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Landrieu phone plot: Men arrested have links to intelligence community

WASHINGTON — Two of the three men arrested on Monday along with “ACORN pimp” James O'Keefe for “maliciously tampering” with Sen. Mary Landrieu's (D-LA) phones in her New Orleans office have ties to the United States intelligence community.

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Dai has been an undergraduate fellow with the Washington-based national security think tank Foundation for the Defense of the Democracies (FDD), according to his College Leadership Program award biography at the Phillips Foundation — as Lindsay Beyerstein first reported.

FDD claims that it's partly funded by the US State Department. Its Leadership Council and Board of Advisers comprise many high-profile conservative politicians and public figures — including former House speaker Newt Gingrich, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), former Bush official Richard Perle and columnist Charles Krauthammer.

Dai traveled to Israel for two weeks in 2004 on an FDD-sponsored trip, the Daily Herald reported. “All expenses (room, board and travel) will be assumed by FDD,” FDD's Web site said of its Israel program.

Phi Beta Iota: A full reading is recommended, there are a number of links that make the article a starting point for deeper reading.

Continue reading “Journal: US Intelligence, Israel, and the Street Clowns”

2010/01/162010/01/16

Journal: DARPA Catches Up with 1994

10 Security, Academia, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence, Computer/online security, Cultural Intelligence

Darpa: U.S. Geek Shortage Is National Security Risk

Darpa’s worried that America’s “ability to compete in the increasingly internationalized stage will be hindered without college graduates with the ability to understand and innovate cutting edge technologies in the decades to come…. Finding the right people with increasingly specialized talent is becoming more difficult and will continue to add risk to a wide range of DoD [Department of Defense] systems that include software development.”

Phi Beta Iota: Great insight….only 16 years behind the point made by the opening speaker at Hackers on Planet Earth 1994. He said “When the Israeli's catch a hacker, they give him a job. When we catch a hacker, we kick them in the teeth and throw them in jail.” We wait with bated breath for DARPA to reach 1998.

Journal: Cyber-War, Cyber-Peace, Cyber-Scam

Journal: Cyber-Security Etc. & Multinational Engagement

Reference: Are Hackers Pioneers with the Right Stuff or Criminal Pathological Scum? Mitch Kabay Reprises

Journal: German Hackers Point to 9-11 Text Messages

Journal: Climate Change and “Hacktivism”

2010/01/092010/01/09

Journal: Ivory Tower Musings on Intelligence-Sharing

Academia, Cultural Intelligence, Methods & Process

Full Op-Ed Online

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.

Phi Beta Iota: The new book,INTELLIGENCE FOR EARTH, with chapters loaded as they are finished in first draft, is both a captone work about decades of work by hundreds that this Op-Ed ignores, and a primer for leaders who wish to get intelligence (decision-support) tuned up for the transnational non-state and often human-created but global non-human threats identified in priority order by the UN High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change in their report A More Secure World–Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change.

2009/12/192010/01/12

Reference: Walter Dorn on UN Intelligence in Haiti

01 Poverty, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 10 Transnational Crime, Academia, Analysis, Articles & Chapters, Civil Society, Ethics, Government, InfoOps (IO), Law Enforcement, Methods & Process, Military, Non-Governmental, Peace Intelligence, United Nations & NGOs

UPDATE: Superceeded by final published version a tReference: Intelligence-Led Peacekeeping

Phi Beta Iota: Dr. Walter Dorn is one of a tiny handful of truly authoritative academic observers of UN intelligence, a pioneer in his own right, and perhaps the only person who has followed UN intelligence from the Congo in the 1960's to the creation of new capabilities in Haiti and elsewhere in the 21st Century. He is the dean of UN intelligence authors. See also Who’s Who in Peace Intelligence: Walter Dorn.

2009/12/032009/12/03

Reference: Measuring Success and Failure in Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism–US Government Metrics of the Global War on Terror (GWOT)

08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 11 Society, Academia, Analysis, Articles & Chapters, Government, Law Enforcement, Methods & Process, Peace Intelligence

Alex P. Schmid, one of a handful of trully expert scholars in the field of terrorism and counter-terrorism, and his colleague Rashmi Singh, have created a summary that is devasting on multiple fronts. The “Global War on Terror” or GWOT has lasted longer than World Wars I and II combined; the money expended (the authors do not include the military costs of occupying Afghanistan and Iraq) has been enormous, and in all that time, no one has defined the metrics by which to measure the endeavor. The chapter in included in After the War on Terror: Regional and Multilateral Perspectives on Counter-TerrorismStrategy

See also:

Search: Strategic Analytic Model

Search: QDR “four forces after next”

2009/12/012009/12/01

Journal: Why they hate us (II): How many Muslims has the U.S. killed in the past 30 years?

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, Academia, Civil Society, Ethics, Government, Military

Tom Friedman had an especially fatuous column in Sunday's New York Times, which is saying something given his well-established capacity for smug self-assurance. According to Friedman, the big challenge we face in the Arab and Islamic world is “the Narrative” — his patronizing term for Muslim views about America's supposedly negative role in the region.

. . . . . . .

I heard a different take on this subject at a recent conference on U.S. relations with the Islamic world. In addition to hearing a diverse set of views from different Islamic countries, one of the other participants (a prominent English journalist) put it quite simply. “If the United States wants to improve its image in the Islamic world,” he said, “it should stop killing Muslims.”

Phi Beta Iota: The chart is below the fold, or at the Full Story Online

Continue reading “Journal: Why they hate us (II): How many Muslims has the U.S. killed in the past 30 years?”

2009/11/292009/11/29

Journal: ClimateGate Meets Yamal Divergence

03 Environmental Degradation, Academia, Analysis, Commerce, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Key Players, Media, Methods & Process, Policies, Reform, Strategy

Phi Beta Iota: ClimateGate has outraged us for two reasons–first, the lack of integrity among the scientists and the selected United Nations officials concerned; and second, the naivete, ignorance, or corruption of government officials all too eager to create a new Global Warming Complex that profits from carbon trades (another form of phantom wealth) while imposing severe social costs on the five billion poor. ENOUGH. Below the fold are the original comments of Contributing Editor Chuck Spinney, relating past Pentagon data manipulation with the data manipulation that charactizes the Climate Change movement. It is our view that the UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) should be disbanded, while the UN High Level Panel and the UN Environmental Program, both of which kept their integrity intact, are asked to create a World Brain with embedded EarthGame that can address all ten high level threats (environmental degradation is third, after poverty and infectious disease) by providing the world with information that allows the harmonization of spending across all twelve core policy areas in a manner attractive to the eight demographic challengers (Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and Wild Cards such as the Congo, Malaysia, and Turkey).

Yamal: A “Divergence” Problem by Steve McIntyre, Climate Audit, September 27th, 2009
Continue reading “Journal: ClimateGate Meets Yamal Divergence”