After nearly two months in captivity, the hostage reviewed what his fate might hold — whether ransom negotiations or rescue efforts or a miracle might bring him freedom.

“One option was for the money to arrive and be ransomed,” the 61-year-old engineer from Ohio told Army Times, speaking on the condition that he remain anonymous. “In my mind, I’d given a military intervention a one out of a hundred chance. Not that they couldn’t do it, but they’re busy, and I’m not that important a fellow.”

However, on an airstrip many miles away, twin sets of Chinook helicopter rotor blades were starting to turn as about 60 of America’s most elite troops prepared to prove him wrong.

This is the story of one of the most daring and successful U.S. hostage-rescue missions in years.

Inside a U.S. hostage rescue

Amitav Ghosh:

Despite all loss of life, this year could well be counted as a victory not for terrorism but for India’s citizenry.

The question now is this: Will the November invasion of Mumbai change this? Although there is no way of knowing the answer, it is certain that if the precedent of 9/11 is taken seriously the outcome will be profoundly counterproductive.

When commentators repeat the metaphor of 9/11 they are in effect pushing the Indian government to mount a comparable response. If India takes a hard line modeled on the actions of the Bush administration, the consequences are sure to be equally disastrous. The very power of the 9/11 metaphor blinds us to the possibility that there might be other, more productive analogies.

India’s 9/11? Not Exactly

Steve Coll:

With its hospitals, universities, and social-service wings, Lashkar is akin to Hezbollah or Hamas; it is a three-dimensional political and social movement with an armed wing, not merely a terrorist or paramilitary outfit.

Clearly, Lashkar knows what it must do to protect the Pakistan government from being exposed in the violent operations that Lashkar runs in Kashmir and elsewhere.

In the long run, this work is a threat to the secular character of Pakistan, but it is certainly preferable to revolutionary violence and upheaval right now. On the other hand, there is little doubt that the Army and I.S.I. continue to use Jamat’s legitimate front as a vehicle for prosecution of a long-running “double game” with the United States, in which Pakistan pledges fealty to American counterterrorism goals while at the same time facilitating guerrilla violence against India.

From the archive:

“I cannot lie to you,” Namdar said, smiling at last. “The army comes in, and they fire at empty buildings. It is a drama — it is just to entertain.”

Entertain whom? I asked.

“America,” he said.

Lashkar-e-Taiba: Think Tank

Alec Baldwin observes, “The collective consciousness has said, ‘Tina, dahling, where have you been? Where on earth have you been?’”

From the recent archive:

John McEnroe: "Why isn't there any good art in here?"

What Tina Wants

Michael Froomkin:

This book chapter for "Lessons from the Identity Trail: Anonymity, Privacy and Identity in a Networked Society" (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) -- a forthcoming comparative examination of approaches to the regulation of anonymity edited by Ian Kerr -- surveys the patchwork of U.S. laws regulating anonymity and concludes the overall U.S. policy towards anonymity remains primarily situational, largely reactive, and slowly evolving.

Anonymous speech, particularly on political or religious matters, enjoys a privileged position under the U.S. Constitution. Regulation of anonymous speech requires a particularly strong justification to survive judicial review but no form of speech is completely immune from regulation. Anonymity is presumptively disfavored for witnesses, defendants, and jurors during criminal trials; the regulation of anonymity in civil cases is more complex. Plaintiffs demonstrating sufficiently good cause may proceed anonymously; conversely, defendants with legitimate reasons may be able to shield their identities from discovery.

Despite growing public concern about privacy issues, the United States federal government has developed a number of post 9/11 initiatives designed to limit the scope of anonymous behavior and communication. Even so, the background norm that the government should not be able to compel individuals to reveal their identity without real cause retains force. On the other hand, legislatures and regulators seem reluctant to intervene to protect privacy, much less anonymity, from what are seen as market forces. Although the law imposes few if any legal obstacles to the domestic use of privacy-enhancing technology such as encryption it also requires little more than truth in advertising for most privacy destroying technologies.

Anonymity and the Law in the United States

The report details an online underground economy that has matured into an efficient, global marketplace in which stolen goods and fraud-related services are regularly bought and sold, and where the estimated value of goods offered by individual traders is measured in millions of dollars. The report is derived from data gathered by Symantec’s Security Technology and Response (STAR) organization, from underground economy servers between July 1, 2007 and June 30, 2008.

The potential value of total advertised goods observed by Symantec was more than $276 million for the reporting period. This value was determined using the advertised prices of the goods and services and measured how much advertisers would make if they liquidated their inventory.

From a year ago:

This paper studies an active underground economy which specializes in the commoditization of activities such as credit card fraud, identity theft, spamming, phishing, online credential theft, and the sale of compromised hosts. Using a seven month trace of logs collected from an active underground market operating on public Internet chat networks, we measure how the shift from “hacking for fun” to “hacking for profit” has given birth to a societal substrate mature enough to steal wealth into the millions of dollars in less than one year.

New Symantec Report Reveals Booming Underground Economy

Google's Lorenzo Colitti:

IPv6 is good for the Internet, and we want to help.

A Strategy for IPv6 Adoption

I need two system programmers ...

The Job

World of Goo is a physics based puzzle / construction game. The millions of Goo Balls who live in the beautiful World of Goo don't know that they are in a game, or that they are extremely delicious.

From the archive:

"We are on the cusp of perfection of extreme evil -- an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond weapons of mass destruction," Joy warned recently in Wired magazine.

You must learn to love the Goo, for it loves you.

I wait in eager anticipation of Grey Goo Graffiti.

Only you can prevent Gray Goo

World of Goo

Paul Starr reviews On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship:

At the root of the rise of partisanship is a change in what parties and party attachments in America signify. The standard observation used to be that the United States, unlike Europe, had no mass ideological parties. Both the Democrats and the Republicans were alliances of convenience that included both liberals and conservatives, and the more ideologically defined third parties, such as the Socialists, were too small to be of consequence. Activists tended to form protest groups to influence the major parties from the outside, while the parties themselves often seemed intellectually vapid at best, unprincipled and corrupt at worst. Learning whether someone was a Republican or Democrat did not necessarily tell you much about that person's beliefs. If you took political ideas seriously, it was hard to take party spirit seriously.

That is no longer so.

From the archive, Stanley Fish:

The assumption is that if we were all independent voters, the political process would be in much better shape.

This seems to me to be a dubious proposition, especially if the word “political” in the phrase “political process” is taken seriously.

From Super Tuesday, a dose of Hofstadter:

While most of the Fathers did assume that partisan oppositions would form from time to time, they did not expect that valuable permanent structures would arise from them ...

The Fathers hoped to create not a system of party government under a constitution but rather a constitutional government that would check and control parties.

... Although Federalists and Anti-Federalists differed over many things, they do not seem to have differed over the proposition that an effective constitution is one that successfully counteracts the work of parties.

On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties & Partisanship