programminglanguage:fp

  • Macron’s Fake News Solution Is a Problem – Foreign Policy
    http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/05/29/macrons-fake-news-solution-is-a-problem

    point de vue d’une juriste doctorante à Toulouse, mis en avant dans FP
    la manchette d’appel dans la newsletter : #The_solution_is_the_problem (tout simplement)
    (la conclusion)

    France’s fake news law will most likely pass with flying colors, though it will almost certainly be challenged constitutionality by political opponents or private citizens. A better approach to the problem would have been to strengthen the formidable legal arsenal already in place. As there is no legal definition of fake news under French law, it remains unclear how magistrates will be able to judge what is false or true in political matters. Implementing such a law would require judges to be extremely creative and subjective in interpreting what exactly constitutes fake news. Second, such provisions could lead to self-censorship as online publishers, fearing legal action, might curtail what is perfectly legitimate speech. The questions remains: How would this law be implemented if, for example, a French politician goes too far in publicly deriding his or her opponents or a foreign leader, as British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson famously did when he published a poem insinuating that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan fornicated with goats?

    Macron’s proposed legislation has no answer. It will not solve the problem of fake news and may indeed amplify it.

  • Israel Is Building a Secret Tunnel-Destroying Weapon | Foreign Policy
    http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/03/10/israel-is-building-a-secret-tunnel-destroying-weapon-hamas-us-gaza

    According to intelligence officials, Israeli engineers are working tirelessly to develop what’s being called the #Underground_Iron_Dome — a system that could detect and destroy cross-border tunnels. According to a report on Israeli Channel 2, the Israeli government has spent more than $250 million since 2004 in its efforts to thwart tunnel construction under the Gaza border.

    The United States has already appropriated $40 million for the project in the 2016 financial year, in order “to establish anti-tunnel capabilities to detect, map, and neutralize underground tunnels that threaten the U.S. or Israel,” said U.S. Defense Department spokesman Christopher Sherwood. While the majority of the work in 2016 will be done in Israel, Sherwood added, “the U.S. will receive prototypes, access to test sites, and the rights to any intellectual property.
    […]
    Among the Israeli companies working to develop the new anti-tunnel mechanism are Elbit Systems and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, the same company that developed the Iron Dome rocket defense system. Both companies declined to provide any details due to security reasons, as did the IDF and other Israeli officials, who fear that such information could play into Hamas’s hands. Yet according to intelligence sources who spoke with Foreign Policy on the condition of anonymity, the system involves seismic sensors that can monitor underground vibrations.

    IDF Chief of Staff Gen. Gadi Eizenkot hinted at these efforts in February. “We are doing a lot, but many of [the things we do] are hidden from the public,” he told a conference at Herzliya’s Interdisciplinary Center. “We have dozens, if not a hundred, engineering vehicles on the Gaza border.

    Yaakov Amidror, a former national security advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former head of Israel’s National Security Council, told FP the confidential new system is not yet operational, but it is “in a testing mode.

    Since the beginning of 2016, nearly a dozen Hamas tunnels have collapsed on the Palestinians who were building them, killing at least 10 of the group’s members. While winter rains have been blamed as the culprit, the wave of collapses has led many here to wonder if Israel’s new secret weapon is already at work.

    Asked by the Palestinian Maan News Agency in February whether or not Israel was behind recent tunnel collapses, the coordinator of government activities in the Palestinian territories, IDF Maj. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, responded, “God knows.

    • In the meantime, Israeli residents of Gaza border towns are growing frustrated with what they perceive as a government that lacks any vision beyond fighting a war with Hamas every two or three years. Israel has fought three wars with Hamas since it withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005 — 2008’s Operation Cast Lead, 2012’s Operation Pillar of Defense, and 2014’s Operation Protective Edge. While border residents wish the government and military would do more to protect them from Hamas’s tunnels, many of them also want the government to help the people of Gaza.

      Gaza is a pot that’s about to boil over, and unless something changes there, nothing is going to change here,” says Adele Raemer, who lives a mile from the Gaza border in Nirim, an Israeli settlement. “People can’t live like that without exploding. They are going to go underground and build tunnels if that’s how they are going to make a living.

  • Fake fake news: The Iranian time machine | FP Passport
    http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/04/11/fake_fake_news_the_iranian_time_machine

    A good rule of thumb for news in the Internet age: If there’s a “Ha, ha, silly foreigners” story circulating on the Internet, and if 90 percent of the people writing about it are citing the Telegraph, it’s probably mostly fake, or at least highly misleading. (See Putin’s Boyz II Men booty call or Sarkozy’s fromage fatwa.

    I suspect this is the case with the story of an Iranian scientist claiming to have invented a time machine, which has been making the rounds today. (To be clear, I realize that no one actually thinks he did invent the time machine. I’m disputing whether or not the news story is real.)

  • Are we moving toward a dataless war ? | FP Passport
    http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/03/11/are_we_moving_toward_a_dataless_war

    Drone Strike Data

    Following increased scrutiny of drone warfare in Congress and a savvy investigation by the Air Force Times, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) conceded on Saturday that it was no longer providing specific data about drone strikes in Afghanistan in its monthly reports. It also removed drone strike data from previous monthly reports on its website. The reason? According to U.S. Central Command, those reports were “disproportionately focused” on drone strike data. ISAF emphasized that drones are predominantly used for surveillance and that “only about 3% of all RPA sorties over Afghanistan invol[ve] kinetic events,” which is another way of saying: We don’t like the way you’re interpreting our information, so we’re going to give you less information.

    Insurgent Attacks

    The number of insurgent attacks was one of the most widely cited statistics in the decade-long Afghan war, but it’s no longer provided to the public as of last week. The change in policy came about after the Associated Press forced ISAF to concede that it incorrectly cited a 7 percent drop in insurgent attacks in 2012. (In reality, the number of Taliban attacks had remained the same.) After that embarrassment, ISAF acknowledged that its reporting methods were flawed. Instead of fixing the problem, however, it decided to stop publishing the data altogether.

    (...)

    At the time, Wired’s Spencer Ackerman put the policy change in vivid context. “This means ISAF is denying you a major metric for assessing the durability and the lethality of the insurgency, as well as, by inference, its freedom of movement,” he said. “When U.S. officials in the future claim that they’re making progress, you will not be able to access the data underlying their claims.”

    Freedom of Information Act Requests

    Another method journalists rely on for obtaining military records about the war is by filing Freedom of Information Act requests. But getting the government to acquiesce to these requests has been increasingly difficult when they pertain to national security issues, an Associated Press investigation today indicates:

    The U.S. government, led by the Pentagon and CIA, censored files that the public requested last year under the Freedom of Information Act more often than at any time since President Barack Obama took office, according to a new analysis by The Associated Press. The government frequently cited national security as the reason.

    Although the administration answered more overall requests last year than ever before, it more often withheld information, citing national security provisions:

    In a year of intense public interest over deadly U.S. drones, the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, terror threats and more, the government cited national security to withhold information at least 5,223 times - a jump over 4,243 such cases in 2011 and 3,805 cases in Obama’s first year in office. The secretive CIA last year became even more secretive: Nearly 60 percent of 3,586 requests for files were withheld or censored for that reason last year, compared with 49 percent a year earlier.

    Other federal agencies that invoked the national security exception included the Pentagon, Director of National Intelligence, NASA, Office of Management and Budget, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Federal Communications Commission and the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Energy, Homeland Security, Justice, State, Transportation, Treasury and Veterans Affairs.

    All things considered, if the White House aims to make this the “most transparent administration in history,” March has been a lackluster month for its national security apparatus.

  • Air Force erases drone strike data amid criticisms | FP Passport
    http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/03/08/air_force_erases_drone_strike_data_amid_criticism

    Quietly and without much notice, the Air Force has reversed its policy of publishing statistics on drone strikes in Afghanistan as the debate about drone warfare hits a fever pitch in Washington. In addition, it has erased previously published drone strike statistics from its website.