Including fake markets for fake nukes:
I [“A-”-list blogger] immediately turned to the chapter [of Will Terrorists Go Nuclear?] on black markets, where [Brian] Jenkins [Wikipedia] quite sensibly argues that we should flood the zone with fake purveyors of nuclear weapons, materials, and technology to make it harder for terrorists to connect with actual merchants of [...]
Mark Schapiro, “Nuclear [Intelligence] Fallout,” Muckraker blog, 29 Aug ’08):
When we were conducting our final reporting back in March, I researched Urs Friedrich Tinner—the one of the three considered most deeply involved in [A. Q.] Khan’s illicit enterprise—through the electronic database Accurint. I was astounded at the time to see that his U.S. address was [...]
Slate’s Ray Fisman (“They Made a Killing,” 29 Oct ’08) reports that forensic economists have discovered that “the Cabots, Dulleses, or other insiders were using their privileged information to profit personally from [the] future coup” in Guatemala by gaming the stock market. What’ll they discover next? Zero?
Fortunately, the article is a pedestrian prologue to the [...]
NYT head (29 Oct ’08):
Intelligence Agencies Face Austerity
Body:
Spending on intelligence operations increased by some 9 percent last year, to $47.5 billion, Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, said on Tuesday. That figure includes most intelligence spending, including the budget for the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and the operations of spy satellites, [...]
Andrew Sullivan points to “new McCain POW footage,” but the film is a longer cut (and much better ‘print’) of the footage included here. The longer cut shows much more clearly the degree of mobility in McCain’s neck, shoulder, and left arm (for example, when he tips his ash at 3:17). At 1:07, the [...]
Did Rick Davis have his hooks in Dean’s operations in early ’04?
3EDC’s website as archived on 10 Jun ’04:
Who’s we?
So what was Rick Davis up to in early summer ’04?
3EDC’s website as archived almost three months earlier, on 18 Mar ’04, said: “Welcome nicco.trueserver.com to Your New Server!”
Who’s nicco?
How about Nicco A. Mele, former deanforamerica.com [...]
Kaplan, “Hunting the Taliban in Las Vegas,” theatlantic.com (Sep ’06):
But the Predator, especially as it is improved, may also interfere with decision making. As one pilot told me: “No general will want to attack something without visual confirmation from a Predator. It’s the old story—by the time you have all the evidence, it’s too late [...]
CJR:
Bob Owen, chief photographer of the San Antonio Express-News, notified the AP that the photos of two deceased soldiers, who died in Iraq on Sept. 14, were nearly identical. Upon examining the photos, Owens noticed that everything except for the soldier’s face, name, and rank was the same. The most glaring similarity, Owen told CJR, [...]
How the North Vietnamese exploited McCain’s nicotine habit for propaganda purposes, and how, since then, McCain—and everyone else—can’t see the forest for the tobacco plantation
Hugh E. Scott, the maintainer and registrant of unfitmccain.com, offers “eight reasons for voting against” McCain, most of which are mainstays of leftish commentary. But one reason treads on a subject [...]
Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, in Newsweek (Skipp, “The Holdouts,” 12 Sep ’08):
We just did a study on evacuations under scenarios of disasters without warnings. We are very concerned about disasters that occur without warning when we have to do evacuations in real-time—in essence, immediate—for example, an earthquake or [...]
Martin Miller (“Is Campaigns’ Path to the Heart a Proper One?”, LAT [11 Aug ’00]), on Windy Smith’s cameo at the 2000 RNC:
“What the nation witnessed was the passing of the torch,” said JoAnn Simons, president of the Atlanta-based National Down Syndrome Congress. “Individuals with disabilities don’t necessarily need people to speak for them.”
More (“Tugging [...]
The NSA has declassified Technical Journal articles ’56–’73. Of the 29 articles they’ve listed, only 7 are working links—the other 22 are 404s.
Working: “About NSA,” “Antipodal Propagation,” “Did Aleksandr Popov Invent Radio?”, “Book Review: Lost Languages,” “Book Review: Lincos, Design of a Language for Cosmic Intercourse, Part 1,” “Aristocrat—An Intelligence Test for Computers,” and “Extraterrestrial [...]
NYT (Schwirtz+Chivers, “Russian Forces Detain Georgian Soldiers at Port” 19 Aug ’08):
Russian forces detained 21 Georgian soldiers in the Black Sea port of Poti on Tuesday. [...] The Georgian soldiers were taken by the Russians to a military base at Senaki, along with five armored American Humvees that were due to be shipped back to [...]
That’s the filename of a map published by the Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs on 11 Aug. The MFA’s statements of 1–14 Aug ’08 offer a clear, blow-by-blow picture of how Georgia saw the unfolding situation as it escalated into an invasion. The full text of all the MFA’s statements with related images is below; [...]
Short history of the recent military/intelligence uses of balloons, starting with the Imperial Japanese Army’s incipient use of the jet stream to deliver fusen bakudan (”balloon bombs”) to the US.
Project MOGUL was first conceived by Dr. Maurice Ewing of Columbia University, NY, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, MA. Dr. Ewing had conducted considerable research for [...]
Lederman at Balkinization pulls this quote from US District Judge John Bates’s 93-page opinion in what he calls the “Miers/Bolton contempt case”:
There are powerful reasons supporting the rejection of absolute immunity as asserted by the Executive here. If the Court held otherwise, the presumptive presidential privilege could be transformed into an absolute privilege and Congress’s [...]
Courtesy of FAS: Lazarus, Voorhees, Wells, and Worlton, “Computing at LASL [Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory] in the 1940s and 1950s,” LASL/USDoE, ’78 (2.1MB PDF).
The report is part of FAS’s Los Alamos Technical Reports and Publications collection:
In 2002, the Los Alamos National Laboratory terminated public access to thousands of unclassified reports on nuclear science and technology [...]
Kamber + Arango, “4,000 U.S. Combat Deaths, and Just a Handful of Images,” NYT (26 July ’08):
News organizations say that such restrictions are one factor in declining coverage of the war, along with the danger, the high cost to financially ailing media outlets and diminished interest among Americans in following the war. By a recent [...]
On October 23, 1990 an armed militant group fighting for the rights of minority Tamils expelled the entirety of the Muslim population of the north [of Sri Lanka] from the province at gunpoint. They were given only a 48-hour ultimatum to leave the Northern Province or to face death at the hands of the militants. [...]
Today marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the initiation of full-scale armed conflict between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE.
National Peace Council of Sri Lanka:
Commemorating July 1983: Bridges that Continue to Hold
On July 23, 1983 law and order in Sri Lanka virtually collapsed as mobs went on a rampage, inciting anarchy and fear, uprooting Tamil [...]
[Update: It seems that quite a few people thought that this was interesting because the HTML was hand-crafted by Karadzic the war criminal. No, it’s not “authentic” in that sense. For what it might actually be, see my comment here.]
[Update 2: paranoia.no has done some nice forensic work which suggests that the second site, psy-help-energy.com—which [...]
Bruce Schneier asks, “Did you know that, in some jurisdictions, police can inject midazolam into suspects to subdue them?” The article he links to (Demetria Kalodimos, “I-Team: Injection Used To Subdue Prisoners Medical Expert Says Practice Is Troubling,” WSMV [Nashville], 10 July ’08), seems either artfully or inartfully written:
But many people said that the injection [...]
FT (Adam Thomson, “Drugs cartels targeting Mexico’s democracy, says intelligence chief,” 14 July ’08; BBC pickup here):
The head of Mexico’s intelligence service has warned that the country’s democratic institutions, including the national Congress, are under threat from powerful drugs cartels.
At some point, subverted governmental entities would make an announcement like this in order to undermine [...]
Mutli-National [sic] Forces—Iraq (MNF-I)
Combined Press Information Center
International Zone, Baghdad, Iraq
As of: 20 NOV 07
NEWS MEDIA GROUND RULES (IAW Change 3, DoD Directive 5122.5)
Ground Rules Agreement
The following is a listing of ground rules that have been developed to protect members of the Armed Services from the release of information that could potentially threaten their security [...]