Corruption – Page 833 – Public Intelligence Blog

Your Apps Are Watching You

A WSJ Investigation finds that iPhone and Android apps are breaching the privacy of smartphone users

Wall Street Journal, Sunday, December 18, 2010

Few devices know more personal details about people than the smartphones in their pockets: phone numbers, current location, often the owner's real name—even a unique ID number that can never be changed or turned off.

These phones don't keep secrets. They are sharing this personal data widely and regularly, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.

Continue reading “Your Apps Are Watching You…AND Reporting Intimate Details Without Your Consent…”

2010/12/182010/12/18

Journal: Spies, Lies, and Diplomatic Disorder

02 Diplomacy, 07 Other Atrocities, Communities of Practice, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, IO Sense-Making, Methods & Process

clinton pompous — Hillary Clinton's handling of the WikiLeaks exposé has been pompous in the extreme

Robert Fisk: Stay out of trouble by not speaking to Western spies

The Independent, 18 December 2010

Almost 30 years ago, a British diplomat asked me to lunch in Beirut.

Despite rumours to the contrary, she told me on the phone, she was not a spy but a mere attaché, wanting only to chat about the future of Lebanon. These were kidnapping days in the Lebanese capital, when to be seen with the wrong luncheon companion could finish in a basement in south Beirut. I trusted this woman. I was wrong. She arrived with two armed British bodyguards who sat at the next table. Within minutes of sitting down at a fish restaurant in the cliff-top Raouche district, she started plying me with questions about Hezbollah's armaments in southern Lebanon. I stood up and walked out. Hezbollah had two men at another neighbouring table. They called on me next morning. No problem, they said, they saw me walk out. But watch out.

. . . . . .ABSOLUTELY WORTH A FULL READ. . . . . .

More and more, WikiLeaks is exposing the hopeless nature of US foreign policy and that of its supposed “allies”. Attack on the international community indeed!

Read full article….

From the ABOUT section of this website.

Continue reading “Journal: Spies, Lies, and Diplomatic Disorder”

2010/12/182010/12/18

Journal: History is repeating itself in Afghanistan

05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Government, IO Multinational, Military, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence

editor spinney time — Chuck Spinney Recommends...

History is repeating itself in Afghanistan

One hears again and again Afghans say that the Taliban may not be liked but that the US is distrusted, even hated

Patrick Cockburn – The Independent 18/12/10

During the mid-1960s, America's goal during a crucial stage in the Vietnam war was to defeat the enemy militarily. But it had no realistic political strategy to underpin the goal, and it was this which ultimately led to failure.

America's strategy in Afghanistan is now suffering from a similar weakness. Barack Obama made the edgy claim this week that the US army is stabilising the military situation, but neither he nor his national security advisers show any signs of understanding the speed at which, politically, the US is losing ground.

Again and again in Kabul one hears Afghans say that the Taliban may not be liked, but that the Afghan government and its US allies are increasingly distrusted, even hated, by the mass of the population.

2010/12/182010/12/18

Journal: 12,000+ Killed in Mexican-American Drug War

03 Economy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Multinational, IO Sense-Making, Law Enforcement, Military, Peace Intelligence

Marcus-Aurelius-150x150 — Marcus Aurelius Recommends

30,000 killed in Mexico’s drug violence since 2006 (AP)

Mexico said Thursday that more than 30,000 people have been killed in drug violence since President Felipe Calderon launched a crackdown against cartels in late 2006.

The government said the violent La Familia cartel in western Mexico has been “systematically weakened” by recent arrests and deaths of leading members of the gang.

More than 12,000 killed in Mexican drug war this year, officials say (Los Angeles Times)

Forensic workers carry a body inside a body bag that was found at a clandestine grave in the town of Asencion, near the northern border city of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, Saturday Dec. 11, 2010. At least 5 bodies have been found in three separate clandestine graves found in the site. (AP Photo/Raymundo Ruiz)

Phi Beta Iota: Both Mexico and the USA are “unintelligent” countries lacking in strategic analytics able to clearly demonstrate “cause and effect.” If they were “smart nations” as we have been advocating since 1995, marijuana would have been legalized long ago, corruption among local officials squelched, pay and training for the police substantially increased….and so on. Everything is connected. For example, the weapons do not really come from US handgun stores–they come from the Guatemalan military that sells entire shipments of “old” weapons provided to the US, and then tells the US the weapons were destroyed. The serial numbers on the captured weapons tell the truth. Until nations learn to think honestly and holistically, any single flaw can be fatal, and multiple flaws will interact in unanticipated and increasingly costly ways. In the USA, crime runs from the border to Wall Street, where drug money laundering has long been known to be a major source of liquidity. Politicians in both countries are paid to be anemic in their thinking and ineffective in their duty to the public. Under these circumstances, neither law enforcement nor the military can be effective. Integrity is the missing factor.

2010/12/172010/12/17

Journal: Humans as Slaves–Our Global Shame

07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence

The word ‘slavery' often conjures brutal images of a long since vanquished historic project, but its practice, more commonly and legally referred to as human trafficking, continues to thrive in every corner of the globe – making it the world's second largest criminal industry.

By Cassandra Clifford for ISN Insights

People are comparatively cheaper than they were in the 1600-1800s, when slaves were purchased for life. Now ownership tends to last only a few months to a few years, making slaves cheaper to purchase and more easily disposable. In 1850 the purchase price of a slave in the southern US averaged the equivalent of $40,000 today. According to Free the Slaves, a slave today costs an average of $90. People have become a disposable commodity, cheap and easy labor one can just toss out when no longer needed. Globalization and the post-World War II population boom have increased access to, and lowered the cost of, transportation, which has in turn contributed to the increased levels of global slavery. Victims are often driven into slavery by severe poverty or acute need for economic gain. Additionally, the ethnicity of today's slave is rarely important.

Read complete article….

Review: The Manufacture of Evil–Ethics, Evolution and the Industrial System

2010/12/16

Reference: Arianna Huffington–Wikileaks About Trust in Government–Or Not

07 Other Atrocities, Analysis, Communities of Practice, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Methods & Process, Misinformation & Propaganda, Officers Call, Policies, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy

Arianna Huffington

Posted: December 15, 2010 09:19 PM

The Media Gets It Wrong on WikiLeaks: It's About Broken Trust, Not Broken Condoms

EXTRACT: It's notable that the latest leaks came out the same week President Obama went to Afghanistan for his surprise visit to the troops — and made a speech about how we are “succeeding” and “making important progress” and bound to “prevail.”

The WikiLeaks cables present quite a different picture. What emerges is one reality (the real one) colliding with another (the official one). We see smart, good-faith diplomats and foreign service personnel trying to make the truth on the ground match up to the one the administration has proclaimed to the public. The cables show the widening disconnect. It's like a foreign policy Ponzi scheme — this one fueled not by the public's money, but the public's acquiescence.

The cables show that the administration has been cooking the books.

EXTRACT: For the Obama administration, it appears that accountability is a one-way street. When he had the chance to bring the principle of accountability to our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and investigate how we got into them, the president passed. As John Perry Barlow tweeted, “We have reached a point in our history where lies are protected speech and the truth is criminal.”

Any process of real accountability, would, of course, also include the key role the press played in bringing us the war in Iraq. Jay Rosen, one of the participants in the symposium, wrote a brilliant essay entitled “From Judith Miller to Julian Assange.” He writes:

For the portion of the American press that still looks to Watergate and the Pentagon Papers for inspiration, and that considers itself a check on state power, the hour of its greatest humiliation can, I think, be located with some precision: it happened on Sunday, September 8, 2002.

That was when the New York Times published Judith Miller and Michael Gordon's breathless, spoon-fed — and ultimately inaccurate — account of Iraqi attempts to buy aluminum tubes to produce fuel for a nuclear bomb.

Continue reading “Reference: Arianna Huffington–Wikileaks About Trust in Government–Or Not”

2010/12/162010/12/16

Reference: The Private War of LtCol Tony Shaffer

07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Articles & Chapters, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Intelligence (government), Methods & Process, Military, Misinformation & Propaganda, Officers Call, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

Shaffer’s book rips the lid off several stories the bureaucrats wanted to suppress: the role of a program named Able Danger in yielding information that could have uncovered the 9/11 plot; Operation Dark Heart, which could have nabbed Al Qaeda’s number two leader; and early indications that Pakistan’s spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, actively supported the Taliban. These are the incendiary bombs the censors tried to defuse. And this is the real story of Tony Shaffer’s book.

Private War JPEG — Playboy Article Online

PDF Copy without Advertising

Phi Beta Iota: The Playboy folks did not do their homework–the destruction of an entire first edition is not unprecendented, it was done by CIA to the first printing (1972) of Col L. Fletcher Prouty's The Secret Team: CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World (Skyhorse, 2008). While the title is hyped and the good Colonel was not aware of the over-arching financial crime families that the US Government has secretly supported and in some instances actually spawned from scratch, his general point to the public was clear: what is done in our name under the guise of secrecy is often criminal, generally unconstitutional, and almost always very costly in long-term blood, treasure, and spirit over both the short and the long term. What is at issue here is straight-forward: either we have a government that works in the public interest and displays integrity at every level, or we do not. It is not only the political “leaders” who have lost their integrity, but the professional “leaders” as well. Until the truth of this is understood by the majority of the American people, nothing will change.

See Also:

Reference: The Fraud-Based US Economy

Reference: Mortgage Fraud in Detail

Journal: Wall Street Financial Crime Spree Spins On….

Journal: The Wall Street Pentagon Papers–Biggest Scam In World History Exposed–Are The Federal Reserve’s Crimes Too Big To Comprehend?