Cryptocurrency – Charlie Shrem: I was invited to speak at Texas Bitcoin Conference in Austin this past week. Due to my house arrest, I’ve been largely staying low key but felt I needed to make a statement, a strong one. I asked Rick if I could use his speech from the Stockholm 2006 pro-freedom demonstration and adapt it to Bitcoin, which he agreed to. The speech ended to a standing ovation, and although I was over Skype I could not help but burst into tears. Free knowledge, free the market, free the world!
Illuminating Videos –Leaders Everywhere: A conversation with Gary HamelToday a leader is expected to be a perfect mix of the innovation instincts of Steve Jobs, the political skills of Lee Kuan Yew and the emotional intelligence of Desmond Tutu! But how many leaders have these characteristics? And what is the alternative?
Management writer and academic Gary Hamel explains how the requirements of a leader have now become overwhelming. Watch this video to understand the transformation needed to have “Leaders Everywhere”.
From day one, the Obama Administration has neglected the imperative to modernize the country’s defense forces, underplayed the amount of forces needed for the national defense, and failed to implement any serious reform agenda. Rather than deliver on its promise to provide more bang for the buck, the White House has done little more than call cuts “efficiencies.” Indeed, how the White House has failed to utilize resources efficiently is more damaging than the spending reductions themselves. Exacerbating this downward spiral, the President has emboldened enemies, strained relations, and undercut the confidence of traditional allies—leaving the nation less safe than when he took office. The President’s re-election squandered the opportunity to reverse a dangerous trend. As a result, by the end of his presidency, America’s military will be “hollow.” The armed forces are already inadequate to protect all the nation’s vital national interests because of shortfalls in training and maintenance. By the endof his second term, the shortfalls in readiness will be compounded by reductions in military capabilities. It is not an overstatement to conclude that the capabilities- requirements mismatch will rival the hollow forces of the 1970s under President Jimmy Carter.
On February 14th, a council of ministers passed a reform on the copyright laws in Spain. According to the reform, content aggregators including Google News, Yahoo News, Bing News and Spain’s famous Menéame would have to depart from part of their income in favor of the original content publishers. As for now it is uncertain how, at what percentage and when this tax will be effective. Google alone is supposed to have had a publicity income in Spain during 2013 close to US$ 50 million and with perspectives to increase by 14% its turnover in 2014.
The advantage of cyberspace is the large volume of information it holds,” said Esti Peshin, Director of Cyber Services for IAI, at the Israeli Video Analysis Conference organized by iHLS. Peshin was referring to the intelligence gathering potential of open source intelligence (OSNIT), adding that “on the other hand, this forces us to use much more advanced methods of analysis.”
According to Peshin one of the most significant challenges lies in categorizing the mass of information in terms of reliability. The only way to overcome this problem is to cross-reference many sources of data. “We want to create a comprehensive intelligence picture, rather than producing just one single item of information, since that single item can be faked.” IAI experiments, added Peshin, have shown that it takes only 48 hours to create a believable and complex fake identity, with no less than a hundred facebook friends who believe it is a real person. All it takes is opening an e-mail account.
The famed American whistle-blower discusses US national security, and those who expose its overreach.
Sadie Luetmer
Al Jazeera, 24 February 2014
Huntingdon, United States – In 1971, US military analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked thousands of pages of a top-secret study on the Vietnam War to the American press. The Pentagon Papers, as the leak would come to be called, revealed previously shrouded layers of deception on the part of the US executive branch regarding decades of military involvement in Indochina.
The famed whistle-blower has since remained active politically, and is a vocal supporter of WikiLeaks and other government challengers such as Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning and Edward Snowden. US Army Private Manning leaked classified documents to WikiLeaks in 2010, and was convicted in 2013 of violating the Espionage Act.
Daniel Ellsberg
Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor, released classified documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras in 2013, and is currently residing in Russia.
Citing a wide array of historical and contemporary American intelligence programmes and policies, Ellsberg advocates critical consideration of the privacy needs of a free press and an active citizenry.
Nearing 83 years old, Ellsberg's political energy shows no sign of atrophy. He spoke to Al Jazeera after giving a speech at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania.
Al Jazeera: For a lot of Americans it seems obvious that national security requires secrecy, but you have described some of the dangers of “secrecy culture”. Why is secrecy culture problematic?
Daniel Ellsberg: “Well I certainly don't take the point of view that no secrecy is justified, or that national security never required secrecy. For example, in the Second World War, the time and place of the Normandy invasion was a very well kept secret, and moreover secured by lies as well as secrecy. It's an interesting example, by the way – which people often bring up – because, of course, the necessary secrecy for that date and place expired rather rapidly in the course of June 1944. And yet, my guess is that there still are thousands of pages, perhaps more, tens or hundreds of thousands, that are still classified from that period. I could be wrong, by this time maybe it's all been declassified; but it could have all been declassified certainly by 1946-47, and was not until many years later, if ever.
“Most of the documentation still called classified by this country, and I'm talking now about billions and billions of pages, most of that has long ago lost any justification for being held secret from the American people. The need is generally measured more in weeks, months, or a year or two, and yet it remains classified indefinitely. Why?
“Really, if you want to know the answer to that, my best guess as someone who worked inside the system, is that they never know what part of that may become embarrassing at some point in the future. What prediction will turn out to look absurd? Not merely wrong, but discreditable. What action may appear as part of the programme that all in all is unconstitutional, or illegal? What policy will appear to have been not only unsuccessful, but undertaken for unjustifiable,self-interested motives? It's very hard to predict that, so simply keep it all secret, if possible, forever.”
