Collaboration Zones – Page 964 – Public Intelligence Blog

See link in message below. Graphic British media reporting. Comments at bottom are from Marine Colonel who sent to me. Stuff like this also happened in Vietnam; village chiefs were a frequent target. Believe it would be naive to believe it could not happen here in U.S. Don't think we have a good handle on who is exploiting narco smuggling routes north from Mexico. No reason I know of to believe it could not be AQ, TB, LH, or IRGC (Quds Force)

RETIRED USMC COLONEL:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2434278/Kenyan-mall-massacre-torture-claims-emerge-soldiers.html

This is a stomach-turning read. But it is the real face of what will come here if we continue to pretend Islamist terrorism is defeated. You all have seen the AQ torture and executions in Syria…the USG are arming to fight Assad. Those of us who were in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Sudan have seen this up close. These types must be dealt with ruthlessly and with no quarter given ever. They are fighting a war against us, so this is not a law enforcement matter IMHO.

2013/09/27

Berto Jongman: RAND on 71 Modern Insurgencies

Cultural Intelligence, Peace Intelligence

ABSTRACT

When a country is threatened by an insurgency, what efforts give its government the best chance of prevailing? Contemporary discourse on this subject is voluminous and often contentious. Advice for the counterinsurgent is often based on little more than common sense, a general understanding of history, or a handful of detailed examples, instead of a solid, systematically collected body of historical evidence. A 2010 RAND study challenged this trend with rigorous analyses of all 30 insurgencies that started and ended between 1978 and 2008.

Cover: Paths to Victory This update to that original study expanded the data set, adding 41 new cases and comparing all 71 insurgencies begun and completed worldwide since World War II. With many more cases to compare, the study was able to more rigorously test the previous findings and address critical questions that the earlier study could not. For example, it could examine the approaches that led counterinsurgency forces to prevail when an external actor was involved in the conflict. It was also able to address questions about timing and duration, such as which factors affect the duration of insurgencies and the durability of the resulting peace, as well as how long historical counterinsurgency forces had to engage in effective practices before they won. A companion volume, Paths to Victory: Detailed Insurgency Case Studies, offers in-depth narrative overviews of each of the 41 additional cases; the original 30 cases are presented in Victory Has a Thousand Fathers: Detailed Counterinsurgency Case Studies.

KEY FINDINGS

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2013/09/262013/09/26

Berto Jongman: U.S. command in Afghanistan gives Army 60 days to fix or replace intel network [meanwhile, Palantir spends millions buying legislative intervention]

Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Ineptitude, IO Impotency

U.S. command in Afghanistan gives Army 60 days to fix or replace intel network

The Pentagon’s main battlefield intelligence network in Afghanistan is vulnerable to hackers — both the enemy or a leaker — and the U.S. command in Kabul will cut it off from the military’s classified data files unless the Army fixes the defects within 60 days, according to an official memo obtained by The Washington Times.

The confidential memo says the Army’s Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS) flunked a readiness test and does not confirm the sources of outside Internet addresses entering the classified database.

Read full article with many links.

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2013/09/26

Berto Jongman: Google Guilty of Global Wiretapping

07 Other Atrocities, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Idiocy, Ineptitude

Google Begs Court to Reconsider Ruling That Wi-Fi Sniffing Is Wiretapping

David Kravets

WIRED, 25 September 2013

Google is asking a federal appeals court to reconsider a recent ruling finding Google potentially liable for wiretapping when it secretly intercepted data on open Wi-Fi routers.

The Mountain View-based company said the September 10 decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will create “confusion” (.pdf) about which over-the-air signals are protected by the Wiretap Act, including broadcast television.

The case concerns nearly a dozen combined lawsuits seeking damages from Google for eavesdropping on open Wi-Fi networks from its Street View mapping cars. The vehicles, which rolled through neighborhoods around the world, were equipped with Wi-Fi–sniffing hardware to record the names and MAC addresses of routers to improve Google location-specific services. But the cars also gathered snippets of content.

The search giant petitioned the San Francisco-based appeals court to reconsider its decision that allowed the case to proceed at trial — a ruling that upended Google’s defense.

Google claimed it is was legal to intercept data from unencrypted, or non-password-protected Wi-Fi networks. Google said open Wi-Fi networks are “radio communications” like AM/FM radio, citizens’ band and police and fire bands, and are “readily accessible” to the general public and exempt from the Wiretap Act — a position the appeals court rejected.

Read full article with more links.

2013/09/262013/09/26

David Swanson: Top 45 Lies in Obama’s Speech at the U.N.

01 Poverty, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Proliferation, 09 Terrorism, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Idiocy, IO Deeds of War, Peace Intelligence

Top 45 Lies in Obama's Speech at the U.N.

1. President Obama's opening lines at the U.N. on Tuesday looked down on people who would think to settle disputes with war. Obama was disingenuously avoiding the fact that earlier this month he sought to drop missiles into a country to “send a message” but was blocked by the U.S. Congress, the U.N., the nations of the world, and popular opposition — after which Obama arrived at diplomacy as a last resort.

2. “It took the awful carnage of two world wars to shift our thinking.” Actually, it took one. The second resulted in a half-step backwards in “our thinking.” The Kellogg-Briand Pact banned all war. The U.N. Charter re-legalized wars purporting to be either defensive or U.N.-authorized.

3. “[P]eople are being lifted out of poverty,” Obama said, crediting actions by himself and others in response to the economic crash of five years ago. But downward global trends in poverty are steady and long pre-date Obama's entry into politics. And such a trend does not exist in the U.S.

42 additional lies below the line.

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2013/09/26

Owl: Supreme Court Justices on Tyranny in America

05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, Cultural Intelligence

Justices Souter and O’Connor, Intelligence Agency Heads and Congressmen All Warn of Tyranny in America

Former Supreme Court Justice David Souter told University of New Hampshire School of Law that the “pervasive civic ignorance” in the U.S. could bring dictatorship:

“I don’t worry about our losing a republican government in the United States because I’m afraid of a foreign invasion. I don’t worry about it because of a coup by the military, as has happened in some other places. What I worry about is that when problems are not addressed people will not know who is responsible, and when the problems get bad enough — as they might do for example with another serious terrorist attack, as they might do with another financial meltdown — some one person will come forward and say: ‘Give me total power and I will solve this problem.’ That is how the Roman republic fell. Augustus became emperor not because he arrested the Roman senate. He became emperor because he promised that he would solve problems that were not being solved.”

2 U.S. Supreme Court Justices – And Numerous Other Top Government Officials – Warn of Dictatorship

2013/09/24

Berto Jongman: Open Secure Internet Moves Forward — Estonia Leads the Way

Advanced Cyber/IO, Peace Intelligence, Software

How the Tech-Savvy Estonian President Led His Country to the Cutting Edge of Internet Politics

On Monday, September 23, the President of Estonia, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, gave the key note address at the United Nations panel discussion entitled “A Secure and Free Internet.” That day he was also hailed in a thorough profile on Buzzfeed as “The President of Twitter.”

Today Ilves spoke about Internet freedom and cybersecurity at Columbia University, as part of their World Leaders Forum, with the authority and expertise of a university professor, complete with a patterned bow tie. His talk this afternoon was basically an introductory lecture on modern warfare and the philosophy of informational technologies, punctuated by references to the books taught in Columbia College's common core curriculum.

Ilves compared the Internet revolution to “a sped up version of industrialization.” After going on a technological tangent, he half-heartedly apologized, but pointed out that, “we will all have to know a little bit of technology in order to survive in the future.”

How did he become such a vocal influence and thought leader, online and off, in Internet politics and cybersecurity? Ilves himself traces it back to 2007, when Estonia became the first target—or at least the first target to go public with the information—of cyberattacks motivated by politics.

In an op-ed for the New York Times earlier this year, Ilves wrote that the 2007 attacks were in fact a “blessing—Estonia took cybersecurity seriously earlier than most.”

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Category: Collaboration Zones

Marcus Aurelius: Kenyan Mall Insights