Paging the Constitution

According to the New York Times,

"Wikileaks began to post pager messages that were sent on September 11, 2001. According to Wikileaks, these messages were intercepted by an "organization which has been intercepting and archiving US national telecommunications since prior to 9/11." Some of these messages are from officials in police and fire departments, though a large number of messages are also from businesses."

I guess I should not be surprised that "an organization" was harvesting this info prior to 9/11 even though the individual messages appear to have no relationship to foreign policy, hanging on to it for nine years, and also not bothering to clean it up for analysis. But I am.

Oh, and did you know people still use pagers?

My Page 99 Test

Marshal Zeringue edits The Page 99 Test, and was kind enough to ask me to take the test. Here is how he described the test:

"The test is simple: Is Ford Madox Ford's statement 'Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you, accurate for your book?"

Here is what I wrote about page 99 of my just-published book, The International Politics of Intelligence Sharing:


Like almost every author who takes this test, my first reaction to
looking at page 99 of The International Politics of Intelligence
Sharing was "Ford Madox Ford was wrong."

My second reaction was, I hope, a bit more thoughtful. "My" page 99
starts out with a detailed summary of the complaints that political
leaders in the European Union have made about their counterparts'
willingness to share intelligence. This is inside baseball stuff--it
is not going to give a casual reader a good sense of the book's
argument. It is an example, though, of the key barrier to effective
intelligence sharing, which is that one state cannot reliably insure
that another is living up to promises to share fully and honestly.

Page 99 gets better towards the end. There it begins to suggest that
that solution is closer European integration of intelligence
activities. That is, these countries would be better off if they
applied some of the institutions they have developed to govern trade
or money to intelligence sharing. A key benefit these institutions
provide is the ability to monitor partners to determine if they are
complying with their promises to share. You will have to keep reading,
though, if you want to find out why this is unlikely to happen.

Peace Science

I am at the annual meeting of the Peace Science Society (International). Great conference. If I find out why it has such a weird name I'll let you know.