Category: Commerce

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Wyly Brothers, Top Republican Bankrollers, Accused of Massive Fraud

09 Justice, Commerce, Corruption, Open Government, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy
article source

By Dave Levinthal on July 29, 2010

Charles Wyly Jr. and Samuel Wyly, Texas businessmen and brothers who are among the nation's most generous campaign donors to Republican political candidates and causes, were today hit with a Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit accusing them of fraud worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

The SEC accuses the Wylys of pocketing $550 million in undisclosed money over 13 years.

“The cloak of secrecy has been lifted from the complex web of foreign structures used by the Wylys to evade the securities laws,” Lorin Reisner, the SEC’s deputy enforcement director, said in a statement this afternoon. “They used these structures to conceal hundreds of millions of dollars of gains in violation of the disclosure requirements for corporate insiders.”

Beneficiaries of Wyly brothers cash together compose a who's who of the decade's most notable Republicans, with dozens of top GOP partisans' campaign coffers touched by Wyly money.

Together with their wives, the Wyly brothers have donated nearly $2.5 million to Republican candidates and committees during the past 20 years, a Center for Responsive Politics analysis reveals. Continue reading “Wyly Brothers, Top Republican Bankrollers, Accused of Massive Fraud”

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Journal: Google, CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web Monitoring

Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Government, Intelligence (government), IO Mapping, Methods & Process

WIRED DANGER ROOM

  • By Noah Shachtman July 28, 2010  |Categories: Spies, Secrecy and Surveillance

    • The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

    The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

    The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.

    Recorded Future strips from web pages the people, places and activities they mention. The company examines when and where these events happened (“spatial and temporal analysis”) and the tone of the document (“sentiment analysis”). Then it applies some artificial-intelligence algorithms to tease out connections between the players. Recorded Future maintains an index with more than 100 million events, hosted on Amazon.com servers. The analysis, however, is on the living web.

    FULL STORY ONLINE

    Phi  Beta Iota: Both CIA and Google (as well as DoD/USDI) are treating OSINT as a technical processing problem.  They will fail for lack of focus on human intelligence–all humans, all minds, all the time; and for lack of respect of the four quadrants cubed (knowledge, new craft, spivak).  When they can overcome the web of fragmented knowledge, and get a grip on all information in all languages all the time (the information cube), we will be impressed.  Right now, Google is nowhere near getting a grip on everything digital, let alone analog or unpublished.

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    Reference: IC-Zilla Epitaph

    03 Economy, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Commerce, Corruption, DHS, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Government, Law Enforcement, Media Reports, Military, True Cost

    The Final Word from a Three-Agency SIS

    28 July 2010

    In my opinion the Washington Post series that exposed the exponential increase in the size and cost of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) was not taken seriously by official Washington and is considered a minor nuisance. That is why the only response to the series, as crafted by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), was largely vintage intelligence agency boilerplate with a few bizarre additions such as the claim that the collection and analysis of intelligence are not essential government functions of intelligence agencies and so can be left to contractor personal. The series did not merit a serious response in the thinking of the Executive Branch and Intelligence Community.

    In fact the series, although much touted, was a huge disappointment to readers expecting a more deeply researched and in-depth look at the IC. Clearly the craft of investigative journalism has fallen on hard times.

    Also it is the case that in this country quantity always trumps quality. The growth in the size of the Intelligence Community is taken by official Washington as a priori evidence of the value it has provided since 9/11. The facts that the current IC is ruinously expensive to operate, is producing largely worthless intelligence, and has frequently failed even in the most basic warning functions are irrelevant. A bloated IC serves as ‘proof’ that political Washington is serious about protecting American citizens from terrorist threats. As with quantity, in the political arena form always trumps substance.

    Continue reading “Reference: IC-Zilla Epitaph”

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    Event: 29-31 July 2010, Berkeley CA, Open Science Summit

    01 Poverty, 02 Infectious Disease, 04 Education, 07 Health, 10 Security, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Government, Reform, Technologies
    event link

    Objectives:  Create an annual flagship event and news hub to build and maintain the identity of the international Open Science Movement.  Organize the various sub-communities into an effective, global, socio-technological force for rapid change in science/innovation policy. An attempt to gather all stakeholders who want to liberate our scientific and technological commons and enable a new era of decentralized, distributed innovation to solve humanity’s greatest challenges. Continue reading “Event: 29-31 July 2010, Berkeley CA, Open Science Summit”

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    Crises of Capitalism Audio + Animation

    01 Brazil, 02 China, 03 Economy, 03 India, 08 Wild Cards, Audio, Civil Society, Commerce, Government, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Videos/Movies/Documentaries

    This is an audio presentation by David Harvey accompanied by an animation that shows an interesting series of recent historical and geographical connections in the global financial system. The speaker admits to not having any solutions, but only providing the overview of what has happened.

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    U.S. Blunder in Africa: PlayPumps Not Play

    01 Poverty, 12 Water, Civil Society, Commerce, Government, Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Media, Misinformation & Propaganda, Non-Governmental
    Play becomes work with playpump + eventually no water, no maintenance, and elder women can't use it. See synopsis and watch the Frontline video here

    (clips from the synopsis about the Frontline video documentary)
    Five years ago, Amy Costello reported a story for FRONTLINE/World. It was about the challenges of getting water in Africa, and a promising new technology called the PlayPump.

    After years of covering “bad news” in Africa, she was happy to report a story that seemed to offer something to cheer about. Her story showed how simple it might be for children to pump fresh water just by playing. Behind it all, a South African entrepreneur named Trevor Field.

    “A report commissioned by the Mozambique government on the PlayPump that was never released, cited problems with the pumps – women finding it difficult to operate; pumps out of commission for up to 17 months; children not playing as expected on the merry-go-rounds, and maintenance, “a real disaster,” the report said. “

    Field had made his career in advertising, but when he heard about this new device, he formed a company and started making PlayPumps himself.

    To cover maintenance costs, he proposed selling ads on the sides of the water tower. He said the PlayPump model would be a big improvement over the hand pumps that Africans have struggled with for years.

    Continue reading “U.S. Blunder in Africa: PlayPumps Not Play”