Phi Beta Iota: We concur with Contributor John Steiner, who sends this direct message from Link TV for consideration by one and all. They have been added as both a Professional Site and a Righteous Site.
Dear Friend,
Sometimes in the life of an organization, there is a defining moment— one that validates everything you believe in and stand for.
For Link TV, the democratic uprising in the Middle East has been that moment. When the people of Tunisia and Egypt roared for democracy, we brought you more than 14 hours a day of unfiltered global news from Link TV’s Mosaic, Democracy Now! and Al Jazeera English.
Egypt: Protesters in Tahrir Square, Cairo, are asking citizens to take part in demonstrations on 11 February, for the “Day of Confrontation,” Al Arabiya reported. One news service reported tens of millions of text messages about the event. According to a report in the Indian Express, “organizers” want a “big push” on Friday that could include storming parliament and the state television station in Cairo.
Secrecy News reported Monday on strange new guidance from the Air Force Materiel Command declaring that Air Force employees and even their family members could be prosecuted under the Espionage Act for accessing the WikiLeaks web site. On Monday night that new guidance was abruptly withdrawn.
Lt. Col. Richard L. Johnson of Air Force Headquarters released this statement: read statement….
“[I]f a family member of an Air Force employee accesses WikiLeaks on a home computer, the family member may be subject to prosecution for espionage under U.S. Code Title 18 Section 793,” the legal guidance reads. “The Air Force member would have an obligation to safeguard the information under the general guidance to safeguard classified information.”
Phi Beta Iota: We do not make this stuff up. If SecDef wants an excuse to dismiss Air Force leadership down to the one-star level, this is it. This is utterly insane, and a clear demonstration of moral and intellectual and leadership vacuum that exists in the US Air Force.
In a major shift to reinvigorate the post-9/11 spy world inside the Central Intelligence Agency, Director Leon Panetta has decided to change how the agency's National Clandestine Service operates, potentially impacting up to half the CIA's workforce. The shift is part of Panetta's long-range “CIA 2015″ reorganization plan and should make the agency much more agile and quick to respond in the war on terror and other national security flare-ups.
Phi Beta Iota: This is not a shake-up. This is an abandonment of language skills and cultural knowledge as a foundation for effective clandestine operations, and a general acknowledgment that the clandestine service is merely in liaison business, and “one size fits all” since English is the common languages for both spies and air traffic controllers. A “real” clandestine service would have five classes of personnel in more or less equal measure:
Career Trainees 20%
Mid-Career US Citizen Non-Official Cover Hires 20%
Foreign Liaison Rotationals to Multinational Field Stations 20%
One-Time “It's Just Business” Contracts 20%
What CIA has today is way too many youngsters with no real foreign experience, and way too many annuitants (contractors) and old guys who will finally retire when the money dries up, as it is about to. CIA clandestine operations have no bench, no middle, and no strategy for the future, in part because CIA analytics are not serious, CIA multi-lingual processing at machine speed does not exist, and CIA leverage of global open sources and methods is both out-sourced and pedestrian. At the same time that our Embassies have become “bunkers,” our spies are increasingly uninformed, disconnected, and ineffective for lack of language, context, and leadership.
Self sufficiency appears to be a worthy goal, but it's now impossible if you want to actually get anything done.
All our productivity, leverage and insight comes from being part of a community, not apart from it.
The goal, I think, is to figure out how to become more dependent, not less.
Phi Beta Iota: It is very hard for cultures that define themselves by secrecy rather than accomplishments to accept this. The “eight tribes” of intelligence are the antithesis to unilateral ineffective secret intelligence. This is about complexity, integrity of feedback loops, and harnessing the collective intelligence of the Whole Earth. Autarky [self-sufficiency] is an oxymoron–so is “central” intelligence.
Below are three separate contributions: Spinney on Sprey; Sprey on Boeing; and Seattle Times on Boeing.
CHUCK SPINNEY SOUNDS OFF
President Obama says that restoring America’s competitiveness is one of his top priorities. Yet under his watch, deindustrialization, financialization, and globalization continue without interruption. Many advocates of defense spending argue that spinoffs from the Pentagon's R&D and high tech engineering practices are keys to reinvigorating America’s manufacturing economy. For whatever reasons, Mr. Obama shows no intention of reining in defense spending by anything more than a cosmetic amount, even though the defense budget is higher now that at any time since the end of WWII (after removing the cumulative effect of 60 years of inflation), and despite the fact that the United States is spending about as much on defense as the rest of the world combined.
With colleagues Pete Lewis, Tony Deifell, Kevin Anderson, Andrew Haeg, and Scott Rosenberg, I’m in a two week conversation about the future of journalism on the WELL. The WELL is the seminal online community; this conversation is in the Inkwell forums, where Bruce Sterling and I have our annual state of the world conversation. Inkwell usually has conversations with authors, but for this conversation we’re trying a panel format.
Here’s my latest contribution to the conversation:
