On the strength of assertions, President Obama banished 35 Russian diplomats from the United States, declaring them “personas non grata.” A report generated by the Orwellian Department of Homeland Security (DHS) offers no proof of state-directed hacks, just a bland and tedious recitation of various digital methodologies it presumes to have been initiated by Vladimir Putin, perhaps as he stomped his scythe on the ground, rattling the ghostly Kremlin floorboards. (Even as Michelle pens her outgoing cards to beltway friends, admonishing everyone to take the high road.)

Howard Friel insightfully explores how The New York Times’ response to this coordinated farce is no different from its embrace of the Bush administration’s groundless tale of Iraqi WMDs. Recall Colin Powell wielding nefarious exhaust pipes and banging on about mobile WMD labs racing around Lower Mesopotamia (later found to be high-powered falafel food trucks). In other words, the mainstream media (MSM) has learned nothing from the Iraqi yarn. Still besotted with power. Still insensate to fact. Still asleep at the switch of critical journalism. But let’s not kid ourselves: the media never intended to learn anything from Iraq except how to better peddle fables, and it hasn’t even learned that. More

When I wrote on election night that the Clinton campaign had forsaken class politics for "politics by algorithm," I had no idea that they really had such an "app" or that they had named it after Lord Byron's daughter, the brilliant Ada Lovelace, the real brains behind the first computer. (Ada would have run a better campaign.) Apparently, Clinton campaign gameboy Robbie Mook ran 500,000 simulations of the election on his Xbox. How many of them had 90,000 Michigan voters leaving their choice for president blank? How many results showed her losing the white women vote by 10 percent? How many showed the vote in union households split nearly 50-50?

As we know from the Wikileaks dumps, Clintonian paranoia extended far beyond her decision to set up a private email server and began to infect the campaign itself. Nargiza Gafurova was an analytics specialist for one of the database companies doing contract work for the Clinton campaign. “Our company worked with her campaign on their data needs - they've been extremely secretive about the data and algorithms they use,” Gafurova told me. “Secrecy was so deep that we couldn't help them effectively as they didn't even tell us who they want to target.” More

There is a dark side to President Barack Obama’s legacy on national and international security matters that will enable President-elect Donald Trump to damage America’s political institutions as well as its standing in the global community. President Obama, a Harvard-trained lawyer and an expert in constitutional law, was insufficiently scrupulous in protecting our moral obligations, creating an ironic and unfortunate page in U.S. history. Instead of making the “world safe for democracy,” the clarion call of President Woodrow Wilson one hundred years ago, President Obama contributed to the furtherance of a national security state and a culture of secrecy.

The administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama tilted too far in the direction of the military, which already plays far too large a role in the policy process and the intelligence cycle. Strategic intelligence has suffered from the Pentagon’s domination of a process that is now geared primarily to support the warfighter in an era of permanent war. The strategic intelligence failures during the Obama administration include the absence of warning regarding events in Crimea and the Ukraine; the “Arab Spring;” the emergence of the Islamic State; and Russian recklessness in Syria. More