Journal: Haiti Earthquake Unconventional C4I

08 Wild Cards, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Gift Intelligence, IO Mapping, IO Multinational, IO Sense-Making, Methods & Process, Mobile, Non-Governmental, Peace Intelligence, Real Time, Technologies, Tools

Sample Commercial Image

Apps for Haiti: An SMS 911, a People Finder, and more to come

Haiti Earthquate Person Registry (Seeking/Found) (Merged with Google Person Finder)

Spreadsheet of 152 Organizations Rendering Aid to Haiti

Wikipedia Page Participants on the Ground and Unconventional Communications

Haiti Crisis Camp Page and Feedback

GeoEye Post-Earthquake Sample Image

ESC Imagery Aid

See also: Journal: Haiti Rolling Update (Chronology with Links)

Reference (2010): Fixing Intel–A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan

08 Wild Cards, DoD, Ethics, Government, Military, Monographs, Peace Intelligence

UPDATE: A colleague from within asked us to highlight this quote with the observation that neither the US IC nor DoD have any clue how to execute.  We agree.  Both lack leadership with vision and multinational panache; they simply do not know what they do not know because they have both wasted the last 21 years refusing to listen or learn.

P.23.  They must embrace open-source, population-centric information as the lifeblood of their analytical work. They must open their doors to anyone who is willing to exchange information, including Afghans and NGOs as well as the U.S. military and its allies. As General Martin E. Dempsey, commander of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, recently stated, “…[T]he best information, the most important intelligence, and the context that provides the best understanding come from the bottom up, not from the top down.”

The Cold War notion that open-source information is “second class” is a dangerous, outmoded cliché. Lieutenant General Samuel V. Wilson, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, captured it perfectly: “Ninety percent of intelligence comes from open sources. The other 10 percent, the clandestine work, is just the more dramatic.

28 Pages Online

News Story with Links: Spies Like Us: Top U.S. Intel Officer Says Spooks Could Learn From Journos

USMC WM in AF

Good News: Some good people in the field have finally re-invented half the wheel–the company-level bottom-up half.  Unfortunately they have absolutely no idea what can be gotten from the rest of the world (non US citizens without clearances); they are jammed into a legacy system that demands at least a SECRET clearance; there is no Multinational Engagement Network that is totally open albeit commercially encrypted, and therefore this is going nowhere.  We could fix this on leftover loose-change, but ONLY if DoD intel leadership will accept the iconoclastic multinational solutions that have been in gestation for 21 years.

Bad News: CIA and DIA are still broken and not likely to get fixed anytime soon.  The Human Terrain Teams (HTT) are an utter disgrace.  DoD commanders still have not figured out Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and OSINT does not appear in this report, nor does Reach-Back, 24/7 tribally-nuanced on demand web-cam translator services, and on and on and on.  Army G-2 is non-existent–Army is simply not trained, equipped, nor organized to do tactical intelligence in small wars.  Neither is the Marine Corps, but they adapt better.  What is so very tragic is that this is a problem that can be  fixed FAST with Multinational Engagement and a proper use of distributed linguistic and cultural assets.  All it needs is an internationalist mind-set, which no one now serving in DIA or CIA actually can muster. All of the pathologies we have been writing about since 1988 are to be found in Afghanistan, and none of the solutions that many, many authors have written about for the last 21 years are even on the table.

See also:

Continue reading “Reference (2010): Fixing Intel–A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan”

Journal: Reality Check on Afghanistan & Gaza

Cultural Intelligence, Peace Intelligence
Chuck Spinney

If you  think the US/NATO occupation of Afghanistan is protecting the Afghan people, and especially the rights of women, think again.

Chuck

Afghanistan’s soft-spoken rebel The voice from the back of the room

Tiny but powerful: Malalai Joya speaks and the women listen

Malalai Joya is only 32, but she has been an exile, a refugee, a teacher of girls in the Taliban’s Afghanistan, and now that country’s youngest member of parliament. She’s still on the run though, and still threatened with assassination

“After 9/11, they occupied my country under the banner of women’s rights and human rights and democracy, but they bring into power this photocopy of the Taliban,” she told supporters in New York. “That’s why today, the situation in Afghanistan is a disaster.”

And on another front….

A second Gaza war around the corner?

Israel's recent aggressions look ominously like the 4 November 2008 attack on Gaza, which killed six persons and shattered the four-month-long truce meticulously respected by Hamas. Predictably, Hamas and other factions retaliated for that Israeli provocation and then Israel used their response to justify its massacre of 1,400 people in Gaza this time last year.

Israel's recent assassinations of Palestinian resistance activists look ominously like the aggression that preceded last winter's attacks in Gaza. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)

Journal: MILNET Selected Headlines

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 06 Genocide, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, Cultural Intelligence, Military, Peace Intelligence

British Search And Rescue Team Turned Away From Port-Au-Prince

There were reports that the airport at Port-au-Prince had run out of aviation fuel, one of the factors that is understood to have led the US military to close it. . . . The scene at Santo Domingo airport was one of chaos, uncertainty and often despair for aid workers.

Ethno-Colonial BIG Africa

Phi Beta Iota: Lesson learned by the USMC the hard way (as of 1992):  need Forward Area Refueling Points (FARP) in the FIRST lift.

U.S. Army Africa Boss: ‘I Feel Like The Lone Ranger…'

“Africa’s not high on America’s priority list these days.

Sometimes I feel like the Lone Ranger trying to get people to bring resources to bear out here.”

I had pointed out in an earlier interview that U.S. Army Africa and Africa Command in general are notably absent from the wars in Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan, conflicts Garrett said are “currently the world’s two deadliest.”

Full Story Online

For Israel, a Reckoning

A new global movement is challenging Israel's violations of international law with the same strategies that were used against apartheid

Phi Beta Iota: Israeli influence on the US Government has been as bad as post-war Nazi influence on the Cold War ubbas–both have spawned policies that have murdered and displaced millions, with attendant atrocities.

Pakistan: U.S.-Backed Broadcast Begins

Phi Beta Iota: Too little too late and they almost certainly have no idea about the history of the Pashtun Peace Army.

Full Story Online

Taliban steps up violence in Afghanistan

Recent Pakistani military operations in insurgent strongholds in Pakistan also have driven greater numbers of Pakistan-based Taliban back into Afghanistan, the officer said.

UK plans ‘trust fund' to woo Taliban fighters

Phi Beta Iota: Turn in one weapon, get enough money for two…or go enlist and training and food along with a new weapon.  Money corrupts and it is not a substitute for Whole of Government Stabilization & Reconstruction accomplishments.

How To Apply ‘Smart Power' In Yemen

Developing a coherent strategy focused on the right objectives is important, and hard to do. The country team in any normal American embassy (like the one in Sana) does not have the staff, resources or experience to do so. The limited American military presence in Yemen does not either. Despite years of talk about the need to develop this kind of capability in the State Department or elsewhere in Washington, it does not exist. It must be built now, and quickly.

Phi Beta Iota: Start with Tony Zinni's The Battle for Peace and implement Robert Steele's DoD OSINT-M4IS2  Strategy along with Whole of Government Intelligence (Decision-Support).

Journal: Second Amendment versus “Police Pirvacy”

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Law Enforcement, Peace Intelligence, Real Time
Rodney King Video Wiki Page

Police fight cellphone recordings: Witnesses taking audio of officers arrested, charged with illegal surveillance

Crooked cops in Boston arresting citizens for recording misconduct with cellphones

Don't Tase Me Bro Wiki

Phi Beta Iota: The police will not only lose this one, we anticipate that one day the Second Amendment will apply to radar detectors and other forms of defense against state excesses.  Certainly the public needs to take its right to be armed–both with weapons and with hip-pocket recording devices, with the utmost seriousness.

Three observations:

1.  Society has forgotten how to be civil at the same time that government has forgotten how to govern (satisfy most of the people most of the time, deal humanely with the rest).

2.  Police have become increasingly militarized and the 9/11 pork has made them more so, at the same time that the FBI and similar forms of authority have forgotten how to do arrests without a SWAT team crashing through the door first.

3.  If you tell the truth and act according to the truth, such counter-surveillance is utlimately beneficial to the truth teller rather than the abuser.

Ultimately, in our view, public use of public technologies to create public intelligence about police abuse and government waste and corporate externalizations of cost (Taiwan now pays for citizen cell recordings of pollution discharges), will be a beneficial means of restoring the public's power over “it's” police forces.

Reference: NGO Guide for the Military

Key Players, Military, Mobile, Non-Governmental, Peace Intelligence

NGO Guide for the Military

Phi Beta Iota: Tip of the Hat to MILNET for noticing and Federation of American Scientists (FAS) for posting.

FAS commentary with additional links recommended also.

A good start but less than 20% of what is needed.  This should be a living online directory that spans all military occupational specialties (e.g. communications, engineering, water treatment, power) and it should have a multinational information-sharing and sense-making component including of course reach-back to the Multinational Decision Support Center, wherever that might be located.  It would also benefit from a revitalization of DARPA's STRONG ANGEL and TOOZL, and a new pilot project to integrate Twitter and UNICEF's RapidSMS into the overall “outside the wire” C4I campaign plan.

Journal: Haiti–Twitter Rocks

03 Environmental Degradation, Geospatial, Gift Intelligence, IO Mapping, IO Sense-Making, Methods & Process, Mobile, Peace Intelligence, Tools

Phi Beta Iota: Now imagine a global public fully aware of the value of Twitter photos with geospatial attributes, and a multinational decision support team able to receive and plot all such contributions….  As long as “research” is controlled by secret and ultra-far out organizations like DARPA and IARPA this stuff is not going to be applied practically.   Civil Affairs Brigade (CAB) and its Joint Civil Information Management (JCIM), combined with a United Nations Open-Source Decision-Support Information Network (UNODIN), a Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) Information Network, and a Multinational Decision Support Center (MDSC) would go a long way toward getting an immediate grip on all this, in detail, and then creating a Haiti Needs Table at the household level that could be triaged out (see Graphic: Global Range of Nano-Needs for the idea).

Highlights

Major quake hits Haiti; many casualties expected

Karel Zelenka, a Catholic Relief Services representative in Port-au-Prince, told U.S. colleagues before phone service failed that “there must be thousands of people dead,” according to a spokeswoman for the aid group, Sara Fajardo.

With phones down, some of the only communication came from social media such as Twitter. Richard Morse, a well-known musician who manages the famed Olafson Hotel, kept up a stream of dispatches on the aftershocks and damage reports.

Haiti earthquake — what we're hearing

CNN is monitoring tweets and other messages from people in Haiti and reports from those who said they have been in touch with friends and family. CNN has not been able to able to verify this material.

“If anyone in Haiti is reading this, please go out and help in the streets, it's very ug;y out there if you haven't seen it #haiti” –From Twitter user fredodupoux in Haiti at 8:04 p.m. ET

“Tipap made it home from Carrefour – saw many dead bodies and injured along the way – said most buidings w/more than one story are down” — From Twitter user troylivesay in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, at 8:22 p.m. ET


Fears of major catastrophe as 7.0 quake rocks Haiti

AFP/Twitter – This image obtained from Twitter purportedly shows Haitians standing amid rubble on January 12 in Port-au-Prince. …

A local doctor told an AFP reporter in the city that hundreds of people are feared dead.

A local UN employee said the earthquake had destroyed the headquarters of the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the country.

Seventy percent of Haiti's population lives on less than two dollars per day and half of its 8.5 million people are unemployed.

According to official figures, food insecurity already affects more than a quarter of Haiti's population, some 1.9 million people, with women and children the worst affected.

Twitter Has First Pictures Of Haiti Earthquake

News is still coming in from Haiti even thought night as fallen. Shortly after the quake, our first look at the devastation was given to us via social media websites like Twitter and Facebook.

1st Look At Devastation In Haiti Quake

Tue Jan 12, 10:51AM PT – CBS 2 / KCAL 9 Los Angeles 0:54 | 33138 views