Britain has for the first time admitted it was spying when Russia’s state security service, the FSB, accused British diplomats of using a transceiver hidden inside a rock on a Moscow street.
Footage showing the alleged spies using the device was aired on Russian TV in January 2006. The FSB described it as “absolutely new spy technology.”
The UK Foreign Office then denied the claims.
But in a BBC documentary due to be broadcast later today, Jonathan Powell, then Prime Minister Tony Blair’s chief of staff, admitted the footage was genuine.
“The spy rock was embarrassing,” Powell said, adding that the Russians “had us bang to rights.”
Phi Beta Iota: Spy rocks are not new–indeed one must give credit to the US for being the best at developing this technology in times past. What is most interesting about the report is the suggestion that the British are using non-governmental organizations for “deep cover.”
At “JOHO the Blog,” David Weinberger has a simple and very cool summary of the meaning of yesterday’s SOPA-induced blackout. “This is our Internet. We built it. We built it for us, not for you. We get to turn off the lights, not you.” Yes, indeed. It took a long time for the the Internet to smell like money to those folks who like that smell more than they like the smell of creativity, innovation, fellowship, commons, etc. Now it’s a platform for all media in digital formats that are easily replicated, therefore distribution is hard to control. Much of what flows across the Internet is freely shared by its creators, and there’s also channels for media that people pay for (like Netflix). A system that facilitates all that sharing, along with a high degree of interactivity, also makes it easy to do the natural sort of sharing that peopel will inherently do. Content providers could spend less time figuring out how to stop sharing, and more time figuring out how to build a business model that works in a social/sharing environment. People who invest time and money in media creation and production have a right to charge for it, but we need to rethink how that works in the 21st century networked world.
The black that covered so many sites yesterday spoke well. I think there were four messages.
First, This is our Internet. We built it. We built it for us, not for you. We get to turn off the lights, not you.
Second, we are better custodians of culture than are culture’s merchants because we understand that culture is what we have in common. We feel pain every time something is held back from this Commons.
Third, just as we can make someone famous rather than having to passively accept the celebrities you foist upon us, we can make an idea politically potent. Going dark was the self-assertion with which political engagement begins.
Fourth, there’s a growing “we” on the Internet. It is not as inclusive as we think, it’s far more diverse than we imagine, and it’s far less egalitarian than we should demand. But so was the “we” in “We the People.” The individual acts of darkness are the start of the We we need to nurture.
Israel already threatens war on Iran. It’s also involved with Washington, Turkey, Jordan, and other rogue Arab states behind Syria’s externally generated insurgency.
Gaza’s also threatened. On January 1, Haaretz writer Amos Harel headlined “Will 2012 bring another Israeli war against Hamas in Gaza?” saying:
Repeated Israeli air strikes and incursions target Gaza. Perhaps they precede a broader offensive. Israel’s IDF chief Benny Gantz “said on Army radio that ‘Operation Cast Lead was carried out in a professional, determined manner, and significantly strengthened Israel’s deterrent strength.’ ”
At the same time, he suggested another round of fighting is likely. “Particularly worrisome (are the alleged) weapons smuggl(ed) into the Gaza Strip. Hamas and Islamic Jihad have….many thousands of rockets; hundreds” able to reach central Israel, said Harel.
As a result, “the IDF is preparing itself for the possibility of a land operation in another few months.”
On January 16, Jerusalem Post writer Yaakov Katz headlined, “IDF preparing for major Gaza action within months,” saying:
European Intelligence & Security Informatics Conference (EISIC 2012)
The Premier European Conference on Counterterrorism and Criminology
Odense, Denmark August 22-24, 2012 http://www.eisic.org, http://www.eisic.eu
Co-sponsored by IEEE Computer Society
Since the drug war has become so unpopular with the electorate, instead of politicians actually changing the drug laws, the Department of Defense seeks to reduce and conceal the real costs by transferring the “dirty work” to private contractors to do what “U.S. military forces are not allowed or not encouraged to do.
The BBC (in Spanish) is reporting that the U.S. Department of Defense is delegating the war on drugs to private mercenary companies. Of those companies, the increasingly infamous organization previously known as Blackwater is said to have received several multimillion-dollar government contracts for “providing advice, training and conducting operations in drug producing countries and those with links to so-called “narco-terrorism” including Latin America.” The “no bid” contracts, issued under the Counter-Narcoterrorism Technology Program Office's $15 billion dollar budget, are described as “non-specific” and are said to be “juicy” for the private contractors. The Pentagon says “the details of each cost in very general contracts do not go through bidding processes.”
An unnamed analyst says “the responsibility of the public and national security changing from a state's duty to be a private business…has become the trend of the future.”
Although parts of the drug war have been privatized for years, the BBC reports this “transfer” of responsibilities is an attempt to placate those looking for Pentagon budget cuts in an election year.
The former director of U.S. programs for production of nuclear materials and components for nuclear weapons, Clinton Bastin, sent an open letter to President Obama the morning of January 13, explaining that there is no weapons threat from Iran's fully safeguarded nuclear power and research programs. A copy of the letter, which the nuclear scientist also sent to the Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations, was made available to 21st Century Science & Technology magazine yesterday. It is reproduced below in full.
Bastin, who has served in leading positions in government since the 1950s, laid out the case on Iran in greater detail in an interview with 21st Century Science Nov. 18, 2011. The interview, which devastates the arguments for an Iranian nuclear weapons threat, is available at the 21st Century Science and Technology website.
Phi Beta Iota: The Iranians certainly have nuclear weapons ambitions. Bearing in mind that Zbigniew Brzezinski personally approved the Pakistani (Sunni) nuclear weapons program, it hardly seems fair to deprive the Iranian (Shi'ite) community of their own nuclear weapons program–from where we sit, they fear the Saudis and Pakistanis vastly more than they fear the USA. The bottom line is that the White House is not making decisions based on intelligence with integrity.
UPDATE 22 March 2012. The Iran situation appears to be theater:
1. To meet oil futures bets made by Israel, Iran, and Wall Street [the high end — some sources say that oil futures were also bought at the low end such that the oil producing countries are not receiving any kick from the higher prices]
2. To distract everyone from Israel pressing forward with more settlements and more atrocities against the Palestinians.
The only serious opposition to this arrogant Ruling Party is coming not from feckless Republicans but from what might be called the Country Party — and its vision is revolutionary. Our special Summer Issue cover story.
When Codevilla’s article appeared I stated that it was the most important essay I had ever read. I still believe this because it is a superb synthesis of class analysis with keen insights on contemporary power elite relationships regarding today’s rulers and the ruled.
This class division of present-day America into two factions, Court and Country, has absolutely nothing to do with any Marxian view or analysis. It is a reaffirmation of the seminal insights of Bernard Bailyn’s Pulitzer Prize winning volume, The Ideological Origins of the AmericanRevolution, and Murray N. Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty.
These books demonstrate that the Founders’ world-view saw the crucial struggle of the Revolution as a battle of liberty versus power. Codevilla posits today’s battle in the same dramatic terms.
Every political movement needs a manifesto. The Tea Party surely needs one. So do other grassroots political resistance organizations. They don’t have it yet, but they now have its preliminary foundation, Angelo Codevilla’s essay, “America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution.”
. . . . . . .
I regard this essay as the finest statement on the two-fold division in American political life written in my lifetime — more than this, in the last hundred years. He has laid it out clearly, accurately, and eloquently.
. . . . . . .
Codevilla correctly identifies the source of legitimacy for the ruling class: Darwinism. Darwinism removed God from the vocabulary of self-accredited academia. Once liberated from the doctrine of original sin, the Progressives regarded as illegitimate the Constitutional limits placed on the Federal government.
The UK Foreign Office then denied the claims.
