An increasingly powerful Islamic militia rolled through its newly captured territory and installed a religious court in one town Wednesday as the remnants of a U.S.-backed alliance of warlords desperately tried to regroup.

The Islamic Courts Union, which has alleged links to al-Qaida, controls the Somali capital and surrounding areas after defeating the secular warlord alliance in weeks of battles that killed at least 330 people - many of them civilians caught in the crossfire.

Somali Militia Poised for Counterattack - Forbes.com

New policies on prisoners being drawn up by the Pentagon will reportedly omit a key tenet of the Geneva Convention that explicitly bans "humiliating and degrading treatment."

You can actually SEE the power corrupting us. Here is the LaTimes link.

Pentagon to omit Geneva ban from new army manual: report - Yahoo! News

Al-Qaeda sympathizers are using Orkut, a popular, worldwide Internet service owned by Google, to rally support for Osama bin Laden, share videos and Web links promoting terrorism and recruit non-Arabic-speaking Westerners, according to terrorism experts and a survey of the sites.

Al Qaeda on Orkut

noteworthy wrote:
But what about private financing of non-governmental counterterror organizations? I'm not talking about desk jockeys. I'm talking about, what if Stratfor went activist, moved to the Sudan, or Somalia, or Yemen, and used the proceeds of a vastly expanded subscription business to fund their own private Directorate of Operations? Would governments indict the subscribers?

This seems to go back to what I said about the distinction between ideas and action. The collection of open source intelligence by private parties is not something that bothers me in the least. By definition, open source intelligence is available for anyone with the time and inclination to collect it.

In theory, you could try to add a hum-int operational aspect but this is an extremely difficult thing to do and you're likely to screw it up unless you hire someone with experience. If the guy you turn ends up getting hanged you could end up impacting the overall strategic situation negatively, and so I can see that governments might want to keep amateur hum-int operators the hell away from terrorist organizations. However, doing this by passing a law seems a bit silly as, well, covert operations aren't covert if you get caught by the police. Its best done by not creating a market for the intel I think, but YMMV.

People in the computer security industry actually do hum-int. Its not a problem by itself (mostly because these operations aren't serious enough to actually infiltrate anyone who would retaliate violently, as far as I know). The problem comes when they lie or exaggerate the results of these operations to their customers, while claiming be making authoritative representations of the people they are spying on because they are "on the inside." Having interesting results helps you sell your result finding service, and people in this position are incented to find stuff where there is nothing to find. This article claims that SITE has this problem. I don't really have a hard time believing that simply because it occurs in other contexts. Customers of such a service should take results with a grain of salt.

Eventually this hypothetical reaches the point where in order to proceed you have to commit a crime, say by running a sig-int operation... hacking into a computer, or, perhaps, by using violence to acheive a tactical goal. Our society cannot tolerate that from private entities. The evolution of private merc forces is already troubling in this regard. Not only does this sort of activity complicate the strategic situation for the real military, but the reason that governments have deliberative processes that might be frustrating to hard liners is that governments attempt to use force justly. Force used without a political process will tend to serve the interests of it's funding source irrespective of justice, and this is a slippery slope toward unravelling civil society.

Having said all of this... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

RE: Private Jihad: How Rita Katz got into the spying business | The New Yorker

Counterterrorism as vocation. True Believers Wanted.

Rita Katz has a very specific vision of the counterterrorism problem, which she shares with most of the other contractors and consultants who do what she does. They believe that the government has failed to appreciate the threat of Islamic extremism, and that its feel for counterterrorism is all wrong. As they see it, the best way to fight terrorists is to go at it not like G-men, with two-year assignments and query letters to the staff attorneys, but the way the terrorists do, with fury and the conviction that history will turn on the decisions you make -- as an obsession and as a life style. Worrying about overestimating the threat is beside the point, because underestimating the threat is so much worse.

It's clear the US government, and much of the international community, seeks to deter, detect, and seize the proceeds of international fundraising for terrorism. But what about private financing of non-governmental counterterror organizations? I'm not talking about desk jockeys. I'm talking about, what if Stratfor went activist, moved to the Sudan, or Somalia, or Yemen, and used the proceeds of a vastly expanded subscription business to fund their own private Directorate of Operations? Would governments indict the subscribers?

If private counterterrorism is deemed terrorism in the eyes of official national governments, how should transnational corporations respond when terrorists begin targeting them directly? To whom do you turn when your infrastructure is simultaneously attacked in 60 countries? Must you appeal to the security council, or wait for all 60 countries (some of whom are not on speaking terms with each other) to agree on an appropriate response? What about when some of those countries are sponsors of the organization perpetrating the attack?

"The problem isn't Rita Katz -- the problem is our political conversation about terrorism," Timothy Naftali says. "Now, after September 11th, there's no incentive for anyone in politics or the media to say the Alaska pipeline's fine, and nobody's cows are going to be poisoned by the terrorists. And so you have these little eruptions of anxiety. But, for me, look, the world is wired now: either you take the risks that come with giving people -- not just the government -- this kind of access to information or you leave them. I take them."

It's the computer security story again. Katz runs a full disclosure mailing list. Privately the Feds are subscribers, even as they complain publicly about training and propriety.

This article probably earns a Silver Star, although it might have been even stronger if it had been a feature in Harper's or The Atlantic, where it could have been twice as long, and could have been less a personal profile and more about the substance and impact of her work.

It's been a year now, and at risk of self-promotion, I'll say it's worth re-reading the Naftali thread.

Private Jihad: How Rita Katz got into the spying business | The New Yorker

Feith's team, Hayden said, had set out to prove a case by assembling "every possible ounce of evidence" and ignoring contradictory information. Using that method, he continued, analysts can build a convincing case against even innocent targets.

"I got three great kids, but if you tell me, 'Go out and find all the bad things they've done, Hayden,' I could build you a pretty good dossier," Hayden said. "You'd think they were pretty bad people because that's what I was looking for and that's what I built up. That'd be very wrong, OK? That would be inaccurate. That would be misleading."

Hayden on Iraq intel

Stratfor: Geopolitical Intelligence Report - May 16, 2006

Civil Liberties and National Security

By George Friedman

USA Today published a story last week stating that U.S. telephone
companies (Qwest excepted) had been handing over to the National
Security Agency (NSA) logs of phone calls made by American
citizens. This has, as one might expect, generated a fair bit of
controversy -- with opinions ranging from "It's not only legal but
a great idea" to "This proves that Bush arranged 9/11 so he could
create a police state." A fine time is being had by all. Therefore,
it would seem appropriate to pause and consider the matter.

Let's begin with an obvious question: How in God's name did USA
Today find out about a program that had to have been among the most
closely held secrets in the intelligence community -- not only
because it would be embarrassing if discovered, but also because
the entire program could work only if no one knew it was under way?
No criticism of USA Today, but we would assume that the newspaper
wasn't running covert operations against the NSA. Therefore,
someone gave them the story, and whoever gave them the story had to
be cleared to know about it. That means that someone with a high
security clearance leaked an NSA secret.

Americans have become so numbed to leaks at this point that no one
really has discussed the implications of what we are seeing: The
intelligence community is hemorrhaging classified information. It's
possible that this leak came from one of the few congressmen or
senators or staffers on oversight committees who had been briefed
on this material -- but either way, we are seeing an extraordinary
breakdown among those with access to classified material.

The reason for this latest disclosure is obviously the nomination
of Gen. Michael Hayden to be the head of the CIA. Before his
appointment as deputy director of national intelligence, Hayden had
been the head of the NSA, where he oversaw the collection and
data-mining project involving private phone calls. Hayden's
nomination to the CIA has come under heavy criticism from Democrats
and Republicans, who argue that he is an inappropriate choice for
director. The release of the data-mining story to USA Today
obviously was intended as a means of shooting down his nomination
-- which it might. But what is important here is not the fate of
Hayden, but the fact that the Bush administration clearly has lost
all control of the intelligence community -- extended to include
congressional oversight processes. That is not a trivial point.

At the heart of the argument is not the current breakdown in
Washington, but the more significant question of why the NSA was
running such a collection program and whether the program
represented a serious threat to l... [ Read More (2.0k in body) ]

Not only has BellSouth categorically denied it has provided bulk customer phone records to the NSA, Verizon came out today and said the same thing.

27B Stroke 6: BellSouth and Verizon deny handing over records to NSA

A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources.

"It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation.

!!!

...within the large pointless program there exists a small, sharply focused program that delivers something the White House really wants.

They aren't looking for Terrorists. They're trying to quash whistle blowers!

FineThen says: The letter from the Pres. of Iran. Very strange read.

My summary: So, you're Christian, Eh? Well, Iraq was a bunch of bullshit, we think we have a right to make nuclear reactors, and we don't recognize the right of Israel to exist because they ran out a bunch of Arabs. But the important point is that people are sick of Liberal Democracy. It obviously doesn't work. We should all turn to fundamentalism instead. If you were really Christian you'd agree.

Its unfortunate that they squandered the opportunity to make substantive points, relying instead on subtle hints of conspiracy theories about September 11th and about the holocaust. However, the general value of this is that it signifies a tremendous turn in strategy. They have decided that getting bombed isn't in their strategic interest. This reduces the risk of more war.

Dear President Bush...