* If you haven’t read enough about how and why Republicans won the US Senate and increased their control of the House [The Hill], here are a couple pointers: Military Times’ elections guide | Familiar Faces in New Places on Senate Defense Committees [Defense News].
* US Defense Acquisition chief Frank Kendall is far from convinced [Breaking Defense] that Congress will stop sequestration from kicking in again next fiscal year.
Asia
* India is concerned about [VOA] Chinese subs in Sri Lankan ports.
* Pakistan is interested in China’s MBT3000/VT4 battle tank according to Kanwa Defense Review via Army Recognition.
* Pakistan also asked [US DSCA] last week for 8 new 43m patrol boats, in order to improve its near-shore control.
* Airbus announced the sale of 11 AS565 MBe Panther helicopters to Indonesia, which will be used for anti-submarine warfare.
Priv-ahah-cy
* Verizon, AT&T tracking their users with ‘supercookies’ [WaPo]; Some Samsung TVs send voice commands to third parties [RedFlag]. Executives at tech companies would do well to sit through the Black Mirror TV series and think through what kind of world they’re building. And if dystopian near future scifi is not enough to give pause, the fact Target’s CEO got fired after a data breach should be. Intelligence agencies may be salivating at the perspective of having more ways to snoop on bad actors, but this cuts both ways.
Casting Stones from Glass Houses
* DID had a massive outage that took our web server offline for most of the day yesterday. We’re still looking at what happened and how to avoid such incidents in the future. We are very sorry for the lapse in service. At least there is no credit card payment information stored on our servers!
JSF Tests At Sea
* Today’s video shows more of the US Navy’s F-35C tests aboard USS Nimitz:
