daniel splittgerber - what I've been reading

If other leakers exist within the NSA, it would be more than another nightmare for the agency—it would underscore its inability to control its own information and might indicate that Snowden's rogue protest of government overreach has inspired others within the intelligence community. “They still haven't fixed their problems,” Snowden says. “They still have negligent auditing, they still have things going for a walk, and they have no idea where they're coming from and they have no idea where they're going. And if that's the case, how can we as the public trust the NSA with all of our information, with all of our private records, the permanent record of our lives?”

So extreme are the admission standards now that kids who manage to get into elite colleges have, by definition, never experienced anything but success. The prospect of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them. The cost of falling short, even temporarily, becomes not merely practical, but existential. The result is a violent aversion to risk. You have no margin for error, so you avoid the possibility that you will ever make an error.

When policy makers disparage Kissinger in private, they tend to do so in a manner that reveals how much they measure themselves against him. [...] Ensuring a nation’s survival sometimes leaves tragically little room for private morality. Discovering the inapplicability of Judeo-Christian morality in certain circumstances involving affairs of state can be searing. The rare individuals who have recognized the necessity of violating such morality, acted accordingly, and taken responsibility for their actions are among the most necessary leaders for their countries, even as they have caused great unease among generations of well-meaning intellectuals who, free of the burden of real-world bureaucratic responsibility, make choices in the abstract and treat morality as an inflexible absolute.

A. On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart. Instead, what works well are structured behavioral interviews, where you have a consistent rubric for how you assess people, rather than having each interviewer just make stuff up. Behavioral interviewing also works — where you’re not giving someone a hypothetical, but you’re starting with a question like, “Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem.” The interesting thing about the behavioral interview is that when you ask somebody to speak to their own experience, and you drill into that, you get two kinds of information. One is you get to see how they actually interacted in a real-world situation, and the valuable “meta” information you get about the candidate is a sense of what they consider to be difficult. Q. Other insights from the data you’ve gathered about Google employees? A. One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything.

A Wall Streeter who has known Loeb since his early days in New York describes how Loeb climbed to the pinnacle of hedge-fund success: He started out “a little bit like J.P.—John Paulson [founder and president of the hedge fund Paulson & Co.]. He was doing O.K. No one took him terribly seriously. And then he kind of figured out his niche. We all know what his niche is: He is just long and loud. He took a position and then started screaming and trying to force some change. He was smart to occupy a place that was really left vacant: All the private-equity funds and the banks had to get out of [doing] hostile deals, and it was left to the guys who didn’t give a crap, knew how to do it, and had nothing that they were compromising or putting in jeopardy by taking on those powers. Carl Icahn didn’t give a fuck. Dan Loeb didn’t give a fuck. I don’t think anyone’s ever said Dan’s a really, really brilliant guy, but this is what the hedge-fund world allows you to be if you’re massively ambitious and you’re kind of really, really, really focused. You’ll probably get there.”

Recommended articles

Oil booms are also bad news for democracy and the rule of law. In fact, not a single developing country that derives the bulk of its export earnings from oil and gas is a democracy. [...] [T]he economies of resource-rich countries have performed far worse than those of their resource-poor neighbors, and increases in natural resource wealth are strongly correlated with greater corruption, authoritarianism, political and economic instability, and civil war. [...] [I]t is time to try a new policy approach, one that could drastically alter these incentives: the direct distribution of a portion of oil revenues to citizens as taxable income.

Indians should recognize that it doesn’t take an autocrat to deliver growth. Since 1980 in emerging markets, democratic and authoritarian regimes have been equally likely to deliver GDP growth averaging more than five percent for a decade. What it does take is good governance, and there is no reason why democrats cannot push growth in India, as Dikshit has proved in Delhi and Chauhan has demonstrated in Madhya Pradesh. [...] The rise of India’s states could just as easily be read as a sign of national maturity: a tacit recognition among voters that the country will not fall apart just because its states can control their own economies.

Schadlow explains that because the military thinks competitively and the foreign assistance bureaucracy does not, the military is far more effective than the State Department, with the result being the militarization of foreign policy. Counterintuitively, the way to reduce America's reliance on hard power is to get the foreign aid bureaucracy to adopt a harder, more competitive approach to its own soft power. If the aid community thought competitively, like the military and the intelligence communities do, it would be more effective in the field, and the militarization of foreign policy would consequently diminish.

“For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished,” [Snowden] said. “I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated. Because, remember, I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.” [...] “Dianne Feinstein elected me when she asked softball questions” in committee hearings, he said. “Mike Rogers elected me when he kept these programs hidden. . . . The FISA court elected me when they decided to legislate from the bench on things that were far beyond the mandate of what that court was ever intended to do. The system failed comprehensively, and each level of oversight, each level of responsibility that should have addressed this, abdicated their responsibility.” Snowden likened the NSA’s powers to those used by British authorities in Colonial America, when “general warrants” allowed for anyone to be searched. The FISA court, Snowden said, “is authorizing general warrants for the entire country’s metadata.” “The last time that happened, we fought a war over it,” he said.

Excellent reporting from the New Yorker

According to the indictment, Silk Road was bigger than anyone had suspected: It boasted over $1.6 billion in sales from 2011-2013, which resulted in $80 million in commissions. (Researchers had previously estimated that Silk Road was doing about $22 million in total sales per year.)

It’s a grand experiment, he concedes: just how free can a free press be?

Before the bombing began, Crocker sensed that the Iranians were growing impatient with the Bush Administration, thinking that it was taking too long to attack the Taliban. At a meeting in early October, 2001, the lead Iranian negotiator stood up and slammed a sheaf of papers on the table. “If you guys don’t stop building these fairy-tale governments in the sky, and actually start doing some shooting on the ground, none of this is ever going to happen!” he shouted. “When you’re ready to talk about serious fighting, you know where to find me”. [...] The good will didn’t last. In January, 2002, Crocker, who was by then the deputy chief of the American Embassy in Kabul, was awakened one night by aides, who told him that President George W. Bush, in his State of the Union Address, had named Iran as part of an “Axis of Evil.” Like many senior diplomats, Crocker was caught off guard. He saw the negotiator the next day at the U.N. compound in Kabul, and he was furious. “You completely damaged me,” Crocker recalled him saying. “Suleimani is in a tearing rage. He feels compromised.” The negotiator told Crocker that, at great political risk, Suleimani had been contemplating a complete reëvaluation of the United States, saying, “Maybe it’s time to rethink our relationship with the Americans.” The Axis of Evil speech brought the meetings to an end. Reformers inside the government, who had advocated a rapprochement with the United States, were put on the defensive. Recalling that time, Crocker shook his head. “We were just that close,” he said. “One word in one speech changed history.”

Talleyrand, the Napoleonic era statesman who was opposed to stern morals in foreign policy, is credited with the notion that in affairs of state a blunder is worse than a crime. So here we have a secretary of state who plays the role of a moralist, trying to rescue his president following a colossal blunder: that of threatening force without being serious about it. The United States is so geographically well endowed that it can afford years of mediocre foreign policy and even occasional incompetent foreign policy without having its security fundamentally undermined. But it is America's allies, not so geographically endowed, who suffer.

Since 2010, the National Security Agency has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans’ social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with officials.