Yup, John Brennan Rolled DiFi on the Torture Report
The 15th paragraph of this story on CIA's continuing efforts to water down the Senate Intelligence Committee's torture report reads,
The CIA's current director, John Brennan, was a senior agency official when the harshest CIA tactics were in…
Did DOJ Prosecute Basaaly Moalin Just to Have a Section 215 "Success"?
At yesterday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the dragnet, the government's numbers supporting the value of the dragnet got even worse. At one point, Pat Leahy asserted that the phone dragnet had only been useful in one case (in the last…
GM's New CEO: This Model Has Titanium Features
The woman in the photo at the right has big titanium ovaries — not malleable brass or rusting iron. Do I know Mary Barra personally to attest to this fact? No. But I have a pretty damned good idea where GM's new CEO has been, and it takes…
Karzai's Latest: US Behaving Like Colonial Power
Since he lobbied for and then obtained loya jirga approval of the Bilateral Security Agreement but then added new conditions before he would sign it, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has exasperated military planners in NATO and the US, confounded…
Sheldon Whitehouse: We Can't Unilaterally Disarm, Even to Keep America Competitive
I have to say, the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the dragnet was a bust.
Pat Leahy was fired up -- and even blew off a Keith Alexander attempt to liken the Internet to a library with stories of the library card he got when he was…
Will Shifting Loyalties in the Middle East (and Fracking) Bring Truth about 9/11?
More at The Real News
As the IBT reported yesterday, Congressman Walter Jones recently managed to get intelligence gatekeeper Mike Rogers to share the 28 redacted pages of the Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry into 9/11 that show Saudi…
Pakistan's Supreme Court Chief Justice Chaudhry Retires
Today marked the retirement of the Chief Justice of Pakistan's Supreme Court, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. Chaudhry has played a central role in many of Pakistan's most dramatic developments in the past eight years during which he served on…
In Naming Its Man of the Year, Time Proves It Doesn't Even READ the News
I'm probably fairly lonely among my crowd to be satisfied that Time picked Pope Francis over Edward Snowden to be Person of the Year. Not only do I prefer that the focus remain on the reporting on NSA than revert back to caricatures like Time…
FISA Orders for Hacking Help
In its latest Snowden story, the WaPo reports that NSA has used Google's cookies to help track people for hacking purposes.
The National Security Agency is secretly piggybacking on the tools that enable Internet advertisers to track consumers,…
China's Media Protectionism
The other day, NYT's great ombud Margaret Sullivan wrote a post on the difficulties it and other media outlets are having with China.
• Last year, The Times published a story by David Barboza about the enormous wealth of China’s ruling…
Three-Hopping the Corporate Store, in Theory
Stanford University has been running a project to better understand what phone metadata can show about users, MetaPhone, in which Android users can make their metadata available for analysis.
They just published a piece that suggests we could…
Skirmishes Along Iran-Pakistan Border Have Increased Since October Incident
Recall that back in October, near the town of Saravan in southeastern Iran, 14 Iranian border guards were killed by attackers who had infiltrated from the adjacent border with Pakistan. Iran retaliated very quickly, executing 16 prisoners the…
NSA Failures and Terror Successes Drive the Dragnet
Ryan Lizza has a long review of the dragnet programs. As far as the phone dragnet, it's a great overview. It's weaker on NSA's content collection (in a piece focusing on Ron Wyden, it doesn't mention back door searches) and far weaker on the…
Chuck Hagel's Tour of Failure
It's hard to imagine how Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel's travels this week could have gone any worse. Starting off with horrible optics, Hagel began his trip with a stop in Bahrain. Although it appears that he at least had enough sense not…
World of Spycraft in Virtual Space
The Guardian's latest Snowden scoop describes how they decided to infiltrate World at Warcraft and other virtual gaming environments. As they point out, there's no clear proof terrorists have used such space (though they were able to follow…
Former Top NSA Officials Insist Employees Are Leaving Because Obama Is Mean, Not Because They Object To NSA's Current Activities
Ellen Nakashima has a story that purports to show 1) significant morale problems at the NSA and 2) proof that the morale stems from Obama's failure to more aggressively support the NSA in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations.
The story…
Sy Hersh Writing about Politicized Intelligence Again, Syria Edition
Sy Hersh has a long piece in the London Review of Books accusing the Obama Administration of cherry-picking intelligence to present its case that Bashar al-Assad launched the chemical weapons attack on August 21.
To be clear, Hersh does not…
Conference Championships and NFL Week 14 Trash Talk
Pretty big weekend of football. After some thrills from Rivalry Weekend, and one very big disappointment from the Wolverweenies' failure to slay the Sweatervests of Ohio State, this weekend serves up some great conference championship games…
US Will Destroy Syrian Chemical Weapon Precursors at Sea
After the debacle of floating prisons used for interrogation that included torture, the US now is set to embark on a more noble mission at sea. Hundreds of tons of precursors to chemical weapons being surrendered by Syria will now be destroyed…
Obama: My Overseas Spying Not Constrained by the Law I Passed as Senator
In a democracy in which separation of powers still functioned as intended, this would be a deliberate provocation (my transcription):
The Snowden disclosures have identified areas of legitimate concern. Some of it has also been highly sensationalized…