Category: Advanced Cyber/IO

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Howard Rheingold: Discovery Engines Trying–and Failing

Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, IO Impotency
Howard Rheingold

Infotention

“Managing attention & information” RSS
Created and curated by Howard Rheingold

Discovery Engines: Policing The Riot Of Information Overload | Fast Company

Taming this torrent into something manageable and highly relevant is increasingly seen as the key for Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and any other chaotic content network looking to realize monster revenue.
That explains why discovery is the word du jour in tech. It also explains why there's a flurry of activity to build a “discovery engine,” the search engine's smart-ass cousin that tries to answer vague queries (like “funny video”–one of the top searches on YouTube).

Click on Image to Enlarge

Phi Beta Iota:  Discovery today sucks, one reason Google is not worth much for serious intelligence (decision-support) endeavors.  As Stephen E. Arnold has documented so ably, there are over 75 search engines, each with its own niche, and no one has put them together.  Worse, they only tap into the 2% or so that is the surface web, and do not do deep web (for that, dee Deep Web Technologies).  Worse, Google shows you what someone else has paid for you to see, not what you actually need or can get for free.  The bleeding edge of the mature intelligence world is focused on multinational information-sharing and sense-making, and on human computation, including leveraging the diasporas for crowdsourcing everything from translation to imagery interpretation.

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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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Cynthia McKinney: Libya Round-Up 23 August 2011

03 Economy, 05 Energy, 08 Wild Cards, 12 Water, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military, Misinformation & Propaganda
Cynthia McKinney

From Don DBar on behalf of Cynthia McKinney.

Battle for Tripoli not yet over as Gaddafi loyalists strike back

Washington Post, 22 August 2011

KPFA's Davey D interviews Don DeBar about the real on-the-ground situation in Tripoli.

This PressTV bit with me was recorded at 2:30 pm New York time yesterday (22 Aug 2011). At that time, I questioned the veracity of the claimed capture of Gadaffi's sons and of rebel control of the city of Tripoli. It turns out I was right.

No, I don't have a crystal ball – just good contacts on the ground who don't lie or hold their tongues when they see horrible wrong being done. NATO – that's Obama to the apologists – has done everything to keep this information from you, but the truth will out!

. . . . . . .

Libya Coverage Provides a Peek Behind the Curtain

Don DeBar at www.warisacrime.org

. . . . . . .

Interview on Costs of War on Sahar TV

Phi Beta Iota:  US Information Operations (IO) includes Pyschological Operations (PSYOP, now under a new name, same mindset, which is to deceive rather than to promulgate the truth).  It has improved since its signal success in sending Iraqi troops home rather than having to deal with their surrender.  What we are seeing in relation to Libya, apart from the impeachable crimes of pilots, generals, Congress, and the White House, is a major IO/PSYOP campaign that is driven by Wall Street and Big Oil, not by the public interest.  Interestingly, this is also the first time that the truth is being crowd-sourced in a moderately effective manner, suggesting that in the future any IO/PSYOP campaign that is less than truthful will be outed in quick time.

See Also:

Search: libyan tribes map + LIBYA RECAP 22 Aug 11

Phi Beta Iota:  The respective press–those trapped in a hotel in Tripoli and those embedded with the rebels–are seeing only what they are allowed to see.  Apart from Patrick Meier, Arno Reuser and a few others, no one is actually putting together “ground truth” based on widely scatted Twitter and other forms of communication.  The West sees Libya as oil, water, and gold.  The Africa Union has failed to see the urgency of protecting its interest in all three.

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Patrick Meier: Crowdsourcing Imagery Analysis Update

Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Geospatial, History, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process, Policies, Real Time, Threats
Patrick Meier

On Genghis Khan, Borneo and Galaxies: Using Crowdsourcing to Analyze Satellite Imagery

My colleague Robert Soden was absolutely right: Tomnod is definitely iRevolution material. This is why I reached out to the group a few days ago to explore the possibility of using their technology to crowdsource the analysis of satellite imagery for Somalia. You can read more about that project here. In this blog post, however, is to highlight the amazing work they’ve been doing with National Geographic in search of Genghis Khan’s tomb.

Read full post with varied illustrations and links.

noble gold