Archives – Page 142 – Public Intelligence Blog

While the automated search produces the relevant results, Jack Davis is the Sherman Kent of our time and deserves a cleaner quicker result. Here is the human in the loop distillation of this great man's contributions as they appear on this web site and the two web sites in Sweden where all our stuff is safely preserved.

Who’s Who in Public Intelligence: Jack Davis

Review: Improving CIA Analytic Performance–Four Papers by Jack Davis

2003 Davis (US) Analytic Paradoxes: Can Open Source Intelligence Help?

1997 Davis A Compendium of Analytic Tradecraft Notes

Search: jack davis and his collected memoranda o

Search: osint cycle

Journal: Opinion on the Failure of “The System”

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Analysis

Review: Assessing the Tradecraft of Intelligence Analysis

Review: Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism That Changed the World

Review: The Landscape of History–How Historians Map the Past (Paperback)

Review: Strategic Intelligence–Windows into a Secret World

2000 PRIMER on Open Sources & Methods

Review: Thinking in Time–The Uses of History for Decision-Makers

1998 Open Source Intelligence: Private Sector Capabiltiies to Support DoD Policy, Acquisition, and Operations

Review: Strategic intelligence for American world policy (Unknown Binding)

2010/11/202010/11/20

Reference: Social Media for Business 101

About the Idea, Articles & Chapters, Collaboration Zones, IO Mapping, IO Multinational, IO Sense-Making, IO Technologies, Mobile, Policies, Real Time, Threats, Topics (All Other)

The New York Times November 17, 2010

A Business Creator Sees Big Returns From Social Media

By DARREN DAHL

Asked to name the world’s wealthiest entrepreneurs, few people would think of Eric Lefkofsky, who is 40 and keeps a deliberately low profile in his hometown of Chicago. But Mr. Lefkofsky has an impressive entrepreneurial track record, one that recently led Forbes to estimate his wealth at $750 million.

The first business Mr. Lefkofsky started, StarBelly, made tools for building Web sites; he sold it in 2000 for $240 million. He then started two companies that have since gone public — InnerWorkings, which provides printing capabilities over the Web, and Echo Global Logistics, a transportation and logistics outsourcing business he founded with a law school friend, Brad Keywell. He also founded MediaBank, which helps companies buy advertising. In each case, Mr. Lefkofsky used the power of technology and the Internet to update an industry.

And then came Groupon, the social-coupon Web site that he bankrolled and started in 2008 with Andrew Mason — a venture that has been called the fastest-growing company ever. Groupon offers its followers a deal-of-the-day coupon, sponsored by a local business, that the followers are encouraged to share with their social networks. The local business gets customers, and Groupon takes a share of the coupon proceeds — a business model that has led to talk that Groupon, still privately owned, could be worth as much as $3 billion. More recently, Mr. Lefkofsky and Mr. Keywell started an investment fund with $100 million of their earnings. It’s called Lightbank, and it invests only in early-stage technology companies that are built around social media. The following is a condensed version of a recent conversation with Mr. Lefkofsky.

Read full article at The New York Times…

Continue reading “Reference: Social Media for Business 101”

2010/11/162013/02/09

Reference: Our Choice–Changing the Game

About the Idea, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, IO Sense-Making, Officers Call, Policies, Real Time, Threats, Topics (All Other)

Today, with permission, I present Tom Atlee's newest vision, “Are We Ready to Change the Game Yet?,” and at the end, a link to his 2000 audio interview with Jim Rough, pioneer of Citizen Wisdom Councils and author of Society's Breakthrough.

ARE WE READY TO CHANGE THE GAME YET?

by Tom Atlee

Some people say Gandhi was about nonviolence. And he was.

But he is significant for something else that I believe is far more important:

He changed the game.

With no one's permission, he reconfigured the playing field of colonialism to a higher Game in which everything the British did in their smaller, narrower game backfired on them. Prisons, guns, threats and bureaucracies of control not only ceased to work like they used to, but actually generated more power for Gandhi's world-changing Game.

Gandhi's Game involved, in his words, “experiments in Truth” — a search for Truth, a bigger Truth, a common inclusive Truth, a win-win Truth in every situation. The British — and even many of Gandhi's compatriots — were not aligned to that Truth. They wanted victory, control, and righteousness. These things trapped them in their smaller game until, one by one, and sometimes wholesale, Gandhi's commitment to Truth won their hearts and minds — and Shift happened.

Unfortunately he failed to create adequate social institutions that embodied, sustained, and empowered the Search for Truth by the whole of society. He depended on individuals seeing the light and being transformed. The miracle of his work is that so many people did transform — and continue to transform even to this day — inspired by his words, his life, his work. But in the end, what he left was an inspiring possibility, not an India or a world that was united, peaceful, just and sustainable.

Today's world calls us, with increasing intensity, not just to carry on Gandhi's work, but to carry it further. It isn't a matter of doing nonviolence as he and Martin Luther King, Jr., did it. It is a matter of changing the game.

Which brings me to the current state of U.S. politics and governance. These games are desperately in need of changing. Several recent innovations offer us the possibility to actually accomplish that and the timing is ripe.

Continue reading “Reference: Our Choice–Changing the Game”

2010/11/122010/11/12

Worth a Look: Momentum Crowdsourcing for Open Source Intelligence

About the Idea, Worth A Look

MOMENTUM: REAL OPEN SOURCE INTELLIGENCE

Here's a short essay on a new software tool my team built called Momentum. It does something pretty unusual and worthy of note. It uses crowdsourcing (by leveraging the work of 500 million users on global social networks) to make open source intelligence gathering easy.*

___________________

Here are some real life events: A YouTube video sparks massive ethnic riots in China. 3 Colombians start a Facebook group that puts 5 million protesters on the streets. The online manifesto of a disturbed man holding hostages at a US corporation. The list of keywords that China's great firewall blocks. A YouTube video showing Iranian militia actually shooting protesters. The list goes on and on.

These are the kinds of events that should be detected by OSINT analysts. However, they aren't detecting them. Why not? The tools they are using don't make finding this information easy.

Here's why. A major problem with the tools that automate open source intelligence gathering is that relevance, serendipity (the propensity of making fortunate discoveries while looking for something else), and timeliness (the ability to find content that matters quickly) are considered tradeoffs. You can't focus on relevance without losing serendipity and you can't focus on serendipity without losing timeliness.

For example:

I am gathering open source intelligence on Iran using the Web. But I run into the following problems with the tools I normally use:

Continue reading “Worth a Look: Momentum Crowdsourcing for Open Source Intelligence”

2010/11/122011/10/22

Reference: Changing the Game

About the Idea, Analysis, Augmented Reality, Budgets & Funding, Collaboration Zones, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Ethics, Geospatial, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process, Mobile, Officers Call, Open Government, Policies, Policy, Real Time, Reform, Threats, Tools

ARE WE READY TO CHANGE THE GAME YET?

by Tom Atlee

Some people say Gandhi was about nonviolence. And he was.

But he is significant for something else that I believe is far more important:

He changed the game.

Continue reading “Reference: Changing the Game”

2010/11/062010/11/06

Journal: Human Intelligence (HUMINT) Successes

08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 10 Transnational Crime, Government, HUMINT, IO Multinational, IO Secrets, IO Sense-Making, Law Enforcement, Military, Peace Intelligence

Marcus-Aurelius-150x150 — Marcus Aurelius Recommends

(1) If true, probably a good idea.

(2) Appears that indiscretions abound.

Miami Herald November 6, 2010

Spy Agencies Use Ex-Captives To Infiltrate Al Qaeda

By Paisley Dodds, Associated Press

LONDON — Months after he was released from Guantánamo Bay, Abdul Rahman was back in the company of terrorist leaders along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. But he was a double agent, providing Taliban and al Qaeda secrets to Pakistani intelligence, which then shared the tips with Western counterparts.

The ruse cost him his life, according to a former Pakistani military intelligence official, Mahmood Shah. The Taliban began to suspect him, and after multiple interrogations executed him.

The case of Rahman, which Shah recounted to The Associated Press, falls in line with a key aspect of the fight against terror — Western intelligence agencies, with help from Islamic allies, are placing moles and informants inside al Qaeda and the Taliban. The program seems to be bearing fruit, even as many infiltrators like Rahman are discovered and killed.

It was a tip from an al Qaeda militant-turned-informant that led international authorities to find explosives hidden in printer cartridges from Yemen to the United States a week ago, Yemeni security officials say. Officials say the explosives could have caused a blast as deadly as the Lockerbie bombing that killed 270 people.

Read rest of article….

Phi Beta Iota: Human Intelligence (HUMINT) done right, in the context of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) done right, is the cheapest, fastest, and most effective means of creating intelligence (decision-support) at all levels from strategic to tactical. After ten years of letting CIA get away with doing both badly, and ten years of the Pentagon's recovering from treating its HUMINT and CI people like shit, it appears that adults are finally back in charge. We continue to under-budget for operational HUMINT and OSINT, and we continue to grossly over-spend on contractor vapor-ware for technical capabilities that simply do not deliver 96% of what what we need, but that is a separate issue. It is good to see HUMINT (not OSINT) making some progress. However, the continued absence of a strategic analytic model and honest governance means that these capabilities are not being focused on transnational crime or on white collar crime, where the most significant gains in the public interest are to be achieved.