The Obama administration won’t initiate Executive Branch investigations of the Bush administration officials in order to prosecute them; but that hardly precludes some sort of lustration process—say, in Congress, with grants of immunity—that documents their misdeeds and leads to prosecutions outside the US.
AP, “Obama Has More Threats Than Other Presidents-Elect” (15 Nov ’08):
[I]n a Maine convenience store, an Associated Press reporter saw a sign inviting customers to join a betting pool on when Obama might fall victim to an assassin. The sign solicited $1 entries into “The Osama Obama Shotgun Pool,” saying the money would go to [...]
No Google street view for West 44th St (and sometimes 45th St too), between 7th and 8th Aves, in Manhattan:
Viacom?
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 [...]
AP (Watkins, “Feds Say They Drive a Stake into Mongols Gang,” 22 Sep ’08):
But U.S. Attorney Thomas O’Brien has asked for an injunction that would seize the Mongols’ trademarked name. If the order is approved, any Mongol would no longer be able to wear a jacket displaying the gang’s name or emblem. “It would allow [...]
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 [...]
Bailoutsleuth notes creeping secrecy in the bailout:
The Treasury Department has hired two big accounting firms to help keep tabs on the government’s financial-industry rescue program, and once again certain basic elements of the deals are shrouded in secrecy. PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP will provide internal controls for the government’s $700 billion bailout fund. Ernst & Young will [...]
Roberto Saviano on the Camorra:
But in reality, it is a life of s—. They are always shut inside their homes. They have the same women who they have to share because they do not trust anyone, so it’s not true that they are big playboys.
An anthro thesis waiting to be written.
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 [...]
FT:
United Airlines plunged yesterday after a false report that the carrier had returned to bankruptcy court surfaced on the internet. A six-year-old Chicago Tribune story on United’s 2002 bankruptcy filing, spotted on a Google search yesterday morning by an investment newsletter, triggered a massive sell-off of the carrier’s shares until trading was halted. [...] United [...]
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 [...]
AJC (Schwartz, “Drug Violence in Atlanta Tied to Several Cartels,” 31 July ’08): “Powerful Mexican cartels have assumed control of drug distribution networks throughout the United States, sparking worry from U.S. law enforcement and experts that they may export the same violent methods that have ravaged Mexico for years.” Kidnapping, for example. Vast tracts of [...]
This seems useful:
Obfuscated TCP is a backwards-compatible modification to the TCP protocol which adds opportunistic encryption. It’s designed to hamper and detect large-scale wiretapping and corruption of TCP traffic on the Internet.
TLS [Transport Layer Security] is the solution to protecting sensitive information. However, there’s room for a low setup cost protocol to protect the bulk [...]
On 29 Apr ’08, the Seattle Times ran a story about Microsoft’s “COFEE,” or Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, a special-purpose USB device “that was quietly distributed to a handful of law-enforcement agencies” the previous summer and, a day before the story ran, “described … to the 350 law-enforcement experts” at an MS-sponsored conf. According [...]
The FBI’s reading list, courtesy of fedbizopps.gov:
0143034669 GHOST WARS , 150 [copies], EA;
006050532X TERROR IN THE NAME OF GOD , 180, EA;
1400030846 LOOMING TOWER , 370, EA;
1857023811 HEZBOLLAH , 150, EA;
0812238087 UNDERSTANDING TERROR NETWORKS , 150, EA;
1934852023 2008 FEDERAL CRIMINAL CODE RULES BOOK , 100, EA;
0743234955 HOLY WAR INC , 30, EA;
1400030250 SOLDIERS OF GOD; [...]
Undated (but post 18 July ’06) letter from DHS Science and Technology Directorate interested in “immobilizing security bracelet” for use, among other places, “on passenger planes”:
[seal]
U.S. Department
Of Homeland Security
Science and Technology Directorate
Office of Research and Development
Protection Branch
William J. Hughes Technical Center
Atlantic City Int’l Airport, New Jersey 08405
Subject: Improved Border Security, with the Detention and Possible [...]
Laser-cut stainless-steel plate + x-ray machine = Evan Roth’s “TSA Communication.”
Very nice.
Michael McClintock’s book Instruments of Statecraft: US Guerrilla Warfare, Countrinsurgency, and Counterterrorism, 1940–1990 (NYC: Pantheon, 1992)—available in full on the web—provides the background for understanding the recently leaked Army field manual Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces (FM 31-20-3; 1994, 2004).
Stephen J. Hadley, Assistant to the President For National Security Affairs reads too much Le Carré:
That was a concern. That’s one of the reasons we rolled up the network here three years or so ago, and fairly successfully. And part of that rolling up was to roll up the network and part of it was [...]
In “Battling Botnets and Online Mobs: Estonia’s Defense Efforts During the Internet War” (Georgetown Journal of International Affairs 9.1 [Winter/Spring 2008]), Gadi Evron writes:
Personal computers on broadband connections were a neglected weakness in Estonian Internet infrastructure. Compromised personal computers launched the majority of the attacks. The challenge of protecting this infrastructure from coordinated Internet attacks, [...]