IO Impotency – Page 242 – Public Intelligence Blog

If there is ever a story to validate the reduction of spending in the
intelligence community, this would be it……….

Exclusive: Comedy of Errors Led to False ‘Water-Pump Hack’ Report

It was the broken water pump heard ’round the world.

Cyberwar watchers took notice this month when a leaked intelligence memo claimed Russian hackers had remotely destroyed a water pump at an Illinois utility. The report spawned dozens of sensational stories characterizing it as the first-ever reported destruction of U.S. infrastructure by a hacker. Some described it as America’s very own Stuxnet attack.

Except, it turns out, it wasn’t. Within a week of the report’s release, DHS bluntly contradicted the memo, saying that it could find no evidence that a hack occurred. In truth, the water pump simply burned out, as pumps are wont to do, and a government-funded intelligence center incorrectly linked the failure to an internet connection from a Russian IP address months earlier.

Read full article with two photos.

More reporting on this event, with some detail showing the lack of “intelligence” within this intelligence activity…….

America's critical infrastructure security response system is broken

Following SCADA water utility ‘hack', is the reporting system in need of re-thinking?

By Ellen Messmer | Network World US | Published: 16:01, 02 December 2011

The flap over the reported water utility hack in Illinois begs the question: Is the reporting system that the US has set up to identify cyberattacks on critical infrastructure broken and in need of re-thinking?

Read full article.

2011/12/042011/12/04

Patrick Meier: Architecture and Calendars as Trojan Horses for Repressive Regimes [Cognitive Dissonance 101]

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, DHS, Government, IO Impotency

Why Architecture and Calendars Are Trojan Horses for Repressive Regimes

by Patrick Meier

The simple thought first occurred to me while visiting Serbia earlier this year. As I walked in front of the country's parliament, I recalled Steve York's docu-mentary, “Bringing Down a Dictator.” In one particular scene, a large crowd assembles in front of the Serbian parliament chanting for the resignation of Slobodan Milosevic. Soon after, they storm the building and find thousands of election ballots rigged in the despot's favor. I then thought of Tahrir Square and how more than a million protestors had assembled there to demand that Hosni Mubarak step down. There was one obvious place for protestors to assemble in Cairo durin g the recent revolts. The word Tahrir means “liberation” in Arabic. That's what I call free advertising and framing par excellence.

These scenes play out over and over across the history of revolutions and popular resistance movements. In many ways, state architecture that is meant to project power and authority can just as easily be magnets and mobilization mechanisms for popular dissent; a hardware hack turned against it's coders. A Trojan Horse of sorts in the computing sense of the word.

Read rest of post.

Phi Beta Iota: Understanding cognitive dissonance between a public and a regime (or between troops / officers and their corrupt chain of command) is not a competency of the national intelligence communities or their political “clients.” What is so sad is that this is the PRECISE competency needed to avoid an all-consuming revolution.

2011/12/04

Chuck Spinney: Is Iran an Enemy of the Arabs? NO!

02 Diplomacy, 05 Iran, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Government, IO Impotency, Peace Intelligence

The West, especially the United States, and Israel are stoking the grand-strategic fires in Middle East by trying to intensify the conflict between the Sunnis and the Shias. As Patrick Seale explains in this important essay, our leaders are playing very a dangerous, and I would add, ‘dirty' game — but the United States are on the cusp of Presidential election year in the United States and Obama's narrow vision of triangulating the Republicans in the domestic politics of foreign policy [1] is trumping the criteria for shaping a sensible grand strategy.

——————–
[1] A pathbreaking book outlining how domestic politics shaped American foreign policy between the Spanish-American War and the Cold War is Robert Dallek's, The American Style of Foreign Policy: Cultural Politics and Foreign Affairs.

Chuck Spinney
The Blaster

Is Iran the Enemy of the Arabs?

by Patrick Seale
Agence Global, 29 Nov 2011

EXTRACT:

It would be wise for the Arab states to look to their own interests in this matter, rather than follow the bellicose lead of the Western powers and Israel. The Arabs must surely be aware that a military clash between Iran and the United States or Israel could be disastrous for the Arab Gulf region. Sensitive installations such as oil terminals and desalination plants could come under fire. The achievements of recent decades could be wiped out.

Read full article.

2011/11/282011/11/28

Mini-Me: When All Else Fails, Try Crowd-Sourcing

Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Collective Intelligence, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), Government, Intelligence (government), IO Impotency, Methods & Process

U.S. Government Turns to Crowdsourcing for Intelligence

National Defense, December 2011

By Dan Parsons

The Pentagon and U.S. intelligence community spend billions of dollars each year trying, with mild success at best, to predict the future.

They organize elaborate wargames, develop computer algorithms to digest information and rely on old-fashioned aggregation of professional opinion.

Past intelligence failures have been costly and damaging to U.S. national security. Trying to avoid previous pitfalls, agencies are on a constant treasure hunt for new technologies that might give them an edge.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity in February solicited industry proposals for how to improve the accuracy of intelligence forecasting. Under the auspices of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, IARPA invests in research programs that provide an “overwhelming intelligence advantage over future adversaries.”

Applied Research Associates, a New Mexico-based firm, has launched a program it hopes will improve upon the traditional methods of gathering expert opinion by using computer software that could make better-informed predictions. The system chooses the best sources of information from a huge pool of participants.

ARA won the bid and started working on its Aggregative Contingent Estimation System, or ACES, in May.

Robert Steele: Iran Arrests Twelve CIA Agents

Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency, Officers Call

steele smiling final — Robert David STEELE Vivas

Iran Reportedly Arrests Twelve CIA Agents

EXTRACT:

US officials confessed on Tuesday that Iranian intelligence forces and Hezbollah have unraveled the CIA’s spy network in Iran and Lebanon and arrested dozens of informants, severely damaging the intelligence agency’s reputation and ability to gather vital information on the two countries at a sensitive time in the region.

A CIA-led program in the Middle East is up in the air after officials confirmed to news organizations today that paid informants in Iran and Lebanon working for the US government have disappeared while attempting to infiltrate Hezbollah.

Read full text and see video.

Steele Sends: For DECADES I and others have been pointing out, in legal, ethical, public terms, the incapacity of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) across all fronts – clandestine operations, covert operations, analysis, administration, and what passes for management, which is merely a conventionally-dressed clown show. We have been called “lunatic fringe,” disgruntled, and worse. The fact of the matter is that I am probably more loyal to the Constitution and more loyal to the Republic and more loyal to the TRUE mission of US Intelligence than anyone now serving. CIA lives immunity, not cover, and that immunity is now over. CIA is incapable of conducting more than a handful of “denied area” clandestine operations, and they are now being confronted with the reality that the entire world is a denied area where they will be held accountable for being inept and where they might even be held accountable for crimes against humanity. Without intelligence and integrity, the US government is nothing more than a front for Congressional looting, and everyone now serving should be deeply ashamed of their role in perpetuating Versailles on the Potomac.

In Passing: I did not want to do a separate post on the reprehensible manner in which CIA is exploiting the death of Mike Spann in Afghanistan. He was totally unqualified to be doing what he was sent to do, and inept CIA managers sent him to his death. When you combine that with Khost Kathy, you get a better appreciation of the utter incompetence, arrogance, hubris, and general pasty-faced bloated psychopathology of CIA management, nowhere more ingained and out of control than in the Directorate of Operations. CIA never had a strong bench to begin with. Today they are, in my view, a danger to themselves and a danger to the Republic.

Footnote: Mike Spann's widow has been in dire financial straits in part because of the self-serving idiocy of CIA managers more interested in putting on a show hiding behind the flag, than in helping her remain employed and sustain her family.

2011/11/252011/11/25

Marcus Aurelius: SecDef to McCain on Sequester + RECAP on DoD Fraud, Waste, & Abuse

04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Analysis, Budgets & Funding, Collaboration Zones, Commerce, Corporations, Corruption, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Government, Hill Letters & Testimony, IO Impotency, Military, Office of Management and Budget, Officers Call, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, True Cost, Waste (materials, food, etc)

Marcus-Aurelius-150x150 — Marcus Aurelius

Invite your attention to pages 5 thru 7 of attached which outlines in very clear terms the likely FY 2013 and longer term impacts on the Department of Defense and the Joint Force of the impending sequester brought about by this week's dereliction of duty on the part of the Senators and Representatives making up the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction.

SecDef Panetta to Senator McCain on Sequester (PDF 2 pages)

Phi Beta Iota: Panetta-McCain may be the toxic replacment to Cheney-Warner. The letter is without merit. The acquisition system is so broken now the Navy and Army cannot build anything coherently–the Navy still lacks Naval Gun Fire and the Army still lacks an infantry weapon able to out-gun the Taliban, while the Air Force continues to stink at close air support and lack both an intra-theater adequacy of lift and a long-haul heavy lift capability (or the ability to be effective above 6,000 ft). DoD, in short, is a mis-managed mess and Panetta has no idea how to go about fixing that, nor does he want to. Lockheed Martin and others are quite happy with the way things are, where 50% of every dollar is waste but that waste is profit for them because it includes their overhead. It is true that the current laws mandated by Congress make it difficult for any Cabinet Secretary to cut waste–this is the same Congress that mandated we pay 100% asking price for Medicare drugs instead of the more common global standard of 2% for generic wholesale. As long as Congress remains corrupt, and the SecDef remains corrupt, there is no fixing this problem. The FACT is that we have to cut one trillion a year (what we are borrowing), not one trillion over ten years. The FACT is that DoD would be much stronger if it could combine both intelligence and integrity and actually create the four forces after next, at a much reduced cost, that those with intelligence and integrity have been discussing for decades, and with greater intensity, since the mid-1990's.

2011/11/21

Theophilis Goodyear: China Credit Crashing

02 China, 03 Economy, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, IO Impotency

Remember the footage in the “Inside Job” documentary of a single Chinese worker working in an otherwise empty giant factory? That factory could be productive, but the international currency system is preventing it.

That's the irony. If all the world's currencies collapse in one day, productive potential will be exactly the same as it was the day before, but production will fall idle all over the world because currency is the medium of exchange that facilitates production.

This is the main problem. If it's not fixed it will become an even bigger problem; but it will still be the same problem. Fix the currency problem and production will be up and running again. Don't fix it, and it will be The Day the Earth Stood Still (original version). And that day could drag into years if something isn't done about it.

A credit crisis in China's most enterprising city is making the country nervous: (article by Time Magazine)

Global Outlook Grim, China tells U.S. (article by Reuters)

Category: IO Impotency

DefDog: DHS Comedy of Errors on Water-Pump “Hack”