IO Impotency – Page 199 – Public Intelligence Blog

2013/03/192013/03/26

Steve Aftergood: Drake Classification Complaint Dismissed and Court Severely Critical of Executive Over-Classification, Arbitrary Classification, and Lack of Accountability for Same

Cultural Intelligence, Government, Ineptitude, IO Impotency, IO Secrets, Military

CLASSIFICATION COMPLAINT ARISING FROM THOMAS DRAKE CASE DISMISSED

In July 2011, J. William Leonard, a former director of the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), took the extraordinary step of filing a formal complaint with the Office he once led charging that a document used to indict former NSA official Thomas Drake under the Espionage Act had been wrongly classified in violation of the executive order on classification. (“Complaint Seeks Punishment for Classification of Documents” by Scott Shane, New York Times, August 2, 2011; “Ex-federal official calls U.S. classification system ‘dysfunctional'” by Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post, July 21, 2012)

Last December, in a newly disclosed response, John P. Fitzpatrick, the current ISOO director, concluded that Mr. Leonard's complaint did not warrant the sanctions that Mr. Leonard had urged. Neither the original classification of the NSA document, titled “What a Wonderful Success,” nor its continued classification “rise to the level of willful acts in violation of the Order,” Mr. Fitzpatrick wrote in his December 26, 2012 response.

With that, the matter was officially closed. But the divergent views underlying the complaint remain unresolved and continue to fester.

“I have devoted over 34 years to Federal service in the national security arena, to include the last 5 years of my service being responsible for Executive branch-wide oversight of the classification system,” Mr. Leonard wrote in his 2011 complaint. “During that time I have seen many equally egregious examples of the inappropriate assignment of classification controls to information that does not meet the standards for classification; however, I have never seen a more willful example.”

Continue reading “Steve Aftergood: Drake Classification Complaint Dismissed and Court Severely Critical of Executive Over-Classification, Arbitrary Classification, and Lack of Accountability for Same”

2013/03/182013/03/26

Chuck Spinney: The Truth About the Cuban Missile Crisis

Corruption, Government, IO Impotency, Peace Intelligence

The below article, which appeared in the Atlantic last January, is a very important illustration of how domestic politics determine foreign policy. Bear in mind, the behaviour described below occurred when there was (and still is) a consensus among the pol-mil intellectuals that domestic politics stops at the water's edge and that foreign policy was and should be bi-partisan — the conclusion is a good analysis of where this kind of romantic intellectualization leads.

The Real Cuban Missile Crisis

EVERYTHING YOU THINK YOU KNOW ABOUT THOSE 13 DAYS IS WRONG.

By Benjamin Schwarz, The Atlantic, 11 January 1913

EXTRACT

On that very first day of the ExComm meetings, McNamara provided a wider perspective on the missiles’ significance: “I’ll be quite frank. I don’t think there is a military problem here … This is a domestic, political problem.” In a 1987 interview, McNamara explained: “You have to remember that, right from the beginning, it was President Kennedy who said that it was politically unacceptable for us to leave those missile sites alone. He didn’t say militarily, he said politically.” What largely made the missiles politically unacceptable was Kennedy’s conspicuous and fervent hostility toward the Castro regime—a stance, Kennedy admitted at an ExComm meeting, that America’s European allies thought was “a fixation” and “slightly demented.”

Read full article.

2013/03/172013/03/26

Yoda: Google Glass — Dark Side of the Force? + Big Data RECAP

Civil Society, Commerce, IO Impotency

Concerns, have we.

Google Glass: The opposition grows

“Stop The Cyborgs” is a new site that attempts to bring a balanced trepidation to the unbalanced idea that we'll all be walking round with Google's outer brain strapped to our faces.

The opposition will congregate in dark corners.

They will whisper with their mouths, while their eyes will scan the room for spies wearing strange spectacles.

The spies will likely be men. How many women would really like to waft down the street wearing Google Glass?

It won't be easy. Once you've been cybernated, there's no turning back. Which is why the refuseniks are already meeting in shaded corners of the Web.

One site is called “Stop The Cyborgs.” It claims to be “fighting the algorithmic future one bit at a time.”

It's going to take a lot of bitty fighting, but the people behind this site — they're naturally anonymous, in an attempt to stop Google spying on them — say they're fighting Google Glass in particular.

They say that it will herald a world in which “privacy is impossible and corporate control total.”

Some would say that, thanks to Googlies and other bright, deluded sparks, we're there already. The Lord and Master Zuckerberg explained to us a long time ago that he knows us better than we do and that we don't actually want privacy at all.

Still, the people behind this anti-cyborg movement claim that there's no way you'll ever know that someone wearing Google Glass is recording your every word and movement.

There's no way of even knowing if someone else is recording you through their glasses from somewhere in the cloud.

And how are we, whose egos are already more fragile than a porcelain potty, supposed to feel when we know that a glasses-wearer has one eye on us and another on our Klout score or teenage sexting pictures?

The site explains: “Gradually people will stop acting as autonomous individuals, when making decisions and interacting with others, and instead become mere sensor/effector nodes of a global network.”

Continue reading “Yoda: Google Glass — Dark Side of the Force? + Big Data RECAP”

2013/03/162013/03/26

Michel Bauwens: Abandoning Checks & Balances

Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, IO Impotency

Question authority!

‘We are abandoning all the checks and balances’

WASHINGTON – Evgeny Morozov is a Belarus-born technology writer who has held positions at Stanford and Georgetown universities in the United States. His first book, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, argued that “Western do-gooders may have missed how [the Internet] … entrenches dictators, threatens dissidents, and makes it harder — not easier — to promote democracy.” The New York Times described it as “brilliant and courageous.”

In his second book, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Follow of Technological Solutionism, Click Here, Morozov critiques what he calls “solutionism” — the idea that given the right code, algorithms and robots, technology can solve all of mankind’s problems, effectively making life “frictionless” and problem-free.

Morozov argues that this drive to eradicate imperfection and make everything “efficient” shuts down other avenues of progress and leads ultimately to an algorithm-driven world where Silicon Valley, rather than elected governments, determines the shape of the future.

. . . . . . . . . .

All solutions come with cost. Shifting a lot of the responsibility to the individual is a very conservative approach that seeks to preserve the current system instead of reforming it. With self-tracking we end up optimizing our behavior within the existing constraints rather than changing the constraints to begin with. It places us as consumers rather than citizens. My fear is policymakers will increasingly find that it is much easier, cheaper and sexier to invite the likes of Google to engage in some of this problem-solving rather than do something that is much more ambitious and radical.

. . . . . . . . . .

I have a lot of respect for these people as engineers, but they are being asked to take on tasks that go far beyond engineering — tasks that have to do with human and social engineering rather than technical engineering. Those are the kind of tasks I would prefer were taken on by human beings who are more well rounded, who know about philosophy and ethics, and know something about things other than efficiency, because it will not end well.

. . . . . . . . . .

The newspaper offers something very different from Google’s aggregators. It offers a value system, an idea of what matters in the world. Newspapers need to start articulating that value.

. . . . . . . . . .

There are many problems I have with TED. It has created this infrastructure where it very easy to be interesting without being very deep. If TED exercised their curatorial powers responsibly, they would be able to separate the good interesting from the bad interesting. But my fear is they don’t care as long as it drives eyeballs to the website. They don’t align themselves with the thinkers, they align themselves with marketing, advertising, futurists who are interested in ideas for the sake of ideas. They don’t care how these ideas relate to each other and they don’t much care for what those ideas actually mean. TED has come to exercise lots of power but they don’t exercise it wisely.

Read full article.

2013/03/142013/03/26

Jon Lebkoswky: Bruce Schneir — The Internet Goes to War

IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency

The Internet inherits war

Bruce Schneier at Technology Review:

Arms races are fueled by two things: ignorance and fear. We don’t know the capabilities of the other side, and we fear that they are more capable than we are. So we spend more, just in case. The other side, of course, does the same. That spending will result in more cyber weapons for attack and more cyber-surveillance for defense. It will result in move government control over the protocols of the Internet, and less free-market innovation over the same. At its worst, we might be about to enter an information-age Cold War: one with more than two “superpowers.” Aside from this being a bad future for the Internet, this is inherently destabilizing. It’s just too easy for this amount of antagonistic power and advanced weaponry to get used: for a mistaken attribution to be reacted to with a counterattack, for a misunderstanding to become a cause for offensive action, or for a minor skirmish to escalate into a full-fledged cyberwar.

2013/03/072013/03/26

Berto Jongman: Defense Science Board Report on Baby Steps Toward Resilient Military C4I Systems

Defense Science Board, IO Impotency

Defense Science Board Task Force Report:

Resilient Military Systems and the Advanced Cyber Threat

EXTRACT

After conducting an 18-month study, this Task Force concluded that the cyber threat is serious and that the United States cannot be confident that our critical Information Technology (IT) systems will work under attack from a sophisticated and well-resourced opponent utilizing cyber capabilities in combination with all of their military and intelligence capabilities (a “full spectrum” adversary). While this is also true for others (e.g. Allies, rivals, and public/private networks), this Task Force strongly believes the DoD needs to take the lead and build an effective response to measurably increase confidence in the IT systems we depend on (public and at the same time decrease a would-be attacker's confidence in the effectiveness of their capabilities to compromise DoD systems. This conclusion was developed upon several factors, including the success adversaries have had penetrating our networks; the relative ease that our Red Teams have in disrupting, or completely beating, our forces in exercises using exploits available on the Internet; and the weak cyber hygiene position of DoD networks and systems. The Task Force believes that the recommendations of this report create the basis for astrategy to address this broad and pervasive threat.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Defense Science Board Report on Baby Steps Toward Resilient Military C4I Systems”

2013/03/042013/03/07