Ethics – Page 307 – Public Intelligence Blog

editor spinney time — Chuck Spinney Recommends

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY, Counterpunch, 27 May 2010

For the past several years Americans have been inundated by reams of journalistic puff pieces extolling the virtues of the new US Counterinsurgency (COIN) Strategy documented by General Petraeus in his much ballyhooed COIN manual — which for the most part was a merely regurgitation of the failed thinking of French Marshal Lyautey's ink spot strategy (that counterinsurgent forces should aim to secure an ever expanding geographic zone of security with each new area secured providing a basis for further spreading, and so on.)
It is becoming clear, however, the showpiece of this new strategy, the Marjah operation, has failed to deliver on the promised security improvements to the people, and in the words of the theater commander, General Stanley McChrystal, has become a “bleeding ulcer.”
Coupled with the deadlines imposed by President President Obama, when he approved McChrystal's ill-thought out plan last Fall, notwithstanding the cogent misgivings expressed by Ambassador Eikenberry, it is now clear that McChrystal is under mounting pressure to deliver some progress by the end of the year.

Indeed, hair may be on fire at McChrystal's Bagram headquarters. Rumors are circulating in military circles of backbiting and finger pointing, as well as complaints that MacChrystal is being set up as a fall guy, while his boss, General Petraeus, skates to a Republican presidential nomination in 2012.

Continue reading “Journal: Dropping COIN–McChrystal Returns to His Roots”

2010/05/312010/05/31

Reference: ClimateGate Tree Ring Debacle

05 Energy, Articles & Chapters, Communities of Practice, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Key Players, Threats

Below is an important presentation by Steve McIntyre to the Heartland Conference on the history of the tree ring shenanigans of Jones, Briffa and Mann, as well as the phony efforts to investigate the dispute. It is a very good dispassionate summary of how the hockey stick cape job was perpetrated in IPCC Report, IMO.

McIntyre does not address the issue of how or whether this behaviour is shaped by the need to acquire grant money. Chuck

Reference: Strategic Asymmetry–with Comment

Analysis, Augmented Reality, Budgets & Funding, Collaboration Zones, Collective Intelligence, Computer/online security, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Ethics, Geospatial, History, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), International Aid, Key Players, Policies, Policy, Reform, Research resources, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Strategy, Technologies, Threats, Tools, True Cost

: Full Source Online

Dr. Steve Metz was published on this topic by the Military Review in July-August 2001. A great deal of original thinking came out of the U.S. Army Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) in the aftermath of the 1998 Army Strategy Conference, and sadly, none of it has gained any traction with any Secretary of Defense (or State) since then. Should Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) actually be selected to be the new Director of National Intelligence (DNI), this is a concept he is going to have to integrate into his thinking.

Although Dr. Metz fully understands the asymmetry of will and touches on the asymmetry of morale, he does not address the core intelligence question of our century: the asymmetry of morality. Will & Ariel Durant understood this and highlighted the strategic value of being “in the right” in their capstone work, The Lessons of History. Others, including Buckminster Fuller in Critical Path and Dr. Robert Ackoff (see first link below), understood that context matters, and within context, morality and doing the right thing.

Morale is not the same as moral, and the “collateral advantage” that allows one to harness the distributed intelligence of the Whole Earth–to receive unsolicited warnings large and small, to receive unsolicited good ideas large and small–comes ONLY when one holds the moral high ground. It merits stressing that CONSENSUS is most easily achieved when those striving to achieve consensus share a common faith in integrity–in morality.

America is in the wrong today, because the US Government is imposing on both the domestic public and on humanity at large the wrong policies, the wrong programs, and the wrong acquisitions–as well as the wrong distribution of US taxpayer funds in the service of dictators, cartel leaders, and predatory immoral banks and businesses not at all interested in earning legal ethical profit fully compliant with true cost economics also known as the triple bottom line.

If the next DNI is to be successful, they must:

Continue reading “Reference: Strategic Asymmetry–with Comment”

2010/05/302010/09/04

Reference: UnityNet — an M4IS2 Option

08 Wild Cards, About the Idea, Analysis, Augmented Reality, C4/JOE/Software, Collaboration Zones, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Computer/online security, DoD, Ethics, Geospatial, Handbook Elements, Historic Contributions, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), IO Multinational, IO Sense-Making, Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Maps, Methods & Process, Open Government, Policies, Policy, Real Time, Research resources, Strategy, Technologies, Threats, Tools, True Cost

Reference: Re-Inventing Fire

08 Wild Cards, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Policies

: Full Source Online

Energy-related economic, security, and environmental threats are intensifying the national conversation about how to regain energy leadership and competitiveness, restore jobs and prosperity, and build a secure and climate-safe energy system.

Yet America lacks a comprehensive vision of how a market economy can achieve these transformational goals.

RMI has that vision, and is now building its detailed roadmap, which we call Reinventing Fire™. This strategy will bring together RMI’s 28 years of innovation and engage the world in our most ambitious and important work yet—using whole-system thinking and integrative design to move the U.S. off fossil fuels by 2050, led by business for profit.

Phi Beta Iota: This is righteous good stuff. It does not go far enough. Agriculture & Water as well as Health & Society are other points on the compass that must be addressed coherently and simultaneously. That will not happen without the restoration of integrity (not just of honor but of thinking). We salute the Rocky Mountain Institute for taking the fist viable step in the right direction.

2010/05/142010/05/14

Search: OSINT software

Analysis, Augmented Reality, Budgets & Funding, Collaboration Zones, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Computer/online security, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cyberscams, malware, spam, Ethics, Geospatial, InfoOps (IO), International Aid, Key Players, Methods & Process, Policies, Searches, Strategy, Technologies, Threats, Tools, True Cost

The search term brings up appropriate results, but the fact of the search gives us an opportunity to provide comment.

1) Nothing now being used by governments, and certainly not iBase or Palantir, both aging technologies that do not scale and have too many fat-finger handicaps, fulfills the originial requirements documents crafted in the late 1980's.

Worth a Look: 1989 All-Source Fusion Analytic Workstation–The Four Requirements Documents

2) The ONLY programs that have gotten anywhere close are COPERNICUS plus plus, and SILOBREAKER. However, both of these have been slow to recognize the urgency of integrating–fully integrating–capabilities that address each of the eighteen functionalities. Below is the list of softwares now in use by US Special Operations Command J-23 Open Source Intelligence Branch along with the STRONG ANGEL TOOZL and a couple of other things.

Memorandum: USSOCOM Software List and STRONG ANGEL TOOZL

Question: Dirty Tricks Against Phi Beta Iota?

Ethics, Searches

Recipient Redacted,

I asked our OSINT department to download an item from the Public Intelligence Blog. They told me that they cannnot enter the blog and get a popup screen from Microsoft: This website has been reported to Microsoft for containing threats to your computer that might reveal personal or financial information.

Did you get complaints from others? Are you subjected to dirty tricks as a result of your critique on US intel service?

Sender Redacted

Phi Beta Iota: We doubt that there is any threat from this site, which is a standard WordPress blog. We have tried to replicate the warning via both Yahoo and Google and cannot find any warning at all. Our first guess is excessive caution on the part of the searching organization; our second is a mirror site unique to The Netherlands seeking to use our content to go phishing; and our last is malicious action by silly little people with no ethics.
Update: Comments posted to the site contained malicious URLs, triggering security measures by search engines crawling malicious pages. As a result, comments have been disabled indefinitely.