Nobel Peace Prize winner and international symbol of freedom Nelson Mandela is flagged on U.S. terrorist watch lists and needs special permission to visit the USA. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice calls the situation "embarrassing," and some members of Congress vow to fix it.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff says "common sense" suggests Mandela should be removed. He says the issue "raises a troubling and difficult debate about what groups are considered terrorists and which are not."

I'm at a complete lack for words...

U.S. has Mandela on terrorist list - USATODAY.com

Whether he was up to no good or simply desperate to play BrickBreaker, a Mexican press attach� was caught on camera by Secret Service pocketing several White House BlackBerries during a recent meeting in New Orleans, FOX News has learned.

Sources with knowledge of the incident said the official, Rafael Quintero Curiel, served as the lead press advance person for the Mexican Delegation and was responsible for handling logistics and guiding the Mexican media around at the conference. He took six or seven of the handheld devices from a table outside a special room in the hotel where the Mexican delegation was meeting with President Bush earlier this week.

Sources said Quintero Curiel made it all the way to the airport before Secret Service officers caught up with him. He initially denied taking the devices, but after agents showed him the DVD, Quintero Curiel said it was purely accidental, gave them back, claimed diplomatic immunity and left New Orleans with the Mexican delegation.

Secret Service Catch Mexican Official Nabbing White House BlackBerries

We are currently preparing the big crowning event of Miss Landmine Angola 2008 in close collaboration with the Angolan government (CNIDAH) and supported by the European Union.The event will be taking place in Luanda, Angola on April 4th, 2008, the UN International Day for Mine Awareness and Assistance in Mine Action.

Stay tuned!

The web voting for Miss Landmine Angola is open until April 3, 2008.

Well, that's certainly an effective way to make a statement. Reality is pretty damn surreal.

MISS LANDMINE

A lucky coincidence of economics is responsible for routing much of the world's internet and telephone traffic through switching points in the United States, where, under legislation introduced this week, the U.S. National Security Agency will be free to continue tapping it.

But contrary to recent assertions by Bush administration officials, the proportion of international traffic entering the United States is dropping, not increasing, experts say.

International phone and internet traffic flows through the United States largely because of pricing models established more than 100 years ago in the International Telecommunication Union to handle international phone calls. Under those ITU tariffs, smaller and developing countries charge higher fees to accept calls than the U.S.-based carriers do, which can make it cheaper to route phone calls through the United States than directly to a neighboring country.

Exchanges in Hong Kong and London are emerging as local hubs for Asian and European traffic, while new fiber cables running north and south from Japan around to Europe will divert traffic from the trans-America route. Meanwhile, more countries are building their own internal internet exchanges.

"Because the decisions are made by the private sector, you're always going to go the direction where you have the cheapest fiber," Woodcock says. "That's likely to be through the U.S. for a while yet, (but) that's changing as more and more fiber gets installed around South Asia."

The trend may leave U.S. spooks longing for a simpler time; like 1992, when the first -- and at the time, only -- internet exchange point, called MAE-East, was erected in Washington D.C.

"All the traffic in the world went through Washington," Woodcock says. "But it was coincidence that it was Washington, more or less, and it was private-sector. And it probably wasn't tapped for at least a couple of years."

I don't think it was luck and coincidence as much as it was convenience and forethought.

NSA's Lucky Break: How the U.S. Became Switchboard to the World

Iraq's Interior Ministry has revoked the license of Blackwater USA, an American security firm whose contractors are blamed for a Sunday gunbattle in Baghdad that left eight civilians dead.

Sunday's firefight took place near Nusoor Square, an area that straddles the predominantly Sunni Arab neighborhoods of Mansour and Yarmouk.

In addition to the fatalities, 14 people were wounded, most of them civilians, the official said.

The ministry said the incident began around midday, when a convoy of sport utility vehicles came under fire from unidentified gunmen in the square.

The men in the SUVs, described by witnesses as Westerners, returned fire, and the witnesses said the vehicles are the kind used by Western security firms.

"We have revoked Blackwater's license to operate in Iraq. As of now they are not allowed to operate anywhere in the Republic of Iraq," Interior Ministry spokesman Brig. Gen. Abdul Kareem Khalaf said Monday. "The investigation is ongoing, and all those responsible for Sunday's killing will be referred to Iraqi justice."

Blackwater security firm banned from Iraq - CNN.com

Just wait for the "5 Things You Didn't Know about UBL" meme to get going.

Spies and teenagers normally have little in common but that is about to change as America’s intelligence agencies prepare to launch “A-Space”, an internal communications tool modeled on the popular social networking sites, Facebook and MySpace.

The Director of National Intelligence will open the site to the entire intelligence community in December. The move is the latest part of an ongoing effort to transform the analytical business following the failure to detect the 9/11 terrorist attacks or find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Two thoughts:

Goal: Ultimately make the social graph a community asset.

If you trust us, you're stupid.

With so many agencies in the IC, analysts have been wasting a lot of time checking sixteen different sites to see what their 'friends' are up to.

Yes, a little infrastructure consolidation project is just what the doctor ordered. There must be an ESX pony in there, somewhere.

Look out for Long Bets on when 'Twitter for spies' and 'Zivity for spies' will be announced.

US launches 'MySpace for spies'

The Iranians finally got around to showing Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith on TV last month, and their ruling mullahs couldn't help but add some commentary of their own. It turns out we Americans have the story all wrong. George Lucas's sci-fi saga, they tell us, is in fact a parable about our own day and age. And guess who the bad guys are...

"In what seems like a children's film, [Lucas] predicts the dark and gloomy future of the U.S.A. Elsewhere in the film, the discussions between Lord Sith and Anakin remind the viewer of the opinions held by White House politicians. It shows that for the sake of popularity, regimes talk about the rule of the people and democracy, but, in fact, they are tyrannies and dictatorships."

MEMRI did the translation. The link on their site appears to be dead. I can't seem to find the full video.. Could Lucas Film have made them pull it?

Bad Guys Blog | Watching Star Wars in Tehran

"This isn't just about going in and blowing things up."

US military and civilian authorities must stop thinking of themselves as a "good-idea factory" whose every thought has greater merit than those of their customers.

It could be too late for extensive rebranding of the US effort in Iraq.

Much of what works for consumer advertising in the US might not translate well in Baghdad. But urban ops is all about experimenting and adapting to new realities.

The study is available.

The Pentagon Gets a Lesson From Madison Avenue

"I want you to know that the gum arabic which runs all the soft drinks all over the world, including the United States, mainly 80 percent is imported from my country," the ambassador said after raising a bottle of Coca-Cola.

A reporter asked if Sudan was threatening to "stop the export of gum arabic and bring down the Western world."

"I can stop that gum arabic and all of us will have lost this," Khartoum Karl warned anew, beckoning to the Coke bottle. "But I don't want to go that way."

As diplomatic threats go, that one gets high points for creativity: Try to stop the killings in Darfur, and we'll take away your Coca-Cola.

Truly amazing..

Denying Genocide in Darfur, and Americans Their Coca-Cola

An Iranian naval patrol seized 15 British sailors who had boarded a vessel suspected of smuggling cars off the coast of Iraq, military officials said.

The British government immediately demanded the safe return of its troops and summoned Tehran's London ambassador to explain the incident.

The Royal Marines and ordinary naval officers were believed to have been apprehended by up to six ships from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy who claimed they had violated Iranian waters.

British military patrols have been given authority to board vessels in Iraqi waters under United Nations mandate and with the permission of the government in Baghdad.

He said the captain of the merchant vessel had been cleared to proceed and the two British inflatable patrol boats were readying for departure when they were surrounded by the Iranian navy and taken into Iranian waters.

Lambert said there is "absolutely no doubt in my mind" that the marines were in Iraqi waters. But, he said, "The extent and the definition of territorial waters in this part of the world is very complicated... We may well find, and I hope we find, that this is a simple misunderstanding at a tactical level," he said.

"There hopefully has been a mistake that's been made, and we'll see early clarification and early release of my people."

CNN's Aneesh Raman in Tehran said there had been no mention of the incident on Iranian TV and calls to officials had not been answered.

It was not immediately clear where in Iran the British personnel were taken.

This is exactly the type of thing that could spin out of control quickly..

Update: The CounterterrorismBlog has posted some questions in regard to this:

Questions: Is this an intentional act approved by senior Iranian leadership in response to findings of the British personnel, or possibly in reaction to the upcoming U.N. vote against Iran? The official IRNA news site includes a story complaining that the White House is throwing up a last-minute obstacle to the issuance of a visa for President Ahmadinejad to take part in the U.N. Security Council meeting Saturday on the Iran sanctions resolution - could that be the reason for this action? Is this a provocation similar to the Hezbollah seizure last year of Israeli soldiers, which led the Israelis into invading Lebanon, to test how the British and Americans move military assets in advance of armed action? Is this a calculated measure due to Iranian claims that the waters are, in fact, Iranian and not Iraqi (a 1975 treaty gave the waters to Iraq, but Iran disputes Iraq's jurisdiction)? Or is this the action of a local commander, unauthorized by leadership, and due to anything from bad navigation equipment (hard to believe but it happens), one too many drinks, or a misinterpretation of orders? Recall that (a) Iranian forces did something like this in 2004 and held British servicemen for three days, then released them, and (b) local commanders' mistakes have had devastating consequences, such as the accidental American shoot-down of an Iranian civilian airliner in 1988.

Iran 'seizes' 15 British sailors - CNN.com