Category: Ethics

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Penguin: MI5 Former Chief Slams War on Terror

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 09 Terrorism, Advanced Cyber/IO, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Law Enforcement
Who, Me?

Better late than never.  Do I sense people catching up with the emphasis on intelligence with integrity?

MI5 former chief decries ‘war on terror'

Lady Eliza Manningham-Buller uses BBC lecture to criticise ‘unhelpful' term, attack Iraq invasion and suggest al-Qaida talks

Lady Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5, delivered a withering attack on the invasion of Iraq, decried the term “war on terror”, and held out the prospect of talks with al-Qaida.

MI5's former director general Lady Eliza Manningham-Buller during her 2011 BBC Reith lecture. Photograph: Jeff Overs/BBC/PA

Recording her first BBC Reith lecture on the theme, Securing Freedom, she made clear she believed the UK and US governments had not sufficiently understood the resentment that had been building up among Arab people, which was only compounded by the war against Iraq.

Before an audience which included Theresa May, the home secretary, she also said the 9/11 attacks were “a crime, not an act of war”. “So I never felt it helpful to refer to a war on terror”.

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Harrison Owen: August Morning Reflection & Invitation…

11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Methods & Process
Harrison Owen

This [ten-page] paper started as a note to myself as I sought to explore the disparity between my home here in Maine, the forest, lake, and loons…and the rushing maelstrom of the world about me that showed up in the instant on my computer screen.

Call it anxiety adjustment, therapy, or just an attempt to make some sense out of thing.

Perhaps it should have remained in that personal, private compartment, but I also felt the need to share, and so I have.  You have to decide the wisdom of that decision.

Ho.

Harrison

 

August Morning: A time for Reflection and an Invitation…

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John Robb: Free Online Open Source Education + RECAP

04 Education, Academia, Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Book Lists, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Gift Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process
John Robb

JOURNAL: Open Source Education

A couple of years back I asked (in the article “Industrial Education” which is worth a read):

“An Ivy League Education for less than $20 a month.  Why not?”

At the time there were only a smattering of course materials online.  That's changing.  It's coming.  Here's an example of a class that signed up 56,000 people in two weeks.

Free Online Class on Artificial Intelligence

Another example of a highly scalable education product: Codecademy

The way to repair and revitalize modern civilization is on the horizon.  It follows a simple dictum:

Localize production.  Virtualize everything else. 

With the above, we see the virtualization of formal education (books were the first wave).

Some other thoughts on this:

  • It can drop costs by 3 orders of magnitude.  $20 a year instead of $20,000.
  • It means that the best instructors teach almost everyone.  Why not the best?

Phi Beta Iota:  There is actually a much larger variant of free online education, and that it the YouTube 2-5 minute micro-class revolution, in which citizen experts create concise lectures on single specific micro-knowledge, for example, a type of algebra problem, or mixing hydoponic solutions, etcetera.

Free Online & RECAP Links Below the Line

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Steven Aftergood: Open Source Intelligence Act III

Advanced Cyber/IO, Book Lists, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Defense Science Board, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Ethics, Hacking, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Key Players, Mobile, Officers Call, Open Government, Policies, Real Time, Serious Games, Threats, Topics (All Other)
Steven Aftergood

Phi Beta Iota:  Act I was 1988-1993.  Act II was 1993-2011.  Act III began with the publication of NO MORE SECRETS with a Foreword by Senator Gary Hart (D-CO).

Below the line in full (or click on links to originals):

OPEN UP OPEN SOURCE INTELLIGENCE

THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF OPEN SOURCE INTELLIGENCE

 

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Howard Rheingold: Editors Matter More in Cyberspace

04 Education, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Media
Howard Rheingold

Infotention

“Managing attention & information”

Created and curated by Howard Rheingold

Accessibility Vs. Access: The Filter Bubble And Human Information Curation | Maria Popova On Nieman Lab

Human-driven information curation is the antidote to this algorithmic disconnect between access and accessibility:

The primary purpose of an editor [is] to extend the horizon of what people are interested in and what people know. Giving people what they think they want is easy, but it’s also not very satisfying: the same stuff, over and over again. Great editors are like great matchmakers: they introduce people to whole new ways of thinking, and they fall in love.

Read more….

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Steven Howard Johnson: Reflections on OSINT

Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Budgets & Funding, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Hacking, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Methods & Process, Open Government, Policies, Resilience, Strategy, Threats
Steven Howard Johnson

Phi Beta Iota:  Mr. Johnson is the author of Integrity at Scale, free online, whose many ideas are being integrated into the vision for a Smart Nation Act and the hub of the Smart Nation, an Open Source Agency and global Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making (M4IS2) network of networks.  He is a party to the on-going push to establish the Open Source Agency and create a more competent and ethical America.

– – – – – – -BEGIN REFLECTIONS- – – – – – –

As I look at the Open Source idea, I find myself experiencing a fair amount of dissonance between a methodological vision of open source intelligence, at one level, and at a very different level, an aspirational vision that sees it as a way of disinfecting a misguided and corrupt set of bureaucracies.

One mission is potentially endorsable by the powers-that-be.  The second mission is not.  Ask people to endorse both and it isn’t likely that either will move forward. If corruption prevention is to be the mission, the open source agency will have to find a home outside of government.  If transparency of intelligence is the mission, then perhaps it can find a home inside government.

My second source of dissonance has to do with design and scale.  Open source intelligence is potentially as vast as all the server farms Google will ever own.  How does a relatively modest site, squeezed in between State and Watergate, ever acquire the heft to handle the challenge?  The scope of the mission and the scope of the agency seem out of sync with the scope of the real estate footprint.

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