Category: Intelligence (Government/Secret)

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Review: Counterterrorism and Open Source Intelligence

5 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Games, Models, & Simulations, Information Operations, Intelligence (Commercial), Intelligence (Government/Secret), Terrorism & Jihad
Amazon Page

Uffe Kock Wiil (ed)

5.0 out of 5 stars , Innovative, Technical, Leverages Open Sources to the Fullest July 27, 2011

Springer needs to make it clear to Amazon that the book ships from a US-based warehouse. I have urged the lead editor and conference organizer to ask Springer to correct the error. The book is available within the US and should be delivered within the week once Springer corrects the way the book has been registered on Amazon. I anticipate that a paperback version will be offered at a more affordable price for individuals–this is the library or institutional “trade” price.

I am very glad to see the publisher make use of Look Inside the Book, and encourage all interested parties to use that feature and study the table of contents. I have to articulate my profound respect for the conference organizer and senior book editor and for those contributing to this book, all of whom I met at the conference for which this content was created.

I have never seen a better collection of scientific and mathematical approaches to leveraging open sources of information to identify precursors and patterns of terrorism. This is an original book, and the first major effort of the new counterterrorism center at the University of Southern Denmark.

Including my alternative perspective, as one other senior participant put it, “makes our job harder.” One reason I particularly like Nordic professionals is because of their integrity. There is a great deal of intelligence and total integrity in this book; it is an honor for me to have been included. I am not competent in the way the other authors are, and my regard for their pioneering is unlimited.

Also just published, very US centric but a really original study, is No More Secrets: Open Source Information and the Reshaping of U.S. Intelligence (Praeger Security International). I have provided a lengthy review at the Amazon page for that book.

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Review: Intelligence Analysis – Behavioral and Social Scientific Foundations

5 Star, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Information Operations, Intelligence (Government/Secret)
Amazon Page

Baruch Fischhoff and Cherie Chauvin (eds.)

5.0 out of 5 stars Insider/Academic/Psychology Overview, Avoids the Negatives,July 25, 2011

First off, this book is not being offered by Amazon but rather by third party sellers seeking to leverage public ignorance. The book is available for $70 instead of $130 at National Academies Press, where it is also available for free by the chapter–every chapter–which gladens my heart. That is how it should be, and earns the book a fifth star despite the rather narrow view offered by the insider/academic authors in the aggregate, all focusing on the psychology of intelligence analysis.

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Review: No More Secrets – Open Source Information and the Reshaping of U.S. Intelligence

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Best Practices in Management, Budget Process & Politics, Change & Innovation, Communications, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Country/Regional, Culture, Research, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Information Operations, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Public Administration, Security (Including Immigration)

Hamilton Bean

5.0 out of 5 stars Spectacular Integrative and Pioneering Work, July 27, 2011

This is a pioneering work that not only explains the true worth of open source intelligence, but also illuminates the institutional bias against it and the pathologies of a culture of secrecy. The use of primary data from interviews makes this an original work in every possible sense of the word. I strongly recommend the book to both professionals and to faculty seeking a provocative book for students.

The book opens with a Foreword from Senator Gary Hart, who cites Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's point that secrecy is used against the US public more often than it is used to withhold information from the alleged enemy. He also makes the observation that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the web occurred almost simultaneously (1990-1991). See Senator Hart's three most recent books, The Thunder and the Sunshine: Four Seasons in a Burnished Life; The Shield and the Cloak: The Security of the Commons, and my favorite The Minuteman: Returning to an Army of the People. The concept of an “intelligence minuteman” is at the foundation of the Open Source Intelligence movement, and highly relevant to this book by Dr. Hamilton Bean.

In his Preface Dr. Bean makes the point that his book is about institutional change and resistance, and the open source intelligence story is simply a vehicle for examining both the utility of his methods with respect to the study of communications and discourse, and the ebbs and flows of institutional change.

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Review: Global Public Policy – Governing Without Government?

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Environment (Solutions), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Future, Intelligence (Commercial), Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Stabilization & Reconstruction, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity
Amazon Page

Wolfgang Reinicke

5.0 out of 5 stars Pioneering Work, Missing Some Pieces,July 7, 2011

This is a pioneering work, easily a decade ahead of other world-class efforts, my favorite being that of (then) World Bank Vice President for Europe, J. F. Rischard, High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them. It has been largely over-looked, but should gain additional importance, along with the author's additional book, Critical Choices. The United Nations, Networks, and the Future of Global Governance, now that George Soros is sponsoring the Central European University (CEU), and within that university, the author Wolfgang Reinicke has been appointed the inaugural dean of CEU's School of Public Policy and International Affairs. In the context of the essay by George Soros, the first 57 pages of The Philanthropy of George Soros: Building Open Societies, and the now hardened disenchantment with the nation-state system for being ignorant, biased, and non-agile (these and other deficiencies are marvelously articulated by Professor Philip Allot of Cambridge in The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State, one can surmise that Dean Peinicke will seek to focus on integrationist endeavors that demand transparency and accountability for multiple stakeholders in return for stability and mutual gain.

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