Before the fuss over Arizona’s immigration law, there was a different fuss over a different Arizona immigration law. Now the first fuss is coming back to haunt the Obama Administration, the professionals in the office of the Solicitor General, and maybe even Elena Kagan. That first fuss was over the Legal Arizona Workers Act, a […]
Author Archive | Stewart Baker
Biological Weapons Amnesia
Judith Miller has a striking article on the history of Japanese WWII biological warfare in City Journal. She interviews a few remaining likely victims of the truly massive biological warfare attacks sponsored by Unit 731 of the Japanese army and describes the “science” that made the weapons possible: Maruta, or “logs,” as the Japanese scientists […]
European Commission Proposes US Surrender in Data Wars
European negotiators have struck three deals on travel reservation data with the United States, and each negotiation has turned out worse for Europe than the last. So now the European Commission has proposed a fourth negotiation. Its opening position for the fourth set of talks is even less realistic than its proposals for the first three. […]
Broadcasting from Cybersecurity’s Ground Zero
My law firm opened an office in Beijing a couple of weeks ago, and I went to the ceremonies, met with clients, and, most entertainingly, I spent half an hour being interviewed about cybersecurity on China’s English-language TV program, Dialogue. It was a bit weird. The pert interviewer managed to deftly combine the style of a Katie […]
News every parent can use
Eating dirt can make you smarter. UPDATE: Fixed broken link
No-Fly Fail Fault?
Matt Drudge wants us to blame “Big Sis” because “SECURITY LET SUSPECT ON PLANE.” And the AP has a similar take, leading with, ” The no-fly list failed to keep the Times Square suspect off the plane.” Is there a fail here? And if so, whose fault is it? To catch everyone up, judging from […]
Travel Data Leads to Times Square Bomb Arrest
DHS officials pulled Faizal Shahzad off a NY to Dubai flight late last night and arrested him in connection with the Times Square bombing. Two sidelights on the arrest drawn from my forthcoming book, Skating on Stilts: First, while DHS continues to be described as a sprawling unmanageable department, its creation has unified US border […]
Times Square bombing — where were the cameras?
Although it’s early still, this bombing doesn’t look especially well-organized, and I expect that we’ll catch the perp soon, given the massive amount of information to be gleaned from inside the car. That said, I can’t help wondering why New York City, the best-funded and most terror-focused police department in the country, doesn’t already have […]
Terrorfare: one more story and it’s officially a trend
I thought that providing government health care and welfare payments to al Qaeda’s favorite Canadians, the Khadr family, was just misplaced Canadian generosity: “Family members have spoken scornfully of Canadian society, as they receive medical care and welfare payments that keep them in a pleasant apartment in Toronto,” the Washington Post once noted. Turns out, […]
Why we aren’t putting Omar Khadr on trial
Omar Khadr turned to terror early in life. He was only fifteen years old in the months after 9/11, but he spent them laying mines for al Qaeda in Afghanistan — and allegedly throwing the grenade that killed Sgt. Christopher Speer, a Special Forces medic. Khadr was pulled from the rubble, patched up, and sent […]
Words I never expected to write
Dick Durbin is right. The Senate Democrats have proposed immigration reform that includes a biometric identity card, and Sen. Durbin is defending the decision. “People understand that in this vulnerable world, we have to be able to present identification,” Durbin said to The Hill. “We want it to be reliable, and I think that’s going […]
Immigrants and Nazis, Communists and Cardinals
I finally had a chance to read Arizona’s new law on illegal immigration. It’s rather different from the press portrayal. Maybe I’ll blog about that, but I want to start with the astonishingly vituperative attack by Cardinal Roger Mahony on what he calls “Arizona’s Dreadful Anti-Immigrant Law.” Here’s what he said on his blog: I […]
Sheep in Spiders’ Clothing?
The malware arms race continues apace. First, the bad guys hid malware on innocent websites, hoping to infect casual web users. Next, Google and Yahoo rode to the rescue, using their spiders to find infected websites and warn web users away from the malware. Now the bad guys have made their countermove. They’re deploying software […]
End of an era?
A high-ranking NSA official has been indicted for leaking classified information and lying about it to investigators. The reported beneficiary of the leaks was Siobhan Gorman, then of the Baltimore Sun and now of the Wall Street Journal. This is a big deal. It’s been years since officials saw any real risk in leaking classified […]
What TSA is doing
The press has been spending a lot of time on TSA’s new policy. This New York Times story is representative (I’ve linked to it here because it has the first ever MSM reference to Skating on Stilts). Despite all the attention, though, there’s a surprising lack of certainty about exactly what TSA is doing that’s […]