In this pathbreaking book, Amy Zegart provides the first scholarly examination of the intelligence failures that preceded September 11. Until now, those failures have been attributed largely to ...individual mistakes. But Zegart shows how and why the intelligence system itself left us vulnerable. Zegart argues that after the Cold War ended, the CIA and FBI failed to adapt to the rise of terrorism. She makes the case by conducting painstaking analysis of more than three hundred intelligence reform recommendations and tracing the history of CIA and FBI counterterrorism efforts from 1991 to 2001, drawing extensively from declassified government documents and interviews with more than seventy high-ranking government officials. She finds that political leaders were well aware of the emerging terrorist danger and the urgent need for intelligence reform, but failed to achieve the changes they sought. The same forces that have stymied intelligence reform for decades are to blame: resistance inside U.S. intelligence agencies, the rational interests of politicians and career bureaucrats, and core aspects of our democracy such as the fragmented structure of the federal government. Ultimately failures of adaptation led to failures of performance. Zegart reveals how longstanding organizational weaknesses left unaddressed during the 1990s prevented the CIA and FBI from capitalizing on twenty-three opportunities to disrupt the September 11 plot.
When states are threatened by war and terrorism, can we really expect them to abide by human rights and humanitarian law? David P. Forsythe's bold analysis of US policies towards terror suspects ...after 9/11 addresses this issue directly. Covering moral, political, and legal aspects, he examines the abuse of enemy detainees at the hands of the United States. At the center of the debate is the Bush Administration, which Forsythe argues displayed disdain for international law, in contrast to the general public's support for humanitarian affairs. Forsythe explores the similarities and differences between Presidents Obama and Bush on the question of prisoner treatment in an age of terrorism and asks how the Administration should proceed. The book traces the Pentagon's and CIA's records in mistreating prisoners, providing an account which will be of interest to all those who value human rights and humanitarian law.
FakeDB: Generating Fake Synthetic Databases Gao, Chongyang; Jajodia, Sushil; Pugliese, Andrea ...
IEEE transactions on dependable and secure computing,
2024
Journal Article
Health care providers may wish to share limited information with researchers. Manufacturing companies may want to share some but not all data with regulators or partners. Since the emergence of ...generative adversarial networks (GANs), efforts have been made to generate synthetic data that preserves semantic properties on the one hand and distributions on the other hand. However, all past efforts focus on a single table at a time. We propose FakeDB, a general framework to generate synthetic data that preserves a a wide variety of semantic integrity constraints as well as a broad set of statistical properties, across an entire relational database. We compare FakeDB with natural extensions of prior work on 8 well known relational databases as well as on a synthetically generated dataset, and show that FakeDB outperforms them. We also show that FakeDB runs in reasonable amounts of time, making it a practical solution to the problem of generating synthetic data.
Reflecting 9/11 Bryan, Victoria M; Pope, Heather
2016, 2016-06-22
eBook
In over fifteen years, the cultural and artistic response to 9/11 has been wide-ranging in form and function. As the turbulent post-9/11 years have unfolded - years that have been shaped and ...characterized by the War on Terror, the Patriot Act, the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, 7/7, Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay - these texts have been commemorative and heroic, have attempted to work through collective and individual traumas, and have struggled with trying to represent the "terrorist other." Many of these earlier domestic, heroic and traumatic works have so often been read as limitations in narrative. This collection, however, challenges the language of limitation and provides re-readings of earlier work, but also traces the emergence of a new paradigm for discussing the artistic responses to 9/11 - one that frames these narratives as dialogic, self-conscious and self-reflexive interventions in the responses to the attacks, the initial representations of the attacks, and the ever-shifting social and geopolitical continuities of the 9/11 decade. These texts widen the conversation about the lasting impacts of 9/11, and incorporate strands of discussion on American exceptionalism and imperialism, torture, and otherness, whilst still remaining invested in the personal and collective traumas of the attacks. The authors included here ask crucial questions about the way 9/11 is being historicized: will it, for example, be read as a moment of rupture or epoch? Will it inevitably be attached to the War on Terror or the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? As they trace the emergent patterns of reflexivity, politicization and dissent, the contributions here are also implicitly invested in asking how far they extend.
The log-sum function as a penalty has always been drawing widespread attention in the field of sparse problems. However, it brings a non-convex, non-smooth and non-Lipschitz optimization problem that ...is difficult to tackle. To overcome the problem, an iterative threshold algorithm for the sparse optimization problems with log-sum function is proposed in this paper. For brevity, the sparse optimization problems with log-sum function are named log-sum regularization. Firstly, by introducing an intermediate function to construct another new function, a property theorem about solution for log-sum regularization is established. Secondly, based on the above theorem, the optimal setting rules of the compromising parameters are elaborated, and an iterative log-sum threshold algorithm is proposed. Thirdly, under the situation that the compromising parameters of log-sum regularization are relatively small, it can be proven that the proposed algorithm converges to a local minimizer of log-sum regularization. Finally, a series of simulations are implemented to examine performance of the proposed algorithm, and the results exhibit that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms.
Starting from the tremendous fascination with images of 9/11, Karen Engle asks what, in the context of a national trauma, makes an image appropriate or scandalous, exploring how diverse visual media ...have been mobilized in political projects of identification and personal narratives of empathy. Focusing on themes of memory, mourning, and history, Engle examines sculptural, photographic, and new media responses to the 9/11 attacks in both contemporary and historical contexts, considers the public's reaction to these visual productions, and suggests that earlier presentations of America at war play a pivotal role in the representations of 9/11 in both official and popular media.
