…except for the ABC story at HotAir that says apprehensions are down.
Mira, the way the Border Patrol works is that if they catch them, they’re apprehensions. If they get away, they’re listed as gotaways. Pretty simple so far. If there are overlapping stations, they may or may not count them as gotaways for the station, because it doesn’t look good for stations to state they’re letting illegals through. So they may pass them off to other stations either to attempt apprehension, or to call them someone else’s gotaways, or the record of the gotaways may be passed back. Stations do things different ways, some list gotaways to show that they’re being overrun and need additional resources, others don’t list gotaways so they can say they have the area under control. It all depends on local management and how they feel about the situation; and different directives from DC on what constitutes what.
From what I’ve heard and seen, and from plenty of open sources as well, the border is in fact not under control, and there are in fact significantly larger numbers of aliens crossing, being apprehended, and getting away.
No small part of this is due to the fact that smuggling operations were able to listen to Obama’s statements that the Border Patrol would have reduced hours for agents – and reduced time in the field means reduced time to apprehend aliens, means more time during shift changes, and means less time to cover remote areas far from the actual station headquarters. Just like any rural law enforcement, officers have to show up for work and then drive to where they’re needed – and often times they’re needed far from where they start their workday.
None of this is news to anyone who’s ever worked anything as simple as a delivery route, or set up a military watch or patrol of a perimeter, or just thought about it for a few minutes. Folks have other things to do, so they typically aren’t thinking about law enforcement operations – but in this case, there’s been a cause and effect from Obama saying “reduced hours” and alien/drug smugglers knowing exactly what that means to them.
Aliens also know that Obama’s promises of ramming amnesty down the throats of American citizens is good news for fence-jumpers. All they have to do is get in before the deadline and they get a claim to your tax dollars.
Two U.S. Border Patrol agents were shot, one fatally, Tuesday morning in an area in south Arizona known as a major drug-smuggling corridor, authorities said.
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The identities of the agents were not immediately released, but the shooting occurred at the Brian Terry Station near Naco, Ariz., which is just south of Tucson. The station was named after an agent who was killed in the line of duty in December 2010. The area is considered a remote part of the state and sources tell Fox News that the shooting occurred at 1:50 a.m. local time and about 8 miles from the border.
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The injured agent was airlifted to a hospital with nonlife-threatening injuries. The injured agent was shot in the ankle and buttocks, the Department of Homeland Security said.
The search for the killer is being led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office. The area is currently flooded with agents on horseback and helicopters conducting a search for the suspects.
Three horse patrol agents had responded to a sensor and were jumped by a rip crew, bandits who prey on drug and alien smugglers. The injured agent will most likely survive, though it will be a long, hard push through physical therapy, and a third was unharmed.
Seeing as how the attack took place only 8 miles from the border, the rip crew stands a good chance of having already escaped into Mexico.
I’m sure somewhere, the ATF is very, very, very worried that another of their Fast and Furious guns will turn up at the murder of a Border Patrol Agent.
Mark Steyn posted an excellent column today that pretty much covers the last week’s events in the Middle East. A couple highlights:
So, on a highly symbolic date, mobs storm American diplomatic facilities and drag the corpse of a U.S. ambassador through the streets. Then the president flies to Vegas for a fundraiser. No, no, a novelist would say; that’s too pat, too neat in its symbolic contrast. Make it Cleveland, or Des Moines.
…
As I say, I’m inclined to be generous, and put some of this down to the natural torpor and ineptitude of government. But Hillary Clinton and General Martin Dempsey are guilty of something worse, in the secretary of state’s weirdly obsessive remarks about an obscure film supposedly disrespectful of Mohammed and the chairman of the joint chiefs’ telephone call to a private citizen asking him if he could please ease up on the old Islamophobia.
Forget the free-speech arguments. In this case, as Secretary Clinton and General Dempsey well know, the film has even less to do with anything than did the Danish cartoons or the schoolteacher’s teddy bear or any of the other innumerable grievances of Islam. The 400-strong assault force in Benghazi showed up with RPGs and mortars: That’s not a spontaneous movie protest; that’s an act of war, and better planned and executed than the dying superpower’s response to it. Secretary Clinton and General Dempsey are, to put it mildly, misleading the American people when they suggest otherwise.
President Barack Obama is considering executive-branch action on U.S. cybersecurity after Congress failed to pass legislation to protect national security assets, a White House aide said.
“If the Congress is not going to act on something like this, then the president wants to make sure that we’re doing everything possible,” John Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, said today at an event at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.
Senate Republicans last week blocked a bill backed by Obama that would have set up voluntary cybersecurity standards for operators of infrastructure such as power grids and water- treatment plants that are considered essential to national security.
Republicans, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups said the voluntary standards would be a back door to government regulation of companies. The bill was sponsored by Senators Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, and Susan Collins, a Maine Republican.
Brennan said opponents misrepresented the bill, which he said called for minimum performance standards. He didn’t specify what the White House is planning, or if it would take the form of an executive order.
Ah, the “Congress won’t act, we MUST DO SOMETHING” argument of the dictatorial Man of Action.
Congress questions Army role in denying life-saving software to troops
By Justin Fishel Published July 26, 2012
Congress is set to launch an investigation into a brewing Army scandal over the difficulty some units have had in securing a software system designed to predict the location of roadside bombs — the No. 1 killer of American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Though the software, called Palantir, is already being used by some troops in Afghanistan, more units have been requesting it and some of those requests remain unfulfilled. The 1st Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division sent a request in May citing an “urgent need” for the intelligence-gathering system and has yet to receive it.
What’s more alarming, said Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., a member of the House Armed Services Committee, is that the Army stands accused of destroying internal reports that favor Palantir over its own system.
“The problem is (the Army) fell in love with their own software,” Hunter told Fox News.
Sounds like a great thing, huh? Sounds like the stupid brass is endangering our troops by not buying this new software. Heck, this whole story practically reads like an ad for Palantir.
Meanwhile, the Army says it’s working to integrate Palantir into more of its computer systems. But when asked about reports that it destroyed favorable reviews of Palantir, the Army responded with a written statement offering no explanation other than to say the matter is under investigation. That investigation is being conducted by an undisclosed three-star general, not the Army’s inspector general which typically handles internal investigations.
Well, what is Palantir?
It’s basically an extension of the all-seeing eye of Sauron from Lord of the Rings, used by his minion Saruman. Y’know, allegorical Satan and his henchman?
Businessweek did a story on Palantir a while back. It’s basically a gigantic snooping system to spy on everything and everyone at all times by cross-checking every bit of data in existence that can somehow be checked.
An organization like the CIA or FBI can have thousands of different databases, each with its own quirks: financial records, DNA samples, sound samples, video clips, maps, floor plans, human intelligence reports from all over the world. Gluing all that into a coherent whole can take years. Even if that system comes together, it will struggle to handle different types of data—sales records on a spreadsheet, say, plus video surveillance images. What Palantir (pronounced Pal-an-TEER) does, says Avivah Litan, an analyst at Gartner (IT), is “make it really easy to mine these big data sets.” The company’s software pulls off one of the great computer science feats of the era: It combs through all available databases, identifying related pieces of information, and puts everything together in one place.
Depending where you fall on the spectrum between civil liberties absolutism and homeland security lockdown, Palantir’s technology is either creepy or heroic. Judging by the company’s growth, opinion in Washington and elsewhere has veered toward the latter….
When that story came out, it was noted by a few folks, including Sipsey Street, but the interesting part comes later in the story:
Thiel, Lonsdale, and a couple of former colleagues officially incorporated Palantir in 2004. Thiel originally wanted to hire a chief executive officer from Washington who could navigate the Byzantine halls of the military-industrial complex. His co-founders resisted and eventually asked Alex Karp, an American money manager living in Europe who had been helping raise money for Clarium, to join as temporary CEO.
It was an unlikely match. Before joining Palantir, Karp had spent years studying in Germany under Jürgen Habermas, the most prominent living representative of the Frankfurt School, the group of neo-Marxist philosophers and sociologists. After getting a PhD in philosophy from the University of Frankfurt—he also has a degree from Stanford Law School—Karp drifted from academia and dabbled in stocks. He proved so good at it that, with the backing of a handful of European billionaires, he set up a money management firm called the Caedmon Group. His intellect, and ability to solve a Rubik’s Cube in under a minute, commands an awed reverence around the Palantir offices, where he’s known as Dr. Karp.
And then it gets worse from there:
At 44, Karp has a thin, sinewy physique—the result of a strict 1,200-calorie-a-day diet—and an angular face that gives way to curly brown, mad-scientist hair. On a November visit at Palantir’s headquarters, he’s wearing purple pants and a blue and orange athletic shirt. As he does every day, he walked to work. “I never learned to drive because I was busy reading, doing things, and talking to people,” he says. “And I’m coordinated enough to bike, but the problem is that I will start dreaming about the business and run into a tree.”
During the era of social networks, online games, and Web coupons, Karp and his engineers have hit on a grander mission. “Our primary motivation,” Karp says, “is executing against the world’s most important problems in this country and allied countries.” That’s an unusual pitch in Silicon Valley, where companies tend to want as little to do with Washington as possible and many of the best engineers flaunt their counterculture leanings.
Palantir’s name refers to the “seeing stones” in Lord of the Rings that provide a window into other parts of Middle-earth. They’re magical tools created by elves that can serve both good and evil. Bad wizards use them to keep in touch with the overlord in Mordor; good wizards can peer into them to check up on the peaceful, innocent Hobbits of the Shire. As Karp explains with a straight face, his company’s grand, patriotic mission is to “protect the Shire.”
This is a problem. This is statism in cute terms. This is a neo-Marxist who believes in the supremacy of the state, immediately getting in tight with the state, in order to “execute against the world’s most important problems”. Wanna bet his definition and yours as a free citizen disagree?
The analogy and their name is apt. The palantir was used for evil. A palantir outright used by a tyrant is easy to see as evil. A palantir used for spying on hobbits “to check up on innocent Hobbits” invades their privacy and is just another apparatus of the tyrant. So what happens if the hobbits don’t want to be spied on?
Or what about the nations of men, or elves, or dwarves, who aren’t keen on being relegated to pet hobbits of some ultra-powerful wizard?
For the analogy to work, it assumes that the citizen wants to be subject to being spied on at all times, as though their personal information should be collected and coallated by a massive government program, accessible to anyone who happens to have a link to Palantir’s network. This also assumes that a neo-Marxist weirdo who acts like a Bond villain is a good person to be designing and presumably have access to all government data everywhere, that a neo-Marxist with a Ph.D fro a neo-Marxist school in a philosophy that basically says people are at their best when being controlled by the state, should be manipulating all the information of the state at all times.
Now, going back to the beginning, there’s a good reason why the Pentagon should be suspicious. Palantir is marketed as an ultimate data-mining system to cross-check every database as an “infrastructure for analysis” – it doesn’t replace them all – it searches them all.
The secretive data-analysis startup, based in Palo Alto, Calif. and backed by early Facebook investor Peter Thiel, has suffered a number of blows to its public image of late. The most recent is the settlement of a lawsuit filed by rival i2 Group, based in McLean, Va., over accusations that Palantir employees fraudulently obtained i2 software and used it to design competing products.
Since Palantir touts itself as the product of fraud-detection technologies pioneered at PayPal, the payments startup Thiel cofounded, those charges present ironies, as i2’s lawyers eagerly pointed out in their initial complaint.
Separately, Palantir CEO Alex Karp issued a public statement apologizing for his company’s role in preparing a plan for Bank of America to strike back at Wikileaks, the Internet-based nonprofit group famed for obtaining and releasing sensitive documents into the public domain. The company also placed employee Matthew Steckman on leave after hackers released emails showing he was involved in preparing a similar plan for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to damage ThinkProgress, a pro-labor publication.
Isn’t that peculiar. Are they playing to their audience of statists, or are they damaging rivals, or what exactly are they doing? Wikileaks and ThinkProgress may both ultimately be bad entities, but that only compounds the untrustworthiness of Palantir.
Reading more about his mentor Habermas is also interesting, as he seems to be of a very Ozymandius-type utilitarianism that “we know what’s best”. His critique of religion as a tool to get people to do “what they should do” is somewhat sinister, as are many of his Marxist roots. It’s subtle, but it’s there.
SO, these folks have built themselves an iPhone called the patriotapp. Here’s what they say about it:
“…the word’s first iPhone application that empower citizens to assist government agencies in creating safer, cleaner, and more efficient communities…. This app was founded on the belief that citizens can provide the most sophisticated and broad network of eyes and ears necessary to prevent terrorism, crime, environmental negligence, or other malicious behavior.”
This is downright scary, this application is capable of letting a person take photos and send those photos along with a write-up to various government agencies including FBI, EPA, GAO, and CDC. this sure smacks of the DHS’s “If you see something, say something,” campaign, which now is at your local Wal-Mart store.
The website states the applications several uses:
Enable citizens to record and communicate the following:
National Security
Suspicious Activities
Crime
Government Waste
Environmental Crime or possible violations
White Collar Crime
Workplace Harassment
Discrimination, or other violations
Public Health Concerns
This basically is another way for the government to build information on the citizens they are supposed to be protecting. The potential for this application to be misused is exponential. People will be turning the neighbors in for blocking each other’s drive ways, playing their music too loud, or collecting information for the government, such as how many guns a guy sees his neighbor with. This app gives people the incentive to actually spy on their neighbors.
On the other hand, however, this touted as a new 911 service that can help the authorities respond even faster with better information. But at what cost? How many potential resources could be wasted when a neighbor gets upset at another and decides to send that message to the FBI or DHS? Is this app going to solve problems or cause new ones.
Lets not forget we have folks calling 911 to complain about their fast food.
