Friday Links

• Edward Snowden impersonated top level NSA officials to steal documents.  Fits my hypothesis about him.
• Indian government to ban use of US email services for official communication.  There's going to be a lot more of this kind of thing, I think.
• Kevin Drum bashes the Obama administration over Syria.  My general sense is that there are no good options here.  If we, collectively, do nothing, we are no doubt in for an ongoing and regular diet of headlines and youtube videos of Syrian kids being massacred with nerve gas.  Being able to clear neighborhoods cheaply is pretty handy for a dictator with his back to the wall and Assad will do it again if he thinks he can.  On the other hand, a limited bombing campaign is likely to be illegal, unpopular, and fairly ineffectual, particularly given the warning the Syrian government has had.  On the third hand, a major involvement in the war would be very costly in lots of ways, and it's completely unclear that the end result would be a better regime.  Anyone who suggests there are any simple good options here isn't thinking it through.  It's fairly likely to suck regardless of what we do, just in different ways.

What The Oil Drum Meant

Tuesday Links

• Libyan oil exports have apparently plunged by 70% due to unrest in that country.
• The utility industry plans to hold large exercises to simulate a big attack on the US electricity grid.  Should be interesting.

Monday Links

• This detention of Glenn Greenwald's partner under British anti-terrorism laws, while flying from Germany to Brazil, is absolutely and completely outrageous.  This is clearly harassment of journalists for publishing stories that authorities don't like, and strikes at the heart of freedom of speech.  If you weren't already convinced that the intelligence/anti-terrorism apparatus in Western countries is out of control, I imagine this will push you a bit further in that direction.
• Things going from bad to worse in Egypt.
• A new tool for scanning the Internet in 45 minutes (with a gigabit uplink).

Friday Links

• The European economy grew very slightly in Q2. The graph of European (and US) GDP is above.  I think it's too soon to be certain that Europe is out of the woods, but this last data point certainly does make the graph look less dismal.
• Parts of China have slowed down badly though.
• NSA surveillance leaks make national cyberdefense plan politically infeasible.  In general, I'm strongly in favor of national cyberdefense, and I research/design/build network intrusion detection systems for a living.  However, I have to admit that at this point I wouldn't trust the NSA with access to such systems either.  This is exactly why, in a democracy, major policy changes shouldn't be pursued in secret; it's toxic when it comes out.
• Bruce Schneier: "Since the Snowden documents became public, I have been receiving e-mails from people seeking advice on whom to trust. As a security and privacy expert, I'm expected to know which companies protect their users' privacy and which encryption programs the NSA can't break. The truth is, I have no idea. No one outside the classified government world does. I tell people that they have no choice but to decide whom they trust and to then trust them as a matter of faith. It's a lousy answer, but until our government starts down the path of regaining our trust, it's the only thing we can do."

Saudi Arabian Oil Production

Monthly Oil Supply Update

Monday Links

• The above is European unemployment.  Is that a slight hint of improvement, finally, there at the end?  Or just noise?  Too soon to tell.
• Apparently, if you set up a decoy water treatment plant control system on the Internet, there are a lot of groups willing and able to compromise it and take over the non-existent water plant.  The implication is that critical infrastructure like this has probably been extensively compromised by foreign intelligence agencies.  Maybe folks should be getting a few extra plastic tanks for the basement?
• Sounds like NSA wiretaps are actually being used to initiate normal criminal cases, and agents are being trained to conceal the fact on a large scale.  Great, just great.  
• European retail trade is below.  Although the last month was down a little bit, the last six months in the aggregate appear to have stopped trending down.

Friday Links

• Apparently INEOS Bio has created some cellulosic ethanol.  Not clear how much.
• Claims that there was a near miss solar flare event a few weeks back (although I can't find any excitement at NASA).
• Republican case for climate action.

Some Questions on XKeyscore

Glenn Greenwald at the Guardian has written another very interesting article on XKeyscore, an NSA intelligence program to search huge amounts of bulk traffic that allied intelligence agencies are collecting from around the globe.  The Guardian also made available a top-secret presentation on XKeyscore from 2008.  This represents the program as it was inherited by the Obama administration from the Bush administration.  However, comments in interviews by Edward Snowden suggest that substantially similar capabilities still exist.

I wanted to draw attention to several things in the NSA presentation that the Guardian didn't mention but that struck me as interesting (having a computer security background).  The first is this map:

Several questions arise: