The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.
The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”
The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.
Recorded Future strips from web pages the people, places and activities they mention. The company examines when and where these events happened (“spatial and temporal analysis”) and the tone of the document (“sentiment analysis”). Then it applies some artificial-intelligence algorithms to tease out connections between the players. Recorded Future maintains an index with more than 100 million events, hosted on Amazon.com servers. The analysis, however, is on the living web.
Phi Beta Iota: Both CIA and Google (as well as DoD/USDI) are treating OSINT as a technical processing problem. They will fail for lack of focus on human intelligence–all humans, all minds, all the time; and for lack of respect of the four quadrants cubed (knowledge, new craft, spivak). When they can overcome the web of fragmented knowledge, and get a grip on all information in all languages all the time (the information cube), we will be impressed. Right now, Google is nowhere near getting a grip on everything digital, let alone analog or unpublished.
India: Minister of State for Defense M. M. Pallam Raju on 7 July said India is concerned about China's plans to build a rail link with Pakistan through the Karakoram mountain range, The Times of India reported. He said India is planning to take countermeasures against the proposed link.
Comment: This is one of four strategically significant rail projects in Asia. All are important in the UN master plan for Asian railroads, but several stand out.
The first is the Chinese project to build a railroad line in Afghanistan that runs southward from the Oxus River to China's Aynak Copper Mine in Logar Province. This is one of the largest, if not the largest, copper deposit in the world. Eventually it could become the leading edge of mineral extraction projects that could transform Afghanistan a generation from now, if security conditions permit.
The second project is the Iranian railroad to Herat, in western Afghanistan. This is moving ahead slowly, but follows a hard road already built by the Iranians. It will tie relatively quiet Herat and western Afghanistan to the economic market area of Mashhad, Iran's second largest city, when completed.
The third rail project with strategic significance is in North Korea, which has two sub-projects that can complete the link of Europe by rail to Japan. Completion of these long delayed spurs depend on whether whoever runs anything in North Korea ever gets a sound grip on their own economic best interests and permit upgrades to the Chinese and to the Russian spurs that run across the Demilitarized Zone and link to the South Korean rail systems that terminate at Pusan. A ferry ride across the Tsushima Strait links to Japan railroads and Tokyo. London to Tokyo by rail is in sight, if the North Koreans would only decide to become prosperous.
The latest project is that announced for Pakistan. In the 1971 general war with India, only Chinese truck convoys through the Karakoram Mountains via the Khunjerab Pass kept Pakistan in the war for the two weeks it actually fought before suing for peace and losing East Pakistan.
The Khunjerab Pass is the highest elevation paved international border at 15,400 ft above sea level. The railroad would presumably follow the Karakoram Highway, which is the highest paved road in the world.
A rail link through those mountains and that pass would link Xinjiang, China, to Karachi and Gwadar – the Chinese built port in southwestern Pakistan on the Indian Ocean — via the Pakistani rail system. The throughput capacity would be exponentially larger than that achievable by truck convoys.
This railroad will create a new market system. No wonder India is concerned, economically and militarily. Pakistan really would become an extension of the new Chinese economic empire. All China needs to do is to complete railroads through Burma and link the Afghanistan line to Iran and it will have an Asian rail empire, within a generation, all the way to the English Channel without using the Trans-Siberian.
Phi Beta Iota: This is the kind of strategic analysis rooted in solid intellect that should characterize the entire US Intelligence Community, not one lone individual. Three big things appear to be looming on the horizon: free cellular around the planet, monetizing the transactions instead of the connections; low-cost rail (and eventually the Buckminster Fuller electrical grid) girding the globe; and finally, the up-ending of capitalism to focus on the needs–and wealth-creating capabilities–of the five billion poor. No one in Washington, London, Paris, Bonn, or Toyko–or even New Delhi and Jakarta where they have the most to gain–is thinking about this. That is a crime against humanity, a moral and intellectual atrocity so horrendous as to call into question the legitimacy of every government.
The alleged Russian spy ring is a pleasant summer distraction (Anna Chapman — call your agent!) and a wonderful opportunity to use the phrase femme fatale. But if you want to ponder a 21st-century intelligence puzzle this July 4 weekend, turn your attention to cyber-espionage — where our adversaries can steal in a few seconds what it took an old-fashioned spy network years to collect.
First, though, let's think about what the Russian “illegals” were up to in their suburban spy nests. U.S. intelligence officials think it's partly that the Russians just love running illegal networks. This has been part of their tradecraft since the 1920s, and it enabled many of their most brilliant operations, from Rudolf Abel to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The FBI finds it hard to break its cultural habits, and so does Russia's intelligence service, the SVR.
The American sources in the attached report of the New York Times blast Turkey, essentially because it refuses to be a US lackey. Even the report’s title drips with contempt and reflects a myopia that is typical of the ego centric view of the perquisites of empire held by the American foreign policy establishment, including the mainstream media. The report's wishy-washy “on the one hand this, on the other hand that” style feeds this overall impression.
Any rational observer of Turkey knows that big things are happening in that country and its part of the world.
Turkey has a large growing economy, is populated by more than 70 million hard working, industrious, increasingly well educated people. It sits on an ocean of fresh water in a parched area of the world — Israel, Iraq, and Syria especially want access to water Turkey controls. Turkey does not even use all its arable land, yet it is a major food exporter in a region of food importers, and local meats, vegetables, grains, and fruits are of the highest quality. The country is metamorphosing into a energy pipeline crossroads, and the Bosporus is the most heavily traveled waterway in the world.
Turkey is a secular democracy, and although many, no doubt a majority of its people are religious, there is very little religious fundamentalism, certainly less proportionally than is evident in either Israel, Iran, or the United States. By an large Turkey’s historic traditions of religious tolerance seem intact — I was recently surprised to learn that there is still a substantial Jewish community in Istanbul that speaks a dialect of 15th Century Spanish at home and Turkish in professional life (a relic from the time when the Ottoman Empire gave sanctuary the Jews in Spain who were persecuted by the Inquisition). I met a member of this community, a prosperous businessman with a magnificent yacht, and he impressed as being Turkish through and through. Interestingly, he told me he was pursuing an offer dual citizenship from Spain (sort of a right of return being instituted by Spain) but had no interest in accepting his automatic offer of citizenship by Israel.
Regardless of whether Turkey eventually enters the EU, it is a country that is moving and being sucked into a regional vacuum left by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Part of this movement is caused by policy, but part of it is caused by the impulse of unpredictable events.
The Turks, to their credit are trying to make the best of this by forging a regional good neighbor policy with all their neighbors, and until recently, this included Israel. To this end, the Turks have, among other things, opened the border for visa free movement between Turkey and Syria, tried to broker a peace deal with the Syrians and Israelis (which the actions of the Israelis scuppered), made overtures of friendship to Armenia, been active in the Black Sea Initiative (basically an effort to protect the environment and delineate the rights and responsibilities of the states bordering on the Black Sea), made commercial overtures toward Iraq and Iran, and most recently, in partnership with Brazil, launched an innovative initiative to defuse the Iranian nuclear problem (which the Obama Administration is petulantly trying to scupper). Meanwhile the Turkish government has been trying to reduce tensions with its own Kurdish minority in eastern Anatolia. While this is a serious problem (and I don’t pretend to understand it), Kurdish separatism and outside agitation by Kurdish insurgents based in Iraq (with some indirect Israeli and American support) and Iran, as well as a history of heavy-handed policies to limit the Kurdish autonomy, all contribute to it. On the other hand, it is also important to acknowledge the fact that Kurds have every right to participate in the Turkish economy and culture as individuals, should they choose to exercise it. And many have done so. One finds Kurds living throughout Turkey, in harmony with their neighbors, working and living prosperously.
Interpreting Turkey’s actions negatively through the lens of America’s imperial pretensions, together with our knee-jerk support of every outrage perpetrated by Israel, is implicit in the statements by the American sources in this report. This attitude is a prescription for making trouble with a proud and independent people whose most recent actions have been focused on a policy of promoting regional comity.
Oh, and one other point — Turks are among the most gracious and welcoming people I have ever met, but push a Turk into a corner, where he perceives he is being treated unfairly and has no face saving exit, and you will have a real problem on your hands.
ANKARA, Turkey — For decades, Turkey was one of the United States’ most pliable allies, a strategic border state on the edge of the Middle East that reliably followed American policy. But recently, it has asserted a new approach in the region, its words and methods as likely to provoke Washington as to advance its own interests.
The change in Turkey’s policy burst into public view last week, after the deadly Israeli commando raid on a Turkish flotilla, which nearly severed relations with Israel, Turkey’s longtime ally. Just a month ago, Turkey infuriated the United States when it announced that along with Brazil, it had struck a deal with Iran to ease a nuclear standoff, and on Tuesday it warmly welcomed Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the Russian prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin, at a regional security summit meeting in Istanbul.
Turkey’s shifting foreign policy is making its prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a hero to the Arab world, and is openly challenging the way the United States manages its two most pressing issues in the region, Iran’s nuclear program and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Turkey is seen increasingly in Washington as “running around the region doing things that are at cross-purposes to what the big powers in the region want,” said Steven A. Cook, a scholar with the Council on Foreign Relations. The question being asked, he said, is “How do we keep the Turks in their lane?”
In my last blaster (here), I raised a question of whether the Israelis were trying to hijack the Green Lobby or whether they were ready for the rubber room. This was made in response to a report by Jonathan Cook that contended Israel was greenwashing war on terror. It turns out that I may have phrased this question in naive, simplistic terms, if my good friend Pierre Sprey (a justifiably well known weapons analyst, mathematician, and recording entrepreneur) is correct, Israel's motives for trying to hijack the Green Lobby can be viewed in a larger, longer range context. Below is his most interesting analysis of Israel's motives for greenwashing the war on terror: Chuck
I totally agree that the currently faddish alternate energy sources are ludicrously uneconomical and, for the most part, environmentally harmful. The only alternate source that could almost completely supplant oil and that actually makes economic and environmental sense, natural gas, is currently among the most unfashionable.
Nevertheless, there's an important larger perspective to Israel's dead serious push to raise huge amounts of capital (guess where?) to produce non-oil based energy from trendy green sources in large enough quantities to reduce worldwide oil demand significantly.
That perspective is simple: unbeknownst to most, the absolute highest priority objective of Israeli foreign policy, from 1949 to today, has been to break the Seven Sisters oil cartel's stranglehold on world oil production in order to collapse the world price of oil. From Israel's point of view, that's a perfectly rational strategic objective–and, almost certainly, the only Israeli objective I know of that would be a major benefit to the world.
CMKM Diamonds was used by the US government as part of a covert sting operation – unbeknown to shareholders – to apprehend criminals for their offences. However, instead of prosecuting most of them, restitution deals were cut. CMKM was registered as a publicly traded diamond and gold mining company. By 2005, concrete evidence detailing fraud within the company emerged. CMKM sold hundreds of billions of unregistered shares (naked short selling) to third parties. One official estimate cites two trillion phantom shares and 40,000 shareholders as being involved. Eventually, the US Securities and Exchange Commission moved to delist CMKM stock, whose value never exceeded one penny per share. After several administrative proceedings, CMKM Diamonds stock was ultimately deregistered in October 2005. The legal status of a meeting held in Las Vegas and chaired by Robert A. Maheu is being questioned. In exchange for a US Government promise of no prosecution for phantom share sales in CMKM Diamonds, brokers, dealers, market makers and hedge fund managers promised to pay negotiated amounts to a frozen trust for disbursal at a later time. What happened to these trust monies is not clear. Robert A. Maheu was heart-attacked out in Las Vegas on Monday 4th August 2008, and died aged 90. The Central District of California Court document (08.01.10 – Case Number CV10-00031-JVS [MLGX]) can be viewed heere. Deep background here (31.03.10), here (02.03.12), here (29.01.10) and here (09.01.10). And more about Bivens Actions (Constitutional Torts) can be found here.
