By
SB Anderson
Getting documents from the Department of Defense might get a little easier, thanks to an updated DOD directive (see document below) that declares a “presumption in favor of disclosure” for Freedom of Information Act requests.
The directive says DOD will “respond promptly to all requests in a spirit of cooperation” and will “take affirmative steps” to maximize what’s made available.
President Obama in an executive order on Jan. 21, 2009 ordered “presumption in favor of disclosure” and asked agencies to “harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public.” Continue reading →
By
Paul Rosenzweig
Jason Healey, a cyber-expert at the Atlantic Council, isn’t too impressed with how the press covers cyber issues. The challenge, of course, is common to many national security stories — how to tackle a complex topic with nuance while making it readily understandable for the reader. Headline writers sometimes don’t help in that process. Healey’s nominee for worst headline (and I agree): Obama Reserves Right to Nuke Hackers. Continue reading →
By
Paul Rosenzweig
It is shocking, apparently, to hear that the Transportation Security Administration has had more than 25,000 security breaches since 2001, or roughly 2,500 breaches every year. Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) thinks its a scandal that proves that airport security is “a mess.” (And, now, apparently, Congressman Chaffetz and TSA are in a tussle about whether or not he was authorized to release these numbers).
But what’s really a mess is how our Representatives (and, sometimes, the press) report these sorts of numbers. They are always portrayed as absolute values and in that abstract context they seem immense. Who, after all, could approve of 2,500 mistakes per year?
But the abstract context is just that — abstract. Numbers have meaning only in a concrete context. So how about this for context: Domestically, there are approximately 2 million enplanements (passengers boarding aircraft) every day. That’s roughly 700 million passengers a year, or 7 billion passengers in the 10 years for which the security breach data are reported (and bear in mind that this is every security breach however minor). That’s an error rate of less than 0.0001%. In what human endeavor is that considered a poor performance? Continue reading →
By
SB Anderson
On Friday, Syria joined the Arab Spring uprising trend of besieged government bureaucrats temporarily shutting down the Internet to try and mute protests.
The first news I saw on this was early in the day in my Twitter feed — but it wasn’t a tweet of a news story or someone quoting a news story or government official.
My news came from a tweet based on raw Google data.
In my feed, @BrianBoyer of the Chicago Tribune retweeted fellow Chicagoan @therealfitz with news that Syria had apparently gone dark, based on Google data — and that was two hours before Google itself tweeted about it.
The source: Google’s Transparency Report, which shows near- real-time data for use of Google services by country/region and “visualizes disruptions in the free flow of information, whether it’s a government blocking information or a cable being cut.”
Continue reading →
By
SB Anderson
A new United Nations report aggregates a number of efforts to measure Internet filtering by governments around the world and concludes “national regulation of the Internet is taking place on a wide scale, despite ambiguity over appropriate policy and uncertainty over its implementation, and risks to freedom of expression.”
Not surprisingly, East and Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa were found to house states with the most filtering. The most extensive filtering of the 47 surveyed nations was found in China, Cuba, Myanmar (Burma), Oman, South Korea, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, and Yemen. (See full interactive map).
Government interference with the internet has been a very high-profile issue in recent months, particularly with the Arab Spring uprisings and the role of the internet in the unrest (and government attempts to stop or inhibit the internet as an enabling tool). The report from UNESCO (United Nations Education, Cultural and Scientific Organization) does not cover political filtering alone, however. The studies it cites also measured filtering for social (e.g., pornography), security and other reasons. Continue reading →
By
Paul Rosenzweig
The old saying goes “prior planning prevents poor performance.” And what is true of music recitals is true (and even more so) of preparing for the response to a natural or man-made disaster.
When disaster strikes, a large number of resources need to be mobilized. The larger the disaster, the more resources are needed, and the greater the need for coordination. But given how infrequent large-scale disasters are (thankfully!) we don’t have a lot of practice with that sort of coordination.
The Federal government runs a robust training and exercise program that models disaster response by having all the players respond to a hypothetical disaster. They run both small regional programs and, annually, a National Level Exercise that models a major catastrophe. This year, NLE 2011 is an exercise that asks “what would happen if we had a major earthquake along the New Madrid fault line in the Midwest?” The three-day exercise is scheduled to begin today.
Continue reading →
By
Josh Meyer
As we near the second anniversary (in weeks, that is) of the killing of Osama bin Laden, the flood of news coverage seems to be increasing by the day. That’s a welcome development, given the potentially seismic shifts that it will likely cause in the global war on terrorism and in the United States’ relationship with front-line states such as Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The fire hose of coverage is also welcome in that it proves that national security journalism is more robust than ever, even if it is barely recognizable from what constituted “the media’’ a decade or even a few years ago.
Those thirsting for information about bin Laden’s death — and his capture, his plots and plans, even his sad and sorry life holed up in Abbottabad — have virtually thousands of places to go to for news and analysis. The mainstream media has done a good job of “moving the ball’’ on all aspects of the subject, thanks in large part to an Obama administration, CIA and military that seem happy to be parceling out little scooplets of information. Some of the best Continue reading →
By
SB Anderson
A fresh analysis by the Congressional Research Office provides a bounty of sliced and diced data for journalists writing about the war on terror and how much the federal government has spent in the past decade on its military efforts.
“The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11” (document embedded below) details the $1.3 trillion spent through this year. This will hit $1.4 trillion if the 2012 budget requests are approved. The current “burn rate,” as they say in business: $6 billion a month. The Department of Defense has spent 94% of the money, the report says.
The largest share of spending has been in Iraq (66%) followed by Afghanistan (35%) and for enhanced base security (2%). CRS couldn’t account for about $5 billion.
The report isn’t just a dry recitation of numbers; it offers insights and analysis over time by theater and type of spending; dissection of cost trends for Continue reading →
By
Ellen Shearer
At the end of long week of news coverage of the killing of Osama bin Laden, a review of the U.S. media by the Project for Excellence in Journalism offers encouraging news: The mainstream news media stayed focused on the news, not moving to political ramifications or analysis, and continued to deepen and broaden its reporting throughout the week, offering readers and viewers new details and international reaction.
“One quarter (25%) of the mainstream media coverage monitored from May 1 through May 4 involved reconstructing the commando mission at bin Laden’s secret hiding place” the report said. “…The second-biggest storyline in the mainstream press was also one that involved reporting more than analysis. It detailed reactions to bin Laden’s death from around the world and around the country, and accounted for 24% of the bin Laden coverage monitored. “ Continue reading →
By
Tim McNulty
The argument for releasing photos of Osama bin Laden to confirm his death has merit, but I suspect bloodlust against the man who generated fear in American society for the last decade also fuels the desire for proof positive that “you will not see bin Laden walking on this earth again.”
President Obama’s decision to withhold the images of Osama and his sea burial also has merit. He didn’t want others using them for propaganda and incitement for retaliation. Obama also told CBS’ 60 Minutes: “That’s not who we are. You know, we don’t trot out this stuff as trophies.”
Displaying images of corpses provokes strong arguments on all sides but for administration officials it is never a matter of just taste or civility but a moment of cold political calculation for both foreign policy and domestic politics. Continue reading →
