President Obama has been saying quite firmly that while he is not willing to negotiate over a clean continuing resolution to fund the government or over a clean resolution to raise the debt ceiling, that once those are passed, he is willing to negotiate over everything else. [Read more…]
Many people seem to be quite complacent about having the US’s NSA, the UK’s GCHQ, and other government agencies spy on people’s communications and compile dossiers on their lives and associates because they have been convinced that they are under serious threat and that such measures are necessary to keep them safe. [Read more…]
You may recall that during the run up to the 2012 election I referred to Sam Wang’s Princeton Election Consortium website a lot because I liked (even more than I did Nate Silver’s work) his statistical approach to dealing with all the polls and the way he translated all that data into easily understandable likelihoods for outcomes. [Read more…]
Stephen M. Walt says that the rhetoric being used against allowing Iran to have any nuclear capability is similar to what was said about China back in the 1960s when that nation was developing nuclear technology, right down to impugning its leaders as irrational crazy people who might go berserk and blow up the world if they were able to make a bomb. [Read more…]
The Onion had a point-counterpoint exchange with John Boehner debating himself over the shutdown and his role in it. In the first part, Boehner recites the official line, saying the same things he has been saying at his public appearances. [Read more…]
Via reader EJ, I learned of this congressional testimony by the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and head of the NSA Keith Alexander that the government shut down is hurting their intelligence gathering programs. Since many of their people are not being paid and may thus be hurting financially, Clapper says that they will become easy targets for subversion. [Read more…]
So we have come to the end of week one of the government shut down with no end in sight. I do not usually concern myself with following the details of political maneuvering since much of it is posturing and lacking any substantive content. It is usually Kabuki theater designed to distract the public while secret deals are made behind the scenes. But this conflict seems genuine and I have been curious about what will bring the shut down to an end because of course it must at some point. [Read more…]
In all the focus on the NSA, we should not forget that the FBI is also part of the massive government intrusion into people’s privacy and in the violation their rights. The ACLU in a new report titled Unleashed and Unaccountable: The FBI’s Unchecked Abuse of Authority describes the many ways that the relaxation of rules governing how the FBI can operate (justified as always by the ‘war on terror’) has resulted in an explosion of abuses. [Read more…]
The Russian government has set in place a monitoring system that will enable their security services to gather up all communications during the Winter Olympics in Sochi. The program is being described as ‘PRISM on steroids’, comparing it to one of the monitoring programs of the NSA.
Athletes and spectators attending the Winter Olympics in Sochi in February will face some of the most invasive and systematic spying and surveillance in the history of the Games, documents shared with the Guardian show.
Russia’s powerful FSB security service plans to ensure that no communication by competitors or spectators goes unmonitored during the event, according to a dossier compiled by a team of Russian investigative journalists looking into preparations for the 2014 Games.
…Tellingly, the FSB has appointed one of its top counterintelligence chiefs, Oleg Syromolotov, to be in charge at Sochi: security will thus be overseen by someone who has spent his career chasing foreign spies rather than terrorists.
…In the end, the goal is overarching, but simple, says Soldatov: “Russian authorities want to make sure that every connection and every move made online in Sochi during the Olympics will be absolutely transparent to the secret services of the country.”
I am surprised that the Russians did not hire Keith Alexander, the head of the NSA, as a consultant on this effort.
I am waiting for the US and UK governments to denounce this massive invasion of people’s privacy as an indicator of how that country does not share its democratic values for the rights of the individual.
Scott Rigell, a Republican congressman, seems to have decided to not follow the party line on how to vote on the shut down and is now calling for a vote on a ‘clean’ continuing resolution. He was the only Republican to vote against a continuing resolution that defunded the Affordable Care Act, though his reason for doing so was because it didn’t replace the sequester. [Read more…]