11-25-2016 | Distant Roar

On September 29, 1944, FBI agents burglarized the New York apartment of a middle-aged man who worked at a record company selling Communist songs. He want by the name of Arthur Alexandrovich Adams, and he was a skilled mechanical engineer. He had probably come to the United States in the 1920s, and he may have been one of the first deep-cover Soviet spies in America. He was certainly the first the FBI ever found.

The black-bag job produced a bonanza.

Adams had notebooks that made little sense to the FBI agents who saw them. "He was in possession of a document that talked about some type of water," FBI agent Donald Shannon, a member of the Bureau's Soviet espionage squad, said in an oral history interview six decades later. "We weren't sure of the information so we turned it over to the Atomic Energy Commission for evaluation." Upon expert review, the notes revealed intimate knowledge of highly technical and deeply secret phases of the Manhattan Project. They included work on heavy water, a linchpin of secret research into the atomic bomb.

"We were informed that the person who had his certainly had some information on America's atomic research," Shannon said. Adams soon was indicted by a federal grand jury in New York under the foreign agents registration law -- and the State Department ordered him deported.

Eighteen months had passed since the FBI's first clue that Stalin's spies were trying to steal the bomb. The second clue was now in hand.

Hoover understood in broad terms what the Manhattan Project was about. The War Department had told him about its own search for spies at Los Alamos. He began to realize that control of the bomb was not simply a matter of winning the war. It was about national survival after the war was won.

Not long before Pearl Harbor, Hoover and his aides had written about the wartime goals of British intelligence: "to be in a position at the end of the war to organize the world." Hoover thought that role rightfully belonged to the United States. The atomic bomb would be the key to its supremacy.

-- Tim Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI

05-09-2016 | Leverage Points

The metropolis is a terrain of constant low-intensity conflict, in which the taking of Basra, Mogadishu, or Nablus mark points of culmination. For a long time, the city was a place for the military to avoid, or if anything, to beseige; but the metropolis is perfectly compatible with war. Armed conflict is only a moment in its constant reconfiguration. The battles conducted by the great powers resemble a kind of never-ending police campaign in the black holes of the metropolis. No longer undertaken in view of victory or peace, or even the re-establishment of order, such "interventions" continue a security operation that is always already in progress. War is no longer a distinct event in time, but instead diffracts into a series of micro-operations, both military and police, to ensure security.

The police and army are evolving in parallel and in lock-step. A criminologist requests that the national riot police reorganize itself into small, professionalized, mobile units. The military academy, cradle of disciplinary methods, is rethinking its own hierarchical organization. For his infantry battalion a NATO officer employs a "participatory method that involves everyone in the analysis, preparation, execution and evaluation of an action. The plan is considered and reconsidered for days, right through the training phase and according to the latest intelligence ... there is nothing like group planning for building team cohesion and morale."

The armed forces don't simply adapt themselves to the metropolis, they produce it. Thus, since the battle of Nablus, Israeli soldiers have become interior designers. Forced by Palestinian guerrillas to abandon the streets, which had become too dangerous, they learned to advance vertically and horizontally into the heart of the urban achitecture, poking holes in walls and ceilings in order to move through them. An officer in the IDF, and a graduate in philosophy, explains "the enemy interprets space in a traditional, classical manner and I do not want to obey this interpretation and fall into his traps. I want to surprise him! This is the essence of war. This is why we opted for the methodology of moving through walls, like a worm that eats its way forward."

Urban space is more than just the theater of confrontation, it is also the means. This echoes the advice of Blanqui who recommended (in this case for the party of insurrection) that the future insurgents of Paris take over the houses in the barricaded streets to protect their positions, that they should bore holes in the walls to allow passage between them, break down the ground floor stairwells and poke holes in the ceilings to defend themselves against potential attackers, rip out the doors and use them to barricade the windows, and turn each floor into a gun turret.

...

The metropolis also produces the means of its own destruction. An American security expert explains the defeat of Iraq as a result of the guerrillas ability to take advantage of new ways of communicating. The US invasion didn't so much import democracy to Iraq as it did cybernetic networks. They brought with them one of the weapons of their own defeat. The proliferation of mobile phones and internet access points gave the guerrillas newfound ways to self-organize, and allowed them to become much more elusive targets.

Every network has its weak points, the notes that must be undone in order to interrupt circulation, to unwind the web. The last great European electrical blackout proved it: a single incident with a high-voltage wire, and a good part of the continent was plunged into darkness. In order for something to rise up in the midst of the metropolis and open up other possibilities, the first act must be to disrupt its perpetual momentum. That is what the Thai rebels understood when they knocked out electrical stations. This is what the French anti-CPE protestors understood in 2006 when they shut down the universities with a view toward shutting down the entire economy. This is what the American longshoremen understood when they stuck in October 2002 in support of three hundred jobs, blocking the main ports on the West Coast for ten days. The American economy is so dependent on goods coming from Asia that the cost of the blockade was over a billion dollars per day. With then thousand people, the largest economic power in the world can be brought to its knees. According to certain "experts," if the action had lasted another month, it would have "produced recession in the United States and an economic nightmare in Southeast Asia."

The Invisible Committee, The Coming Resurrection p. 58-61

05-03-2016 | Minor Quibbles

The first global slaughter, which from 1914 to 1918 did away with a large portion of the urban and rural proletariat, was waged in the name of freedom, democracy and civilization. For the past five years, the so called "war on terror" with its special operations and targeted assassinations have been pursued in the name of these same values.

Yet the resemblance stops there: at the level of appearances. The value of civilization is no longer so obvious that it can be brought to the natives as a package. Freedom is no longer a name scrawled on walls, for today it is always followed, as if by its shadow, with the word "security." And it is well known that democracy can be dissolved in pure and simple "emergency" edicts -- for example, the official restitution of torture in the US, or in France's Perben II law.

In a single century, freedom, democracy and civilization have reverted to the state of hypotheses. The leaders' work from now on consists of shaping the material and moral as well as symbolic and social conditions in which these hypotheses can be more or less validated, in configuring spaces in which they can seem to function. All means to these ends are acceptable, even the least democratic, the least civilized, the most repressive. It was a century in which democracy regularly presided over the birth of fascist regimes, civilization consistently rhymed -- to the tune of Wagner or Iron Maiden -- with extermination, and in which, one day in 1929, freedom showed its two faces: a banker throwing himself from a window and a family of workers dying of hunger.

Since then -- let's say, 1945 -- it's taken from granted that manipulating the masses, secret service operations, the restriction of public libraries, and the complete sovereignty of a wide array of police forces were appropriate ways to ensure democracy, freedom and civilization. At the final stage of this evolution, we see the first socialist mayor of Paris putting the finishing touches on urban pacification with a new police protocol for a poor neighborhood, announced with the following carefully chosen words: "We're building a civilized space here." There's nothing more to say; everything has to be destroyed.

The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, p. 85-86

cf. The Triple Revolution Memorandum

04-29-2016 | Wise Guys

The B. R. Fox Company was located in a duplex apartment on Connecticut Avenue in downtown Washington, DC. While B. R. Fox was supposedly the only tenant, the apartment in fact served a number of purposes and housed an assortment of intriguing characters. For one thing, it was used by Lou Conein as a safe-house for the vanguard of the DEA's Special Operations Group (DEA-SOG). That group numbered a baker's dozen of handpicked Latino CIA officers transferred at "Black Luigi's" behest to the DEA. Appointed to the DEA post by Nixon, Conein's task was to establish an international intelligence network capable of destroying the narcotics traffic.

Accomplishing this would be no easy matter. The DEA suffered from internal corruption, and its best agents were consistently outmaneuvered by Oriental, French and Cuban smugglers trained in techniques by their own countries and the CIA. Lacking sophistication in spookery, the DEA compiled a stunning record of failures and desperately required the expertise available in Langley. The CIA, however, was reluctant to participate in any serious effort to destroy the heroin trade, regarding its own mission as more important. Moreover, many of those involved in the trade as financiers and couriers were themselves valuable CIA agents.

Conein resolved the dilemma of DEA impotence and CIA recalcitrance by having the Dirty Dozen transferred from one agency to the other. His orders were to create a clandestine service within the DEA, and each of the dozen agents would be regarded as a future DEA "chief of station" in a foreign country. There they'd establish their own apparats, run agents, and carry out a de facto guerrilla war on dope, all of it masterminded by Lou Conein. And, because he distrusted the DEA itself, Conein chose to isolate his proteges from other agents in DEA headquarters. He did this by having them rendezvous in the La Salle apartment building leased to B. R. Fox -- but paid for, in large part, by the DEA.

Besides harboring the Fox Company and the Dirty Dozen, the apartment was also headquarters for Security Consultants International ("SECOIN"). Conceived by Mitchell WerBell (already the proprietor of the Central Investigative Agency), SECOIN was run by John Muldoon, who viewed Washington's huge embassy population as a likely clientele for debugging services. Finally, the LaSalle Building duplex served as a kind of crash pad for freelance spooks.

"It was bizarre," Eliot Spindel says. "Muldoon would show up every day with a stack of cards about three inches high. He'd sit down at his desk and, one by one, make phone calls to the numbers printed on the cards. He'd do that until noon or so, then go out with Conein for lunch, drink beer for a couple hours, and come back to make more phone calls till five o'clock...that's all he ever did. It was unnerving! I still don't know what it was all about. But the place really jumped when WerBell came through on one of his missions. It was like a visit from the general, you know?"

It must have been. At the time, WerBell was simultaneously wired into deals involving the "liberation" of Abaco, the establishment of a submachine gun factory in Costa Rica, the sale of his arsenal to Robert Vesco, and a variety of more routine transactions, described earlier. He was, in addition, under pressure from the CIA to leave the country, and according to Eliot Spindel, he was preparing to establish an offshore version of the B. R. Fox Company on Abaco. It's entirely possible that CIA pressure and the off-shore plan were related. Since the 1969 Omnibus Crime Bill, manufacturers of clandestine weapons and surveillance devices have shifted their bases to locations in the Caribbean, establishing factories and shops in mini-nations that have neither the motives nor the funds needed to regulate their export. According to WerBell, the CIA and DEA wanted him in an offshore position so that he could make and sell clandestine weapons in near-absolute secrecy.

- Jim Hougan, Spooks p. 138

04-28-2016 | Time Limits

Half a century ago H. G. Wells observed, correctly enough, that mankind faced a race between education and catastrophe. But what he failed to recognize was that something like catastrophe has become the condition for an effective education. This might seem like a dismal and hopeless conclusion, were it not for the fact that the power system, through its own overwhelming achievements, has proved expert in creating breakdowns and catastrophes.

...

Admittedly the partial disasters of war, though no longer locally limited, had through the ages grown too familiar to bring about a sufficient reaction. During the last decade, fortunately, there has been a sudden, quite unpredictable awakening to prospects of a total catastrophe. The unrestricted increase of the population, the over-exploitation of the megatechnical inventions, the inordinate wastages of compulsory consumption, and the consequent deterioration of the environment through wholesale pollution, poisoning, bulldozing, to say nothing of the more irremediable waste-products of atomic energy, have at last begun to create the reaction needed to overcome them.

This awakening has become planet-wide. The experiences of congestion, environmental degradation, and human demoralization now fall within the compass of everyone's daily life. Even in the open country, small communities are now forced to take political action against canny enterprisers seeking to dump wastes from distant cities in rural areas that already have difficulty enough in coping with their own rubbish and sewage. The extent of the approaching catastrophe, its visible nearness, and its dire inevitability unless countermeasures are rapidly taken, have done far more than the vivid prospects of sudden nuclear extinction to bring on a sufficient psychological response. In this respect, the swifter the degradation, the more likely effective measures against it will be sought.

- Lewis Mumford, The Pentagon of Power p. 411

11-30-2015 | Lost Keys

PDF: The Dilemma of Covert Action - Alan K Strait

Origins of the American Security Council - ISGP

Deep Thought - Blake Masters

Disreputable Men - Jeff Wells

11-22-2015 | Dead Memes

Cosmological Infancy - Xenosystems

ISIS x Open Source Warfare - John Robb

[PDF] The Management of Savagery - Abu Bakr Naji

[PDF] Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance - NSF

11-21-2015 | Fitness Landscapes

"The first assumption is that states are the principal actors in international politics, and they operate in what is called an anarchic system.

Now when you use the word "anarchy," for most people that means murder and mayhem. That's not what it means in International Relations speak. Anarchy is simply an ordering principle that says that there is no higher authority that sits above states. It is the opposite of hierarchy. Anarchy means that states are like pool balls on a table."

Why John J. Mearsheimer is Right - Robert Kaplan



Underscoring the seriousness of these issues are the conclusions of retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who was asked last year to review the method for tracking the Defense Department's most sensitive programs. Vines, who once commanded 145,000 troops in Iraq and is familiar with complex problems, was stunned by what he discovered.

"I'm not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities," he said in an interview. "The complexity of this system defies description."

Via: Washington Post



"All normal countries ruthlessly punish treason and traitors, and these terms are often expansively defined in the aftermath of a bitter war. Perhaps in a topsy-turvy Monty Python world, wartime traitors would be given medals, feted at the White House, and become national heroes, but any real-life country that allowed such insanity would surely be set on the road to oblivion. If Tokyo Rose’s wartime record had launched her on a successful American political career and nearly gave her the presidency, we would know for a fact that some cruel enemy had spiked our national water supply with LSD.

The political rise of Sen. John McCain leads me to suspect that in the 1970s some cruel enemy had spiked our national water supply with LSD."

Ron Unz, American Pravda: When Tokyo Rose Ran For President

11-17-2015 | Obvious Mistakes

Is Strategy Dead? - Zenpundit

The Monetization of Text - Amy Merrick

Gotham in the Russian-American SpyWar - The XX Committee

The Supervillains Guide to Saving the Internet - Fredrik deBoer

05-04-2015 | Target Rich

Cops Need More Rights Than You, Citizen - Pope Hat

Baltimore Riots as Altruistic Punishment - Interfluidity

On ISIS and Their Puppet Masters - Sic Semper Tyrannis

State Complicity and 43 Dead Students in Mexico - Ryan Deveraux - Part 2

04-21-2015 | Impending Doom

The Subterranean Future of War - Benjamin Runkle

Understanding "The ISIS Files" - Der Spiegel

Anti-Elitism in America Today - Adam Rose

The Art of the Turf War - Gary Brecher

04-19-2015 | Sunday Sermon

"All normal countries ruthlessly punish treason and traitors, and these terms are often expansively defined in the aftermath of a bitter war. Perhaps in a topsy-turvy Monty Python world, wartime traitors would be given medals, feted at the White House, and become national heroes, but any real-life country that allowed such insanity would surely be set on the road to oblivion. If Tokyo Rose’s wartime record had launched her on a successful American political career and nearly gave her the presidency, we would know for a fact that some cruel enemy had spiked our national water supply with LSD.

The political rise of Sen. John McCain leads me to suspect that in the 1970s some cruel enemy had spiked our national water supply with LSD."

Ron Unz, American Pravda: When Tokyo Rose Ran For President

04-14-2015 | Paranormal Activity

Jallianwala Bagh Massacre - Jimmy Wales

The DEA Dragnet and David Headley - Emptywheel

A Brief History of Yon Yemen Clusterfuck - Gary Brecher

Unmanned Swarms and the Third Offset in Military Technology - Avascent

04-04-2015 | Smoke Signals

The Islamic State: From al-Qaeda Affiliate to Caliphate - Ahmed S. Hashim

Critical Assessment on the Psyops Campaign Against ISIS - Charles Cameron

How Many Fighters Does ISIS Really Have? - Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

ISIS x Twitter: A Census - Brookings

03-03-2015 | Red Horizon

Open Season on the Tech Elite - John Robb

The Coming Wars -- Seymour "Trust Me" Hersch

Stafford Beer, Cybernetics and Occupy - Thomas Swann

Analysis of the Information Networks from Insider Trading Cases - HBR

02-20-2015 | Gathering Storms

Post-Mortem on Operation Merlin - Gareth Porter

Notes on Brainwashing Cults - LessWrong

Inventing the Crusades - Thomas Madden

Libya Unravelling - Jon Lee Anderson

02-18-2015 | Deceptive Practices

Dark Side Epistemology - Yudkowsky

Valerie Jarrett: Obama Whisperer - Noam Scheiber

The Asshole Theory of International Relations - Thomas Wells

Why Goldman Sachs Doesn't Care What You Think - Epicurean Dealmaker

02-15-2015 | Unintended Consequences

The Disappeared and Mexico's New Dirty War - NACLA

Obama and the Global War on Whatever - XX Committee

Murder Hobos and the Supply Curve of Evil - project multiplexer

Coming soon - the Giga-death world of the mutants - Bruce Charlton

FLASHBACK Colonel Blotto | Scientific Persuasion | Best of #OCCUPY

01-01-2015 | Our Blight Future

Spaced Repetition - gwern

Vladislav's Masterpiece - IP

Good Americans - John Judge (RIP)

The Pirate Insurgency - Kevin Flaherty

ISIS and the Cockroaches of War - Zenpundit

The Maldon Institute & John Rees - Chip Berlet

We Are All Intelligence Agents Now - Daniel Geer

The Infinite Space Between Words - Coding Horror

The Henry Ford Sociological Department - Jalopnik

On North Korea & The United States - Timothy Shorrock

On the Multi-Dimensional Failures of the F-35 - The War Nerd

3 Business Lessons from the Sinaloa Drug Cartel - Fast Company

The Thirteen Commandments of Neoliberalism - Philip Mirowski

A Word About Banks and the Laundering of Drug Money - Golem XIV



THE MODEL GOT IT WRONG. ALL THE THEORETICAL UNDERPINNINGS OF VALUATION HAVE BROKEN DOWN AND THE VOLATILITY HAS BROKEN ALL HISTORICAL AND WORSE CASE BANDS. - Ina Drew

12-25-2014 | Bethlehem Burning

A Brief, Uncharitable History of John Negroponte - Frank Morales

Seven Impressions of the Islamic State - Juergen Todenhoefer

Selections from "Unrestricted Warfare" - Cryptome

Taste the Color Revolution Rainbow - Vice