Communities of Practice – Page 1032 – Public Intelligence Blog

2012/02/12

Berto Jongman: From the Edge of the Abyss – FBI, DNS Routers, Mossad & You – Back-Up Everything, Wait and See?

I do not know what this means but it is interesting.

February 11, 2012

Planned US Internet Blackout On March 8 Raises Concerns

By: Sorcha Faal

A disturbing Ministry of Trade report circulating in the Kremlin today is raising serious concerns over the United States plan to shut down significant parts of the Internet on 8 March in a move many Russian experts warn could be a prelude to massive attacks against the growing number of dissidents in that country.

According to this report, The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) will unplug on 8 March the Domain Name System (DNS) servers it set up to replace rogue DNS servers that sent victims to malicious sites. A report on Infoworld said the removal of this temporary fix may affect “a substantial number” of users, as half of Fortune 500 companies and US government agencies are infected with the malware, not to mention tens-of-millions of privately owned American computers.

Read rest of article.

Phi Beta Iota: When government gets into areas it really does not fully understand, “first do no harm” and the precautionary principle should be foremost in the managing agency head's mind. There is also the matter of the Israeli Mossad and their long history of penetrating governments with malware, ostensibly in pursuit of their own “higher good” never mind the cost to others. Bottom line: A few extraordinary successes aside, no one seems to have a grip on the cyber terrain over which their diplomatic, information, military, and economic communications are running.

2012/02/122012/02/12

Penguin: “Or Your Lying Eyes…” Truth and Fiction in the News Business – Conspiracy of Lies While US Networks Prepare & Rehearse for Israeli Attack on Iran

Corruption, Government, IO Deeds of War, Media, Military

“Or Your Lying Eyes…” Truth and Fiction in the News Business

Alex Cockburn

Counterpunch, Weekend Edition February 10-12, 2012

If you want a sense of what could well lie in store for Syria, go no further than Anthony Shadid’s report from Libya in the New York Times for February 9. Shadid, a good reporter, describes a dismembered country, rent by banditry.

EXTRACT:

As Byrne reported,

“Of the three main sources for all data on numbers of protesters killed and numbers of people attending demonstrations – the pillars of the narrative – all are part of the ‘regime change’ alliance. The Syrian Observatory of Human Rights, in particular, is reportedly funded through a Dubai-based fund with pooled (and therefore deniable) Western-Gulf money (Saudi Arabia alone has, according to Elliot Abrams allocated US$130 billion to ‘palliate the masses’ of the Arab Spring).

What appears to be a nondescript British-based organization, the Observatory has been pivotal in sustaining the narrative of the mass killing of thousands of peaceful protesters using inflated figures, ‘facts’, and often exaggerated claims of ‘massacres’ and even recently ‘genocide’.”

And from the Arab League Report:

Continue reading “Penguin: “Or Your Lying Eyes…” Truth and Fiction in the News Business – Conspiracy of Lies While US Networks Prepare & Rehearse for Israeli Attack on Iran”

2012/02/122012/02/12

Owl: Shyness, Grieving Classified as Mental Illness Treatable by Drugs, Incarceration of Sane Next?

07 Health, 07 Other Atrocities, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Earth Intelligence, Government, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Uncategorized

An article like this poses the question – who is really insane, psychiatrists or the people they treat? When readers finish this article, they may vote for the former.

“In a damning analysis of an upcoming revision of the influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychologists, psychiatrists and mental health experts said its new categories and “tick-box” diagnosis systems were at best “silly” and at worst “worrying and dangerous.” Some diagnoses – for conditions like “oppositional defiant disorder” and “apathy syndrome” – risk devaluing the seriousness of mental illness and medicalising behaviors most people would consider normal or just mildly eccentric, the experts said. At the other end of the spectrum, the new DSM, due out next year, could give medical diagnoses for serial rapists and sex abusers – under labels like “paraphilic coercive disorder” – and may allow offenders to escape prison by providing what could be seen as an excuse for their behavior, they added.

Continue reading “Owl: Shyness, Grieving Classified as Mental Illness Treatable by Drugs, Incarceration of Sane Next?”

2012/02/112012/02/11

Berto Jongman: Anonymous Takes Down CIA Website + RECAP

Commerce, Corruption, Government, IO Impotency, Law Enforcement, Military

This refers to the external publicity site, not to any analytic or operational system.

Anonymous Takes Down CIA Website

Hacker group Anonymous on Friday took down the website of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), online publication PC Magazine reported.

The website is still offline.

“CIA TANGO DOWN: https://www.cia.gov/ #Anonymous,” the @YourAnonNews feed tweeted.

Anonymous did not make public the attack’s details, but the group’s hackers normally use distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks to knock their targets offline.

“We are aware of the problems accessing our website, and are working to resolve them,” CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood said Friday night as quoted by the CNN.

Last month, Anonymous briefly took down the websites of the Department of Justice and the FBI in retaliation for the Megaupload file sharing site’s shutdown.

Phi Beta Iota: The solution was clearly stated in 1994 and again in 2010. Until the US Government gets a grip on “Smart Nation” and “Whole Earth” concepts of security at the code level, migrating to open source software across the board, and reinforcing all the shared nodes, it will continue to be easy to take down individual capabilities. And if all else fails, most systems can be taken down by cutting their obvious external big wires and/or their satellite downlinks, most easily reachable from outside the wire with various means.

2012/02/102016/03/25

Robert Steele: Intelligent Management of Intelligence Agencies, and the New Craft of Intelligence

Analysis, Budgets & Funding, Collaboration Zones, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Computer/online security, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Ethics, Geospatial, Hacking, History, Information Operations (IO), Intelligence (government), Key Players, Methods & Process, Officers Call, Open Government, Policies, Real Time, Reform, Resilience, Serious Games, Strategy, Technologies, Threats, Waste (materials, food, etc), Whole Earth Review

steele formal high res — Robert David STEELE Vivas

I have begun drafting my portion of the new Handbook of Intelligence Studies (Routledge, 2013), it is a chapter early on entitled “The Craft of Intelligence.” I pick up where Allen Dulles and Sherman Kent left off. My graphic on Intelligence Maturity captures the essence of my thinking at the strategic level, but of course there is more to come, including the desperate need to restore integrity to all that we do.

In 1988 I ghost-wrote for the Commandant of the Marine Corps an article that he enhanced and signed, “Global Intelligence Challenges in the 1990's.” At that time my focus was on the difference between the conventional threat and the emerging unconventional threat.

Now my focus is on the purpose and process of intelligence as decision-support. We must — we will — move from secret intelligence for the few to open intelligence for the many; from expensive centralized largely worthless intelligence to free and low-cost distributed intelligence relevant to every person at every level on every issue; from intelligence as window-dressing for channeling $80 billion a year to banks and corporations, to intelligence as an integral element of every aspect of a Smart Nation.

Today Owl sent me a link to an article, Philip E. Tetlock and Barabara A Mellers, “Intelligent Management of Intelligence Agencies,” American Psychologist, 2011, pp. 1-12. I respect Owl, so I printed it and read it twice.

This article is completely out of touch with reality and the authors have not bothered to familiarize themselves with the literatures pertinent to their endeavor. Out of 89 cited sources 12 are non-intelligence-related prior publications of the lead author, 1 is a prior publication of the second author, and 11 are ostensibly about intelligence but truly marginal selections. So 12% sources on the subject, 13% self-citation, and 75% escoteric psycho-babble irrelevant to the actual challenge. As an intelligence professional, I am offended that two ostensibly erudite individuals would dare to publish this trype without even a semblance of understanding of the subject under discussion.

Here are a few comments and additional links:

Continue reading “Robert Steele: Intelligent Management of Intelligence Agencies, and the New Craft of Intelligence”

2012/02/10

John Robb: Four Sources of Trust, Crypto Not Scaling….

Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Computer/online security, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Methods & Process, Officers Call, Policies, Threats

Why The Global System is Killing Trust

Posted: 09 Feb 2012 03:35 PM PST

Trust is an essential building block of any economic and social system. Systems that attempt to operate without it inevitably fail. A loss of trust typically preceeds a collapse in legitimacy.

That's our future. Here's why:

Let's start with a philosopher “king” of crypt0-security, Bruce Schneier. He has a new book out called Liars and Outliers: Eneabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive (Wiley, 2012).

The book is all about the mechanisms for building trust. There are four mechanisms:

moral controls,
reputational pressure (shame),
institutional pressure (legal system), and
security controls (encryption, locks, etc.).

He contends (rightly) that in the modern world, we don't typically make/have the personal relationships required to build moral and reputational trust. We typically make impersonal relationships when we interact with a global economic system (you buy stuff made by people you don't know). As a result, we rely up on institutional (legal compliance) and security (to guard against bad behavior) to provide the level of trust necessary to make the global economy work.

There are two massive problems with that.

Legal compliance is increasingly a farce. Take the mortgage settlement the US government and the financial industry reached over rampant fraud in mortgage lending. I wrote a bit more about it on the Resilient Community blog if you want more detail. What does this mean? That even at the national level in a “developed country” it is impossible to use legal means to enforce trustworthiness (let's not even talk about compliance at the global level). It's doesn't work anymore. It's just too easy for anybody with financial means, to buy off country's legal system for pennies on the dollar (to the damage caused). The compliance system is broken.

So, that leaves us with security as the only way to prevent bad actors from running away with the global system. This leads me to a great presentation I heard yesterday by Dan Geer. He's another philosopher “king” of crypto-security (but for the CIA). Very smart guy. He made a convincing case that security is scaling slower than data, bandwidth, node, and user growth. It is falling behind and will continue to fall behind as the global system grows.

Upshot: it's already nearly impossible to secure big organizations. Every Fortune 500 company has and will continue to compromised. The government's systems are already a sieve. There's almost nothing that can be done about it and it will get increasingly worse. Forget about securing a single person trying to connect to the global system. They are just sheep ready for slaughter.

So, what happens now?

The global system will continue to grow. Trust will continue to leak as attempts at compliance and security fail to work effectively. The economic depression we have already started gets worse and worse and worse. Disorder erupts. It grows….

Is there a solution? An alternative form of social order that can provide a scalable global solution?

Yes. Resilient communities. Resilient communities rescale your life down to a rational level. They make personal relationships with the people that economically interact with you possible (again).

Hey, let the rest of the world sink into the squalor of a trust free world. It will make that system easier to trounce in head to head competition for people.

See Also:

Robert David Steele, THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth, & Trust (Evolver Editions, 5 June 2012)

and

Robert Garigue at Phi Beta Iota

2012/02/092012/02/09

Eagle: 300 Million Citizens – 100 Million Qualify for Poverty Phone?

Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Government, IO Deeds of Peace

Mixed feelings. Great idea — one that has been recommended for the five billion poor everywhere else in the world.

Troubling: out of 300 million citizens, 100 million qualify for this specific form of poverty assistance?

Obama Phone: Gov to Spend $2.4 Billion On Millions of Free Phones In 2012

Mac Slavo

SHTFplan.com, February 9th, 2012

One of the complaints about the U.S. Constitution recently, being as outdated as it is, is that it fails to guarantee certain unalienable rights such as free medical care, housing , food, and of course, the right to bear cell phones. And, although the founders failed to specifically cite social programs as a necessary element for promoting the general welfare, the living nature of our founding document has been interpreted by political and legal scholars alike to allow for the seizure of assets by force from one group of people in order to redistribute those assets in a fair and responsible manner to those less fortunate.

As such, if you’re one of the 100 million Americans living below or at the edge of the poverty line, you’ll be happy to know that you more than likely qualify for a free cellular phone, also known as the Obama Phone, from the US government:

Continue reading “Eagle: 300 Million Citizens – 100 Million Qualify for Poverty Phone?”