Egypt: Update. Bedouin protesters in Egypt fired two rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) at a police station in the Sinai Peninsula town of Sheikh Zuweid on the 27th. One of the rockets hit empty space at the station, while the other missed and hit a nearby medical center. No casualties were immediately reported. Protesters also fired an RPG at another police station outside the town, setting it on fire. The attacks came hours after police shot and killed a protester.
Members of the pro-democracy Egyptian youth group April 6 Movement promised more anti-government demonstrations, defying a government ban on protests and called for mass demonstrations on 28 January after Muslim prayers. According to one demonstrator, after the protests started on Jan. 25, they will not end until the demands of life, liberty and dignity for the Egyptian people have been met.
Scientists say video games can increase concentration, help with learning and even improve decision-making skills. Now, in an effort to improve the work of spies, the intelligence community may also resort to using educational games.
Phi Beta Iota: Nothing the secret world does in gaming can be called serious, and that includes the ridiculous DARPA initiative to model a world so as to influence what real people think. There is no game that can help those put into IC leadership positions or those who continue to allow $75 billion a year to be spent on technical collection and contractor butts in seats that produce “at best” 4% of what top commanders need. The insanity continues. The ONLY “serious game” any intelligence community should be funding (and ideally all together in the aggregate) is the EarthGame designed by Medard Gabel. Medard was co-creator with Buckminster Fuller of the analog World Game, and the only person truly qualified to create the EarthGame in the context of a global Strategic Analytic Model that allows to design a world that works for all. Anything less is a corruption of the possible.
The success of a throng of Tunisian protesters who toppled Ben Ali, the seemingly unshakable dictator, caught the world off guard.
Analysts have rushed to make sense of Tunisia's unforeseen popular revolt. The media have emphasized the economic discontent caused by unemployment, poverty, and high food prices. Others have noted the role social networks have played, characterizing the uprising as an instance of online activism and hailing it as a “Twitter revolution.”
This extraordinary uprising is being seen as the possible start of a domino effect in the Arab world.
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Going forward, Tunisians will scrutinize the sincerity of these statements. The Obama administration’s initial hesitation exposed its unease with this transformation. U.S. policy and its national-security strategy in the Arab world need reassessment. Tunisia’s democratic impulse, as well as the uprising’s reverberations in other Arab countries, presents challenges for U.S. policy and that of its authoritarian allies in the region.
Phi Beta Iota: Most governments are under siege, for most governments, to one extent or another, have failed to attend to the public interest, instead bending or selling out completely to special interests. The United States of America is especially vulnerable at this time because it is over-extended, financially and morally bankrupt, and has a government that is out of touch with both the public interest, and global reality. Tunesia is not unique–all countries have the preconditions for revolution extant, what has changed are two things: the proliferation of precipitants, and the ability of the public to connect and promulgate.
For an open source revolt (here's some background on “open source insurgency“) to be successfully formed, it needs a plausible promise. A meta issue around which all of the different factions etc. can form (remember, most of the groups and individuals involved in an open source revolt can't agree on anything but some basic concepts). A generic “day of revolt” doesn't accomplish that. What could?
Using the multi-million scale No Mas FARC protests as an example and the critical ingredient in the Tunisian protests (extreme corruption that generated an endless wellspring of anger/frustration), a potential “plausible promise” for an Egyptian open source revolt is:
No More Corruption
Not only is a movement opposing corruption something the government will find hard to oppose, it is something every Egyptian deals with on a daily basis. It also has the added benefit of directly harming the entrenched ruling elite, who are likely to become poster children of the very thing the movement is against.
EXTRACT: What we are witnessing in the 21st century is the empowerment of sovereign individuals to confront the legitimacy and authority of a sovereign nation state's government via digitally driven means. As witnessed in Tunisia, revolution has been attempted and achieved via digitally driven leaderless groups. [ATCA: Tunisia: A Digitally Driven Leaderless Revolution, 15th January 2011]
Revolutionaries are leveraging digital technology to self-organise, to learn and to proliferate. Incumbent leaderships struggle to keep up because their thinking is generationally out-of-step and based on traditional forms of centralised hierarchical control and resource allocation.
The below was inspired by a close look at the evolving concept of cyber-commands. In our judgment, LtGen Keith Alexander, USA and those in charge of the various service cyber-commands are headed for spectacularly expensive failure, minor operational successes not-with-standing. The officers concerned are well-intentioned, precisely like their predecessors who chose to ignore precisely the same insights published in 1994–they simply lack the intestinal fortitude to break with the past and get it right for a change. What they plan is the cyber equivalent of “clear, hold, build,” and just as mis-guided. They are out of touch with reality and will remain so. They will all be happily retired long before the predictable recognition of their failure occurs, and the next generation of young flags will make the same mistakes again…and again…until we get an honest President with an honest Office of Management and Budget (OMB) able to demand and enforce integrity across the board.
