The nsa's metastasised intelligence-industrial complex is ripe for abuse

By September 2013, the NSA's new data centre will employ around 200 technicians, occupying 1m sq ft and use 65 megawatts of power.

guardian | Let's be absolutely clear about the news that the NSA collects massive amounts of information on US citizens – from emails, to telephone calls, to videos, under the Prism program and other Fisa court orders: this story has nothing to do with Edward Snowden. As interesting as his flight to Hong Kong might be, the pole-dancing girlfriend, and interviews from undisclosed locations, his fate is just a sideshow to the essential issues of national security versus constitutional guarantees of privacy, which his disclosures have surfaced in sharp relief.

Snowden will be hunted relentlessly and, when finally found, with glee, brought back to the US in handcuffs and severely punished. (If Private Bradley Manning's obscene conditions while incarcerated are any indication, it won't be pleasant for Snowden either, even while awaiting trial.) Snowden has already been the object of scorn and derision from the Washington establishment and mainstream media, but, once again, the focus is misplaced on the transiently shiny object. The relevant issue should be: what exactly is the US government doing in the people's name to "keep us safe" from terrorists?

Prism and other NSA data-mining programs might indeed be very effective in hunting and capturing actual terrorists, but we don't have enough information as a society to make that decision. Despite laudable efforts led by Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall to bring this to the public's attention that were continually thwarted by the administration because everything about this program was deemed "too secret", Congress could not even exercise its oversight responsibilities. The intelligence community and their friends on the Hill do not have a right to interpret our rights absent such a discussion.

The shock and surprise that Snowden exposed these secrets is hard to understand when over 1.4 million Americans hold "top secret" security clearances. When that many have access to sensitive information, is it really so difficult to envision a leak?

We are now dealing with a vast intelligence-industrial complex that is largely unaccountable to its citizens. This alarming, unchecked growth of the intelligence sector and the increasingly heavy reliance on subcontractors to carry out core intelligence tasks – now estimated to account for approximately 60% of the intelligence budget – have intensified since the 9/11 attacks and what was, arguably, our regrettable over-reaction to them.

The roots of this trend go back at least as far as the Reagan era, when the political right became obsessed with limiting government and denigrating those who worked for the public sector. It began a wave of privatization – because everything was held to be more "cost-efficient" when done by the private sector – and that only deepened with the political polarization following the election of 2000. As it turns out, the promises of cheaper, more efficient services were hollow, but inertia carried the day.

Today, the intelligence sector is so immense that no one person can manage, or even comprehend, its reach

old crusty nsa whistleblower goes on record talking out of school....,

boilingfrogspost | NSA whistleblower Russel Tice told Peter B. Collins on Boiling Frog Post News (the website of high-level FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds): Complete podcast of interview available at this link.

[excerpt]

Tice: Okay. They went after–and I know this because I had my hands literally on the paperwork for these sort of things–they went after high-ranking military officers; they went after members of Congress, both Senate and the House, especially on the intelligence committees and on the armed services committees and some of the–and judicial. But they went after other ones, too. They went after lawyers and law firms. All kinds of–heaps of lawyers and law firms. They went after judges. One of the judges is now sitting on the Supreme Court that I had his wiretap information in my hand. Two are former FISA court judges. They went after State Department officials. They went after people in the executive service that were part of the White House–their own people. They went after antiwar groups. They went after U.S. international–U.S. companies that that do international business, you know, business around the world. They went after U.S. banking firms and financial firms that do international business. They went after NGOs that–like the Red Cross, people like that that go overseas and do humanitarian work. They went after a few antiwar civil rights groups. So, you know, don't tell me that there's no abuse, because I've had this stuff in my hand and looked at it. And in some cases, I literally was involved in the technology that was going after this stuff. And you know, when I said to [former MSNBC show host Keith] Olbermann, I said, my particular thing is high tech and you know, what's going on is the other thing, which is the dragnet. The dragnet is what Mark Klein is talking about, the terrestrial dragnet. Well my specialty is outer space. I deal with satellites, and everything that goes in and out of space. I did my spying via space. So that's how I found out about this.

Collins: Now Russ, the targeting of the people that you just mentioned, top military leaders, members of Congress, intelligence community leaders and the–oh, I'm sorry, it was intelligence committees, let me correct that–not intelligence community, and then executive branch appointees. This creates the basis, and the potential for massive blackmail.

Tice: Absolutely! And remember we talked about that before, that I was worried that the intelligence community now has sway over what is going on. Now here's the big one. I haven't given you any names. This was is summer of 2004. One of the papers that I held in my hand was to wiretap a bunch of numbers associated with, with a 40-something-year-old wannabe senator from Illinois. You wouldn't happen to know where that guy lives right now, would you? It's a big white house in Washington, DC. That's who they went after. And that's the president of the United States now.

u.s. seemingly unwaware of the irony of accusing snowden of spying...,

newyorker | The United States government charged former intelligence analyst Edward Snowden with spying on Friday, apparently unaware that in doing so it had created a situation dripping with irony.

At a press conference to discuss the accusations, an N.S.A. spokesman surprised observers by announcing the spying charges against Mr. Snowden with a totally straight face.

“These charges send a clear message,” the spokesman said. “In the United States, you can’t spy on people.”

Seemingly not kidding, the spokesman went on to discuss another charge against Mr. Snowden—the theft of government documents: “The American people have the right to assume that their private documents will remain private and won’t be collected by someone in the government for his own purposes.”

“Only by bringing Mr. Snowden to justice can we safeguard the most precious of American rights: privacy,” added the spokesman, apparently serious.

Double-0 has charged more under espionage act than all other preznits combined...,

slate | The U.S. government charged former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden with three felonies, including two under the Espionage Act. He now becomes the eighth person to be charged under the Espionage Act under Obama, according to Firedoglake. That is more than double all previous presidents combined. Prior to Obama’s administration only three people who leaked information had been charged under the 1917 statute that was never really intended for leakers. The arguments that Obama uses now to use that statute to go after those who reveal information were first brought up by Ronald Reagan’s administration when it went after a Navy civilian analyst who leaked photographs to a British military magazine. But now the practice has become widespread.

The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald wonders how these prosecutions are even “remotely defensible” coming from a president who vowed to usher in an era of transparency in Washington. Sure, Snowden may have broken the law, writes Greenwald, but he hardly committed “espionage.” He didn’t sell secrets to foreign governments, or try to profit from them in any way. Snowden simply blew the whistle on something he saw. “The irony is obvious,” writes Greenwald, “the same people who are building a ubiquitous surveillance system to spy on everyone in the world, including their own citizens, are now accusing the person who exposed it of ‘espionage.’”

david gregory needs to be shot with hot pee...,

dailycaller | “I think it’s pretty extraordinary that anybody who would call themselves a journalist would publicly muse about whether or not other journalists should be charged with felonies,” Greenwald said. “The assumption in your question, David, is completely without evidence — the idea I’ve aided and abetted him in any way. The scandal that arose in Washington before our stories began was about the fact that the Obama administration is trying to criminalize investigative journalism by going through the emails and records of AP reporters, accusing a Fox News journalist of the theory you just embraced — being a co-conspirator in felonies for working with sources. If you want to embrace that theory, it means every investigative journalist in the United States who works with their sources [and] receives classified information is a criminal. And it’s precisely those theories and precisely that climate that has become so menacing in the United States. It’s why the New Yorker’s Jean Mayer said investigative reporting has come to a ‘standstill,’ her word, as a result of the theories you just referenced.”

Gregory reacted to Greenwald’s reply by questioning whether or not what Greenwald was engaging in was journalism and that he was only asking a question.

“Well, the question of who’s a journalist may be up to a debate with regard to what you are doing and of course anybody who was watching this understands what I was doing,” Gregory said. “And that question has been raised by lawmakers, as well. I’m not embracing anything. But obviously, I take your point.”

clare daly not slobbering over barry o'bama...,

memory hole: does anybody else remember a purported dormitory killer with a hard x-ray emitter?

guardian | Crawford, an industrial mechanic for General Electric, met Feight, an outside GE contractor with mechanical and engineering skills, through work, authorities said. Feight designed, built and tested the remote control, which they planned to use to operate an industrial X-ray system mounted on a truck.

According to the indictment, the investigators had a confidential undercover source in place within weeks after learning of Crawford's attempts to solicit money and later an undercover investigator introduced by the source. They recorded meetings and conversations, and in December investigators got court authorisation to tap Crawford's phones, the indictment said.

In June 2012 the undercover investigator brought Crawford X-ray tubes to examine for possible use in the weapon, followed by their technical specifications a month later. At a November meeting with undercover investigators, Crawford brought Feight. Both said they were committed to building the device and named the group "the guild", the indictment said.

Investigators gave Feight $1,000 to build the control device and showed the men pictures of industrial X-ray machines they said they could obtain.

They planned to provide him access to an actual X-ray system to assembly with the remote control. According to court documents, the sealed indictment was filed the same day and both men were arrested.

A GE spokesman, Shaun Wiggins, said the company was informed on Tuesday of Crawford's arrest and he was suspended from his job. The company had no information that any employees' safety was compromised or that alleged illegal acts were committed at his workplace.

the story of the ringworm children...,

scribd | In 1951, the director general of the Israeli Health Ministry, Dr. Chaim Sheba flew to America and returned with 7 x-ray machines, supplied to him by the American army. They were to be used in a mass atomic experiment with an entire generation of Sephardi youths to be used as guinea pigs. Every Sephardi child was to be given 35,000 times the maximum dose of x-rays through his head. For doing so, the American government paid the Israeli government 300 million Israeli liras a year.The entire Health budget was 60 million liras. The money paid by the Americans is equivalent to billions of dollars today. To fool the parents of the victims, the children were taken away on "school trips" and their  parents were later told the x-rays were a treatment for the scourge of scalpal ringworm. 6,000 of the children died shortly after their doses were given, while many of the rest developed cancers that killed them over time and are still killing them now. While living, the victims suffered from disorders such as epilepsy, amnesia, Alzheimer's disease, chronic headaches and psychosis.

Yes, that is the subject of the documentary in cold terms. It is another matter to see the victims on the screen.To watch the Moroccan lady describe what getting 35,000 times the dose of allowable x-rays in her head feels like: "I screamed make the headache go away. Make the headache go away. Make the headache go away. But it never went away."

14 prinicples of an elite boarding school curriculum

containment, contamination, classification, compliance, conformity - the purpose of schooling

top lives off the yield of the bottom: tax havens and the men who stole the world...,

resilience | In his influential book Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole The World Nicholas Shaxson tells us that if you thought the open face of global capitalism was bad enough, the murky and secret world of tax havens is even worse. If this comes as an introduction to the offshore industry the book lets us know that we should have started worrying, no less been doing something about tax avoidance for a long time now.

Jonny Gordon-Farleigh: Your book Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World was first published in 2010 and has since been an extremely important contribution to our understanding of a secret, hidden and misrepresented part of our global economy: tax havens. What has happened since then in terms of the scale and complexity of tax avoidance schemes and how have governments responded?

Nicholas Shaxson: That’s a big question. I would say that different things have happened in different countries but what has been a common factor in most has been that public deficits and austerity measures have focused minds on tax revenues. There has been a real change in the public mood and receptiveness to the issue of tax avoidance and that it’s a problem more serious than we thought. In the Go-Go years before the boom, in places such as the UK, the attitude was “I’m alright, Jack,” and people didn’t seem to worry about it. Now, the general public are also realising that tax havens are much more central to the global economy than anyone had previously imagined. They had previously been seen as an exotic sideshow to the main event but, increasingly, the public is realising that tax havens are at the heart of the mainstream global economy. On some measures half of all cross-border trade is conducted on paper through tax havens. Tax havens are not so much about Mafiosi and drug dealers, even though there is plenty of that still about, but most fundamentally about banks and financial intermediaries. That’s the context.

Now politicians, if we take the example of the UK, are being led by the public mood. It’s remarkable to see a Conservative prime minister making such statements about tax avoidance, which had previously been considered legal and therefore little wrong with the practice. The shift in public mood means politicians are being forced to condemn tax avoidance and are certainly making the right noises. Also, the OECD — a club of rich countries that had previously jealously protected this awful system of secret information exchange that is very favourable to tax havens and corporate taxation that is very favourable to tax avoiders — now suddenly seem much more open to looking for real alternatives. A closed door is now open, at least a bit. This has not yet translated into any serious policies but there are some incremental changes that have been made such as openings into Swiss bank secrecy, even though there’s still a long way to go there.

On the other side of the equation, though, the offshore system has been growing under its own momentum for decades. It is a self-reinforcing process where countries compete with each other to offer the best tax loopholes or secrecy facilities. This race-to-the-bottom dynamic is still firmly in place. So there are two opposing forces: one is the offshore system pushing ahead through its own momentum, and then the public mood pushing in the other direction. I wouldn’t say anything more than that things are beginning to change. A true rollback of offshore abuses needs much more sustained public pressure.

the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data

agnotology

skepticalscience | Agnotology is the study of ignorance and how it's produced. For example, examining how misinformation can generate misconceptions about climate change. An interesting (and influential, at least in my case) paper on this topic is Agnotology as a teaching tool: Learning climate science by studying misinformation by Daniel Bedford, a professor at Weber State University, Utah. Bedford suggests how how examining and refuting misinformation is actually a powerful way to teach climate science, sharpen critical thinking skills and raise awareness of the scientific method. He then illustrates this with case studies applied in his own college classroom. This paper opened my eyes to the educational opportunities in addressing misinformation - an approach I adopted in the chapters "Understanding Climate Change Denial" and "Rebuttals to Climate Myths" in the textbook Climate Change Science: A Modern Synthesis.

Recently, David Legates, Willie Soon and William Briggs published a paper in the journal Science & Education, Learning and Teaching Climate Science: The Perils of Consensus Knowledge Using Agnotology. The paper comments extensively on Bedford's agnotology paper. Unfortunately, it comprehensively misrepresents Bedford's arguments. Consequently, Daniel Bedford and I have co-authored a response to Legates' paper that was just published in Science & Education: Agnotology, Scientific Consensus, and the Teaching and Learning of Climate Change: A Response to Legates, Soon and Briggs. For those without library access, our paper is unfortunately behind a pay-wall. However, the full pre-press version of our paper is available here.

In our response, we examine the scientific consensus on climate change and briefly look at the results from our recent Consensus Project paper. We explore the consensus gap - the large discrepancy between public perception of consensus and the 97% reality. We also clarify that while there is a scientific consensus on the basic fact of human-caused global warming, this doesn't mean there is overwhelming agreement of every aspect of climate science. Legates misrepresents this point by misquoting Bedford's paper. We examine one of the reasons for the consensus gap - two decades of a persistent misinformation campaign focused on casting doubt about the consensus.

Next, we get to the real meat of agnotology-based learning - exploring the educational opportunities in addressing misinformation in the classroom. Correcting misperceptions are an important part of education - it's not all about downloading new information into students' brains. Over two decades of research have found that refutational style lectures are one of the most effective ways of correcting misperceptions.

you holding out for something better?

HBR | I was 10 years old when the Berlin Wall came down — old enough to grasp that something important was happening, but not really old enough to understand exactly what was happening. Like a lot of kids born around that age, the specter of communism has never seemed like that much of a threat. We would hear stories about how horrific life was living under conditions such as these; but only in the context of something that had already failed. It's only through history and books or films that my generation has a grasp of what life must have been like.

Just recently, I had the chance to watch the German film, The Lives of Others, which won the 2007 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Not only is it a remarkable story, but it gave me the best glimpse I've had yet of what day-to-day life must have been like in a state like East Germany. The infamous East German secret police, the Stasi, managed to infiltrate every pay of German life, from factories, to schools, to apartment blocks — the Stasi had eyes and ears everywhere. When East Germany collapsed in 1989, it was reported to have over 90,000 employees and over 170,000 informants. Including the part-time informants, that made for about one in every 63 East Germans collaborating to collect intelligence on their fellow citizens.

You can imagine what that must have meant: people had to live with the fact that every time they said something, there was a very real chance that it was being listened to by someone other than for whom they intended. No secret police force in history has ever spied on its own people on a scale like the Stasi did in East Germany. In large part because of that, those two words — "East Germany" — are indelibly imprinted on the psyche of the West as an example of how important the principles of liberal democracy are in protecting us from such things happening again. And indeed, the idea that it would happen seems anathema to most people in the western world today — almost unthinkable.

And yet, here we are. In terms of the capability to listen to, watch and keep tabs on what its citizens are doing, the East German government could not possibly have dreamed of achieving what the United States government has managed to put in place today.

The execution of these systems is, as you'd expect, very different. The Germans relied upon people, which, even if not entirely effective, must have been absolutely terrifying: if for no other reason than you weren't sure who you could and could not trust. There was always that chance someone was reporting back on you. It might have been a colleague. A neighbor. A shop keeper. A school teacher. Not knowing whether someone you couldn't see was listening to what you had to say, or whether those that you could see might be passing it back to the authorities — that must have taken an incredibly heavy toll on people.

But as any internet entrepreneur will tell you, relying entirely on people makes scaling difficult. Technology, on the other hand, makes it much easier. And that means that in many respects, what has emerged today is almost more pernicious; because that same technology has effectively turned not just some, but every single person you communicate with using technology — your acquaintances, your colleagues, your family and your friends — into those equivalent informants.

the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you to the truth...,

guardian | If you want an alternative way to think about Google+, you could start with Horace Dediu's wonderful metaphor comparing what Google does to catching fish:

Google tries to make a business succeed through having a huge amount of _flow_ in terms of data, traffic, queries and information that is indexed. So think about this idea of them tapping into a vast stream. The more volume that is flowing through the system the more revenue they generate.

As so given this very rough analogy I try to sharpen it up by saying: imagine it more as a river. And even more than a river, as a watershed, a river basin. Perhaps a giant basin the size of a continent. The business is, let's say, capturing fish at the mouth of the biggest river, before it exits into the ocean at its delta.

And so your job (as Google) is to catch fish mostly at one point. It's the most efficient way to catch fish because you have the most flow of water at that point and building nets is not trivial.

If you use that metaphor, then Google+ puts radio tags on all the fish. It's so much easier to know where they're going. (Ignore for a moment that you're the fish. It only gets in the way.)

The question really is, now you know that, are you comfortable with it? Personally I always found the choice at the heart of The Matrix a puzzling one. The choices seemed to be: you can know that the world you live in is a blasted, awful place with a dire climate, or you can live in what seems like a fairly comfortable world (as long as you don't mess with the agents, of course).

To be honest, I always wondered whether the people whose "lives" (computer-generated or no) were upended by Neo, the hacker hero of the film, really liked having that choice made for them.

Anyhow, that's what Google+ is about. Discussing it as if it were a social network which needs activity in the way that Facebook and Twitter do misses the point. It really doesn't matter if you never use it, never fill out your profile, never fill a circle, never get added to anyone's circle. What matters to Google is that you're signed in, in order that it can form its matrix of knowledge about you.

So now that you know: red pill or blue pill? Sign in or sign out?

top lives off the yield of the bottom...,

NYTimes | Here’s one sign the global elite is starting to get worried that capitalism isn’t working for the Western middle class. At the TED Global gathering in Scotland’s elegant capital city this week, much of the spotlight was on what’s going wrong with the 21st-century economy.

That matters because the TED conferences (TED stands for technology, entertainment and design, and is a not-for-profit global conference organization) are one of the obligatory stops on the itinerary of any self-regarding plutocrat, and in the past that constituency has often preferred its vision of the economic future served sunny-side up. 

The gloom started with former Prime Minister George Papandreou of Greece. In a remarkably candid and introspective talk, Mr. Papandreou offered a mea culpa for his own mistakes and those of the European political elite. He admitted that hardship had been imposed on people who were “in the main, not to blame for the crisis” and accused the European establishment of uncritically, and at great cost, clinging to “the orthodoxy of austerity.” 

Small Greece, he argued, had been made the scapegoat for a larger political and economic failure. As Mr. Papandreou mockingly put it, Europe chose to point the finger at “those profligate, idle, ouzo-swilling, Zorba-dancing Greeks.” Instead of addressing the harder, underlying issues, the impulse was to say: “They are the problem! Punish them!” 

Mr. Papandreou is a son of privilege — both his father and grandfather were prime ministers of Greece — but, in a sign of the times, he inveighed against “plutocrats hiding their assets in tax havens” and “powerful lobbies protecting the powerful few.” His comments made an impact partly because he was so open in declaring his own shortcomings. Nor did he shy away from how angry a lot of people are about them.

“It’s no wonder many political leaders, and I don’t exclude myself, have lost the trust of our people,” Mr. Papandreou said, in the most affecting passage of his talk. “When riot police have to protect parliaments, a scene that is increasingly common around the world, there is something wrong with our democracies.”

killer-ape "progressives" faking it till they make it tickle me - same story - international, worldwide....,

NYTimes | “We are a civilized nation, a nation that is going through an excellent phase, and we have got everything prepared to receive adequately the honor to organize an excellent World Cup,” Ricardo Teixeira, then the president of the Brazilian Football Confederation, said at the time.

Since then, the sentiment surrounding Brazil’s preparations for the World Cup, and much else overseen by the government, has shifted. Mr. Teixeira himself resigned last year, under a cloud of corruption allegations, and while the Brazilian government says it is spending about $12 billion on preparing for the World Cup, most of the stadiums are over budget, according to the government’s own audits court.

The sheen that once clung to the Workers Party has also been tarnished by a vast vote-buying scheme called the mensalão, or big monthly allowance, in a nod to the regular payments some lawmakers received. The scandal resulted in the recent conviction of several of high-ranking officials, including a party president and a chief of staff for Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was a popular Brazilian president.

“There’s been a democratic explosion on the streets,” said Marcos Nobre, a professor at the University of Campinas. “The Workers Party thinks it represents all of the progressive elements in the country, but they’ve been power now for a decade. They’ve done a lot, but they’re now the establishment.”

The economic growth that once propelled Brazil’s global ambitions has slowed considerably, and inflation, a scourge for decades until the mid-1990s, has re-emerged as a worry for many Brazilians.

puts me in mind of the Hon.Bro.Preznit's neoliberal crackdown on the occupy movement...,

NYDailyNews |  As Brazilian taxpayers decry the high cost of low-quality services, riot police are apparently cracking down on protestors so harshly that bystanders might be in harm's way.

A dreadful image of a riot officer blasting pepper spray into a young, unarmed woman's face in Rio de Janeiro went viral Tuesday morning.

But that lady was simply standing on a deserted street corner Monday about 11:20 p.m. — no demonstrations in sight.

The picture, snapped by photographer Victor Caivano, does not include the officer's face. He stands with his back to the camera, an impersonal symbol of authority.

The women's scrunched-up grimace, on the other hand, is clearly visible — pummeled with an incapacitating aerosol blast.

Her green dress and tote bag are a far cry from the officer's tactical vest and bag of weapons.

Caivano told New Yorkmagazine that three riot officers asked the woman to leave the desolate street corner but that she either refused or questioned their order. She reportedly claimed that she was not doing anything wrong.
Then, without second guessing himself, the officer raised the canister and doused her with a pain-, temporary-blindness- and tear-inducing liquid.

 She stumbled backward screaming and cursing until she was detained. When they shuffled her into a police van, the non-demonstration of one was supposedly disbanded.

Rio de Janeiro reeked of tear gas by the end of the day after about 100,000 protestors marched through the city. Another march is scheduled for Thursday.

That night, tens of thousands of Brazilians also gathered on the streets of the São Paulo, the nation's largest city, to air their grievances. They spoke against how much money Brazilians give their government.

They said it is riddled with corruption and provides pitiable public services.

More than 50,000 people gathered outside the city's main cathedral. The demonstrations were mostly peaceful but small groups did fight with police and break into stores.

american political science: a generational divide over education delivery models

Prof. Joyce M. | I saw the video. Is this the new bright shiny object obscuring a real problem with promises of a magic fix? It disparages textbooks and lectures. I see this as the rote learning model that has been pushed by Rupert Murdock(wants to make money from it), the Walmart family and Bill Gates. Teaching children to have short attention spans has no long term benefit. These programs teach to a test that they help to create. You learn to write well by reading. No textbooks, huh? This is a photo of a "flipped classroom" http://www.flickr.com/photos/2... and this is a photo of a Harvard University classroom http://www.johnhopebryant.com/... Rote learning does not foster creativity, independent thought or increased attention spans. Textbooks and lectures are still widely in use at our universities. http://webcast.berkeley.edu/se... Good luck passing the AP and CLEP with that type of education. http://clep.collegeboard.org/ & http://apcentral.collegeboard....

ENu | I think the film has pretty much got the idea. In my opinion education in the U.S. is a huge fail. On one side you have kids who simply dgaf(don't give a f___) and on the other you have kids killing themselves trying to "learn." Unfortunately, neither side is benefitting or actually learning or being educated and there doesn't seem to be a middle ground. Things are just going to continue spiraling with incompetence increasing.

What's truly sad is that the kids who work hard and try to actually understand are being beaten out by those who are good at guessing - because everything seems to be based on tests. The trick is no longer to understand what you're learning in high school and at some colleges, it's simply to regurgitate facts. I was honestly shocked the first time I wrote a paper at _______ and my teacher didn't like it because it didn't incorporate my opinion. Shoot, I didn't even know if I knew how to have my own opinion in an academic setting. And in biology, when they asked for extrapolations on tests, you could almost see the steam coming out of people's heads trying to figure out what to do with those! It became more of a guessing game than an understanding challenge, and less than 2% of the class had a clue as to what was going on.

If the education system were improved and students were actually given the chance to learn and understand, the opportunities would be endless. I don't know what it'll take to get us there, but something must be done ASAP.

CNu | ENu is my 19 year old daughter. She weighed in on the topic with me last night with the trailer video for the documentary Race to Nowhere. A product/result of exceptional heredity, parental investment, the finest private/independent education available in the midwest, and matriculating at one of the highly selective colleges and universities that still matters - I was delighted to receive the benefit of her opinion on this topic. Education is fundamental. It's a subject we ponder at great length and hopefully at some depth hereabouts. We have a significant divergence of opinion wrt prospective remedies. Frankly, however, I'm at a complete loss to understand what a credible and objective criticism of flipped classrooms looks like. Mebbe I'll hear one before everything is said and done, but I'm not holding my breath.

american political science: schooling ourselves in an unequal america

NYTimes | Averages can be misleading. The familiar, one-dimensional story told about American education is that it was once the best system in the world but that now it’s headed down the drain, with piles of money thrown down after it.

The truth is that there are two very different education stories in America. The children of the wealthiest 10 percent or so do receive some of the best education in the world, and the quality keeps getting better. For most everyone else, this is not the case. America’s average standing in global education rankings has tumbled not because everyone is falling, but because of the country’s deep, still-widening achievement gap between socioeconomic groups.

And while America does spend plenty on education, it funnels a disproportionate share into educating wealthier students, worsening that gap. The majority of other advanced countries do things differently, at least at the K-12 level, tilting resources in favor of poorer students.

Historically, the role of the federal government, which takes a back seat to the states in education, has been to try to close achievement gaps, but they have continued to widen. Several changes in federal education policy under President Obama have actually increased the flow of scarce federal dollars toward those students who need it less, reinforcing inequities and further weakening overall educational performance. Reversing America’s slide in international education rankings will require turning that record on its head.

America’s relative fall in educational attainment is striking in several dimensions. American baby boomers ages 55 to 64 rank first in their age group in high school completion and third in college completion after Israel and Canada. But jump ahead 30 years to millennials ages 25 to 34, and the United States slips to 10th in high school completion and 13th in college completion. America is one of only a handful of countries whose work force today has no more years of schooling than those who are retiring do.

On international tests, American students consistently score in the middle of the pack among advanced countries, but America underperforms most on two measures — preschool enrollment and college on-time completion. Nearly all 4-year-olds in Japan, France, Britain and Germany are enrolled in preschool, compared with 69 percent in the United States. And although the United States is relatively good at getting high school graduates into college, it is horrible at getting them to graduate on time with a college degree. With more than half of those who start college failing to earn a degree, the United States has the highest college dropout rate in the developed world.

On average, money is not the problem. Given the country’s relative wealth, per-pupil spending on elementary and high school is roughly on track with other advanced countries. At the college level, the United States spends lavishly, far more than any other country.

The problem is that the United States is not spending its education dollars effectively. At every point along the education track, from preschool to college, resources are skewed to wealthier students.

trusted partners don't compete, they just cheat?

bloomberg | Thousands of technology, finance and manufacturing companies are working closely with U.S. national security agencies, providing sensitive information and in return receiving benefits that include access to classified intelligence, four people familiar with the process said.

These programs, whose participants are known as trusted partners, extend far beyond what was revealed by Edward Snowden, a computer technician who did work for the National Security Agency. The role of private companies has come under intense scrutiny since his disclosure this month that the NSA is collecting millions of U.S. residents’ telephone records and the computer communications of foreigners from Google Inc (GOOG). and other Internet companies under court order.

Many of these same Internet and telecommunications companies voluntarily provide U.S. intelligence organizations with additional data, such as equipment specifications, that don’t involve private communications of their customers, the four people said.

Makers of hardware and software, banks, Internet security providers, satellite telecommunications companies and many other companies also participate in the government programs. In some cases, the information gathered may be used not just to defend the nation but to help infiltrate computers of its adversaries.

Along with the NSA, the Central Intelligence Agency (0112917D), the Federal Bureau of Investigation and branches of the U.S. military have agreements with such companies to gather data that might seem innocuous but could be highly useful in the hands of U.S. intelligence or cyber warfare units, according to the people, who have either worked for the government or are in companies that have these accords.