Al Jazeera exclusive: The investigation into the death of al-Qaeda's leader blames top leaders for ‘gross incompetence'.
EXTRACT:
The Commission’s 336-page report is scathing, holding both politicians and the military responsible for “gross incompetence”, leading to “collective failures” that allowed Bin Laden to escape detection, and the United States to perpetrate “an act of war”.
Colleagues at GNIP and MapBox recently published this high-resolution map of iPhone, Android and Blackberry users in the US (click to enlarge). “More than 280 million Tweets posted from mobile phones reveal geographic usage patterns in unprecedented detail.” These patterns are often insightful. Some argue that “cell phone brands say something about socio-economics – it takes a lot of money to buy a new iPhone 5,” for example (1). So a map of iPhone users based on where these users tweet reveals where relatively wealthy people live.
A long-running personnel dispute at the Congressional Research Service offers up conflicting visions of the proper role of the congressional support agency, which provides policy and legal analysis to Congress.
In 2009, then-CRS Director Daniel Mulhollan fired then-CRS Division Chief Col. Morris Davis, a former Guantanamo prosecutor, after Davis publicly criticized the military commission process in an op-ed article in the Wall Street Journal. (“CRS Fires a Division Chief,”Secrecy News, December 4, 2009)
By engaging in public controversy (even as a private citizen), Col. Davis had deviated from CRS norms, according to Library of Congress General Counsel Elizabeth Pugh.
We're seeing protests everywhere. From Brazil to Turkey to Egypt.
What's going on? Here are some.
Once ignited, open source protest is hard to stamp out.
Open source protest is usually focused on a single overarching goal. In most recent cases, it's a call for a government that isn't corrupt.
“No corruption” is the type of goal everyone can get behind. To get a protest going, all there needs to be is a successful trigger event. Often, that an be as simple as a protest called by some group on Facebook that takes off virally.
This methodology causes false facts to be considered truth. Briggs brings up the “Trust In Science Would Be Improved By Study Pre-Registration” signed by more than eighty signatories and for the scientific community to require pre-registration for publishing before results are in. The idea is that journals would publish whatever the results and reduce the amount of “making a piece publishable” thought processes. Read full post.
It can be hard to get any insider information out of Microsoft, but Ahmet Alp Balkan is a young software engineer working at the aforementioned company. He started working at Windows Azure as an intern and he was hired right after college. Since working there he was learned a lot, much of which he did not glean from college. He tells what he learned about the business world in, “8 Months In Microsoft, I Learned These.” Some of the items he learned are quite startling and others will not even make you blink. For instance, everyone learns at some point that they are working for someone else to earn their paycheck, they also have to step outside their specialty comfort zones, getting the job done, is the most important, and the latest upgrades are usually skipped.
Transparency lost? Or an admission that SEALS were theater for a CIA theatrical production?
The nation's top special operations commander ordered military files about the Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin Laden's hideout to be purged from Defense Department computers and sent to the CIA, where they could be more easily shielded from ever being made public.
This obituary is of note because it is a rare example of that long-time media bedfellow of spooks, the Washington Post, telling a piece of the story of the long relationship between the corporate media and the spook world. Other examples follow.
Washington Post – Austin Goodrich, an undercover CIA officer during the Cold War who also worked for several years as a CBS television correspondent before his identity was unmasked, died June 9 at his home in Port Washington, Wis. He was 87…
While stationed in Oslo and Stockholm early in his clandestine career, he sought a suitable occupation to cover his true profession. He assumed a dual identity as reporter and spy.
At the same time that he was recruiting sources to provide information on the Soviet threat, Mr. Goodrich was meeting the deadlines of a working journalist. He reported on sports for the International Herald Tribune, contributed pieces to Swedish radio programs and, in the early 1950s, became a stringer for CBS News.
