Recommended Reading

Top Billing! Dr. David Ucko and Carl Prine’s  Point -COINterpoint debate:

PRISM – Counterinsurgency After Afghanistan: A Concept in Crisis (Ucko)

LoD– Ucko is Wrong (Mostly)  (Prine)

KoW – Prine is Wrong (Mostly): A Reply to a Critic (Ucko)

LoD– Ucko Attacks! (Prine)

KoW – Prine Attacks! (Again) (Ucko)

Can’t really summarize this much prose, so a short quote from each gentleman:

PRINE: Ucko’s obvious intelligence can’t compensate for a Prism essay that lacks a rudimentary understanding of recent Iraqi history, a grasp on guerrilla strategies employed there during the occupation and the political realignments that followed in the wake of the rebellions.  It devolves into the same sort of scholarship about counter-insurgency ginned up five decades ago during an age of nationalist and communist revolt throughout the Third World, which surprised me because Ucko is an exceptionally well-read analyst….

UCKO: My crime, apparently, is writing a book on counterinsurgency that included a two-page foreword written by arch-nemesis John Nagl. This is sufficient for Prine to misinterpret the rest of my work as surge propaganda, even when my position is not so far removed from his own. For example, Prine seems to concede that local factors along with US inputs accounted for the decline in Iraqi casualties in 2006-2008, but when I say the same, he reads it as ‘COIN porn’. 

CTOvision.com – Carrier IQ invades privacy ( Bryan Halfpap)

The application collects the following data:

• Phone Keypad Presses
• Website URLS (regardless of https encryption)
• Home/Properties/Back/Search button presses
• Battery State Changes
• Location

And requests access to many hardware and system resources in Android, including “services that cost you money” and “personal information”.

Admittedly, the collection of location on its own may not be a big deal to many people, but the fact that it is collecting URLs which should be encrypted is a problem. This could expose sensitive user credentials. Collecting phone call key presses is even worse because it can easily collect banking PINs, credit card numbers, passwords, and more. The application even has access to sound and recording functionalities, which means it could be turned into an all-in-one surveillance device.

There is absolutely no reason for a diagnostic application to collect the amount of data it is collecting. There is no reason for a diagnostic application to record key-presses or any other user action when crash reports are readily available from the phones operating system. This should not have happened.

SWJ – Toward a Gentler, Kinder German Reich (Dr. Tony Corn)

Corn on the emerging play by Berlin for an economic Festung Europa.

In the past two years, German elites have taken up the Rahm Emanuel doctrine (“never let a serious crisis go to waste”) all the more eagerly that Washington, in the process of rebalancing away from the Greater Middle East to the Asia-Pacific region, is less interested than ever in following intra-EU affairs.

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