The latest in anti-pirate satellite imaging has led the UN to make some interesting conclusions about security programs, according to the Danger Room from Wired.com
There have been a total 84 reported pirate incidents in just the last three months, UNOSAT says. Half of them occurred in or around the shipping “corridor” sent up by the international community to protect commercial vessels. And that corridor didn’t seem to do much to deter the pirates; their rate of successful attacks dipped only slightly (37 percent, versus 42 percent) inside the protected area. What the corridor did do was concentrate the pirate strikes. “The mean distance between reported attacks has fallen from 30.5km… to 24.6km after,” UNOSAT says.
Perhaps this has been asked elsewhere and I haven’t noticed but, if the corridor is successfully concentrating attacks, should we now expect a navy to deploy heavily-armed decoy ships to trick the pirates and destroy them upon contact or start taking hostages? I’m just reading out of the old anti-pirate playbooks at this point, and wondering when history will repeat itself.
On my way to meet [the FBI agent] the next morning, I realized that I didn’t know what he looked like. Not to worry: I was in Adams Morgan, D.C.’s original hippie/hipster neighborhood, and he and his colleague were FBI agents straight out of central casting, with dark-blue suits and close-cropped hair. They wanted to know everything I knew about Vladimir. I had assumed that he was a spy. But I was pretty confident that there was nothing illegal about our conversations. So I spent about 45 minutes telling them what I could. I learned my experience was not that unusual: Cactus Cantina, the agents told me, was the favorite haunt of Russian spooks (and the cringe-worthy tipping I had observed was standard practice).
How much is cringe-worthy tipping?
Do the Russians like Mexican food or are they trying to blend in? It sounds like pizza is acceptable to them also, especially if the name of the pizza includes the letters P-U-T-I-N. The FBI on the other hand go for Starbucks. The American agent’s choice might seem as obvious to us Americans as their stereotypical clothes, but maybe it looks to Muscovites like fancy taco joints are where Americans want to go for lunch.
I can just imagine a KGB bulletin describing the current administration’s culture of tex-mex preferences, with a potential shift coming towards deep-dish (Chicago-style) pizza.
Gee, either it’s lunch time or I’m getting hungry just reading about national security…perhaps one of these savvy beltway insiders/journalists could put together a spook’s guide to dining?
I suspect many people already knew this, as I heard them discussing it months ago, but I just read in the news that Kansas State University will be the US center of BioSecurity research:
Kansas has won a three-year competition to land a new $450 million federal laboratory to study livestock diseases and some of the world’s most dangerous biological threats. But some states that lost out are crying foul.
The Homeland Security Department’s choice of a lab site at Kansas State University in Manhattan beat out rival bids from Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina and Texas.
Opponents to the Australian government’s Internet content-filtering scheme will take to the streets in a series of protests planned in the country’s capital cities.
The protests, organized by members from activist groups including the Electronic Freedom Project and Digital Liberty Coalition, will be held at Sydney’s Town Hall, Brisbane Square, Melbourne’s State Library, Adelaide Parliament House, Perth’s Stirling Gardens and Tasmania’s Parliament Lawns.
Activists, rebels…what else can they call the people who oppose this network control? Imagine if we could call users rebels when they argued over a firewall rule.
Anyway, the crazy thing about the rule is how low the standards were set for approval. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) is supposed to maintain a list, but even with a perfect list the technology is likely to never push above “a 94% accuracy rating, would incorrectly block up to 10,000 Web pages out of 1 million”. Have supporters of the measure really done their risk/reward calculations properly?
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995