America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon.
In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.
No that's not a typo: that's the statistic according to USA Today. The folks over there have done some really great work this week with another interesting interactive chart attached to an article about the nation's debt. If they keep this up, I'll have to stop considering it a useless free newspaper I step over when leaving a hotel room. The numbers it reports are staggering. [Phi Beta Iota: tip of the hat to USA Today, live link above recommended.]
The Conservative MP for Braintree calculates the true level of government debt is £2,200 billion (or £85,610 per household), equivalent to 157% of GDP.
He said the latest official figure of £805 billion does not take into account:
the full cost of projects financed through the PFI (£139 billion)
unfunded public sector pension liabilities (£1,104 billion)
contingent liabilities such as Network Rail (£22 billion)
the cost of recent interventions in the financial sector (£130 billion).
These hidden liabilities total £1,395 billion (100% of GDP).
Silent Install Firefox Plugin Backfires on Microsoft
posted by Kroc Camen on Sat 17th Oct 2009 05:27 UTC
Now a security hole has been found in a plugin that Microsoft have been silently installing into Firefox. Along with .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, Microsoft have been silently installing a Windows Presentation Foundation Plugin that allows the embedding of XAML applications (an XML-based UI technology) in web pages, called XBAP (XAML Web App). … The only thing that surprises me more, is that I’m not surprised that Microsoft could be this incompetent when it comes to the safety of all users of the web using Windows, regardless if they’re using IE or not.
Afghanistan is the largest and the most difficult crisis Obama confronts away from home. And here the trap was fashioned largely by himself. He said, all through the presidential campaign, that Iraq was the wrong war but Afghanistan was the right one. It was ‘a war of necessity’, he said this summer. And he has implied that he would accept his generals’ definition of the proper scale of such a war. Now it appears that Afghanistan is being lost, indeed that it cannot be controlled with fewer than half a million troops on the ground for a decade or more. The generals are for adding troops, as in Vietnam, in increments of tens of thousands. Their current request was leaked to Bob Woodward, who published it in the Washington Post on 21 September, after Obama asked that it be kept from the public for a longer interval while he deliberated. The leak was an act of military politics if not insubordination; its aim was to show the president the cost of resisting the generals.
The US increasingly displays characteristics that we have seen many times in middle-income “emerging markets” – new dimensions of vast inequality, forms of financial instability that benefit the best connected, and consistently easy credit for the privileged. But this raises the question: who exactly is going to dominate our economic and political landscape moving forward?
. . . . . . .
But we are entering a new, more global era of state capture, and the US government (or, more precisely, its credit) was handed over – rather meekly – during the past 12 months.
The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.
