Corruption – Page 682 – Public Intelligence Blog

Outside the normal press field, this is the second article I saw today in
CSO Salted Hash newsletter about Big Brother….

Will Obama preside over the coming of Big Brother?

Privacy advocates and civil libertarians say among the president's broken promises is a failure to restrain the NSA's growing domestic surveillance

By Taylor Armerding

April 25, 2012 — CSO —

If President Barack Obama is going to win a second term, he may have to do it without the support of privacy and civil liberties organizations, including those in information and personal security.

Increasingly the president, who was expected to fulfill the dreams of civil libertarians by creating a more open, transparent and less-intrusive government, is instead being viewed as a nightmare.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: This is not about Obama — or whoever is in the White House including Romney or Ron Paul or Hillary Clinton. This is about a financial system that is on auto-pilot, that has rotted out the core of the Republic.

The NSA possible domestic interception/collection points have been mapped and include seven AT&T and one Verizon location. Despite NSA Chief Alexander denying domestic spying, NSA whistleblower Binney told Democracy Now that the NSA is lying and has copies of all emails in the United States. Binney added that the Total Information Awareness program was alive and covertly running . . . and may still be.

Read full article, see map of seven known NSA sites focused on domestic US targets.

The Battle for the Soul of the Republic (Reality Sandwich)

2012/04/252012/04/25

Chuck Spinney: US Senate Notices Next Atomic Disaster in Japan

05 Energy, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Proliferation, 10 Security, 11 Society, Civil Society, Corruption, Earth Intelligence, Government, Intelligence (government), IO Impotency

Warning Signs for the US

Why Fukushima is a Greater Disaster Than Chernobyl

by ROBERT ALVAREZ,

Counterpunch, APRIL 24, 2012

In the aftermath of the world’s worst nuclear power disaster, the news media is just beginning to grasp that the dangers to Japan and the rest of the world posed by the Fukushima-Dai-Ichi site are far from over. After repeated warnings by former senior Japanese officials, nuclear experts, and now a U.S. Senator, it is sinking in that the irradiated nuclear fuel stored in spent fuel pools amidst the reactor ruins may have far greater potential offsite consequences than the molten cores.

After visiting the site recently, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) wrote to Japan’s ambassador to the U.S. stating that, “loss of containment in any of these pools could result in an even greater release than the initial accident.”

This is why:

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: This is a classic illustration of how dangerously useless it is to have a massively expensive secret intelligence and “heavy metal” military, without capacity for global coverage, true cost economics, and so on. Until governments make the shift toward future-oriented hybid governnance — embracing the core ideals of clarity, diversity, and integrity — it will not be possible to get a grip on the challenges and the possibilities facing the human species on Earth. We have been here before: in the 1970's when Peak Oil, Peak Water, and AIDs were all briefed to the US Senate and to the White House. The reality is that the corruption characteristic of those bodies then is still with us–there is only ONE serious approach to this and all other issues, and that is the creation of the World Brain and Global Game and a commensurate commitment to integrate true cost economics into every decision, and to make every decision as indigenous communities have done for thousands of years: future-oriented — Seventh Generation.

2012/04/252012/04/25

Yoda: Thinking in a Foreign Language Improves Decisions

07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Government, IO Impotency, Military, Officers Call, Policies

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

Maybe we should stop worrying about analysts w second language capabilities and insist that policymakers have a second language.

Thinking in foreign language makes decisions more rational

To judge a risk more clearly, it may help to consider it in a foreign language.

A series of experiments on more than 300 people from the US and Korea found that thinking in a second language reduced deep-seated, misleading biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived.

“Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue?” asked psychologists led by Boaz Keysar of the University of Chicago in an April 18 Psychological Science study.

“It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a foreign language would make decisions less systematic. We discovered, however, that the opposite is true: Using a foreign language reduces decision-making biases,” wrote Keysar’s team.

Psychologists say human reasoning is shaped by two distinct modes of thought: one that’s systematic, analytical and cognition-intensive, and another that’s fast, unconscious and emotionally charged.

In light of this, it’s plausible that the cognitive demands of thinking in a non-native, non-automatic language would leave people with little leftover mental horsepower, ultimately increasing their reliance on quick-and-dirty cogitation.

Equally plausible, however, is that communicating in a learned language forces people to be deliberate, reducing the role of potentially unreliable instinct. Research also shows that immediate emotional reactions to emotively charged words are muted in non-native languages, further hinting at deliberation.

. . . . . . .

The researchers believe a second language provides a useful cognitive distance from automatic processes, promoting analytical thought and reducing unthinking, emotional reaction.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: Integrity is not just about people making decisions. It is about the whole — the context, the clarity of communication, the diversity of views, the integrity of all feedback loops. Today there is very little integrity in the process of intelligence – on those rare occasions when it actually exists — and there is zero integrity in the policy process, something Paul Pillar and Morton Halperin (among many others) have documented nicely.

See Also:

Morton Halperin, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy (Brookings, 2006)

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011)

Paul Pillar, Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform (Columbia, 2011)

Phi Beta Iota: Journal: Politics & Intelligence–Partners Only When Integrity is Central to Both

2012/04/24

Mini-Me: To Legalize Marijuana or Criminalize Government Misbehavior – That Is the Question

Commerce, Corruption, Government, Law Enforcement

Huh?

Hundreds Of Economists Agree Marijuana Legalization Could Save US Taxpayers $13.7 Billion Per Year

(NaturalNews) Marijuana prohibition currently costs taxpayers billions of dollars a year to enforce, and it accomplishes little or nothing beneficial in terms of economic benefits. On the contrary, legalizing marijuana would not only save taxpayers billions of dollars a year in unnecessary costs, but it would also jumpstart the economy to the tune of $100 billion a year or more, say some economists.

Josh Kilbourn: US Leads Developed Nations In Percent of People In ‘Low Wage Work’

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Government

US Leads Developed Nations In Percent of People In ‘Low Wage Work'

Research shows the US is a low wage country
By Mark Thoma
April 23, 2012

(MoneyWatch) – Recent research from John Schmitt of the Center for Economic Policy Research shows that the US leads developed countries in the share of workers earning low wages. The research also shows that increased wage polarization over the last several decades is one of the reasons for the large share of low wage-work in the US. The bars in this graph represent the share of workers in low wage work, where low wage work is defined as employees earning less than 2/3 of the median wage (approximately $10 per hour or $20,000 per year). In this category, the US leads among developed nations…

Research Shows that US is a ‘low wage' country

2012/04/242012/04/24

DefDog: Cyber-Idiocy Rules

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

Still fixation on monolithic threats…..where are errors and ommissions, poor coding, etc?

Rethinking cyber warfare

Scott Borg: Cyber warfare will require us to rethink every aspect of defence. Our current weapons and defence systems will still be needed, but the way we use them will become very different. A major cyber assault could completely bypass our military forces. It would not require incoming airplanes, missiles, ships, or troops. The attack could suddenly appear inside the computerized equipment of our major industries. The identity of the country or organization that was responsible could be impossible to determine quickly or with complete confidence. The cyber assault could cause almost any kind of damage that could be produced by the human operators of computerized equipment. In fact, a cyber attack could cause many kinds of damage that the human operators of industrial equipment could only achieve by reprogramming their controls.

Phi Beta Iota: Nobody has learned anything since NSA first learned about hackers and then was told to focus on both the security of corporation communications and the need for a national secure information infrastructure. The above perspective is uninformed, and also dangerous for its idiotic suggestion that we should militarize all domestic systems.

See Also: Graphic: Cyber-Threat 101

2012/04/212012/04/21

Richard Wright: General Flynn to Head DIA – Exile or Reward? PLUS Comments by BG Bubba Boo, Ralph Peters, and Airborne Ranger

Corruption, DoD, Ethics, Intelligence (government), IO Impotency, Military

General Flynn to Head DIA: Exile or Reward?

General Michael Flynn (USA) has been nominated to become the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in spite of or because of his severe criticisms of the inability of the U.S. Intelligence System to produce useful strategic intelligence on Afghanistan. As a result among the small portion of the media that even noted his nomination, a good deal of nonsense has been written about DIA. I hope this will clear the air a bit.

The DIA was created by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1961 with the specific mission of providing a single voice for the individual military service intelligence commands. As with many of Secretary McNamara’s ideas, DIA completely ignored reality. The service chiefs simply ignored DIA and the directors of DIA (all general officers of those services) went along. In the press of the Vietnam War Secretary McNamara paid no attention to DIA after creating it. So DIA really had no defined mission and became known as the “redundant agency.”

Since its creation DIA has struggled to find a viable mission that would not interfere with the missions of the service intelligence commands or of the National Security Agency (NSA) which also was under the Department of Defense (DOD) or the independent Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) which had considerable status as the senior intelligence authority and in the theory the ear of the President. This continues to be a problem with DIA having only Measurement and Signature Intelligence (MASINT) as its exclusive domain. DIA also has numerous heavily classified programs and projects, but when these see light of day they often prove to be pointless or even lunatic. DIA does have one central mission and that is to serve as the J2 (intelligence arm) for the Joint Chiefs of Staff (ICS). Having actually worked in J2, I can testify that this does not give DIA a good deal of authority either in the Intelligence Community (IC) or even with JCS.

Continue reading “Richard Wright: General Flynn to Head DIA – Exile or Reward? PLUS Comments by BG Bubba Boo, Ralph Peters, and Airborne Ranger”

Category: Corruption

DefDog: NSA Ubber Alles – Resistance is Futile

By Taylor Armerding

Chuck Spinney: US Senate Notices Next Atomic Disaster in Japan

Yoda: Thinking in a Foreign Language Improves Decisions

Mini-Me: To Legalize Marijuana or Criminalize Government Misbehavior – That Is the Question

Josh Kilbourn: US Leads Developed Nations In Percent of People In ‘Low Wage Work’

US Leads Developed Nations In Percent of People In ‘Low Wage Work'

DefDog: Cyber-Idiocy Rules

Richard Wright: General Flynn to Head DIA – Exile or Reward? PLUS Comments by BG Bubba Boo, Ralph Peters, and Airborne Ranger