Ringing In The New Year, Narco Style

The New Year arrived in Monterrey, Mexico, pretty much simultaneously with the first drug cartel-related killing of 2011. According to Blog del Narco:

This morning came the report of the first finding of an encobijado of 2011 in Nuevo Leon, the event occurring in Del Carmen in the municipality of Monterrey.

Following the report of a man dead in the parking lot of an office of accountants and lawyers, authorities arrived and learned that the caretaker of the place, named Jose Martinez, found the body.

The unknown man was barefoot and had been shot, approximately three days ago.

I had never seen the word "encobijado" before and had to look it up:

Encobijado, noun, a person found wrapped in blankets after being assassinated by drug traffickers or their associates.

That's a sad commentary on the situation south of the border. Narco killings are so numerous and so stylized that Mexicans coin new words to describe them.

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Wiki-Whinging About Increasing Security Measures

The Wiki-Wallop that was delivered to the USG's classified information holdings in 2010 has, predictably, resulted in a backlash that will tighten up our info security measures. And that, ironically, does damage to responsible advocates of declassification and disclosure such as the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy.

FAS finds itself Wiki-Whipsawed. It denounced WikiLeaks, and paid the price for that in loss of esteem from the more extreme openness advocates. And yet, its own project will now suffer as the USG responds to WikiLeaks by retreating further into its shell of secrecy.

FAS did some justified Wiki-Whining yesterday in a post about Tightening Security in the “Post-WikiLeaks” Era. They make a good point:

The Wikileaks model for receiving and publishing classified documents exploits gaps in information security and takes advantage of weaknesses in security discipline. It therefore produces greater disclosure in open societies, where security is often lax and penalties for violations are relatively mild, than in closed societies. Within the U.S., the Wikileaks approach yields greater disclosure from those agencies where security is comparatively poor, such as the Army, than from agencies with more rigorous security practices, such as the CIA.

What this means is that Wikileaks is exercising a kind of evolutionary pressure on government agencies, and on the government as a whole, to ratchet up security in order to prevent wholesale compromises of classified information. If the Army becomes more like the CIA in its information security policies, or so the thinking goes, and if the U.S. becomes more like some foreign countries, then it should become less vulnerable to selective security breaches.

Regarding that ratcheting-up of security, FAS linked to a January 3, 2011, memo from the Office of Management and Budget titled “Initial Assessments of Safeguarding and Counterintelligence Postures for Classified National Security Information in Automated Systems” [here]. The memo includes an 11-page list of questions and prompts for USG agencies to use in their security self-assessments.

I was relieved to see that blogging and social networking were not mentioned in the assessment criteria. However, there was this:

Have you conducted a trend analysis of indicators and activities of the employee population which may indicate risky habits or cultural and societal differences other than those expected for candidates (to include current employees) for security clearances?

Undefined "risky habits" could be a broad enough category to justify monitoring of government employee blogging, perhaps. We'll see.

There was also this:

Do you use psychiatrist and sociologist to measure:

o Relative happiness as a means to gauge trustworthiness?
o Despondence and grumpiness as a means to gauge waning trustworthiness?

So, will we see shrinks assessing employee trustworthiness according to some approved ratio of happiness-to-grumpiness? And how do you measure that, anyway? Is there a happiness dipstick?

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Captured Israeli Spy Might Come Home To Roost

Not Jonathon Pollard, this one.

As for Pollard, I have no idea.

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Lady Gaga Makes a Great Marie Antoinette

Apropos of nothing and just out of the blue, I have to say I love these brilliant musical teaching aids on European history that I just came across.

If I were a high school history teacher, my New Year's Resolution would be to play them over and over until my students could sing them in their sleep. Please browse them; I particular like the ones on the Battle of Agincourt, Elizabeth I, and the Canterbury Tales.

Most of the videos are shorter than this one, but a major topic like the French Revolution needs a full five minutes:



New media and old history combine very well (my old school even has an academic center for that), despite grumbling from those who assume history has to be made dry and boring or else it won't give the kids a character-building experience.

When you consider how vivid and dramatic the personalities of European history really are - Joan of Arc, the Borgias, Henry VIII - the music video is exactly the right format for teaching the subject. Personally, I think Beowulf is actually improved when put to 99 Luftballons.

The new and old combine to make something unique and mutually beneficial, as Philip Larkin knew:

New eyes each year
Find old books here,
And new books, too,
Old eyes renew;
So youth and age
Like ink and page
In this house join,
Minting new coin.

[ Download ]

[ Download ]

[ Download ]

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U.S. Embassy Baghdad's "Last Three (Virtual) Feet"

DipNote has announced U.S. Embassy Baghdad's latest initiative in public diplomacy, a new program on its YouTube channel called "Window Into the U.S. Embassy."

OK, given the realities of the security situation in and around Baghdad, maybe our public diplomacy options there are limited to social media and YouTube. I can understand that. But, the Dipnote post has this strange concluding paragraph that makes a mockery of the whole idea of impersonal person-to-person communication:

I'm a firm believer in Edward R. Murrow's tried and true words about effective communication with foreign audiences: "The real crucial link in the international communication chain is the last three feet... one person talking to another." While there's no substitute for meeting Iraqis face-to-face, and building relationships over a cup of steaming tea or a plate of kebabs, here at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad social media is helping us open windows into new audiences and build bridges across those last three (virtual) feet.

DipNote's post seems to be having an argument with itself. In the first place, we will speak to Iraqis at arms length, and in the second place, face-to-face communication is crucial. Which is it?

If there really "is no substitute" for meeting Iraqis face-to-face, then why are we substituting a YouTube program for just that? And, if we have no better option but to do just that, why are we invoking the sainted Edward R. Murrow and his all-important "last three feet" in a post about how we will keep the internet between us and the Iraqi public?

What is the "virtual" last three feet, anyway? Virtual as in "simulated," I suppose. We will pretend to talk to you in person, and we invite you to pretend along with us.

The idea of virtual human contact simply doesn't fit into the Murrow paradigm, and by using it Dipnote invites snickering.

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Wiki-Whizzzzz

The State Department dodged a bullet last May, according to the WaPo.

In a WaPo story with a somewhat misleading headline, WikiLeaks cable dump reveals flaws of State Department's information-sharing tool, we learn that:

A few State Department officials expressed early concerns about unauthorized access to the [Net-Centric Diplomacy] database, but these worries mostly involved threats to individual privacy, department officials said. In practice, agency officials relied on the end-users of the data - mostly military and intelligence personnel - to guard against abuse.

The department was not equipped to assign individual passwords or perform independent scrutiny over the hundreds of thousands of users authorized by the Pentagon to use the database, said Kennedy, the undersecretary of state.

"It is the responsibility of the receiving agency to ensure that the information is handled, stored and processed in accordance with U.S. government procedures," he said.

Indeed. That's what is somewhat misleading about the headline, since the "flaws" in that info-sharing tool were introduced when the Army allowed PFC Manning to pretty much run amok with its classified computer databases.

But here's the bullet-dodging moment:

Although it is perhaps small comfort, the disclosures could have been worse. In May, the Obama administration's top intelligence officer asked the State Department to expand the amount of material available to other agencies through Net-Centric Diplomacy.

In a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, then-Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair urged that the database include not only cables but also e-mails between State Department officials. Such a move would "ensure that critical information will reach the necessary readers across the government," Blair wrote.

Clinton refused.

Having cable traffic in the public view is bad enough, but imagine how much worse it would be if WikiLeaks had your e-mails as well.

That was close.

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Synchronicity?

A correspondent who keeps track of these things notified me of a confluence of seemingly unrelated events that occurred in St. Petersburg, Russia, on December 28/29.

First, Bobby Farrell, front man of the musical group Boney M, died there while on tour. The UK Telegraph reports:

Farrell, 61, had performed in St Petersburg on Wednesday but had complained of breathing problems before and after his show, according to his agent John Seine. Staff at his hotel discovered him after he failed to answer a wake-up call.

Coincidentally, the date of his death, December 29, was the same as Grigori Rasputin, the infamous Russian mystic who was an adviser of the Russian Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra, who died in 1916. Rasputin however met a more brutal demise, as he was poisoned, shot four teams and thrown in the river before he eventually drowned.

Rasputin was also the name of a 1978 Boney M hit [here's the video], reaching number two in the British charts.

-- snip --

Boney M was the first Western music group invited by a Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, to perform in the Soviet Union. A Soviet military plane flew the performers from London to Moscow, where they sang for an audience of 2,700 Russians in Red Square.

Okay, one coincidence is easy to accept. But now the coincidences multiply.

The evening before Farrell and Rasputin died, Anna Chapman, the protege of Vladimir Putin, Russia's current mad monk and St. Petersburg's favorite son [Putin and Rasputin, is there a little similarity there?] gave her first interview to Russian state-run television. She talked about her hopes to have a TV or movie career, and was presented with a pet lion.

See for yourself:

Now here's the second Rasputin tie-in. Rasputin had a daughter, Maria, who grew up in St. Petersburg and aspired to be an entertainer. After the Revolution she became a lion tamer, toured the United States, and settled down in Los Angeles. She died in a bungalow near the Hollywood Freeway.

I'll admit the destiny behind all of this is still a bit murky. Maybe it will take a vodka or two before the course of the future becomes clear.

H/T to The Snake's Mommy, and a happy new year!

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