals. Facing a global
threat with local resources
will not be enough. Countries
need to do more internally
and internationally to
coordinate their efforts.
How to best work
together
To begin, the private sector
offers many good examples
of cooperation. The
industry deserves credit for
taking the lead in many
areas—developing technical
and risk management
standards, convening information
sharing forums,
and spending considerable
resources.
International bodies,
including the Group of 7
Cyber Experts group and the
Basel Committee, are creating
awareness and identifying
sound practices for
financial sector supervisors.
This is important work.
But there is more to be
done, especially if we take
a global perspective. There
are four areas where the
international community
can come together and
boost the work being done
at the national level:
First, we need to develop
a greater understanding of
the risks: the source and
nature of threats and how
they might impact financial
stability. We need more
data on threats and on the
impact of successful attacks
to better understand the
risks.
Second, we need to
improve collaboration on
threat intelligence, incident
reporting and best
practices in resilience and
response. Information sharing
between the private and
public sector needs to be
improved—for example, by
reducing barriers to banks
reporting issues to financial
supervisors and law enforcement.
Different public agencies
within a country need to
communicate seamlessly.
And most challenging, information
sharing between
countries must improve.
Third, and related, regulatory
approaches need to
achieve greater consistency.
Today, countries have different
standards, regulations,
and terminology. Reducing
this inconsistency will facilitate
more communication.
Finally, knowing that
attacks will come, countries
need to be ready for them.
Crisis preparation and
response protocols should
be developed at both the
national and cross-border
level, so as to be able to
respond and recover operations
as soon as possible.
Crisis exercises have
become crucial in building
resilience and the ability to
respond, by revealing gaps
and weaknesses in processes
and decision making.
Connecting the
global dots
Because a cyberattack
can come from anywhere
in the world, or many places
at once, crisis response protocols
must be articulated
within regions and globally.
By Jumaane D. Williams
It’s time we all learned a lesson
on school diversity.
When the NYC School Diversity
Advisory Group (SDAG) released
its recommendations for addressing
the nation’s segregated school
system, a 9,000 word report with a
wide range of recommendations,
most people read just three words
— gifted and talented.
When I met with the students,
teachers and parents who are
members of the Advisory Group
— it was a high school student
who put it most succinctly. She
said that reforms and reactions
would always involve two components,
data and experience.
The data is clear — and along
with many other students, I’ve had
the experience.
As a kid, I was in the Gifted
and Talented program beginning
in third grade, then at Philippa
Schuyler Middle School. That
experience helped prepare me for
Brooklyn Tech, and ultimately
where I am today. But right now,
the barriers to that kind of enrichment
are overwhelming, and the
implementation unconstructive.
The separation of ‘gifted and
talented’ students is itself flawed
— especially four year olds —
as is the implicit idea that students
outside the program lack
certain abilities. As a student with
Tourette Syndrome and ADHD
— which went undiagnosed until
high school — I could have been
categorized ‘special education’ as
needing additional support. Categorizations
and labels cannot be
so simple, nor can educational
systems.
Enrichment cannot be about
privilege. Preparing for and passing
an extensive verbal and nonverbal
entry exam before a child
can read and write is about privilege.
This issue was exacerbated
under Mayor Bloomberg, who set
an early age and a rigid standard
to a criteria which had previously
been more district and individually
based. Credit is due to this
administration for helping to in
some way equalize early education
with universal pre-K and
3-K, but resource disparities still
exist that will persist throughout a
student’s education if introduced
in this early stage. Isolating one
group of students as talented, and
the inherent contrast and explicit
separation it creates with their
fellow students, is about privilege.
We can’t solve a diversity problem
with segregation.
Research shows that separating
students by achievement levels
at young ages hurts integration
efforts, pulls down students in
the “general population,” and does
not help students who qualify as
Gifted and Talented. The solution
is not to eliminate the benefits of
the gifted and talented program,
but to remove barriers to them
— to eliminate the entry test in
favor of a multi-measure model
and to integrate the benefits of the
program into the classroom, not
to remove them from it. Without
argument, there should be a path
for highly achieving students to
advance. But those opportunities
should be available to all students,
all classrooms, all communities.
Our elementary educational
system needs dynamic schoolwide
enrichment model where elementary
aged students are placed
in modules based on achievement
level — all contained within the
same classroom. Each student
OP-EDS
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Continued on Page 11
Continued on Page 11
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Cybersecurity threats call
for a global response
It’s time to learn a lesson
on school diversity
International Telecommunication Union (ITU)
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