Month: November 2010

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Journal: Wikileaks Inspires Panetta, Raises Mouse Turd Count

Intelligence (Government/Secret), Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy
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Impacts from Wikileaks continue to multiply.  Now, just getting a routine courier card renewed now involves pole vaulting over major mouse turds.

Message from the Director: Recent Media Leaks

November 8, 2010

We have seen in recent months a damaging spate of media leaks on a wide range of national security issues. WikiLeaks is but one egregious example. In some cases, CIA sources and methods have been compromised, harming our mission and endangering lives.

When information about our intelligence, our people, or our operations appears in the media, it does incredible damage to our nation’s security and our ability to do our job of protecting the nation. More importantly, it could jeopardize lives. For this reason, such leaks cannot be tolerated. The Office of Security is directed to fully investigate these matters. Unauthorized disclosures of classified information also will be referred to the Department of Justice. Our government is taking a hard line, as demonstrated by the prosecutions of a former National Security Agency official, a Federal Bureau of Investigation linguist, and a State Department contractor.

Here at the Agency, we are a family, which means we depend on each other—sharing burdens, challenges, and successes. But sharing cannot extend beyond the limits set by law and the “need to know” principle. The media, the public, even former colleagues, are not entitled to details of our work.

I would ask that every employee reflect on the responsibilities and privileges of service at CIA. Every officer takes a secrecy oath, which obligates us to protect classified information while we serve at the Agency and after we leave. A vast majority of officers live up to their oath, but even a small number of leaks can do great damage. Our adversaries benefit, while our credibility, our operations, and, ultimately, our ability to accomplish the mission all take a hit. Our sworn duty to the American people is to protect them and we must do nothing to violate the law or that sacred pledge.

Leon E. Panetta

Phi Beta Iota: Nothing has changed since the Moynihan Commission received testimony on CIA's refusal to brief Congress on its “sources & methods” that were and are very well known because CIA is a bureaucracy and persists in operating out of official installations.  Its one very expensive attempt to create 21 non-official cover companies ended in failure, with 20 of the companies being closed down.  What Panetta simply refuses to compute is that bad management and poor tradecraft are a much graver offense deleterious to national security, than straight-forward critical commentaries such as appear in the See Also and Miscellaneous sections below.  We were surprised to see that Panetta now claims to oversee open source intelligence for the US Intelligence Community.  It's hard to sink any lower in performance, but that does it for us.  CIA has hit rock bottom.

See Also:

Journal: Why Do We Need a CIA At All?
2010: Human Intelligence (HUMINT) Trilogy Updated
Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Intelligence (Lack Of)
Review: Nation of Secrets–The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life
Worth a Look: Secrecy as Fraud (2002)
Review: Report of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy
Reference: 1996 Testimony to Moynihan Commisson

Miscellaneous:

Journal: CIA Denies Disability to Poisoned Officer
Journal: CIA Leads the “Walking Dead” in USA
Journal: The Truth on Khost Kathy
Journal: CIA Officer Blew Off Warning in Jordon Weeks in Advance of Jordanian Suicide Bombing in Afghanistan that Killed Seven
Reference: Panetta Puts Lipstick on the Pig (Again)

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Who’s Who in Collective Intelligence: Nancy Bordier

Alpha A-D, Collective Intelligence
Nancy Bordier

Nancy Bordier is the inventor of the Interactive Voter Choice System. She is a political scientist, web entrepreneur, former electoral candidate, high-tech marketing executive and university professor. Her experience in electoral politics includes a 1985 campaign on the Democratic ticket for the office of mayor of White Plains, New York. A middle class city with 57,000 residents, White Plains is a suburb of Manhattan and the county seat of Westchester County.

Her opponent won his fourth four-year term with the aid of large campaign contributions from developers doing business with the city. Bordier's platform advocated balanced residential and commercial development. By 2009, the modest homes of White Plains residents were dwarfed by two $400 million 40-story-high towers built by Donald Trump and his development partners, featuring luxury condominiums, a hotel and office space. The city's projected “rebirth” stalled “halfway through” its plan, according to the New York Times, due to developers' failure to “unload” the unsold inventory of high-priced condominiums.

From 1988-1991, Bordier served on the launch team of the $1 billion telecommunications start-up, the Prodigy Interactive Personal Service. Originally founded by a partnership of IBM, CBS and Sears, it was one of the first online consumer services. Prodigy's CEO honored her with an Outstanding Achievement Award for her nationwide event marketing campaign and design of multimedia marketing materials. She later won more than a dozen awards for corporate positioning.

Bordier later founded and served as managing director of one of New York's first technology incubators for Internet start-ups (1994-1998). Her efforts to create a high-tech zone in the tri-state area led Gannett Suburban Newspapers to name her to its “Who's Who” of economic development leaders in the region.

Awarded M.A. and Ph.D. degrees by the Graduate Faculties of Columbia University, she has held research, faculty and administrative positions at Columbia University, Fordham University, The New School University, Hunter College of the City University of New York and the University of Geneva in Switzerland.

ReinventingDemocracy.us
Third Party Rising?
“Missing Mandate” in the 2010 Elections
How Voters Can Unrig the 2012 Elections with Transpartisan Voting Blocs and Electoral Coalitions

Contact:

Nancy Bordier, President
Citizens Winning Hands Corporation
1718 M Street, NW #240
Washington, D.C. 20036

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Reference: How to Achieve Wise Democracy

Blog Wisdom, Fact Sheets, Methods & Process
Wise Democracy Hand-Out (2 Pages)

Phi Beta Iota: We are in the process of identifying at least eight “modalities” that stand in sharp contrast to “rule by secrecy” as is characteristic of the axis of crime running from Wall Street to the Democratic-Republican “two-party tyranny.”  We anticipate their all participating in a nation-wide series of citizen encounters on policy and budget, culminating in the Sense-Making Summit in October 2011.  While the first summit is focused on Health in the larger context of the ten high-level threats to humanity and the twelve core policies, our intent from Summit '12 onwards, is to engage all citizens in addressing all ten threats across all twelve policies in the context of  balanced budget, first in the USA, then in such other countries as might have a citizenry interested in Wise Democracy and Participatory Budgeting.

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Journal: Intelligence Out of Control

02 China, Analysis, Augmented Reality, Budgets & Funding, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Government, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), International Aid, Methods & Process, Military, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence, Policies, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Strategy, Threats
Marcus Aurelius Recommends

IMHO, ill-advised.

Washington Times
November 11, 2010
Pg. 10

Inside The Ring

By Bill Gertz

Financial intel killed

The Pentagon's intelligence directorate is killing off one of its most strategically important mission areas: monitoring efforts by foreign governments to buy U.S. firms and technology, such as the multiple efforts by China's military-linked equipment company Huawei Technologies to buy into the U.S. high-technology sector.

Defense officials tell Inside the Ring that Thomas A. Ferguson, acting undersecretary of defense for intelligence (USDI) and a former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) space analyst, initiated the dismantling of the financial-threat intelligence monitoring.

Read rest of the article….

Phi Beta Iota: US Intelligence is out of control–as good as some of the leaders are in terms of diversity of experience within the OLD system, they simply do not have the mind-set nor the authorities to restructure intelligence to the point that it can meet all appropriate needs.  The person ostensibly responsible for strategy, a CIA body, has just been made deputy director of DIA, and we have no doubt that a “strategy” exists that might ultimately turn DIA into the analysis center and CIA into a collection management center (while NSA becomes the all-source processing center, all as outlined in Chapter 13 of ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World) as well as all subsequent books such as INFORMATION OPERATIONS: All Information, All Languages, All the Time, this is all too little, too slow, too incoherent, and too expensive.  An Open Source Agency (OSA) under diplomatic auspices, and a voluntary shift of $200 billion from Program 50 to Program 150 as a lure for Newt Gingrinch coming into the 2012 coalition cabinet under Obama running as an Independent (miracles do happen), are both essential.

See Also:

2010: Human Intelligence (HUMINT) Trilogy Updated

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Journal: DoD Goes to the Dogs…

Methods & Process, Military, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence

Marcus Aurelius Recommends

(1)  Militaries have used working dogs for a variety of offensive and defensive purposes for years; (2) military working dogs have been very active in Iraq and Afghanistan; (3) airborne (parachute) units have been jumping dogs officially and unofficially for years, although this is the first report I've personally seen of dogs being jumped using the military freefall technique, (4) the biggest problem I see for the dogs is the landing since, before their handler lands, he will likely lower the dog on a 15-20 foot line so that the dog lands before he does so the challenge for the dog is doing a parachute landing fall with four, rather than two, rather slender and fragile legs — kind of difficult to “keep your feet and knees together”; (5) the alternative to (4) above is for the handler to execute a standing landing, something that is at least theoretically feasible for a well-trained jumper using a ram-air canopy under favorable wind and drop zone conditions; that could possibly mitigate the doggie PLF challenge; (6)  I think I'm glad I'm not the free-fall jumper since, while you can see that the dog in the photo below is muzzled to prevent bites, unless he's also sedated, he could flop around enough in his harness to make a stable descent to pull altitude a challenge for his jumper; (7) I'm not sure the United States Parachute Association has ever considered this application of the Tandem technique which is well established for willing human cargoes.)

Full Story Online
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Reference: A Path Toward Open Government

Analysis, Augmented Reality, Budgets & Funding, Collective Intelligence, Computer/online security, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Methods & Process, Open Government
Six Pages Online

Phi Beta Iota: This is one of the most balanced sensible white papers from a vendor it has been our pleasure to encounter.  Taken in context of Microsoft thinking about buying Adobe after failing to see the value of Sun's Open Office, this white paper merits broad appreciation against the possibility that Adobe could become the Context & Content Division that Microsoft does not have and will not have under Steve Ballmer now that Ray Ozzie has given up on Microsoft and moved on.

See Also:

Graphic: One Vision for the Future of Microsoft

2010 Reference: 5 Lessons From Outgoing Microsoft Software Architect Ray Ozzie