Australia’s intelligence agencies reviewed
If you can find anything substantive – anything at all – in the unclassified summary report of the Independent Review of Australia’s intelligence community, perhaps you should apply for a job at one of the agencies reviewed.
Defence and security links post
The reaction to Barack Obama’s announcement of the Defence Strategic Guidance document is as good an opportunity as any to open a thread to discuss defence-related matters. The document puts a little bit more meat on the bones on some [...]
More foreign policy: US Marines and tripwires
There’s been lots of discussion of what the de-facto basing of up to 2,500 US Marines at a training area in the Northern Territory means. There’s been blather about Guam, Okinawa and Chinese missile strike capability, for instance. Perhaps the [...]
CIA’s fake vaccination drive to get bin Laden
The Guardian reports that the CIA set up a fake vaccination drive in Abbottabad, Pakistan to obtain DNA samples from individuals in the bin Laden compound. The CIA organised a fake vaccination programme in the town where it believed Osama [...]
ASIO gets wider remit, to furious debate…only kidding
Apparently, ASIO’s role in economic espionage and counter-espionage is to be stretched so broadly that the catch-all of “national security” can no longer always be applied:
Crowd sourcing radiation detection
Isabelle Stengers, one of the most interesting and provocative defenders of science against both social constructivists and those who believe they’re speaking in the name of Nature, published an interesting op-ed on the ongoing, and increasing problems of trust between [...]
Dive! Dive! Dive!
It seems that the Very Serious People are determined to make one of my predictions for 2020 come true before 2011 is out, and bring on a full-blown public panic a mature and reasoned discussion about the strategic implications of [...]
Scotland Yard requires budget cuts
What else can you say in response to the shocking but not all that surprising story in The Guardian of an undercover cop spying on environmental activists. Undercover policeman Mark Kennedy posed as “Mark Stone”, a professional climber and environmental [...]
Google grows a pair?
Google. We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we [...]
Afghanistan – one soldier's story
As previously noted, finding out what’s going on with the Australian deployment in Afghanistan is almost impossible. Therefore, this piece by the ABC’s Hungry Beast is a fairly rare data point, and a fascinating one: …Eventually, we found one currently-serving [...]
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