zenpundit.com

[by Mark Safranski a.k.a. “zen“]

Top Billing! Infinity Journal Volume 3, Issue 2 

IJ requires free registration but has a consistently high level of articles, for example “Strategic Culture: More Problems than Prospects” by Antulio J. Echevarria:

The concept of strategic culture has grown more popular of late than its problematic origins and dubious attempts at application warrant. Once described as having undergone three generational shifts, the concept is now in at least its fourth generation, and is no better for any of them. Over the span of more than four decades, the theory’s diachronic and synchronic tensions have resisted resolution. The concept fails, in other words, to account for change over time as well as commonality in time. It attempts to privilege continuity over change in the former sense, and uniqueness over similarity in the latter sense. Its empirical base, moreover, has not gone beyond broad generalizations that do little more than reaffirm national and cultural stereotypes. The idea of strategic culture is, therefore, in need of another more critical examination. Such a re-examination can only lead to the conclusion that, on the whole, the concept’s problems far outweigh its prospects. No doubt this condition will continue to attract scholarly interest in the hopes of resolving these tensions. However, for policymakers and strategists, the concept is best avoided, at least for another generation or two. There are enough tautologies involved in formulating policy and strategy already. It is not clear that the credibility of the process can withstand another one. […] 

William Lind –  John Boyd’s Art of War 

….Boyd had a reservoir of comments he repeated regularly, one of which was, “A lot of people in Washington talk about strategy. Most of them can spell the word, but that’s all they know of it.” The establishment’s insistence on an offensive grand strategy, where we attempt to force secular liberal democracy down the throats of every people on earth, is a major reason for our involvement and defeat in Fourth Generation conflicts. A defensive grand strategy, which is what this country followed successfully through most of its history, would permit us to fold our enemies back on themselves, something Boyd recommended. With us out of the picture, their internal fissures, such as those between Sunni and Shiites in the Islamic world, would become their focus. But as usual, Boyd was right: virtually no one in Washington can understand the advantages of a defensive grand strategy.

Being involved in every conflict on earth is useful if the real game is boosting the Pentagon’s budget rather than serving our national interests. Here too Boyd had a favorite line. He often said, “It is not true the Pentagon has no strategy. It has a strategy, and once you understand what that strategy is, everything the Pentagon does makes sense. The strategy is, don’t interrupt the money flow, add to it.”

Information Dissemination (Galrahn) – 21st Century Mahan 

….21st Century Mahan is a very clever book. The book combines five articles written by AT Mahan for periodicals specifically for public audiences, thus presenting AT Mahan in a way that is more approachable by those like me who can get annoyed by his difficult to read classical writing style. All five articles are very well written, but they are also relevant to the discussions surrounding the US Navy today. Benjamin Armstrong is a Lieutenant Commander in the US Navy today, so the author intentionally draws no conclusions from Mahan’s work and applies them to current events. And yet, because of the presentation and delivery within the book, the reader can’t help but think about Mahan in a 21st century context applicable today. I am not sure if that was how LCDR Armstrong intended to write the book, or how the USNI editors helped arrange the book, but it is very clever and works well.

I really enjoyed the book. It helped that I had never read any of the five AT Mahan essay’s covered in the book, and it also helped that I enjoyed each of the essay’s. In particular the way the chapter involving Naval Administration and Warfare, Some General Principles came together early in the book was so well done I had to read it again with my yellow marker I was so impressed. To give one a sense of just how much easier this book is to read on Alfred Thayer Mahan than most works of AT Mahan, my 18 year old daughter actually finished the book when I asked her to read it just for an opinion. I assure you, if this was a typical Mahan book, she would not have made it past chapter 2.

If you are looking for a book with a strong authors opinion that draws conclusions for you in applying AT Mahan to the 21st century, this is not the right book for you. This book asks readers to draw their own conclusions. That detail actually defines the style of the book better than any other detail of the book, because the author doesn’t tell the reader what to think, rather asks the reader to think for themselves.

Washington’s Blog – NSA Whistleblowers: NSA Collects ‘Word for Word’ Every Domestic Communication 

JUDY WOODRUFF:   Both of you know what the government says is that we’re collecting this — we’re collecting the number of phone calls that are made, the e-mails, but we’re not listening to them.

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, I don’t believe that for a minute. OK?

I mean, that’s why they had to build Bluffdale, that facility in Utah with that massive amount of storage that could store all these recordings and all the data being passed along the fiberoptic networks of the world. I mean, you could store 100 years of the world’s communications here. That’s for content storage. That’s not for metadata.

Metadata if you were doing it and putting it into the systems we built, you could do it in a 12-by-20-foot room for the world. That’s all the space you need. You don’t need 100,000 square feet of space that they have at Bluffdale to do that. You need that kind of storage for content.

Joshua Foust –The Miranda Detention: Troubling from all Sides

….So, this is complicated. The UK authorities were correct to question David Miranda, but they were stupid, wrong, and abusive to have held him for so long — and in doing so, they ruined any possible legitimacy their questions might have held. It was a needless own-goal.

More immediately, too, the instinctive reaction of far too many journalists to shriek about their own spouses being targeted is going to have a downside. Few journalists would treat their spouses as authority-bait the way Greenwald did this past weekend, and few would tell other reporters, for a profile, that they used their spouses to help them avoid intelligence agencies. Glenn Greenwald is a very smart man — he knew what he was doing. While we should all condemn the British authorities for holding Miranda for so long, we should also keep in mind exactly why he might have been singled out — and there a whole new set of complications and questions emerge.

There’s also a bit of historical literacy we should perhaps add to the discussion. Histrionics aside, most governments, and many more unsavory groups, treat secrecy very seriously — sometimes with deadly seriousness. Regardless of the rightness or wrongness of his decision to help pilfer and distribute the treasured secrets of several governments, to do so openly, with such braggadocio, is not only arrogant it is misguided. This is not a game, especially to the governments being exposed, and casually involving a spouse to take a hit when he won’t risk it is a bizarre and troubling decision.

Chuck Spinney – An American Sun Tzu – John Boyd

Dr. Chet Richards – Spinney and Lind 

BLACKFIVE celebrates National Airborne Day ( it was a perfectly good airplane….)

Dr. Steve Metz – Strategic Horizons: The Revolution in American Security Policy 

War on the Rocks – ( COL David Maxwell) UNCONVENTIONAL WARFARE DOES NOT BELONG TO SPECIAL FORCES and (Jason Fritz) COUNTERINSURGENCY IS NOT THE PROBLEM 

Small Wars Journal – The Roots of Military Doctrine: Change and Continuity in Understanding the Practice of Warfare,  Cartel Car Bombings in Mexico and ( Kyle Fonay) On Guerrilla Warfare: Two Takes, Mao vs. Guevara 

Feral Jundi –Executive Protection: So Who Does Warren Buffet Use For Security? 

Eeben Barlow – THE DANGERS FACING REVOLUTIONARY GOVERNMENTS 

RECOMMENDED VIEWING:

Top Billing! Adam Elkus –Banquo in Bandit Country 

One long, deadly night in an isolated outpost in a place few Americans could place on a map. A tragic turn of events and Americans dead. The headline could stand in for a dizzying number of places from the Horn of Africa to Afghanistan. So why Benghazi? Why has it stuck in the spotlight while the others have not?

Partisanship is a big reason. Like many post-Bush security debates, it’s easier to point fingers when the other guy is sitting in the Oval Office. But this doesn’t really begin to get to the bottom of the puzzle. The public has evinced little interest in Benghazi. The political press has mostly forgotten about it. So why do DC insiders fight so heavily over it? And why is CNN claiming in its latest scoop that the “CIA is involved in what one source calls an unprecedented attempt to keep the spy agency’s Benghazi secrets from ever leaking out?”

Benghazi is the Banquo’s Ghost of the post-Bush counterterrorism wars, a lingering symbol of a dangerous flaw within a consensus national security policy that many in Washington have convinced themselves is the way to fight the wars of future while avoiding a heavy ground presence. To be sure, the Macbeth analogy here is not a one-to-one mapping. The “ghost” here is a metaphor for the lingering specter of the disaster, its dead, and what the torching of the consulate represents for the indirect strategy. Like Banquo, the specter lingers during what should be a feast and time of celebration. But a review of the strategic landscape in the so-called “arc of conflict” reveals little to celebrate.

To understand why, it’s important to briefly review some parts of the Benghazi affair that have mostly escaped attention in the political obsession with tactical marginalia….

SWJ Blog  (Gian Gentile) Counterinsurgency: The Graduate Level of War or Pure Hokum?,   (Robert Bunker)-How Caribbean Organized Crime is Replacing the State and (William Olson) The Continuing Irrelevance of Clausewitz 

….This notion of counterinsurgency warfare requiring a special martial skill set because of its so-called difficulty that conventional armies by nature do not have is nothing new in modern history.  Starting in the 19th century, the French and British armies began to treat small wars (an earlier moniker for counterinsurgency) as a special form of war requiring officers with unconventional skills who can transform the hidebound conventional armies that were resistant to change.

Counterinsurgency experts, especially since the Vietnam War, have written histories of various cases of counterinsurgency warfare with the idea that a special form of war requires special skills as a foundational premise.  For example, in The Army and Vietnam, Andrew Krepinevich argues that the American Army lost the war because it could not break out of its conventional war mindset that focused on the abundant use of firepower instead of the correct and special methods of COIN designed to win hearts and minds.[3]

Unfortunately, counterinsurgency is not the graduate level of war, it is simply war.  Moreover, the notion that counterinsurgency wars require the soldiers who fight them to possess special skills is not supported by historical evidence.  And contrary to what writers like Krepinevich and Cassidy say, counterinsurgency wars have not been won or lost by the tactical methods of the armies that have fought them.  Instead, as historian Douglas Porch argues, they were won or lost “because the strategic context in which the wars were fought defied a tactical remedy.”[4] 

Pundita –You didn’t actually think Obama would let Greenwald testify to Congress about NSA, did you? and Let’s roll: Some legislators mount desperate campaign to save the U.S. republic 

Raúl goes on to speculate about other possible reasons for the President’s ploy. My take is that Obama had already lost face with Liberals over drone war and related issues. And I don’t think there is one genuine Leftist or civil libertarian in the world who has any illusions left about what Obama is.  

Yet it was the American Leftist, law professor and political scientist Stephen F. Diamond who alone pegged Obama during the Democratic presidential primary campaign in early 2008.  After studying Obama’s political career up to that point he said that Obama was no Leftist; that he was an authoritarian — although what specific type, he wouldn’t speculate at that early stage.  

“Isn’t that just like a Leftist,” I observed sarcastically at the time. “When one of their own turns out to be a monster they say, ‘Oh that’s not a real Leftist.'”  But I listened to Steve despite my grumbling, and made sure Pundita readers heard what he had to say.  I am very glad I did.

The American democracy may be strong enough to survive the Obama presidency, but there are many younger democracies that can count themselves lucky he wasn’t born there.

The secret origin of Doctrine Man!

Not the Singularity (Steve Hynd) – NSA Surveillance Didn’t Help Identify New Alleged Al Qaeda Threat and ( Matthew Elliot) – Weekend NSA Reader

BLACKFIVE – Brian Stann – The Dark Side of a Warrior 

Slightly East of New – Incestuous delusion

Dr. Tdaxp –Pimps, Hos, and When to Get Out of the Ghetto

Nick Carr – PRISM and the New Society

Bruce Schneier – XKeyscore and Scientists Banned from Revealing Details of Car-Security Hack 

Presentation Zen –Good science makes for good story 

Eric Drexler – Transforming the Material Basis of Civilization:

The Long Now Foundation blog – Language may be much older than previously thought

Aeon Magazine – Out of the Deep 

Studies in Intelligence –Intelligence Officer’s Bookshelf

NRO – Jeb’s Education Racket  

Democracy Journal – An Elite Deserving of the Name 

Reason – Thanks to NSA Surveillance, Americans Are More Worried About Civil Liberties Than Terrorism

Recommended Viewing:

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen”]

Top Billing! SWJ Blog  ( BG HR McMaster) The Pipe Dream of Easy War and General James Mattis (USMC Ret) On Middle East Policy 

….Our record of learning from previous experience is poor; one reason is that we apply history simplistically, or ignore it altogether, as a result of wishful thinking that makes the future appear easier and fundamentally different from the past.

We engaged in such thinking in the years before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; many accepted the conceit that lightning victories could be achieved by small numbers of technologically sophisticated American forces capable of launching precision strikes against enemy targets from safe distances.

These defense theories, associated with the belief that new technology had ushered in a whole new era of war, were then applied to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; in both, they clouded our understanding of the conflicts and delayed the development of effective strategies.

Today, budget pressures and the desire to avoid new conflicts have resurrected arguments that emerging technologies — or geopolitical shifts — have ushered in a new era of warfare. Some defense theorists dismiss the difficulties we ran into in Afghanistan and Iraq as aberrations. But they were not aberrations. The best way to guard against a new version of wishful thinking is to understand three age-old truths about war and how our experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq validated their importance. 

Information Dissemination ( Bryan McGrath) H.R. McMaster Sets His Sights On AirSea Battle 

….If you think that I’m wrong, and that he’s not arguing against AirSea Battle, then it is not worth your time to read on.  If you think he is or might be, then consider moving forward. 

McMaster employs the straw-man technique of argument in this piece, defining for us “War” by three of its “age old truths” and by inference, pointing out the shortcomings of this shadowy approach that he does not name.  Additionally, he creates a ridiculously high bar over which “defense concepts” must hurdle, one that lards the full weight of the conduct of war upon constituent pieces thereof.  His first lesson:  ” Be skeptical of concepts that divorce war from its political nature, particularly those that promise fast, cheap victory through technology.”  So, we are to be skeptical of military concepts that do not take into consideration a full Clausewitzian approach to war?  How hamstrung will that leave us?  Why should concept development worry about the political nature of war?  Isn’t this the purview of statesmen and politicians?  Is it not the job of military thinkers and planners to put together a menu of possibilities for civilian leadership to choose among, one aspect of which would be the political fall-out therefrom?  This line of operation is aimed squarely at the possibility that in a conflict with China, we might target mainland objectives.  “There go those irresponsible fools in the Navy and the Air Force, talking about mainland strikes.  Why this would lead to horrible escalation, probably nuclear war.  Why would we even consider these things?”  We consider them because they could be militarily useful, and because a commander might wish to utilize such an approach in an actual war, guided by the political instructions received  from civilian leadership 

USNI Blog  – The Battle for American Minds: Guest Post by Robert Kozloski 

….The Chinese thinking on psychological operations continues to advance and expand.  In a recentbackgrounder, Dean Cheng notes, “Successful coercive psychological warfare is the realization of ends for which one is prepared to go to war without having to take that final step and engage in active, kinetic, destructive warfare. From the Chinese perspective, given the destructiveness of nuclear weapons and even conventional forces, there is also significant incentive to develop coercive psychological approaches in order to achieve strategic ends without having to resort to the use of force.”

….Is it possible to defend a nation against widespread psychological operations?  The Chinese believe so.  Cheng describes one of five broad tasks:

Implementing Psychological Defenses. Since psychological warfare can have such far-reaching impacts, in the Chinese view, it is assumed that an opponent will mount psychological attacks. Consequently, in addition to negating or neutralizing such attacks, it is necessary to expose them, both to defeat them and to demoralize an opponent by demonstrating the ineffectiveness of his efforts. Thus, not only must there be counter-propaganda activities, but one must also publicize enemy machinations and techniques, thereby exposing and highlighting their futility. 

Defense News (Freier & Guy) – Future of Ground Forces:Planners Must Evolve Beyond Past Wars 

If you like this short riff, it is drawn from a more comprehensive CSIS report

John Arquilla –How Chess Explains the World and Founding Insurgents 

Marine Corps Gazette Blog (Brett Friedman) –Back to the Future Part One, Back to the Future Part 2 and Back to the Future Part 3: Amphibious Raiding 

War on the Rocks (Frank Hoffman) – Forty Shades of Gray 

Feral Jundi –Industry Talk: Bancroft Global’s Bet On Peace In War-Torn Somalia

DoDBuzz –Generals: ‘Human Domain’ Will Dictate Future Wars 

Global Guerrillas – China: The Watermelon Revolution 

Scholar’s Stage –Despots Near and Despots Far 

Steven Pressfield Online –Art is Artifice, Part Two

WPR (Steve Metz) –Strategic Horizons: America’s Limited Leverage in Afghanistan 

Slightly East of New –Temporary insanity 

David Ronfeldt -In favor of “peer progressives”: how, where, and why they’re good for TIMN (part 4 of 4) 

That’s it.

[ Mark Safranski – a.k.a “zen“]

As you may have noted above, starting today I am following Charles, Scott and Lynn in adding my name to my posts. With four bloggers here and perhaps more to come in the future, it is becoming too confusing for occasional or new readers for me to continue to leave my posts “unsigned”.

Going to catch up now with the best of the non-cyber posts and articles of the last few weeks:

Top Billing! The National Interest (BJ Armstrong) – Mahan, the Forgotten Grand Strategist

Armstrong is also the editor of the newly published 21st Century Mahan: Sound Military Conclusions for the Modern Era. 

….Before Thomas P.M. Barnett ever introduced international relations theorists and futurists to the idea of the “core” and the “gap” nations, Mahan was writing about two groups of people in the world. Mahan suggested that advancements in the west “have extended the means whereby prosperity has increased manifold, as have the inequalities in material well-being existing between those within its borders and those without.” This, he believed, would result in conflict. Globalization and the technological development of the West certainly had increased the standard of living of most Americans and Europeans, but Mahan knew that the economic difficulties of the rest of the world were just as important to the international order.

Mahan recognized the “inequalities” could cause conflict and he warned that “those who want will take, if they can … for the simple reason that they have not, that they desire, and that they are able.” The challenge to international order was something Mahan foresaw, despite the fact that thinkers like Normal Angell were writing that globalization would mean the end of war. Other writers during his time believed that since economic difficulties were shared challenges they would balance one another. Mahan, on the other hand, realized these challenges would be shared unequally, and inequality was only going to add to international instability and stoke the fires of conflict. 

John Hagel– Strategy Made Simple – The 3 Core Strategy Questions 

The ultimate goal of differentiation is to avoid direct confrontation with our competitors. In the words of SunTzu and The Art of War, if we have to engage the enemy in battle, then we’ve already lost. If there’s any uncertainty about why we are different, we won’t be able to focus effectively and we’ll be fighting an uphill battle to gain and sustain the attention of our audience.

Of course, differentiation has always been important to success in any environment.  What’s different now is that people face an exponentially increasing array of alternatives.  They have more information and more ability to switch across as larger and larger array of options. In a world of power laws, we’re competing not only with the blockbusters in the head of the power curve, but an ever expanding long tail of options that are able to serve very narrow niches. That’s why it’s more critical than ever to be able to answer this question clearly and compellingly, for ourselves and the people we want to reach.

War on the Rocks has been launched!!!! Congrats to the gents involved.

War on the Rocks is a web publication that serves as a platform for analysis, commentary, and debate on foreign policy and national security issues through a realist lens. It will feature articles and podcasts produced by an array of writers with deep experience in these matters: top notch scholars who study war, those who have served or worked in war zones, and more than a few who have done it all.

Some of WotR top stories in their online debut include REVIEW BY ADMIRAL STAVRIDIS: THE GUNS AT LAST LIGHT BY RICK ATKINSON and PAKISTANI MILITANTS PLAN THEIR OWN PIVOT EAST by Stephen Tankel

Washington Times (Brahma Chellaney): Afghanistan’s Looming Partition 

Chellaney is a national security/strategy eminence grise in India. Read this op-ed as Indian elite alarm over America’s pending withdrawal from Afghanistan that might leave Kabul a Taliban dominated, anti-Indian, ISI satrapy. Note a “Greater Pushtunistan” would leave Pakistan a rump Punjabistan plus Sind.

….Foreign military intervention can effect regime change, but it evidently cannot re-establish order based on centralized government. Iraq has been partitioned in all but name into Shia, Sunni and Kurdish regions, while Libya seems headed toward a similar tripartite, tribal-based territorial arrangement. In Afghanistan, too, an Iraq-style “soft” partition may be the best possible outcome.

Afghanistan’s large ethnic-minority groups already enjoy de facto autonomy, which they secured after their Northern Alliance played a central role in the U.S.-led ouster of the Taliban from power in late 2001. Having enjoyed virtual self-rule since then, they will fiercely resist falling back under the sway of the Pashtuns, who ruled the country for most of its history.

For their part, the Pashtuns, despite their tribal divisions, will not be content with control of a rump Afghanistan consisting of its current eastern and southeastern provinces. They will eventually seek integration with fellow Pushtuns in Pakistan, across the British-drawn Durand Line — a border that Afghanistan has never recognized. The demand for a “Greater Pashtunistan” would then challenge the territorial integrity of Pakistan (itself another artificial imperial construct).

Dr. Tdaxp –Review of “America 3.0: Rebooting American Prosperity in the 21st Century-Why America’s Greatest Days Are Yet to Come ,” by James Bennett and Michael Lotus 

….What keeps America 3.0 from being simply an economic-determinist, however, is Jim Bennett’s focus on the Anglosphere, and particularly Lotus’ and Bennett’s theory of what makes English-speaking countries nearly unique in the world: the “Absolute Nuclear Family” and the Common Law. According to America 3.0, this style of family is shared between English speaking countries, and some areas of Denmark and the Netherlands where the Anglo-Saxon-Jute peoples were active fifteen centuries ago. The Common Law, a result of the eradication of Roman Law and subsequent British hostility to the re-imposition of the Roman-based Laws latter (partially as a result for how Roman Law conflicts with the Absolute Nuclear Family type), also creates a difference.

….The standard economic-determinist answer to the important of economic foundation is “a whole lot.” This makes sense to me. We’re still a way from a scientific study of history — a cliodynamical analysis of the role of steam, say, in American history — but all-in-all I found this part of the book to be insightful and non-controversial. Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy all differed on many things, but all agreed on the importance of economies of scale, which were themselves clearly enabled by steam.

Maggie’s Farm –What could have beens in Vietnam

SWJ – Economic and Religious Influencers in the Era of Population-centric Warfare 

America 3.0 Are Breitbart.com’s Standards Falling Down?

Not the Singularity – Then they Came for your Snail Mail

Ribbonfarm –Players versus Spectators 

Slightly East of New – New Edition of the Origins of Boyd’s Discourse 

Scholar’s Stage – Rise of the West: Asking the Right Questions

Slouching Toward Columbia – On Reappraising the Civil War

The Glittering Eye –Defining Genocide Down 

Campaign Reboot –Constraining Creativity 

The American Thinker- The Fall of the Humanities

Top billing! Michael Tanji – 140+ Ed Snowden Edition 1.0, Compare and Contrast, Prepare for the Pendulum Swing 

I’m not going to belabor the tale of woe those trying to deal with Edward Snowden’s theft are dealing with right now. For a moment I want to opine on some of the secondary and tangential issues that I predict is going to make life in the IC more difficult because of his actions:

1. Polygraphs. If it is true that he only took the job with BAH to gain access to specific data in order to reveal it, IC polygraph units are going to have to cancel leave through 2025. Moving from one agency to another? Get ready to get hooked up to the box (again). In a sys admin job? Pucker up. That old timer you used to get who realized that people were people and they had lives? He’s going to be replaced by a legion of whippersnappers who will all be gunning to catch the next leaker. Good people will be deep-sixed and those who survive will wonder if it’s worth the ***-pain.
2. Investigations. When you can’t pick up on obvious problem-children, and when the bottom-line is more important than doing a good job, the bureaucracy will retrench and do what it does best: drop into low gear and distrust outsiders. There are only so many government investigators, and it’s not like there are fewer missions. Coverage will slip, tasks won’t get done, the risk of surprise (you know, what we’re supposed to try and avoid) goes up. 

Global Guerrillas  – Info Bomb,  Positive Control 

Here’s a framework that will allow you to put the stuff you read in the news into context.  

From hat bans to NSA leaks about surveillance programs.  

Problem:  Everybody on the planet IS a potential terrorist.

 Solution:  Put everybody on the planet under positive control.  

Positive control means the continuous monitoring.  

• Location  GPS phone. Implied by utility use (smart grid).  Car GPS.  CCTV.  Facial recognition everywhere.  Social media data.
• Network  Phone.  Social media connections.  Proximity.  Network analysis.  
• Behavior  Economic activity.  Utility use.  Content use.  Usage monitoring.

In the case of positive control, any lack of activity or lapse in data flow is considered a dangerous act.  

Try to hide = something to hide.   

Any blocking of monitoring will be made illegal and a major crime.

Multiple systems with overlapping control will provide a complete cradle to grave blanket. 

There’s no way to avoid this.  It’s already here and nobody cares.  

Polizeros –Steve Gibson on NSA surveillance and PRISM. “Most important show ever”

Gibson’s point is that NSA taps into Tier 1 routers, and splits the data off, hence the name PRISM. They don’t have to tap your house or a server farm, just on the Tier 1 routers. Thus Apple, Facebook, and Google et al are correct in saying NSA didn’t have access to their servers. Forget server farms, the question we need to ask is, do they have access to routers near those companies by tapping the fiber optic lines. NSA targets the bandwidth provider of big high tech companies to tap the routers closest to them. All email is readable on the routers because it’s not encrypted (unless you use encryption software.) Semantic technology is used to analyze the data further. 

Joshua Foust – Can the NSA Search for Americans? Who Knows. and Three Guiding Principles for Reforming the NSA 

Lawfare Blog– Philip Bobbitt on the Snowden Affair and The Miminization and Targeting Procedures: An Analysis

Volokh Conspiracy –What is The “Real Story” About Edward Snowden and His Disclosure of NSA Activities? 

Abu Muqawama – Through a Murky PRISM 

Sic Semper Tyrannis – The Snowden Ruckus By Richard Sale and Clerks often have a lot of access 

Pundita – Out with Obama’s China Pivot; in with the Snowden Pivot, and  Obama’s Insider Threat program: Are you having a bad hair day? I might have to report you as a potential traitor to the United States. 

That’s It!