Collaboration Zones – Page 1238 – Public Intelligence Blog

2011/07/01

Open Source Insurgency = System Disruption

09 Justice, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of Peace, IO Deeds of War, Law Enforcement, Military, Peace Intelligence

Thursday, 30 June 2011

WAR NERD: How the IRA used Systems Disruption

I've enjoyed The War Nerd for years. Great, colorful writing. The author of the column, “Gary Brecher,” was never on the same page as me when it came to warfare. However, that's changed.

He now thinks, and makes an excellent case for global guerrilla thinking. In short: that blood and guts warfare is counter productive and that systems disruption (hiting network systempunkts/nodes to generate high ROI‘s and publicity) is a potential path to long term victory for guerrillas. In short: in the modern context, if you keep the blood/guts to a min, and keep the cost ratio massively in your favor while staying alive, you will eventually win.

To demonstrate this, he has a great article on how the IRA eventually adopted systems disruption:

“In 1994, they took the idea of non-lethal warfare a notch up by doing one of the most revolutionary things any guerrilla army has ever done: IRA mortar teams dropped shells on the runways at Heathrow Airport, totally stopping air traffic… but the shells weren’t even designed to explode. Intentional duds. That’s amazing; I’ve never heard of anything like that. It shows how far they’d come by that stage, away from the simple Al Qaeda maximum-blood crap I bought into in that earlier article. In contemporary urban guerrilla warfare, at least in Western Europe, killing civvies is counterproductive. What you want to do, what the IRA had mastered by the 1990s, was messing with the incredibly fragile and expensive networks that keep a huge city going. Interrupt them and you cost the enemy billions of dollars, and they don’t even have any gory corpses to shake in your faces. Fucking brilliant, and I was too dumb to see it!

Continue reading “Open Source Insurgency = System Disruption”

2011/06/302011/06/30

Obama Honors Gates for Civility

Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Military

Obama made it clear today….civility is the Washington D.C. substitute for integrity. Go along with with military-industrial complex and you get the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Speak truth to power, and you lose your job. Land of the free and home of the brave? Not in Washington, D.C.

Phi Beta Iota: These are smart people. To tell the lies they do, to behave as they do, is not out of ignorance. It is the elevation of personal greed and political ideology over integrity. The Republicans are just as guilty–one bird, two wings, same stink.

See Also:

Journal: Reflections on Integrity

Search: Gates sniffed

Bob Gates: Flat Out Liar or Just Feeble? + RECAP

Bob Gates Spins Exit from Afghanistan

Robert Gates: A Brilliant Career — As a Courtier

Bob Gates, Chief Maintenance Clerk, Talks Crap — and the Wall Street Journal Goes Along…

Robert Gates: Spendthrift Ace of Double-Speak

2011/06/30

TDL-4 Rules–Industrial Era Governments Helpless

07 Other Atrocities, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Computer/online security, Corruption, IO Impotency, Key Players, Policies, Real Time, Standards, Technologies

New Botnet, Now 4.5 Million Machines Strong, is ‘Practically Indestructible'

Today in cyber threats: more than four million Windows PCs have been commandeered by a botnet that cybersecurity experts are calling nearly “indestructible.” Known as TDL-4 (it’s the fourth iteration of the malicious program), this particular little nuisance hides in places security software rarely checks and speaks with other infected machines and their overseers in a novel encrypted code. Some are calling it the most sophisticated threat out there today. Watch your back, Stuxnet.

Read rest of story….

Phi Beta Iota: Apart from the known fact that the US Government ignored documented warning from Winn Schwartau, Jim Anderson, Bill Caelli, and Robert Steele in 1994, what we have here is the culimination of fifteen years in which governments continue to operate as Industrial Era hierarchies, choosing secrecy to protect incompetence rather than multinational sharing to achieve resilience–they are as a result inept beyond belief. The cloud–given the plethora of proprietary and therefore generally insecure hardware and software–is not going to be cleaned up on the present course, where spam is 75% of all email despite the best (isolated) efforts of all concerned. M4IS2, anyone?

Search: Steele USMC C4I 1990′s

2011/06/30

OECD Serial Global Shocks Demand “Think Long”

Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Communities of Practice, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Key Players, Methods & Process, Policies, Real Time, Strategy, Threats

220px-Michel_Bauwens_crop — Michel Bauwens

Analysis: Serial shocks forcing world to “think long”

By Mike Dolan

LONDON, Jun | Wed Jun 29, 2011 9:44am EDT

(Reuters) – Thrown by a mounting series of extreme events over the past four years, global policymakers and investors are being urged to think long and prepare more systematically for the worst.

. . . . . . .

Part of the problem today is that the latest wave of globalization was led solely by transnational corporations and their interwoven supply chains and by financial markets' 24/7 worldwide blizzard of electronic transactions.

While this greatly facilitated the transmission of shocks worldwide, it was not matched by countervailing global governance and regulation to keep this activity in check or mitigate its most socially- or systemically-threatening aspects.

Read full article….

OECD Launch of Future Global Shocks

More information on the OECD’s Future Global Shocks project is available at: www.oecd.org/futures, including case studies on cyber attacks, pandemics, geomagnetic storms, social unrest and financial crises.

2011/06/302011/07/01

Cost of War: Obama and Dr. Gates Both Lie….

03 Economy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Military, Peace Intelligence

WinslowWheeler Cropped — Winslow Wheeler

Released Wednesday by the sponsoring Watson Institute of Brown University, a new multi-author study of the costs of the post-9/11 wars is available. Most prominently, the study finds the appropriations thus far to have been between $2.3 and 2.7 trillion; with an additional $884 to $1,334 billion to already have been incurred for future costs for veterans and their families. This would make a total, incurred thus far, of from $3.2 Trillion to $4.0 trillion. (Find a summary of these costs at http://costsofwar.org/article/economic-cost-summary.) It is important to note that these are basically budget costs to the federal government, not the broader economic costs to the economy or other costs to state and local governments.

The study also addresses still other expenses, such as the human costs in terms of civilian dead, the wounded, refugees, and more.

There is certainly some you will find to disagree with, but it is clear that advocates of the various conflicts who pretend the costs have been only the $1 trillion that President Obama articulated last week are feeding the nation grotesquely inaccurate information. Others, like departing SecDef Gates, who pretend that DOD spending is not a major factor in the size of our deficit are not particularly skilled in “math,” an elementary skill for government types that Secretary Gates has chosen to deride and to leave to others to perform.

I participated in the Costs of War study; see my paper on the DOD . It makes two basic points on p. 14:

1) “… while [the Congressional Research Service] and others have done long, hard, and excellent work to capture the identifiable appropriations to the Pentagon for the Post-9/11 wars, the $1.2 trillion CRS has, for example, identified in current dollars is problematic, but the fault is not with CRS, CBO, or GAO. The available figures have gaping holes and problems in them because of the sloppy, inept and misleading accounting of the costs by the Defense Department and Congress.”

2) “The $667 billion in 2011 dollars ($617 billion in current dollars) appropriated to the Defense Department's base budget since 2001 as a result of the wars, while squandered, should be included in any comprehensive attempt to capture the total cost of the wars. These amounts would bring the total DOD costs of the wars to $1.98 Trillion in constant 2011 dollars and $1.82 trillion in current dollars.”

A Reuters story below summarizes the overall “Costs of War” study.

Cost of war at least $3.7 trillion and counting

By Daniel Trotta

NEW YORK | Wed Jun 29, 2011

(Reuters) – When President Barack Obama cited cost as a reason to bring troops home from Afghanistan, he referred to a $1 trillion price tag for America's wars.

Staggering as it is, that figure grossly underestimates the total cost of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan to the U.S. Treasury and ignores more imposing costs yet to come, according to a study released on Wednesday.

The final bill will run at least $3.7 trillion and could reach as high as $4.4 trillion, according to the research project “Costs of War” by Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies.

Phi Beta Iota: Emphasis added above. Brown, like Rutgers, is a hotbed of left-leaning intellectuals who probably wonder how a Democratic President could have become a neo-fascist war-monger. The answer is simple: corruption has no ideology. It is pervasive. Interestingly, the wire services (AP, Reuters, AFP, Bloomberg on occasion) and Russian Television as well as Al Jazeera, are emerging from this period as examples of integrity in action.

2011/06/292011/06/29

Greece About Future of Democracy, Not Budget

08 Wild Cards, 11 Society, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Government

Postcard From Greece: This Should Not Be About Austerity, It's About The Future Of Democracy

Arianna Huffington

Huffington Post, 28 June 2011

Given that the Greeks invented democracy, it's only fitting that they're now being given the chance to reinvent it. And yes, I know we Greeks have a reputation for mythmaking and drama — but, as I found out during my trip to Greece last week, those really are the stakes.

Until I went over and witnessed what's happening, I too had become convinced that the real issues were the ones the media were obsessively covering: the effects of a potential sovereign default on the Euro and worries about the crisis spreading to other European countries.

But here's the bigger issue: Can a truly democratic movement break the stranglehold of corrupt elites and powerful anti-democratic institutional forces that have come to characterize not just the politics of Greece, but most Western democracies, including our own? Greece is only an extreme example of an unfolding seismic social shift that is challenging democracies the world over.

What happens in Greece might very well tell us whether democracy will recover from the crisis of legitimacy exacerbated by the financial crisis or whether it will shrink — undermined by the very forces that brought on the crisis in the first place.

It's way too early to tell whether the forces of democracy will prevail, but I came away extraordinarily moved and heartened by the courage, passion, engagement and dedication I witnessed during a trip in which three different perspectives converged.

Read full article….

2011/06/29

Legal Profession Undergoing Massive Structural Shift

Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence

Law Job Stagnation May Have Started Before the Recession—And It May Be a Sign of Lasting Change

William Henderson and Rachel Zahorsky

ABA Journal, 1 July 2011

EXTRACT:

The golden era is gone, but this is not because the law itself is becoming less relevant. Rather, the sea change reflects an urgent need for better and cheaper legal services that can keep pace with the demands of a rapidly globalizing world. The Great Recession—a catalyst for change—provided an opportunity to re-examine some long-standing assumptions about lawyers and the clients they serve.

Read full article….

TIP OF THE GRAPHICS HAT to Andy Foltz, Gonzo Artist and UI Designer