* We know that many readers are preparing for the 50th Paris Air Show next week. Here’s a recent BusinessWeek article describing the 5 best travel apps for your phone. To which we’d add: Expensify. For your mandatory contingency planning, we recommend perusing AskMen’s very different choices.
* Where’s Edward? If this “should be disappeared” tweet isn’t the answer, Russia has offered to consider asylum – but NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden hasn’t asked them. His strange lack of interest in a deluxe Grozny, Chechnya apartment alongside Gerard Depardieu may be related to his wish for a new home “with shared values,” and he has named Iceland. If an Icelandic invite seems improbable, recall that Iceland decided to give the entire global banking system a big middle finger back in 2008.
* Israel has exported military items to countries it doesn’t have diplomatic relations with. Mostly, this translates as “Israel makes F-16 components, deal with it.” Customer militaries aren’t stupid and know this, but people in Egypt, Morocco, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates may be a bit surprised. Not sure what Algeria was all about, but the reports say that UAV components were involved.
* If you make batteries, or need batteries for future systems, a new University of California Santa Barbara paper may be of interest.
* A former infantry and civil affairs officer who has done civilian development work in Afghanistan since 2009 doesn’t think much of Foreign Policy Magazine’s “How to Negotiate Like a Pashtun.” Like the Iraqi theater he once served in, the dismantling is thorough – construction of a different framework, not so thorough.
Today’s video is of William Binney, a 30+ year NSA veteran and co-founder of its Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center. You can’t escape irony in this field, and we love the incredulous questions about pervasive state surveillance, from a Russia Today interviewer, to the guy who did more than anyone else to crack Soviet communications. Fact-filled, but the best part is Binney’s response to a question about people who have “nothing to hide”:
“The problem is, if they think they not doing anything that’s wrong, they don’t get to define that. The central government does [retroactively]. The central government defines what is right and wrong, and whether or not they target you.”
Here’s the full video below:
