All Reflections & Story Boards – Page 5

Reflections: Seven Steps to US Intelligence Reform

I was quite surprised to see multiple searches using the same language. It is an important question that I have been asking — and answering — since 1988 when I helped create the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity (today a mini-me of the larger mis-directed secret intelligence world).

My six challeges defined and published (with pre-publication clearance as usual) in 1994 have still not been met because we have not had any intelligence “leaders” willing to commit to intelligence with integrity.

I now believe that the DNI was a wrong turn. The next DNI should be charged by the next President with dismantling the DNI, restoring the DCI position, and executing a variety of straight-forward reforms that I have championed for a quarter century. A transformative intelligence reform process would shut down ODNI, restore the DCI, create an Open Source Agency (OSA), and elevate the National Intelligence Council (NIC) to the Executive Office of the President (EOP). Somewhere in there OMB, Congress, the media, and the public would receive public (open unclassified) ethical evidence-based decision-support on all threats, policies, and country counterparts, while creating Community Decision-Support Networks that implement the proven process of intelligence at the local, county, state, and regional issue management levels.

Seven Steps to US Intelligence Reform*

Continue reading “Reflections: how can the intelligence community remain relevant in the 21st century”

2014/02/112016/03/26

Reflections on the Ecuador Initiative — Open Source Everything Combined with Ethical Evidence-Based Decision-Support 1.1

#OSE Open Source Everything, All Reflections & Story Boards

Michel Bauwens, founder of the Peer to Peer (P2P) Foundation and one of my personal pioneer heroes, is deeply engaged in Ecuador with a Presidential initiative.

This endeavor could be world-changing, first in Ecuador, then across South America, and ultimately around the globe starting with the BRICS and the rest of the Southern Hemisphere.

I am deeply honored to have been invited to contribute a few thoughts.

BACKGROUND:

Ecuador Initiative @ Phi Beta Iota

FLOK Society Research Portal

Below is my primary graphic that speaks directly to the two things that are missing from the project — a comprehensive embrace of Open Source Everything (OSE); and a coherent approach to decision-support across all mission areas and at all levels. After the first graphic, below the line, are several of my long-standing intelligence renaissance graphics with a few words about their applicability to Ecuador Initiative, a Presidential endeavor.

As this graphic, building on the complex vision of the entire team, shows, there is a need for a larger construct that both blends together all that is being done in the relatively isolated domains, each with their own project manager, and that also serves as a service of common concern, doing research and providing ethical evidence-based decision-support to each of the project managers as well as all others.

The central precept, from my book THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth, & Trust (North Atlantic Books / Evolver Editions, 2012) is that one must embrace all of the opens together. They are a “package deal.” Hence this interpretation of the President's vision adds the essentials for doing open source information-sharing and sense-making across all boundaries.

In that context, it adds the needed function of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), the revolution I led prior to becoming enthusiastic about a complete liberation of the public from the industrial era elites that are corrupt and that are destroying our commonwealth.

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2014/02/032016/03/26

Reflections on the Future of Information Technology – An Open Letter

#OSE Open Source Everything, All Reflections & Story Boards

SHORTCUT: http://tinyurl.com/2014-Open-Letter

This started out as an a letter to the collective leadership of a very promising open source software company, took a side step toward Microsoft, and finally made the leap here as a general open reference.

Earth Intelligence Network, A Virginia Non-Profit (501c3) Corporation, is seeking endowed alliances that might wish to advance the craft of public intelligence in order to create a prosperous world at peace.

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Click on Image to Enlarge

For a quarter century I have been a proponent for intelligence reform – for a revolution in the I of IT that moves beyond the industrial era commoditization of humanity toward the information era actualization of humanity's full potential to create infinite wealth, a prosperous world at peace. Peter Drucker called for this (a focus on the I instead of the T) in Forbes ASAP on 28 August 1994.For the past decade I have been immersed in the possibilities of collective intelligence applied with integrity. I believe many paths are converging. Here to the side is the latest depiction of our larger vision for integrating education, intelligence (decision-support) and research.

This open letter outlines seven goals and seven actions bracketing my explicatory vision with graphics. I invite one and all to consider this. My email is at the end of this post. St.

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2014/01/292016/03/26

Reflections on Specific Intelligence Reforms (Including Alarm on NSA from 1994 Onwards)

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The US IC has spent 1.2 trillion dollars since 1992 — and failed to provide ethical evidence-based decision-support capable of influencing tens of trillions more. This waste has to be understood in the context of a leadership (both intelligence and political) focused moving money, not actually in the business of producing decision-support or making decisions in the public interest.no.

All of these documented advisories were published in the key journals of the time, and ignored.

What does it say when an intelligence community is incapable of doing intelligence on itself?

DOC (1 Page Table): Steele On Intelligence Cross-Walk Over Time

Extracts (quotes on NSA not in table) and Links Below the Line

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2014/01/222016/03/26

Reflections: Policy Makers and Social Science — Distant & Lacking Value-Added Decision-Support

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Carnegie and the Stimson Center are exploring the distant and largely dysfunctional relationship between policy makers and the social sciences. This is an important topic that could usefully be expanded to explore the similar distance between government and the other information tribes.*

Below are two seminal references in this area.

Carnegie Stimson National Security Programs Supporting Social Science in Academia

Carnegie Stimson Article As Published

Based on reading the two above references, I have three preliminary thoughts pending an invitation conference on this topic to take place 30-31 January (I am attending as an observer):

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2014/01/212016/03/26

Reflections on Intelligence Reform

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SHORT URL: http://tinyurl.com/2014-Reform

Security sector reform and advancement begins in the mind. In the 21st Century, raw information and tailored intelligence (decision support) are fundamental to progress at the strategic, operational, tactical, and technical levels.

If we are to properly address intelligence governance from a comparative and international perspective rooted in an appreciation for the rule of law – appreciating the purpose and obligations of government, intelligence, and the law, we must begin with definitions.

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2013/07/192016/03/26

Reflections on Tired Databases versus Wired Analytics + Jack Davis & Analytic Tradecraft RECAP

Advanced Cyber/IO, All Reflections & Story Boards

There are multiple analytic flaws with most source data, and particularly with any source data labeled in relation to terrorism. If Israelis have have touched the data in any way, shape, or form (especially including the software), it must be considered contaminated and severely suspect. While I have nothing critical to say about the application of Sentinel to flawed data, I do feel obliged to point out the sucking chest wounds that afflict most source data.

01 Terrorism is not a threat, it is a tactic. Defining every criminal or political incident in a pre-determined “hot-spot” as being “terrorism-related” is not analysis, it is sophmoric.

02 Databases are an important counterintelligence target. Who created the analytic model and source data parameters, who wrote every bit of code touching the data, who the source feeders and intermediaries are — all of this matters. Apart from data bases corrupted by elements of the US Government to their own ends, we have data bases and information technology systems so totally penetrated by enemy powers and special interests as to call into question the integrity and utility of at least 50% of all standing databases.

03 Incidents are what should be plotted, in context not only of time and space, but of all of the other pre-conditions of revolution that the US Government in particular refuses to contemplate because it would make it obvious that it has severe shortcomings in its intelligence function. Still-born babies and babies born deformed as so many have been in Fallujah, Iraq, are just as important to stability analytics as are incidents of direct violence against “authority” figures or forces.

Continue reading “Reflections on Tired Databases versus Wired Analytics + Jack Davis & Analytic Tradecraft RECAP”