Collaboration Zones – Page 1143 – Public Intelligence Blog

2012/01/31

John Robb: Drone Diplomacy – Comply or Die + Meta RECAP

07 Other Atrocities, Blog Wisdom, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, DHS, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military, Officers Call

Drone Diplomacy: Comply or Die

Gunboat diplomacy was the essence of military power projection for centuries. Want to coerce a country? Sail a aircraft carrier battle group into their national waters.

However, carrier battlegroups are hideously expensive, increasingly vulnerable to low cost attack, and less lethal than they appear (most of the weapons systems are used for self-defense).

What are nation-states replacing them with? Drones. You can already see it in action across the world as drone staging areas are replacing traditional military bases/entanglements. Further, drones already account for the vast majority of people killed by US forces.

Of course, the reason for this is clear. Drones are relatively cheap, don't require many people to deploy/operate, don't put personnel directly at risk, can be easily outsourced, can be micromanaged from Washington, and are very effective at blowing things up.

The final benefit of Drone Diplomacy: drones make it possible to apply coercion at the individual or small group level in a way that a blunt instrument like a carrier battle group can't.
What does this mean?

It allows truly scalable global coercion: the automation of comply or die.

Call up the target on his/her personal cell (it could even be automated as a robo-call to get real scalability — wouldn't that suck, to get killed completely through bot based automation).

Ask the person on the other end to do something or to stop doing something.

If they don't do what you ask, they die soon therafter due to drone strike (unless they go into deep hiding and disconnect from the global system).

With drone costs plummeting, we could see this drop to something less thanWhat can we look forward to?

The mid term future of a national security apparatus in secular ($$) decline?

Drones, drones, and more drones. Shrink the headcount. Cut training. Put manned weapons systems in life support mode. Cut mx.

All the money is on cyber intel (to generate targets based on “signatures”) and drones to kill them. When domestic unrest occurs in the US due to economic decline, these systems will be ready for domestic application.

Oh joy.

See Also:

Is There a Defense Against Drones?

Chuck Spinney: Real Cost vs Real Value of Drones? + RECAP

DefDog: Iran Hijacks US Drone Shows Film + RECAP

G.I. Wilson: Killer Drones, Moral Disengagement, + War Crimes RECAP

John Robb: Micro Drones Threaten US Citizens at Home

Marcus Aurelius: US Navy Hypes Water Drone Threat

Mini-Me: Assassination – Made in America – At What Cost? Impeachable Treason.

2012/01/312012/01/31

Mini-Me: Workers Kill Company President in India

03 Economy, 03 India, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence

India Factory Workers Revolt, Kill Company President

Workers at the Regency Ceramics factory in India raided the home of their boss, and beat him senseless with lead pipes after a wage dispute turned ugly.

The workers were enraged enough to kill Regency’s president K. C. Chandrashekhar after their union leader, M. Murali Mohan, was killed by baton-wielding riot police on Thursday. The labor violence occurred in Yanam, a small city in Andra Pradesh state on India’s east coast. Police were called to the factory by management to quell a labor dispute. The workers had been calling for higher pay and reinstatement of previously laid off workers since October. Murali was fired a few hours after the police left the factory.

. . . . . .

India’s factory workers are the lowest paid within the big four emerging markets. Per capita income in India is under $4,000 a year, making it the poorest country in the BRICs despite its relatively booming economy.

. . . . . . .

Once news of Murali’s death spread, the factory workers allegedly destroyed 50 company cars, buses and trucks and lit them on fire. They ransacked the factory. Residents joined hands with around 600 workers, while others were enroute to Chandrashekhar’s house.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: A very famous experiment in the 1970's added one rat at a time to an empty aquarium, and found that at the same point each time, there was a crowding “tipping point” at which the rats would begin eating each other. The world is ready to explode. The resource split between the 1% and the 99% is unsustainable.

2011 Thinking About Revolution in the USA and Elsewhere (Full Text Online for Google Translate)

Dr. Russell Ackoff on IC and DoD + Design RECAP

Graphic: Preconditions of Revolution in the USA Today

Mini-Me: World Revolting Against US Economic Model [Full Text Online for Google Translate]

Paul Fernhout: Encouragement for the Sick at Heart – Planning for US Collapse, Learning from Soviet Collapse

Review: No More Secrets – Open Source Information and the Reshaping of U.S. Intelligence

Review: Who’s To Say What’s Obscene – Politics, Culture, and Comedy in America Today

2012/01/302012/01/30

Josh Kilbourn: DHS to Twitter – What You Write Can and Will Be Used Against You….

07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency, Law Enforcement

Twitter Users Beware: Homeland Security Isn’t Laughing

Two British tourists were detained after tweeting a joke about Marilyn Monroe. Is Homeland Security monitoring social media too closely?

Mathew Ingram

Bloomberg/Businessweek, 30 January 2012

Planning to make a joke on Twitter about bombing something? You might want to reconsider: According to a report from Britain, two tourists were detained and denied entry into the U.S. recently after they joked about destroying America and digging up Marilyn Monroe. That the Homeland Security Dept. and other authorities—including the FBI—are monitoring such social media as Twitter and Facebook isn’t surprising. That these authorities are willing to detain people based on what is clearly a harmless joke, however, raises questions about what the impact of all that monitoring will be.

Leigh Van Bryan, a 26-year-old bar manager from Coventry, told The Sun that he and friend Emily Bunting were stopped by border guards when they arrived at Los Angeles International Airport and were questioned for five hours about messages Van Bryan had tweeted saying he planned to “destroy America.” After the questioning, during which Homeland Security agents threatened the two, said Van Bryan, they were put into a van and taken—along with a few illegal immigrants—to a holding cell and held overnight. The next morning, they said, Van Bryan and Bunting were forced to take a plane back to England.

According to a report in the Daily Mail, the officers gave Van Bryan a document that detailed why he was refused admission into the U.S. The document reads like a bad joke itself, saying:

“He had posted on his Tweeter [sic] website account that he was coming to the United States to dig up the grave of Marilyn Monroe. … Also on his tweeter [sic] account Mr. Bryan posted that he was coming to destroy America.”

Van Bryan told the newspaper he tried to explain to Homeland Security officials that the term “destroy” was British slang referring to a party and that his comments about “digging up Marilyn Monroe” were an attempt at humor, but the officers didn’t listen. The authorities even searched the two tourists’ luggage for shovels and other tools, he said.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: Good news is that our experiences with TSA do not bear out the many horror stories in the media. Bad news is that DHS may be retarded beyond all expectations.

2012/01/302012/01/30

Pierre Levy: Open-Science Movement Catches Fire

Advanced Cyber/IO, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence

Researchers revolt against Elsiever

Testify: The Open-Science Movement Catches Fire

David Dobbs

WIRED, 30 January 2012

For years, the open science movement has sought to light a fire about the “closed” journal-publication system. In the last few weeks their efforts seemed to have ignited a broader flame, driven mainly, it seems, by the revelation that one of the most resented publishers, Elsevier, was backing the Research Works Act — some tomfoolery I noted in Congress Considers Paywalling Science You Already Paid For, on January 6. Now, 24 days later, scientists are pledging by the hundred to not cooperate with Elsevier in any way — refusing to publish in its journals, referee its papers, or do the editorial work that researchers have been supplying to journals without charge for decades — and the rebellion is repeatedly reaching the pages of the New York Times and Forbes.

In my feature I speculated whether librarians who would eventually lead the charge. But Jason Hoyt, then of Mendeley and now of OpenRePub, seemed to have it closer: the revolution awaited only the researchers. In what is easily the biggest surge the open-science movement has ever put on, a growing list of researchers is publicly pledging against Elsevier. At The Cost of Knowledge, a site created this purpose, there were 1400 signatories last night, and when I woke today at 5 a.m., over 1600. The thing seems to be snowballing. Some have ached to take action for years. Others are newly radicalized. Together, their stated reasons form a sort of first-person dramatization of the issues I explored in “Free Science.” A skim through their testiomony (below the jump here) is an education in why the call for open science is going mainstream:

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: This is of course the whole point of creating the World Brain and Global Game, to achieve precisely the efficiencies and zero resistance to multinational information-sharing and sense-making that we have been advocating since 1988 in various forms, since 1995 in Smart Nation and World Brain forms. Open Government, Open Economy, Open Society — it is all coming as a tsunami of cultural change.

2012/01/30

Perry Bezanis: Odds and Ends for Reflection

Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence

Armed with a Bachelor's in math and 4 years of GI Bill, dillettantism post-that and primarily in natural sciences, I finally got around to really trying to figure out what ‘the human condition' forever bugging me was really all about.

Along that line then, “the happenstantial appearance of Godel's Proof precipitated ‘possible applicability to language in general' as an analytical tool for a more properly ‘scientific' analysis of language itself and the evolution of words and language in general” -the deconstruction and re-evolution of ‘the human condition', so to speak.

A few contributions:

How We Came to Democracy – Why It Is Not the Best Form of Government and Where It Is Going

Human Nature and Continuing Human Existence – the Inevitabilities of Human Deliberative Capability

The State of Affairs an Excerpt from Godel's Proof and the Human Condition

Democracy – and Further

Breakdown – Futurology (appendix to Arms Reduction and Global Reconstruction)

2012/01/30

David Isenberg: Iran Prepared for the Worst with A2/AD

03 Economy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Iran, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Analysis, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), Government, IO Deeds of War, Military, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

Iran well prepared for the worst

David Isenberg

31 January 2012

Most discussions of possible United States military operations in the Persian Gulf, should Iran try to prevent maritime traffic from going through the Strait of Hormuz, generally say that while it would not be a cakewalk, it would not be an enormously difficult task either.

But that conventional wisdom is wrong, according to a recent report issued by an independent, non-profit public policy research institute in Washington DC. The report found that the traditional post-Cold War US military ability to project power overseas with few serious challenges to its freedom of action may be rapidly drawing to a close.

. . . . . . .

It stressed that “a Strait of Hormuz closure could trigger a much larger price spike, including by limiting offsetting supplies from other producers in the region”.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: Two themes are emerging in the open source world. First, the depth and breadth of Israel's clandestine agreements with its Arab neighbors is not clearly understood–a National Intelligence Estimate is required, but the collection, processing, and analysis capabilities are simply not there, and the management will to do this as a multinational task is not there either. Second, as the US loses its ability to actually project force, the finance of war is being replaced by the theater of war, such that oil prices can still be manipulated, but at a fraction of the blood, sweat, and tears previously mobilized – financial fraud on the cheap, as it were.

2012/01/302012/01/30

Chris Pallaris: 12 Aspects of Creative Thinking Not Taught in Schools

Blog Wisdom, Cultural Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process

Creative Thinkering

Resurrecting your natural creativity through inspiring techniques and practical examples

Michael Michalko

Twelve Things You Were Not Taught in School About Creative Thinking

Aspects of creative thinking that are not usually taught.

LIST ONLY – read full article for expansions.

1. You are creative.
2. Creative thinking is work.
3. You must go through the motions of being creative.
4. Your brain is not a computer.
5. There is no one right answer.
6. Never stop with your first good idea.
7. Expect the experts to be negative.
8. Trust your instincts.
9. There is no such thing as failure.
10. You do not see things as they are; you see them as you are.
11. Always approach a problem on its own terms.
12. Learn to think unconventionally.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: They left out the following:

1. Everything is connected.
2. Understanding true costs as a concept is fundamental.
3. Cultural lenses matter.
4. Understanding history is a strong foundation for shaping the future.
5. The best thinkers are not necessarily the best teachers or doers.
6. Trust is the fuel for all of the above – transparency & truth build trust.