The National Guard for Mexico would be nothing like our National Guard. Actually, even the Mexican army can hardly be considered much more than an internal security force, but perhaps one better suited for the barracks than the streets most of the time. The National Guard Peña Nieto speaks of would be more a gendarmerie, a sort of national paramilitary police force, with military organization and equipment, but also typically the capacity to arrest lawbreakers.
With the death of North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Il, which was announced yesterday, we enter a nervous new phase in Asian diplomacy. Korea watchers have known that Kim Jong Il’s health was not well for some time. His death is something we knew was coming, but there are many possible outcomes it could produce. Thus, there are some very important potential developments that should be considered by the United States, South Korea, Japan, Russia and (not least) China.
The most important question regards succession of supreme power from Kim Jong Il to an heir or regent. Kim’s youngest son, Kim Jong Un, has been named the hereditary successor to his father, as his other brothers are viewed as marginal or irresponsible. (Some years ago, one brother was detained by Japanese authorities attempting to enter the country on a false third-country passport.) The important item to consider in this area is that we can assume that the North Koreans have been preparing for this moment, and that Kim Jong Un will be made out to be legitimate by the country’s internal propaganda organs. Continue Reading
In a recent Houston Chronicle op-ed, information technology fellow Christopher Bronk explains why two new bills in Congress, aimed at reducing vulnerability in the nation’s cyber infrastructure, are not a viable solution for increasing digital security. According to Bronk, the Preventing Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property (PROTECT IP) Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) attempt to enact legislation on digital crime without a complete understanding of how the Internet and computing technology works. Continue Reading
We hear a great deal of debate here in the United States on the issue of online privacy. There are persuasive arguments from both sides on this issue, but the most interesting comments I hear on this topic are often from my students at Rice University. Even during the peak of the warrantless wiretapping controversy, my students generally made the argument, “I don’t do anything wrong on the web, so I have nothing to fear from monitoring and surveillance.”
Elsewhere, this is definitely not the case. Continue Reading
This past summer, two Rice engineering undergraduate students, Robyn Moscowitz ’12 and Vivas Kumar ’14, worked for the City of Houston as inaugural members of a program with the City of Houston, Rice Center for Engineering Leadership (RECL) and the Baker Institute for Public Policy. Mentored by Rice alumnus and George R. Brown School of Engineering lecturer Tory Gattis, the students served as internal information technology consultants. The students’ observations follow after the jump. Continue Reading
Over the weekend, we were greeted with news that materials from the U.S. stealth helicopter left behind at the compound in Abottabad, Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden was located and killed on May 2, 2011, had been shared with officials from the People’s Republic of China. This should not surprise or terribly upset us. Continue Reading
As I’ve mentioned here before, my own political consciousness was largely awakened during the early 1980s. This was a time before Wikipedia, of course, when trivia had to be collected where it might be found, rather than downloaded at any… Continue Reading