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27. september 2005
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William M. Arkin, blogging on WaPo, argues that the importance of Able Danger is greatly exaggarated.
The Pentagon is hiding something. But it’s not what Weldon thinks.
First, to debunk the myths:
- As best as I can determine, having spent tens of hours talking to military sources involved with the issue, intelligence analysts did not identify anyone prior to 9/11, Mohammed Atta included, as a suspect in any upcoming terrorist attack.
- It is not even clear that a "Mohammed Atta" was identified, let alone that it is the same Atta who died on 9/11.
- No military lawyers prevented intelligence sleuths from passing useful information to the FBI.
- Able Danger itself was not an intelligence program.
As a representative of U.S. Special Operations Command said at a special Pentagon briefing arranged on September 1, Able Danger "was merely the name attributed to a 15-month planning effort" to begin building a war on terrorism. This is the real story.
So why the secrecy today?
Using the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and associated lists of suspect individuals as a starting point, LIWA [Land Information Warfare Activity] began to compile databases of "associated" individuals, and then they began to "data mine" their mountains of collected records to find links between them. What they ended up with—and what is still being hidden today—is the questionable (read: potentially illegal) collection and acquisition of information on American citizens before and after 9/11.
The article outlines some interesting details of US government and military use of data mining and social network analysis to combat the threat of global terrorism before 9/11.
The rubbishing of earlier statements about Able Danger is, unfortunately, based on anonymous and unspecified sources. Considering that there are people on both sides with clear political agendas, I'd treat both this and the earlier sensationalised claims with a lot of caution.
Arkin promises a follow-up tomorrow.
11:16:51 PM 
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Norwegian teenagers are much more skeptical of immigrants compared to six years ago:
The number of Norwegian teenagers who are sceptical about foreigners and say they feel immigrants threaten Norway's national identity has nearly doubled in the past six years, according to a poll published on Monday.
Forty percent of Norwegian high-school students agreed with the statement that immigrants "pose a serious threat to our national distinctive character", according to the poll, which was taken in connection with a countrywide school vote ahead of Norway's general election on September 12.
That is nearly double the number of immigrant-skeptical youths found in a similar poll from 1999, according to Norwegian daily Aftenposten, which published the study.
Knud Knudsen, a sociology professor at the Stavanger University in western Norway, said: "This must be seen in connection with the terror acts in recent years in London, Madrid and the United States, where immigration has been linked to acts of terror and terror threats."
The talking heads argue that this is evidence of racism and xenophobia. Maybe to some extent, but the wording of the question is really left open to be interpreted by the questioned teenagers themselves. Do they mean some immigrants pose a serious threat? Surely, that is a most reasonable fear, in light of the terror acts, some widely reported honour killings and disgusting customs like female genital mutilation. Or do you interpret the question to state that most of immigrants are a threat, a most dubious proposition, or maybe all, which would be absurd? I don't think such badly worded polls really tell us very much in itself, but the fact that the number who answered yes increased so dramatically tells us more.
11:05:39 PM
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MySQL 5.0 is out (release candidate). The big new features would be stored procedures, named views and triggers, very much missed by serious database developers in past versions.
Now, if anyone could develop some serious .Net controls for it, I'd be very happy...
9:03:21 PM
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Just so you know it: looking at babies violates their human rights.
A West Yorkshire hospital has banned visitors from cooing at new-born babies over fears their human rights are being breached and to reduce infection.
A statement from Calderdale Royal Hospital in Halifax said staff had held an advice session to highlight the need for respect and dignity for patients.
On one ward there is a doll featuring the message: "What makes you think I want to be looked at?" [...]
Debbie Lawson, neo-natal manager at the hospital's special care baby unit, said: "Cooing should be a thing of the past because these are little people with the same rights as you or me.
It's probably going to be in Amnesty International's next annual report.
12:36:34 PM
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Microsoft is entering the lucrative keyword advertisement market, taking on Google AdSense.
MSN AdCenter, which debuted in Singapore at the end of last month, allows advertisers to launch highly targeted online keyword search-based campaigns, with the ability to include or exclude target customers based on geographic location, gender and age and to run ads only during certain times and days.
The system competes with Google's AdWords program and will eventually replace a keyword-based advertising program MSN contracts out to Yahoo. It has a simple user interface and is notable for its use of customer profiling, taking advantage of the data MSN gathers from its more than 9 million subscribers.
And the online ad market is indeed growing very fast.
As of June, advertisers had spent $5.8 billion to place ads online this year, a 26 percent increase compared with the first six months of 2004, according to a new report.
This record spending was once again led by ads linked to Web search results, said the Interactive Advertising Bureau, or IAB, which released the report Monday in conjunction with PricewaterhouseCoopers. Spending on search-related ads reached $2.3 billion, a 27 percent increase compared with the same period last year, the report said.
No tree is growing into heaven, though. I can't help thinking that so much online content, so many online companies, are now totally dependent on and living off advertising on the Net. True, the situation now is not directly comparable to the dot.com bubble, but an economic recession will hurt online advertising budgets pretty fast, and very hard. Since many online advertisers are often themselves dependent on advertising income, there is a danger that once there is any decline in ad revenue, this will become a self-reinforcing process that hurts the online world disproportionally hard.
There is also the issue of supply and demand. There is a massive increase in money available for online advertising, and services like AdSense makes it possible for even minor advertisers to reach an audience. Yet, the explosive growth of the blogosphere is one of the factors contributing to a serious rise in supply of sites eager to carry advertising, too. I can't help thinking this situation is quite unstable.
8:26:55 AM
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Christopher Hitchens continues to give it to the "anti-war" left, a movement he once belonged to but is now totally alienated from.
No sane person would march with neo-nazis even if there was something, by chance, you agreed with them about. So why legitimize pro-fascist groups like International ANSWER by letting them front the anti-war protests?
To be against war and militarism, in the tradition of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, is one thing. But to have a record of consistent support for war and militarism, from the Red Army in Eastern Europe to the Serbian ethnic cleansers and the Taliban, is quite another. It is really a disgrace that the liberal press refers to such enemies of liberalism as "antiwar" when in reality they are straight-out pro-war, but on the other side. Was there a single placard saying, "No to Jihad"? Of course not. Or a single placard saying, "Yes to Kurdish self-determination" or "We support Afghan women's struggle"? Don't make me laugh. And this in a week when Afghans went back to the polls, and when Iraqis were preparing to do so, under a hail of fire from those who blow up mosques and U.N. buildings, behead aid workers and journalists, proclaim fatwahs against the wrong kind of Muslim, and utter hysterical diatribes against Jews and Hindus.
Some of the leading figures in this "movement," such as George Galloway and Michael Moore, are obnoxious enough to come right out and say that they support the Baathist-jihadist alliance. Others prefer to declare their sympathy in more surreptitious fashion. The easy way to tell what's going on is this: Just listen until they start to criticize such gangsters even a little, and then wait a few seconds before the speaker says that, bad as these people are, they were invented or created by the United States. That bad, huh? (You might think that such an accusation—these thugs were cloned by the American empire for God's sake—would lead to instant condemnation. But if you thought that, gentle reader, you would be wrong.)
Who'd ever expect that one of the Bush administration's most effective public supporters should be a British Trotskyite? And why, oh why, isn't the Bush and Blair administrations more effectively defending themselves? It has been left mostly to outsiders to explain both the rationale for the war, why it was necessary to do it, and why it is necessary to keep at it.
8:09:13 AM
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Another one bites the dust:
Al Qaeda in Iraq’s leadership suffers another blow. Sheikh Abdullah Abu Azzam, purportedly al Qaeda’s number two in command, has been killed by Coalition forces in Baghdad during a raid after the Coalition received a tip on his location. That the Coalition found him indicates excellent actionable intelligence was available, and that he was in Baghdad indicates he may have been leading the recent spate of attacks in the capitol.
Abu Azzam, speculated to be al-Zarqawi's potential successor, was a ruthless mass murderer and very important in al-Qaeda's operations. His demise is yet another blow for the terrorists in Iraq, who appears to have dropped any pretence of actually fighting for any conceivably realistic strategic goals beyond mindless slaughter.
1:15:44 AM
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Finally an excellent editorial article about evolution in the mainstream press: Rick Weiss and David Brown in the Washington Post shows they have understood why biologists, and indeed anyone with knowledge of evolution, think it is outright ridiculous to propose 'Intelligent Design' or any other myth-based explanation of origins deserves any hearing in science classes. It also rubbishes the popular conception that evolution is in any way a theory in crisis.
When scientists announced last month they had determined the exact order of all 3 billion bits of genetic code that go into making a chimpanzee, it was no surprise that the sequence was more than 96 percent identical to the human genome. Charles Darwin had deduced more than a century ago that chimps were among humans' closest cousins.
But decoding chimpanzees' DNA allowed scientists to do more than just refine their estimates of how similar humans and chimps are. It let them put the very theory of evolution to some tough new tests.
If Darwin was right, for example, then scientists should be able to perform a neat trick. Using a mathematical formula that emerges from evolutionary theory, they should be able to predict the number of harmful mutations in chimpanzee DNA by knowing the number of mutations in a different species' DNA and the two animals' population sizes.
"That's a very specific prediction," said Eric Lander, a geneticist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Mass., and a leader in the chimp project.
Sure enough, when Lander and his colleagues tallied the harmful mutations in the chimp genome, the number fit perfectly into the range that evolutionary theory had predicted.
Genetics have offered a totally independent test of predictions made by Charles Darwin almost 150 years ago. Darwin had really no idea how traits were inhertied from parents to offspring, and this posed major challenges for his theory. When the DNA was discovered, it provided an independent test of the basics of the theory, which it passed with flying colours, and evolutionary biology made countless predictions about nature that we since have been able to test. As this example shows, the modern synthesis of Darwin's theory is much stronger today than it has ever been, and those who claim the opposite can rightfully be considered ignorant or dishonest.
Simply said, ID, or any other form of creationism, doesn't offer any idea that can serve to improve our knowledge of nature.
1:03:33 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.10.2005; 12:26:11.
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