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| 0593716604
| 4.08
| 695
| unknown
| Feb 13, 2024
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really liked it
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I suppose this book is best described as a companion to Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal. Musk is certainly an
I suppose this book is best described as a companion to Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal. Musk is certainly an interesting fellow, and I have Isaacson's biography of him on my list. Lots of money does funny things to people. It's made Musk into a narcissistic autocrat who has taken Charlie Wilson's comment about General Motors ("What's good for General Motors is Good for the Country")** to heart. Substitute Twitter for General Motors. You will remember that Musk offered $44 billion to purchase Twitter only to back down but then be forced to buy it. The company was saddled with a huge amount of debt (that continues to rise), Musk fired hundreds of employees, many of whom were involved with content moderation, others simply because they had the temerity to tell him the truth. Then he re-branded Twitter into X (he seems to have a passion for that letter -- personally I prefer the letter B for bullshit...) Advertisers began to flee in droves as the site became home to right-wing kooks and hate-mongers all in the name of free expression. What Musk did not recognize was that “Advertisers play an underappreciated role in content moderation,” says Evelyn Douek, a professor and speech regulation expert. “So much of the content moderation discourse has always been a highfalutin discussion on free speech, on safety versus voice. But content moderation is a product, and brand safety has always been a key driver in terms of how these platforms create value.” Musk promised all sorts of things, including money, to some of the employees, promises he has yet to fulfill. Indeed, there are many outstanding lawsuits to force him to pay off on those promises. (Hundreds of millions in severance pay guarantees. As of today, April 1st, settlement talks have gone nowhere.) It's important to remember that both of these books reflect the personal opinions and experiences of those willing to talk. Many of those remaining with the company were afraid to talk for fear of repercussions. As these author states: "This book is a snapshot of the lives of Twitter employees during a pivotal moment in tech history." Looking at the history of tech, lots of prominent, highly touted apps fall by the wayside, so I'm not sure just how "pivotal" Twitter/X is/was. "But anyone seeking those answers discovered that the transition from Twitter to X wrought something entirely different. Musk’s intentions became clearer. In his mind, the company’s success had nothing to do with people’s work ethic or ability to think creatively. Instead, it was about placating the person at the top. Musk, after all, was the man with the vision. He was the one on the hero’s journey." **This is the popular version of the quote. What he actually said was "Yes, sir; I could. I cannot conceive of one because for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa. The difference did not exist. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country. Our contribution to the Nation is quite considerable.” (p. 26 of the transcript of his confirmation hearings for Secretary of Defense.) Substitute Twitter for General Motors and Musk believes this. Source: https://blogs.loc.gov/inside_adams/20... ...more |
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Feb 20, 2024
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| 1591846013
| 9781591846017
| 1591846013
| 4.04
| 18,516
| Nov 05, 2013
| Nov 05, 2013
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really liked it
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I like this kind of book. It’s an irreverent view of the geeks and misfits who created Twitter, perhaps the most used but least necessary software on
I like this kind of book. It’s an irreverent view of the geeks and misfits who created Twitter, perhaps the most used but least necessary software on the planet. That is, until Elon got a hold of it. This book was first published in 2013 and so much has changed since then. Twitter (now X, in what has to be the silliest of rebrandings) has become perhaps less relevant than it ever was. Musk has seen the price fall through the floor and see value evaporate. Fun book if you like business origin stories, but he really needs to do a follow-up, perhaps annually. Just started Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter by Zoë Schiffer, that, so far, provides an in-depth view of Musk’s demolition of Twitter. ...more |
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Dec 14, 2023
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Jan 14, 2024
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| B08WK73TZR
| 4.27
| 383
| unknown
| Oct 26, 2021
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it was amazing
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In a 1955 news show called See It Now Edward R. Murrow asked the inventor of the polio vaccine, Jonas Salk, who owned the patent to the vaccine. Salk
In a 1955 news show called See It Now Edward R. Murrow asked the inventor of the polio vaccine, Jonas Salk, who owned the patent to the vaccine. Salk replied, "Well, the people. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" This book is about a specific case, but it's also about much more, an indictment of the current patent system. Myriad Genetics, a company held the patents on two key genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2. Everyone has those genes, but women with certain mutations in their BRCA genes face much higher risks of breast or ovarian cancer. Through its patents, Myriad had essentially cornered the market on BRCA testing. The company charged more than $3,000 for a test, and insurers didn’t always cover it. Some women weren’t able to get tested because they couldn’t afford it. And the problem went beyond cost: One woman who joined the lawsuit as a plaintiff tested positive for a BRCA mutation but before undergoing surgical removal of her ovaries wanted a second opinion; because of Myriad’s patents, no other lab could confirm the diagnosis. The Association for Molecular Pathology along with several other medical associations, doctors and patients sued the U.S.Patent and Trademark Office and Myriad Genetics to challenge several patents related to human genetics. The suit also challenged several method patents covering diagnostic screening for the genes. Myriad argued that once a gene is isolated, and therefore distinguishable from other genes, it could be patented. By patenting the genes, Myriad had exclusive control over diagnostic testing and further scientific research for the BRCA genes. Petitioners spearheaded by the ACLU, argued that patenting those genes violated the Patent Act because they were products of nature. They also argued that the patents limit scientific progress. Section §101 limits patents to "any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof." The district court granted summary judgment in favor of petitioners, holding that isolating a gene does not alter its naturally occurring fundamental qualities. (Judge Robert Sweet was ably assisted by his clerk who had an advanced degree in the bio-sciences. Sweey's opinion is worth reading as a clear exposition of both the science and the legal aspects of the case. You can read it here**.) The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (specializing in patent cases, it was known as the "nerd's" court) reversed, holding that isolated genes are chemically distinct from their natural state in the human body. In March 2012, Petitioners sought certiorari; and in light of Mayo Collective Services v. Prometheus Laboratories. the U.S. Supreme Court vacated the Federal Circuit judgment and remanded, i.e., sent it back for further consideration On remand, the Federal Circuit again upheld the patentability of the BRCA genes. Again appealed to the Supreme Court which ruled unanimously that genes were not patentable although cDNA was, as it was not a product of nature. The case was unusual in that the Solicitor General's Office took a position in opposition to that of the Patent Office which had declared that since they had permitted patenting of genes already, to reverse that would just mess up previously decided cases. That the SG's office did so, was the result of compromise worked out by many agencies brought together at the behest of Obama to determine what the position of the government should be. (It's worth remembering that Obama's mother had died of ovarian cancer at 56, fighting insurance companies until her death, and his grandmother died of breast cancer.) The compromise was orchestrated by Mark Freeman who serves a gold star for bringing such disparate parties together. It's also notable that Francis Collins, NIH director was adamantly opposed to gene patenting. He had been a co-worker with Mary Kelly and Mark Skolnick in isolating and linking the BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene mutations to breast and ovarian cancers. Skolnick had recognized the monetary potential in their discovery and founded Myriad genetics, over the opposition of Kelly and Collins, which monopolized BRCA testing and made lost of money. There are some very appealing characters: Lori Andrews, the "Gene Queen" an attorney who was upset with the patenting of a test for Canavan Disease; Michael Crighton, whose book Next and NYT op-eds laid some of the public groundwork for the court cases; Dan Ravicher, a successful patent attorney who became disillusioned with the way patents were destroying innovation and who formed his own public interest firm to challenge patents; Tania Simoncelli, the individual most responsible for getting the ACLU interested in gene-patenting; and Chris Hansen, the ACLU attorney who argued the case before the court. A very interesting read that raises all sorts of bioethical, medical, economic, and legal issues. **https://patentlyo.com/media/docs/2010... ...more |
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Kindle Edition
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| 0316441430
| 9780316441438
| 0316441430
| 4.29
| 4,318
| May 14, 2019
| May 14, 2019
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really liked it
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This provocative book could have been entitled "Hubris, or, How Government Does Things Forbidden to Everyone Else." I've been reading a lot of books
This provocative book could have been entitled "Hubris, or, How Government Does Things Forbidden to Everyone Else." I've been reading a lot of books lately about cyber security and warfare as well as a couple related to diplomacy and the discussions that go on behind the scenes in making difficult decisions. Jacobsen adds another thought-provoking element to the discussion. Just what should be the role of secrecy and unaccountability in actions taken by government in a democracy where citizens are expected to play a role in decisions of consequence. Do a few people have the right to make decisions of extraordinary consequence that involve killing without better oversight. All of our previous presidents have had to make decisions that could result in the death(s) of people whose innocence or guilt is determined by just a few others. In the fifties and early sixties, the United States had an inadvertent shadow government consisting of the Dulles Brothers, Allen and John Foster, Director of the CIA and Secretary of State respectively. (See The Brothers by Stephen Kinzer for more detail.) Couple their antagonism and paranoia of perceived Soviet aggression, particularly in Central America with power, and you have a recipe for covert U.S. intervention to prevent the rise of nationalist states or any hint of revolutionary behavior that might disrupt the status quo, i.e. dictatorial governments favorable to U.S. interests. Democratically elected governments were anathema given their messy nature and tendency to support their electors rather than the U.S. In one of her presentations on YouTube, Jacobsen tells the story of a visit she received from one of her sources who had been in Afghanistan and elsewhere. He showed her sons (with her permission) his scoped rifle which, when they looked through it, revealed the veins on leaves across the valley. In another case, that he did not open for her boys, he showed her the contents: a very large knife with a serrated edge, the purpose, he explained, was for when quiet was required. Her reverence was palpable. One of the covert operatives she reports on was Larry Thorne, recipient of the Finnish equivalent to the U.S. Medal of Honor, but also the only member of the Waffen SS to serve in the U.S. military. By all accounts he was an extraordinary individual who, I would guess, would have languished had he lived to see retirement (he was killed in a copter crash in Vietnam.) Thorne took a covert team into Iran to recover material from a U.S. plane that had crashed in Iranian mountains. They were never detected. The CIA operated as a virtual shadow government with little, if any, oversight, often with future unintended consequences. The failure of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, was not just because the U.S. failed to come to the aid of the French, but also thanks to the superior guerrilla tactics of Ho Chi Minh and General Giap who had been taught the techniques by the OSS, precursor to the CIA, to use against the Japanese. The title comes from the motto of the OSS, the covert operations group during WW II. It was "Surprise, Kill, Vanish." In a world filled with euphemisms (Reagan's name for the "kill list committee" (those targeted for assassination) was "preemptive neutralization" , Eisenhower's was "the Health Alteration Committee." The committee's role was to provide authorization for the assassinations.) The euphemisms were to hide the information. Jacobsen maintains in a democracy information must not be buried. The rules of engagement differ from the military to the CIA. The Seals who killed Bin Laden were enrolled for the day(s) in the CIA because the CIA can operate in a country with whom we are not at war. We have teams in 134 countries performing covert actions. Completely at the sole direction of the President. The Bay of Pigs calamity was to have long-term implications for the CIA. Kennedy was so upset with their failure that he reorganized it and placed it in the military structure. This meant that the military would now be in charge of para-military operations. The man he placed in charge of the covert operations was Victor Krulak*, leader of the Marines he had rescued during WW II. (Jacobsen makes the mistake here of assigning the rank of Lt. Colonel to Kennedy when he was in reality a Navy Lieutenant (equal to the Marine rank of Captain). at the time. It was Krulak who was the Lt. Colonel. This change meant that during Vietnam, covert operatives had access to unlimited supplies of materiel that could be dropped to them using the endless resources of the military. As the author gets closer to the present, the descriptions and details get longer, not a bad thing and certainly fascinating, but the book loses sight of the forest for the trees. The recounting of the debacle at Oscar 8, for example. The CIA had developed intelligence that General Giap would be at a certain location at a certain time on the Ho Che Ming Trail. A plan was created to kill or capture him, which, if successful, was certain to shorten the war. SOG (Special Operations Group forces) men would be inserted following carpet bombing of the area by B-52s. Description of the scene was provided by the observer watching from above in a Cessna who desperately tried to warn off the approaching troop helicopters after they realized the bombing hadn't diminished NVA anti-aircraft at all. Unable to warn them off, the observer and his pilot, watched as each chopper was shot down as were 100% of the support aircraft. Only about 25 survived in a huge bomb crater, so it was now a rescue operation. I'm not smart or well-read enough to know the veracity of many of the stories Jacobsen recounts. Kai Bird, an author, for whom I have great respect, and who wrote about the CIA, doesn't think much of her book, complaining she relies to much on Billy Waugh's account of things and that her focus is often conspiratorial and silly witness her book on Area 15 and the one on paranormal phenomena. (https://tinyurl.com/2kdau6ec) I have read enough to know that many of the CIA's activities were rogue operations and of questionable long-term value with innumerable unintended consequences, often getting their presidents in trouble. The question I think Jacobsen should have asked is whether this kind of activity is better than war. Good question. *Krulak was an interesting character. It was he who, after seeing the unique designs of Japanese landing craft, that had a ramp in front which could be lowered, as a Lt. had proposed something similar to the Navy brass. His proposal was shelved and marked as the ravings of some lunatic. Unwilling to give up on the idea, he worked with boat designer Higgins to create the iconic landing craft used throughout the war, and without which, most beach landings could not have been accomplished. See Robert Coram's biography of Krulak. [https://tinyurl.com/y2h8zr8e] ...more |
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Feb 14, 2022
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| 0385542585
| 9780385542586
| 0385542585
| 4.13
| 1,675
| Aug 11, 2020
| Aug 11, 2020
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it was amazing
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Veritas in Latin translates as "truth". Sabar has written a detailed and fascinating book about how that was achieved in the case of a papyrus fragmen
Veritas in Latin translates as "truth". Sabar has written a detailed and fascinating book about how that was achieved in the case of a papyrus fragment that had a series of words that could be interpreted to suggest that Jesus was married (ala DaVinci Code -- a fun book, btw.). Sabar's story contains confirmation bias, hubris, amateur scholars v. professional scholars, and academic jealousies. Truths might take a while to get into the Ivory Tower but they do make it eventually. The temptation to read a concept into something because it matches an agenda we already subscribe to is an overwhelming temptation. Karen King, esteemed professor in the Divinity School at Harvard, fell victim to a forged papyrus that could (! not necessarily) have suggested Jesus had a wife. (That it's much more likely he was gay, given his predilection for hanging out with guys, has been suspected in other quarters.) Nevertheless, this scrap of papyrus was a dream come true for King who had argued the Church's position on women was all wrong. The story is fascinating. Two amateur Coptic scholars, one an atheist, when they had a chance to look at the fragment, realized the translation and wording was lifted verbatim from the Gospel of Thomas and the translation of the word for "my" most likely had a different meaning anyway. Other professional scholars also revealed doubts although their argument that the grammar was inappropriate for the time period didn't convince me. All you have to do is watch television or listen to conversations on the street and you will quickly realize how perverted colloquial grammar can become. Words like notorious, infamous, and famous have all become synonymous, ruining any former subtleties, not to mention confusion of ran and run, nor the infamous "he gave it to you and I" which sends shivers down my Strunk and White. (If you don't know what Strunk and White is, then you're part of the problem.) Not to mention the total destruction of the past tense by the historical present. End of rant. Sabar had followed the story from the beginning and it was his article in the Atlantic that reopened the furor. He had taken the time to track down the origin of the fragment and doggedly sleuthed out the seller of the fragment, something King most assuredly should have done. Along the way, Sabar discusses the history of our attitudes toward marriage and Augustine's obsession with sex as well as the non-canonical Gospels. It all provides very appropriate context. In the end I don't damn King as much as others have in the media. We ALL suffer from confirmation bias and her case is simply confirmation of how powerful it can be. (Puns intended.) ...more |
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Dec 07, 2021
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Nov 28, 2021
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Hardcover
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| 1324001879
| 9781324001874
| 1324001879
| 4.22
| 1,253
| 2020
| Jan 14, 2020
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really liked it
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I am no fan of the Trumps. Nor do I approve of many of the financial shenanigans engaged by him, his company, and his family. But the problem lies pri
I am no fan of the Trumps. Nor do I approve of many of the financial shenanigans engaged by him, his company, and his family. But the problem lies primarily with the loopholes created by legislators at the behest of the rich so they can avoid taxes and get richer all the while sucking at the public teat through government contracts. Trump himself has acknowledged publicly in one of the debates that he used money to purchase influence and garner favor. The Fact is that politicians love power and want to keep it. To do that they need lots of money and people like Trump were there to fulfill their wishes. At a price. "Consultants" hire themselves out to help get politicians elected. Then get hired to work in the government they helped elect. Then leave that government and create lobbying firms to sell the influence and connections they now possess thanks to their time in that government. One of the advantages to owning a casino is how easy it is to launder money and get unregistered loans. His father bailed him out when Trump was close to insolvency and unable to make a bond payment by walking into one of Trump's casinos in Atlantic City and purchasing $3.5 million worth of chips and then just walking out effectively giving his son a free loan. Clearly, following the refusal of American banks to loan him more money following a string of bankruptcies in which they lost millions, the Russian oligarchs stepped in to fill the void. Given what Trump said during the debates, i.e., how he gave money to both parties in order to garner favor and influence, I should not have been surprised with the close political relationships between the Kushner family and the Democrats, especially Bill Clinton, but I certainly was with their connection to Benjamin Netanyahu. Perhaps the Jewish connection and appreciation for Israel stemmed from the horrific experience of their family under the Nazis. (The failure of Trump to denounce the anti-Semitism of his more radical followers is the more surprising given the Kushners' Jewishness and the conversion of Ivanka to Judaism.) Trump benefited from the Bloomberg policy of seeking foreign investment for New York. Bloomberg actively solicited money from overseas, proclaiming that the city needed them to help pay taxes and fund schools and police. The Trumps took advantage of this policy, and so did the Russians, who invested heavily in Trump projects, often buying condos and apartments in his buildings for millions of dollars in cash. It was a marvelous way to laundry money and curry favor with the future president. More than 50% of these units were occupied less than two months out of the year. A less beneficial impact was a doubling of rental costs in the city. Ultimately, this is a very depressing book. The clear lesson is that if you have money, you can flaunt the laws; if you have money you inherited, you can create an image for yourself that may be completely at odds with who you are; that if you have money, the rules that apply to everyone else don't apply to you; and, if you have money, you can buy influence among politicians who then build loopholes for you to drive your trucks through. One wonders what the net effect of the Trump presidency will be. One danger will be, as a reviewer in the Washington Post noted, " cottage industry of Trump biographers and researchers has uncovered so many examples of deceptive, fraudulent and mean-spirited behavior by the president and his family that one succumbs to outrage fatigue." ...more |
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Nov 28, 2021
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Nov 28, 2021
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Hardcover
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| 125024756X
| 9781250247568
| 125024756X
| 4.43
| 1,299
| May 27, 2021
| Jul 13, 2021
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it was amazing
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Flies, flies, and more flies and they were all fat. The city had no cats, dogs, or birds. They had all been eaten by the starving inhabitants. Such wa
Flies, flies, and more flies and they were all fat. The city had no cats, dogs, or birds. They had all been eaten by the starving inhabitants. Such was the way one British observer described the city upon entering Berlin. It was a scene straight out of Hieronymous Bosch with destruction on a massive scale, dead bodies everywhere, and anything that had survived ripped off, literally, by Soviet troops who had arrived first to cart everything east. Fanatical Nazis, following Hitler's final orders to destroy everything, had done their work well, too. The Soviets were a problem from the beginning, never willing to compromise, and dismantling everything they could lay their hands on to be shipped back to Russia. There was conflict between Lucius Clay, the brilliant logistician who had never experienced combat, but who kept the troops supplied with what they needed, and Frank Hawley, general in charge of the American sector of Berlin who didn't trust the Russians. Clay knew they had to figure out a way to get along with the Soviets. He also realized the importance of resurrecting German industry rather than destroying it. It was the only way to keep people fed, not to mention it was important for U.S. industry as a consumer of U.S. goods. The Russians were, then as now, masters of misinformation and sowing mistrust among the allies, deviously spreading lies about each other and other falsities. Those who were surprised by Russian manipulation of American social media during recent elections should not have been. They have many decades of experience. They revealed their distaste for fair play in one anecdote. All the allied leaders were invited to a boar hunt, an invitation that was accepted by all with pleasure. They were surprised when the Russians arrived with submachine guns instead of rifles. When the boars came out of the woods, the Russians opened up with a fusillade that had all everyone else hitting the ground to avoid bullets that were flying everywhere. When the shooting stopped a mass of dead boar lay in front of them having been slaughtered by the massive firepower. That was emblematic of Russian tactics. That first winter was the coldest on record, and the suffering of Germans and refugees was terrible. Meanwhile, the winners were living in splendor and unimaginable comfort. They requisitioned beautiful mansions, had access to the riches of the PX, and had plenty of servants. The Black Market made many rich, and virtually anything could be had for a few cigarettes which had become the de facto currency. The disparity between the conquerors and the people was a worry to some as they feared that unless the allies could get German industry and society back on its feet that Communism, which on its face lacked the same disparities, would become more appealing. The Allies won a stunning election victory in the first election as the allies merely posted signs reminding Germans of the vicious reprisals taken by the Russians. But people can be fickle and tend to follow food rather than politics, so providing sustenance became a priority. Ironies abound. The Soviets themselves should have realized how people can come together to survive sieges; they had their own Leningrad and Stalingrad examples before them. Had Stalin not unleashed the fury of Russian troops to wreck havoc on Berliners by Russian troops, they might have been far less fearful of Soviet domination. Traffic between East and West Berlin remained open during the airlift, which was instituted in 1948 ( a magnificent logistical feat) , the catch being that Westerners crossing the checkpoints had to register with the Soviet authorities thus placing them under Soviet control. So even though they could get food on the Eastern side, few people crossed to risk Soviet control. Electricity was a huge problem. 80% of electricity generators were in the Eastern sector, so that was severely rationed in the West. Since water had to be pumped from deep wells, it had to be rationed as well. One high placed U.S. official remarked of the crisis, "One wrong foot now, and it's World War III." I could write a lot more. Loved this book. ...more |
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Oct 18, 2021
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| 198213173X
| 9781982131739
| 198213173X
| 4.17
| 24,506
| Sep 15, 2020
| Sep 15, 2020
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really liked it
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"Rage" by Bob Woodward is quite interesting on numerous levels. For one, I had not realized how competent Mattis was, nor how close we came to war wit
"Rage" by Bob Woodward is quite interesting on numerous levels. For one, I had not realized how competent Mattis was, nor how close we came to war with North Korea. The media have focused on Trump's mendacity with regard to COVID-19, but the real story is how he pulled the rug out from under those people he had hired and who were trying to do a good job for America. It was impossible for these folks to hide from events, nor did they want to, "Mattis had a light in his bathroom at his quarters in Washington that would flash if he was in the shower when the National Event Conference alert came. A bell would also ring in the bathroom, bedroom and kitchen announcing that the conference was standing up because a North Korean missile had been launched or was ready on the launching pad." Mattis was really concerned about his boss. Mattis had over 7,000 books in his personal library and believed studying and learning was key to developing and making policy decisions. "Mattis believed there were ways for a president to be tough and keep the peace. “But not with the current occupant. Because he doesn’t understand. He has no mental framework or mode for these things. He hasn’t read, you know,” he told an associate. Reading, listening, debating and having a process for weighing alternatives and determining policy were essential, Mattis believed. “I was often trying to impose reason over impulse. And you see where I wasn’t able to, because the tweets would get out there.. ..All the victories,” he said, “were becoming just submerged by this mercurial, capricious tweeting form of decision-making.” Lots of revealing quotes, all taken from the tapes that Trump egotistically let Woodward make. Woodward had the temerity to suggest that the impeachment hearings and criticism of the Ukraine phone call would have gone away if only Trump had just apologized. “I have this reputation of not being willing to apologize,” Trump said. “It’s wrong. I will apologize, if I’m wrong.” “When’s the last time you apologized?” “Oh, I don’t know, but I think over a period—I would apologize. Here’s the thing: I’m never wrong. Okay. No, if I’m wrong—if I’m wrong—I believe in apologizing. This was a totally appropriate conversation. It was perfect. And again, if I did something wrong, I would apologize. Okay?” And Trump truly believes he knows everything and understands everything. In full Lamarckian mode: He reminded me again of his late uncle, Dr. John Trump, a physicist who taught electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1983. “He was at MIT for 42 years or something. He was a great—so I understand that stuff. You know, genetically.” As we all know the book was based on extensive interviews -- all taped -- with Trump. One piece that came across clearly from his own words was that Trump claims as accomplishments things that he has only talked about, not actually done, prison reform, fixing COVID, peace in the Middle East, a great trade deal with China, etc. I recommend reading this book in concert with I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final YearI Alone Can Fix It. ...more |
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Sep 07, 2021
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| 0593298942
| 9780593298947
| 0593298942
| 4.39
| 10,313
| Jul 20, 2021
| Jul 20, 2021
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it was amazing
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I'm sure everyone reading this lived through 2020. This book lets you relive the events in a nifty chronological package that I could not put down. I
I'm sure everyone reading this lived through 2020. This book lets you relive the events in a nifty chronological package that I could not put down. It was interesting to match my recollection against the book's actual account. No one in the Trump administration connected in any way to COVID-19 fared well. Those who tried to warn the president got fired. Those, like Pence, the "oleaginous sycophant", in George Will's memorable characterization, deferentially who did their master's bidding, got burned. The authors clearly had a lot of these folks as sources; even Trump agreed to be interviewed. But that also means the reader must be careful as many of the comments, made with full hindsight, are clearly attempts to put themselves and their own actions in the best light possible. Even where Trump's policies were popular and would have benefited the country, his administration's incompetence prevented their implementation. The Supreme Court turned away several petitions because of incompetent presentation; the proposal to reduce drug costs failed because they ignored the rules, and it was tossed in court; and we all know about the Great Wall. If there is any hero, it has to be General Mark Milley who repeatedly tried to be the adult in the room during meetings and was devoted to the concept of civilian control of the military, which he interpreted as also implying that civilians could not use the military as their own police force. Trump's recurring fantasy was that, as president, all the people and agencies owed personal loyalty to him and him alone, not the Constitution nor its principles. Trump, who had refused to be interviewed for the authors' first book, gladly agreed to two hours for this one. It's recounted in the epilogue and consisted primarily of diatribes against those he had initially lauded but now despised and how he really won the election by the greatest margin in the history of the world. The man doesn't know how to speak in anything but hyperbole and superlatives. Doesn't say much for his ability to judge people. A great read. ...more |
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| 4.21
| 1,131
| Nov 26, 2019
| Nov 26, 2019
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it was amazing
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It's no wonder that conspiratorialists and Trump supporters (a redundancy?) have set out to trash this book. It provides a thorough examination of the
It's no wonder that conspiratorialists and Trump supporters (a redundancy?) have set out to trash this book. It provides a thorough examination of the process and results of investigations over several years by Fusion GPS. Malcolm Nance, author of The Plot to Betray America, is an intelligence and foreign policy analyst. In a recent interview he described how Putin made millions after the fall of the Soviet Union by aligning himself with those who were selling off state property. He had been a ranking official in the KGB that became the FSB, the new Russian spy service and from there moved into the dictatorship role. Spies are good at getting the goods on people and using that information to their own ends. They look for those who love money and have large egos because they will do anything for money and flatter themselves it's for the best. Guess who fit that bill to a Tee. They soon had all sorts of goods on him. The Steele Dossier had the details. Fusion GPS was a small research company that specialized in getting the goods on intricate financial transactions. It was founded by Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, two former Wall Street Journal reporters. They had done no political work, but mainstream GOP, worried about the Trump candidacy in 2016, hired them to research into Trump's background. Fusion had begun its own research into Trump at the behest of a Republican client. It found damning open-source evidence: court documents, corporate bankruptcies and ties to organized crime. It turned to Christopher Steele to get intelligence from inside Russia. Many strands pointed there. What Steele might find was uncertain. “We threw a line in the water and Moby-Dick came back,” Simpson writes dryly. Steele, who had worked for MI6, soon to become a household word for the "Dossier" with its salacious details. Among those they hired was Warren Barrett who had written a detailed book about Trump's early financial dealings.* Their funding originally came from a conservative billionaire. As Trump became more and more acceptable to the GOP, Simpson and Fritsch peddled their research to the Democrats. Almost all of their research was done by examining public documents, especially court cases, depositions, and filings. As Trump gained momentum, the billionaire's support waned and even though Simpson and Fritsch rather despised the Clintons for their ostensible soliciting of funds from countries where Hillary was in a position to make a difference, they agreed to turn over what they had on Trump to the Democrats and continue to do more research, when asked. The contents of the famous dossier have been related elsewhere and far be it from me to go into the prostitute urinating scene. What is much more interesting is the revelation that the Russians had prevented Trump from appointing Mitt Romney as Secretary of State. That implies a shocking level of foreign influence over Trump, or, that someone is not acting on the level. Steele argued that the Russians never would have revealed the urinating incident because they wanted Clinton to be defeated and therefore would try to suppress negative information about Trump. All they needed was the threat of revelation. There does seem to be plenty of "evidence" leading one to speculate just how much influence the Trump campaign was seeking from the Russians. Carter Page's Trump that put him on the FBI's radar has never been explained. Surprisingly, Simpson and Fritsch never trusted Steele and never wanted his allegations to be revealed, but they did feel they were important enough to turn over to the authorities. The authors insist they were not the ones who went to the FBI with the dossier; it was Steele himself. Paul Manafort and his lobbying firm, of which Roger Stone was a partner, had been the subject of attention for several years before Trump sought high office. They specialized in polishing the reputations of dictators, mobsters (particularly Russians who had piles of cash) and strong men. The research began with a survey of all the legal databases for lawsuits that to which Trump was a party. It was a rich vein, indeed. Most businessmen get sued or sue at one time or another, but Trump brought them to a new level. Rather than a one-page list, his went on for dozens of pages and a pattern soon emerged that showed him involved in hundreds of schemes to bilk investors, suppliers, and customers. Fusion's research process was simplicity itself. They hired researchers to scour public databases for information. What they uncovered about Trump was rampant hypocrisy (he hired hundreds of undocumented workers), numerous bankruptcies and illegal actions, not to mention several mob connections. All of this was made available to anyway interested (and willing to pay). Paul Manafort and General Flynn had been involved with the Russians and Turks. The Russians had been seeking to annex Ukraine, a worrisome prospect for western European countries who got much of their natural gas from a pipeline traveling through Ukraine. Manafort was indicted under 12 counts of violating FARA, the Foreign Agents Registration Act, a 1938 law intended to prevent Nazi disinformation campaigns in the United States. (Flynn had retroactively registered when it became obvious that he was lobbying for Turkey. Late registrations are common. He resigned following revelations that he and the administration had lied about the conversations he had had with the Russian ambassador. The fact that he was a registered foreign agent also made him subject to FISA investigations. See the Lawfare article cited below for a more detailed explanation.*) Flynn had had conversations and made promises to the Russians before he was appointed as National Security Advisor (that has to be one of the worst nominations ever) and then lied about those conversations not to the FBI but also his boss. The FBI had tapes of Russians discussing how they could best manipulate Manafort and Flynn who seem to have been motivated mostly by money. The book has many critics who cherry pick assorted charges and speculations. Representative Nunes, of the House Intelligence Committee, flew to Britain to discuss Steele with MI6 and MI5. They refused to meet with him. It was amateur hour at its worst. But the book is not about Steele or the dossier. It's an examination of Fusion GPS, how it worked, and the process it used to collect information for its clients and the failure of the American media to followup on a story that was handed to them. The book is also a story without an end. A really important book for anyone who wants to know the real story behind the headlines. *Trump: The Deals and the Downfall by Warren Barrett, 1992. Interview with the author at Politics and Prose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Hgw0... Other references https://www.motherjones.com/2020-elec... *FISA v FARA https://www.lawfareblog.com/flynn-fis... Logan Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan_Act The now-declassified FBI annex says, referring to Steele: “The most politically sensitive claims by the FBI source alleged a close relationship between the President-elect and the Kremlin. The source claimed that the President-elect and his top campaign advisers knowingly worked with Russian officials to bolster his chances of beating Secretary Clinton; were fully knowledgeable of Russia’s direction of leaked Democratic emails; and were offered financial compensation from Moscow.” Later, the annex elaborates: “The FBI source claimed that secret meetings between the Kremlin and the President-elect’s team were handled by some of the President-elect’s advisers, at least one of whom was allegedly offered financial remuneration for a policy change lifting sanctions on Russia.” ...more |
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Jan 24, 2021
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Nov 08, 2020
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| 3.76
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| Mar 10, 2015
| Mar 10, 2015
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it was amazing
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I picked up this book for $1.00 at Dollar Tree. It was worth forty times that. It was extraordinary. I had a terrible time putting it down. Terrific b
I picked up this book for $1.00 at Dollar Tree. It was worth forty times that. It was extraordinary. I had a terrible time putting it down. Terrific blend of mystery, investigation, spy and war story. The Valley was a long ribbon of ever narrowing gorge leading to the Pakistan border. The furthest outpost from the FOB Omaha was known as Vega and was manned by a platoon under almost constant fire. It was supplied weekly and Lt. Black, relegated to administrative desk duties for some as yet unspecified violation of Army tradition or protocol, has been randomly assigned to investigate a case of a warning shot that had killed a farmer's goat. Black is universally despised by the rest of the troops. His commander, Lt. Colonel Gayley wasn't a bad commander, as things went. He was classic army and Black's description is priceless: True, the beating bureaucratic heart of the Army had a slobbering crush on officers like Gayley. Somewhere in a lab at West Point his instructors had mixed him in a bowl. whipping into him the precise proportions of accountability. flawless attention to detail. chipper optimism, and bold cooperativeness. folding in a hardy tolerance for paperwork and a relentless professional ambition, with a dash of tanned physical perfection for flavor. They had tried and failed many times before, but when they poured Gayley into the mold and pulled him from the oven, they saw what they'd made and cried, 'That's it!' its' then hugged one another and drank reasonable amounts of sparkling cider to celebrate. He was a little of everything and a little of nothing. He yelled at the right people, didn't yell at the wrong people, didn't fail in his duties, didn't cause surprises or embarrassments. He was just so. When Black arrives at Vega, he's met with hostility. The soldiers know Black doesn't have a clue what they go through almost on a daily basis. He thinks the 5-16 is bullshit. They know it's bullshit Just the day before his arrival, a new soldier had lagged just a few feet behind his squad on patrol in the fog and disappeared, to reappear the next day, ball-less, intestines hanging out, tied to a tree in front of the outpost, and alive. But he didn't cry out because he knew anyone who came to help would be shot by snipers in the hills overlooking their post. And they know the villagers they are there to help participate and help the Taliban. Shades of Vietnam. It's all so fucked up. But.... so they all think. Note: The attack on COP Vega bears a striking resemblance to a real event, the attack on COP Keating in 2009. Renehan has referred to it as well as Jake Tapper's book a bout COP Keating. (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...) or Red Platoon by a Medal of Honor winner who was there. (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...) For a summary of that battle see https://mohmuseum.org/copkeating/. Who builds a base at the bottom of a valley surrounded by mountains? ...more |
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Sep 22, 2020
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| 4.10
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| Aug 17, 2020
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it was amazing
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Balkin looks at American history as a series of cycles resulting from four factors all related to polarization and its negative effects on our politic
Balkin looks at American history as a series of cycles resulting from four factors all related to polarization and its negative effects on our political system: a.) generations polarized by an event die off; b.) party coalitions change as they begin to fracture; c.) income inequality becomes more pronounced leading to corruption and political protests; and finally d.) immigration slows in response to events or policies and that diminishes a source of anger. He has identified three of these cycles that cause the rise and fall of political parties and alternate what he calls constitutional rot and renewal through its affect on the courts and constitutional interpretation. Race is a crucial element in the rise and fall of these cycles. Even though Balkin doesn’t explicitly use race as one of the organizing principles of the book, race is clearly a fundamental factor in all of American politics, as he acknowledged in a recent law review article. 1 Each of the cycles has deep connections to successive political struggles in the United States over race and racial equality. The coalitions that rise and fall often do so because of massive disagreements regarding slavery (before the Thirteenth Amendment) and race (after it, often intertwined with immigration.) Nothing is more polarizing than race in American society. The cycles are characterized by what he calls regimes, each dominated by one particular party. The dominant party may not win all the elections in a given regime, but it sets the agenda. The three he identifies are Federalists v Agrarian Republicans and Jacksonian Democrats; Republican domination during and after the Civil War; the Democratic domination during the New Deal; and the waning one we are currently in of the Reagan Republicans. In the first cycle, Jefferson won over John Adams only because of the 3/5ths clause (see also Garry Wills’ book)2 That clause determined the presidential winners for the next half century by giving power to the slave-holding states. Eight of the first nine presidential elections were won by candidates who were plantation owners from Virginia. As there was a requirement that Supreme Court justices had to live in the state where they rode circuit, Jacksonian Democrats made sure that a majority of the circuits were composed of slave-holding states. This, in turn, helped ensure that a majority of Justices were from slave-holding states, or were otherwise sympathetic to the interests of slavery. “The defense and expansion of slavery had become a dominant force in American politics.” The second major regime cycle was the dominance of the Republicans (1860-1932). Again, race was crucial, as the ending of the slave-state dominance became a goal of the new regime. Initially concerned primarily with the rights of newly freed slaves, as the years wore on, the Republican regime became less concerned about racial equality and more concerned about the defense of business interests. Support for black suffrage was also undermined by white violence and terrorism so the goals of the regime changed. As the Democrats began to win more elections (1874 they won both houses) they changed state constitutions to make black voting more difficult and the Republicans interests were more focused on economic issues. Their Supreme Court emphasized the protection of capital and business, in 1888 reinforcing the idea that corporations had the same rights as persons, thus using the 14th Amendment in a way completely foreign to its creators. “These decisions reflected the evolution of the Republican regime during the Gilded Age. The Republican Party transformed from a multi-racial coalition devoted to equal rights for all citizens into a coalition primarily concerned with the protection of business interests, including the interests of railroads and other corporations.” The thirties saw the rise of black migration to the north, where they could vote with less hindrance. The Depression fueled antagonism toward the moneyed classes and big business, so northern Democrats created a new regime that relied on emphasis on individual and civil rights. “Political depolarization allowed cross-party alliances on different issues. But the success of the New Deal coalition always rested on a Faustian bargain concerning race. Southern and northern Democrats agreed on economic issues, but not on race. Democratic unity frayed following the election of Truman who infuriated southern Democrats with his integration of the military and other support for civil rights, so they began to flee to the Republican Party. This was deliberately accentuated by Nixon who courted southern racists. The New Deal coalition was doomed over differences in race. Even though Johnson beat Goldwater handily, he managed to win five southern states, a harbinger of the future. Opposition to desegregation, court-ordered busing and affirmative action became key issues in American politics. A racist demagogue, Alabama Governor George Wallace, managed to attract a large number of Democratic voters in the 1968 presidential election. The Reagan regime was formed by a coalition of Catholics, evangelicals, southern Democrats, and white voters concerned about black civil rights. They swept presidential elections for the next 20 years. Republican politicians and conservative political entrepreneurs discovered that the key to becoming the nation’s dominant party was to fight the culture wars and make issues of race, religion, morality, and culture the central focus of their campaigns. It was very effective at splitting the Democratic Party. Law and order became a euphemism for keeping the blacks in their place. For example, the Reverend Jerry Falwell, who founded the Moral Majority, was first drawn to the New Right not because of opposition to abortion but because the federal government refused to allow tax exemptions for private “segregation academies” that discriminated on the basis of race. Falwell’s decision to focus on abortion came in the late 1970s, well after Roe v. Wade was decided. Continuing the campaign, Trump found multiple ways to invoke race and racial stereotypes both during the 2016 campaign and throughout his presidency. Republican political strategies on culture and race have made Republicans increasingly a white person’s party. Moreover, the party has been losing college-educated professionals and suburbanites – who became independents or Democrats – for white working-class voters, especially in the South and rural areas. Balkin notes this is not a good strategy for a party that wants to remain in power. Indeed, “since George H.W. Bush’s victory in 1988, the Republican Party has won the popular vote for the Presidency only once, in 2004. This is not good news for a political party that wants to remain dominant.” This would seem to imply that the Reagan/Republican cycle is nearing an end. Not necessarily write Balkin. “In the 2020 election, however, Donald Trump attracted a slightly larger number of Black and Latino voters – particularly male voters – than he had in 2016....Trump’s modest inroads with non-white voters probably surprised Democrats, who assumed that these voters would never vote for an overt racist like Trump. But this neglects several factors. First, minority voters are not monolithic. They have conflicting and cross-cutting values, which will become ever more salient as the percentage of non-white voters in the population grows. Second, many non-white voters are culturally conservative and aspire to be prosperous members of the middle class; this may attract them to the Republican Party.” Republican talent for winning in smaller states that hold the balance in the Electoral College may also become a factor, as it did with Trump in 2016 and George Bush in 2000. The Founders feared despotism. Benjamin Franklin lectured his colleagues at the end of the convention: “I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.” To prevent this, the Founders decided on a divided government, a separation of powers. That worked until what Belkin describes as Constitutional rot sets in. It’s characterized by polarization, a lack of trust in government and fellow citizens, increased economic inequality, and failures in decision-making, a whole host of which led up to the Civil War. The Gilded Age was another example of constitutional rot with huge disparities in wealth, vast immigration, polarization, distrust in government because of policy mistakes, and violence including riots and anarchy. Belkin thinks the GOP is coming to the end its regime that began with Reagan and we’re in a situation very similar to the end of the Gilded Age. There’s a donor class of wealthy individuals who seek and gain power to enrich themselves, thereby increasing economic disparity, vast distrust in government and fellow citizens, as well as extreme polarization fueled by the mediatainment empires. As I’m writing this, Kevin McCarthy has just failed the 13th ballot for Speaker, a suitable punctuation to Belkin’s thesis. Related.: 1. Jack M. Balkin, Race and the Cycles of Constitutional Time, 86 MO. L. REV. (2021) Available at: https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/... 2. Wills, G. (2005). Negro president: Jefferson and the slave power. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 3. Conlin, M. F. (2019). The constitutional origins of the American Civil War. Cambridge University Press. 4. Wilentz, S. (2016). The politicians and the egalitarians: The hidden history of American politics. W. W. Norton & Company. 5. Balmer, Randall. " The Historian’s Pickaxe: Uncovering the Racist Origins of the Religious Right." The Changing Terrain of Religious Freedom, 2021, pp. 173-185. 6. Balkin, Jack M. (2019) "The Recent Unpleasantness: Understanding the Cycles of Constitutional Time," Indiana Law Journal: Vol. 94 : Iss. 1 , Article 6.. Available at: https://www.repository.law.indiana.ed... edited 1/6/23 ...more |
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Dec 02, 2020
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Dec 11, 2022
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Sep 09, 2020
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Kindle Edition
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| 1982107294
| 9781982107291
| 1982107294
| 4.07
| 915
| Jan 28, 2020
| Jan 28, 2020
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it was amazing
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I read Kaplan's Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War and discovered it to be a very lucid explanation of the technological challenges faced
I read Kaplan's Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War and discovered it to be a very lucid explanation of the technological challenges faced by the security departments around the world. So naturally, I was anxious to check out his most recent book, courtesy Net Galley, for which I am grateful. It's an immensely enjoyable, if a bit scary, book about the political infighting and territoriality of the armed services and policy development of nuclear weapons. There was a lot of jockeying between the Navy, Army, and Air Force as to who would control "the bomb". and unfortunately much of that in-fighting controlled policy. Curtis LeMay, a brilliant leader in the organization and implementation of the bombing campaigns (read fire-bombing) in Europe and then Japan, as head of the Strategic Air Command was all in favor of a virtual first strike with everything as the SAC bombers were quite vulnerable. (His philosophy was simply to bomb everything.) The Navy, meanwhile, was eager to get funds for the development of large numbers of ballistic missile equipped Polaris submarines, arguing that if the Russians never knew where you were the deterrent effect was far greater and more valuable. The Army, on the other hand, promoted the use of smaller tactical nukes on the battlefield suggesting that a nuclear counterattack to defend Europe against Russian aggression would lead to a Russian withdrawal and peace discussions. The casual manner in which civilian casualties (not to mention military) were discussed was a bit disheartening. The man who replaced LeMay at SAC was Thomas Power. Even LeMay thought he was excessive: "There was a cruelty to Power’s zest for bombing cities. Even LeMay privately referred to his protégé as a “sadist.” When Bill Kaufmann briefed him on the Counterforce strategy at SAC headquarters, Power reacted with fury. “Why do you want us to restrain ourselves?” he screamed. “Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards!” After a bit more of this tirade, Power said, “Look. At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win!” Kaufmann snapped back, “You’d better make sure that they’re a man and a woman.” Power stormed out of the room. " One surprising and note-worthy section was on how Cheney, of all people, was instrumental in reducing the huge number of weapons by half. All of the president's since have failed to reject the no-first-strike policy. Trump, himself, in his on-again, off-again relationship with North Korea didn't hesitate to wave the arsenal and threaten its use. Kaplan describes the abyss that policy makers then and since have become trapped in. The mere idea of how many times cities (people) need to be nuked in order to assure our victory, even as we ourselves are annihilated, inevitably leads to comparisons with Alice in Wonderland. That about sums up the insanity faced by all the presidents since Hiroshima. The importance of policy discussions and analysis worries me when I read that our current president disdains not just the briefing books, but the idea of analysis, preferring to rely on his "gut feeling" no doubt the most attuned gut in the history of the world. But then he's such a self-described "stable genius." A good companion book to McNamara's memoir, "In Retrospect" and Ellsberg's "Secrets." Each is ostensibly more about Vietnam but each reveals much a bout how decisions are made in government. Other titles I will have to read are Kaplan's "Wizards of Armaggedon", Ellsberg's "The Doomsday Machine," and Bruce Kuklick's "Kennan to Kissinger" and I'm sure many others, but we only live so long. ...more |
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Jan 21, 2020
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| 1250191270
| 9781250191274
| 1250191270
| 4.26
| 338
| Jul 30, 2019
| May 07, 2019
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really liked it
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A common definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over while expecting different results each time. That is a good definition of Israel
A common definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over while expecting different results each time. That is a good definition of Israeli-Arab relations. Katz, enamored of the Israeli armed forces, writes hagiographically about the Israeli strike on the Syrian nuclear plant in 2007. Justification for this act of war was the assumption that a nuclear power plant -- Israel has several in addition to nuclear weapons -- could only be used to create the material for nuclear weapons, the presence of which Israel assumed could only be an existential threat to their country. ** There is an assumption that some countries act responsibly when it comes to nuclear weapons and others are not. Israel, while never admitting publicly it has nuclear weapons, clearly does, yet cannot seem to understand why that knowledge would not encourage hostile neighbors to want the same. Another assumption is that democracies will always act more sensibly than authoritarian governments. Recent events in the United States reveal just how fragile that assumption is. It's an assumption Plato warned about a millennia ago when he foresaw the seeds of its own destruction built into democratic governments. Israel has determined (at least the more recent governments) that countries in the Middle East will not (except for itself) be permitted to have nuclear weapons nor nuclear power plants that might be used to create the seeds of a nuclear weapons program. They see it as an existential threat. Then again, they see almost everything they don't like as an existential threat. From his extensive interviews with the decision-makers, advisers and planners — American and Israeli — Katz, the editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post, has written a gripping story of the Sept. 6, 2007 destruction of a secret, nearly completed al-Kabar nuclear reactor in Syria. knowledge of which was confirmed only in March of 2018. The Syrian strike at al-Kabar was not the first time the Israelis felt compelled to act. On June 7, 1981, the IAF destroyed a nuclear reactor in Osirak, Iraq, which was, at the time, a nation ruled by Saddam Hussein, another dictator willing to use chemical weapons. A fascinating portion of the book is devoted to the discussions within the Bush administration on the proper response to the intelligence that had been shared by Israel about the construction of a reactor in Syria. It was the hawks (Cheney et al) v diplomats (Rice eta al.) each with valid concerns and suspecting different outcomes. What was the possibility of a wider war? What would be the reaction of the Russians? Would this help or hurt the Iranians? Was the intelligence legitimate. It was an example of how government should work, but often doesn't. Cheney, ever the hawk and advocate of preemptive strikes, whatever the issue, was alone in thinking the U.S. should bomb the site. Everyone else in the Cabinet thought otherwise. The Iraq war, begun on faulty intelligence, was not going well and the feeling was that each administration gets just one war; trying to conduct two would lead to disaster. A more nuanced role proposed by a few was that the facility should be destroyed, but better that Israel should do the bombing. It would reinforce the view that Israel had rebounded from the Lebanese debacle and help issue a warning that Israel could handle its own affairs and protection and was not the minor stepchild of the U.S. The author claims at the end of the book that it was less about the strike than decision-making. That's certainly true. But what a messy process, indeed, influenced less by reality than perceptions, ideology, religion, and politics. **It was just learned that Syria fired a missile that landed perilously close to an Israeli nuclear plant in April 2021. Israeli responded with a retaliatory strike. Agence France has reported that Israel is suspected to have between 100 and 200 nuclear weapons. [https://www.france24.com/en/middle-ea...] ...more |
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Aug 2021
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Sep 18, 2019
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| 0544972007
| 9780544972001
| 0544972007
| 3.78
| 235
| Jun 2019
| Jun 18, 2019
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it was amazing
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It wasn't long into the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that Rumsfeld realized the quantum difference between earlier wars and the new situation. Fo
It wasn't long into the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that Rumsfeld realized the quantum difference between earlier wars and the new situation. Formerly, satellites and airplanes would take still pictures which would then be analyzed and bombed or whatever. Airfields and buildings did not move so there was time. Even tanks moving on a road had limited options where they might proceed and their speed was easily known. Now, the bad actors didn't even belong to a state, they were an amorphous group of individuals who could disappear from a location with the start of an ignition. Predator drones had been around for a while and had increased in sophistication. They could now fly higher and had cameras with resolution such that they could pick out an earring from 20,000 feet. What Rumsfeld wanted was video to follow a moving target. Enter "Stare". These video cameras coupled with a drone like the Predator could follow a man for hours, circle and wait if need be. One great missed opportunity was the targeting of Osama Bin Laden before 9/11. He was spotted and followed but for some unexplained reason it was decided not to fire on him. A lost opportunity, but then perhaps it was figured he hadn't done anything yet. Technical problems in developing the Gorgon Stare were overcome by melding commercial hardware and software. Cell phone cameras were linked together in an array that provided 176 times the megapixel of just one cell camera and then they discovered the best software for manipulating the huge number of images the cameras collected was in video game boxes. The result was stunning. The result was wide-area extremely sensitive cameras and recording. It has been tested by several agencies under the guise of those manufacturing the devices, usually done in secret because of fears the public might not be especially receptive to the idea of being under constant surveillance. Proponents point to assorted successes: catching bad guys after crimes have been committed by following them back to their dwellings, maximizing resources in wildfires, traffic control in real time, even something as prosaic as helping drivers find parking spots at large events. NASCAR hired one to watch over a race and the operator, bored to tears, realized after watch a car spend two hours trying to find a parking place when he could see several available, that had drivers had access to his information, and they had purchased just one soda during the time saved, that NASCAR would have paid the fee for the surveillance several times over. There are myriad uses for such wide-area-surveillance, the technology for which has exploded. It used to be thought that 100 megapixels (your phone camera has about 10 megapixels) would be plenty. The latest model now sports 40 GIGApixels and there is no end in sight. The cameras are smaller, the processing power and storage cheaper. The civilian applications are numerous. One demonstration over an unnamed city in the south suggested the expensive (but getting cheaper) flights could pay for themselves in catching traffic violations. Hit-and-run drivers were identified as were the causes of accidents not to mention blown through stop signs and traffic signals. Another use has been to monitor the health of underground pipelines. The technology is already there to share usage, so you could have firefighters monitoring wild fires while others watched traffic patterns, and still others looked for crimes being committed especially now that artificial intelligence is becoming more sophisticated and able to make split-second decisions. A good book to read in connection with Paul Scharre's An Army of None Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War. It's fascinating if a bit frightening; another case of technology outstripping policy. (Bear in mind the Supreme Court is populated with justices who don't know how to use email.) Check out https://www.pss-1.com/what-is-wide-ar... ...more |
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| 3,027
| Oct 02, 2018
| Oct 02, 2018
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it was amazing
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Every new technology is disruptive and many of those in the past bear an uncanny resemblance in their effects to those of today. Each has been heralde
Every new technology is disruptive and many of those in the past bear an uncanny resemblance in their effects to those of today. Each has been heralded as providing the means for everlasting peace. Moveable type democratized book production making reading almost a required skill yet contributed to religious upheaval. The telegraph and then the telephone made communication virtually instantaneous and while they brought people closer together provided the means for generals to control their troops from afar. Radio gave FDR the means to go around the newspapers who had pushed back against his third and fourth terms. His fireside chats reduced his message to just short bursts of ten-minute talks (tweets of the day, if you will) while Goebbels noted that the rise of Nazism would never have been possible without radio. Television forced politicians to change their habits and locked in the public to news as entertainment. It ended the Vietnam War by bringing battle scenes into living rooms. The Internet, still in its infancy really, is equally disruptive by changing the way we link to one another. Twitter, live streaming, and blogging have become essential parts of the distribution of information, both real and fake. Virtually everyone has a smart-phone which even radically alters the battlefield. The Russians used the geo-location transmissions of Ukrainian soldiers cellphones to zero in their artillery on those troops during that brief war. Cyber warfare includes more than just hacking a network. It's possible to cause damage by hacking information as well. Singer and Brooking cite the seesaw battle for Mosul in Iraq as just one example. ISIS used Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook to manipulate likes and the streams to promote their own POV. By manipulating images, followers, and hashtags they were successful in winning converts and battles. The U.S. and Iraqi armies were totally unprepared for this propaganda warfare, but they learned fast, and the #freemosul tag soon appeared countering the ISIS streams with those more favorable to U.S. actions. Just as Amazon has disrupted commerce, so had social media disrupted warfare and politics. Terrorists now show their work online. They use Twitter routinely. Russia tries to destabilize democracies by fomenting distrust of civil institutions with fake material. The result is that war, tech, and politics have blurred into a new kind of battleground that plays out on our smartphones. Singer and Brooking, using a combination of stories and research, lay out the problems facing us with new ways of conducting warfare. But it works both ways. Those Russian soldiers who shot down MH17 were identified through painstaking crowd sourcing work online by tracking soldier's emails, tire treads, registration numbers, all sorts of clues that were found online. Their work for the Dutch Investigation team was hacked by Russian hackers attempting to hide the Russian involvement. Propaganda can now go viral. Fake stories are re-tweeted by confederates whose followers often unwittingly re-tweet the false information and soon millions have received precisely the message intended by the original poster who may be a governmental entity seeking to destabilize an adversary. The audience is huge as is the volume. Around 3.4 billion people have access to the Internet -- about half the world's population. Roughly 500 million tweets are sent each day and nearly seven hours of footage is uploaded on YouTube every second in 76 languages. "No matter how outlandish these theories sound, they served their purpose successfully. 'The disinformation campaign [around the flight] shows how initially successful propaganda can be. . . . Obviously the ...lies were eventually debunked, but by then their narrative had been fixed in many people's minds.' That is the overarching goal of information hackers: 'The more doubt you can sow in people's minds about all information, the more you will weaken their propensity to recognize the truth.'" Trump was one of the first to recognize the power of Twitter. Following his massive bankruptcy and declining interest in the Apprentice TV show, Trump began to tweet thousands of messages, bombarding the twitter-sphere with provocative, false, and often incendiary tweets. Soon his financial peccadilloes were forgotten, obliterated by his Twitter-storm. His infamy rose, but he didn't care as he valued the attention more than anything. It's a lesson he has never forgotten. As Alexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica, said, "it matters less that what you say is true, only that it be believed." The recent video of Nancy Pelosi appearing to be drunk and the Trump's attempt to doctor the CNN video showing that Acosta had inappropriately touched a white House intern are just a couple examples of internal use of social media to influence popular thought. Lifewire.com, a technology website based in New York, defines an internet troll as a modern version of the same mythical character. They hide behind their computer screens and go out of their way to cause trouble on the Internet. Like its mythical predecessor, an internet troll is both angry and disruptive - often for no real reason. The effects can be completely out of proportion to their size. The question remains what should governments do, if anything, to shut down trolls. In some cases they are freedom fighters trying to rally against a corrupt government. Would it be better to simply keep the Internet as open as possible? Satire, parody, misleading content, imposter content, fabricated content and manipulated content all need to be seen separately from each other and dealt with accordingly. How is that to be accomplished? Who will control it? The "Like" phenomenon is an important part of the campaign. The more "likes" a piece of news or comment gets on a news or social site, the more likely it is to be believed. People are more likely to believe a headline if they have seen a similar one before. “It didn’t even matter if the story was preceded by a warning that it might be fake,” the authors write. “What counted most was familiarity. The more often you hear a claim, the less likely you are to assess it critically.” That's what irritates me about the media's obsession with Trump's Tweets. By repeating them incessantly and parsing them repeatedly, they are validated. That, to some extent, was the genius of the Russian interference in the last election. You don't need sophisticated hackers to implement it either, just a bunch of people promoting a certain meme or thought until it becomes a tsunami overwhelming any other rational discussion; it becomes "the truth." Slick videos, click bait, and viral memes become the new weapons in undermining democracy effectively grounding billion dollar fighter jets which then become obsolete as the war has already been lost. As an aside, I remember listening to a commentator who suggested that the Phil Donahue show started the descent into irrationality. He was the first to invite callers on the show live to express their opinion. Soon all the shows were doing it. Callers became the experts and soon everyone was his own expert bypassing the value of people who had actually studied an issue. A bit simplistic perhaps, but there may be a grain of truth there. Fascinating book. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Aug 25, 2019
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Aug 25, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 154176238X
| 9781541762381
| 154176238X
| 3.75
| 2,043
| Jun 04, 2019
| Jun 04, 2019
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it was amazing
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Cult of the Dead Cow is the facetious name of an early group of hackers (white hat) that began as a computer bulletin board (BBS). Consisting origina Cult of the Dead Cow is the facetious name of an early group of hackers (white hat) that began as a computer bulletin board (BBS). Consisting originally of bored but talented teenagers who enjoyed reverse engineering phone systems and early computer software, they evolved into "hactivists" (hackers with a mission), many of whom went on the become influential and and important members of the establishment. Menn follows the individual careers of cDc members who initially focused on security flaws in Windows. They were completely apolitical but then morphed into " human rights activists and internet freedom advocates, eventually becoming security advisers for powerful institutions. The hackers all started out delighting in discovering security holes in early Windows software but were dismayed by the reaction of the software giant when these holes were pointed out to them. The reaction was a large ho-hum. suggesting that and if you wanted to have a secure system, "go buy Windows NT. That's an irony since no one "buys" software, you buy a license which immunizes the software developer from accountability and permits them to see access to a product that's defective. Their dismay is illustrated by this anecdote. The cDc had created a program that revealed the flaws in Windows but it was also a tool that could be used for less than savory purposes. They released it free to everyone as open source so others could revise and manipulate it. The establishment wasn't sure what to make of it. The FBI, while trying to discourage its release decided it didn't violate any existing laws. The anti-virus business was not pleased as it also showed how weak their software was, but many security professionals decided it was a necessary evil if for no other reason than to force Microsoft to fix their security holes. “Microsoft is evil because they sell crap.” One of the cDc members took a copy of the program on a CD to a Microsoft higher-up. He said thanks and was about to insert it into his CD-ROM drive when she, horror-stricken, asked if his computer was networked. It was. She then asked if it was sand-boxed (programs loaded were quarantined until proven safe.) No, was the response, to which she, shocked, pointed out to him that he was just about to load a program from someone he didn't know, a self-identified hacker, into a computer that was not sand-boxed and connected to his entire network and therefore completely vulnerable. That was their state of mind. Eventually, major businesses realized how important these hackers were and many moved on to become security professionals. As their prominence grew so did the counterculture environment of the early movement begin to fade and they became more political especially after the Chinese student movement was squashed. They began to create software intended for use by dissidents and other cultural reformers, anyone anti-authoritarian. Under Obama, through Hillary Clinton’s State Department, the hacktivism championed by Brown and the cDc to help with dissident subversion of foreign governments would become American foreign policy, part of a program informally known as “internet in a box.” While generally laudatory, Menn doesn't like all of them. Julian Assange and Jake Applebaum of Wikileaks and the TOR project are not portrayed sympathetically, "draping themselves in morality while serving other causes.” Assange was known for his sexual straying and his current behavior certainly distracts from the more positive aspects of Wikileaks. Menn is also not afraid to criticism the industry proposing that cybersecurity problems today are at least partly the result of terrible business and engineering decisions made decades ago. These decisions caused problems that still exist. Whether the movement of the hacktivists into the world of corporate and individual greed will be able to remedy some of those structural problems without becoming part of the problem themselves remains to be seen. To some extent it's the old story: countercultural anti-authoritarian types find success and join the corporate elites. How many Vietnam's most vocal protesters went on to become a prominent part of the culture they had so despised? Beto O'Rourke, one of the early cDc members is now running for President and another is security chief for Facebook! How well did that go... Great read. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Aug 11, 2019
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Aug 11, 2019
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0199918112
| 9780199918119
| 0199918112
| 3.83
| 1,318
| Jan 01, 2013
| Jan 03, 2014
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it was amazing
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Singer and Friedman argue that cyber knowledge needs to be a requirement in schools. All the kids are now in cyberspace yet there is little formal edu
Singer and Friedman argue that cyber knowledge needs to be a requirement in schools. All the kids are now in cyberspace yet there is little formal education about the insecurity of simple passwords, the importance of OS updates, and problems inherent in social networking as a mechanism to reveal personal information. Most common password="password" and the 2nd most common is "123456". Common words are easily hack-able. One high level executive told his IT people he only wanted a one letter password, that he was too busy to be bothered to type in a long one. By the end of the day he had labelled himself to everyone in the corporation as a really stupid person and one who didn't care about security. With complexity comes vulnerability. BMW had designed a high tech car and when authorities in Paris couldn't figure out why only a certain new model of BMW was being stolen they reviewed CCTV cameras and discovered how the thieves could hack into the car's software, unlock the doors, reprogram a blank key and just drive off, all in the pace of five minutes. Terrorists use social networking to get their word out and often with the unwilling connivance of the West. One terrorist cell was using a web hosting company located in Texas to promote their campaign. The hosting company had sixteen million web pages, had not seen the offending pages, and did nothing until someone happened to point out to them what they were doing. Humans are often the weak link in the chain. In a famous "candy drop" attack, malevolent actors left flash drives around a military base. Sure enough, a soldier picked one up and inserted it in his machine to see what was on it. It took the Army 14 months to clean up the damage to all its machines. People will often just give out their passwords to official sounding individuals who may or may not be really who they say they are. In another example, some soldiers in Iraq took pictures inside their helicopters and posted them to a picture website. There was nothing classified in the pictures but each picture contained locational information in the meta-data and terrorist were able to destroy the helicopters in a mortar attack by knowing their exact location. Emails, pictures, virtually everything that moves on the Internet has meta-data attached to it and just a routine search of social sites can reveal all sorts of information about people they would rather not have known Just defining what is or is not an attack can be problematic. The authors identify several types. What the response should be may depend on the severity or the result. Often even experts can't agree on what constitutes an attack. How about denial of service attacks. If it simply interferes with gamers ability to finish a game it's not as serious as preventing banks from interacting with their customers or delivering a utility. Is stealing someone's identity in a confidentiality attack just as serious as stealing the plans of a new fighter jet? In one war game sponsored by the U.S. the opposition team changed the shipping labels on shipments intended for troops and they received toilet paper instead of ammunition and MREs. NSA surveillance practices have caused tension throughout the world. In one instance, the Dutch, were about to refuse any access to cloud services in the Netherlands to U.S. companies. Some foreign countries have now begun to institutionalize the Internet as a basic human right. Authoritarian regimes, on the other hand, see internet freedom as a threat to their governments. Censorship is seen as a tool for stability. In Thailand it's against the law to defame the monarch; in Britain it's a hobby. Cultural differences abound. Internet governance is still up for grabs. A really interesting book, aimed at the informed layperson. The problem with books of such currency is that they really lack timelessness because of the speed with which the technology changes so the reader has to assume the possibilities have advanced far beyond what the author has explained. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Aug 2019
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Aug 01, 2019
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1610394151
| 9781610394154
| 1610394151
| 3.71
| 262
| Feb 02, 2016
| Feb 23, 2016
|
it was amazing
|
As I write this John Bolton and Trump seem to be planning a major war with Iran. They are not paying attention to the incredible damage that can be do
As I write this John Bolton and Trump seem to be planning a major war with Iran. They are not paying attention to the incredible damage that can be done by state-sponsored or even independent actors to infrastructure by cyber-attacks. Iran caused millions in damage to Saudi oilfield computers; Russia virtually shut down Estonia for more than a week to punish them for their support of Ukraine; the U.S. and Israel wrecked havoc on Iranian centrifuges with a cleverly designed malicious worm; Iran caused millions in damages to Sheldon Adelson's empire after he made injudicious remarks regarding nuclear war and Iran; the list goes on and on. The web is used to wage war and spy on, coerce, and damage other countries. Israel and the U.S. is want to derail the Iranian nuclear weapons program. India wants to prevent Pakistani terrorists from using smartphones to coordinate attacks. Brazil has plans to lay new fiber cables and develop satellite links so its Internet traffic no longer has to pass through Miami. China does not want to be dependent on the West for its technology needs. These new digital conflicts pose no physical threat—no one has ever died from a cyber-attack—but they serve to both threaten and defend the integrity of complex systems like power grids, financial institutions, and security networks. What makes these attacks so problematic is that they can be designed to hide the source and can be initiated from virtually anywhere. The U.S. is so dependent on the Internet that even the slightest upheaval in some router farm could make bank deposits unavailable, the electrical grid unreliable, just to mention a few potential problems. State-backed hacking initiatives can shut down, sabotage trade strategies, steal intellectual property, sow economic chaos, and paralyze whole countries. Segal insists that MAD (mutually assured destruction - the bedrock of nuclear war prevention) applies here as well, i.e., that countries would be afraid of massive retaliation were they to engage in widespread harm to another country. Insidious targeted attacks could be more useful and determining where they are coming from is often a laborious and time-consuming process. Hacking tools themselves can come back to haunt their creators. "Cyber-security firm Symantec discovered that Chinese hacking group, APT 3 acquired National Security Agency (NSA) hacking tools used against them in 2016 to target U.S. allies. APT 3 is responsible for various attacks on the United States and has been tracked by the NSA for over a decade. Symantec does not believe the group stole the U.S. code, but rather acquired it from an NSA attack on its computers. APT 3 then used the hacking tools in cyber-attacks involving five countries in Europe and Asia. This is not the first time U.S. agencies’ cyber weapons have fallen into the wrong hands." (from Adam Segal's blog, May 10, 2019) Those hacking tools remain viable almost indefinitely and are impossible to eradicate The issues raised by Segal are mind-boggling. The cyber-attack by the North Koreans for example were supposedly in retaliation for SONY's production of a sophomoric comedy ridiculing the North Korean leader. 200 TB of emails and information was retrieved and then used as blackmail to force SONY to not release the movie. What role should states play in such an attack. For that matter what state did SONY belong too? They are a multi-national corporation. What nation should be responsible for its defense? The attack on Estonia by the Russians in 2007 raises additional issues. Russia (or its non-state actors) complained about the removal of a statue in Tallinn. Estonia refused to back down and soon a huge denial of service attack began that virtually shut down the country for about three weeks. Estonia is one of the most wired countries in the world having decided following the fall of the Soviet Union that it would be the most effective and economical way to build infrastructure in the new country. They had a strong cadre of programmers and IT people. Access to the Internet is considered a basic human right there. Western and Estonian analysts were confident the attacks came from a Russian source but were they state coordinated or simply vandals. And since Estonia was a member of NATO, what was NATO's responsibility in helping t defend against an attack on Estonian infrastructure? Ultimately, several western countries helped in thwarting and reducing the effects of the attacks and the resulting permanent damage was minimal, but for a while the country was at a virtual standstill. The Estonian response has been to develop a large volunteer (larger than their army) group of IT specialists who help to defend their cyber infrastructure. In the DDOS attacks on Georgia, the Russians claimed these were independent folks just wanting to express their opinions. So the freedom to launch cyber-attacks has now morphed into freedom of expression.The situation there was different, everyone having learned from Estonia and Georgian traffic was routed through the U.S. with help from Poland and Estonia. Whether that made the U.S. complicit in the conflict or not was problematic. Hacking of social media has become extremely sophisticated and the U.S. is woefully behind except as used by a certain U.S politician who dominates the Twitter world. The technique is to drown out the opposition. China used massive troll tweets and bots to overwhelm any discussion of opposition to their regime in Tibet. The Russians spread disinformation, anything to provoke and incite assorted groups. The idea is to confuse and promote their POV to the exclusion of others while preventing any kind of rational or reasonable debate on any issue. Doctored photos are spread about the opposition and soon it becomes impossible to separate reality from the simulated. Ultimately Segal is optimistic, forecasting that if not pacific, the world will at least have come to terms with cyberspace and information will flow freer and be less dangerous. I remain more skeptical. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jul 21, 2019
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Jul 21, 2019
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1476763259
| 9781476763255
| 1476763259
| 3.90
| 2,988
| Mar 01, 2016
| Mar 01, 2016
|
it was amazing
|
This is an excellent book, a very readable, veritable page-turner that details in clear, understandable terms, the technology, bureaucratic in-fightin
This is an excellent book, a very readable, veritable page-turner that details in clear, understandable terms, the technology, bureaucratic in-fighting, and events that have led us to where we are today, on the cusp of a revolution in surveillance, intelligence, and warfare. It's almost a truism that generals fight the last war instead of the present one. That is certainly obvious from reading Kaplan's very disturbing history of cyber vulnerabilities in the United States. In spite of the efforts of numerous people in the CIA and NSA to alert the Defense establishment to their vulnerabilities, top ranking officers, for whatever reason, ignored the warnings or even misused the information they were given by the intelligence people or failed to take advantage of that information. For example, during the first Iraq war, General Shwarzkopf was provided with the locations of the fiber optic switching locations that carried all the traffic between Saddam's headquarters and his army in Kuwait. Schwarzkopf was happy to bomb those installations, but when the transmission were replaced with microwave towers he bombed those, too, against the advice of the intelligence types who knew that microwave transmission were easily monitored via satellite and available for information harvesting. Generally, the military establishment was very skeptical of charges their networks were insecure. Ironically, it was a movie, War Games, that motivated not just hundreds of hackers but also Ronald Reagan, who, after bringing in experts who assured him all that was possible, began a campaign to analyze networks. Repeatedly, the military had to be shown just how insecure the networks were. There was the inevitable overreaction by the NSA who wanted to install a chip (the Clipper chip) in every computer in the country that would monitor transmissions and provide a backdoor for the intelligence community to monitor everything. That failed, but thanks to Snowden, we know that it wasn't needed and the NSA is basically collecting every phone and message transmission in the U.S. close to 2 billion per day. There was always tension between the NSA and technologists side and civilians. The NSA wanted "zero days" (holes open for exploitation in software) left open so they could exploit them, while those holes could be used by foreign governments and malicious hackers to wreck havoc on the civilian population: good for national security, bad for individuals. When Bush was elected in 2000, all the work of Richard Clarke and George Tenet was thrown out the window. Bush wanted nothing to do with Clinton initiatives or people so their warnings about Al Qaida were dismissed. Cheney and Bush were more interested in threats from Russia and Iran so they could build their missile defense system. In the panic following 9/11, bureaucratic in-fighting for control of the money that was being thrown at terrorism went into overdrive. Verisign (the company that controls domain and registration web names) had analyzed web traffic and discovered that 80% of all the internet traffic in the world flowed through one of two major distribution points in the United States. The NSA realized that was a goldmine for information gathering and with the help of Mitch McConnell pushed through features of the Patriot Act that eventually permitted the NSA to "store" (collecting information on U.S. citizens without a warrant was illegal) virtually all the internet traffic in the world. The ramifications were enormous. If for example, an American citizen were to have phoned a number anywhere in the world that "might" have had terrorist connections, the NSA could go to a FISA court (all in secret) to get a warrant to track other calls plus calls made by others this person might have called and calls those people made, looking for "connections". Before you know it, that one call, which might even have been accidental, would result in collecting relationships of millions of Americans, thus completely subverting the prohibition against surveilling Americans. One can only wonder at the immense power granted numerous federal agencies by the Patriot Act, which permits so much to be done in secret. When I was director of a college library, we were very concerned by one feature that pertained to libraries. The FBI could walk into the library, demand to see the patron records of anyone, and it was a federal crime not just to refuse, but also even to mention to anyone that they had asked for it. Fortunately, the library community designed its software to delete any trace of books that had been checked out. Having read Kaplan's book, I suspect now they wouldn't bother to ask as they have the capability to examine all the metadata of all the internet and phone traffic anywhere in the world. One can only wonder how Trump, were he smart enough, might use such incredible power. Then again, if I were he, I would be very afraid of what those same agencies might have on him. J. Edgar Hoover is salivating in his grave ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Apr 26, 2019
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Apr 26, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 4.08
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really liked it
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Apr 2024
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Feb 20, 2024
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| 4.04
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really liked it
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Dec 14, 2023
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Jan 14, 2024
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| 4.27
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it was amazing
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not set
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Mar 07, 2022
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| 4.29
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really liked it
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not set
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Feb 14, 2022
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| 4.13
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it was amazing
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Dec 07, 2021
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Nov 28, 2021
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| 4.22
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really liked it
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Nov 28, 2021
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Nov 28, 2021
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| 4.43
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it was amazing
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Oct 18, 2021
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Oct 18, 2021
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| 4.17
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really liked it
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not set
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Sep 07, 2021
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| 4.39
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it was amazing
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Aug 16, 2021
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Aug 16, 2021
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| 4.21
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it was amazing
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Jan 24, 2021
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Nov 08, 2020
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| 3.76
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it was amazing
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not set
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Sep 22, 2020
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| 4.10
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it was amazing
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Dec 11, 2022
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Sep 09, 2020
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| 4.07
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it was amazing
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Apr 02, 2020
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Jan 21, 2020
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| 4.26
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really liked it
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Aug 2021
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Sep 18, 2019
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| 3.78
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it was amazing
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Nov 02, 2019
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Sep 18, 2019
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| 4.27
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it was amazing
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Aug 25, 2019
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Aug 25, 2019
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| 3.75
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it was amazing
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Aug 11, 2019
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Aug 11, 2019
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| 3.83
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it was amazing
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Aug 2019
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Aug 01, 2019
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| 3.71
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it was amazing
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Jul 21, 2019
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Jul 21, 2019
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| 3.90
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it was amazing
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Apr 26, 2019
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Apr 26, 2019
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