The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time….
An internal presentation on the Silicon Valley operation, intended for senior analysts in the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, described the new tool as the most prolific contributor to the President’s Daily Brief, which cited PRISM data in 1,477 articles last year. According to the briefing slides, obtained by The Washington Post, “NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM” as its leading source of raw material, accounting for nearly 1 in 7 intelligence reports.
That is a remarkable figure in an agency that measures annual intake in the trillions of communications. It is all the more striking because the NSA, whose lawful mission is foreign intelligence, is reaching deep inside the machinery of American companies that host hundreds of millions of American-held accounts on American soil.
The technology companies, which participate knowingly in PRISM operations, include most of the dominant global players of Silicon Valley. They are listed on a roster that bears their logos in order of entry into the program: “Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.” PalTalk, although much smaller, has hosted significant traffic during the Arab Spring and in the ongoing Syrian civil war. Dropbox , the cloud storage and synchronization service, is described as “coming soon.”
The Examiner notes some testimony before congress: “Eric Holder refused to answer when asked if the Justice Department is spying on members of Congress, citing the need for a classified conversation.” Wouldn’t a better answer be “no”? This is getting really weird, the speed with which a shoe drops nearly every day. We wouldn’t be surprised if some very senior and recently departed people from the military and intelligence worlds are actively orchestrating these disclosures, and not simply as payback for what was done to them.
Quite a sentence for the NYT to write. (We note in passing that those unconcerned about these surveillance measures are making the crucial assumption that the information is being used for vital national security purposes and is not being used for domestic political purposes; why would anyone assume such a thing, given this crew’s track record?) HT: TW
When I was a child in the 1960s, names like Corregidor and Iwo Jima were still sacred, and pronounced everywhere with respect. Writing in the 1960s about the battle of Midway, Samuel Eliot Morison stepped out of character to plead with his readers: “Threescore young aviators…met flaming death that day in reversing the verdict of battle. Think of them, reader, every Fourth of June. They and their comrades who survived changed the whole course of the Pacific War.” Today the Battle of Midway has become niche-market nostalgia material, and most children (and many adults) have never heard of it. Thus we honor “the greatest generation.” (And if I hear that phrase one more time I will surely puke.)…
The Japanese army saw captive soldiers as cowards, lower than lice. If we forget this we dishonor the thousands who were tortured and murdered, and put ourselves in danger of believing the soul-corroding lie that all cultures are equally bad or good. Some Americans nowadays seem to think America’s behavior during the war was worse than Japan’s — we did intern many loyal Americans of Japanese descent. That was unforgivable — and unspeakably trivial compared to Japan’s unique achievement, mass murder one atrocity at a time.
In “The Other Nuremberg,” Arnold Brackman cites (for instance) “the case of Lucas Doctolero, crucified, nails driven through hands, feet and skull”; “the case of a blind woman who was dragged from her home November 17, 1943, stripped naked, and hanged”; “five Filipinos thrown into a latrine and buried alive.” In the Japanese-occupied Philippines alone, at least 131,028 civilians and Allied prisoners of war were murdered. The Japanese committed crimes against Allied POWs and Asians that would be hard still, today, for a respectable newspaper even to describe. Mr. Brackman’s 1987 book must be read by everyone who cares about World War II and its veterans, or the human race.
The attitude of American intellectuals: Before Pearl Harbor but long after the character of Hitlerism was clear — after the Nuremberg laws, the Kristallnacht pogrom, the establishment of Dachau and the Gestapo — American intellectuals tended to be dead against the U.S. joining Britain’s war on Hitler.
Today’s students learn (sometimes) about right-wing isolationists like Charles Lindbergh and the America Firsters. They are less likely to read documents like this, which appeared in Partisan Review (the U.S. intelligentsia’s No. 1 favorite mag) in fall 1939, signed by John Dewey, William Carlos Williams, Meyer Schapiro and many more of the era’s leading lights. “The last war showed only too clearly that we can have no faith in imperialist crusades to bring freedom to any people. Our entry into the war, under the slogan of ‘Stop Hitler!’ would actually result in the immediate introduction of totalitarianism over here….The American masses can best help [the German people] by fighting at home to keep their own liberties.” The intelligentsia acted on its convictions. “By one means or another,” Diana Trilling later wrote of this period, “most of the intellectuals of our acquaintance evaded the draft.”
We link to SLA Marshall’s account of D-Day here. For more on the anti-war left in WWII there’s this. HT: PL
The new US ambassador to the UN in 2002 responded to a questioner at UC Berkeley:
Q: Let me give you a thought experiment here, and it is the following: without addressing the Palestine-Israel problem, let’s say you were an advisor to the President of the United States, how would you respond to current events there? Would you advise him to put a structure in place to monitor that situation, lest if one party or another begins looking like they might be moving toward genocide?…
A: What we don’t need is some kind of early warning mechanism there, what we need is a willingness to put something on the line in helping the situation. Putting something on the line might mean alienating a domestic constituency of [chuckle] tremendous political and financial import; it may more crucially mean sacrificing — or investing, I think, more than sacrificing — billions of dollars, not in servicing Israel’s military, but actually investing in the new state of Palestine, in investing the billions of dollars it would probably take, also, to support what will have to be a mammoth protection force, not of the old…Rwanda kind, but a meaningful military presence. Because it seems to me at this stage (and this is true of actual genocides as well, and not just major human rights abuses, which were seen there), you have to go in as if you’re serious, you have to put something on the line.
Unfortunately, imposition of a solution on unwilling parties is dreadful. It’s a terrible thing to do, it’s fundamentally undemocratic. But, sadly, we don’t just have a democracy here either, we have a liberal democracy. There are certain sets of principles that guide our policy, or that are meant to, anyway. It’s essential that some set of principles becomes the benchmark, rather than a deference to people who are fundamentally politically destined to destroy the lives of their own people. And by that I mean what Tom Friedman has called “Sharafat”. I do think in that sense, both political leaders have been dreadfully irresponsible. And, unfortunately, it does require external intervention…. Any intervention is going to come under fierce criticism. But we have to think about lesser evils, especially when the human stakes are becoming ever more pronounced.
As has been said, market processes are superior to centralized processes because the amount of information needed for effective centralization is too vast, and too fast changing, for bureaucracies to keep up (assuming they even wanted to). The OrCam is but one of many experiments. Some will succeed and some will fail and some will morph into things unimagined right now. The logic of progress in the internet age dramatically disfavors centralization and regulation. Transparency, crowd-feedback and the like are the way to improve products and services. Pity they don’t seem to get that in Washington. HT: WRM
The president of Bowdoin played golf with the head of the Claremont Institute and therein lies a tale. There’s a video featuring the head of the NAS recounting what happened. You can read the Bowdoin project here. The Life of Julia is the rule, not the exception, on campus and if you grew up in the ethos of the 1950′s, it is not only gone, it is verboten.
Shale gas, only 2% of total U.S. natural gas production a decade ago, is now nearly 40%…1.7 million jobs are currently supported by this unconventional revolution in oil and gas…such drilling even in gas-rich Texas uses only 1% of the total water consumed in the state…a few weeks ago, the Potential Gas Committee, a nonprofit affiliated with the Colorado School of Mines and the authoritative source on the nation’s gas resources, raised its projection for technically recoverable natural gas supplies in the U.S. by 26%.
We asked why not an Apollo Program for developing shale gas, but it seems to be doing nicely, and the less government involvement the better of course. This is a very interesting time for American business, and would be more so if the clown carnival in Washington would shut down and leave town.
For example, it’s much easier for many small companies to become world class manufacturers than it was decades ago. It’s all happened very recently. Advanced CNC technology enables the production of complex monolithic structures without welding, etc., which lowers cost, increases reliability, and removes labor cost as a factor. New management techniques, such as implementing LEAN not only on the shop floor but in the back office, repeatedly and dramatically lowers costs and improves both efficiency and job satisfaction. Finally, advanced ERP technologies produce real-time, online visibility of the production process both for the producer and the customer. This reduces inventory and other costs, improves visibility across the entire supply chain, and solves problems like bottlenecks before they occur. Only large companies could do this 20 years ago, and they solved the problems with big SG&A. Today for the first time a small company can have the same world class capabilities as a large legacy manufacturer with a sustainably lower cost structure.
29 times more regulations were issued by agencies than there were laws passed by Congress.
Dodd-Frank is 2300 pages of mostly rubbish, and we wouldn’t be surprised if there are 29 regulations for each page of the law. It’s no accident that it takes 10x more time to build some skyscrapers today than it did a century ago.
more than 75 countries have remote piloted aircraft. More than 50 nations are building a total of nearly a thousand types. At its last display at a trade show in Beijing, China showed off 25 different unmanned aerial vehicles.
The MQ-9, pictured above, is a serious aircraft. New versions will have 1K thrust engines, 88 foot wings, 12,000 pounds GTOW, and up to 42 hours of non-stop ISR flying. They can carry 14 Hellfire missiles or 4 of those plus two 500LB laser guided bombs. The technology is advancing very quickly in this arena, and soon there will be thousands of them flying globally. The current US order book is less than 500, but that will no doubt increase substantially. Oddly enough, we don’t recall ever hearing of the company that makes these aircraft before now. From the Google car to this, a brave new world.
Although acting commissioner Steven Miller apologized for the “horrible customer service” conservative taxpayers had gotten, a gentleman by the name of Malik Obama received impeccable, express service when he took the precaution of mailing in his nonprofit application from N’giya, Kenya, rather than notoriously slower mail processing centers such as Phoenix and Dallas. Malik, the brother of President Obama, runs the Barack H. Obama Foundation, named for the president’s father. On May 30, 2011, they applied for tax-exempt status, and had their approval signed less than a month later by Lois Lerner herself, and conveniently backdated by Lois to cover the two-and-a-half years the enterprising Malik had already been raking in “tax-deductible” donations from Americans. The Washington address of the Barack H. Obama Foundation appears to be bogus, and it’s not clear whether the funds are being used back in Kenya for anything other than supporting the famously lavish lifestyle of Malik and his 12 wives. Given that the IRS is not shy about asking American conservatives for Facebook posts and lists of who attends their meetings, Ms. Lerner surely would have been within her rights to ask Malik Obama about the “exclusive” photographs currently displayed on the Barack H. Obama Foundation website of a recent meeting in Sudan, one of only four countries the U.S. government designates as a “terrorist state,” and the foundation’s apparently extensive association with the Sudanese president and blood-soaked genocidal war criminal Omar al-Bashir. Given that the IRS likes to ask conservative taxpayers whether their friends and relatives are planning on running for office, Ms. Lerner might like to ask Malik Obama when his friend President Bashir is planning on leaving office. After another quarter-million corpses? Whatever. Let’s accept that, when U.S. taxpayers wind up giving tax breaks to an entity linked to the butchers of Darfur, it’s pure coincidence that the racket turns out to be run by the president’s brother. Let’s accept that Malik Obama just got lucky that his letter landed on the desk of Lois Lerner, and that, when she backdated his application for two-and-a-half years, she’d momentarily forgotten that it’s illegal for her to backdate it more than two-and-a-quarter years. Indeed, let’s take the president at his word, that the existence of this shadowy IRS entity working deep within the even shadowier U.S. Treasury planted in deep cover within the shadowiest conspiracy of them all, this murky hitherto unknown organization called “the Executive Branch,” that all this was news to him.
Mieke Crane is the mother of the six-year-old kindergarten student who brought the gun on the bus…The school sent home a letter to parents of students who take the bus explaining what happened. It stressed no gun was on the bus and there was never any danger. The letter also has photo of the toy showing it’s actual size, which is slightly larger than a quarter.
Former Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa P. Jackson will become Apple’s top environmental officer…After coming under fire from environmental groups such Greenpeace for powering its data centers with fossil fuel energy, the company vowed to switch over to renewable sources. In March it announced that all of its data centers now run on solar, wind or geothermal energy.
More: “A North Carolina couple traveled to Hawaii in order to bring their baby into the world in a dolphin-assisted birth.” More: “With regard to potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material, that is not something I’ve ever been involved in, heard of, or would think would be wise policy.” More. Sigh.
“China is pulling ahead on the environment,” was the title of a 2009 column in Forbes. “China is pushing ahead on renewable technologies with the fervor of a new space race,” Peter Ford reported in the Christian Science Monitor the same year. “Green Giant” was the title of a 7,000-word thumb-sucker by Evan Osnos in the New Yorker, which spelled out the scale of the Chinese government’s investment in green tech. And there was this: “Being in China right now,” wrote Tom Friedman of the New York Times in January 2010, “I am more convinced than ever that when historians look back at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, they will say that the most important thing to happen was not the Great Recession, but China’s Green Leap Forward. The Beijing leadership understands that the E.T. — Energy Technology — revolution is both a necessity and an opportunity, and they do not intend to miss it”…
The heady optimism of four years ago has now given way to more sober views, thanks to the accretion of facts. Facts like 16,000 dead pigs floating down Shanghai’s Whampoa river in March. Or the worst air pollution on record in Beijing in January, with levels of tiny particulate matter reaching levels 25 times higher than the standard in the U.S. Or 80% of the East China Sea lost to fishing because of the pollution, according to Elizabeth Economy of the Council on Foreign Relations. Or 1.2 million premature deaths due to air pollution
That Friedman bit is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? Try finding some safe drinking water in the countryside in China. Finally, in a nasty bit of irony, the wind turbines in the West are killing people in China.
We, the faculty of the Dept. of Atmospheric Sciences of Texas A&M, agree with the recent reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that: It is virtually certain that the climate is warming, and that it has warmed by about 0.7 deg. C over the last 100 years. It is very likely that humans are responsible for most of the recent warming. If we do nothing to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases, future warming will likely be at least two degrees Celsius over the next century. Such a climate change brings with it a risk of serious adverse impacts on our environment and society.
AT has a nice piece on this subject. Air is 7800 parts nitrogen, 2000 parts oxygen, 900 parts argon and 4 teeny-weeny parts CO2, up from 3 teeny-weeny parts some years ago. Another hare brained religion that shows no sign of dying soon.
Taranto had a bad experience back then. It’s been another 15 years downhill to the life of Julia. Roger Simon sees some signs that things might turn for the better. Maybe, but two generations have fallen for the claptrap from the academy and the media about multiculturalism, catastrophic AGW and all the rest. We’re more with Wretchard on this one.
while the Stockholm riots keep spreading and intensifying, Swedish police have adopted a tactic of non-interference. ”Our ambition is really to do as little as possible,” Stockholm Chief of Police Mats Löfving explained to the Swedish newspaper Expressen on Tuesday. “We go to the crime scenes, but when we get there we stand and wait,” elaborated Lars Byström, the media relations officer of the Stockholm Police Department. ”If we see a burning car, we let it burn if there is no risk of the fire spreading to other cars or buildings nearby. By doing so we minimize the risk of having rocks thrown at us.” Swedish parking laws, however, continue to be rigidly enforced
Maybe this leak to a (formerly?) in-the-bag media outlet is true, but if it is it seems to contradict recent previous assertions to Congress. Huh? We have to say we’re perplexed. There’s always the possibility of gross incompetence at work. But a clever adversary might start feeding false information to the press to set them up and pull the rug out from under them. Frankly we would not be surprised to find out in retrospect that both things were true. The leaks are coming too fast and furious right now.
Caution in reporting leaks as facts is warranted. Discrediting certain high profile “leaks” and leakers would be an outstanding strategy for those under siege in order to spread the idea that “leaks” equal falsehoods. We’ll see.
Wrethcard: “National Public Radio reporter Ari Shapiro spotted pundits Jonathan Capehart, Josh Marshall, and Ezra Klein headed into the West Wing.” Lifson: “Lois Lerner, the head of the IRS operation that targeted Tea Party groups is being thrown under the bus…media operatives, both veterans of Journolist who were called into the White House yesterday for consultations, both called for her firing. The two are the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein and Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memorandum.” It’s nice when those who have perpetrated a scandal of breathtaking scope, hubris and incompetence start acting like the rats they are.
The NYT is still hoping for a redemptive outcome, but Dana Milbank of the WaPo seems to have jumped to the other side. He quotes Rosen and gives his verdict:
“I want to report authoritatively, and ahead of my competitors, on new initiatives or shifts in U.S. policy, events on the ground in [North Korea], what intelligence is picking up, etc…I’d love to see some internal State Department analyses…In short: Let’s break some news, and expose muddle-headed policy when we see it, or force the administration’s hand to go in the right direction, if possible.” That is indeed compelling evidence — of good journalism.
At the end of the piece Milbank pulls his punches of course. Like his colleagues, Milbank was once a true believers in the One. Attkisson, Rosen, the AP: can he become a true believer agina? We’ll see.
the administration has gone overboard in its zeal to find and muzzle insiders. The Associated Press revealed last week that the government had secretly seized two months’ worth of records for telephones used by the agency’s staff, partly to determine the source of a leak about a report involving a foiled terrorist plot in Yemen…
administration officials often talk about the balance between protecting secrets and protecting the constitutional rights of a free press. Accusing a reporter of being a “co-conspirator,” on top of other zealous and secretive investigations, shows a heavy tilt toward secrecy and insufficient concern about a free press.
“Muzzle” is a strong word, but the tone is moderate particularly in the concluding paragraph. Perhaps the wayward will return to the fold. We guess they’ve gotten past the schoolyard crush so evident on 1/20/09 when they went all gooey over things like “transparency” and how these new guys were so different and so much better than what came before.
Still, they can’t seem to confront the real story yet (at least publicly), that as the Sharyl Attkisson story appears to indicate, all this spying is not so much about national security as about getting dirt on reporters.
