Salon.com > intelligence

I failed a Mensa test — twice

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 18:00:00 +0000

American Mensa, an organization that admits people with an IQ in the top two percent of the population, claims nearly 60,000 members, including more than 2,300 in the Greater New York area (and a bunch of toddlers).

On a Saturday morning in late May, I went to see if I could become one of them.

FBI’s shameless 9/11 claims

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 21:05:00 +0000

Could the National Security Agency's massive surveillance programs uncovered this month have stopped 9/11? That's what outgoing FBI Director Robert Mueller said before a House Judiciary Committee hearing today, in the latest escalation from administration officials defending the programs. First, officials said the program had helped stop a plot in New York, then they said it had stopped "dozens," and now the big one -- 9/11.

Had the program been in place at the time, Mueller said, counterterrorism officials may have been able to connect the dots and could have "derailed" the plot entirely. He pointed to one specific case: There was an al-Qaida safe house in Yemen that was in contact with a house in San Diego where plotter Khalid Almihdhar was staying, and:

If we had this program in pace at the time, we would have had been able to identify that particular telephone number in San Diego... If we had the telephone number from Yemen, we would have matched it up to that telephone number in San Diego, got further legal process, identified Almihdhar... The 9/11 Commission itself indicated that investigations or interrogations of Almihdhar once he was identified could have yielded evidence of connections to other participants in the 9/11 plot. The simple fact of their detention could have derailed the plan. In any case, the opportunity was not there.

Is Edward Snowden a hero or a traitor? Who cares

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 13:00:00 +0000

Following multiple stunning intelligence leaks revealing the scope and scale of our government's data-gathering and analyzing abilities, an important, long-overdue debate has raged in papers, on the Internet, and on TV: Is Edward Snowden a big jerk or the best dude ever?

There is the (interesting but only marginally consequential) media debate over the terminology to use when referring to Snowden: Leaker, whistle-blower, source? And then there is the much sillier public wrangling over whether Snowden is a "hero" or a "traitor," as if those maddeningly reductive (and not exclusive) terms expressed anything other than the speakers' tribal allegiances and predispositions. He's a man who did a remarkable and newsworthy thing. The thing he did is what people should probably still be talking about.

The New Yorker on Sunday and Monday ran three different pieces, by three different authors, examining Snowden the man. The first, and best, was by Amy Davidson, who sketched his biography and quoted his justifications, but largely held off on casting moral judgment in favor of raising useful questions: "How many people with a private contractors’ job and a password have the privilege of knowing the names of our spies?" And:

The government has all your info

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 13:23:00 +0000

The CIA does the sexy evil stuff -- assassination attempts, regime change, torture, air strikes against crowds of people totally unknown to us -- but the scariest domestic intelligence agency for your average American, at little risk of dying in a drone strike or being deposed in by a military junta, has always been the National Security Agency. Last night, the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill and Spencer Ackerman reported that the NSA ordered Verizon to provide it with information on every call made in the United States for a three-month period ending in July. Yes, every call.

The NSA got a FISA judge to order Verizon to turn over "all call detail records or 'telephony metadata' created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad" or "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls." The records include "metadata," meaning the records show the phone numbers, call length and possibly location the calls were made, among lots of other helpful identifying information.

Are humans getting smarter?

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 21:30:00 +0000

Psychologists often use puzzles to test intelligence. So, puzzle this: on the one hand, many psychologists tell us that intelligence is an enduring individual trait, pretty much hard-wired by a person’s DNA and by cell development in the fetus’s brain. On the other hand, testing shows that there have been huge increases around the world in IQ scores over the last two or three generations—so large that most Western adults a century ago would be considered dimwits by today’s standards.

This puzzle emerged a couple of decades ago from psychologist James Flynn’s discovery of what is now labeled the Flynn Effect. He found that, in the United States, for instance, IQ scores rose about fifteen points between roughly 1950 and 2000. They are still rising. The ascent in scores can be quite rapid—a half-point per year for young eastern German men in the 1990s. Fragments of earlier American data and more complete testing in other Western nations suggest that the surge in scores began early in the last century. IQ scores may now be leveling off in northern European nations even as they are jumping in developing nations.

Super-hacker “Guccifer” strikes again

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 12:00:00 +0000

The pseudonymous hacker “Guccifer,” whose list of hacking victims includes President George W. Bush and former secretaries of state Hillary Clinton and Colin Powell, has recently seemed to veer into surprising territory, hitting Sex and the City creator Candace Bushnell and journalist Carl Bernstein.

But now, tanned, rested and ready, he has returned to his old stomping grounds, the email accounts of political figures.

Is your dog smarter than other dogs?

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 22:08:00 +0000

"Aren't you just the smartest little guy in the whole entire world?"

Be honest: You've probably said this to your dog before. Maybe it's because he once successfully fetched a tennis ball that was hidden by some bushes. Or how about that time he barked in the direction of your apartment keys while you were looking for them? Or perhaps it's how he can make toaster waffles for you in the morning. (OK, that last one is actually really smart.)

If you are looking to quantify that hunch about your pup's superior brain power, there is now an app for you.

Duke University's "Dognition" project is trying to revolutionize scientific understanding of canine cognition by crowdsourcing data about man's best friends from around the world.

"In a weekend, we could have 10,000, maybe 50,000 people give data," Brian Hare, associate professor in evolutionary anthropology at Duke, director of Duke's Canine Cognition Center and creator of the "Dognition" app, told LiveScience. "I can't even say how big of a quantum leap this will be."