A cyber attack reported last week by one of the federal government’s nuclear weapons laboratories may have originated in China, according to a confidential memorandum distributed Wednesday to public and private security officials by the Department of Homeland Security.

China Link Suspected in Lab Hacking

One of my Republican brothers told me he wished he could vote for “a Protestant Mitt Romney.”

The problem with Mitt is not his religion; it is his overeager policy shape-shifting. He did not give a brave speech, but a pandering one. Disguised as a courageous, Kennedyesque statement of principle, the talk was really just an attempt to compete with the evolution-disdaining, religion-baiting Huckabee and get Baptists to concede that Mormons are Christians.

“J.F.K.’s speech was to reassure Americans that he wasn’t a religious fanatic,” Mr. Krakauer agreed. “Mitt’s was to tell evangelical Christians, ‘I’m a religious fanatic just like you.’”

The world is globalizing, nuclear weapons are proliferating, the Middle East is seething, but Republicans are still arguing the Scopes trial.

Mitt’s No JFK

The term “lifelog” refers to a comprehensive archive of an individual's quotidian existence, created with the help of pervasive computing technologies. Lifelog technologies would record and store everyday conversations, actions, and experiences of their users, enabling future replay and aiding remembrance. Products to assist lifelogging are already on the market; but the technology that will enable people fully and continuously to document their entire lives is still in the research and development phase. For generals, edgy artists and sentimental grandmothers alike, lifelogging could someday replace or complement, existing memory preservation practices. Like a traditional diary, journal or day-book, the lifelog could preserve subjectively noteworthy facts and impressions. Like an old-fashioned photo album, scrapbook or home video, it could retain images of childhood, loved-ones and travels. Like a cardboard box time capsule or filing cabinet it could store correspondence and documents. Like personal computing software, it could record communications data, keystrokes and internet trails. The lifelog could easily store data pertaining to purely biological states derived from continuous self-monitoring of, for example, heart rate, respiration, blood sugar, blood pressure and arousal. To the extent that it preserves personal experience for voluntary private consumption, electronic lifelogging looks innocent enough, as innocent as Blackberries, home movies, and snapshots in silver picture frames. But lifelogging could fuel excessive self-absorption, since users would be engaged in making multimedia presentations about themselves all the time. The availability of lifelogging technology might lead individuals to overvalue the otherwise transient details of their lives. Furthermore, the potential would be great for incivility, emotional blackmail, exploitation, prosecution and social control by government surrounding lifelog creation, content and accessibility. Existing privacy law and policy do not suggest meaningful limits on unwanted uses of lifelogging data. This parry of the costs and benefits commences a fuller discussion of lifelogging's ethical and legal implications.

Dredging-up the Past: Lifelogging, Memory and Surveillance

At the dawn of America's love affair with the automobile, cars and trucks leaving the nation's largest city were unceremoniously dumped out of the western end of the Holland Tunnel onto local roads wending their way through the New Jersey Meadowlands.

Jersey City mayor Frank Hague -- dictator of the Hudson County political machine and a national political player -- was a prime mover behind the building of the country's first "superhighway," designed to connect the hub of New York City to the United States of America. Hague's nemesis in this undertaking was union boss Teddy Brandle, and construction of the last three miles of Route 25, later dubbed the Pulaski Skyway, marked an epic battle between big labor and big politics, culminating in a murder and the creation of a motorway so flawed it soon became known as "Death Avenue" —now appropriately featured in the opening sequence of the hit HBO series The Sopranos.

A book in the tradition of Robert Caro's The Power Broker and Henry Petroski's Engineers of Dreams, The Last Three Miles brings to vivid life the riveting and bloodstained back story of a fascinating chapter in the heroic age of public works.

The Last Three Miles: Politics, Murder, and the Construction of America's First Superhighway

Changes are occurring from top to bottom — from reassigning personnel to counterterrorism, to examining our hiring practices, to rethinking the scope and form of internal and external information sharing. FBI Headquarters has been restructured to make it more effective and efficient. We have centralized case management; realigned the workforce to address our priorities; and developed a central body of knowledge available to all field offices and to our partners in the Law Enforcement and Intelligence Communities.

These changes have allowed us to make significant contributions to the war on terrorism. Working with our partners over the past 28 months, we conducted numerous counterterrorism investigations, resulting in more than one thousand arrests and hundreds of convictions or pre-trial diversions. We broke up the Lackawanna Six, dismantled the Portland Seven, and put would be shoe bomber Richard Reid behind bars. We investigated thousands of cyber intrusions, with one case involving a global criminal network reaching as far as the South Pole. We strengthened counterintelligence operations, placed counterintelligence squads in almost every field office, and created a counterespionage section at FBI Headquarters.

Looking forward, the FBI’s greatest challenges will be to further improve its intelligence capabilities and strengthen its information technology infrastructure. The FBI will continue to develop its talents through ongoing training, and through the recruitment and hiring of analysts, technology experts, and individuals with language skills. The FBI’s international presence will continue to grow, and we will continue our tradition of excellence in carrying out all of our responsibilities overseas and at home.

The FBI’s 2004–2009 strategic plan serves as a high-level road map for the FBI to achieve its mission. While the strategic plan provides clear goals and objectives, it also includes the flexibility necessary to adjust quickly to evolving threats. Since the FBI’s inception, the nation has turned to it to address the most significant threats, and the FBI has always responded. The strength of the FBI has been, and will always be, its people. The skill, determination, and sacrifice of the men and women of the FBI are outstanding, and I am extremely proud to serve as the Director of this extraordinary organization.

FBI Strategic Plan, 2004-2009

Following up on recent comments by Don Kerr.

Antiterrorism intelligence sharing across national borders has been trumpeted as one of the most promising forms of networked global governance. By exchanging information across the world, government agencies can catch terrorists and other dangerous criminals. Yet this new form of global governance is also one of the most dangerous. Even at the domestic level, secrecy and national security imperatives have placed intelligence agencies largely beyond legal and democratic oversight. But at the global level, accountability is missing entirely. Global cooperation among national intelligence agencies is extraordinarily opaque. The nature of the international system compounds the problem: these actors do not operate within a robust institutional framework of liberal democracy and human rights. Safeguarding rights in the transnational realm when governments conspire to spy, detain, interrogate, and arrest is no easy matter. Privacy is one of the most critical liberal rights to come under pressure from transnational intelligence gathering.

This Article explores the many ways in which transnational intelligence networks intrude upon privacy and considers some of the possible forms of legal redress.

Part II lays bare the different types of transnational intelligence networks that exist today. Part III begins the analysis of the privacy problem by examining the national level, where, over the past forty years, a legal framework has been developed to promote the right to privacy in domestic intelligence gathering. Part IV turns to the privacy problem transnationally, when government agencies exchange intelligence across national borders. Part V invokes the cause celebre of Maher Arar, a Canadian national, to illustrate the disastrous consequences of privacy breaches in this networked world of intelligence gathering. Acting upon inaccurate and misleading intelligence provided by the Canadian government, the United States wrongfully deported Arar to Syria, where he was tortured and held captive by the Syrian Military Intelligence Service for nearly one year. Part VI begins the constructive project of redesigning transnational networks to defend the right to privacy, with the safeguards of European intelligence and police networks serving as inspiration for transnational networks more broadly.

These European systems feature two types of privacy safeguards: multilateral standards, to which all network parties must adhere, and unilateral standards, applicable under the law of one network party and enforced against the others through the refusal to share intelligence with sub-standard parties. Moving to the global realm, this Article concludes that the multilateral avenue is more promising than the unilateral one.

Multilateral standards require consensus on common privacy norms, and consensus will be difficult to achieve. Notwithstanding this hurdle, multilateral privacy standards are crucial, for they will both enable the cooperation necessary to fight serious transnational crime and provide for vigorous protection of basic liberal rights.

Previously on Maher Arar:

Freedom vs. Torture?

Qaeda Pawn, US Calls Him. Victim, He Calls Himself.

Canadian deported to Syria by United States details torture, calls for public inquiry

Wired News: AT&T Whistle-Blower's Evidence

Arar Commission Report

A CIA Man Speaks His Mind on Secret Abductions

Towards a Right to Privacy in Transnational Intelligence Networks

Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal consists of approximately 60 nuclear warheads. Pakistan continues fissile material production for weapons, and is adding to its weapons production facilities and delivery vehicles. Pakistan reportedly stores its warheads unassembled with the fissile core separate from non-nuclear explosives, and these are stored separately from their delivery vehicles. Pakistan does not have a stated nuclear policy, but its “minimum credible deterrent” is thought to be primarily a deterrent to Indian military action. Command and control structures have been dramatically overhauled since September 11, 2001 and export controls and personnel security programs have been put in place since the 2004 revelations about Pakistan’s top nuclear scientists, A.Q. Khan’s international proliferation network.

Pakistani and some U.S. officials argue that Islamabad has taken a number of steps to prevent further proliferation of nuclear-related technologies and materials and improve its nuclear security. A number of important initiatives such as strengthened export control laws, improved personnel security, and international nuclear security cooperation programs have improved the security situation in recent years.

Current instability in Pakistan has called the extent and durability of these reforms into question. Some observers fear radical takeover of a government that possesses a nuclear bomb, or proliferation by radical sympathizers within Pakistan’s nuclear complex in case of a breakdown of controls. While U.S. and Pakistani officials express confidence in controls over Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, it is uncertain what impact continued instability in the country will have on these safeguards.

Pakistan’s Nuclear Weapons: Proliferation and Security Issues

Afghanistan has now laid the foundation for a market-based economy. A new economic system, based on the state as a regulator, not a producer, of goods, with a clear separation between the public and private sectors, stands in place of the centralized economy of the past. An independent central bank, a liberalized foreign exchange system, and laws permitting foreigners to wholly own property characterize the new economic landscape. A doubling of the gross national product and per capita income, a 13 percent growth rate in 2007, and modest inflation paint a vibrant picture.

Yet substantial challenges linger. Many of the problems Afghanistan’s economy faces are typical for those rebuilding after war: high prices from an immature system that lacks adequate private sector competition; resistance to change from a state-controlled system; the dearth of human capital; corruption; insecurity; and inequalities created by the market system itself. Critics also believe that the billions of dollars spent on Afghanistan by the international community have not had the expected impact.

Afghanistan's Economy: On the Right Road, But Still a Long Way to Go

Opinion polls coming out of Iraq are only useful so long as it is remembered how difficult they are to conduct.

In Iraq, poorly phrased questions make it especially easy for politicians to cherry-pick results.

Iraqis' Opinions Are Known Unkowns

Frog, water, heat, etc., etc.

The fight is long over here for authority over the security services, the oil business, mass media and pretty much all the levers of government. But now there is concern that the Kremlin is setting its sights on Russian culture.

"They're creating, quickly, a kind of Iran situation, a new-old civilization, an Orthodox civilization," Viktor Yerofeyev, a prominent Russian author, said at his apartment the other evening, from inside the classic thick plume of cigarette smoke that still seems to engulf every Russian intellectual. “The climate has totally changed. What was allowed the day before yesterday now is dangerous. They don’t repress like the Soviets yet, but give them two years, they will find the way."

See also, A Tsar Is Born, featured in the December issue of Harper's, from Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917-1953, published in September by Yale University Press.

Joseph Stalin, to Sergei Eisenstein: You need to depict historical figures correctly. For instance, it's wrong that Ivan the Terrible kisses his wife for so long. In those days, that wasn't allowed. And Ivan the Terrible was very cruel -- you can show that -- but you have to show why it was essential. One of Ivan's mistakes was that he didn't finish off the five major feudal families. If he had wiped them out, there would never have been a Time of Troubles. But he would execute someone and then spend a long time repenting and praying. God hindered him in this matter. He should have been more decisive.

YUP also offers another excerpt.

Putin’s Last Realm to Conquer: Russian Culture