Journal ISSN 1078-1935 – Page 1408 – Public Intelligence Blog

2014/12/14

Stephen E. Arnold: A Balanced View of “Artificial Intelligence” — Elementary, Not a Threat — Most, Including Factiva, Have Missed the Boat…

I have been following the “AI will kill us”, the landscape of machine intelligence craziness, and “Artificial Intelligence Isn’t a Threat—Yet.”

The most recent big thinking on this subject appears in the Wall Street Journal, an organization in need of any type of intelligence: Machine, managerial, fiscal, online, and sci-fi.

Harsh? Hmm. The Wall Street Journal has been running full page ads for Factiva. If you are not familiar with this for fee service, think 1981. The system gathers “high value” content and makes it available to humans clever enough to guess the keywords that unlock, not answers, but a list of documents presumably germane to the keyword query. There are wrappers that make Factiva more fetching. But NGIA systems (what I call next generation information access systems) use the Factiva methods perfected 40 years ago as a utility.

Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: A Balanced View of “Artificial Intelligence” — Elementary, Not a Threat — Most, Including Factiva, Have Missed the Boat…”

2014/12/132014/12/13

Owl: Jeb Bush vs Hillary Clinton 2016 — Two Crime Families Fight for Scraps?

Cultural Intelligence

Oh, going to do it, no doubt about it. It's going to be him against Hillary. 2 crime families fighting it out. Inevitable.

Jeb Bush sending signals that he may be getting ready for 2016 presidential run

“Jeb Bush and his emissaries are sending increasingly strong signals that the former Florida governor is gearing up for a 2016 presidential campaign, with associates saying he could announce his intentions within a month. Bush recently e-mailed major Republican donors asking them to, as several of them put it, “keep your powder dry.” His allies are urging would-be bundlers not to commit to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie or other potential rivals. Bush’s top strategist, Mike Murphy, has also been telling potential campaign staffers not to sign up to work for another candidate and to expect Bush’s announcement soon.”

Continue reading “Owl: Jeb Bush vs Hillary Clinton 2016 — Two Crime Families Fight for Scraps?”

2014/12/112014/12/11

SchwartzReport: 20 Key Findings on CIA Torture — Should President Fire DNI, USDI, and D/CIA?

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Terrorism, 11 Society, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, Officers Call

20 key findings about CIA interrogations

Almost 13 years after the CIA established secret prisons to hold and interrogate detainees, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report on the CIA’s programs listing 20 key findings. Click a statement below for a summary of the findings:

1 “not an effective means of acquiring intelligence” 2 “rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness” 3 “brutal and far worse than the CIA represented” 4 “conditions of confinement for CIA detainees were harsher” 5 “repeatedly provided inaccurate information” 6 “actively avoided or impeded congressional oversight” 7 “impeded effective White House oversight” 8 “complicated, and in some cases impeded, the national security missions” 9 “impeded oversight by the CIA’s Office of Inspector General” 10 “coordinated the release of classified information to the media” 11 “unprepared as it began operating” 12 “deeply flawed throughout the program's duration” 13 “overwhelmingly outsourced operations” 14 “coercive interrogation techniques that had not been approved” 15 “did not conduct a comprehensive or accurate accounting of the number of individuals it detained” 16 “failed to adequately evaluate the effectiveness” 17 “rarely reprimanded or held personnel accountable” 18 “ignored numerous internal critiques, criticisms, and objections” 19 “inherently unsustainable” 20 “damaged the United States' standing in the world”

Continue reading “SchwartzReport: 20 Key Findings on CIA Torture — Should President Fire DNI, USDI, and D/CIA?”

2014/12/102014/12/10

Mel Goodman: CIA Directors’ High Crimes

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Terrorism, 11 Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War

The CIA’s Operation Deception

A Spurious Challenge to the Senate Torture Report

CounterPunch, 10 December 2014

CIA director John Brennan, having failed to block the release of the Senate intelligence committee’s report on torture and abuse, is now abetting the efforts of former CIA directors and deputy directors to rebut the report’s conclusions that the interrogation techniques amounted to sadism and that senior CIA officials lied to the White House, the Congress, and the Department of Justice about the effectiveness of the enhanced interrogation program. Former CIA directors George Tenet and Michael Hayden and deputy directors John McLaughlin and Steve Kappes, who were guilty of past deceit on sensitive issues, have threatened to make documents available to undermine the findings of the Senate committee. The senior operations officer who ran the CIA’s torture and abuse program, Jose Rodriquez, has been permitted to write a book and a long essay in the Washington Post that argue the interrogation techniques were legal and effective. Their charges are completely spurious and their credibility is non-existent. Read more.

Continue reading “Mel Goodman: CIA Directors' High Crimes”

2014/12/102014/12/10

Steven Aftergood: CIA Torture Report – Oversight, But No Remedies Yet — With Strong PBI Comment

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Terrorism, 11 Society, Corruption, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, Officers Call

CIA Torture Report: Oversight, But No Remedies Yet

The release of the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation program is, among other things, an epic act of record preservation. Numerous CIA records that might not have been disclosed for decades, or ever, were rescued from oblivion by the Senate report and are now indelibly cited and quoted, even if many of them are not yet released in full. That’s not a small thing, since the history of the CIA interrogation program was not a story that the Agency was motivated or equipped to tell. Read more.

Continue reading “Steven Aftergood: CIA Torture Report – Oversight, But No Remedies Yet — With Strong PBI Comment”

2014/12/10

Sepp Hasslberger: Sun, Not Carbon, Determines Climate Change

03 Environmental Degradation

Whenever talk comes to global warming – or climate change as they call it now, we go off into an irrational fear of CO2 as the cause and agent of change. – Evidence is now accumulating that it's the sun's activity, not our emission of CO2 that causes such changes.

New paper finds strong evidence the Sun has controlled climate over the past 11,000 years, not CO2

The authors find temperature changes lag solar activity changes by ~40 years, which is likely due to the huge heat capacity and inertia of the oceans.

2014/12/10

SchwartzReport: Australia Achieves Most Efficient Solar Panels — Total Conversion Within 15 Years?

05 Energy

Here is the latest on the Solar Trend, and it is very good news. The price of non-carbon energy is dropping so quickly and so far, that will will soon be clear to anyone that whatever one's views on climate change, carbon energy is simply no longer competitive. A conversion generally thought to take 30 years, is compressing down to perhaps half that.

Australia develops world's most efficient solar panels

The new photovoltaic (PV) system created by University of New South Wales (UNSW) researchers converts 40 percent of solar light into electrical energy, which is a 15 percent increase over regular panels.