Author: Jason Ditz

A senior European Union official today discussed the possibility of the EU causing the collapse of the Palestinian Authority if the current round of peace talks fail, with an eye toward pressing Israel to make some serious moves toward Palestinian statehood.

The official, who was not named, noted that the funding was supposed to be to prepare the PA for the establishment of statehood, and said there was no point to keeping the spigot flowing if the Palestinians weren’t going to get a state anyhow.

The end of EU bankrolling of the PA would virtually assure its collapse, and would force Israel to take offer practical responsibility for the occupied West Bank, instead of just letting the EU subsidized PA muddle through.

PA President Mahmoud Abbas raised a similar prospect in 2010, suggesting that the PA be dissolved if there was no progress toward statehood. The idea then is that without the PA, Israel has no one to hold phony negotiations with, and no pretense that they’re going to allow statehood at some far-flung future date, meaning they’d struggle to defend their treatment of the Palestinains as “non-citizens” going forward.

The Russian Space Forces, an actual real branch of the Russian military (with on-again, off-again independence historically) is not in very good shape if war breaks out with some other planet.

“We are unfortunately not ready to fight extraterrestrial civilizations,” conceded Sergey Berezhnoy, the deputy chief of the Titov Main Test and Space Systems Control Centre, who was asked about the forces’ readiness for defending against extraterrestial incursions.

The Titov Centre has been around since 1957, and was eventually just part of the Soviet space program, before its attention turned primarily toward orbital defense, preparation that included not just the prospect of exchanges with other Earth factions in orbit (and missile exchanges), but also at least some preliminary examination of what will happen if and when things get real on a galactic scale.

Of course it’s hard to imagine how anyone could really prepare to fight a whole different species that hasn’t been discovered yet with entirely unknown capabilities, and agendas, but Russian officials don’t seem optimistic about their Space Forces getting “ready” any time soon, noting that there are an awful lot of problems on the planet that are actually taking precedent over the entirely theoretical one.

Justifying massive military expenditures and a program of universal conscription isn’t easy in a time of peace, but the Swiss military has managed to keep it up even though they don’t face any conceivable military threats, and indeed haven’t faced any in decades.

But being the head of a conscript military with no enemies is kind of boring, so at least for the sake of wargames, they had to make one up.

So get this: France has split up into multiple warring statelets, and somehow the Duchy of Burgundy is independent for the first time since 1477 and falls on hard economic times. And they’re pretty sure it’s Switzerland’s fault, because banks.

So a totally fictional militant faction, the Brigade Libre Dijonnais (BLD), based in the totally fictional future statelet of Saonia, which is named after the Saone river but is itself based on the borders of an ancient duchy, invades Switzerland outright, with an eye on robbing banks.

Swiss officials defended the wargame, saying that maintaining the nation’s military credibility required preparing for the “threats of the 21st century.” In practice, it seems the wargame centers more on the threats of the mid-15th century.

Desperate to drum up some sort of evidence of the NSA’s effectiveness in tracking down terrorists by collecting phone records from literally every single American, officials have tapped a relatively minor case of an immigrant cab driver arrested for sending money to Somalia as proof of how important the program is.

Basaly Moalin, a San Diego cab driver who managed to get asylum after being wounded in tribal fighting in Somalia, was arrested for providing $8,500 to a top leader in his tribe, who was also considered a member of al-Shabaab. The FBI conceded at the time that the money wasn’t about ideological support but rather an attempt to promote his own status within his tribe.

Moalin was under constant surveillance from 2003 until his arrest in 2010, charged with “aiding terrorism,” and is still awaiting sentencing.

So to sum it up, it took them seven solid years to arrest a cab driver whose crime amounts to sending a relatively small sum of money to a member of his tribe, in a country where his family still lives. And that’s the NSA’s big story to brag about.

Officials even conceded that they could’ve just gotten a court order for Moalin’s phone records instead of collecting the phone records of every single human being on the planet, but argue that this way is just more convenient for them.

White House denials are so often overt lies these days that when they say something at least plausible it’s worth examining. Today, Press Secretary Jay Carney insisted the NSA “examine only a very small percentage” of the world’s Internet traffic.

Examine as in give serious scrutiny to. That may sound weird when you first hear it, because we’ve got so much evidence that the vast majority of online communication is surveilled as a matter of course. But here’s thing thing: most of the Internet isn’t communication.

Sandvine’s reports on North America have been really informative on this, showing that in the ballpark of 1/3 of Internet traffic is just plain Netflix streaming in North America. And that’s just one video service, with a good chunk of the top 10 also video streaming services.

Unless someone’s attaching big pictures, all your email for the day is unlikely to be much more than a megabyte. By contrast, streaming a whole baseball game in high-def is about 4,000 times that much, 4 GB. The NSA probably isn’t scrutinizing all the data being streamed from MLB.tv or Netflix or Hulu or any of the countless other services not because they can’t, but because there’s really no need to when they can intercept (or flat out subpoena) the data showing what you watched if they really want to know.

I don’t think anyone really thought the NSA was literally monitoring most of the bandwidth on the Internet to begin with, but that doesn’t make what they’re doing any more palatable. Your credit card number is just a few bytes. All of your instant messages in a given day are unlikely to be more than a few kB. A “very small percentage” of Internet traffic is still more than enough to be devastating to our personal privacy.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s failed underwear bombing on Christmas of 2009 has fueled the imagination of many a TSA agent. Not that the TSA really did anything to foil him, mind, the underbomber’s explosive parcel managed to start a small fire that burned his genitals pretty bad, but that was about it.

Still, the “next-generation” of exploding britches looms large, officials are pretty sure. Dubbed “our greatest threat,” a “clear and present danger,” and probably some other stuff that sounds like Tom Clancy novels, Underwear 2 was spotted by a double agent.

The menace of Underwear 2 continues to grow in the mind of TSA chief John Pistole, and justify ever more aggressive TSA policies.