Michael Mosman's Interesting 10 Days
On November 24, 20114, Oregon District Court Judge Michael Mosman issued a somewhat curious order explaining his decision, issued 3 days earlier, not to grant Raez Qadir Khan notice of all the surveillance authorities used to investigate him.
While…
If Bibi Wasn't Wanted, Maybe Obama Wasn't Either?
The usual suspects are up in arms that President Obama neither attended nor sent a representative to Paris' unity rally yesterday.
But I wonder whether the US was not invited?
Ha'aretz has a report on how Bibi Netanyahu was not invited…
SIGAR Finds Huge Problems With $300 Million Afghan National Police Payroll
SIGAR, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, has released a report (pdf) describing very disturbing problems with salaries for the Afghan National Police. The report concludes:
The U.S. government is spending more than…
DC's Elite: Let Our General Go!
At almost precisely the moment the FBI started investigating who was pestering Tampa Bay socialite Jill Kelley, an investigation that would lead to the resignation and investigation of David Petraeus, John McCain called for an investigation…
NCAA Football Championship Trash Talk (after NFL games)
UPDATE: Allright Emptywheel lugnuts, here is yer update to the post I said would serve all huge games this expanded weekend. Not much has changed on my original discussion below, however, Oregon had a number 3 receiver, Darren Carrington, suspended…
Rules on Leaking for Generals and CIA Directors
1) If you leak who-knows-what to your mistress, you might actually get prosecuted (or at the very least, prosecutors and/or FBI Agents will leak to the press that they recommended you be prosecuted but the Attorney General has been stalling…
James Clapper's Dystopian Novel about North Korea's Hack
I noted the other day how centrally James Clapper foregrounded his recent trip to North Korea in his discussion of the alleged North Korean hack of Sony. Now that the transcript is up, I see the trip was even more central in his discussion than…
Ghani Institutes Night Raids While Facing Treason Accusations Over Absence of Cabinet
Despite the rampant corruption of his administration and his many other faults, Hamid Karzai was a consistent critic of US-led night raids that led to many senseless civilian deaths, disappearances and torture. Those raids, and the US death…
Distribution of Income By The Plutocracy
I’ve written a pair of posts at Naked Capitalism on the neoclassical theory of marginal productivity as an explanation for the distribution of income in our neoliberal market economy. The first is based on Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the…
If IPs Are So Solid, Why Won't FBI Tell Us How Many Americans Get Sucked Up in Section 702?
By his own admission, James Clapper had dinner with the North Korean General who (again, according to Clapper) ordered the hack on Sony just weeks before the hack happened. That puts him at most two degrees away from the actual hackers, according…
North Korea and Sony: James Clapper Describes His Trip
As debates about whether North Korea hacked Sony continue (or even better, websites mockingly show you could randomly assign blame to any number of people; h/t Kim Zetter), there's something that has long bothered me. The excuse for the government's…
Pentagon Slowly Coming to Realization That There Might Possibley Be Civilian Deaths from Airstrikes On ISIS
Hell froze over yesterday:
The United States military is investigating reports of civilian casualties that may have occurred as part of the American-led fight against the Sunni militancy known as the Islamic State, a senior Pentagon official…
Does Dianne Feinstein Realize DOJ Has a Big Exception for National Security Interrogations?
On the day on which her tenure as Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee ended -- and with it, a significant chunk of her power to effect any change -- Dianne Feinstein released a letter she sent last week to President Obama with recommendations…
More Visibility on Stingrays
On New Year's Eve, Chuck Grassley released details of ongoing discussions he and Patrick Leahy have had with the FBI about its use of Stingray (or IMSI catcher) technology, which the FBI and other agencies use to identify cell phone location.…
Pakistan's National Assembly, Senate Pass Bills Establishing Military Courts
On Sunday, Dawn's editors knew that Pakistan's lawmakers would enact the bills needed to establish military courts and published a stern condemnation of the move in an editorial with the telling title "A Sad Day":
In the end, our political…
The NSA's Funny Numbers, Again
Back when the WaPo published a quarterly NSA compliance audit from 2012, I caught the largest math organization in the world failing basic arithmetic. I've been comparing that report with the Intelligence Oversight Board report covering the…
Attack at Saudi-Iraq Border Kills Three Saudi Guards
I've long followed events along the porous Pakistan-Iran border area, as there are often events taking place there that have very different descriptions on opposite sides of the border. As recently as December 28, three Iranian IRGC members…
Hacking in the IOB Reports
If I'm not mistaken, this -- in the Q3 2008 NSA Report to the Intelligence Oversight Board -- is the first mention of Computer Network Exploitation in the reports.
As with almost every single reference to CNE -- that is, hacking,…
What the Reporting on the Re-Released DOJ IG Report on Section 215 Missed about FBI's Misuse of Terrorism Tools
I've been meaning to return to coverage of the re-release of the DOJ IG Reports on Section 215 liberated by Charlie Savage just before Christmas. I've been seeing a lot of focus on posts like this which "report" that FBI used NSLs to get data…
2014 Wildcard Weekend NFL Trash Talk
It is wildcard weekend and there are four awesome games on tap. Let's get to them.
First up is the snake bit 11-5 Cardinals visiting the 7-8-1 Carolina Panthers. In a sane seeding system, this game would be in Phoenix as the Cards have 4…