Ellen Nakashima and Joby Warrick profile National Security Agency director/Cyber Command commander General Keith Alexander in today’s Washington Post. Nakashima and Warrick are able to thoughtfully assess the scope of Alexander's innovations at NSA, and balance against the various legitimate criticisms of their scope of the power the subsequently accrues to one man. And they manage to do this without the paranoia, hearsay, and factual inaccuracies of the James Bamford piece in Wired last month.
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| General Keith B. Alexander |
Also, Kasper Agger of the Enough Project follows up on the Project’s expose on the Lord’s Resistance Army’s elephant poaching with a report on recent defections from the LRA, claiming “roughly 60 people have been set free or escaped within the last two months.” Given that the LRA’s estimated strength is estimated to be as low as 250-300 fighters, these are significant losses. Agger ascribes the increasing disaffection within the militia to the coming of age of the child soldiers abducted by the LRA in the 1990s.This may be correct (although it begs the question of why they don’t just replenish ranks with more raids), but also suggests the LRA will have even more incentive engage in illegal activities such as ivory smuggling in order to create new incentives (i.e. profit instead of divinely-inspired revolution) to attract retain fighters.
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| Joseph Kony: Will defections be the key to his capture? |
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