Month: November 2011

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Google Effect: Signs of Intelligence in the UK

Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government
Who? Mini-Me?

‘Google Effect' Raised Bar for Spies to ‘Produce Secret Intelligence': Ex-UK Intelligence Chief

The rise of the web and Google means that spies in the UK need to work really hard to produce genuinely secret intelligence, former director of the country's intelligence agency has said.

Former chief of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) Sir David Pepper pointed out that “the Google effect” of so much information being readily available online had “very substantially” raised the “threshold for producing intelligence” for MI5, MI6 and GCHQ.

“Nobody wants the easy stuff anymore and there is no point spending effort and money collecting it,” the Telegraph quoted Sir David, as saying.

“Many of the sort of things for which (officials) once would have turned to the intelligence agencies are now readily available to them online,” he added.

Sir David said that with the help of technologies like Google Maps and Streeview anyone could now see photographic detail of far away countries, which hitherto would have been available only through secret and highly sophisticated national satellites.

“Intelligence producers have had to become very sensitive to this phenomenon and very careful not to put effort into producing intelligence that purports to be secret which is in fact not secret at all,” he added.

Read full article.

Tip of the Hat to AFIO.

Phi Beta Iota: Evidently the British have not yet realized that intelligence is about decision-support outputs rather than secret inputs, but at least they have a clue with respect to open sources.  In another related article, AFIO points to Congress asking the US secret intelligence community to focus on domestic targets–marijuana growing on federal lands is evidently a major threat to national security, along with the majority of the US population that supports its legalization.  Evidently corruption and idiocy in Congress complement each other.  Meanwhile, CIA–with the explicit abdication of moral or intellectual leadership from the DNI– fights the Open Source Agency with every dirty trick it can muster including outright lies to Congress and the media.  All this means is that the US Government will remain very expensively stupid, while other countries advance the M4IS aspect of the craft of intelligence.

See Also:

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Jameson Quinn – Reflections on Voting Alternatives

Uncategorized
Jameson Quinn

Rob R: Thanks for including me on this mail. I know our opinions differ – even, sometimes, to the point where we are forced to doubt each others' good faith. Yet I know that we have a common enemy in plurality voting.

Robert S: I presume you're involved with the “politics and electoral reform” working group of occupy wall street (or some other “occupy” group?). I'm sorry, reading back through this thread, it's hard to tell exactly what your role is. But as far as I can tell, the intent here is to try to find some “consensus language” about voting reform that the various sides can all agree with.

I very much sympathize with this goal. I myself have tried to promote something similar, and the resulting “consensus statement” is posted here and here (same statement, different groups of signatures; over 15 signatures ove-rall, and to my knowledge ALL of those signers have advanced degrees and/or years of experience with the mathematical analysis of voting systems).

The basic thrust of that statement is:

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Who’s Who in Public Intelligence: Jameson Quinn

Alpha Q-U, Public Intelligence
Jameson Quinn

Jameson Quinn has been interested in election theory for over ten years. He has worked as a programmer and as a Guatemalan public school principal and teacher. He has served as statistical analyst for an independent survey of the quality of Guatemalan voter rolls, and initiated the creation of the consensus Declaration of Electoral Reform Advocates. He grew up in California, studied applied math and cognitive science in Massachusetts and Ohio, and lives in Guatemala.

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John Robb: Radical Energy Innovation Here Now

05 Energy, Blog Wisdom
John Robb

RC ENERGY TIDBIT: Leveraging the Earth for Heat/Cooling

Resilient energy leverages the terrain.

Resilient guerrillas/warriors leverage the terrain they are fighting on to the max.  In our case, we want:

  • plentiful, low cost (hyper efficient) energy that
  • uses a process that's inexpensive to maintain and is
  • under our control (not subject global supply chain factors and limited to locally available labor).

The way to do that is through the installation of geo-exchange systems.  These systems run water through plastic pipes buried in the ground.  Since the ground (below six feet or so) remains at a constant temperature (50-65 degrees) year round (it's a heat sink), this circulation process will heat or cool water to the ground's temperature.  This allows heat pumps that run 2-3 times more efficiently and cooling that is dirt cheap.  For example:

Here's a note from Australia on a recently built hospital. Lithgow hospital uses 1/3 less energy as any other hospital in the state and it's heating/cooling system requires less maintenance.  It also eliminates noise and the risk of Legionnaires disease (an added bonus).

See Also from John Robb:

“Reinventing Fire maps pathways for running a 158%-bigger U.S. economy in 2050 but needing no oil, no coal, and no nuclear energy.”

Virtual power plant market set to zoom.

International Academy of Astronautics says we need to start building an orbital solar power system.