Collaboration Zones – Page 994 – Public Intelligence Blog

Six months ago I wrote Clearing Somalia Of al-Shabaab. Today I was reading Will Somali Islamist Purge Strengthen al-Shabaab? and I see they have not updated their map of who controls what since then, even though the situation is clearly changing.

Read full post with two graphics.

Phi Beta Iota: We consider Somalia and Yemen to be two perfect candidates for any coalition that wishes to wage peace instead of war. Bury them in solar power, desalinated water, hydroponic agriculture, and free celluar and Internet access. Then get out of the way as they create wealth and with wealth, legitimacy and stability.

2013/07/092013/07/09

Berto Jongman: West Point Software for Mapping Organized (Street) Crime — Made in Israel, Another Back Door to US Data?

Cultural Intelligence, Peace Intelligence

Unmasking organised crime networks with data

Military software engineers have developed a program that can predict the social structures of street gangs. Philip Ball explains how it could help fight crime.

One of the big challenges in fighting organised crime is precisely that it is organised. It is run a bit like a business, with chains of command and responsibility, different specialised “departments”, recruitment initiatives and opportunities for collaboration and trade. Their structures often make crime syndicates and gangs more able to evade attempts by law enforcers to disrupt their activities.

That’s why police forces are keen to discover how these organisations are arranged – to map the networks that link individual members. While gang structures are typically fluid and informal compared to most legitimate businesses, they are far from random. In fact, violent street gangs seem to be set up along similar lines to insurgent groups that stage armed resistance to political authority, such as guerrilla forces in areas of civil war. These kinds of organisations tend to be composed of affiliated cells, each with its own leader.

For this reason, some law-enforcement agencies are hoping to learn from military research. A team at the West Point Military Academy in the US state of New York has just released details of a software package it has developed to aid intelligence gathering by police dealing with street gangs. The program, called Orca (Organization, Relationship, and Contact Analyzer), can use real-world data acquired from arrests and the questioning of suspected gang members to deduce the network structure of a gang.

Read full article.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: West Point Software for Mapping Organized (Street) Crime — Made in Israel, Another Back Door to US Data?”

2013/07/09

Berto Jongman: Free Publication Understanding and Tackling Violence Outside of Armed Conflict Settings

Cultural Intelligence, Peace Intelligence

Understanding and Tackling Violence Outside of Armed Conflict Settings

Lind, J. and Mitchell, B.

IDS Policy Briefing 37

Download this publication free of charge

Understanding and tackling violence that occurs outside of armed conflict settings is essential to improving the wellbeing of some of the world’s poorest communities.

Whilst advances have been made in terms of designing policies that address violence in fragile or conflict-affected countries, progress has been slower in relation to dealing with violence happening outside of these settings.

New forms of violence, such as organised crime and political instability, often arise in states which have undergone rapid economic growth and social transformation. These forms of violence are difficult to address because they are part of the very structures and processes that drive and shape development.

Fresh approaches are required. They need to be driven by communities, civil society and young people, as well as the state and international donors. They must also be underpinned by a better understanding of how violence affects the poor and what works in terms of interventions.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Free Publication Understanding and Tackling Violence Outside of Armed Conflict Settings”

2013/07/082013/07/08

Owl: People as Co-Conspirators in Own Demise

Cultural Intelligence

The “People” (Much of the the 99%) Are Co-Conspirators with the Elite (the 1%) in Their Own Demise

“Are we too stupid to continue as a nation? That may seem like a harsh question, but I think that it is one that we need to ask. Even though we have more access to information today than ever before, it seems like the U.S. population just keeps becoming more ignorant. So at what point does a society become so “dumbed-down” that it can no longer function effectively? We like to complain about our leaders, but the truth is that we are the ones that elected them. They are a reflection of who we are as a society. And when you compare Barack Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner to men like George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, they don’t fare too well. Sadly, the truth is that most of our founding fathers would not have a prayer of being elected today. Instead, they would be labeled as crazy “extremists” for insisting that we follow the U.S. Constitution. In our entertainment-addicted society, Lady Gaga would have a much greater chance of being elected president today than George Washington would. That is how far we have fallen.”

Five randomly selected survey results mentioned in article:

#1 One survey found that 56 percent of Americans believe that it is okay for the government to track “the telephone records of millions of Americans” in order to keep us safe. Apparently those people have never heard of the Fourth Amendment.

#7 29 percent of Americans believe that “cloud computing” involves an actual cloud.

#10 According to a survey conducted by the National Geographic Society, only 37 percent of all Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 can find the nation of Iraq on a map.

#11 Close to 25 percent of all Americans do not know that the United States declared independence from Great Britain.

#14 Approximately one out of every five teenage girls in the United States actually wants to be a teenage mother.

For the others:

19 Surveys Which Prove That A Large Chunk Of The Population Is Made Up Of Totally Clueless Sheeple

2013/07/082013/07/09

2013 Robert Steele Reflections on [Search:] non+traditional+threat 1.2

Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Peace Intelligence, Searches, Threats

ROBERT STEELE: I have elected to answer this personally. It may well be the most fundamental question this web site has received in that any corruption in the answer to this question assures the failure of any strategy, policy, acquisition, or operation that is spawned from an inherently corrupt — a deliberately corrupt — refusal to take the question seriously.

There are several ways to address this. The first is the most obvious, which is to say that the traditional threat is state on state conventional forces, and the non-traditional threats are everything else. Here in one chart is what General Al Gray, USMC, then Commandant of the Marine Corps, with my assistance as his ghost-writer, put in “Global Intelligence Challenges in the 1990's” (American Intelligence Journal, Winter 1989-1990).

The whole point of that article was to suggest that both the US Intelligence Community and the US Department of Defense needed to radically alter how they trained, equipped, and organized. I now realize that it was corruption, not stupidity, that buried this message. As SOCOM and Navy Irregular Warfare said in defending their decision not to go after the Somali pirates from 2005-2008 and later, “it's not an expensive enough problem.”

Continue reading “2013 Robert Steele Reflections on [Search:] non+traditional+threat 1.2”

2013/07/07

Jean Lievens: Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth

Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Peace Intelligence, Worth A Look

Available Now!

A Collection of Essays
Edited by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

The Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh was asked what we need to do to save our world.

“What we most need to do,” he replied,

“is to hear within us the sound of the earth crying.”

Our present ecological crisis is the greatest man-made disaster this planet has ever faced—its accelerating climate change, species depletion, pollution and acidification of the oceans. A central but rarely addressed aspect of this crisis is our forgetfulness of the sacred nature of creation, and how this affects our relationship to the environment. There is a pressing need to articulate a spiritual response to this ecological crisis. This is vital and necessary if we are to help bring the world as a living whole back into balance.

Contributors include: Chief Oren Lyons, Thich Nhat Hanh, Sandra Ingerman, Joanna Macy, Sister Miriam MacGillis, Satish Kumar, Vandana Shiva, Fr. Richard Rohr, Bill Plotkin, Jules Cashford, Wendell Berry, Winona LaDuke, Mary Evelyn Tucker, Brian Swimme, and others.

2013/07/072013/07/07

Chuck Spinney: Be Very Afraid — Obama Kept the Debt He Promised to Write Down and Now Pressure is On for Governments to Sell the Commonwealth Piece by Piece

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude

From the Bubble Economy to Debt Deflation and Privatization

Michael Hudson, Counterpunch, 2013-07-05

The Federal Reserve’s QE3 has flooded the stock and bond markets with low-interest liquidity that makes it profitable for speculators to borrow cheap and make arbitrage gains buying stocks and bonds yielding higher dividends or interest. In principle, one could borrow at 0.15 percent (one sixth of one percent) and buy up stocks, bonds and real estate throughout the world, collecting the yield differential as arbitrage. Nearly all the $800 billion of QE2 went abroad, mainly to the BRICS for high-yielding bonds (headed by Brazil’s 11% and Australia’s 5+%), with the currency inflow for this carry trade providing a foreign-exchange bonus as well.

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Be Very Afraid — Obama Kept the Debt He Promised to Write Down and Now Pressure is On for Governments to Sell the Commonwealth Piece by Piece”

Category: Collaboration Zones

Neal Rauhauser: Somalia’s al-Shabaab Has a Coup