Wal-Mart’s ability to crunch numbers is a favorite of conspiracy theorists, and its data centers are the corporate counterpart to Area 51 at Groom Lake in the state of Nevada. According to one consumer activist, Katherine Albrecht, even the wildest conspiracy buff might be surprised at just how much Wal-Mart knows about its customers –…

It was a beautiful spring day at the Edina Art Fair. Some quite good and plenty of really bad “art” and the diet-blowing menu of brats, fried cheese curds, cherry lemonade, all ridiculously overpriced but oh-so delicious in the 84-degree sun. A perfect time to turn on my underused biological SIGINT capability and see what…

(Hat Tip to Bruce Schneier . . . naturally) I have been waiting for someone to tackle this topic from the European point of view: Had a European government, instead of the Bush administration, created the NSA’s call database, would that government be in violation of European privacy law? I think so, for the reasons…

Via Geostrategy Direct (subscription): The Iran navy has procured hundreds of fast patrol boats as part of what is believed to be a swarm strategy to overcome the firepower of U.S. cruisers and destroyers. Gulf analysts said the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has deployed and trained hundreds of FPBs in the northern Gulf to surround…

The Department of Homeland Security yesterday slashed anti-terrorism money for Washington and New York, part of an immediately controversial decision to reduce grant funds for major urban areas in the Northeast while providing more to mid-size cities from Jacksonville to Sacramento. The announcement that the two cities targeted on Sept. 11, 2001, would suffer 40…

They have a plan, they have a pattern . . . Armed with details of billions of telephone calls, the National Security Agency used phone records linked to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks to create a template of how phone activity among terrorists looks, say current and former intelligence officials who were briefed about the…

Gamers quibble over trees while missing a forest: Was an elite congressional intelligence committee shown video footage from an off-the-shelf retail game and told by the Pentagon and a highly-paid defense contractor that it was a jihadist creation designed to recruit and indoctrinate terrorists? It’s looking more and more like that is the case. The…

A long post derived from Inside the Pentagon (subscription): Retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, who led a “red team” of notional enemy forces at the outset of JFCOM’s Millennium Challenge 2002 war game, is calling on the command to spell out publicly how the experiment has influenced the Defense Department view of…

Acting on Assumptions with Iran & Iraq: To learn lessons from history, including recent history, it’s essential to get the history right. That’s why, in order to understand what to do about the mullahs’ regime in Iran, it’s worth revisiting the debate over the intelligence in Iraq. . . . and that’s just the first…

Work (I won’t call it duty) calls and finds me at the keyboard when I should be doing something that a lot of brothers are unable to do today: enjoying their families. In between flashes of corporate panic I find myself visiting the ‘sphere and taking note of those who are intentionally still blogging today,…