A diplomatic disaster for the United States is currently unfolding in Berlin. The revelation that the NSA may have monitored cell phone conversations and text messages of Chancellor Angela Merkel has led to popular outrage in Germany, as well as unusually pointed language from the Chancellor and other government officials. The U.S. Ambassador was not merely asked but summoned (“einbestellt”) to the German foreign office—a strong verb used until now (if at all) only for the Syrian and Iranian ambassadors. The Chancellor’s phone conversation with President Obama did nothing to ease the tension. Merkel declared such practices totally unacceptable: Between friends and partners such as the United States and Germany, the monitoring of communications by government leaders is a grave breach of trust, her press secretary emphasized. The Obama administration, other than saying the Chancellor’s phone is not now and will not in the future be monitored, has offered nothing: neither apology, nor explanation of what happened in the past, nor any sort of suggestion for future cooperation or discussion of a collective solution.
The unprecedented Saudi refusal to take up its Security Council seat is not just about Syria but a response to the Iranian threat
The Muslim world’s historic – and deeply tragic – chasm between Sunni and Shia Islam is having worldwide repercussions. Syria’s civil war, America’s craven alliance with the Sunni Gulf autocracies, and Sunni (as well as Israeli) suspicions of Shia Iran are affecting even the work of the United Nations.
Saudi Arabia’s petulant refusal last week to take its place among non-voting members of the Security Council, an unprecedented step by any UN member, was intended to express the dictatorial monarchy’s displeasure with Washington’s refusal to bomb Syria after the use of chemical weapons in Damascus – but it also represented Saudi fears that Barack Obama might respond to Iranian overtures for better relations with the West.
The Saudi head of intelligence, Prince Bandar bin Sultan – a true buddy of President George W Bush during his 22 years as ambassador in Washington – has now rattled his tin drum to warn the Americans that Saudi Arabia will make a “major shift” in its relations with the US, not just because of its failure to attack Syria but for its inability to produce a fair Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement.
What this “major shift” might be – save for the usual Saudi hot air about its independence from US foreign policy – was a secret that the prince kept to himself.
Israel, of course, never loses an opportunity to publicise – quite accurately – how closely many of its Middle East policies now coincide with those of the wealthy potentates of the Arab Gulf.
Seeing What Is in a Laundry List of Search Results
In late October I will be delivering a webinar version of my lecture “What to Do When Google Doesn’t Answer Your Question.” The webinar is at this time not open to the public. My topic is that free Web search engines offer useful information. Most people have neither the time nor tools to pinpoint the item which provides significant insight or a useful fact; for example, a relationship between two people or a phone number of a person associated with a subject like the Muslim Brotherhood.
You may be one of the hundreds of millions of Bing or Google searchers who uses the results lists as they are presented. I have no desire to argue with anyone about relevance, precision, and recall. The reason is that modern technology makes ad-supported search results the Great Destroyer of objective information retrieval measures. In short, precision and recall are dead. Too bad. I miss them. Nevertheless, useful information is in the public and open source indexes. The problem is finding useful information.
One of the topics in the 2.5 hour lecture at the ISS World Conference for intelligence and law enforcement professionals elicited quite a bit of post-presentation discussion. The interest in the topic fueled the upcoming webinar.
I want to highlight one service I described at ISS World and will touch upon in the webinar in late October 2013.
The system is Cluuz.com, a service of Sprylogics. Sprylogics is a Canadian outfit originally set up by a former military officer. To follow along with this example, point your browser to www.cluuz.com.
Here are the steps I followed on October 8, 2013. Because content in public Web indexes changes, your results will differ. Also, Cluuz.com is a metasearch engine. The system sends a query to a public Web index and then processes the results. The Sprylogics’ technology extracts entities, performs relationship analyses, and formats results in a laundry list and graphic reports. Remember, at this time Cluuz.com is available without charge.
“I am overwhelmed by the elegance and simplicity of the techniques that are being deployed to defeat the dissemination of 9/11 Truth to the American public”–Jim Fetzer
The massive NSA surveillance program appears to have benefits for those who are in control beyond what has been generally acknowledged, which, evidence suggests, includes manipulating search engines to make it more difficult, if not impossible, to access programs about 9/11, even if they are broadcast by as important a source as “Russia Today”.
In addition, even as prominent and respected a source as NPR has begun to run a series of animated features about those who died on 9/11, which appears to be a brilliant stroke from the point of view of public relations. Emotions almost always outweigh reason and rationality in dealing with traumatic events, such as 9/11, where they may have found a way to control the public effortlessly.
Manipulating the Internet
In an article published on 3 October 2013, “Search Engine Manipulation. Google and YouTube Suppress Controversial 9/11 Truth?”, Elizabeth Woolworth reports about a recent broadcast by RT (“Russia Today”), which illustrates the technique that we can expect is going to be utilized on a large scale by the NSA and the CIA, not only in relation to 9/11 but JFK and other issues:
On September 8, 2013, the popular Russia Today “Truthseeker” program, with over a million subscribers on YouTube,[1] published a 13-minute newscast entitled “The Truthseeker: 9/11 and Operation Gladio (E23)”:
Below the video frame ran the caption:
Bigger than Watergate’: US ‘regular’ meetings with Al-Qaeda’s leader; documented White House ‘false flag terrorism’ moving people ‘like sheep’; the father of Twin Towers victim tell us why he backs this month’s 9/11 campaign on Times Square and around the world; & the protests calendar for September.
This paragraph was followed by a list of interviewees, including four people representing three scholarly research organizations: Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth,[2] the 9/11 Consensus Panel,[3] and The Journal of 9/11 Studies.[4]
The “Truthseeker” video immediately started to gain popularity on YouTube, reaching 131,000 views in the first three days.[5](The history of the viewing statistics may be seen by clicking on the little graphic symbol under the video frame, and to the right)
Truthseeker posted its program to YouTube on Sept. 8. Russia Today tweeted the YouTube link to its 546,000 followers and to the interviewer, Daniel Bushell, that day:
When people criticize overclassification of national security information, what exactly are they talking about? Is it too much secrecy? The wrong sort of secrecy? Classifying something at too high a level? Oddly, there is no widely-accepted definition of the term.
But since the solution to overclassification, if any, will naturally be shaped by the way the problem is understood, it is important to specify the problem as clearly as possible.
In 2010 Congress passed (and President Obama signed) the Reducing Over-Classification Act, which mandated several steps to improve classification practices in the executive branch. But in a minor act of legislative malpractice, Congress failed to define the meaning of the term “over-classification” (as it was spelled in the statute). So it is not entirely clear what the Act was supposed to “reduce.”
Among its provisions, the Act required the Inspectors General of all classifying agencies to perform an evaluation of each agency's compliance with classification rules.
“Over-classification,” according to ISOO, means “the designation of information as classified when the information does not meet one or more of the standards for classification under section 1.1 of
.” If something is classified in violation of the standards of the executive order– then it is “over-classified.”
So, for example, information that is not owned by the government, such as a newspaper article, cannot be properly classified under the terms of the executive order. And neither can information that has no bearing on national security, such as an Embassy dinner menu. And yet information in both categories has been known to be classified, which is indeed a species of overclassification.
Unfortunately, however, this ISOO definition presents the problem so narrowly that it misses whole dimensions of overclassification.
FUSION: A BEHAVIOURAL APPROACH TO COUNTERINSURGENCY
Article by: Rob Sentse and Jeroen Jansen
Major BC. Rob SENTSE is attached to the 13 Mechanized Brigade RNLA as a Staff officer Information Operations. In 2006 he worked at the Canadian led RC-S HQ as J2PLANS also responsible for the Fusion Cell and in 2008 he worked as G2X for Taskforce Uruzgan.
Jeroen JANSEN MSc. Is currently writing a PhD. on intelligence collaboration. Both are member of the Netherlands Intelligence Studies Association www.nisaintelligence.nl
ABSTRACT
This article examines the way in which we organise and combine our efforts during military operations abroad. We seek to illustrate where the current organisations involved would tend to work separately, thus enhancing the chance for missed opportunities, wrong assessment of situations or counter-productive action. To achieve flexibility there has been a great deal of emphasis on the network perspective to organisation, causing concepts such as network enabled capability and network centric warfare to become common good. Based on previous experience in the field, we here propose an additional element that will better allow the various disciplines to work together in a concerted manner providing a good base for human understanding of the situation and effects caused by previous decisions.
The main focus of this approach is to influence attitudes and induce a desired behavioural context in the area of operations (AO). These ideas sprouted in Afghanistan during the installation of a fusion cell in 2006 which combined people from various disciplines to assess incoming information; impact of recent events; and impact of our own decisions and actions. Current operations and security environment are increasingly complex and require an organisational structure that is flexible and synergised, creating the necessary pre-conditions for a well conceived Counter-Insurgency (COIN1) approach. The operational environment has to be viewed in a behavioural context.
The last decades we have seen situations in which military involvement was not limited to achieving military victory. Rather, it was one of the instruments to influence behaviour. Using this behavioural approach, fusion cell members assess all actors as complex, adaptive, interactive systems-of-systems in a wider context. These actors not only include the local population, leaders and media but also the public and policymakers of troop contributing and other countries of influence. To put these actors in their proper context political, military, cultural, and economical aspects of the environment are taken into account. In this article we highlight the added value of the fusion approach in Afghanistan and make some recommendations for structurally implementing this approach in future COIN operations.
