Category: Advanced Cyber/IO

Not sure I agree with NATO advice to their seniors to all start social networking sites.  I personally avoid that stuff like the plague.

How spies used Facebook to steal Nato chiefs’ details

NATO'S most senior commander was at the centre of a major security alert when a series of his colleagues fell for a fake Facebook account opened in his name – apparently by Chinese spies.

. . . . . . .

They thought they had become genuine friends of Nato's Supreme Allied Commander – but instead every personal detail on Facebook, including private email addresses, phone numbers and pictures were able to be harvested.

Read full story.

Phi Beta Iota:   In an “open everything” world, those raised in walled garden are actually retarded and pay the price.  It is not possible to be smart in isolation.  Secrecy is now a fatal cancer.  Bureaucracy is now a fatal cancer.  Governments (and all other forms of organization) in isolation are now fatal cancers.  For a tiny fraction of what is being wasted by the US Cyber Command and the US National Security Agency, an Open Source Agency under diplomatic auspices could catapult the USA into Smart Nation status.

See Also:

Yoda: Big Data Tough Love, Everyone Fails

Yoda: The Extended School – Obstacles & Possibilities

Open Source Agency: Executive Access Point

THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust

Truthiness as Probability: Moving Beyond the True or False Dichotomy when Verifying Social Media

I asked the following question at the Berkman Center’s recent Symposium on Truthiness in Digital Media: “Should we think of truthiness in terms of probabili-ties rather than use a True or False dichotomy?” The wording here is important. The word “truthiness” already suggests a subjective fuzziness around the term. Expressing truthiness as probabilities provides more contextual information than does a binary true or false answer.

When we set out to design the SwiftRiver platform some three years ago, it was already clear to me then that the veracity of crowdsourced information ought to be scored in terms of probabilities. For example, what is the probability that the content of a Tweet referring to the Russian elections is actually true? Why use probabilities? Because it is particularly challenging to instantaneously verify crowdsourced information in the real-time social media world we live in.

There is a common tendency to assume that all unverified information is false until proven otherwise. This is too simplistic, however. We need a fuzzy logic approach to truthiness:

Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Truthiness as Propability – Moving Beyond Absolutism within the Global Social Media Information Environment”

Truth Is Not a Singularity

One thing I learned from Joan V. Bondurant's book The Conquest of Violence, is that Gandhi was in search of Truth with a capital T. But I eventually realized that it was SOCIAL Truth he was looking for. And there is no single social truth, because every person's experience is valid from a certain perspective; and every person experiences the world in a different way.

That means that there are 6 billion social truths out there; and there are even more than that, because those six billion individuals also experience reality as a couple, as a family, as a group of friends, as a neighborhood, as a community, as a nation, as a culture, as a religion, as Miles Davis fans . . . ad infinitum.

Gandhi was looking for a Truth that cut through all these differences. And that truth was Justice in a given social situation.

In other words, Truth with a capital T can only be discovered through our social interactions. And it's always relative. Always.

When it comes to Social Reality, there's never just one truth.

The Truth is this: when some people suffer through the actions of other people, it's never right or fair. It may be unintentional, but that doesn't alter the equation. Some people are suffering, and other people are causing their suffering. That was the Truth Gandhi was searching for—-justice between people. And he claimed that there's only one reliable road to that Truth.

Nonviolence.

But the above is just a small sliver of his philosophy. It's more complex than that. But at the same time it's simple. It reminds me of the line from Amadeus, where Salieri said:

” . . . music, finished as no music is ever finished. Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall.”

Gandhi's satyagraha is like that. It's a continual effort to find balance in a given social situation. Once you understand the strategy and dynamics of his philosophy, it's very simple to understand and apply. But the social world is a very complex system. Satyagraha only works if it is continually adapted to changing circumstances. That's where the challenge lies.

But no one simplified that challenge like Gandhi. And no one simplified Gandhi like Bondurant. In fact, Bondurant explains Gandhi better than Gandhi explained Gandhi. It took someone of her superior intellect to untangle all of the sometimes confusing threads of Gandhi's unique wisdom.

Gandhi was a force of nature. Bondurant was like a quantum physicist who successfully analyzed and explained that force

The Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict, by Joan V. Bondurant