Killing Pablo
Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw is a book by Mark Bowden that details the efforts by the governments of the United States and Colombia, their respective military and intelligence forces, and Los Pepes to stop illegal activities committed by Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar and his subordinates. It relates how Escobar was killed and his cartel dismantled. Bowden originally reported this story in a 31-part series published in The Philadelphia Inquirer and in a companion documentary of the same title.
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- Here's a few I've really liked that have a broader subject matter than only what you asked for. I figure that if you like to read you'd like these books.
--- NON-FICTION ---
Darkness Visible
A Mathemematician's Apology
Omnivore's Dilemma
Fermat's Enigma
The Code Book
Born to Run
Judgement of Paris
Siddhartha
Killing Pablo
The Victorian Internet
Lone Survivor
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman
Papillon
Into Thin Air
Born on a Blue Day
Touching the Void
Got Fight
The Conquest of Happiness
--- FICTION ---
Switch Bitch
Lost Horizon
The Cuckoo's Egg
The Simlarillion
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Alchemist
The Count of Monte Cristo
A Canticle for Leibowitz
Neverwhere
My Uncle Oswald
Stories of Your Life and Others
Invisible Cities
Life of Pi
Atlas Shrugged
--- WALL STREET / FINANCE ---
When Genius Failed
Liar's Poker
Buffett (Lowenstein)
Bull!
Black-Scholes and Beyond (textbook)
Fixed Income Securities (textbook)
The Road to Serfdom
The Smartest Guys in the Room
Fortune's Formula
The Fourth Turning
Inside the House of Money
--- ENTREPRENEURSHIP / COMPUTERS (non-textbook) ---
Masters of Doom
It's Not About the Bike
Dot. Bomb
Founders at Work
The PayPal Wars
Coders at Work
The Mousedriver Chronicles
Leaving Microsoft to Change the World
The Soul of a New Machine
Startup
The Hypomanic Edge
Small Giants
Small is the New Big
Four Hour Work Week
The Boy who Harnessed the Wind
Four Steps to the Epiphany
Pour your Heart into it
Beyond Software Architecture
Setting the Table
--- DESIGN / UX ---
On Writing
The Design of Everyday Things
Understanding Comics
The Elements of Typographic Style
Don't Make me Think!
A Pattern Language
--- PROGRAMMING ---
Programming Pearls
Effective Java
The Algorithm Design Manual
Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment
The Pragmatic Programmer
Refactoring
Java Concurrency in Practice
Java Puzzlers
Expert C Programming
--- COOKING ---
The Secrets of Cooking Revealed
Cooking for Geeks
The Bread Baker's Apprentice
The Brewmaster's Table
--- MISC ---
Robot Building for Beginners
Mountaineering - The Freedom of the Hills
A First Course in Coding Theory
The Computational Beauty of Nature
Total Control
The Ashley Book of Knots
Make: Electronics
- Systems like these (tactical SIGINT, vs. the kind of strategic collection of everything. like NSA does) have been part of war pretty much ever since radio was invented.
Most of Rommel's awesomeness in North Africa was due to his superior radio directing finding units. No need to necessarily translate enemy communications if you know where they are and when they're sending.
The premier tier-1/special mission unit in the US military (Intelligence Support Activity (ISA), aka "the Activity", Gray Fox, Torn Victor, Cemetery Wind, Centra Spike, ... they have a lot of code names) was basically the key piece in killing Pablo Escobar (the book "Killing Pablo" is a pretty good account). They're obviously extensively involved in Iraq and Afghanistan.
One of the major reasons the military was more effective in 2005-now in Iraq, vs. 2003-2004, is that cellphones spread out to cover the whole country, and insurgents and their friends used cellphones (although this is more "strategic" vs. tactical/field gathering like this system).
I'm just waiting for the first fully autonomous weapon which combines signals intelligence and killing -- flies around listening for a specific IMSI, then drops down on the target and blows up.
- = Finished =
* Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari
* Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt
* The Quants
* All About ADHD: A Family Resource for Helping Your Child Succeed With ADHD
* Still Procrastinating? The No Regrets Guide To Getting It Done
* Why Does He Do That? Inside The Minds of Angry And Controlling Men
* Killing Pablo
* Blackhawk Down (re-read)
* Revelation Space. Banks. (re-read)
= Finished Chapters Required For A Course =
* Essential University Physics, Volume 1. Wolfson.
* Linear Algebra, A First Course. Kutler.
* A Concise Introduction to Linear Algebra. Schay.
* Biology I: Cells, Molecular Biology, and Genetics. Custom Text (York University, BIOL 1000).
* Chemistry, A Molecular Approach. Tro et. al.
= In Progress =
* 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval Noah Harari
* Time Reborn: From the Crisis In Physics to the Future of the Universe. Smolin.
* Freemium Mobile Games: Design & Monetization
