From the Internet — quick reference list of actions/characteristics used to categorize people as potential terrorists. Note that affiliation with Islam is not included (at least I don't see it), while the 19 9/11 attackers were Muslim Arabs, as were the COLE attackers
EXTRACT: Departing more and more from rational depictions of truly suspicious activity, the criteria listed in law enforcement reports as indicating criminal or terrorist activity have become so expansive as to include many ubiquitous, everyday activities.
Phi Beta Iota: This is a classic example of trying to micro-manage from the top in an environment of such increasing complexity and constant change as to be completely dysfunctional at great expense.
Sooner than you thought? I would also suggest that Karzai is on shaky
ground unless he figures out a way to get out of his Parliament
crisis…..the Pashtu do not go for technology the way the Hazara and
Tajiks do……
Thousands of protesters on Thursday took to the streets of Yemen, one of the Middle East’s most impoverished countries, and secular and Islamist Egyptian opposition leaders vowed to join large protests expected Friday as calls for change rang across the Arab world.
and also this….at least one country understands the impact of the Internet on mobilizing
the masses….
As Egyptians plan for massive protests Friday, the government shuts down the internet.
An Egyptian woman shouts as she demonstrates outside the Lawyers' Syndicate in Cairo on January 27, 2011. (Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images)
Phi Beta Iota: From 1989 with the publication of General Al Gray's “Global Intelligence Challenges for the 1990's,” and then 1992, with the publication of “E3i: Ethics, Ecology, & Evolution,” is has been known that “open everything” was the single sustainable path to a prosperous world at peace. In 1995, in 1998, and again and again over the years the case has been made for an Open Source Agency (as recommended on pages 23 and 423 of the 9-11 Commission Report) able to achieve the Open Source “Tri-Fecta” of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS), and Open Spectrum (OpenBTS ++). CORRUPTION of intellect and politics, plain and simple, has been the constant obstacle. It is not too late for the USA to “turn on a DIME” (that's a pun for War College graduates) and get cracking and implement the four core initiatives to stabilize the world:
1) Electoral Reform in the USA to settle the USA by 2012
2) Open Source Agency as planned by Rob Simmons, Robert Steele, and Joe Markowitz with help from retired OMB officials and advance approval from serving OMB officials contingent solely on ONE Cabinet secretary asking for it (State with DoD non-reimbursable funding)
3) Undersecretary of State for Democracy, Ambassador Mark Palmer being the obvious choice, with two Assistant Secretaries, one to deal with the dictators that accept the six year exit plan, one for the other others who do not (and are immediately cut off from all assistance).
4) Undersecretary of Defense for Civil Affairs and Cyber-Collaboration, able to simultaneously make real the redirection of resources toward Operations Other Than War (OOTW) and unscrew the mess being made within communications, intelligence, and information operations by four star generals and their lesser followers, all without a clue. They mean well, but they are both timid and ignorant.
Egypt: Update. Bedouin protesters in Egypt fired two rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) at a police station in the Sinai Peninsula town of Sheikh Zuweid on the 27th. One of the rockets hit empty space at the station, while the other missed and hit a nearby medical center. No casualties were immediately reported. Protesters also fired an RPG at another police station outside the town, setting it on fire. The attacks came hours after police shot and killed a protester.
Members of the pro-democracy Egyptian youth group April 6 Movement promised more anti-government demonstrations, defying a government ban on protests and called for mass demonstrations on 28 January after Muslim prayers. According to one demonstrator, after the protests started on Jan. 25, they will not end until the demands of life, liberty and dignity for the Egyptian people have been met.
Scientists say video games can increase concentration, help with learning and even improve decision-making skills. Now, in an effort to improve the work of spies, the intelligence community may also resort to using educational games.
Phi Beta Iota: Nothing the secret world does in gaming can be called serious, and that includes the ridiculous DARPA initiative to model a world so as to influence what real people think. There is no game that can help those put into IC leadership positions or those who continue to allow $75 billion a year to be spent on technical collection and contractor butts in seats that produce “at best” 4% of what top commanders need. The insanity continues. The ONLY “serious game” any intelligence community should be funding (and ideally all together in the aggregate) is the EarthGame designed by Medard Gabel. Medard was co-creator with Buckminster Fuller of the analog World Game, and the only person truly qualified to create the EarthGame in the context of a global Strategic Analytic Model that allows to design a world that works for all. Anything less is a corruption of the possible.
Bill Keller is the executive editor of The New York Times. This essay is adapted from his introduction to “Open Secrets: WikiLeaks, War and American Diplomacy: Complete and Expanded Coverage from The New York Times,” an ebook available for purchase at nytimes.com/opensecrets.
EXTRACT: The government surely cheapens secrecy by deploying it so promiscuously. According to the Pentagon, about 500,000 people have clearance to use the database from which the secret cables were pilfered. Weighing in on the WikiLeaks controversy in The Guardian, Max Frankel remarked that secrets shared with such a legion of “cleared” officials, including low-level army clerks, “are not secret.” Governments, he wrote, “must decide that the random rubber-stamping of millions of papers and computer files each year does not a security system make.”
Phi Beta Iota: Upgraded to a Reference because this nine part overview of the entire process is elegant, informative, and provocative. A very fine contribution of lasting value.
The success of a throng of Tunisian protesters who toppled Ben Ali, the seemingly unshakable dictator, caught the world off guard.
Analysts have rushed to make sense of Tunisia's unforeseen popular revolt. The media have emphasized the economic discontent caused by unemployment, poverty, and high food prices. Others have noted the role social networks have played, characterizing the uprising as an instance of online activism and hailing it as a “Twitter revolution.”
This extraordinary uprising is being seen as the possible start of a domino effect in the Arab world.
. . . . . . .
Going forward, Tunisians will scrutinize the sincerity of these statements. The Obama administration’s initial hesitation exposed its unease with this transformation. U.S. policy and its national-security strategy in the Arab world need reassessment. Tunisia’s democratic impulse, as well as the uprising’s reverberations in other Arab countries, presents challenges for U.S. policy and that of its authoritarian allies in the region.
Phi Beta Iota: Most governments are under siege, for most governments, to one extent or another, have failed to attend to the public interest, instead bending or selling out completely to special interests. The United States of America is especially vulnerable at this time because it is over-extended, financially and morally bankrupt, and has a government that is out of touch with both the public interest, and global reality. Tunesia is not unique–all countries have the preconditions for revolution extant, what has changed are two things: the proliferation of precipitants, and the ability of the public to connect and promulgate.
Put another way, Simon Johnson is saying that Orientation (in the form of rigid pre-conceptions) is shaping the Observations as well as the Decisions and Actions (made in response to those observations). Any student of nonlinear dynamics and control theory will tell you that when a positive feedback loop like, Orientation's positive shaping effect, is pumping without interruption into a negative feedback control system, the entire system spins out of control and its outputs become increasingly disconnected from the real world environment that system is struggling to cope with. The inevitable result is chaos — full stop, end of story.
Following President Obama’s State of the Union address, there is a great deal of discussion about whether we might now be edging our way towards fiscal responsibility.
Unfortunately, most of our political elite – both left and right – is still living in a land of illusions. They cannot even seriously discuss what would be required to bring our true fiscal position under control – remember that most of the recent damage to our collective balance sheet was done by big banks blowing themselves up. No one who refuses to confront the power of those banks can be taken seriously as a fiscal conservative.
