Communities of Practice – Page 969 – Public Intelligence Blog

I can not judge this source … I do not know anything about the publication — the article is fascinating. In 2008, I visited Temple Mount and saw the Israeli archaeology project, which literally abuts the al Aqsa Mosque. Totally sealed off and makes it inconvenient for Palestinians to visit mosque. If they decide to rebuild temple, they will have to destroy mosque — I need not tell what that means.

Surely, Israelis understand that means going to the mattresses with the entire Arab world (including Christian Arabs because they depend on religious tolerance which is more prevalent among moslems than jew in that part of world). In fact, rebuilding the temple could unite Shi'ites and Sunnis. Netanyahu, for all his rhetoric, is more cautious about starting wars — look at his track record — he is a master of bluffing. Olmert and perhaps Barak are more dangerous.

The problem of course, is controlling the right wing crazies in Israel, and IDF is definitely getting more religious. The really tragic irony in all this is the most Israelis come from or are descended from eastern Europeans (Netanyahu is of Lithuanian descent), and in all probability, the vast bulk of E. European Jewry is descended from Kazars who converted from paganism to Judiaism 400-800 years AFTER the temple was destroyed. The true descendants of the Jews who suffered the Roman persecution are probably the Palestinians who converted to Islam. A distinguished Israeli historian at U. of Tel Aviv, Schlomo Sand, has written a stunning history of the Jewish “diaspora” that concluded most was the result of conversion not migration. The name of the book is The Invention of Jewish People. I really recommend it.

Chuck

Israel – Temple Mount War Moves Begin as Iran Back Up

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Invented People Plan War Over Temple on the Mount”

2012/07/272012/07/27

Michel Bauwens: Peer-to-peer production and the coming of the commons | Red Pepper

03 Economy, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Economics/True Cost, Ethics, Government, Hacking

220px-Michel_Bauwens_crop — Michel Bauwens

Peer-to-peer production and the coming of the commons | Red Pepper

Michel Bauwens examines how collaborative, commons-based production is emerging to challenge capitalism. Below, Hilary Wainwright responds

Capitalism in its present form is facing limits, especially resource limits, and in spite of the rapid growth of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) economies, is undergoing a process of decomposition. The question is whether the new proto-mode can generate the institutional capacity and the alliances able to break the political power of the old order.

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2012/07/272012/07/27

John Robb: 3D Printing of Weapons – Public Power by Printer

10 Security, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Hacking, Hardware, Liberation Technology

Printing Weapons at Home for Fun and Mayhem

It's now possible to print functional weapons at home. This is going to progress rapidly now.

Think: global file sharing of designs for servicable weapons, from pistols on up to ?, that can be printed at home. What you can print — from the materials to the size/quality of the object to the completeness (snap together construction) — is already moving forward quickly. The weapons effort will just be along for the ride.

“HaveBlue” has tested the first “printed” firearm and it works. Here's his site, but it's VERY slow. It didn't blow up in his face.

Granted, he used an older professional grade Stratys 3D printer to do it. Printeres are much better now and handle many new materials.

Haveblue has been testing the “market” for distributing CAD/CAM weapons designs. His post of an earlier design to Thingverse (a site for 3D printing design patterns) led to a change in their policy (although it hasn't been enforced).

Haveblue's work is based on the Solidworks files available for download from the CNCguns site. Here's his earlier project:

Phi Beta Iota: Violence should be a last resort — publics today are far from fully exploiting the use of public intelligence in the public interest. However, it bears mention that both Gandhi and Martin Luther King were quite clear: non-violence is preferable to violence, but violence is preferable to continued oppression. Most governments, including the European governments still favoring banks over people and refusing to honor the Iceland model, no longer represent their publics and have lost all legitimacy in the eyes of many. We pray they will awaken to the reality that those governments that do not empower, protect, and respect the public, will ultimately be abolished. In the meantime, they are merely ignored.

2012/07/262012/07/26

Tom Atlee: Expanding our capacity for “unitary democracy”

Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government

Expanding our capacity for “unitary democracy”

Below are highlights from Jane Mansbridge's IN CONTEXT article “Unitary & Adversary: The Two Forms of Democracy”, which was itself an excerpt from her book BEYOND ADVERSARY DEMOCRACY (1983) which has had a significant impact on my thinking.

I often use Mansbridge's distinction between (1) “unitary democracy” based on consensus arising from conversations about common interests shared by people who know each other and (2) “adversary democracy” based on majority votes among competing interest groups who may think they have little reason to take each other seriously.

Mansbridge clearly believes that adversary democracy must necessarily predominate in large complex societies where people don't know each other. However, she also believes its toxic effects should be ameliorated by the practice of unitary democracy at local levels and in official governing bodies, as well as through more cooperative forms of economics.

I think the landscape of democratic possibilities she was observing in the 1960s and 70s has been transformed by modern social technologies – conflict resolution, group process, organizational development, networked communications, journalism, multi-media storytelling and, especially, social microcosm design. These technologies are making it possible to bring unitary democracy to more issues and greater scales than ever before.

When I say “social microcosm design”, I'm referring to our ability to select groups of 10-1000 people whose diversity accurately reflects the diversity of a whole population or community. We are increasingly able to convene such “fair cross-section minipublics” in face-to-face conversation. Once we do that, we can apply powerful group processes – advanced forms of dialogue, deliberation, choice creating, etc. – to this smaller group in ways that evoke, reflect and activate the highest collective intelligence and wisdom of the population from which they were drawn.

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2012/07/262012/07/26

Penguin: Official Report on 2011 Cost of Intelligence “Security”

Corruption, Government, Knowledge, Politics

good indication…” that we are out of our minds

Information Security Oversight Office 2011 Cost Report

Phi Beta Iota: The cost, totalling $12 billion, is as good as a deceptive bureaucracy can provide. Our own estimate based on other sources over time is that it is closer to $15-20 billion, and this is without considering the cost of lost productivity, lost critical access to multiple data bases (the National Counterterrorism Center, for example, should be included in any calculation of the cost of idiocy, along with half or more of the cost of the Department of Homeland Security and half the cost of the Pentagon). Then of course one has the complex cost of dereliction of duty across all the Cabinet functional areas. Good people trapped in a bad system that is totally lacking in both intelligence and integrity.

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2012/07/262012/07/26

Search: future of osint

#OSE Open Source Everything, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Future-Oriented, Hacking, Information Operations (IO), Key Players, Liberation Technology, Mobile, Policies, Threats

For reasons unknown to us, Google search with source=phibetaiota are superior to internal Word Press searches.

Here are top three hits using the above formula.

Search: The Future of OSINT [is M4IS2-Multinational]

Open Source Agency: Executive Access Point

OSINT Generic (Category Table at Phi Beta Iota)

OSINT is passe. Governments and vendors to government have wasted 20 years and perhaps 25 billion dollars in that time. The refusal to focus on machine-speed translation and inserting geospatial attributes at all points of collection across all collection disciplines, while also refusing to accept multinational human sources unemcumbered by the idiocy of the clearance bureaucracy, have left governments in the stone age. The next big leap is going to be M4IS2 that routes around governments or — if governments reconnect to their integrity — embraces governments as beneficiaries of M4IS2 (they will never be the benefactors, but one Smart Nation could transform everything overnight). The biggest change in our own thinking has been the realization that education, intelligence, and research must be reinvented together, and that Open Source Everything is the only agile, acalable, shareable, and affordable means of achieving the necessary pervasive transformations.

2012/07/252016/03/26

Reflections on Data as the New Oil BUT No One Is Serious About Holistic Analytics, True Cost Economics, Machine or Man-Machine Translation, or M4IS2

All Reflections & Story Boards, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Information Operations (IO), Knowledge

steele formal high res — Robert David STEELE Vivas

It is fashionable now to talk about data as the new oil (or dirt), and to proclaim breathlessly that the ever-increasing masses of data allow for ever more wonderous things to be done including my personal favorite, situational awareness.

However, no one is yet serious about holistic analytics (which also implies a holistic collection management strategy and a clear definition of both what is to be collected and what is to be done with anomalous data encountered in passing). Neither is anyone serious about True Cost Economics, Man-Machine Translation, Global Near-Real-Time Crowd-Sourcing (for observations, translations, and culturally-grounded interpretations) or M4IS2 (Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making).

I cannot help but recall my briefing to the National Research Council in 1994, when I was asked to comment on the US Army's multi-billion dollar communications plan for the future. I pointed out the obvious: the US Army was assuming that all data would be generated from within the US Army or other US Government systems, and was making no provision for ingesting and digesting data from the 99% of the data sources outside the US Army. Of course they blew me off then, and they still do not get it today, 22 years later.

Continue reading “Reflections on Data as the New Oil BUT No One Is Serious About Holistic Analytics, True Cost Economics, Machine or Man-Machine Translation, or M4IS2”