A hypothesis: Pirates, hackers, and terrorists are perennial actors in international relations. They will never be permanently defeated; the frontier will never be permanently settled.The underlying material reason that these actors exist is actually quite simple....
[Cross posted at bill | petti)Christopher Penn crafts an interesting piece arguing that piracy (i.e. copyright infringement) is, among other things, a market signal:Piracy indicates that something...
Before heading over to the YouTube Conference keynote, I tuned in for a few hours Thursday morning to the Harvard University Humanitarian Law and Policy Forum's latest live webcast. (Recording can...
OK, in between wrapping up my tenure statement draft and taking my daughter to the orthodontist, finally a moment for some Monday pirate blogging. As Peter notes, the big news story since Sunday was...
From the AP:"Somali pirates on Wednesday hijacked a U.S.-flagged cargo ship with 20 American crew members onboard, hundreds of miles from the nearest U.S. military vessel in some of the most dangerous waters in the world.It was the sixth ship seized within a week, a rise that analysts attribute to a new strategy by Somali pirates who are operating far from the warships patrolling the Gulf of Aden.In a statement, the company confirmed that the U.S.-flagged vessel has 20 U.S. nationals onboard.It is not clear whether the pirates knew they were hijacking a ship with American crew members."Now...
On the last day of class in "Rules of War," I ask my students what kinds of things are needed to strengthen the regime governing the conduct of war. They come up with all kinds of nifty ideas, and then I ask them what they'll personally do to move the world in that direction. For awhile they struggle to come up with anything more concrete than "raise awareness," but after awhile they will say things like, "run for office," or "join the State Department," or "go to work for Doctors Without Borders." They rarely say they'll join the military and work from within to uphold the spirit of the...
The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10cThe Buccaneer Stops HereBarack Obama InterviewJohn McCain InterviewSarah Palin VideoFunny Election VideoWhy is it so hard to deal with the Pirate problem? The Daily Show is onto something here....
This post began as a response to the comments on Peter's recent post on pirates, but they got to be so long, and required hyperlinks, I decided to start a new thread. In his comment to that post, T. Greer asks what the pirates who hijacked the oiltanker Sirius Star were thinking, since they can't deal with the logistics involved in selling the cargo and were certainly likely to provoke the great powers (further) by targeting such a prize. Somali pirates want two things, as far as I can tell: 1) Money, which is why their strategies have been based on ransom demands - they don't care about...
International Talk Like a Pirate Day ends at midnight, and once again pirate lovers around the world are gleefully splicing the mainbrace with their mateys and poking fun at the bilge rats who don't get that it's, well, Talk Like a Pirate Day. (Pirate Dictionary here for the uninitiated; a superior and more scholarly resource is George Choundas’ A Pirate Primer.)While that's all in good fun, the time seems right to remind ourselves that maritime piracy is resurgent globally (the International Maritime Bureau reported rates of four attacks per week in April) and that it represents a scourge,...
Rodger and Peter remind us that many things are happening out there besides the commotion between Russia and Georgia. For example:Canada has dispatched the naval frigate HMCS Ville de Québec to the waters off the Horn of Africa, in the hopes of stemming pirate attacks that have in recent months drastically curtailed the delivery of humanitarian aid to Somalia’s war-affected masses. It's unclear whether a single additional vessel will be up to the task, even if its mission is to rather single-mindedly protect World Food Programme shipments, rather than to police the waters more generally....
Foreign Policy has released its annual “Top Ten Stories You Missed in 2007.” Among the contenders: 1. The Cyberwars Have Begun. However, see Miriam Dunn Cavelty’s article “Cyberterrorism: Looming Threat or Phantom Menace” in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Information Technology and Politics. 2. US Navy is in Iraq for the Long Haul. And a good thing too, if trade in the Arabian Gulf is to be protected from the emerging threat of piracy, which is on the rise off the coast of Iraq and is already thriving in other areas of the world characterized by state failure. See the International...