'War on Terror' II - Nation

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We know the rules by now, the strange conventions and stilted Kabuki scripts that govern our cartoon facsimile of a national security debate. The Obama administration makes vague, reassuring noises about constraining executive power and protecting civil liberties, but then merrily adopts whatever appalling policy George W. Bush put in place. Conservatives hit the panic button on the right-wing noise machine anyway, keeping the delicate ecosystem in balance by creating the false impression that something has changed. We've watched the formula play out with Guantánamo Bay, torture prosecutions and the invocation of "state secrets." We appear to be on the verge of doing the same with national security surveillance.

Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee seemed to abandon hope of bringing any real change to the Patriot Act. A lopsided and depressingly bipartisan majority approved legislation that would reauthorize a series of expanded surveillance powers set to expire at the end of the year. Several senators had proposed that reauthorization be wedded to safeguards designed to protect the privacy of innocent Americans from indiscriminate data dragnets--but behind-the-scenes maneuvering by the Obama administration ensured that even the most modest of these were stripped from the final bill now being sent to the full Senate.

In September the Senate got off to a promising start. Only three provisions are actually slated for "sunset" this year: "lone wolf" authority to wiretap terror suspects unconnected with any foreign terror group; "roving" wiretaps that can follow a suspect across an indefinite number of phone lines and Internet accounts; and "Section 215" orders that can be used to compel third parties to turn over any "tangible thing" investigators believe may be relevant to a terrorism investigation. Yet several Democrats had signaled a desire to use the renewal process to undertake a much broader review of the post-9/11 surveillance architecture, including National Security Letters (NSLs)--a controversial tool that permits the mass acquisition of financial and telecommunications records without court order--and last year's sweeping amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which permit the executive branch to authorize broad interception of Americans' international communications with minimal court oversight. Democratic Senator Russ Feingold proposed an ambitious and comprehensive reform bill called the JUSTICE Act--which still would have reauthorized roving wiretaps and 215 orders--while Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy offered a more modest bill that nevertheless sought to narrow the nearly unlimited scope of NSLs and Section 215.

The renewal of the expiring provisions was always a fait accompli, though Fox News and some conservative columnists falsely claimed that Democrats were scheming to eliminate them entirely. Feingold had recommended permitting the as-yet-unused "lone wolf" provision to lapse, but at hearings on renewal last month Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse didn't believe there was "any doubt" about the reapproval of all three. Rather, Whitehouse explained, the question was whether any "further refinements" might be needed to check potential abuses.

In public, the administration declared its openness to such "modifications." As well one might expect, considering that President Obama himself had co- sponsored legislation in 2005 containing many of the very same safeguards now in Feingold's bill. Even when, during the campaign, Obama had disappointed many of his supporters by voting for the very FISA Amendments Act he pledged to filibuster, he reassured them that as president he would revisit that "imperfect" bill. Civil libertarians understood that the more limited Leahy bill would provide the template for reform but had reason to hope some of the key provisions of Feingold's JUSTICE Act might be incorporated during markup.

It was not to be. When the Senate Judiciary Committee convened at the beginning of the month to start work on legislation, it became clear that the Obama administration had been waging a campaign behind the scenes to oppose any significant modifications to NSL or 215 authority--in particular, any requirement that investigators have "specific and articulable facts" tying records sought to terror suspects or their associates. In a last-minute switcheroo, Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein swooped in with a substitute bill that gutted the core reforms of Leahy's modest bill. And it got worse. A week later, a series of further amendments offered by Republican Jeff Sessions watered down the final bill reported out of committee still further. Remarkably, the arch-conservative Sessions appears to have been taking dictation from the Obama administration, presumably to spare committee Democrats the indignity of further overt capitulation: the New York Times reported that his changes were "a verbatim transfer of the text of amendments the Obama administration had privately sent to Congress on Wednesday." An attempt by Feingold to amend the FISA Amendments Act--perhaps the most egregious of the post-9/11 expansions of executive branch surveillance authority--was promptly torpedoed by Leahy on procedural grounds.

The supposed rationale for rejecting these changes--many of which the very same Judiciary Committee had unanimously favored just four years earlier--was that any new limitations on broad search powers might interfere with an "ongoing investigation." During hearings, one Justice Department official had alluded to an "important, sensitive collection program" involving 215 orders, and Attorney General Eric Holder publicly implied--though he did not state outright--that the new powers had played a crucial role in the capture of alleged bomb plotter Najibullah Zazi.

But there is ample reason for doubt. According to a report on National Public Radio, intelligence officers became aware of Zazi thanks to a tip from Pakistani intelligence indicating that he had trained with Al Qaeda. Such a tip should have provided grounds for a full-blown FISA wiretap warrant, and would have far surpassed the mere "reasonable basis" to suspect a terror link that even the most aggressive reform proposals required for NSLs or 215 orders. Democratic Senator Dick Durbin complained that "the real reason for resisting this obvious, common-sense modification of Section 215 is unfortunately cloaked in secrecy," and worried that posterity would look unkindly on his colleagues once that cloak was lifted. Feingold, too, disputed that his reforms would hamper investigations, and hinted that classified briefings had revealed uses of Section 215 that he considered abuses of the power.

While it's impossible to know precisely which tools were pivotal in the Zazi investigation, or what difference the proposed reforms would have made, the intelligence community has recently shown it has few qualms about making strained claims of necessity to support expansion of its powers.

That power to spy on "lone wolf" terror suspects under the looser standards of FISA was originally justified by the claim that FBI agents were unable to search "twentieth hijacker" Zacarias Moussaoui's laptop before 9/11 for want of such power. Yet in 2003 a bipartisan Senate report concluded that this was untrue: in reality, FBI supervisors had "failed miserably" by misunderstanding the fully sufficient powers they already enjoyed under FISA. The law as written in September 2001 would have permitted them to obtain a warrant; and in fact, investigators later used precisely the same evidence they'd already gathered to obtain an ordinary criminal warrant on Moussaoui.

Or consider the 2005 investigation of Magdy Mahmoud Mostafa el-Nashar, a former acquaintance of the London transit bombers (later cleared of wrongdoing). An FBI agent had gone to obtain records from North Carolina State University, where el-Nashar had done a stint as a graduate student. With the records in hand, however, the agent got a call from FBI headquarters instructing him to return them and instead obtain the same documents using a National Security Letter. As anyone even remotely acquainted with NSLs would have known, however, they cannot be used for educational records--and indeed, agents had to improvise a form to make their request. The perplexed university properly denied the request, and another subpoena was obtained.

Though any such misuse of an NSL is supposed to be reported to an oversight board promptly, no such report was filed for more than a year. Yet within a week of the incident, it had somehow come to the attention of FBI Director Robert Mueller, who cited the "delay" as evidence that the Bureau's current NSL powers were inadequate.

The FISA Amendments Act is the successor to an even broader bill called the Protect America Act, which similarly gave the attorney general and director of national intelligence extraordinary power to authorize sweeping interception of Americans' international communications. It was hastily passed in 2007 amid claims that the secret FISA Court had issued a ruling that prevented investigators from intercepting wholly foreign communications that traveled across US wires. Former Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell even claimed that FISA's restrictions had rendered it impossible to immediately eavesdrop on Iraqi insurgents who had captured several American soldiers. The New York Post quoted tearful parents of the captured men expressing their horror at the situation and a senior Congressional staffer who alleged that "the intelligence community was forced to abandon our soldiers because of the law."

Yet as a Justice Department official later admitted, the FISA law clearly placed no such broad restriction on foreign wire communications passing through the United States; rather, there had been a far more narrow problem involving e-mails for which the recipient's location could not be determined. And as James Bamford explained in his essential 2008 book, The Shadow Factory, the delay in getting wiretaps running on the suspected kidnappers was the result of a series of missteps at the Justice Department, not the limits of FISA--no surprise, since even when FISA does require a warrant, surveillance may begin immediately in emergencies if a warrant is sought later. (The suspected kidnappers, by the way, turned out not to have been the actual kidnappers.) Yet on the basis of such claims, a panicked Congress signed off on almost limitless authority to vacuum up international communications--authority that we already know has resulted in systematic "overcollection" of purely domestic conversations, and even resulted in the interception of former President Bill Clinton's e-mails.

In theory, the purpose of building "sunset" provisions into these new powers was to allow--indeed, to force--Congress to consider what changes might be needed in the event of such misuse. Given the incredible secrecy of intelligence investigations, this would be a dubious check even under ideal circumstances. But what's truly astonishing is that even known abuses don't seem to have given legislators second thoughts about resisting administration demands.

Among the reforms in Feingold's JUSTICE Act was a measure requiring targets of "roving" wiretaps to be identified, as is required under criminal wiretap statutes, rather than merely described. Unlike criminal taps, FISA eavesdropping tends to be extraordinarily broad, with any innocent communications picked up "minimized" later. Yet "minimization," the legal procedures meant to protect the privacy of innocent Americans when their communications are swept up in a FISA wiretap, does not mean deletion. In a 2003 case, US v. Sattar, prosecutors submitted 5,175 recordings made under FISA that had not been "minimized." Yet, faced with disclosure obligations at trial, it turned out that they were able to produce a far greater volume of recordings: more than 85,000 audio files.

Given that breadth, the risks inherent in "John Doe" warrants, which neither name a specific phone line or Internet account in advance nor identify a target, are obvious. Indeed, a 2005 Inspector General report on the FBI's translation backlogs revealed that among the eighty-seven years' worth of foreign language material recorded FISA in 2004 alone--a tiny fraction of what the NSA collects--there were an undisclosed number of "collections of materials from the wrong sources due to technical problems." Feingold's proposed change was not even publicly debated.

Still harder to justify is the unwillingness to rein in NSLs, now issued by the tens of thousands annually--the majority of which are for the records of US persons. The Senate did see fit to make some modest changes to the NSL gag orders that prohibit recipients from talking about them--orders federal courts had already found unconstitutional in their present form. But there seemed little concern that the massive expansion in the scope of NSL authority under the Patriot Act and subsequent legislation had given rise to the endemic misuse of the letters discovered in two Inspector General reports. As IG Glenn Fine testified in September, two years after that first report, the FBI has still not produced the new internal guidelines his office recommended.

Fortunately, not all legislators are quite so willing to accept the "trust us" standard of the Bush years. Several House Democrats are requesting more public information about the use of 215 orders in particular, and there is still plenty of time to fix the flaccid bill produced by the Senate Judiciary Committee. It will take courage to push back against glib assurances that we can be made safe from terror only if Americans' private records can be vacuumed into vast databases with few limits. But if Democrats want to project real toughness in the national security arena, this would be a good place to start.

About Julian Sanchez

Julian Sanchez is a research fellow at the Cato Institute and a contributing editor for Reason magazine.

Inside Indonesia - Land titles do not equal agrarian reform

Activists split with Indonesia’s government over whether land registration helps the rural poor

Noer Fauzi

Land is a justice issue Danu Primanto

In a speech on 31 January 2007 President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said that agrarian reform would be a priority for his government. Since that time, Indonesia’s National Land Agency (BPN, Badan Pertanahan Nasional) has dramatically increased the rate at which it registers land title. But land rights activists are sharply critical of the government’s policy. Despite, the increase in registrations, we think the BPN has set aside its original agrarian reform goal of redistributing land to the poor. This is a goal that is mandated by Indonesia’s 1960 Basic Agrarian Law, as well as the 2001 legislative Decree No 9, on Agrarian Reform and Natural Resource Management. Providing individual land titles does not necessarily help the poor; in fact it can make the livelihoods of struggling rural people and communities even more precarious.

Accelerated land title registration

Under the leadership of Dr. Joyo Winoto, BPN has pursued a process of ‘legalising’ land assets through accelerating the certification of land titles at an astonishing rate. The volume of government sponsored land ‘legalisation’ has risen sharply. In 2004, before Joyo was appointed,, the BPN issued full legal title for only 269,902 land holdings. By 2008 the total had reached 2,172,507 – an increase of over 800 per cent. Adding cases for which individuals, groups, and businesses paid their own processing fees brings the total to 4,627,039 property titles certified.

Since 2004, BPN has used a 500 per cent budget increase to update its institutional procedures. It runs several schemes that aim to certify land titles, including two supported by World Bank loans: LMPDP (Land Management and Program Development Project) and RALAS (Reconstruction of Aceh Land Administration System). BPN has established a mobile Land Certification Service to extend its reach to some 60 per cent of Indonesia’s land area, sending officers to remote areas, and improving data processing and telecommunications.

With tight land and macro-economic conditions that do not favor small farmers, land title certification … without agrarian reform, is a systematic tool that forces farmers to sell their land more quickly

With such accelerated service, Joyo Winoto estimates it will take only 18 years more to title all land holdings in Indonesia. President Yudhoyono’s campaign team celebrated this spectacular success in a full-page advertisement: ‘Land for the People. Not Just Empty Words’ (Pertanahan untuk Rakyat. Bukan Omong Kosong) in the newspaper Media Indonesia of 24 June 2009.

President Yudhoyono touts his agrarian reform achievements

The advertisement appeared as the 188 member organisations of the Consortium for Agrarian Reform (KPA, Konsorsium Pembaruan Agraria) held their fifth national conference in Puncak, West Java. At the meeting KPA leaders introduced a strategic program and targets, results of three years’ work. KPA was founded in 1995 as a nationwide network of NGOs involved in campaigning in favour of a policy of land redistribution for the rural poor.

KPA tackled the Land Agency’s claims of success skeptically. Were BPN’s remarkable figures on land title certification believable? More importantly, will universal land titles fulfill the primary goal of agrarian reform - to help lift poor people out of poverty? Will they protect the rights and livelihoods of poor farmers and marginalised indigenous communities?

As a national advocacy network of civil society organisations, KPA has long criticised the Land Administration Project, which is funded with a World Bank loan backed by AusAID (The Australian government’s overseas aid program). [See Inside Indonesia 47: July-Sept 1996, Noer Fauzi: ‘We Promote Community-based Land Mapping ’, and ‘Australians Help Codify Indonesian Land Titles ’].

In a press release on 3 July 2009, KPA’s new General Secretary Idham Arshad asserted that BPN’s land titling program will cause farmers with small land holdings to lose more land, because individual titles make land easier to sell or to mortgage. ‘With tight land and macro-economic conditions that do not favor small farmers, land title certification … without agrarian reform, is a systematic tool that forces farmers to sell their land more quickly. Land will be transferred toward big capital, so that the existing unequal land distribution will become even worse. That’s why farmland is now increasingly owned by urban non-farming groups, while poor farmers become farm labourers.’

Differing positions, arguments, and visions

Joyo Winoto, the BPN head, is aware that ‘legalising’ assets by certifying land titles often leads poor owners to lose their land, if they cannot use land optimally because they lack capital or other resources. To reduce farmers’ vulnerability, his reforms combine land titling with a range of support and extension services for poor farmers.

KPA activists criticise BPN’s primary focus on land titles, believing that land titles have become an end in themselves, not just a means to achieve broader social justice. Unlike KPA, officials at BPN treat land title certification as equivalent to agrarian reform. BPN agents in the field and district offices do not differentiate between the two major programs they administer to ‘legalise’ land assets: land registration through ‘adjudication’ (land titling through the World Bank-funded Land Management and Program Development Project) and ‘land redistribution’ (through the National Agrarian Reform Project, paid through the routine national budget). From 2005 to 2008, BPN registered some 651,000 land certificates through ‘adjudication’, while nearly 333,000 titles were registered through ‘land redistribution’ schemes. Both programs result in similar land title certificates with the same full legal force, despite the two programs’ differing goals, funding sources, budget mechanisms, and administrative procedures.

Yet these two program approaches recognise very different legal bases for land ownership. Legal titles granted through the ‘adjudication’ process certify property based on evidence of customary ownership, inheritance, purchase, donation/bequest, or other land transactions recognised by local practices. By contrast, BPN’s ‘redistribution’ process deals with ‘state land’ (tanah negara), that has been designated for redistribution by BPN, targeting approximately 1.1 million hectares of such land for eventual redistribution.

KPA contends that it is necessary to differentiate between land ‘legalisation’ and redistribution because of the very different origins, agendas, and visions of these two approaches. KPA asserts that BPN’s underlying purpose in certifying, or legalising, land titles is to foster a global agenda to expand the land market. In line with the World Bank’s economic liberalisation agenda, clarifying land rights by issuing land certificates in huge numbers furthers economic development.

In fact, BPN’s land title certification program is one tool in President Yudhoyono’s and Joyo Winoto’s embrace of an ideological vision promoted by Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, the most recent in a long line of neo-liberal modernisation proponents to gain disciples in Indonesia. De Soto presented his thoughts to President Yudhoyono and ten cabinet-level ministers in November 2006 (see the report on the presidential website ).

De Soto’s reputation as a ‘global guru of neo-liberal populism’, as Mike Davis dubbed him in his 2006 book Planet of Slums, is based on de Soto’s promotion of a simple and highly seductive prescription: the solution to poverty lies in providing secure property rights to the poor, and integrating their land assets into the market system. The policy tool to achieve this is a massive government land registration and titling effort.

KPA’s alternative agrarian reform agenda starts from the evidence we see all around us of the suffering experienced by victims of land expropriation and land-grabbing, and the concentration of wealth by people who control extensive lands

De Soto believes that most rules that govern landed property and transactions in non-western nations like Indonesia operate outside the formal legal system, in customary and informal practices. Modernisation must transform all of these extra-legal rules into a single, integrated system of property rights and contracts accepted by all parties. Only in this way can the peoples’ land, now wasted as ‘dead capital’ beyond the formal legal system, be brought to life through land titling, and enter the economic system. Poor landowners will then be able to use their title as collateral in securing loans to assist their entrepreneurship. In this way, de Soto promotes a capitalist market system as the instrument to lift the people out of poverty.

In contrast to Joyo Winoto’s eager embrace of de Soto’s approach, KPA rejects the notion that integrating all land into the market system will overcome poverty in Indonesia. De Soto’s thinking merely softens, even hides, the greedy and predatory character of a capitalist economy based on universal private property and on commodification of everything through market mechanisms. KPA’s alternative agrarian reform agenda starts from the evidence we see all around us of the suffering experienced by victims of land expropriation and land-grabbing, and the concentration of wealth by people who control extensive lands.

In Indonesia, the underlying legal mechanism for pervasive land expropriation is what I call ‘state-isation of peoples’ land’ (negaraisasi tanah-tanah rakyat). In this process, the state legalises and legitimates its expropriation of peoples’ land, then turns it over to private companies for exploitation or ‘investment’. KPA rejects not only the transfer of control over land to private corporations, but also the ‘state-isation’ process that enables it.

KPA insists that the central intentions of the 1960 Basic Agrarian Law were to redistribute extensive land areas controlled by the state and by private companies, to give land to landless and impoverished farmers, and to raise their productivity by providing them with credit, education and appropriate technology. Managing land with regard to its ecological functions, rather than just profits, was also key in the Basic Agrarian Law. KPA supporters believe that only by reviving this agenda can we surmount the major causes of chronic rural poverty today.

Over the past five years, KPA’s leaders have worked closely with BPN’s policy reform process from conception to implementation. KPA took this course because the president had charged BPN to carry out an agrarian reform agenda, as spelled out in Presidential Decree No. 10/2006 and in other places. KPA hoped to see a genuine government agrarian reform program, dedicated to overcoming poverty and protecting human rights as its fundamental values. But, after four years of implementation, land rights activists including KPA have concluded that President Yudhoyono’s Program for Agrarian Reform has moved too far from the experiences of the victims of land expropriation and the day-to-day struggles of poor rural people.

Where are we going?

Government agencies are still a long way away from formulating a convincing approach to agrarian reform. Agrarian reformers in civil society must carefully consider our own future direction.

State land ‘reform’ policies legitimate a new model of land grabbing for food production, energy and biofuels, and the production of industrial raw materials

In the agrarian dialogue at KPA’s recent national conference, participants were troubled by more than just the problems of land titling. State land ‘reform’ policies also legitimate a new model of land grabbing for food production, energy and biofuels, and the production of industrial raw materials. If this model prevails, it will turn Indonesia into merely a source of land, natural resources, and cheap labour for the global market. Constant vigilance is required to accurately understand this, even more to resist it.

After almost ten years of democratic politics in Indonesia, now is a time for introspection and renewed resolve for those of us, like KPA, who struggle for agrarian justice. Where are we going? It will be a long, steep climb without clear direction unless we understand what has occurred, what is taking place now, and what is likely happen if current directions continue. ii

Noer Fauzi (noer@berkeley.edu) is a member of the KPA Expert Council, and is a PhD candidate in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management (ESPM) at the University of California, Berkeley. He served two terms as Chairperson of KPA (1995-1998 and 1999-2002). He thanks his KPA colleagues, Usep Setiawan, Idham Arsyad, Dede Shineba, and Dewi Kartika for their efforts, as well as Laksmi Savitri, Mohamad Shohib, Adriana, and Ann Hawkins, for their feedback. Judith Mayer translated and adapted this article for Inside Indonesia.

Bret Stephens: Does Obama Believe in Human Rights - WSJ.com

Image by Bob.Fornal via Flickr

Nobody should get too hung up over President Obama's decision, reported by Der Spiegel over the weekend, to cancel plans to attend next month's 20th anniversary celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Germany's reunited capital has already served his purposes; why should he serve its?

To this day, the fall of the Berlin Wall on the night of Nov. 9, 1989, remains a high-water mark in the march of human freedom. It's a march to which candidate Obama paid rich (if solipsistic) tribute in last year's big Berlin speech. "At the height of the Cold War, my father decided, like so many others in the forgotten corners of the world, that his yearning—his dream—required the freedom and opportunity promised by the West," waxed Mr. Obama to the assembled thousands. "This city, of all cities, knows the dream of freedom."

Those were the words. What's been the record?

China: In February, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton landed in Beijing with a conciliating message about the country's human-rights record. "Our pressing on those [human-rights] issues can't interfere on the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crisis," she said.

In fact, there has been no pressing whatsoever on human rights. President Obama refused to meet with the Dalai Lama last month, presumably so as not to ruffle feathers with the people who will now be financing his debts. In June, Liu Xiaobo, a leading signatory of the pro-democracy Charter 08 movement, was charged with "inciting subversion of state power." But as a U.S. Embassy spokesman in Beijing admitted to the Journal, "neither the White House nor Secretary Clinton have made any public comments on Liu Xiaobo."

Sudan: In 2008, candidate Obama issued a statement insisting that "there must be real pressure placed on the Sudanese government. We know from past experience that it will take a great deal to get them to do the right thing. . . . The U.N. Security Council should impose tough sanctions on the Khartoum government immediately."

Exactly right. So what should Mr. Obama do as president? Yesterday, the State Department rolled out its new policy toward Sudan, based on "a menu of incentives and disincentives" for the genocidal Sudanese government of Omar Bashir. It's the kind of menu Mr. Bashir will languidly pick his way through till he dies comfortably in his bed.

Iran: Mr. Obama's week-long silence on Iran's "internal affairs" following June's fraudulent re-election was widely noted. Not so widely noted are the administration's attempts to put maximum distance between itself and human-rights groups working the Iran beat.

Earlier this year, the State Department denied a grant request for New Haven, Conn.-based Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. The Center maintains perhaps the most extensive record anywhere of Iran's 30-year history of brutality. The grant denial was part of a pattern: The administration also abruptly ended funding for Freedom House's Gozaar project, an online Farsi- and English-language forum for discussing political issues.

It's easy to see why Tehran would want these groups de-funded and shut down. But why should the administration, except as a form of pre-emptive appeasement?

Burma: In July, Mr. Obama renewed sanctions on Burma. In August, he called the conviction of opposition leader (and fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner) Aung San Suu Kyi a violation of "the universal principle of human rights."

Yet as with Sudan, the administration's new policy is "engagement," on the theory that sanctions haven't worked. Maybe so. But what evidence is there that engagement will fare any better? In May 2008, the Burmese junta prevented delivery of humanitarian aid to the victims of Cyclone Nargis. Some 150,000 people died in plain view of "world opinion," in what amounted to a policy of forced starvation.

Leave aside the nausea factor of dealing with the authors of that policy. The real question is what good purpose can possibly be served in negotiations that the junta will pursue only (and exactly) to the extent it believes will strengthen its grip on power. It takes a remarkable presumption of good faith, or perhaps stupidity, to imagine that the Burmas or Sudans of the world would reciprocate Mr. Obama's engagement except to seek their own advantage.

It also takes a remarkable degree of cynicism—or perhaps cowardice—to treat human rights as something that "interferes" with America's purposes in the world, rather than as the very thing that ought to define them. Yet that is exactly the record of Mr. Obama's time thus far in office.

In Massachusetts not long ago, I found myself driving behind a car with "Free Tibet," "Save Darfur," and "Obama 08" bumper stickers. I wonder if it will ever dawn on the owner of that car that at least one of those stickers doesn't belong.

What Happens If the Dollar Crashes - BusinessWeek

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Trade wars could break out. Overexposed banks might collapse. And that's just for starters

By Peter Coy

The financial crisis taught us that markets can drop further and faster than anyone expects. Housing prices, for example, fell for three straight years starting in 2006, even though the conventional wisdom right up until the bust began was that prices would not fall even a little bit.

Let's apply some of our hard-won knowledge to the dollar, which is also supposed to be resistant to a bust. After weakening gradually since 2002, the greenback rose during the financial crisis last year. It has fallen roughly 15% since March as investors moved to higher-yielding currencies. The conventional wisdom is that at these levels the dollar is cheap and, if anything, due for a rebound. "Currencies don't go much more than 20% from their long-term averages in real [inflation-adjusted] terms. We're there already," says Michael Dooley, an economist who is co-founder and research chief of Cabezon Capital Management, a San Francisco investment firm.

But it's worth at least thinking about the possibility of a dollar bust. The reason the housing bust had such devastating consequences was a failure of imagination: Lenders, regulators, credit raters, and others simply couldn't believe that house prices would ever fall the way they did, so they were blindsided.

Bank Blowups Possible

Let's imagine the dollar quickly dropped by a further 25% against each major world currency, roughly parallel to housing's unprecedented 30% decline. That would mean it would take $2 to buy a single euro. On the good side, U.S. manufacturers would find it easier to compete globally, and foreign tourism would boom in the U.S. On the bad side, inflation in the U.S. would zoom because of the rising cost of imported products. Americans would have even more trouble getting a loan as foreign buyers pull out of the debt market.

Abroad, the cheap dollar would make it harder for other nations to export to the U.S., hurting their growth. China could face social unrest. Trade wars could break out. And there could be blowups at overexposed banks whose risk managers were sure no such dollar bust could happen. As investor Warren Buffett once said: "You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out."

Federal regulators are monitoring banks for a wide variety of risks, including the threat of a dollar bust: "We're not looking quarter to quarter, we're looking hour to hour and minute to minute at what those risks are," says one regulator who requested anonymity.

From its spring peak, the dollar is down 11% against the Japanese yen, 16% against the euro, 21% against the Canadian dollar, and about 30% against the Brazilian and Australian currencies, which are benefiting from a commodity price spike. Against a broad market basket of all U.S. trading partners, and adjusted for inflation, the dollar has fallen 15% from its spring high.

Deficits Depress Dollar

Behind the dollar's weakness are near-zero short-term U.S. interest rates. As they once did with yen, investors are borrowing dollars cheaply, then selling them to buy currencies of countries whose stocks and bonds promise better returns. The Federal Reserve is keeping the federal funds rate at a rock-bottom zero to 0.25% to stimulate the U.S. economy and heal the banks, but a side result is the dollar has turned into the preferred fuel for an international speculative play that is weighing down the greenback.

Another force driving down the dollar: continued U.S. trade deficits, which the U.S. is paying for by borrowing from the rest of the world. Some economists and traders believe that eventually the U.S. will be forced to devalue its own currency to make its global debt more affordable. While the trade gap has narrowed to less than 3% of gross domestic product in the second quarter from 6% at its peak in 2006, it is still high by historical standards.

Now, some of the foreign central banks that have propped up the dollar seem to be getting cold feet. Instead of buying just dollars for their foreign-exchange reserves, they're diversifying into other currencies. The countries that reveal the composition of their reserve holdings put 63% of their new reserves into euros and yen in the second quarter, according to an analysis by Barclays Capital (BCS). Says Steven Englander, Barclays' chief U.S. currency strategist: "Their incentive is to try to do stealth diversification, not 'get me out of here at any price.' " (China, with more than $2 trillion worth of reserves, doesn't reveal what currencies in which it holds the funds.)

The Bearish Case

Obama Administration officials don't seem perturbed by the dollar's slide so far. A weaker dollar helps shrink the trade deficit by making American-made goods more competitive in world markets. Drew Greenblatt, owner of Marlin Steel Wire Products in Baltimore, which makes high-tech baskets for assembly lines, says he's winning orders from countries that are better known as exporters. Exults Greenblatt: "We are shipping ice to Eskimos."

This state of calm would vanish overnight, though, if the financial markets got a sense that the dollar's decline was starting to snowball out of control. At that point, the invisible "force field" protecting the dollar would fade away, says Martin D. Weiss, chairman of Weiss Group, a financial data and analysis firm in Jupiter, Fla. Says Weiss: "We would become more like ordinary mortals and more vulnerable to attacks on our currency."

The bearish case for the dollar is that the decline takes on a life of its own. Selling begets more selling. The world's central bankers and finance ministers intervene to prop up the currency, but speculators, having tasted victory, aren't scared off. Princeton University economist Paul R. Krugman once called this the Wile E. Coyote scenario, after the character in the Road Runner cartoons who runs off a cliff but doesn't start to fall until he looks down and sees there's nothing beneath his feet.

Speculation that the dollar is headed for a tumble can become self-fulfilling if traders rush for the exit. Ashraf Laidi, chief foreign exchange strategist at CMC Markets, a London currency and commodity brokerage, says "right now there is around a 30% to 40% chance we are going to see the dollar falling toward a crisis point."

Dollar bulls like to point out that the currency rallied strongly last year during the worst of the financial crisis. But Laidi says that was no show of support for the dollar or the U.S. economy. Rather, he says, investors retreated from all types of risk and put their money into the most liquid, short-term instruments they could find—which just happened to be U.S. Treasury bills, which are held in accounts all over the world. Agrees Barclays' Englander: "It wasn't a long-term bet that the U.S. economy would be the most dynamic in the world."

Inflation Could Emerge Quickly

Currency traders don't put much stock in the statements of support for a strong dollar by Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and other Administration officials. They note that Treasury chiefs dating back to the Clinton Administration have said they support a strong dollar, yet the U.S. has not supported its currency through purchases since 1995.

If the dollar did tumble, import prices might rise faster than most economists now expect. New research by Columbia University economists Emi Nakamura and Jon Steinsson shows that the "pass-through" from a cheap currency to high import prices was underestimated because of poor data. In other words, inflation could emerge more quickly than is commonly believed. It would be disastrous for the economy if the Federal Reserve had to jack up interest rates to cool inflation or defend the currency while growth remained weak. A lower dollar makes Americans poorer by cutting the purchasing power of their currency. And there's no guarantee it would bolster U.S. industry, says David Malpass, president of New York research firm Encima Global. Malpass says the fall of the dollar in the late 1980s hurt rather than helped Detroit by giving Japan the buying power to strengthen its automakers. Says Mallpass: "We can make ourselves poor enough that we can't import very much and we'll have balanced trade. But how would that be good for the U.S.?"

In the short run, the biggest risk would be the failure of some firm that made a highly leveraged bet that was vulnerable to a falling dollar. A dollar plunge would affect not only currency trades but also interest-rate derivatives and credit default swaps. Five big banks accounted for 88% of the credit-risk exposure from derivatives in the entire U.S. banking system in the second quarter.

No one knows whether the dollar is headed for disaster. But assuming the best is perilous.

American Literature - Words Without Borders - NYTimes.com

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By LIESL SCHILLINGER

It’s been a capricious month for awards. First there were the Nobels, with the peace prize going to President Obama for work as yet undone and the literature prize to Herta Müller for works most people haven’t read. Then last Wednesday came the announcement of this year’s finalists for our own National Book Awards. Three of the five candidates in the fiction category were not born in this country; two of those three live abroad.

Last fall Horace Engdahl, then the spokesman for the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel literature prize, criticized American fiction for being “too isolated, too insular.” In light of the controversy that followed, it seems natural to ask: was Mr. Engdahl wrong?

To refine the question: how can our literary tastes be “isolated” and “insular” when they can be assimilated and imitated so successfully? And what does it mean to write an “American” book, if you don’t need an American address to do it?

The judges of the National Book Awards tacitly suggest a heartening response: the American idea not only translates, it disregards national boundaries. To qualify for the award, a writer must have American citizenship but can carry other passports, too. The Irish author Colum McCann, one of the finalists, was born in Dublin but makes his home in New York. For the epigraph to his novel, “Let the Great World Spin,” a kaleidoscope of New York City lives set in the 1970s but doubling as a 9/11 allegory, Mr. McCann chose two sentences from one of last year’s contenders, “The Lazarus Project”: “All the lives we could live, all the people we will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is what the world is.”

This borderless vision belongs, of course, to that book’s author, Aleksandar Hemon, who was born in Sarajevo in 1964, came to this country in 1992 as a tourist and stayed here after war broke out in Bosnia. In 2004 he won a MacArthur Fellowship. His worldview rejects the connection between passport and pen.

That’s a liberating thought to keep in mind while considering the other candidates for this year’s National Book Award in fiction. Marcel Theroux, who was born in Kampala, Uganda, and now lives in London, has produced a post-apocalyptic fable called “Far North,” written in an American idiom but set in Siberia. Its net effect recalls Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “We,” Jack London’s “White Fang” and “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy, frosted with the snowy brutality of “McCabe and Mrs. Miller.” Ultimately, though, such comparisons can’t serve, because Mr. Theroux, a son of the American writer Paul Theroux, yokes his style to his own intent.

Another candidate for the prize, Daniyal Mueenuddin, who grew up in Pakistan and Wisconsin, lives in the southern Punjab but is spending a year in London. His enthralling collection, “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders,” a series of interconnected stories set mostly in Pakistan (with detours to Paris, and, tangentially, the United States), evokes Guy de Maupassant or, a more recent author, the Indian-American Manil Suri, who wrote “The Death of Vishnu.” Who, reading Maupassant, thinks, “Oh, there’s a Frenchman for you?” Who, reading “The Death of Vishnu,” thinks: “I can’t relate. I’ve never slept on a Bombay stairwell?” One of Mr. Mueenuddin’s characters, a wealthy Pakistani, tells her husband, who fantasizes that if he had been born in America, he wouldn’t be “weighed down by history,” that he’s wrong. “Just because an American runs away, to Kansas or Wyoming, doesn’t mean that he succeeds in escaping whatever it is he left behind,” she says. “Like all of us, he carries it with him.” Mr. Mueenuddin transcends place; he’s as American as he wants to be, even if most of his stories take place in the region served by Pakistan’s M-2 motorway and not Wisconsin’s I-94.

These writers, in expressing their associations and wide-ranging stomping grounds, show readers “what the world is.” By the same token, this year’s native nominees make their purely American experience sharable. The rookie, Bonnie Jo Campbell, grew up in rural Michigan. She writes about her home state in an arrestingly insightful debut story collection called “American Salvage.” The veteran author Jayne Anne Phillips was born in West Virginia and now lives in New Jersey. She sets her fourth novel, “Lark and Termite,” in the 1950s, resting her sensitive, knowing gaze on two children in West Virginia and a father lost to the Korean War.

And yet ... not all fiction rises to this level; not all American fiction, and not all foreign fictions. A year has given the sting of Horace Engdahl’s slap in the face time to cool. It’s true that the work of some writers does not thrive when it’s plucked from its surrounding soil. Any open-minded critic who regularly receives offerings of new books or translations from Europe, the Middle East or Asia knows the bitter experience of opening a book by an unknown foreign author with anticipation, only to cast it away in irritation or boredom, finding it impossible to engage with a novel that was esteemed in a distant land.

And it’s also true that there are limitations to how much a reader can appreciate cultural preoccupations that differ too greatly from the reader’s own. Many French readers have a passion for short, self-serious, faux-philosophical novels that stupefy American sensibilities. Many German and Northern European contemporary novels zestfully catalogue bleak, pessimistic realities that strike an American audience as profoundly depressing. Middle Eastern fiction at the current moment lacks a Jane Austen who could win over an American female readership. By the same token, why should anyone be surprised if the Middle East couldn’t care less about the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and its divine secrets; or if the Germans don’t share our obsession with the Vietnam War (just as we tire of their revisitations of World War II); or if the French don’t care for the meditative descriptions in the tomes of American short stories that emerge from M.F.A. programs from Iowa to the Atlantic Ocean. Not every taste travels. But that doesn’t rob it of its intrinsic value, or of its appeal to the land that produced it.

On Nov. 18, only one of the five authors that the National Book Awards selected will get the laurels. Will it be the Dubliner turned New Yorker? The Ugandan-British Yank? The Pakistani-American? The Michigander? The West Virginian? Whoever it is, he or she will be a writer who expands the versatile adjective “American,” enriching the world’s understanding of itself.

Liesl Schillinger is a literary critic and translator.

Field Study - Just How Relevant Is Political Science? - NYTimes.com

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By PATRICIA COHEN

After Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, this month proposed prohibiting the National Science Foundation from “wasting any federal research funding on political science projects,” political scientists rallied in opposition, pointing out that one of this year’s Nobel winners had been a frequent recipient of the very program now under attack.

Yet even some of the most vehement critics of the Coburn proposal acknowledge that political scientists themselves vigorously debate the field’s direction, what sort of questions it pursues, even how useful the research is.

Much of the political science work financed by the National Science Foundation is both rigorous and valuable, said Jeffrey C. Isaac, a professor at Indiana University in Bloomington, where one new winner of the Nobel in economic science, the political scientist Elinor Ostrom, teaches. “But we’re kidding ourselves if we think this research typically has the obvious public benefit we claim for it,” he said. “We political scientists can and should do a better job of making the public relevance of our work clearer and of doing more relevant work.”

Mr. Isaac is the editor of Perspectives on Politics, a journal that was created by the field’s professional organization to bridge the divide after a group of political scientists led a revolt against the growing influence of statistical methods and mathematics-based models in the discipline. In 2000 an anonymous political scientist who called himself Mr. Perestroika roused scores of colleagues to protest the organization, the American Political Science Association, and its flagship journal, The American Political Science Review, arguing that the two were marginalizing scholars who focused on traditional research based on history, culture and archives.

Though there is still jockeying over jobs, power and prestige — particularly in an era of shrinking budgets — much of that animus has quieted, and most political scientists agree that a wide range of approaches makes sense.

What remains, though, is a nagging concern that the field is not producing work that matters. “The danger is that political science is moving in the direction of saying more and more about less and less,” said Joseph Nye, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, whose work has been particularly influential among American policy makers. “There are parts of the academy which, in the effort to be scientific, feel we should stay away from policy,” Mr. Nye said, that “it interferes with the science.”

In his view statistical techniques too often determine what kind of research political scientists do, pushing them further into narrow specializations cut off from real-world concerns. The motivation to be precise, Mr. Nye warned, has overtaken the impulse to be relevant.

In recent years he and other scholars, including Robert Putnam and Theda Skocpol, both former presidents of the American Political Science Association, have urged colleagues not to shy away from “the big questions.”

Graduate students discussing their field, said Peter Katzenstein, a political science professor at Cornell University, often speak in terms of “an interesting puzzle,” a small intellectual conundrum that tests the ingenuity of the solver, rather than the large, sloppy and unmanageable problems that occur in real life.

“This is the great divide on what we are doing,” he said, adding that political scientists did not agree on the unit of analysis (whether the focus should be on the individual or social relationships), the source of knowledge or how to measure things.

Rogers Smith, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who has been active in the “Perestroika” movement, said that the question should determine the method. If you want to test cause and effect, “quantitative methods are the preferred way to go,” he said, but they can’t tell “how political phenomena should be understood and interpreted” — whether a protest, for instance, is the result of a genuine social movement or an interest group, whether it is religious or secular.

Arthur Lupia, a professor in the University of Michigan’s political science department, said he was using the scientific method to understand what processes and institutions were necessary for a democratic society to function.

Mr. Lupia is the lead investigator on one of the projects financed by the National Science Foundation that Senator Coburn has attacked: the American National Election Studies. Senator Coburn has maintained that commentators on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and other news media outlets “provide a myriad of viewpoints to answer the same questions.” He has argued that the $91.3 million that the foundation spent on social science projects over the last 10 years should have gone to biology, chemistry or pharmaceutical science.

Mr. Lupia, whose background is in applied mathematics and economics, concedes that political science is not quite like the natural sciences. First, the subjects under study “can argue back.” But he maintains that it uses the same rigorous mechanisms to evaluate observations as any other science.

The elections project, which has been financed by the foundation in various forms for more than three decades and has involved 700 scientists, tracks why citizens vote and how they respond to elections. The database is used by thousands of scholars, and has been widely praised as illuminating the question of why democracy works.

No date has been set for a vote on Senator Coburn’s proposal, which was introduced on Oct. 7. Yet even as he is trying to restrict National Science Foundation financing of social science, the Defense Department has been recruiting scholars in the same fields to work on security issues like terrorism, Iraq and China’s military. The nation must embrace “eggheads and ideas,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has said, to meet potential national threats.

Some Defense Department grants were awarded by the Pentagon through a new program titled Minerva; others were distributed through the National Science Foundation because it has experience in grant making and is apolitical.

As for those who criticize quantitative analysis as too narrow, Mr. Lupia said that the big questions were precisely what interested him. His work has been used by the World Bank and government officials in India, for example, to figure out which villages had sufficient institutions and practices to ensure that money earmarked to build a water system would not end up in someone’s pocket. Political science can also help determine what institutions and arrangements are needed to help a dictatorship make the transition to a democracy, he added.

After the fall of Communism, “when Eastern European governments were writing their constitutions, I can guarantee you they weren’t calling George Stephanopoulos,” Mr. Lupia said.

“I try to identify problems and then identify solutions to them,” he said, “to find the type of scientific method” that can answer the question.

Facebook hits 300 million users. What's next for social networking? - washingtonpost.com

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Now that everybody and his mother is on the site, is it time to look for the next big thing in social networking?

By Monica Hesse
Monday, October 19, 2009

Five years from now, will Internet historians signpost the Facebook movie, due out in 2010, as the beginning of the site's end?

"West Wing" writer Aaron Sorkin is writing and producing the flick, called "The Social Network," about Facebook's birth. Jesse Eisenberg will play founder Mark Zuckerberg, and Justin Timberlake is cast as Sean Parker, the first company president.

But will the real star be . . . nostalgia? Will Facebook seem passe, like watching a movie about the invention of VHS? A dramatization of the site could turn it into a time capsule, with fossilized reenactments of the first friend poke.

If "The Social Network" isn't a harbinger of doom, then what is? Last month, the site gained its 300 millionth user and turned a profit for the first time in its six-year history. Can we just Facebook forever, friend requesting until we are officially connected to everyone? (What would that last friend acceptance look like? Osama bin Laden added you as a friend on Facebook. "Oh, all right.")

One year into Facebook's unchallenged social networking domination -- three years ago this month from its availability to the general public -- and suddenly people are beginning to speculate about its demise. Facebook feels "dead," a columnist for the New York Times observes, saying that several of her friends have gone inactive. "Did Facebook Kill Itself?" asks the headline of a recent U.S. News & World Report article. "What's new on the net after Facebook?" writes a listless user going by TabithaFlyin on Help.com. "I'm bored."

All social networking sites eventually die off, mutate or find a second life elsewhere, as evidenced by the ones that have come before. But why are we so eager to move on?

* * *

Remember Friendster?

Remember the mysterious invitations that appeared in your inbox? Someone cooler and more tech-savvy than you had joined and they wanted you to join, too. It's not skeezy, they promised. Remembering this is really about remembering 2003, because that's when buzz about the site peaked, when everyone was Friendstering, Dogstering, Catstering, making verbs out of Web sites.

And then . . .

Then everyone trekked to MySpace -- the (same) invitation from the (same) cool person, the indie bands, the customizable backgrounds. That was 2005-06, although some may be there still.

And then . . .

Then Facebook! Especially for the college-educated crowd, FacebookFacebookFacebook. Facebook groups, Facebook gifts, Facebook existential dilemmas over how to describe your romantic relationships and religious beliefs.

Along the way, you might have joined other sites -- SixDegrees, Orkut, Bebo. But those were brief dalliances that lacked staying power. Now it's mostly Facebook, the fourth most popular Web site in the world according to market research firm ComScore.

And then . . . ?

It's an endless cycle of "and then." Users update their statuses with one hand while packing for a Facebook exodus with the other.

The irony is that while we've been searching for the Next Big Thing, Facebook has never grown faster. The site tripled in size in the past year.

Despite those numbers, there's the ennui. "After Facebook and Twitter what's next on the horizon?" asks a user on Twitter (an argument, perhaps, that whatever is after Facebook, Twitter's not it.)

It's possible that Facebook really is losing some users -- the company does not release its retention data, says spokesman Victor Lu. But it's more likely that people are just getting . . . antsy.

"Facebook as a social networking Web site is not dead," S. Shyam Sundar writes via e-mail. Sundar is the founder of Penn State's Media Effects Research Laboratory, where he studies the psychology of communication technology. "Facebook as a cool new thing" is.

For users new to a social network, the site becomes a full-time addiction. There are old high school teachers to be found, old middle school tormenters to gleefully reject, groups to join and then leave. As each friend is added, there are profiles to stalk and dissect, and perfunctory "tell me about the last seven years of your life" e-mails to exchange. There is the endless care and development of one's own profile, plus the quizzes and the lists.

But after a while, a balance is reached. Users have found all of the people they are going to find. Visits to the site are less about building and more about maintenance. And while friend collecting used to be the de rigueur Facebook activity, the fashionable thing now is the friend purge. Elliott Hoffman, a software engineer in Missouri, describes how he recently went from 300 friends down to 70.

"When I was in college and Facebook had just come out, if you met someone at a party you would friend them," Hoffman says. But as the site approached saturation, "I realized it was just too much noise." He felt compelled to keep up with the minute activities of virtual strangers. Now, with his slimmer friend base, the time he spends on the site is richer in quality, but far less in terms of quantity.

For many users, this balance describes where Facebook is now. It might "feel dead" only in the way that four beers might "feel meager" to a recovering alcoholic who is used to drinking nine.

"It's like that 46-inch LCD HDTV," Sundar writes. "The first week with it was full of excitement with the technology itself, but now, we simply switch it on and think about what's on rather that what it's on."

"There are two conflicting processes," says Jason Kaufman, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society who studies social networking sites. "On the one hand, the more people who join Facebook, the more useful it is." On the other hand, its very ubiquity makes some users uneasy. "There's a countervailing tendency toward the fringe -- to want to do things that are not in the mainstream," Kaufman says. "Americans don't want to follow the herd, but they want the convenience of being in the herd."

The fact that the fastest-growing Facebook demographic is users over 55 -- that your latest friend request might be from your grandmother -- doesn't help the coolness factor.

"By definition, it's like bar hopping," says Kurt Cagle, an editor for O'Reilly Media, which publishes technology books. "You want to go to ones before they're popular. You don't want to go to ones that are too crowded. . . . No social media will have huge staying power."

Hip bellwethers within the herd eventually start looking for another place to drink.

* * *

Is this what happened to Friendster?

Shortly after its 2002 founding, the site almost immediately gained several hundred thousand users through word of mouth, but by late 2003 Americans began to leave. They were annoyed by technical difficulties, they were frustrated by some of Friendster's policies, and a rash of sudden mainstream media attention suddenly made the site feel crowded, writes Internet scholar Danah Boyd in an essay on the history of social networking sites.

In early 2004, employees of the site noticed that big traffic spikes were occurring in the middle of the night. Friendster, it seems, was huge in Asia. "We've never let the U.S. go," says Friendster communications director Jeff Roberto. "However, we are focusing on growth where we're dominant and popular." Now the site has 115 million users, 90 percent of whom live in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.

Social networking site Orkut was a similar story -- in its first year of existence, U.S. users were the largest audience. But as North Americans got flighty, South American users got loyal. Now the company is headquartered in Brazil.

One wonders if all social networking sites' lifecycles eventually include a David Hasselhoff phase -- snubbed in America, gangbusters in Germany.

But Facebook is in a different place than Friendster and Orkut were, by sheer virtue of its enormous size, and by the amount of time users spend on it. People invest so much in social networking sites that it becomes harder to leave, says David Weinberger, a colleague of Kaufman's at Harvard and author of "Everything Is Miscellaneous." In essence, the longer we're on Facebook, the longer we're going to be on Facebook. The question of moving becomes not just logistical but moral and ethical as well. "So many years of contacts, conversations and games" between friends, Weinberger says. "It's hard to transfer that stuff. If I move to a new social network because it's cooler, how much of you am I allowed to move?"

And then . . .

What comes after?

Where would we move to?

Transitioning from Friendster to MySpace was an easy decision, when MySpace appeared to address Friendster user complaints (people wanted to be allowed to create bogus profiles -- say, one for Hermione Granger -- but Friendster deleted the so-called Fakesters). Then Facebook's sparer interface and apparent privacy -- only accepted friends could see your profile -- seemed to address some MySpace users' concerns, making that switch easy, too.

But many social networking experts say that there is nothing obviously poised to overtake Facebook right now -- just vague ideas of what such a site might look like.

"Putting profit and revenue aside, ultimately it seems like some kind of non-proprietary social networking cloud is where we would best be served," says Kaufman. Something that's not trying to make money, where users can exchange information without worrying about being data mined or monetized. "That kind of thing doesn't exist."

Not surprisingly, Facebook believes that the next big thing is . . . Facebook. (Full disclosure: Post Co. Chairman Donald E. Graham sits on Facebook's board.) "It's critical for any company to keep innovating," Lu says. Innovation "has always been at the core of how we view ourselves."

But assuming there is a next big thing after Facebook, it probably won't be the social networking companies, or the scholars, or the journalists, or the movie industry who accurately predict what it is. It will probably be the 16-year-old kids, same as always, finding their own parent-free space -- followed by their parents, same as always, wanting to make sure that parent-free space doesn't contain anything dangerous. Then grandparents, celebrities, nonprofits, marketers.

By the time there really is a new big thing, we won't realize it until we've all joined up, too.

More schools experimenting with digital textbooks - washingtonpost.com

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Digital texts gaining favor, but critics question quality

By Ashley Surdin
Monday, October 19, 2009

AGOURA HILLS, CALIF. -- The dread of high school algebra is lost here amid the blue glow of computer screens and the clickety-clack of keyboards.

A fanfare plays from a speaker as a student passes a chapter test. Nearby, a classmate watches a video lecture on ratios. Another works out an equation in her notebook before clicking on a multiple-choice answer on her screen.

Their teacher at Agoura High School, Russell Stephans, sits at the back of the room, watching as scores pop up in real time on his computer grade sheet. One student has passed a level, the data shows; another is retaking a quiz.

"Whoever thought this up makes life so much easier," Stephans says with a chuckle.

This textbook-free classroom is by no means the norm, but it may be someday. Slowly, but in increasing numbers, grade schools across the country are supplementing or substituting the heavy, expensive and indelible hardbound book with its lighter, cheaper and changeable cousin: the digital textbook.

Also known as a flexbook because of its adaptability, a digital textbook can be downloaded, projected and printed, and can range from simple text to a Web-based curriculum embedded with multimedia and links to Internet content. Some versions must be purchased; others are "open source" -- free and available online to anyone.

Some praise the technology as a way to save schools money, replace outdated books and better engage tech-savvy students. Others say most schools don't have the resources to join the digital drift, or they question the quality of open-source content.

Hardbound books still dominate the $7 billion U.S. textbook market, with digital textbooks making up less than 5 percent, according to analyst Kathy Mickey of Simba Information, a market research group.

But that is changing, as K-12 schools follow the lead of U.S. universities and schools in other countries, including South Korea and Turkey. In Florida's Broward County, students and teachers log online to access digital versions of their Spanish, math and reading books. In Arizona, classes at one Vail School District high school are conducted entirely with laptops instead of textbooks. And in Virginia this year, state officials and educators unveiled a free physics flexbook to complement textbooks.

California's experiment

California made the largest embrace of digital textbooks this summer when it approved 10 free high school math and science titles developed by college professors and the CK-12 Foundation, a Palo Alto-based nonprofit aimed at lowering the cost of educational materials. The titles were approved as meeting at least 90 percent of California's academic standards, with the state leaving the choice to use them up to individual schools.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) hopes they will. His digital textbook initiative is meant to cut costs in the severely cash-strapped state. (Given that the average textbook costs $100, he argued, the state could save $400 million if its 2 million high school students used digital math and science texts.) The initiative also aims to replace aging hardbound books that don't teach students about the Iraq war, the country's first black president or the Human Genome Project.

"The textbooks are outdated, as far as I'm concerned, and there's no reason why our schools should have our students lug around these antiquated and heavy and expensive books," Schwarzenegger said this summer. "Digital textbooks are good not only for the students' achievement, but they're also good for the schools' bottom line."

California public and private schools spent more than $633 million on textbooks in 2007, making the state the biggest spender nationwide, according to the latest data from the Association of American Publishers. Schools in Texas spent $375 million; in New York, $264 million. The District spent $13.9 million.

Controlling costs?

Concerns over costs prompted Congress to pass legislation last year that requires publishers to disclose the price of textbooks when they sell them to teachers. It also ends a practice in which publishers sell books and supplemental materials together, driving up costs. Several states have passed similar legislation.

But some dispute the idea that digital textbooks -- even open-source versions -- will be cheaper for states, at least right away, or improve education quality.

"Keep in mind that with open-source materials, you have to ask, 'Where are they coming from?' " said Jay Diskey, executive director of the Association of American Publishers' school division. "Is it a trusted source? Is it aligned to state standards? Is it based on real research?"

Diskey said traditional textbooks offer a comprehensive curriculum, while some open-source texts provide only bits and pieces. "There can be quite a difference of content and accuracy," he said. "In many cases, you get what you pay for."

Textbook publishers face losing business as free Internet content expands. But Diskey blames the recession, not free digital books, for any fiscal hardships facing the industry. "We don't think budgets are being cut because of open-source materials," he said.

A lack of digital resources

Schools using digital texts say it's too soon to tell how much money they may be saving. As critics point out, long-term fiscal benefits require upfront resources that many schools lack: money, teacher training, bandwidth to support Internet multimedia and, most critically, computers.

The majority of households have personal computers and Internet access, according to a 2005 report from the Census Bureau, but access declines with income. And U.S. schools on average have roughly one computer for every four students, according to 2005 data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

"It's going to be a bit of a challenge for schools throughout the country to implement this new technology," said David Sanchez, president of the California Teachers Association. "How do you guarantee all children have access to that kind of textbook?"

Glen Thomas, California's education secretary, questions whether digital textbooks require a computer for every child. "This initiative is not about hardware," he said. "I visited a classroom where there were a couple kids using laptops, several had textbooks, some had a couple chapters printed out, and the lesson was displayed on a screen in front of the class."

For now, it appears that digital textbooks are largely a school-by-school, teacher-by-teacher choice. But converts such as Stephans of Agoura High School are quick to encourage more.

"If there was a list of math teachers who would have signed up for this, I would have been at the bottom," said Stephans, who hesitantly agreed to pilot the textbook-free class this year. To educators considering the digital possibilities, he now says: "What are you waiting for?"

Flow of terrorist recruits increasing - washingtonpost.com

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Westerners attending camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan despite successful U.S. strikes

By Craig Whitlock
Monday, October 19, 2009

BERLIN -- Midway through a propaganda video released last month by a group calling itself the German Taliban, a surprise guest made an appearance: a cleanshaven, muscular gunman sporting the alias Abu Ibrahim the American.

The gunman did not speak but wore military fatigues and waved his rifle as subtitles identified him as an American. The video contained a stream of threats against Germany if it did not withdraw its troops from the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan. Although the American's part in the film lasted only a few seconds, it has alarmed German and U.S. intelligence officials, who are still puzzling over his background, his real identity and how he became involved with the terrorist group.

U.S. and European counterterrorism officials say a rising number of Western recruits -- including Americans -- are traveling to Afghanistan and Pakistan to attend paramilitary training camps. The flow of recruits has continued unabated, officials said, in spite of an intensified campaign over the past year by the CIA to eliminate al-Qaeda and Taliban commanders in drone missile attacks.

Since January, at least 30 recruits from Germany have traveled to Pakistan for training, according to German security sources. About 10 people -- not necessarily the same individuals -- have returned to Germany this year, fueling concerns that fresh plots are in the works against European targets.

"We think this is sufficient to show how serious the threat is," said a senior German counterterrorism official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

German security services have been on high alert since last month, when groups affiliated with the Taliban and al-Qaeda issued several videos warning that an attack on German targets was imminent if the government did not bring home its forces from Afghanistan.

There are about 3,800 German troops in the country, the third-largest NATO contingent after those of the United States and Britain. German officials say Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders are trying to exploit domestic opposition in Germany to the war; surveys show that a majority of German voters favor a withdrawal of their soldiers.

The videos all featured German speakers who urged Muslims to travel to Afghanistan and Pakistan to join their cause.

"They're doing such good business that they are dropping a new video every week or so," said Ronald Sandee, a former Dutch military intelligence officer who serves as research director of the NEFA Foundation, a U.S. group that monitors terrorist networks. "If I were a young Muslim, I'd find them very convincing."

Last week, German officials disclosed that a 10-member cell from Hamburg had left for Pakistan earlier this year. The cell is allegedly led by a German of Syrian descent but also includes ethnic Turks, German converts to Islam and one member with Afghan roots.

Other European countries are also struggling to keep their citizens from going to Pakistan for paramilitary training.

In August, Pakistani officials arrested a group of 12 foreigners headed to North Waziristan, a tribal region near the Afghan border where many of the camps are located. Among those arrested were four Swedes, including Mehdi Ghezali, a former inmate of the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Meanwhile, three Belgians and a French citizen are facing trial in their respective home countries after they were arrested upon their return from Pakistani camps last year. The suspects deny they were part of a terrorist conspiracy or plotting attacks in Europe. But one defendant has admitted to French investigators that the group received explosives training while in Waziristan. Three other Belgian and French members of the alleged cell are still believed to be at large in Pakistan or Afghanistan.

Recruiting networks

European security officials have warned for many years of the threat posed by homegrown radicals who have gone to Afghanistan and Pakistan to wage jihad. Officials in some countries, such as Britain, said they have successfully cracked down on the number of would-be fighters going to South Asia. But others, such as Germany, are seeing a significant increase and struggling to contain it.

In the past, such volunteers were largely self-motivated and had to find their own way to South Asia. Today, however, al-Qaeda and its affiliates have developed extensive recruiting networks with agents on the ground in Europe, counterterrorism officials said. The agents provide guidance, money, travel routes and even letters of recommendation so the recruits can join up more easily.

In a recent report, the Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service said there were a "growing number of indications" that more Europeans were attending camps in the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Obama administration has said that al-Qaeda's command structure and operations wing have become weaker in the past year because many of its leaders have been killed in drone missile attacks. But in its report, the Dutch intelligence agency offered a different assessment, saying that al-Qaeda's ability to carry out attacks has generally improved in recent years largely because it has successfully bolstered its alliances with other terrorist groups.

"With the jihadist agenda of those allies becoming more international, at least at the propaganda level, the threat to the West and its interests has intensified," the Dutch report found.

German officials said they have discovered multiple recruitment networks that work for al-Qaeda, the Taliban and other groups, such as the Islamic Jihad Union, which has been issuing many of the online threats against the German government. But they said the recruiting networks often operate independently, making it difficult for the security services to detect or disrupt them.

"In Germany, we don't have a uniform structure that recruits people," another senior German counterterrorism official said in an interview. "We have a wide variety of structures."

U.S. residents detained

Another sign of the internationalization of the recruitment networks is the small but growing participation of U.S. residents.

Abu Ibrahim the American, the gunman in last month's German Taliban video, is also being touted as a poster boy for jihadi recruitment on a Turkish-language Web site. The site, Sehadet Zamani, issues propaganda on behalf of the Islamic Jihad Union, an offshoot of an Uzbek terrorist group that now counts Turks, Germans, Arabs and Chechens among its members.

In July, U.S. officials announced that they had apprehended Bryant Neal Vinas, 25, a resident of Long Island, N.Y., who has confessed to traveling to al-Qaeda camps in Pakistan and firing rockets at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan.

Vinas, the son of immigrants from Peru and Argentina, is cooperating with U.S. and European authorities. He has testified about his interaction with the six-member cell of recruits from Belgium and France. Vinas has also told the FBI that he spent time in Pakistan with another New York resident, whose identity and whereabouts are unknown.

Last month, the FBI arrested yet another U.S. resident, Najibullah Zazi, and accused him of plotting a bombing in New York. Zazi, 24, an Afghan national who has lived in New York since he was a child, traveled to Pakistan last year.

U.S. intelligence officials have said that he made contact with a senior deputy to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and learned how to make homemade bombs. Zazi said he went to Pakistan to visit his wife but has denied going to a training camp.

Terrorism analysts said the CIA campaign to kill al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders had been generally effective, but warned that the strategy had its limitations and that missile attacks alone would not put an end to the training camps.

"The drone attacks seriously weaken these organizations, but you can't rely on that alone," said Guido Steinberg, a researcher at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. "They obviously have no problem recruiting new members. In the long run, they won't have any problem replacing the leaders who have been killed."

On Saturday, the Pakistani military deployed 30,000 troops into South Waziristan as part of a broad offensive against the Taliban and other militant groups. U.S. and European officials have said they hope the mission will force many of the training camps to shut down.

But analysts said the camps, which offer basic lessons in homemade explosives and countersurveillance as well as weapons training, could easily relocate elsewhere in Pakistan or even back across the border in Afghanistan, where they operated before the U.S. invasion in 2001.

"We're talking about much smaller, much more mobile camps that don't train by the hundreds, but by the handful," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University. "They can be repacked and set up again fairly easily and quickly."