carapace – Not your father's america

First Amendment Architecture, Marvin Ammori, Wisconsin Law Review, Vol. 2012, No. 1, 2012.

"The right to free speech is meaningless without some place to exercise it. But constitutional scholarship generally overlooks the role of judicial doctrines in ensuring the availability of spaces for speech. Indeed, when scholarship addresses doctrines that are explicitly concerned with speech spaces such as public forums and media or Internet forums, it generally marginalizes these doctrines as "exceptions" to standard First Amendment analysis. By overlooking or marginalizing these decisions, scholarship has failed to explicate the logic underlying important doctrinal areas and what these areas reveal about the First Amendment’s normative underpinnings. This Article adopts a different interpretive approach. It identifies and interprets the Court’s role in ensuring, requiring, or permitting government to make spaces available for speech. Across a range of physical and virtual spaces, the Article identifies five persistent judicial principles evident in precedent and practice that require or permit government to ensure spaces to further particular, substantive speech-goals. Further, rather than quarantining these speech-principles as exceptions to the standard analysis, this Article explores the significance of these principles for "core" speech doctrine and theory. The resulting analysis poses fundamental challenges to conventional wisdom about the First Amendment and the normative principles generally believed evident in doctrine. Consequently, the Article provides timely guidance for legislators and judges, particularly for shaping access to the technology-enabled virtual spaces increasingly central to Americans’ discourse."

The Pakistani Taliban’s Coming Divide
How the Death of Its Leader Could Be Bad for the United States

ForeignAffairs.com Features Article by Archive Analyst

For more information contact:
Barbara Elias-Sanborn – 202/994-7000
belias@gwu.edu
http://www.nsarchive.org

Washington, DC, February 3, 2012 – As the U.S. searches for opportunities to negotiate with the Taliban while simultaneously targeting key Taliban leaders with drone strikes, a new article published today on the Web site of Foreign Affairs magazine by National Security Archive analyst Barbara Elias-Sanborn, discusses the prudence of this approach in light of recent rumors of a fatal strike against Pakistani Taliban (TTP) leader Hakimullah Mehsud.

Using recent media reports and declassified documents, Elias-Sanborn, director of the National Security Archive’s Afghanistan/Pakistan/Taliban Documentation Project argues that Mehsud, a key figure behind the brutal 2009 Camp Chapman attack which left seven CIA employees dead, is dangerous, but his death may not help American efforts to find an acceptable negotiated settlement to the war in Afghanistan.

Mehsud’s eventual demise, the article argues, could potentially help Islamabad, but may not help Washington. Pakistani officials could use the TTP leader’s death as an opportunity to reconcile Taliban elements who have taken to targeting the Pakistani government, instead directing those forces against U.S. and Afghan targets. Or, Mehsud’s demise may open the door for greater unity among Taliban factions, augmenting the power of Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar and making negotiations more difficult.

The article concludes by arguing that "Mehsud’s elimination would potentially create opportunities for Pakistan to reconcile with TTP militants. But before the teams at Langley pop the champagne, policy makers should consider the possible downsides, as they could be many. If Washington is serious about negotiating an end to the war, it should suspend the drone assassination campaign and take its chances talking to existing Taliban leaders, instead of trying to kill its way towards more pliable negotiating partners that may not exist."

The Archive’s Afghanistan/Pakistan/Taliban Documentation Project has filed hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests for documents on the region and historical U.S. government approaches toward it. Many of these materials are posted on the Archive’s Web site at www.nsarchive.org.

Read the article at ForeignAffairs.com – http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137077/barbara-elias-sanborn/the-pakistani-talibans-coming-divide?page=show

Check out today’s posting at the National Security Archive website – http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20120203a/index.htm

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Unredacted, the Archive blog – http://nsarchive.wordpress.com/

February 03, 2012

Mary Tao, New York Fed Research Library

More than three decades ago, Robert Stovall, a money manager, championed a theory put forth by a sports columnist. Stovall studied the performance of stock indexes after each Super Bowl and concluded that the winner could predict stock market trends. For fifteen consecutive years, between 1967 and 1983, the New York Stock Exchange showed annual gains when a team from the old National Football League won the Super Bowl and fell when a team from the old American Football League emerged as the victor.

Two academic researchers put Stovall’s conclusions to the test; their findings, published in a 1990 Journal of Finance paper, showed that the predictions were accurate twenty out of twenty-two times between 1967 and 1988 for each of the following stock indexes: New York Stock Exchange, S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrial Average, and American Stock Exchange. (Note that the researchers used the pre-merger placement of the Pittsburgh and Baltimore teams. So the victories by the Steelers [1975-76, 1979-80] and Colts [1971] counted as NFL wins.)

In more recent times, the accuracy rate drops significantly, or perhaps not, depending on one’s perspective. Among various debunkings of the theory, this humorous one comes with a great line: “Statistically significant success in prediction does not automatically lead to economically profitable strategies.”

New York Giants fans who also subscribe to this Super Bowl theory: You have one more reason to root for your team. Should the Giants prevail this year, however, let’s hope it doesn’t cause a repeat of the 2008 experience, when stock markets diverged from the theory and experienced a downward spiral.

Super Bowl victories aside, sales of these items have also been cited for their ability to gauge the state of economic activity: lipstick, Spam, and cardboard boxes.

Because official statistics are subject to publication lags, some researchers have begun to examine Internet search terms and word frequency for more timely insight into economic conditions. Searches for “jobs” and “unemployment benefits” were compared with unemployment data over the same period, while “estate agents” was correlated with house price inflation as a likely predictor of changes in employment rates and housing prices, respectively. A more recent New York Fed finding declared that “Internet search counts possess useful information, not available in other variables, to now-cast or forecast the trajectory of some financial market data.”

The Economist evaluated the number of newspaper articles using the term “recession,” thus creating the R-word index. Researchers at the San Francisco Fed expanded on the index by examining more search terms in thirty newspapers to gauge consumer sentiment. And an analysis of social-media posts led to the announcement in 2011 of the high-heel index.

Disclaimer
The views expressed in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or the Federal Reserve System. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the author.

From:

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and other officials have warned that if
U.S. military spending is cut significantly, the unacceptable result would
be a "a hollow force incapable of sustaining the missions it is assigned."

http://www.defense.gov/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=14928

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R42334.pdf

From: The Secrecy News Blog at:  http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/

Defense Logistics – Improvements Needed to Enhance Oversight of Estimated Long-term Costs for Operating and Supporting Major Weapon Systems, GAO-12-340, February 2, 2012

"DOD’s reports to Congress on estimated weapon system O&S costs are often inconsistent and sometimes unreliable, limiting visibility needed for effective oversight of these costs. The SAR statute requires that life-cycle cost reporting for major weapon systems be uniform, to the extent practicable, across the department, but GAO found a number of inconsistent practices in how program offices were reporting life-cycle O&S cost estimates in the SAR."

The DNA Backlog

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/newsroom/factsheets/ojpfs_dnabacklog.html

A sample of more than 2,000 agencies found that 14% of unsolved homicide cases (an estimated 3,975 cases) and 18% of unsolved rape cases (an estimated 27,595 cases) contained forensic evidence not submitted by law enforcement agencies to a crime laboratory for analysis. Twenty-three percent of all unsolved property crimes (an estimated 5,126,719 cases) contained unanalyzed forensic evidence. The National Institute of Justice has provided funds to assist in testing approximately 1.8 million DNA samples taken from convicted offenders and arrestees since 2005, leading to more than 18,000 hits in the FBI’s database. As of August 2010, more than 8.7 million offender profiles and 332,000 forensic profiles from crime scene samples had been added to the database, resulting in more than 124,800 hits and assisting more than 121,900 investigations.