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10 Dec 09

Obama Administration on Open Government: More than Rhetoric? « UNREDACTED

  • To date, there have been some positive signs that the Obama Administration has been trying to shift the federal government away from the excessive secrecy that characterized the Bush 43 Administration. Many of these efforts, however, have been small steps that impact only a limited area of federal activity—although in some cases those have been important areas.  Many open government advocates, however, have been frustrated that the inauguration of President Obama did not lead to a dramatic opening up of federal agency filing cabinets (and databases).  More critically, many of the hardest secrecy issues that arose during the prior administration are still not resolved or have not been resolved favorably, from the open government perspective.
  • to proactively make its visitor records public, is the type of action that is largely in control of the White House itself and that requires little buy-in from other agencies (although we have heard that the national security establishment objected and tried to hold it up).
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03 Dec 09

the highlights of Richard Armitage's interview with Prism - By Tom Ricks | The Best Defense

  • an
    interesting interview
    to Prism
  • "The second surprise was frankly how successful we were for
    the first 4 years-almost 5 years-at keeping the ISI [Pakistan's Inter-Service
    Intelligence] relatively out of it. They were so shocked with the speed at
    which we invaded Afghanistan that I think the ISI felt it was only a matter of
    time until we prevailed."
  • 5 more annotations...
23 Nov 09

Schneier on Security: Al Qaeda Secret Code Broken

  • Between them, the code-breakers speak all the dialects that form the basis for the code. Several of them have high-value skills in computer technology. The team worked closely with the U.S. National Security Agency and its station at Menwith Hill in the north of England. The identity of the code-breakers is so secret that not even their gender can be revealed.
13 Nov 09

Revolutionary Guard Tightens Security Grip - WSJ.com

  • Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard has sidelined the country's intelligence ministry, forming a new organization that reports directly to the Supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
11 Nov 09

» A Sixty-Eight Year Old Code - Entropic Memes

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The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  • [N]ew research from psychologists and criminologists suggests
    that jurors tend not to discount evidence obtained from rough
    interrogations even though there's plenty of evidence to suggest that
    those claims aren't reliable.

Ben Casnocha: The Blog: Contrasts in How Google Suggets Searches

  • There are some remarkable contrasts between "dumb" searches and "smart" ones. People who start their search "how 2" are more likely to search "how 2 get pregnant" or "how 2 grow weed." People who start their search "how one might" are more likely to search "how one might discover a new piece of music" or "how one might for the rise of andrew jackson in 1828."
  • 091110_LH_isItWrongTo
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05 Nov 09

Pakistanis may be working with Taliban and al Qaeda - By Tom Ricks | The Best Defense

  • A French official who conducted investigations in Pakistan
    adds more weight to charges that Pakistani intelligence officers are in bed
    with the Taliban and even with al Qaeda.
  • He is quoted as writing, "The central
    government has lost control of certain elements of the army and the ISI, an
    intelligence service that no longer has the trust of its foreign partners."
    French investigators in Pakistan also were physically intimidated, he charges.
29 Oct 09

The Brothers Karzai and the CIA | Foreign Policy

  • Ahmed Wali Karzai, who
    controls the drug trade and much else in the bellwether province of Kandahar
    where he is president of the provincial council, is clearly his own man.
  • The resemblance is indeed so striking that, without prompting last
    month, a former top NATO official in Afghanistan described Wali Karzai to me as
    "a Tip O'Neill, a ward heeler," to whom all outsiders paid tribute.
  • 6 more annotations...
28 Oct 09

Ryan Sager - Neuroworld – Bush’s Brain: Smart, but Too Certain - True/Slant

  • I got a hold of that Bush’s Brain paper referenced here, yesterday. I’m not allowed to post the whole thing because the paper has been published as chapter two of “Judging Bush,” just out from Stanford University Press.
  • SAT scores and other available measures indicate that Bush has sufficient intelligence to serve as president. Yet the best studies, in which raters evaluate statements without being aware of their source, suggest that Bush lacks integrative complexity and thus views issues without nuance.
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16 Oct 09

Did Italy pay off the Taliban? | FP Passport

  • suggesting that the Italian secret service had been secretly paying Taliban leaders to keep an area it was patrolling quiet. Worse, they reportedly didn't tell the French soldiers who took the area over, resulting in an ambush that killed ten French soldiers
05 Oct 09

David Ignatius - Afghan War Exposes Strains Between U.S., Pakistan - washingtonpost.com

  • "the boys from Aabpara,"
  • Under the ground rules, I cannot quote Pasha directly, but I can offer a sense of how his agency looks at key issues -- including the Afghanistan war and the ISI's sometimes prickly relationship with America.
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02 Oct 09

CIA expanding presence in Afghanistan -- latimes.com

  • The CIA is also carrying out an escalating campaign of unmanned Predator missile strikes on Al Qaeda and insurgent strongholds in Pakistan. The number of strikes so far this year, 37, already exceeds the 2008 total, according to data compiled by the Long War Journal website, which tracks Predator strikes in Pakistan.
  • Mahsud's organization had become a major supplier of suicide bombers to other insurgent groups, training attackers that in some cases would be deployed to carry out strikes in Pakistan or Afghanistan.



    "He turned it into a business," the Defense Department official said. "Putting people through a process to indoctrinate them, prepping them to execute and then basically they can be bartered or sold."



    Though other U.S. officials said Mahsud did not appear to have been motivated by financial gain, they did confirm the supplier arrangement.



    "He didn't sell suicide bombers like a commodity for profit," said a U.S. counter-terrorism official. "He'd offer resources -- in this case human beings ready to die -- to his sympathizers in exchange for things he needed. These were deals among tribal figures, not outsourcing agreements among corporations."
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CIA expanding presence in Afghanistan -- latimes.com

  • Reporting from Washington - <!-- P2P_LIVE_EDIT "content_item_dateline_preview" END -->


    <!-- P2P_LIVE_EDIT "content_item_body_preview" START -->The CIA is deploying teams of spies, analysts and paramilitary operatives to Afghanistan, part of a broad intelligence "surge" that will make its station there among the largest in the agency's history, U.S. officials say.
  • When complete, the CIA's presence in the country is expected to rival the size of its massive stations in Iraq and Vietnam at the height of those wars.
  • 5 more annotations...
11 Sep 09

Matthew Yglesias » Successes in Pakistan

  • Meanwhile, Senate Armed Forces Carl Levin is joining Nancy Pelosi in expressing serious skepticism about the wisdom of deploying more forces to Afghanistan. Pelosi never seems to get any credit from anyone over this, but before she was Speaker she was Vice Chair of the Intelligence Committee and thus, like Levin, has the kind of background that normally gets you taken seriously as a national security policy thinker on the Hill.
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