This series reveals a political and military system that is sick in its core. This toxic stew of the F-35's high cost, abetted by concurrent production, lagging performance and continuing design problems, has put U.S. and allied air power into a dive. The dive will steepen so long as F-35 production at the currently-projected rates continues. I recommend starting with Part 5, the summary by Mark Thompson of TIME Battleland Blog.
MS, Yahoo FB, Apple and the rest all deny they know anything the NSA's program – implemented with these tech giant's cooperation – called “PRISM.” It's evident from this article they are all lying:
The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.
The highly classified program, code-named PRISM, has not been disclosed publicly before. Its establishment in 2007 and six years of exponential growth took place beneath the surface of a roiling debate over the boundaries of surveillance and privacy. Even late last year, when critics of the foreign intelligence statute argued for changes, the only members of Congress who know about PRISM were bound by oaths of office to hold their tongues.
The Washington Post obtained “briefing slides” from an “internal presentation on the Silicon Valley operation, intended for senior analysts in the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate,” from a “career intelligence officer” who cited “firsthand experience with these systems, and horror at their capabilities,” as the reason for the disclosure. These materials described PRISM as “the most prolific contributor to the President's Daily Brief” and the NSA's “leading source of raw material, accounting for nearly 1 in 7 intelligence reports.” The Post, goes on to report that while PRISM allows the NSA to collect “anything it likes” from the available data, it is in practice not utilized as a “dragnet” per se:
Analysts who use the system from a Web portal at Fort Meade key in “selectors,” or search terms, that are designed to produce at least 51 percent confidence in a target’s “foreignness.” That is not a very stringent test. Training materials obtained by the Post instruct new analysts to submit accidentally collected U.S. content for a quarterly report, “but it’s nothing to worry about.”
One may nevertheless worry about this thing that is “nothing to worry about/”
On the hidden battlefields of history’s first known cyber-war, the casualties are piling up. In the U.S., many banks have been hit, and the telecommunications industry seriously damaged, likely in retaliation for several major attacks on Iran. Washington and Tehran are ramping up their cyber-arsenals, built on a black-market digital arms bazaar, enmeshing such high-tech giants as Microsoft, Google, and Apple. With the help of highly placed government and private-sector sources, Michael Joseph Gross describes the outbreak of the conflict, its escalation, and its startling paradox: that America’s bid to stop nuclear proliferation may have unleashed a greater threat.
Phi Beta Iota: Buried in the small print are severe shortcomings in intelligence support to strategy, policy, acquisition, and operations around the world; TRANSCOM thinking that Guam comprises a long-haul strategy; the Arctic uncovered and the Antarctic ignored; and at the very end, a tiny mention of the alternative concept of joint inter-agency commands–and of course no mention at all of the key concepts of Network-Enabled Capabilities, OSE (technical solution) and M4IS2 (human solution). The new National Security Advisor is inheriting a gawd-awful mess that is out of control, out of money, out of imagination and out of integrity.
You and I, thanks to Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Daniel Pipes, and a number of other lesser neocons, and an almost fatally incurious President, spent over a TRILLION dollars of public money, and squandered the lives of tens of thousands of young Americans who were killed, wounded, or permanently maimed, in order to achieve… nothing… for either America or Iraq, as t! his report makes clear.
Historians, I think, will say it was the worst foreign policy blunder in U.S. history. It has resulted in the destabilization of an entire region of the world, sucked out the money that should have gone to rebuilding our infrastructure and our schools, and laid the foundation for generations of anti-American hate throughout the Islamic world.
As the previous story pointed out the deaths of thousands of Americans and some far large but never accurately counted number of Iraqis, and the wounding and maiming of hundreds of thousands of Americans and Iraqis produced no benefits for either country and great damage to both. Even on the terms the neocons argued for the war: it would protect Iraq's massive o! il supplies for the U.S. (read the neocons' corporate masters) turns out to be wrong, as this story makes clear. Everything the Bush Administration based its policy decisions on was wrong, and China is the main beneficiary.
