Buried in a post from Ben Wittes at Lawfare is a suggestion (in response to HRW's Tom Malinowski) that the Espionage Act shouldn't apply outside US territory to non-citizens: [T]his statute has a nuance that makes one pause before treating it as just another extraterritorial application of American law. That nuance is that the entire moral force of a...
The government of India is protesting TSA's "humiliating" pat-down of its ambassadress to the United States. On Dec 4, [Ambassador Meera] Shankar was subjected to a rigorous public "pat down" at the Jackson-Evers International Airport after a visit as a guest of the Mississippi State University. According to The Jackson Clarion-Ledger, Shankar was singled out from a group...
This message just went out on Twitter: WE ARE ATTACKING WWW.VISA.COM IN AN HOUR! GET YOUR WEAPONS READY http://bit.ly/e6iR3X AND STAY TUNED. #ddos #wikiealsk #payback Sure sounds like war to me. I have no idea what the weapons actually consist of, but they were apparently effective earlier today against Mastercard. I wonder if Visa's "troops" are now metaphorically massing on the other...
John Perry Barlow has made a call to arms (via Twitter): "The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops." That's a little grandiose to my taste. But among the many interesting things going on here is the prominent role of nonstate actors. The battleground players include: Domain name services: On the first day,...
It's easy to laugh at the USG for its directives to employees re the handling of Wikileaks cables (as the NYT put it this morning, a case of "shutting the barn door after the horse has left"). The idea that a State Department employee talking about the cables in a Starbucks, much less with her spouse at home, would constitute...
Well, not quite that broad, but almost. This letter from career services at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs (posted here) is a stunner: Hi students, We received a call today from a SIPA alumnus who is working at the State Department. He asked us to pass along the following information to anyone who will be applying for...
And why not? Assuming that the feds don't catch up with this operation at this rate (by my calculation) we have more than four years of daily document dumps ahead of us. From Foreign Policy, let's welcome Wikileaked to the blogosphere. Today's highlights include more accounts of inebriated and otherwise less-than-sparkling eastern European and central Asian leaders. (Material from these realms...
From an interview with Jennifer Rubin, a new conservative blogger on the WaPo: Bolton has begun to talk openly to conservative gatherings and media about his interest in a 2012 presidential run. "I'm seriously considering it," he told me in an interview, in large part because of the "lack of foreign policy debate." Having gotten past the idle...
The Wikileaks episode seems to be turning to the USG's advantage, at least domestically: it's provoking a lot of sympathy for the government as an entity. That's a rare sentiment these days. Leave aside angry calls for Assange's head (almost literally), people are actually feeling sorry for the USG. One way that's being expressed is to compare the government to private...
I suspect this will be a much bigger story than the previous Iraq and Afghanistan disclosures, mostly because there will be something here for everyone. I'm not sure that the State Department looks particularly bad, as Timothy Garten Ash explains. It shouldn't be a revelation to anyone that diplomats sometimes do something that looks like spying. This is much more...
Here's an interesting story from FP's The Cable: Several dozen countries can't get checking accounts with which to operate their embassies in Washington. Angola is the lead example: the Bank of America shut down its accounts here and no one else appears to want its business. The Angolans, frustrated and running out of options, are considering reciprocity measures, such as closing...
Richard Hasen writes in Slate: There are of course good reasons to limit foreign money in the electoral process—it's just that none of them are compatible with the Supreme Court's First Amendment absolutism. Unlike American citizens, foreign individuals, governments, and associations are unlikely to have allegiance to the United States. A foreign entity may even have military...
