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HELLO~I'M BACK !^^昨天由于网络的原因所以是今天发的作业发的今天的哈~~这次的文章我觉得难度适中。其中1，2，5是单独的，3，4是一个还是和这次的斯诺登有关，感觉象在看美式大片儿，作者说的佷全面，可是有可能里面的单词有点多。。。。頑張って！
号外号外！！第一楼俺答应过一位叫小鱼的童鞋了嘻嘻嘻嘻
SPEED
[Time1]
During my thirty-plus years working abroad for the CIA, the unspoken truth among case officers like me was that you'd have to be nuts, as the citizen of another country, to be a spy for a foreign intelligence service. In recruiting an agent or 'asset,' we were asking him to ignore the instinct of self-preservation, to break the laws of his own country─to become a traitor. And we were asking him to trust that no leak or mole would ever expose him.
Today, there are still secrets that need stealing, and the consequences of detection remain dangerous. Moscow's recent expulsion of an alleged CIA officer was dramatic, but such moves are among the lesser costs of espionage gone awry.
How, then, does a case officer persuade someone to become a traitor? There is no definitive handbook. The process is as complex as human relationships. If possible, a friendship should develop between the case officer and the prospective agent; bonds of trust must be established. But beneath the surface, there is the CIA officer's constant and often uncharitable assessment of the target's aspirations, fears and desires. You must know what motivates the potential recruit so that you can better exploit his vulnerabilities and, in the end, put him in the right frame of mind for your 'pitch.'
In making this assessment, the CIA relies on four basic human motivations, described by the acronym MICE: money, ideology, conscience and ego. Some agencies in the U.S. intelligence community, perhaps not realizing that MICE is already a plural word, insist on adding an S to the end for sex. But sexual entrapment is not a reliable recruitment technique. A blackmailed agent tends to be resentful, brooding, prone to disloyalty and the fabrication of intelligence. Other countries, most infamously Russia, have used sexual entrapment in intelligence operations without compunction.
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[Time2]
Something that has always intrigued1 me about Abraham Lincoln is, not surprisingly, his sense of humor. As far as I can tell, he’s the first American President to have one.
That’s because the term “sense of humor” really wasn’t in common usage until the eighteen-sixties and seventies. In the eighteen-forties and fifties, it was called “the sense of the ridiculous,” and didn’t have the positive connotations2 that “sense of humor” has today. Back then, what was ridiculous was what invited ridicule3. Funniness and cruelty went hand in hand. Of course, they still do a lot of arm-in-arm strolling in our day as well.4
Lincoln’s humor was very different because, for one thing, it was actually “humor” as the word was defined in his time. We don’t make the distinction between “wit” and “humor” anymore, but in the nineteenth century people did. Wit was sarcastic and antipathetic while humor was congenial and empathetic.5 It’s the differ—ence we note now when we distinguish between “laughing with” and “laughing at.” Lincoln was much more about “laughing with” than “laughing at.” And when “laughing at,” it was often himself he was mocking.
In the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, when Douglas accused Lincoln of being two-faced, Lincoln replied, referencing his homeliness,6 “Honestly, if I were two-faced, would I be showing you this one?” And, in a way, Lincoln’s face itself tells us much about his sense of humor.
You can comb through7 thousands of photographs of politicians, soldiers, and the like from Lincoln’s time and not find a single smile. Here’s his sourpussed cabinet.8
True, the extended exposures9 required for photographs of that era made smiling difficult. Yet Lincoln alone, as far as I can tell, overcame that difficulty. And though there is only a hint of smile in his photographs, it hints at what Lincoln knew too well: that, as Mark Twain pointed out, “the secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow.”
Interestingly, while having a sense of humor, or at least the appearance of one provided by comedy writers, has become a necessary characteristic for an American President in our time, in the nineteenth century, too much humor was considered a liability.10 And that was the case for Lincoln. A journalist covering the Lincoln-Douglas debates commented that “I could not take a real personal liking to the man, owing to an inborn weakness for which he was even then notorious and so remained during his great public career, he was inordinately fond of jokes, anecdotes, and stories.”11
There’s hoping that our age might have a more favorable feeling towards him.
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[Time3]
Look who’s listening
America’s National Security Agency collects more information than most people thought. Will scrutiny spur change?
THICK and fast they came at last, and more and more and more. On June 5th the Guardian, a British newspaper, reported that America’s National Security Agency (NSA) was collecting the telephone records of millions of Americans not suspected of crimes. A day later, theWashington Post reported the existence of a programme code-named PRISM, under which the NSA collects an unknown quantity of e-mails, internet phone-calls, photos, videos, file transfers and social-networking data from big internet companies, including Google, Facebook, Apple, YouTube, Skype, Microsoft and PalTalk—a video-chat service popular in the Middle East and among Muslims.
Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed that widespread collection of telephone records had been going on for years. As for PRISM, on June 8th America’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, issued a rare public statement acknowledging its existence, but stressing that it is lawful and operates under a secret court that oversees intelligence-gathering. The leaker revealed himself the next day: Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old who had worked as a security contractor at the NSA for the past four years, employed by several private contractors.
In an interview with the Guardian (from Hong Kong, where he had holed up in hope of avoiding extradition to America), Mr Snowden said the NSA had built the capacity to ingest massive quantities of information from people not suspected of crimes. “I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded,” said Mr Snowden. He believes that the public, not spies and secret courts, ought to decide whether this is right. He chose to reveal himself to avoid hiding behind the secrecy he abhors.
Since its creation in 1952 the NSA has been listening in on the world’s communications, from drunk Soviet leaders to Osama bin Laden’s satellite phone. Its thirst for information is well known. For decades, under a programme called Echelon, it has operated listening stations around the world that intercept troves of phone and data traffic.
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[Time4]
Yet the latest disclosures suggest a scale of data-collection bigger than many experts had expected. A former high-ranking American official with ties to intelligence says more programmes skirting legality have still to be exposed. Mr Snowden has handed over “thousands” of classified documents, according to Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who broke the story, so more disclosures are probably on the way. His revelations have already prompted condemnation—and vigorous debate over the proper role and extent of modern government surveillance.
Insight into the telephone-data collection came from a leaked order from a FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court instructing Verizon, one of the country’s biggest telecoms firms, with 121m American customers, to hand over information about all calls on its network “on an ongoing daily basis”. The FISA court was created in 1978 to approve or deny government requests to listen to foreigners’ calls on the ground of national security. Other telecoms firms are believed to deliver data under similar FISA orders, which appear to be renewed every three months.
The order does not give the government the right to listen to the content of calls, as Barack Obama, in response to the leak, emphatically told Americans. For that, law-enforcement agents need a separate warrant: one far harder to obtain because it requires suspicion of particular individuals and proof that “normal investigative procedures have been tried and failed”. Instead, the NSA has hoovered up “metadata”—the records of who people call, when, for how long, and so on.
Back when telephones were plugged into walls and data analysis was done by humans, the usefulness of metadata was limited: hence the lower evidentiary standards required to obtain them. But thanks to powerful computers that can map people’s associations, and mobile phones that pinpoint a person’s movements, metadata can now provide a detailed portrait of who people know, where they go and their daily routines. The NSA may be able to use metadata to identify connections between people even if they have never shared a direct link, just as Facebook can predict which people a user may know. From a security point of view, what matters is getting all the information available. At the same time, the need to examine data at a moment’s notice has shifted the regime to “collection first” and analysis later, under FISA approval.
The details of PRISM are murkier. The initial leak for the programme was a computer slide presentation, in which the NSA said it had access to a cornucopia of customer information from American web firms. That stoked fears that the NSA is hoovering up information on a grand scale. But according to Mr Clapper, PRISM is not a data-gathering tool; it is an “internal government computer system” for accessing content that a court has already ordered companies to provide.
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Stewart Baker, a former homeland-security official, compared PRISM to FTP (file transfer protocol)—a way to transfer files over a network. In America’s system of law-enforcement wiretapping, operators must provide access to the line when they are served with a court order to do so. Big internet companies may have simply designed a similar system for requests for content. There is no evidence yet that all the world’s Skype conversations, e-mails and Google docs are being sucked into NSA headquarters.
[Time5]
Are volunteers doing more harm than good?
在英国，许多大学生选择毕业后休个“间隔年”，利用这段时间出国旅行兼做义工，希望借此领悟到生活真谛。而这真是个好点子吗？让我们来倾听一些不同的声音。
Every year, hundreds of thousands of college students in the UK choose to take a gap year or a short-term volunteering trip abroad. They dig wells in Africa, build schools in Thailand and save elephants in India.
It sounds like a win-win situation in which students broaden their experience by helping others, while locals benefit from their financial support, knowledge and skills.
But in recent years, gap year volunteering has come under fire for becoming just a fashion trend.
A video that went viral on YouTube in 2010 best captures the mindset of some gap year volunteers. It’s a three-minute comedy sketch called Gap Yah, in which a young, British, upper-middle class man tells his friend on the phone about his gap year in Tanzania, Peru and Myanmar. All of his experiences result in him “chundering everywhah” (slang for being sick or vomiting) due to drinking heavily every day.
Matt Lacey, the video’s creator, told The Guardian that “It’s a satire on the great number of people who seem to be leaving these shores to vomit all over the developing world.”
But many volunteers have the best of intentions when they embark on their gap year. Their biggest problem, according to American Daniela Papi, founder of a non-profit organization that specializes in organizing gap year tours, is that they suffer from a superiority complex. Recently, Papi wrote a piece for the BBC sharing her view on gap year volunteering.
According to her, many Westerners believe that because they come from a wealthy country, they have the right to bestow their generosity and kindness on people in developing countries. But often they know little about the local people and their culture, and lack the necessary skills to help them.
“It’s like we think we are all Clark Kent [Superman’s disguise as an office clerk],” Papi says. “At home we work hard to be useful in our jobs, but then we enter a magical phone booth and we take off to a far away country and somehow our Superman suit, or our volunteer T-shirt, gives us all of the power and knowledge we need to save the world.”
Volunteering is not about volunteers fulfilling their dream of being a hero, Papi says. “The travelers are not just missing out on learning the lessons that lead to more sustainable changes in themselves and in the world, but they are also often negatively impacting the people they are meant to be ‘serving’.”
OBSTACLE
Above the fray, but part of it
Why the Supreme Court annoys both left and right
Jun 29th 2013 |From the print edition
IT IS lucky for the nine justices of America’s Supreme Court that they need not seek re-election. In the last days of their latest term they were denounced from the left for one ruling, which narrowed the scope of a 1965 law against racist barriers to voting, and from the right for a second, which struck down federal curbs on the rights of same-sex married couples.
John Lewis, a black Democrat who marched with Martin Luther King, accused the court of sticking “a dagger through the heart” of the Voting Rights Act. Michele Bachmann, a vocal Republican, charged the court with trying to dismantle marriage, a creation from “the hand of God”.
Dissenting members of the court sounded no less cross. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, at 80 the court’s combative liberal conscience, accused her colleagues of “hubris” in suggesting that racism has faded as a menace, notably in the Deep South—a suggestion, she noted, that involved ignoring a 2006 judgment to the contrary by Congress. At the conservative end of the court, Antonin Scalia accused his peers of plotting a “black-robed supremacy” in striking down the Defence of Marriage Act, a law passed by Congress in 1996 to grant primacy to heterosexual marriage and to minimise the legal import of state-devised gay marriages.
Under its chief justice, John Roberts—a staunch small-government conservative appointed by George W. Bush—this is a highly polarised court, and one with a clear 5-4 conservative majority, to boot. But partisan labels such as left-wing and right-wing are not much help when assessing this Supreme Court, or the spate of historic rulings that it issued in the usual end-of-term rush before the justices headed off for their summer breaks (conferences, the odd opera festival, a spot of teaching in some agreeable foreign spot). A single instinct binds together several big and seemingly incompatible rulings handed down by the Supreme Court at the end of its term. That instinct touches on traditional arguments about the competing rights of the federal government versus the 50 states, but is larger than a discussion of states’ rights. Put simply, the court showed a deep suspicion of attempts to use the law to place a particular group or institution on a pedestal, granting it special privileges to shield it from attack or competition. To give this instinct a single label, the court rejected paternalism as a way of organising American society.
The Supreme Court has not always opposed paternalism. For nearly two centuries, as Justice Thurgood Marshall, its first black member, noted in 1978, the court found ways to reconcile the constitution with “ingenious and pervasive” forms of discrimination against black Americans, often dressed up as concern for their welfare. In a 1973 sex-discrimination case another justice, William Brennan, lamented America’s long history of keeping women down, all too often in the name of a paternalism which, he argued, had in practice “put women not on a pedestal but in a cage”.
In modern American politics all manner of paternalistic impulses live on—and just to complicate matters, thrive on both the right and the left. This term the Supreme Court ruled on three big cases involving race. All in some sense challenged a long-standing, often left-led consensus that blacks and other long-oppressed minorities continue to require unequal protections, in the name of a broader equality. In the voting-rights case, the majority found that America had moved on since the dark and violent days of 1965, yet rules kept in place by Congress seemed to ignore such changes, leaving in place special federal oversight for former hotbeds of discrimination. While leaving in place nationwide rules against racist barriers to voting, the court shifted the burden of proof to those complaining of discrimination.
In an affirmative-action case involving the University of Texas at Austin, the court upheld the idea that a racially diverse campus is of benefit to all, but strongly nudged universities to seek colour-blind ways to achieve such mixing. A third case, a sad battle over an adopted toddler whose biological father is part-Cherokee Indian, in theory turned on a narrow reading of custody rules. But the court’s opinion made clear a broader dislike of a sweeping 1978 law, passed by Congress to discourage the removal of Indian children from their tribes. The opinion repeatedly noted that the baby in question was only 3/256ths Cherokee, and suggested that special treatment of Indian children might put certain vulnerable youngsters at a “great disadvantage”.
We are the law
In contrast, in striking down the Defence of Marriage Act, the majority was—in effect—taking issue with a paternalism of the right. The author of the court’s opinion was Anthony Kennedy, a Republican appointee with an independent streak who—to his ill-concealed delight—often acts as a swing vote. He chided Congress for intruding on the rights of states to define marriage, but also for attempting to put traditional marriage on a pedestal at all, with the stated aim of “protecting the traditional moral teachings reflected in heterosexual-only marriage laws”. With relish, Justice Kennedy tore into Congress for ignoring both the constitution’s stress on equality and the federalist system’s insight that different communities have different values, and that these evolve.
The Supreme Court’s suspicion of paternalism belongs to a long national tradition, to be sure: America was born of revolution and built around self-government. The court’s big end-of-term rulings defy easy partisan labelling. But Justices Ginsburg and Scalia—who seldom agree on much—are both right in sensing what is at stake, politically. This is a Supreme Court which does not hide its disdain for Congress. This is a supremely confident court. As a result, this has been a term of unusual confrontation and drama. Expect more to follow.
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发表于 2013-6-30 09:43:10
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