ROBERT STEELE: I had the pleasure of listening to Dr. Patrick Meier speak at the National Defense University (NDU) this past Thursday. He is based in Qatar because the US Government is not very good at spotting, assessing, recruiting, and respecting world-class individual talents. Patrick is a global asset. What he knows about humanitarian technology is priceless. Below is Patrick's “long” briefing, 99 slides, with words in Notes format.
During the Q&A one of the NDU staff asked Dr. Meier if he had considered asking NSA for help [I don't make this stuff up.] In the ensuing discussion what was really clear to me is that the the pioneers in humanitarian technology not only do not need anything NSA has to offer, but they are far advanced — vastly advanced — beyond anything the US secret intelligence community is capable of doing. CLARIFICATION BY DR. MEIER: Point is we don't need half as advanced tech/methods to do what we currently need to do, much of this commercially available already and slowly coming to open source world as well.
Among the highlights for me personally:
01 Every image taken by a cell phone is capable of having the geospatial coordinates and the time and date stamped within the image. This feature is turned off on most cell phones. We need to find a way for individuals to be able to easily activate the feature. If we can ever get The Virgin Truth off the ground, I'd like to see the OpenBTS cell phones given out free pre-set to this function — its value in relation to early warning on crop or animal disease as well as very rapid situational awareness when many images are coming is, cannot be exaggerated.
02 When humanitarian technologist talk about geo-tagging, they are talking about hash-tags and words added by the sender they are NOT talking about embedded geospatial code. Some in the audience did not appear to understand this distinction, at least one clearly did.
03 Some — at least as represented in this room by the most talkative among a small handful — are spectacularly ignorant about what NSA cannot and does not do, and about the limitations of big data (legacy) versus big data (real time). They are particularly limited in understanding that one human brain is vastly more powerful than any single NSA computer, and that a thousand or ten thousand or a hundred thousand human minds, organized voluntarily and coherently
There are very few people that I consider spectacularly gifted and relevant to the creation of a World Brain and Global Game. Medard Gabel is one of them. Patrick Meier is another.
