Is Your Privacy Worth 50 Foiled Terror Plots?
Postal Service Eyes Cuba
Tangherlini As GSA's Mr. Fix-It?
Lew Cleans Up Signature for the Nation's Currency
The Plan to Open More Military Jobs to Women
Should Leaders Ever Lie?
AUTHOR ARCHIVES
Silicon Valley is More Involved in National Security Than You Think
June 10, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
Some of America's biggest social media and tech companies have been denying in recent days that they were aware of the National Security Agency's recently-exposed "PRISM" and telephone monitoring programs. But these denials obscure a larger truth: The government's massive data collection and surveillance system was largely built not by ...
The Surveillance State: How We Got Here
June 7, 2013 On December 20, 2002, a Senate Intelligence Committee that included Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., today one of the most vociferous critics of the so-called "surveillance state," came to the following conclusion in its official report on the mistakes that led to 9/11: The National Security Agency had harmed U.S. counterterrorism ...
Intelligence Chief: I Didn't Lie About NSA Surveillance
June 6, 2013 Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said Thursday that he stood by what he told Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., in March when he said that the National Security Agency does not "wittingly" collect data on millions of Americans. "What I said was, the NSA does not voyeuristically pore through U.S. ...
Susan Rice and Samantha Power: Less Change Than Meets the Eye
June 6, 2013 In appointing Susan Rice as his new national security adviser, President Obama appears to be taking two big risks at once: openly defying Republicans who have made her the centerpiece of the Benghazi imbroglio, and embracing a new interventionist view of the world that may well get him into trouble ...
How the Afghan Conflict Will Be Decided
May 16, 2013 KABUL, Afghanistan – Gen. Sher Mohammad Karimi thumbs excitedly through a brochure prepared for him by Textron, the U.S. defense contractor. “This is what I want!” the Afghan army chief of staff says, pointing to a picture of the latest technology in armored troop carriers. Outside Karimi’s window, the giant, ...
NATO’s Plan for Afghanistan Post-2014: A ‘Stable Instability’
May 13, 2013 KABUL – Many Americans think we’re winding down in Afghanistan by the end of next year, for better or for worse. We’re not. Despite America’s evident desire to extricate itself from the nation’s longest war, Taliban fighters, criminal gangs and other insurgents continue to terrorize much of Afghanistan, making travel ...
Analysis: Incompetence, but No Cover-up in Benghazi.
May 8, 2013 There was tragic incompetence, plainly, in the Obama administration’s handling of the Benghazi attacks, and even possibly some political calculation. It is a record that may well come to haunt Hillary Clinton, the first Secretary of State to lose an ambassador in the field in more than three decades, if ...
It’s Obama’s Economy—at Last
March 8, 2013 For most of his first term, President Obama successfully sold a line to the public that economists will tell you is, at least in part, intellectual snake oil. He managed to blame our historically slow economy almost entirely on President George W. Bush. Polls taken right after the 2012 election ...
Analysis: How Obama Fumbled Afghanistan
March 6, 2013 Until he took the job as President Obama’s special representative, Richard Holbrooke was known as one of the toughest, smartest, and most nimble diplomats of his era. He had plenty of ego, but few people doubted Holbrooke’s effectiveness. So what happened to make Holbrooke so seemingly ineffective in dealing with ...
Analysis: The Rehabilitation of Chuck Hagel
February 28, 2013 Having been ushered into his job as Defense secretary with the biggest dissenting Senate vote in U.S. history, Chuck Hagel appears to be already a politically damaged figure. And now, adding injury to insult, the first thing the new Defense secretary must do is go back to the Congress that ...
