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Today, I gave the closing address at the RUSI conference, Protecting the Critical Infrastructure, in a session introduced by RUSI’s head of risk and resilience, Anthony McGee. From the introduction to the conference by RUSI’s head, Professor Michael Clarke:
Protecting the Critical National Infrastructure and ensuring the continuation of political, social and economic activity is vital [...]

Do, if you get time, read Phillippe Sands on the American ‘torture trail‘ in May’s Vanity Fair. Sands is a law professor at University College London and author of Lawless World, in which he questions US and British commitment to the basic tenets of international law.
Sands, like a growing number of other commentators, believes that [...]

David Steven has recently reminded us of the horrors of Abu Ghraib, but an earnest story from DoD reveals that the U.S. is now running hearts and minds operations inside its “detention facilities” in Iraq.
New ways of dealing with detainees in coalition-run facilities in Iraq are paying off through less violence, more actionable intelligence for [...]

Richard Gott in the Guardian may well be right that the Colombian government’s decision to bump off two FARC guerrilla leaders a mile inside Ecuadorian territory was “a political decision taken by the Colombian president, Alvaro Uribe, to end the peace process orchestrated by Chávez”.  But I’m bemused by his line that
Ever since 9/11, the [...]

ForeignPolicy.com has an excellent interview with Jack Cloonan, a former FBI interrogator who worked extensively on Al Qaeda.  Here’s the part where he’s asked about the proverbial ‘ticking bomb scenario’:
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Wired has a series of photos from Philip Zimbardo’s presentation at TED 2008:

Zimbardo devised and ran the famous Stanford prison experiment. His new book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding how good people turn to evil, is sitting on my to-read pile. In his TED talk, he argues that there are “seven social processes that grease the [...]

Courtesy of The Times. We will be posting more on the UK Government’s CT legislation in the future.

 
From Bruce Schneier, this irresistible reflection of the interesting times in which we live: a Playmobil security checkpoint.  One of the commenters on Bruce’s blog points us towards this helpful reaction to the product on Amazon.com:
I was a little disappointed when I first bought this item, because the functionality is limited. My 5 year old [...]

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A propos of David’s recent posts on lax security surrounding Barack Obama, American voters can at least take heart from new research from Harvard University, which finds that the effect of assassination attempts in democracies - either successful or not - is negligible.  In autocracies, on [...]

Yesterday, I blogged on Dallas’s bid to stage another high profile political assassination. Now the Secret Service has tried to explain its decision to let people into an Obama rally without searching them for weapons.
“There were no security lapses at that venue,” said Eric Zahren, a spokesman for the Secret Service in Washington. He added [...]

The New Scientist has an interesting interview with Darius Rejali, author of Torture and Democracy. Rejali identifies a competitive dynamic which, he believes, can drive torture through a law enforcement system:
Usually the top authorizes it and the bottom delivers. Then it’s a slippery slope as torturers quickly become less responsive to centralised authority.
One [...]

Lax security has already given the world one political martyr this year - let’s not have another one, eh?
Security details at Barack Obama’s rally Wednesday stopped screening people for weapons at the front gates more than an hour before the Democratic presidential candidate took the stage at Reunion Arena.
The order to put down the metal [...]

If you’ve never been cornered by a 911 truther then you should definitely read Paul Constant’s excellent profile of the movement for the Utne Reader. Key quote:
The very fact that they’ve branded themselves the “Truth” movement shows a canny grasp of public relations on a level with the Bush administration’s lusty embrace of the word [...]

FCO has been briefing journalists in the last few minutes: here’s the Times -
David Miliband is expected to apologise to the Commons today as he discloses that two American “extraordinary rendition” flights did, after all, land on British soil.
The Government has always insisted that there was no evidence that such flights had occurred, but ministers [...]

As Charlie noted here yesterday, lots of people are having a grand old time fulminating about the Gwyn Prins / Robert Salisbury article in the new RUSI Journal on risk, threat and security in the UK.  It’s not hard to see why their piece has aroused such passions:

The United Kingdom presents itself as a target, [...]

Everything else is early this spring - so maybe April Fool’s Day too?  Er no, they’re serious.  TPM Muckracker has more:
The CIA’s use of waterboarding was legal and not torture, a Justice Deparment official argued this morning, because it was a “procedure subject to strict limitations and safeguards” that made it substantially different from historical [...]

Lawrence Wright has an excellent interview with US Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell in the last edition of the New Yorker.  Read the whole thing; but here are three highlights.
First, note McConnell’s assessment of the relative place of terrorism on America’s threat list - which chimes with remarks made here in the UK by Richard [...]

Someone mentioned this list to me at the conference. It includes political, economic, ecological, educational targets, tourist and military targets - and a ‘Top 10 Terrorist Wishlist’. Bit weird.
Sometime ago The Times did a front page spread of all the likely terrorist targets in the UK. It highlighted them on a map of Britain. Unsurprisingly a [...]

Margaret Beckett has become the new chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee, succeeding Paul Murphy who got moved in last week’s reshuffle. Murphy’s legacy to Beckett and the ISC is the Committee’s annual report, published today and which no doubt will capture some headlines in the media and set eyes rolling around Whitehall. According [...]

Reading Dominic Sandbrook’s excellent Never Had It So Good - a history of Britain from Suez to the Beatles last night, I came across this interesting observation about why McCarthy-style witchunts never took off in the UK:
A Whitehall committee set up to examine the case for positive vetting reported in 1950 that the procedures in [...]

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