TSA: Total Security Abyss

While a TSA agent pawed my hair bun this weekend, presumably on high alert for improvised explosive bobby pins, I pondered the latest news on the Somalia airplane terror attack. Intelligence officials released video footage of airport employees in Mogadishu handing a laptop to a jihadist suspect before he boarded Daallo Airlines Airbus Flight D3159 last week.
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Unsafe at Any Web Speed: Intel Chairs Say Take Down Healthcare.gov

When the Democratic and Republican chairmen of the congressional intelligence commitees both agree that HealthCare.gov, Obamacare’s version of Internet Hell, should be taken down for security reasons, it’s time to pay attention. Democrat Dianne Feinstein, who has chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee for the last five years, startled Bob Schieffer on CBS’s Face the Nation today when she said, “I felt and I said this directly to the president’s chief of staff, that they ought to take down the website until it was right. They believe that they need to keep it running and that they can sort out the difficulties.” One way to interpret that is that the political survival of President Obama’s signature achievement takes precedence over the cybersecurity of all Americans. As I wrote last month, the White House has shown an astonishing lack of concern for Obamacare’s security vulnerabilities.

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What We Lose if We Give Up Privacy

Peggy Noonan - What is privacy? Why should we want to hold onto it? Why is it important, necessary, precious? ✧ Is it just some prissy relic of the pretechnological past? ✧ We talk about this now because of Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency revelations, and new fears that we are operating, all of us, within what has become or is becoming a massive surveillance state. They log your calls here, they can listen in, they can read your emails. They keep the data in mammoth machines that contain a huge collection of information about you and yours. This of course is in pursuit of a laudable goal, security in the age of terror. ✧ Is it excessive? It certainly appears to be. Does that matter? Yes. Among other reasons: The end of the expectation that citizens' communications are and will remain private will probably change us as a people, and a country.

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College Republicans Deemed Security Threat, Refused Entrance to Obama’s Campus Speech

WARRENSBURG – Ten College Republicans were dubbed a security threat and refused admittance to President Barack Obama’s speech at the University of Central Missouri on Wednesday.

Despite the fact that the students had tickets to the event, security personnel turned them away at the door to the recreation center where Obama gave a speech on economic policy, telling the group it wasn’t about their politics but the president’s safety, State Treasurer of the College Republicans Courtney Scott told The College Fix.

The students, some of whom donned Tea Party T-Shirts and others who wore patriotic or Republican-inspired clothing, had protested the president earlier in the day on campus, but had put away their signs and said they were ready to simply listen to Obama when security shut them down – and even told them to leave the vicinity and stay several hundred yards away from the rec center.

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Obama’s Lost in Space

Administration approves controversial export license allowing sensitive space technology transfer to China

The Obama administration recently notified Congress that it has agreed to license exports of sensitive U.S. space technology to China from a U.S. company that was fined in the past for illegally supplying space support that improved Chinese ballistic missiles.

The State Department’s Directorate of Defense Trade Controls, the unit that licenses exports of sensitive technology, notified House and Senate leaders on Wednesday of plans to go ahead with an export license for a deal between Space Systems/Loral and AsiaSat, a company owned in part by a Chinese state-run investment company linked to past satellite deals in the 1990s.

Additionally, U.S. government reports indicate that China’s People’s Liberation Army, which is currently engaged in a major space warfare program that involves anti-satellite missiles and lasers, used AsiaSat communications satellites in the past.

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Interesting local letters

Gazette-Times, 12/15/2010 by Linda Weimer - Letter: There’s nothing funny about soda that references Communism. (Also read some interesting comments.

Gazette-Times, 12/15/2010 by Jane Newton - Letter: Thanks to FBI, TSA; local Muslims could start anti-terrorism effort. Read More......

FYI: Copy Machines, a Security Risk?

CBS News
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Analysis: US role in Iraq doesn't end just yet

BREITBART.COM, 6/20/2009 by Robert Burns - WASHINGTON (AP): U.S. troops are out of Iraq's cities but not its future. Even a best-case scenario is likely to feature an American role there for years—militarily as well as diplomatically. ∴ That does not mean a permanent large U.S. troop presence in Iraq. Under a security deal struck with the Bush administration, American forces are to be out by the end of 2011. ∴ But it's no secret that Iraq's security forces are not fully ready to handle even a diminished insurgency on their own. ∴ Some senior U.S. military officers say privately they anticipate Iraqi setbacks in coming months, particularly if the insurgents regroup. But by partnering with American forces, the Iraqis stand a good chance of succeeding. That is why a number of U.S. troops will remain in the cities to assist and advise. Read more at Breitbart...

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Blast kills 33 as Iraq takes charge of security Read More......

President Bush visits U.S. Army War College

The White House - [On Wednesday, December 17th] President Bush Discusses National Security, Homeland Security and the Freedom Agenda at U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania (Read full transcript)

Excerpt: In the broader struggle between freedom and terror, people around the world have made their choice clear. In Afghanistan, eight million men and women went to the polls to elect a president for the first time in their history. In Iraq, 12 million people defied the terrorists and elected a representative government. You know, one of the things I'll never forget are the ink-stained fingers of people who had a chance to vote their conscience. In countries from Liberia and Lebanon to Georgia and Ukraine, citizens have taken to the streets to cast off the chains of tyranny, and demand their God-given right for freedom. And around the world, more people live in liberty than at any other time in human history.

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