With all the cyber spies and state-sponsored hackers on the Internet, is there any way to defend ourselves? Critics say not completely

Defenseless on the Net

The federal government has launched a cyber security "Manhattan Project," U.S. homeland security secretary Michael Chertoff said Tuesday, because online attacks can be a form of "devastating warfare", and equivalent in damage to "physical destruction of the worst kind."

US Has Launched a Cyber Security 'Manhattan Project'

Richard Haass, in Foreign Affairs:

The United States' unipolar moment is over. International relations in the twenty-first century will be defined by nonpolarity. Power will be diffuse rather than concentrated, and the influence of nation-states will decline as that of nonstate actors increases. But this is not all bad news for the United States; Washington can still manage the transition and make the world a safer place.

The Age of Nonpolarity

Along with its various derivatives, “misspeak” has become one of the signature verbal workhorses of this interminable political season, right up there with “narrative,” “Day One,” and “hope.” It carries the suggestion that, while the politician’s perfectly functioning brain has dispatched the correct signals, the mouth has somehow received and transmitted them in altered form. “Misspeak” is a powerful word, a magical word. It is a word that is apparently thought capable, in its contemporary political usage, of isolating a palpable, possibly toxic untruth, sealing it up in an airtight bag, and disposing of it harmlessly.

Such a feat of modern hygiene is impressive in a word of such ancient origins. The Oxford English Dictionary finds it in Chaucer (“I me repente / If I mis spak”), but the hoary examples involve meanings that are either obsolete (to calumniate) or irrelevant to the present case (to mispronounce or speak incorrectly, a specialty of George W. “Misunderestimated” Bush). The last item in Oxford’s half-column entry, however, gets us where Senators Clinton and McCain want us to go:

3.b. refl. To fail to convey the meaning one intends by one’s words.

This use of “misspeak” is of American origin. Oxford’s first example (“I believe he misspoke himself”) is drawn from, aptly, the Congressional Record, 1894; its second (“The President misspoke himself”) is from Richard Nixon’s iconic press secretary, Ron Zeigler, in 1973, annus mirabilis of the Classical period of American misspeaking.

Mr. and Ms. Spoken

Trying to stem the infiltration of militia fighters, American forces have begun to build a massive concrete wall that will partition Sadr City, the densely populated Shiite neighborhood in the Iraqi capital.

American soldiers scanned roofs in Sadr City on Thursday after shots were fired near their base.

The construction, which began Tuesday night, is intended to turn the southern quarter of Sadr City near the international Green Zone into a protected enclave, secured by Iraqi and American forces, where the Iraqi government can undertake reconstruction efforts.

“You can’t really repair anything that is broken until you establish security,” said Lt. Col. Dan Barnett, commander of the First Squadron, Second Stryker Cavalry Regiment. “A wall that isolates those who would continue to attack the Iraqi Army and coalition forces can create security conditions that they can go in and rebuild.”

US Begins Erecting Wall in Sadr City

Steven Simon, in Foreign Affairs:

The Bush administration's new strategy in Iraq has helped reduce violence. But the surge is not linked to any sustainable plan for building a viable Iraqi state and may even have made such an outcome less likely -- by stoking the revanchist fantasies of Sunni tribes and pitting them against the central government. The recent short-term gains have thus come at the expense of the long-term goal of a stable, unitary Iraq.

The Price of the Surge

Go away, the Internet is full.

U.S. telecommunications giant AT&T has claimed that, without investment, the Internet's current network architecture will reach the limits of its capacity by 2010.

AT&T: Internet to hit full capacity by 2010

To date, the war in Iraq is a classic case of failure to adopt and adapt prudent courses of action that balance ends, ways, and means. After the major combat operation, U.S. policy has been insolvent, with inadequate means for pursuing ambitious ends. It is also a case where the perceived illegitimacy of our policy has led the United States to bear a disproportionate share of the war’s burden. U.S. efforts in Iraq stand in stark contrast to the war in Afghanistan, where, to the surprise of many, U.S. friends and allies have recently taken up a larger share of the burden of that conflict. Afghanistan has become the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO’s) war, but the war in Iraq has increasingly become only a U.S. and Iraqi struggle. The British drawdown in Basra in the summer of 2007 heightened the isolation of the U.S. and Iraqi governments.

The goal of this case study is to outline how the United States chose to go to war in Iraq, how its decisionmaking process functioned, and what can be done to improve that process. The central finding of this study is that U.S. efforts in Iraq were hobbled by a set of faulty assumptions, a flawed planning effort, and a continuing inability to create security conditions in Iraq that could have fostered meaningful advances in stabilization, reconstruction, and governance. It is arguable whether the Iraqis will develop the wherewithal to create ethnic reconciliation and build a coherent national government. It is clear, however, that the United States and its partners have not done enough to create conditions in which such a development could take place. With the best of intentions, the United States toppled a vile, dangerous regime but has been unable to replace it with a stable entity. Mistakes in the Iraq operation cry out for improvements in the U.S. decisionmaking and policy execution systems. In turn, these improvements will require major changes in the legislative and executive branches, as well as in interagency processes.

Choosing War: The Decision to Invade Iraq and Its Aftermath

CBO finds that:

* The current economic situation is quite fragile, largely as a result of the difficulties in mortgage markets and other financial markets. Much of that fragility arises from falling house prices, which affect consumers through their housing wealth and lenders through their loss of collateral. It is exacerbated by the growing complexity of financial instruments and entities, which may make it difficult for participants to know what risks they are assuming, and by the leverage of both borrowers and financial market intermediaries, which means that it is difficult to prevent liquidity and solvency problems from spreading throughout the financial markets.
* Foreclosures are an expensive way to resolve delinquencies. A large number of foreclosures is also likely to reduce the demand for houses, as potential purchasers conclude it would be better to wait until prices stop falling. Thus, excessive foreclosures could trigger a downward spiral of house prices that could take them below what would be justified on the basis of normal relationships to income and production costs. Such a downward spiral would exacerbate the problems in the financial markets, and by reducing household wealth, could reduce consumption spending, increasing the likelihood and severity of a recession. While actions could be taken to limit the risk of such a downward spiral in housing prices, it is not feasible for policy interventions to stabilize house prices at current levels since such prices are strongly influenced by the significant inventory of unoccupied houses for sale.
* Significant impediments stand in the way of private market resolution of the difficulties in the mortgage market. In order for large numbers of mortgages to be restructured, procedures must be developed to secure the agreement of the institutions that hold second mortgages. Because most mortgages are securitized, resolution procedures also have to respect the limits of securitizing agreements. Without committing resources, the Congress could provide a standard for mortgage restructuring that might assist agreement among the first- and second-lien holders and simplify the decisions lenders have to make. Legislation could also change the treatment of mortgages in bankruptcy, which would help borrowers and might increase the pressure on lenders to voluntarily restructure loans outside of bankruptcy; such a change, however, might also lead to higher interest rates on future mortgages.
* Direct federal provision or guaranteeing of credit to mortgage markets could help avoid foreclosures and ease the downward pressure on house prices, helping the market to adjust in an orderly manner. It would also shift part of the cost of mortgage losses from current lenders and investors to taxpayers. Most of the proposals under discussion involve modest federal subsidies and would probably affect several hundred thousand homeowners.

Policy Options for the Housing and Financial Markets

While hanging out with the folks at Harvard's student radio station for a story about a long-running specialty show, Phoenix music editor Michael Brodeur was shown a shelf filled with grade-school-style composition notebooks dating back to the early 1980s. Since first coming on the air in 1984, DJs at WHRB's Record Hospital have been keeping meticulous records of every night, every playlist, every song (or non-song) they've ever played. (And let's face it: any radio station that can go 24 years without playing "Sister Christian" deserves a closer look.)

The hand-written journals, which were kept in the studios and became the primary means of communication between dozens of DJs, reveal that many of the tropes that we tend to associate with message boards -- the snarky put-downs, the punning screen-names, the long-running flame wars -- were actually alive and kicking at least a decade before the Web browser. It's kind of like finding AIM chats in a cave painting.

Ancient Pre-Internet Message Boards Unearthed at Harvard