Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has called out lawmakers for their inability to compromise and develop bipartisan strategies and policies to “address our very real and serious problems.”
During a speech in which he called Washington a town of “oversized egos and undersized backbones,” Gates said “zero-sum politics and ideological siege warfare are the new order of the day.”
As the year draws to a close, EFF is looking back at the major trends influencing digital rights in 2011 and discussing where we are in the fight for a free expression, innovation, fair use, and privacy.
The government has been using its secrecy system in absurd ways for decades, but 2011 was particularly egregious. Here are a few examples:
Government report concludes the government classified 77 million documents in 2010, a 40% increase on the year before. The number of people with security clearances exceeded 4.2. million, more people than the city of Los Angeles.
Government tells Air Force families, including their kids, it’s illegal to read WikiLeaks. The month before, the Air Force barred its service members fighting abroad from reading the New York Times—the country’s Paper of Record.
Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees were barred from reading the WikiLeaks Guantanamo files, despite their contents being plastered on the front page of the New York Times.
Phi Beta Iota: Variants of this stuff are for sale at Brookstone and Best Buy. The US has consistently refused to be serious about emission control, downlink security, and real-time processing. This is a “disaster” only to the degree that it reveals–once again–how immature the US “intelligence” archipelago of fiefdoms actually is.
Iranian TV has shown the first video footage of an advanced US drone aircraft that Tehran says it downed near the Afghan border.
Images show Iranian military officials inspecting the RQ-170 Sentinel stealth aircraft which appears to be undamaged.
US officials have acknowledged the loss of the unmanned plane, saying it had malfunctioned.
However, Iranian officials say its forces electronically hijacked the drone and steered it to the ground.
Click on Image to Enlarge
BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner says the intact condition of the Sentinel tends to support their claim.
Iran's Press TV said that the Iranian army's “electronic warfare unit” brought down the drone on 4 December as it was flying over the city of Kashmar, about 140 miles (225km) from the Afghan border.
Nato said at the weekend that an unarmed reconnaissance aircraft had been flying a mission over western Afghanistan late last week when its operators lost control of it.
Pentagon officials have said they are concerned about Iran possibly acquiring information about the technology.
Phi Beta Iota: Our first impression has been that Iran has downed the UAV with an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) beam. This is much cooler. As with the Taliban in Afghanistan able to hijack the downlinks, the Iranians simply hijacked the entire aircraft. From where we sit, the Chinese (who ride electric power circuits into “isolated” computers) and the Iranians [Persians, more PhDs per capita than most] are laughing at us, while the Russians simply ignore us. Newsflash for the Pentagon: our technology is not that great. Classifying the idiot vulnerabilities does not work–something we have been pointing out for twenty years.
Bob Seelert, Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide (New York):When things are not going well, until you get the truth out on the table, no matter how ugly, you are not in a position to deal with it.
When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this infallible sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
Jonathan Swift
It is clear to anyone who has studied the financial crisis of 2008 that the private sector’s drive for short-term profit was behind it. More than 84 percent of the sub-prime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending. These private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year. Out of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006, only one was subject to the usual mortgage laws and regulations. The nonbank underwriters made more than 12 million subprime mortgages with a value of nearly $2 trillion. The lenders who made these were exempt from federal regulations.
It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp. Now, I’m not saying I’m sure that was terrible policy, because a lot of those people who got homes still have them and they wouldn’t have gotten them without that. But they were the ones who pushed Fannie and Freddie to make a bunch of loans that were imprudent, if you will. They were the ones that pushed the banks to loan to everybody. And now we want to go vilify the banks because it’s one target, it’s easy to blame them and Congress certainly isn’t going to blame themselves.”
Barry Ritholtz in the Washington Post calls the notion that the US Congress was behind the financial crisis of 2008 “the Big Lie”. As we have seen in other contexts, if a lie is big enough, people begin to believe it.
Full Story Below the Line with BLOCKBUSTER Itemization
Invite your attention to pages 5 thru 7 of attached which outlines in very clear terms the likely FY 2013 and longer term impacts on the Department of Defense and the Joint Force of the impending sequester brought about by this week's dereliction of duty on the part of the Senators and Representatives making up the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction.
Phi Beta Iota: Panetta-McCain may be the toxic replacment to Cheney-Warner. The letter is without merit. The acquisition system is so broken now the Navy and Army cannot build anything coherently–the Navy still lacks Naval Gun Fire and the Army still lacks an infantry weapon able to out-gun the Taliban, while the Air Force continues to stink at close air support and lack both an intra-theater adequacy of lift and a long-haul heavy lift capability (or the ability to be effective above 6,000 ft). DoD, in short, is a mis-managed mess and Panetta has no idea how to go about fixing that, nor does he want to. Lockheed Martin and others are quite happy with the way things are, where 50% of every dollar is waste but that waste is profit for them because it includes their overhead. It is true that the current laws mandated by Congress make it difficult for any Cabinet Secretary to cut waste–this is the same Congress that mandated we pay 100% asking price for Medicare drugs instead of the more common global standard of 2% for generic wholesale. As long as Congress remains corrupt, and the SecDef remains corrupt, there is no fixing this problem. The FACT is that we have to cut one trillion a year (what we are borrowing), not one trillion over ten years. The FACT is that DoD would be much stronger if it could combine both intelligence and integrity and actually create the four forces after next, at a much reduced cost, that those with intelligence and integrity have been discussing for decades, and with greater intensity, since the mid-1990's.
Worth a close reading. The revealed conflicts of interest and probably high crimes and misdemeanors and nothing less than expected, but astonishing all the same.
As a result of the greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior on Wall Street, the American people have experienced the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Millions of Americans, through no fault of their own, have lost their jobs, homes, life savings, and ability to send their kids to college. Small businesses have been unable to get the credit they need to expand their businesses, and credit is still extremely tight. Wages as a share of national income are now at the lowest level since the Great Depression, and the number of Americans living in poverty is at an all-time high.
