The Intelligence Club: A Comparative Look at Five Eyes

The goal of intelligence is to evaluate data and attempt to reduce uncertainty. Successful intelligence practices try to reduce apparent ambiguity through accurate estimates and support the implementation of successful policy. The ability of intelligence communities to react to new threats and adapt and focus on relevant issues quickly and efficiently is essential for modern intelligence.

A greater understanding of what comprises (or what is perceived as) an intelligence failure is important in avoiding methods that don’t work; similarly, having an awareness of other states’ intelligence efforts and observing different (and possibly more successful) approaches can help mitigate sedentary, too-conservative thinking. A group which has been extraordinarily successful, by any subjective or objective standard, has been the Five Eyes. Five Eyes is a surveillance arrangement comprised of the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA), the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSEC), and New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB). A comparative look at Five Eyes’ intelligence efforts and agencies provides an opportunity to examine what may contribute to common themes of intelligence success.

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Public Interest as Concept and Legal Practice in China

Public interest law as concept and practice emerged in the US in the early 20th century and was expanded in connection with the civil rights movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The concept has to a large degree been imported from the West where it has travelled from the US to other jurisdictions and been somewhat transformed along the way. Litigation, petitioning and advocacy activities in the name of the public interest have during the last decade been used by Chinese lawyers and activists in order to strengthen the protection of the rights of Chinese citizens. This article analyzes the version of public interest law developed in China, tailored to the distinguishing features of the social and political system there. The public interest label is used as it is less politically sensitive than terms like civil society or human rights protection.

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Politics, Promises, and Partisanship? An Analysis of President Obama's Economic Stimulus Plan at the Congressional District Level

This research focuses on President Obama’s signature economic plan adopted in February 2009—the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Using data available from Recovery.gov, the analysis refines prior efforts to test the thesis that partisanship has played a central role in the distribution of funds across congressional districts by distinguishing between total spending on infrastructure and non-infrastructure programs as of the end of the second quarter of 2010.

Further, this research examines not only political and demographic factors relative to the locus of stimulus fund expenditures but also the expected and actual employment impact of ARRA by district. The analysis provides little evidence for the partisan theory of stimulus spending. Rather, the results accentuate the demographic characteristics of the districts that have thus far received stimulus money and putatively benefitted from the most jobs, in some ways counter to what the White House may have intended due to the complexities of fiscal federalism.

Equal Access to Elective Offices: A Challenge for Italian Democracy

Italy moves in that way from the 63rd to the 34th place in the women’s representation world ranking, drawn up periodically by Ipu (Inter parliamentary Union). It is a novelty of no small matter, especially considering the number of women in Parliament in past terms. In fact, in the past parliamentary term, women in the Chamber of Deputies were about 136 and 61 in the Senate, and, respectively, 21.6% and 19% of the total number of representatives.

The achievement of 20% in the national parliament represented a great result compared to the past, even fairly recent. Previous parliamentary terms experienced a female incidence significantly lower: in the XII legislature women were about 12% of the total, in the XIII and XIV parliamentary term the women representation goes further, at about 10% for then registering a small increase in the XV legislature with 109 women in the Chamber of Deputies and 45 in the Senate, respectively 17.3% and 14% of the delegates.

Political Science for whom?: Knowledge in the Online Era

If the Arab Spring taught us anything, it was that the Internet has become an important mean of the dissemination of ideas, creation of interest groups, mobilization of people, and changing public opinion. Although some will insist that the Arab Spring was not a social media phenomenon but a grassroots movement, we cannot ignore the power of unhampered information presented by the millions of users during the revolution. Images posted on Flickr or Face book and videos uploaded on YouTube were being seen by the world without the framing bias and “coloring” from traditional media outlets.

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Political Science for whom?: Knowledge in the Online Era

If the Arab Spring taught us anything, it was that the Internet has become an important mean of the dissemination of ideas, creation of interest groups, mobilization of people, and changing public opinion. Although some will insist that the Arab Spring was not a social media phenomenon but a grassroots movement, we cannot ignore the power of unhampered information presented by the millions of users during the revolution. Images posted on Flickr or Face book and videos uploaded on YouTube were being seen by the world without the framing bias and “coloring” from traditional media outlets.

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Greening a Machiavellian State? Insights for International Environmental Governance

This article is an appeal to common sense, once seen as the American virtue, as it may be applied to contemporary considerations of the contest over same-sex marriage. Specifically, I argue that all societies, including our own, are bound together by an underlying or fundamental common sense of a select few things. Each society builds upon these few universal fundamentals with its own particular mythic and social constructions. 

When any one society begins to lose sight of these original human fundamentals and relies instead upon new shared conceptions of its world based solely upon abstract instrumental reason, it not only risks creating social and political mistakes-these, we may be able to live with, if not correct. More importantly, when such mistakes completely detach us from our fundamental common sense of human society, we risk the loss of this very society itself. This we cannot live with, at least not together. In other words, no policy or legislation, no constitution, and no charter of rights can bind together a people determined to become unbound by their loss of a fundamental common sense of the things by which they are first constituted together as human beings. I write with hope that we Americans-humanity’s “last best hope”-are not yet so determined.