Category: Communities of Practice

Posted on

Journal: That Should Be Classified….

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, Cultural Intelligence, Government
DefDog

I continue to hear military and civilian IC folks belittle Open Source.  I passed this around to show them what can be done and all I get is the response, “this should be classified”.  They cannot believe it is from purely open source data…..link provided due to size of document…

The Haqqani Network: From Pakistan to Afghanistan

Key Findings

The Haqqani network, which has the backing of elements within the Pakistani security establishment, is one of Afghanistan’s most experienced and sophisticated insurgent organizations.

Although the Haqqani network is officially subsumed under the larger Taliban umbrella organization led by Mullah Omar and his Quetta Shura Taliban, the Haqqanis maintain distinct command and control, and lines of operations.

Siraj Haqqani, the son of the famous anti-Soviet fighter Jalaluddin Haqqani, is the current leader of the Haqqani network. Siraj is more extreme than his father and maintains closer ties to al-Qaeda and other foreign extremists in Pakistan.

The Haqqani network maintains a safe haven in North Waziristan, Pakistan, across Afghanistan’s southeastern border. The Pakistani Army has consistently refused to launch a military operation in North Waziristan despite the presence of al-Qaeda senior leadership.

Elements within the Pakistani security establishment continue to view the Haqqani network as a useful ally and proxy force to represent their interests in Afghanistan. To this end, Haqqani forces have repeatedly targeted Indian infrastructure and construction projects in Afghanistan.

The Haqqani Network Afghanistan Report #6 October 12, 2010 Jeffrey Dressler .  . Haqqani_Network.pdf

Phi Beta Iota: It is now known that Pakistan successfully fooled the most experienced CIA officers in the world, leading them to believe for decades that the Pakistani ISI elements dealing with the Taliban were “renegades” whose misbehavior was not sanctioned by the government.  We now know that every move, every word was sanctioned, and we now can calculate that at least half of the money from CIA intended for Afghanistan was siphoned off to fund Pakistani priorities and private bank accounts.  If CIA cannot figure this out while it is happening, why should we trust them to figure anything else out?  A major reason CIA did NOT know what it needed to know was because then and now it refuses to actually deal in depth with anyone lacking clearances or US citizenship.  The one decent initiative CIA had, apart from Project GEORGE, was the Global Futures Partnership.  Both died in infancy.  Nothing has changed.

See Also:
Posted on

Journal: Terminator to Feds–“Can You Spell Nullify?”

10 Security, 11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Government
State Rights Emergent

Marijuana in California: Prop. 19 won't stop federal drug enforcement

Even if voters pass Proposition 19 on Nov. 2, which would legalize use of marijuana in California, the Justice Department will continue to enforce federal drug laws there, Attorney General Eric Holder said Friday.

Read full story….

Phi Beta Iota:  States have the right to secede from the Union–they also have the right to nullify federal regulations within the state.  Over in Virginia, suit has been filed against the mandatory purchase of health insurance.  What we are seeing is the coming end to both the Federal Reserve and the Federal Empire.  The federal government is supposed to be a service of common concern to the United STATES of America, but over time, the “top two” parties have conspired to exclude the other 63 parties and their members from both politics and governance, and to exclude the Governors and state from governance.   The world is changing.  The spectacle of an Attorney General who is obviously loosely-educated and has no clue that he is a servant of the people, not their master, more or less sums up the state of the federal government…..dead in the water and sinking fast.  IOHO.

ALERT READER observes:

Thanks, also a note to your posting on States rights….look what is happening in the foreclosure world, 49 States are now looking into the legal issues while the feds say there is nothing wrong….

See Also:

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Leadership for Epoch B

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Self-Determination & Secession

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Diversity of Voices & Values (USA)

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Disinformation, Other Information Pathologies, & Repression

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Empire as Cancer Including Betrayal & Deceit

Worth a Look: Impeachable Offenses, Modern & Historic

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Institutionalized Ineptitude

Posted on

Journal: WikiLeaks Losing Funding Channel, Plot Thickens

07 Other Atrocities, Civil Society, Military, Peace Intelligence

Full Story Online

WikiLeaks says funding has been blocked after government blacklisting

Founder Julian Assange hits out at decision by Moneybookers, which collects the whistleblowing website's donations

The whistleblowing group WikiLeaks claims that it has had its funding blocked and that it is the victim of financial warfare by the US government.

Moneybookers, a British-registered internet payment company that collects WikiLeaks donations, emailed the organisation to say it had closed down its account because it had been put on an official US watchlist and on an Australian government blacklist.

Read Full Story….

Phi Beta Iota: This is interesting at multiple levels and requires further investigation.  As best we can tell, WikiLeaks is not subject to US secrecy REGULATIONS and US laws do not apply–if anyone knows differently, please let us know.  We believe Moneybookers when they say the US Government did not call on them.  This reeks of lawyers with too much power over simple business decisions.  We do not trust WikiLeaks management to be completely honest.  Finally, it is not possible to censor information once it is out.  As John Perry Barlow said so famously at OSS '92, “The Internet interprets censorship as an outage, and routes around it.”

Continue reading “Journal: WikiLeaks Losing Funding Channel, Plot Thickens”

Posted on

Journal: Tracking Animal Abusers Begins

09 Justice, 11 Society, Cultural Intelligence, Law Enforcement
I know where you live....

Animal Abuse Registry: Suffolk County, NY Creating Nation's First Public Database Tracking Animal Cruelty Offenders

FARMINGVILLE, N.Y. — You've heard of Megan's Laws, designed to keep sex offenders from striking again. Now there's a law created in the hope of preventing animal abusers from inflicting more cruelty – or moving on to human victims.

Suffolk County, on the eastern half of Long Island, moved to create the nation's first animal abuse registry this week, requiring people convicted of cruelty to animals to register or face jail time and fines.

“We know there is a very strong correlation between animal abuse and domestic violence,” said Suffolk County legislator Jon Cooper, the bill's sponsor. “Almost every serial killer starts out by torturing animals, so in a strange sense we could end up protecting the lives of people.”

Phi Beta Iota: Would you hire a known animal abuser to walk your dogs?  What is interesting about this is not the context, but the fact of.  What can be tracked will be tracked.  There will be PerpFax service just like CarFax.  No place to hide–and virtual justice will also be done, as people who buy their way out of high crimes are “outed” everywhere they go.  Non-violent shaming and shunning…now there's an ancient concept coming back to life.

Posted on

Journal: A Conversation with Clay Shirky

Media
Full Story Online

Net Positive: A Conversation with Clay Shirky
in Media | October 14th, 2010

EXTRACT:

My current formulation is that markets supply less accountability than democracies demand—that if you leave the presence of accountability to an entirely market-driven press corps, you get less coverage than democracies need to survive. And we’ve had all of these ways in the past of subsidizing that, right? So broadcast news had to be subsidized because the FCC said so when they handed out the licenses, and newspapers subsidized it because they had essentially enjoyed local monopolies but were relatively free of too much interference by advertisers. But a lot of those old subsidies are breaking. So the advertising subsidies that newspapers enjoyed, and the subsidies that were essentially required by the federal government of broadcast outlets, are all going away at the same time, and they’re all going away for the same reason, which is to say, none of those subsidies survive abundance. So the question I’m asking myself is—assuming this hypothesis is right—what are other ways that society can subsidize the kind of journalism that leads to accountability of elites, principally politicians but also business and religious elites? I don’t know the answer to that. There’s a lot of interesting experiments: ProPublica, Spot.us, GroundReport. But that’s the question I’m turning my attention to.

Tip of the Hat to Stan Garfield at LinkedIn.

See Also:

Review (Guest): Cognitive Surplus–Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age

Review: Here Comes Everybody–The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

Review: The World Is Open–How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education

Review: Everything Is Miscellaneous–The Power of the New Digital Disorder

Review: Mobilizing Minds–Creating Wealth From Talent in the 21st Century Organization

Posted on

Reference: Daring to Dream

Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Key Players, Policies

33 Pages Online

Seven Challenges

1.  Restoring Belief in the Future  to Overcome Fear, Pessimism, and Passivity

2.  Cultivating Leaders Who are Thoughtful, Inspiring, and Think Long-Term

3.  Empowering Six Billion People Economically and Politically

4.  Harmonizing Cultural, Racial, and Gender Differences in a  Globalizing World

5.  Reinventing an Outdated Educational System for the 21st Century

6.  Guiding Technological Progress Wisely

7.  Addressing Climate Change and Creating Social and Environmental Responsibility

Tip of the Hat to Paul Harper.

Phi Beta Iota: There are two sucking chest wounds in this otherwise superb report:  first, the complete absence of any sort of strategic analytic model with which to actually inform decisions; and second, the no doubt deliberate avoidance of the raw fact that corruption is the single largest obstacle to achieving any of these dreams, the reason the public strategic analytic model and public intelligence in the public interest are needed.

Posted on

Journal: What to do with all this data?

Analysis, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Government, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Methods & Process, Mobile, Real Time
Marjorie Hlava Taxodiary Home

October 15, 2010
Posted in Business strategy, News, indexing, metadata

October 15, 2010 – Large institutions have massive amounts of data in this modern age, the question is what to do with all of it. Extracting the right information can help avoid waste, delays, systems failures, even terrorist threats. A perfect example is Toyota’s customer support and repair data. If business intelligence had been applied and management had been looking, they would have noticed that something was going terribly wrong.

NewsBreak brought this to our attention in their article, “Search and Business Intelligence: The Humble Inverted Index Wins Again.” Business intelligence means mining through all that digital data—in legacy systems, databases, and even spreadsheets—and reporting what’s going on. Institutions with all that data know its value. When implemented well, business intelligence can be a huge success to all involved.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.

Phi Beta Iota: The two graphics below, one from the 1990's the other very recent, sum up all that governments and businesses simply do not get, do not practice, and do not leverage.  Dashboards, like Smart Phones, are fairly stupid.  Existing “data mining” systems do not adapt, scale, or make sense in relation to externalities.  It takes humans to do that, and not geek IT humans but rather all-source holistic analytics humans.  We have a ways to go.

Graphic: Four Quadrants J-2 High Cell SMS Low

Graphic: OSINT and Full-Spectrum HUMINT (Updated)