In 2005, the U.S. Army issued a new field manual on the military use of dogs, which it said were being “employed in dynamic ways never before imagined.” The field manual was approved for public release and marked for unlimited distribution. See FM 3-19.17, “Military Working Dogs” (pdf), 6 July 2005.
But in May 2011, the same Army manual on military working dogs (redesignated as ATTP 3-39.34) was updated, and this time its distribution has been limited to DoD and DoD contractors only. Public access to the document is barred. At the same time, copies of the unrestricted 2005 edition have been removed from Army websites. (A copy is still available through the Federation of American Scientists web site.)
The net loss of public access to information in this case illustrates a new trend that is at odds with the Obama Administration's declared policy. Although the President promised to create “an unprecedented level of openness in Government,” in practice new barriers to access to unclassified information continue to arise.
Anyone who believes we are winning the War on Terror doesn't understand the goals of AQ. They wanted us to be afraid and to spend our money, both of which the government is doing in spades…..one really has to ask, then, who is winning?
By Richard Engel, NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent
NEW YORK – As a foreign correspondent for NBC News, I haven’t spent much time in the United States during the last decade. I return only occasionally to check in with colleagues, visit family, or, this last time, to research a documentary for MSNBC.
The documentary, still in the works, is about the Global War on Terrorism, and what it has done to our military, economy and American society in general. Perhaps because the subject was on my mind, I found a recent travel experience especially meaningful.
Through my work I travel to some of the busiest airports in high-risk areas. Just this year I have been in Egypt, Tunisia, Iran, Bahrain, Libya, France, Italy and many other countries. But I have yet to feel so angry, so embarrassed or so scrutinized as I did going through airport security for a flight from Los Angeles International Airport to New York’s JFK while visiting home.
. . . . .
I’ve watched American troops fight, and sometimes die, to drive the Taliban and al-Qaida from Afghanistan, and to secure free elections in Iraq. They have been fighting for other people to be free. I was horrified to see that despite their sacrifices we’d let ourselves become a nation that appears to be driven by fear.
. . . . .
But at the airport, watching a 7-year-old girl go through a full body scan in public – just so she could fly out of the city of Los Angeles – made me wonder how much we have lost.
Phi Beta Iota: The Founding Fathers do not approve….
Thomas Jefferson:A Nation’s best defense is an educated citizenry.
Thomas Jefferson:Educate and inform the whole mass of the people… They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.
James Madison:Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
This post is highlighting content areas for The Future of Facebook project, a six-part video series exploring the impacts of social networking technologies on our lives and business.
Social networks are a tool for activism and civic engagement, as well as a means of control, manipulation, and surveillance.
What is the role Facebook will play in local and global political processes?
As futurist Chris Arkenberg put it, “Facebook really represents a battleground for ideas. It’s becoming an area for propaganda, for influence, for memetics, for advertising, for marketing. It is like any other public square: highly diverse and opinionated, potentially volatile and easily influenced by third parties.”
In an aspirational future scenario, we can imagine Facebook as a place that would encourage political transparency as well as civic engagement.
Collective intelligence is not an abstraction. It is a real-world emergent phenomenon — a phenomenon that ranges from collective stupidity to collective brilliance. It arises from interactions among entities in shared situations. Collective intelligence — of any quality — can just happen, or it can be consciously enhanced or undermined. The diversity of the entities involved and the free flow (and absorption and consideration) of relevant information among them can facilitate higher levels of collective intelligence. But regardless of what is happening, some level of collective intelligence is always present wherever interacting entities share fate in shared circumstances.
Many people think collective intelligence only applies to groups of people or, perhaps also, to groups of primates and social insects. But we as individuals are actually intelligent collectives. One aspect of this can be seen when a therapist helps a patients sort out different “voices” inside them — and then has those voices talk to each other — sometimes with the patient physically moving to different chairs assigned to each voice. In therapy, these bickering “voices” are helped to come up with some coherent decisions or more conscious relationships among themselves that make the patient more functional and feel more whole. As it gets its act together, this little internal community acting as one person usually seems to work quite well!
Rarely do the post-industrial stars align so well for an entrepreneurial enterprise hellbent on market revolution. Between the ongoing digitalization, consumerization, and personalization of health care delivery, Google was supremely well-positioned to have as big an innovative impact on medical informatics as it's had on mass media. Admittedly, Google Health's original conception and execution as a ‘personal health records' portal wasn't particularly sexy or exciting. But then, that's what many naysayers had said about search and maps. Google had the skills and resources to iterate its way greater impact. Everyone understood that organizing the world's health care information was a worthy business ambition squarely in Google's innovation sweet spot.
The market reality proved sour. Nothing much happened. Barely three years after the service launched, Google announced its demise. Health officially dies in January; all whimper, no bang. By virtually every metric that matters, it's been a stunning disappointment. The service may not have lost Google much money but, relative to opportunities and expectations, Google Health transformed nothing. No paradigms were nicked or even nudged. Genuinely talented people with top management support and technological brilliance don't even have the satisfaction of a successful failure. (Google Wave, for example, may have been a market failure but even its critics acknowledged its innovation chops.) One of the world's most innovative companies didn't just fail to innovate as a business, it dramatically underachieved even as a technical innovator in one of the world's biggest, most dynamic, and most important industries. What happened?
Phi Beta Iota: Hugely important observations applicable to Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, etcetera. They are all in the Industrial Era pattern of fringe innovation and doing the wrong things righter, confusing money with insight. Stephen E. Arnold has been saying similar things in more depth (see his Google Trilogy) for years. No large organization with deep human and capital resources appears ready to create the World Brain & Global Game.
From a Human Intelligence perspective, below is a very strong signal that the Arab Spring and its “Days of Rage” are spreading; even well-managed countries such as Malaysia (and one speculates, badly-managed ones like the USA) appear to be in line for Electoral Reform protests and perhaps Open Source Insurgency.
Demonstrators march in defiance of ban, call for electoral reform
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Police fired repeated rounds of tear gas and detained more than 1,600 people in the capital on Saturday as thousands of activists evaded roadblocks and barbed wire to hold a street protest against Prime Minister Najib Razak's government.
Phi Beta Iota: All governments are in the process of collapse as credible sole focal points for governance. None are gearing up for the inevitable emergence of bio-regional hybrid governance networks based on accountability, information-sharing, transparency, and a common interest in sustainable peace and prosperity.
A former Microsoft exec, who has experienced C-level meetings with CEO Steve Ballmer, said he doesn't think Microsoft would have bought Skype to help Facebook compete with Google. “Steve is one of the smartest people you'll meet, processing-power smart,” he said. “But he's not a complex multivariate thinker, meaning he doesn't think 15 chess moves out. So that's why I don't think anything more complex went into the decision, other than they thought the company would make a strong asset.”
