Reading this I am reminded of three things; the stellar effectiveness at keeping the peace that UN forces in Srebrenica, their inability to keep their pants on in the presence of children, and the idea that a best-seller-scenario (as opposed to movie-plot-threat) is actively being discussed as an option. Peacekeepers, please. Marine barracks bombing ring…

So I’m flying home from DC and dutifully get in like at the TSA screening point. No, no one placed a wand in an inappropriate place or groped me or made me drink my own bodily fluids. No, I was struck by the TSA staff, which consisted of one . . . what is the…

A reader sends this link to the SITE Institute . . . A document which seeks to debunk the claim that jihad is a wasted venture against America due to the disparity in terms of military capabilities and force in numbers, and discusses the concept of “Fourth Generation Warfare,” was distributed yesterday, July 10, 2006,…

Thursday marks a dubious anniversary in the Homeland Security Department’s brief history. A year ago Secretary Michael Chertoff, as part of a department-wide restructuring, announced he would appoint an assistant secretary for cybersecurity and telecommunications. Today, that position remains unfilled. Chertoff took the first step on Thursday toward elevating the position of national cybersecurity czar…

GroupIntel Forums members (and anyone who wants to join) please hit the new poll at: http://groupintel.net/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/9901014161/m/6351053691

As mentioned previously, I participated in a panel discussion about captured media at the Heritage Foundation on Tuesday. Most of the thunder was stolen by HPSCI Chairman Hoekstra, but I didn’t mind. The guy has his finger on the pulse of related issues and frankly I wouldn’t have cared if he had talked the whole…

Crypto star and security maven Schneier trots out an academic ally to beat the “data mining is bad” horse: Floyd Rudmin, a professor at a Norwegian university, applies the mathematics of conditional probability, known as Bayes’ Theorem, to demonstrate that the NSA’s surveillance cannot successfully detect terrorists unless both the percentage of terrorists in the…

Some US intelligence experts say the government should rethink how it gathers information in the war on terror. Four intelligence community veterans led by former C-I-A deputy director Richard Kerr offer their assessment in an unofficial C-I-A journal. The group was tasked with studying how the agency botched its assessment of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of…

A Senate intelligence panel is pushing the National Security Agency to open its databases of raw signals intelligence to a wider audience within the intelligence community. […] The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence ordered the NSA and the Defense Intelligence Agency to arrive at an agreement by the end of August to extend access to…

In another story that may not make the White House happy, The New York Times on Sunday reported that it had obtained what it calls “a sharply worded letter” by a top Republican sent to President Bush on May 18, which charged that the administration “might have violated the law by failing to inform Congress…