Independent links

Today is Finland's independence day, and to appropriately honor this country's history and its people's patriotism, I'm going to ignore it. Here's some links instead.

* Johan Norberg: GDP and its enemies

* (via The Agitator): Legalizing child pornography is linked to lower rates of child sex abuse: study

Results from the Czech Republic showed, as seen everywhere else studied (Canada, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Finland, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Sweden, USA), that rape and other sex crimes have not increased following the legalization and wide availability of pornography. And most significantly, the incidence of child sex abuse has fallen considerably since 1989, when child pornography became readily accessible – a phenomenon also seen in Denmark and Japan. Their findings are published online today in Springer's journal Archives of Sexual Behavior.

The findings support the theory that potential sexual offenders use child pornography as a substitute for sex crimes against children. While the authors do not approve of the use of real children in the production or distribution of child pornography, they say that artificially produced materials might serve a purpose.

* Wired: Lieberman Introduces Anti-WikiLeaks Legislation

The so-called SHIELD Act (Securing Human Intelligence and Enforcing Lawful Dissemination) would amend a section of the Espionage Act that already forbids publishing classified information on U.S. cryptographic secrets or overseas communications intelligence — i.e., wiretapping. The bill would extend that prohibition to information on HUMINT, human intelligence, making it a crime to publish information “concerning the identity of a classified source or informant of an element of the intelligence community of the United States,” or “concerning the human intelligence activities of the United States or any foreign government” if such publication is prejudicial to U.S. interests.

Leaking such information in the first place is already a crime, so the measure is aimed squarely at publishers.

In short, videogame hater Joe Lieberman is now going after Wikileaks by trying to criminalize publishing information concerning the human intelligence activities of the United States. Free what?

Book review: Legacy of Ashes

This time, a book recommendation! Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes, the 2007 National Book Award winner for non-fiction.

The book is exactly that, a history of the CIA from its founding to 9/11 and beyond. In my opinion, this is one of those books that anyone really interested in the way the world works today, or in global history from 1950 onward, needs to read this.

Weiner draws together a narrative of the CIA's history, and highlights the one fact that has very often been its most conspicuous trait: sheer incompetence. As Weiner explains, the agency's covert operations have been at best questionable and at worst downright amateurish.

A far more serious failure has been the CIA's failing as an organization providing intelligence to the President. Over the years, the CIA's analysts and intelligence gatherers have consistently been neglected in favor of covert operations, sabotage, election-rigging and assassination. Having read Weiner's book, it's fair to ask what, exactly, a succession of American presidents and intelligence decision-makers imagined the job of an intelligence agency to be? It certainly doesn't seem to have been gathering intelligence.

How good is the book? So good, in fact, that the CIA has issued a rather sniffy rebuttal. This prompted my co-blogger Juho, currently reading the book, to wonder how long it took them to realize it had been published.

There's also a longer review of the book on the CIA website, where they lambast it for some factual errors. I'm in no position to disagree with them, but as something of a historian, in my opinion the most signal merit of Weiner's book is that it has such explanatory power. This account of America's consistent failure to supply its decisionmakers with good intelligence goes a long way toward expaining some of that nation's greatest failures in the 20th century.

A significant trend that develops very early in the book is the distortion on intelligence to fit either the White House's or the CIA's political agenda. As this book makes manifestly clear, the Iraqi WMD episode was not the first time intelligence data was manipulated to serve political ends. As it stands, it won't be the last.

This book will expand your understanding of the political history of our world immensely. A must-read.