In Slate Eric Weiner beats me to the punch on comparing wiretapping in the US and Europe: For Europeans, scolding the Bush administration for everything from Guantanamo to the Iraq War to secret CIA prisons has become a full-time job. But when it comes to the American scandal over President Bush’s warrantless wiretaps, there’s been…

I shake my head ruefully at the thought of those I have left behind that are now likely to face still more hours away from the job learning how to love and respect one another: John Robinson was appointed the first chief of equal employment opportunity for U.S. intelligence by the Director of National Intelligence…

Newsweek, the magazine that was so sure that we were flushing Korans down toilets, now uses its mind reading powers to explain away content it hasn’t heard. There are plenty of other sites that address journalists as political hacks and MSM bias, so I won’t try to replicate that here. Let’s just take a minute…

While pulling diaper duty I listened to Gibson of Fox News rip Pillar a new one and lambaste his Federal Reserve idea. The angle was political, and the workability of such an approach may be debatable, but I think the larger issue of getting a handle on who works what for how long needs to…

(Yes, I stole the title from Steve Hayes) ;- ) Under normal circumstances blue-collar IOs like myself would never go up against an NIO, but seeing as how we can both append “former” to our old titles – and we’re thousands of miles apart – I don’t mind taking a crack at Paul Pillar’s Foreign…

DCIA Goss in the NY Times on leaks and leakers: At the Central Intelligence Agency, we are more than holding our own in the global war on terrorism, but we are at risk of losing a key battle: the battle to protect our classified information. […] As a member of Congress in 1998, I sponsored…

A number of commentators lament what I’ll call – for lack of a better term – the state of the populace during war time. The lack of sacrifice, the lack of concern (sometimes the presence of scorn) over the endeavor we are engaged in. I thought it might be enlightening, perhaps refreshing, certainly entertaining, to…

InsideDefense (subscription required) has a great new article about the Combatant Commanders trying to address the problem of the sharing and delivery of intelligence data. Assuming all goes well, a more thorough treatment of the issues raised in the item below will be forthcoming soon (I’m likely to be the dimmest bulb in the marquee,…

Former President Jimmy Carter says: “Under the Bush administration, there’s been a disgraceful and illegal decision _ we’re not going to the let the judges or the Congress or anyone else know that we’re spying on the American people,” Carter told reporters. “And no one knows how many innocent Americans have had their privacy violated…

A good Christian Science Monitor article that brings up a new program, reminds us of old ones, and points out some serious issues. The comments of the EFF and EPIC folks are arguably the most important. On the one hand the data in use is personal, but at the same time it is for the…