Communities of Practice – Page 935 – Public Intelligence Blog

steele smiling final — Robert David STEELE Vivas
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Open Season on CIA? – Are The Days of Living Immunity Instead of Cover Over?

I had occasion to reflect today on the past twenty years, recollecting how easily in 1992 a new path could have been taken, one that reconnected the US intelligence community to “ground truth” using open sources and methods, as well as “full spectrum” HUMINT, a term I coined. It gives me pause to recollect that 1993 was also the year in which CIA was attacked by a lone gunman at its front gate, killing two and wounding three others., an attack inspired by and stemming directly from CIA operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Although I have been an intelligence reformer since first realizing how little CIA actually knows about the business of intelligence (for example, writing the first ever Standard Operating Procedures for a (Clandestine) Field Station in 1985, along with the first ever Guide to Managing the Support Account, I have never sought to harm CIA, nor have I wished for harm to befall those that work for CIA.

Today, in the aftermath of Benghazi, a quick tour of the horizon suggests to me that CIA's days of living immunity instead of cover are over. Although my first book, ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World (AFCEA, 2000) addressed the urgency of getting serious about cover — official “cover” as practiced by CIA is a global joke — and I had a foreword from Senator David Boren (D-OK), past Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) — CIA has chosen to ignore all the signals of its looming demise as a global intelligence service.

In recent times, I have been struck by the lack of professionalism and lack of integrity that has characterized CIA's rush into renditions and torture in secret prisons, to the point that CIA officers alive and well in the USA today have been convicted in an Italian court and the way is now open for a formal extradition request. Even if they are not extradited, I would certainly recommend to those officers a complete change of name, location, and even profession. It is a certainty that one day, some angry Italian is going to be moved to hunt them down and kill them and their families–I hope without success. Other countries, other relatives, are going to start coming after CIA, not only from Iraq and Afghanistan, but from the many other countries where CIA has been both amatuerish and cavalier in its covert operations.

Continue reading “Robert Steele: Post-Benghazi — Open Season on CIA?”

2012/11/11

Yoda: Data Producing Intelligence — But Not in the “Intelligence” Community

Corruption, Government, Ineptitude, IO Impotency

yoda with light saber — Got Crowd? BE the Force!

Intelligence, this is.

Predicting presidents, storms and life by computer

Associated Press, Saturday, November 10, 2012

WASHINGTON (AP) — Forget political pundits, gut instincts, and psychics. The mightier-than-ever silicon chip seems to reveal the future.

In just two weeks this fall, computers models displayed an impressive prediction prowess.

It started when the first computer model alerted meteorologists to the pre-Halloween disaster headed for the Northeast from a bunch of clouds in the Caribbean. Nearly a week later, that weather system became Hurricane Sandy and grew into a superstorm after taking a once-in-a-century sharp turn into New Jersey.

Then, statistician and blogger Nate Silver correctly forecast on his beat-up laptop how all 50 states would vote for president. He even predicted a tie in Florida and projected it eventually would tip to President Barack Obama, which is the equivalent of predicting a coin landing on its side. He did it by taking polling data, weighing it for past accuracy and running 40,000 computer simulations at a time.

He then gave his forecast in terms of percentages, saying that Obama had a 91 percent chance of being re-elected.

In the case of Sandy, lives were at stake. With the election, reputations were on the line and some pundits were dismissive of the computer modeling. Bets were made. Challenges issued.

The math majors came out on top thanks to better and more accessible data and rapidly increasing computer power.

Continue reading “Yoda: Data Producing Intelligence — But Not in the “Intelligence” Community”

2012/11/11

SchwartzReport: Frank Rich on Fantasyland — A Public Without the Truth Gets a Government Far Removed From the Truth

Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government

Fantasyland

Denial has poisoned the GOP and threatens the rest of the country too

EXTRACT:

The country has a larger problem-‘intellectual nihilism,” as the writer Noam Scheiber recently labeled it. Since 9/11, often but not always under the right’s aegis, truth has been destabilized in America. The Bush administration’s contempt for what it dismissed as the ‘reality-based community” was vindicated when it successfully ginned up a war by convincing Americans that the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis and that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Our susceptibility to elaborate, beautifully wrought myths remains intact-whether we’re being spun by politicians, captains of finance pumping up a bubble, or sports heroes like Lance Armstrong and Joe Paterno. The news business, which we once counted on to vet hoaxes and fictions, is now so insecure about its existential future that it was cowed to some extent by the Scarboroughs, Noonans, and Roves, with most of the networks, not just Fox, ignoring the ! statistical data of Silver and others and instead predicting a long, nail-biting Election Night. (In reality, the election was called for Obama at 11:12 p.m. EST on NBC, just twelve minutes after it had been in 2008.) Our remaining journalistic institutions have even outsourced what used to be the very core of their craft, fact-checking, to surrogates relegated to gimmicky sidebars (awarding Pinocchios and ‘pants on fire”). The fact-checkers have predictably become partisan targets, only further destabilizing the whole notion of what is meant by ‘news.”

Daniel Patrick Moynihan might be surprised to learn that he is now remembered most for his oft-repeated maxim that ‘everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” Yet today most Americans do see themselves as entitled to their own facts, with one of our two major political parties setting a powerful example. For all the hand-wringing about Washington’s chronic dysfunction and lack of bipartisanship, it may be the wholesale denial of reality by the opposition and its fellow travelers that is the biggest obstacle to our country moving forward under a much-empowered Barack Obama in his second term. If truth can’t command a mandate, no one can.

Full article with many links.

2012/11/102012/11/10

SchwartzReport: Texas Republican Talks Secession

Civil Society, Corruption, Ethics, Government

TPMMuckraker

Texas Republican Wants State To Leave U.S. Over Obama Wins

A Republican official in Texas called for his state to separate from the United States and the “maggots” who reelected President Barack Obama in a newsletter he sent out this week.

Peter Morrison, who serves as treasurer of the Hardin County Republican Party, wrote in his post-election newsletter that there was a clear solution to the problem of Obama’s re-election.

“We must contest every single inch of ground and delay the baby-murdering, tax-raising socialists at every opportunity,” Morrison wrote. “But in due time, the maggots will have eaten every morsel of flesh off of the rotting corpse of the Republic, and therein lies our opportunity.”

Read full article.

Continue reading “SchwartzReport: Texas Republican Talks Secession”

2012/11/102012/11/10

Marcus Aurelius: Pararescuemen Rule

Ethics, Military

Marcus-Aurelius-150x150 — Marcus Aurelius

Pararescuemen walk line between fierce warrior, caring savior

Laura Rauch

Stars and Stripes, 29 October 2012

While their core function is combat rescue and the personnel recovery of downed aircraft, Air Force pararescue teams also fly throughout Afghanistan augmenting the Army medevac mission.

Though medevac and pararescue overlap in terms of pulling the wounded from the battlefield, they are distinctively different. While medevac adheres to the Geneva Conventions by flying in unarmed helicopters marked with red crosses, pararescue flies in unmarked birds equipped with two .50 caliber machine guns. And they carry the guardian angels.

“We are a weapons system, we are armed,” Senior Airman and Pararescueman Jason Sweet said. “We’re shooters, divers, jumpers, technical rescue specialists. We’re ready to rescue anyone, anywhere, anytime.”

While the inception of Air Force combat rescue began in 1947, its legacy has been forged in every conflict since Korea.

The helicopters fly in pairs, one designated as the trail aircraft, and one as lead. Each is capable of landing in the hot zone or providing covering fire from above.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: Peace Jumpers capable of calling in precision parachute drops are a variation of this idea. They too would have guardian angels, but the focus would be on protection from proven rapid delivery of what is needed on the ground in the moment.

2012/11/102012/11/10

Mini-Me: Benghazi — DoD “Timeline” and Reason for Not Dispatching Armed Aircraft (Incomplete Intelligence Picture on the Ground)

Government, Ineptitude, Military

Huh?

EXTRACT:

“Due to the incomplete intelligence picture on the ground, armed aircraft options were simply not feasible.”

DOD Releases Detailed Timeline for Benghazi Response

Dorian De Wind

The Moderate Voice, 10 November 2012

The Defense Department released a detailed timeline yesterday of the Pentagon’s response to the September attack in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead, including U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.

The following is the verbatim 10 November news release by the American Forces Press Service:

A senior defense official, speaking on background with Pentagon reporters, emphasized the rapid consultation, planning and troop pre-deployment actions defense leaders undertook in the first hours following the attack.

“With naval, Marine, special operations and air forces either employed or en route to Libya during the attacks, we responded,” the official said. “We mourn the loss of four American heroes in Benghazi.”

The military’s initial response began within minutes of the first incident in Benghazi, the official said: the attack on the U.S. consulate began at 3:42 p.m. EDT [9:42 p.m. Benghazi time], and by 5:10 EDT an unarmed surveillance aircraft was on station over the Benghazi compound.

Continue reading “Mini-Me: Benghazi — DoD “Timeline” and Reason for Not Dispatching Armed Aircraft (Incomplete Intelligence Picture on the Ground)”

2012/11/092012/11/09

Yoda: Research Fraud Has Exploded in Past Decade — Pattern of Fraud in Education, Intelligence, & Research

Academia, Commerce, Corruption, IO Impotency

Sad, this is.

Research fraud exploded over the last decade

And retractions don't always mention when data's fraudulent (43% of the time, in fact).

A number of studies have spotted a worrisome trend: although the number of scientific journals and articles published is increasing each year, the rate of papers being retracted as invalid is increasing even faster. Some of these are being retracted due to obvious ethical lapses—fraudulent data or plagiarism—but some past studies have suggested errors and technical problems were the cause of the majority of problems. (…) The authors find that, since 1975, the rate of retracted articles as a percent of total publications has increased nearly tenfold. Duplicate publications and plagiarism, which didn't use to be a significant problem, have boomed since 2005. And while retractions due to errors have increased, those due to fraud have increased much faster.

. . . . . . . .

Patterns of deceit

When it comes to fraud, the traditional research powers are leading the way. The US has the largest number of cases, followed by Germany and Japan. But things like plagiarism and duplicating publications are quite different, with China being a major player, and India having a large presence. These sorts of copying problems are rare in high-profile journals like Nature and Science. Instead, there was a strong correlation between the incidence of fraud and the prominence of the journal, as measured by its impact factor.

Continue reading “Yoda: Research Fraud Has Exploded in Past Decade — Pattern of Fraud in Education, Intelligence, & Research”