President Obama gave an eagerly anticipated speech yesterday outlining his plans for the reform of the NSA. You can see the speech and read the transcript here. While the initial quick reactions amongst the punditry were mixed, more careful reading of his words reveal (as usual) that there is less than meets the eye. It is once again vintage Obama, using his skill with words to make the unacceptable palatable. [Read more…]
What is with people who are constantly worried that American manhood is under threat? It seems like anything that seeks to make people safer or expects people to treat others with respect and dignity and not act like a jerk, is taken as evidence of the increasing wussification and feminization of America. [Read more…]
The president of Uganda Yoweri Museveni has decided not to sign a controversial bill that the parliament passed that called for life imprisonment for gays. There had been worldwide protests against the bill (earlier versions of it had called for the death penalty for homosexual acts) and although he claimed that this had not influenced him, he had warned legislators of serious damage to the country’s international relations if the law passed. [Read more…]
While talks continue between the P5+1 countries and Iran, there have been determined efforts to try and disrupt the talks and thus increase the threat of war, and the main vehicle for doing has been to push for more sanctions against Iran while talks are going on.. This push has been strongly supported by Israel’s main lobbying group in the US known as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee or AIPAC. The new sanctions have been vigorously opposed by the Obama administration, which is seeking to make improved relations with Iran the centerpiece of its second term foreign policy. [Read more…]
The US government is notorious for its abuse of the so-called no-fly list. People find that they are suddenly refused to be boarded on to planes and are not told why. The government refuses to state who is on the list and what criteria are used to put people on it or even confirm to people denied boarding that it is because they are on the list. And once you are on it, it is almost impossible to get off it. [Read more…]
New reports have emerged today about the NSA’s practices of inserting tiny circuit boards and USB cards surreptitiously into computers that then send out radio-frequency signals that can be picked up by listeners even if the computer is not hooked up to the internet. [Read more…]
Heather Linebaugh is someone who operated killer drones in Afghanistan and she writes about what it was like.
Whenever I read comments by politicians defending the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Predator and Reaper program – aka drones – I wish I could ask them a few questions. I’d start with: “How many women and children have you seen incinerated by a Hellfire missile?” And: “How many men have you seen crawl across a field, trying to make it to the nearest compound for help while bleeding out from severed legs?” Or even more pointedly: “How many soldiers have you seen die on the side of a road in Afghanistan because our ever-so-accurate UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] were unable to detect an IED [improvised explosive device] that awaited their convoy?” [Read more…]
While the US and British governments undoubtedly have the resources to obtain the best computers and cryptographers that money can buy, they cannot (at far as I know) break really good encryption systems. This is why they have achieved much of their success the old-fashioned way and resorted to cheating, such as getting computer and chip makers and communication companies to collaborate with them to install back doors. News reports based on leaked documents by (who else?) Edward Snowden show that the NSA may have bribed RSA, one of the most important companies in the security industry, to get them to provide a loophole that the NSA could exploit. [Read more…]
A lot of attention has been focused on the Republican race to be the party’s nominee for the 2016 presidential election. Less attention has been paid to the events on the Democratic side because of what seems to be a media consensus that that nomination is Hillary Clinton’s for the taking and until such time as she announces that she is not interested in running, there is no point talking about it. [Read more…]
I am bit of a sucker for these little quizzes that pop up on the internet from time to time, as long as they do not take more than a couple of minutes to complete and are not totally idiotic. Since I am a news junkie, I was tempted to do this short 13-question Pew News IQ quiz to assess whether you know more about the news than the average American. This is an admittedly low bar so this is one of those quizzes where doing well does not bring any credit at all. [Read more…]