CHICAGO (AP) – A would-be terrorist tries to board a plane, bent on mass murder. As he walks through a security checkpoint, fidgeting and glancing around, a network of high-tech machines analyzes his body language and reads his mind.
Screeners pull him aside.
Tragedy is averted.
As far-fetched as that sounds, systems that aim to get inside an evildoer's head are among the proposals floated by security experts thinking beyond the X-ray machines and metal detectors used on millions of passengers and bags each year.
Why intelligence-sharing can't always make us safer
By Jennifer Sims and Bob Gallucci
Friday, January 8, 2010; A19
Phi Beta Iota: This Op-Ed is stunningly irrelevant to the problem at hand: a secret intelligence community that over-emphasizes cash inputs and secret remote collection, and simultaneously fails to exploit machine-speed all-source geospatially and time tagged processing, multi-lingual open sources, or analysts that actually know anything in the way of historical, cultural, and linguistic context. Intelligence-sharing–as the CIA Mid-Career Course teaches so very well–is a cultural trait that ultimately can only be achieved by humans who know each other, walk around, and frequently engage in informal non-bureaucratic non-mechanical interaction. We're not there. The alternative below is what was done when Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski (two sides of the same coin) tried to be their own intelligence analyst, with the futher unprofessional crime of not sharing what they gathered with their intelligence support team. As Ellsberg lectured Kissinger, this ultimately made him “like a moron,” a phrase that will be instantly pushed back by those who have “bought in” to the Potemkin Village (or what Chuck Spinney calls “Versailles on the Potomac”) but instantly embraced by those who live in the real world and understand Whole Systems.
Three representative sentences from their Op-Ed:
To win against a networked adversary, the intelligence community must share critical information with decision makers but not always with every element of its own community first. . . . . . . .
Yet if this instance suggests that single, timely tips can be enough, psychological research suggests that intelligence-sharing can be downright bad. . . . . . . .
To win in network warfare, then, decision makers must think of themselves as collectors and analysts, too.
A small private school in Seattle offered a kindness class this fall, part of a larger movement that started more than a decade ago. Offered online, the class had 250 people — the most ever — who lived as far away as Poland.
If you recently found a shiny gold dollar coin in downtown Bellevue, thank the kindness class. Ditto if you stumbled upon a piece of glass art in Pioneer Square, or a lottery ticket taped to a bus shelter with a note saying, “This may be your lucky day.”
Since mid-September, the 250 people in Puget Sound Community School's online course learned about kindness by practicing it.
Along the way, they took emotional risks, repaired relationships, improved their outlook on the world, and realized that kindness is contagious.
Phi Beta Iota: We now know that no one briefed the White House on the fact that Iraq was deeply divided between Sunnis in power and Shi-ites under repression. We have to ask ourselves if anyone has figured out that Azerbaijan is the other Shi'ite majority nation.
Shi'ites Rock On....
Iran starts to introduce visa-free regime with Azerbaijan on February 1 – Head of the press service of the Iranian Embassy
Earlier Iranian Ambassador to Azerbaijan Mohammad Bagir Behrami said that any Azerbaijani citizen can travel to Iran without a visa and stay for one month.
The ambassador expressed hope that the Azerbaijani side will take a similar step.
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Armenian Center for National and International Studies (ACNIS) Director Richard Giragosian issued a statement today criticizing Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s renewed “threats of war.
Baku. Elmin Ibrahimov-APA. Afghanistan National Security Directorate (NSD) has announced that a member of the al-Qaida network was arrested in the country’s eastern province of Khost.
“Normalization of relations between Turkey and Armenia is not enough,” Turkish foreign ministry spokesman Burak Özügergin told a press briefing on Wednesday. “If Armenia does not resolve Upper Karabakh dispute with Azerbaijan, stability in the Caucasus can not be established. This is quite clear.”
A North Dakota rural electric cooperative made history on New Year’s Eve, in completing the nation’s largest wind project to be entirely owned by a consumer cooperative.
The $240 million, 115.5 MW wind farm was begun in August and completed a mere four months later; three and a half hours before midnight on the last night of 2009. GE supplied the 77 1.5 MW turbines.
. . . . . . .
By the end of 2010 the cooperative hopes that it will produce 20% of its electricity from wind power for its 2.8 million rural consumers in parts of rural Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming.
. . . . . . .
1. Rural empty states are where the wind is.
2. Rural empty states are where electricity cooperatives are.
3. Rural empty state’s cooperatives are beating national averages in bringing the most renewable energy online the fastest.
Renewable capacity among rural electricity cooperatives grew 65% in 2008. The rest of us: 25%
While so many of our institutions have failed, we can repair them. The first step is to take personal responsibility.
Maybe the most worrying trend the past 10 years can be found in this phrase: “They forgot the mission.” So many great American institutions—institutions that every day help hold us together—acted as if they had forgotten their mission, forgotten what they were about, what their role and purpose was, what they existed to do. You, as you read, can probably think of an institution that has forgotten its reason for being. Maybe it's the one you're part of.
Phi Beta Iota: The Op-Ed reads like Paradigms of Failure, and this ia good thing. The American public is awake now, and moderate right to mdoerate left, 43% of the eligible voters now Independent and most very angry with the failure of all of our institutions and most especially the two-party tyranny–if President Barack Obama does not break from his partisan colleagues and sponsor Electoral Reform in time for 2010, the Second American Revolution may just show itself in a massive housecleaning, a “pox” on both houses, both parties.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a superstate called Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that “passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past', ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past'.”
Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war that “extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan” to “disorderly regions and diffuse enemies”. He called this “global security” and invited our gratitude. To the people of Afghanistan, which America has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: “We have no interest in occupying your country.”
