Thousands of people from across the country are planning to converge on Wall Street this Saturday to protest America’s “corrupt democratic process” and the use of corporate moneyin American elections.
The day has already seen support from hactivist group Anti Sec, which wrote on Twitter Thursday: “Americans it is now our time. The Tunisians did it, then the Egyptians. It is OUR time. It is OUR America.” Anti-consumerist magazine AdBusters asked on its site: “Is American ripe for a Tahrir moment?”
Phi Beta Iota: There isn't a single politician out there that “gets” this, with one possible exception we will identify if and when he makes reference to the connection between the USA Day of Rage, his campaign, and the need for Electoral Reform–there is nothing wrong with America that cannot be fixed relatively quickly and simply via the restoration of the integrity of our electoral process and our government.
9-11: Incestuous Amplification Highjacks the American OODA Loop
Mark Danner has written a brilliant exegesis (also attached below) of how the collective leadership of the United States dragged an entire nation off its moral rails in its reaction to 9-11. It is long but well worth the reading investment.
While Danner does not use the term, he has provided a detailed case study of how the phenomenon of a dysfunctional Orientation folds back on itself to disconnect a decision maker (or any collective of decision makers up to and including a nation) from reality, thereby increasing confusion and disorder, and in so doing, destroying what passes for a moral compass. A key to understanding how this evolves ineluctably (and correcting it) from an epistemological perspective is to understand the Colonel Boyd’s theory of the Observation – Orientation – Decision – Action or OODA loop [1] and how the phenomenon of Incestuous Amplification (IA) corrupts the Orientation, which then folds back on itself to disconnect the entire loop from reality. Once IA is set into motion and is left uncorrected, it always tears any decision cycle to pieces form within. Boyd showed why there are very fundamental epistemological reasons for this unfolding evolution. New readers will find an introduction to incestuous amplification in my essay: Incestuous Amplification and the Madness of King George (Counterpunch, 10 Sep 2008). In fact, when reading this essay, all one needs to do is substitute Danner’s analysis for Andrew Bacevich’s analysis, take the two-question quiz at the end of the 2008 essay and marvel at the contemporary relevance of the answers.
Caveat: Trying to understand Boyd’s ideas might help guard against IA, but it is by no means a guarantee. What I find truly horrifying is that the only national leader who made an effort to understand Boyd’s ideas — Richard Cheney when he was a congressman and Secretary of Defense — has just written a self-righteous memoir that proves his decision cycle is still corrupted by an extreme case of incestuous amplification.
Chuck Spinney
From the Sea
EXTRACT
One of the most damaging failures of the early War on Terror was the willingness of the Bush administration to act in a way that seemed to embody the caricature that bin Laden and al-Qaeda had made of the United States: a muscle-bound, arrogant, crusading, hegemonic superpower intent on repressing and abusing and humiliating Muslims. The naked obscenities from Abu Ghraib, the images of shackled, hooded Muslims in their orange jumpsuits at Guantánamo, were immense victories for al-Qaeda in a war whose foremost strategic goal was the recruitment of young Muslims to the cause of extremist, anti-American Islamic fundamentalism. It is this “battle of the story” that Dick Cheney, for example, still fails utterly to grasp. “I don’t have much sympathy for the view that we should find an alternative to Guantánamo…,” he tells us in his memoir, “simply because we are worried about how we are perceived abroad.”
Phi Beta Iota: When idiocy and ideology become the coin of the realm, everyone who remains silent is a collaborator in the high crimes and misdemeanors that occur. This is why the Oath to the Constitution explicitly calls for loyalty to the Constitution, not the chain of command, and for attention to domestic enemies, not just foreign enemies. We have met the enemy, and he is us. Everything else is a traffic accident.
Study says US government, business need to kick network security up a notch
Michael Cooney
Network World, 12 September 2011
There is an urgent need for businesses and our government to develop high-level cyber intelligence as a way to combat the unacceptable levels of online security threats because the current “patch and pray” system won't cut it in the future.
That was the major thrust of a study by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance's (INSA) Cyber Council which went on to state that such a cyber-intelligence discipline will demand discussion of the unique training, education and skill sets that will be required to successfully conduct meaningful collection and analysis in the cyber domain.
“While there is a great deal of focus on current cyber security issues, there is little focus on defining and exploring the cyber threat environment at a higher level,” INSA stated. INSA describes itself as a non-profit, non-partisan, public-private organization.
The group says the dilemma that exists in the current cyber intelligence apparatus is that the Department of Homeland Security has the authority but lacks the experience and capabilities to orchestrate a comprehensive approach to cyber intelligence. The Department of Defense has much of the actual cyber intelligence capabilities, and private industry owns most of the infrastructure. “Ultimately, INSA's Cyber Council would like to see a meaningful partnership among all relevant government agencies and the private sector to ensure seamless sharing of threat information, timely analytical judgments, and reasoned, measured responses to clear threats.”
The group made a number of suggestions to help businesses and government build this intelligence community including:
Develop strategies (beyond current “patch and pray” processes), policies, doctrines, legal frameworks, and overall global context for cyber intelligence matters
Increase global business, diplomatic and other forms of engagement, which should discuss potential ways to create more stability and mutual security in the cyber arena in order to reduce the potential for cyber conflict, theft, sabotage, and espionage
Support development of deterrence, dissuasion, and other high level concepts and measures for maintaining peace and stability at all levels of conflict and crisis
Define cyber intelligence professions, needed skillsets, training, and education for both industry and government needs.
Enable the creation of cyber intelligence related polices, approaches, and pilot efforts across industry, academia/non-profits, and government that provide unclassified situational awareness and indications and warning data, analytics and 24/7 unclassified and classified (as appropriate) reporting to government agencies, trusted industry, and global partners.
Corporately define specific activities, plans, and intentions of adversaries; continuously identify current and emerging threat vectors, and support our plans and intentions
Identify the specific technical means utilized or planned for cyber attack operations in deep technical detail to include supply chain issues, paths to be exploited, nature and character of deployed infections, systems/product weakness, effects, and anticipated planned or ongoing adjacent activities
Maintain detailed cyber situational awareness writ large
Participate in the rapid control and release of cyber means in order to ensure a viable intelligence gain and loss awareness
Identify what criminal activities are ongoing or have already happened in cyber networks, do formal damage assessments in these areas, and support development of improved defenses
Partner on research and development in the challenging areas of attack attribution, warning, damage assessment, and space related threat collection and analysis
Organize and support counter-intelligence and counter-espionage (CI/CE) activities, with special focus on identifying/using auditing tools and processes to deal with the insider threats
Create a consistent and meaningful approach for the cyber equivalent of Battle Damage Assessment (BDA)/Combat Effectiveness Assessment
Establish public-private partnership cyber outreach forums that address these areas in a comprehensive, practical, and executable fashion. These forums can take the form of commissions that study the demand for cyber intelligence and value added to cyber security.
Phi Beta Iota: The US is not just lacking in cyber-intelligence, it is lacking in all forms of intelligence qua decision-support. The US intelligence community lacks integrity, and General Keith Alexander and General Jim Clapper and Mr. Mike Vickers have all been given too much money with zero adult leadership. Top Secret America is a disgracefully dysfunctional enterprise, and now richly deserving of almost complete shut-down. Congress and the White House have failed to be ethical or intelligent in this matter.
Editor’s Note: The following report includes adapted excerpts from David DeGraw’s book, “The Road Through 2012: Revolution or World War III.”
Release Date: 9.28.11
Analysis of Financial Terrorism in America By David DeGraw, AmpedStatus Report
EXTRACTS
The following report is a statistical analysis of the systemic economic attacks against the American people.
Currently, at least 62 million Americans, 20% of US households, have zero or negative net worth.
Recently, the National Academy of Science released their latest findings, backing up my claim by revealing that 52,765,000 Americans, 17.3% of the population, lived in poverty in 2009.
…counting the total number people in need of employment, you get a current unemployment rate of 22.5%, which is an all-time record total of 34 million people currently in need of work.
Netanyahu may be tough enough to cow President Obama, but to date, he has been afraid to reign in his fanatical Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. His plan to” weaken” Turkey described below in the Israeli outlet YnetNews suggests that time is running out.
One thing is clear from Lieberman's outrageous proposals to sow dissension in Turkey by supporting anti-Turkish claims of Armenians and Kurds: it will blow back to unify and harden Turkish attitudes. Israel's opportunistic cynicism and lack of a moral center revealed by these proposals boggles the mind — this is particularly true of its flip flop on the recognizing the Armenian holocaust after decades of opposing such recognition on the grounds that it diminished the moral stature of Jewish holocaust.
But these proposals are more than outrageous; they set a new standard for self-referencing stupidity: The Turkish army, which has been one of Israel's best friends in Turkey, has been in a power struggle with PM Erdogan. The army is fundamentally, however, a proud nationalist institution. The army will have no choice but to side with Erdogan in this conflict with Israel. This will increase Erdogan's and the ruling AKP party's political power and give him much more domestic support to tough it out with Israel. And Erdogan is a little like Lieberman, in that he is a self-made tough guy who grew up in the back streets of Istanbul, but he is much smarter and is a true reformer to boot.
Moreover, setting aside personalities of individuals, Turkey, unlike Israel, is not a country burdened down with emotional baggage or a sense that the world owes it. Anyone with a modicum of understanding of Turkish culture knows that it is a proud, self confident culture, with its own sense of history. It is not dependent on handouts from others and is dynamically expanding to the status of being regional power. Finally, a strategy based on the idea that one should publicly back a Turkey into a corner and humiliate her national honor is without a doubt the stupidest way to deal with this proud country.
One can only conclude that a failure to dump Lieberman is a signal that Israel is losing its collective mind and a kind of self-righteous paranoia is displacing common sense in a nuclear armed country. One has to wonder what extent Obama's pusillanimity in dealing with Netanyahu has contributed to this dangerous evolution.
Jerusalem fights back: Foreign Minister Lieberman formulates series of tough moves in response to Turkish steps; Israel to cooperate with Armenian lobby in US, may offer military aid to Kurdish rebels
In the first such analysis ever conducted, Swiss economic researchers have conducted a global network analysis of the most powerful transnational corporations (TNCs). Their results have revealed a core of 787 firms with control of 80% of this network, and a “super entity” comprised of 147 corporations that have a controlling interest in 40% of the network’s TNCs.
Phi Beta Iota: It is not the first time this has been done, original work was done in the 1970's on inter-locking boards of directors, and complex forms of relationship analysis were pioneered by Samuel Milgram among others. It is the first time it has been done in digital form with large amounts of data. It is not, however, ”
the final answer.” For that one must understand deep secrecy, over-lapping proxies, the role of clandestine and covert entities, the cross-over among religious organizations, criminal organizations, and government entitites nominally responsible for justice but more often than not actively engaged in crimes against the public interest. Certainly worth a close read, but the banks are fronts, not the high table.
Since September 11, 2001, so-called “homegrown terrorists,” working alone or with others, have planned and in some cases implemented terrorist activities, contributed financial or other material support to others' terrorist activities, or become radicalized in the United States and then traveled to other countries to conduct terrorist activities directed against those countries or against the United States. This paper examines the cases of homegrown terrorism from 9/11 through 2010, highlights lessons learned from those cases that suggest actions for the future, and includes a chronology of numbers and case descriptions of terrorist events in the United States during that period. Most of the individuals involved are Muslim, but the numbers are small. A total of 176 Americans have been indicted, arrested, or otherwise identified as jihadist terrorists or supporters since 9/11. They were involved in 82 cases, a majority of which involve the actions of a single individual. Al Qaeda has increasingly used the Internet to build an army of followers. Many of the terrorists identified in this study began their journey online. However, al Qaeda has not yet managed to inspire its online followers to action. Few of the 32 locally hatched jihadist plots to carry out terrorist attacks in the United States since 9/11 got much beyond the discussion stage. Nevertheless, al Qaeda remains a threat. More terrorist attempts will occur. Traditional law enforcement, in which authorities attempt to identify and apprehend a perpetrator after a crime has been committed, is inadequate to deal with terrorists who are determined to cause many deaths and great destruction and who may not care whether they themselves survive. Public safety demands a preventive approach — intervention before an attack occurs. In addition to law enforcement, intelligence collection, and community policing, public reaction is an essential component of such preventive defense.
