Surreal Saturday: Parkour (YouTube)

If you are not familiar with the outrageous sport of parkour (or its close cousin, free running) take a look at the video below:

Annual Wiretap Report Released (USCourts.gov)

The Director of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts released its 2007 Wiretap Report to Congress recently. The statute requires that specific information be reported each year "including the offense(s) under investigation, the location of the intercept, the cost of the surveillance, and the number of arrests, trials, and convictions that directly result from the surveillance."

According to the report: "A total of 2,208 intercepts authorized by federal and state courts were completed in 2007, an increase of 20 percent compared to the number terminated in 2006. The number of applications for orders by federal authorities fell less than 1 percent to 457. The number of applications reported by state prosecuting officials grew 27 percent to 1,751, with 24 states providing reports, 1 more than in 2006."

However, there is a catch. The Feds did not include data "involving sensitive and/or sealed matters". That means the report had to include this little gem: "Statistics indicate that if all intercepts undertaken for federal investigations in 2007 were reported, the 2007 Wiretap Report would not reflect any decrease in the use of court-approved electronic surveillance by the agencies." Given that Federal wiretaps reported are below the ten year average, it is virtually certain that the actual number of wiretaps is higher, though probably not hugely so.

The report goes on to say: "Installed wiretaps were in operation an average of 44 days per wiretap in 2007, compared to 40 days in 2006." This came at an average cost of over $48,000 per wiretap! The most common specific location for the wiretap was a “portable device, carried by/on individual” by a very large margin -- 94% of wiretaps were on cell phones, etc.

81% of all applications for wiretaps stated that drug offenses were the most serious crime under consideration. There is not even a category for terrorism on the chart provided. It is unclear if this is because terrorism is included in the "other" category (which, at the federal and state level combined, accounted for only 30 wiretaps) or because these are "sensitive and/or sealed matters".

Arrests vs. conviction rate told the most interesting story to me, however. The graph below (built by me using the data from Table 9 of the report) shows the percent of convictions in cases where wiretaps were used versus the total number of wiretaps authorized per year (I have normalized the number of wiretaps by dividing the total by 100 so that both lines could easily fit on the same graph. To get the actual number of taps, you need to multiply the raw number by 100). I have also added a trendline to both sets of data. It appears that the number of arrests is staying more or less the same but that the number of convictions is dropping. This might just be a statistical artifact (arrests are often made months or years after the intercept is made) but it is still a trend worth noticing.

The "Real" Price Of Gasoline And The Value Of History (EIA via LII)

The always helpful Librarian's Internet Index pointed me today towards some interesting charts at the Energy Information Administration showing "real" (i.e. inflation adjusted) gasoline and other petroleum product prices over time. Most of the charts date back to 1980 but the one below, dating back to 1919, seemed the most interesting. Of course, the importance of gasoline in the US economy is far more significant than it was in 1919 (and maybe than even in 1983), but it is still useful to get the historical perspective.

Country Reports On Terrorism (US State Department)

The US State Department has just released its annual Country Reports On Terrorism. The document is quite extensive and contains not only a Strategic Assessment and individual country reports but also a full description of "strategies, activities, tools for disrupting or eliminating safe havens" and a list of designated terrorist organizations (with brief descriptions of each). The full, 50 minute briefing announcing the report is at the end of this post but I have extracted some of the highlights from the Strategic Assessment (Hyperlinks, italics and bold are mine):

• "Al-Qa’ida (AQ) and associated networks remained the greatest terrorist threat to the United States and its partners in 2007. It has reconstituted some of its pre-9/11 operational capabilities through the exploitation of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), replacement of captured or killed operational lieutenants, and the restoration of some central control by its top leadership, in particular Ayman al-Zawahiri. Although Usama bin Ladin remained the group’s ideological figurehead, Zawahiri has emerged as AQ’s strategic and operational planner."

• "2007 was marked by the affiliation of regional insurgent groups with AQ, notably the growing threat in North Africa posed by the Algerian Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat’s (GSPC) September 2006 merger with AQ, which resulted in GSPC renaming itself al-Qa’ida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). AQIM is still primarily focused on the Algerian government, but its target set is broader than it was prior to the merger."

• "At the same time, the alliance of convenience and mutual exploitation between al-Qa’ida in Iraq (AQI) and many Sunni populations there has deteriorated. The Baghdad Security Plan, initiated in February, along with assistance from primarily Sunni tribal and local groups has succeeded in reducing violence to late 2005 levels, has disrupted and diminished AQI infrastructure, and has driven some surviving AQI fighters from Baghdad and Al Anbar into the northern Iraqi provinces of Ninawa, Diyala, and Salah ad Din."

• "Throughout 2007, AQ increased propaganda efforts seeking to inspire support in Muslim populations, undermine Western confidence, and enhance the perception of a powerful worldwide movement. Terrorists consider information operations a principal part of their effort. Use of the Internet for propaganda, recruiting, fundraising and, increasingly, training, has made the Internet a “virtual safe haven.” (Note: For an interesting perspective on this see The Mercyhurst Virtual Jihad Project) International intervention in Iraq continued to be exploited by AQ as a rallying cry for radicalization and terrorist activity, as were other conflicts such as Afghanistan and Sudan. The international community has yet to muster a coordinated and effectively resourced program to counter extremist propaganda."

• "Iran remained the most significant state sponsor of terrorism. A critically important element of Iranian national security strategy is its ability to conduct terrorist operations abroad."
  

• "Hizballah, a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, is key to Iran’s terrorism strategy. Iran also continued to threaten its neighbors and destabilize Iraq by providing weapons, training, and funding to select Iraqi Shia militants."

• "In Colombia, the FARC exemplified another trend: growing links between terrorist and other criminal activity. The FARC, which continued to hold hundreds of hostages, including three American citizens captive for more than four years, raised more than an estimated $60 million per year from narcotics trafficking."

• "Responding to terrorist groups that have many of the characteristics of a global insurgency – propaganda campaigns, grass roots support, and political and territorial ambitions, though ill-defined, requires a comprehensive response. Successful methods include a focus on protecting and securing the population; and politically and physically marginalizing the insurgents, winning the support and cooperation of at-risk populations by targeted political and development measures, and conducting precise intelligence-led special operations to eliminate critical enemy elements with minimal collateral damage."

• "There were significant achievements in this area this year against terrorist leadership targets, notably the capture or killing of key terrorist leaders in Pakistan, Ethiopia, Iraq, and the Philippines. These efforts buy us time to carry out the most important elements of a comprehensive counterterrorist strategy: disrupting terrorist operations, including their communications, propaganda and subversion efforts; planning and fundraising; and eliminating the conditions that terrorists exploit."

• "Radicalization of immigrant populations, youth and alienated minorities in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa continued. But it became increasingly clear that radicalization to violent extremism does not occur by accident, or because such populations are innately prone to extremism. Rather, we saw increasing evidence of terrorists and extremists manipulating the grievances of alienated youth or immigrant populations, and then cynically exploiting those grievances to subvert legitimate authority and create unrest. We also note a “self-radicalization” process of youths reaching out to extremists in order to become involved in the broader AQ fight."

• "Counter-radicalization (Note: Is this a new term? I do not recall having seen it before...) is a key policy priority for the United States, particularly in Europe, given the potential of Europe-based violent extremism to threaten the United States and its key interests directly. The leaders of AQ and its affiliates are extremely interested in recruiting terrorists from and deploying terrorists to Europe, people familiar with Western cultures who can travel freely. Countering such efforts demands that we treat immigrant and youth populations not as a source of threat to be defended against, but as a target of enemy subversion to be protected and supported."

• "The key success factor in confronting violent extremism is the commitment by governments to work with each other, with the international community, with private sector organizations, and with their citizens and immigrant populations. Local communities are also a vital part of countering radicalization strategies."

Related Posts:
Country Reports On Human Rights Practices (State Department)
Terrorism Threat Map (AON)
Annual Threat Assessment Of The Director Of National Intelligence (Senate Testimony)
Rank Ordering The 26 Risks From The 2008 Global Risk Report (WEF)
One Stop Shopping; Current US National Strategies

Iraqi Reconstruction Five Years On (SIGIR)

The Special Inspector General For Iraq Reconstruction has just published its most recent quarterly report on the status of Iraqi reconstruction. The graphic can be seen below and the full (10 MB) report can be downloaded here.

Read this doc on Scribd: Iraq Construction Five Years On -- SIGIR