On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the University of California, Berkeley's Samuelson Clinic have filed a lawsuit (PDF document) against six government agencies, seeking information on their use of social networking sites for data collection and surveillance . This is because six government agencies Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice, Department of Treasury, Central Intelligence Agency, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence. On it's use of social networks for information gathering. The eight page complaint list an example of law enforcements use of social networking sites to look for photos of underage drinking and watching YouTube videos to spot rioters. The complaint would like to address the formula these agencies are following and make that known. Are they looking randomly or searching for the top 20 offenders. According to Informationweek.com " Surveillance and intelligence gathering from the Inter...