adam, 66 words, 2 comments, Opacity, Entropy, Intelligence, Classified, Ministry of Information

The US government has been reclassifying documents previously released to the public.

That was when an intelligence historian, Matthew Aid, noticed that dozens of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the archives' open shelves.

Aid was struck by what seemed to him the innocuous contents of the documents: mostly decades-old State Department reports from the Korean War and the Cold War.

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cam, 580 words, 0 comments, National Security State, Shadow State, John Howard, Phillip Ruddock, Intelligence, Terrorism

A popular absurd photoshop which floats around on the internet is the dynamite monkey. The image has an aggravated monkey sitting near dynamite with plunger, and infront of a sign which has emblazoned in red and yellow, "Don't taunt the dynamite monkey". The bottom right hand corner has a human hand with the middle finger extended, and the remaining fingers closed. This is a good analogy for what can happen when the shadow state is taunted - something John Howard did when publicly claiming Australia faced a terrorist attack. (more)