Word: echelons
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...literary world doesn’t appear to have entirely avoided the trend either, with debuts by everyone from James Frey to Yale Daily News sex columnist Natalie Kirinsky garnering attention at every echelon of cultural criticism. But the biggest winner in the scramble for fresh blood has been Jonathan Safran Foer, who was reportedly only 20 when he wrote his first New York Times bestseller, “Everything is Illuminated...
...stood for Schutzstaffel, meaning protective echelon, or, as commonly translated, elite guard. The organization grew out of a small group of thugs recruited in 1923 to protect Hitler, and was originally the security arm of the Nazi Party. When it came under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler in 1929, the SS began to expand; by the war's end almost 1 million men had passed through its ranks. The Waffen combat units were formed in the late 1930s. It was members of the Totenkopf ("Death Head") SS who served as guards and executioners at the concentration camps, wearing black caps...
...want to get back to where I was in high school, where I was at the top echelon of players,” he says. “I haven’t yet been able to do that. Now I feel I’m back in shape and can make it through the game. I can finally let my natural ability take over...
Rather than be discouraged, Keefe uses what little knowledge he can gather on Echelon as a jumping off point to analyze and criticize the intelligence community’s growing reliance on signals intelligence—a tactic whose effectiveness is constantly dropping as technology becomes more sophisticated, and the sea of signals in the air gets incomprehensibly dense. Reading like a spy novel itself, revealing information at a guarded pace to maximize the reader’s paranoia, Keefe’s book explains how the National Security Agency (NSA) and CIA’s reliance on signals intelligence...
Keefe is right to point out that from a strategic standpoint, signals intelligence alone is insufficient, and that the U.S. needs more flesh-and-blood agents gathering and evaluating information out in the field. But what he neglects to fully address critically are the ramifications of programs like Echelon on individual privacy and civil liberties. Public oversight of intelligence organizations is poor to nonexistent; the answer to the question Quis custodiet ipsos custodies—who watches the watchers?—is, effectively...