Irrespective of the details of the current revelations about US spying being provided by Edward Snowden in the Guardian, there is already a huge collateral benefit. On the one hand, the US government is falling over itself to deny some of the allegations by offering its own version of the story. That for the first time gives us official details about programmes that before we only knew through leaks and rumours, if at all. Moreover, the unseemly haste and constantly-shifting story from the US authorities is confirmation, if anyone still needed it, that what Snowden is revealing is important – you don't kick up such a fuss over nothing.
NOTE: 2 years ago. At TED@MotorCity, Lisa Gansky, author of “The Mesh,” talks about a future of business that's about sharing all kinds of stuff, either via smart and tech-enabled rental or, more boldly, peer-to-peer. Examples across industries — from music to cars — show how close we are to this meshy future.
Comment by zasounotsukushi: Information company, not car company – I agree that's what I see for the future. But Zipcar has left some communities feeling abandoned, and didn't do what they needed to make the consumer feel listened to. On top of that, I think there's way more to collaborative consumption than how they were going about it. I like the final point – we need transparency and need to share failures. People need to stop picturing a shiny and happy picture of a connected society, cynicism needs to be built in.
Comment by D.S. Wellhauser: Another faux-intellectual re-packaging/re-marketing old ideas with some pseudo-new ideas…TED is Dead.
A new scientific review from Poland discusses irreparable harm done by vaccines.
This review addresses the issue in terms of adverse effects, immune system effects, neurological symptoms following vaccination, and a history of vaccines demonstrating little benefit. It centers mostly on studies not often referenced in the western world, providing fresh and broad-ranging information.
An honest reading of the study can leave little doubt that harm done may be extensive and often permanent.
Military software engineers have developed a program that can predict the social structures of street gangs. Philip Ball explains how it could help fight crime.
One of the big challenges in fighting organised crime is precisely that it is organised. It is run a bit like a business, with chains of command and responsibility, different specialised “departments”, recruitment initiatives and opportunities for collaboration and trade. Their structures often make crime syndicates and gangs more able to evade attempts by law enforcers to disrupt their activities.
That’s why police forces are keen to discover how these organisations are arranged – to map the networks that link individual members. While gang structures are typically fluid and informal compared to most legitimate businesses, they are far from random. In fact, violent street gangs seem to be set up along similar lines to insurgent groups that stage armed resistance to political authority, such as guerrilla forces in areas of civil war. These kinds of organisations tend to be composed of affiliated cells, each with its own leader.
For this reason, some law-enforcement agencies are hoping to learn from military research. A team at the West Point Military Academy in the US state of New York has just released details of a software package it has developed to aid intelligence gathering by police dealing with street gangs. The program, called Orca (Organization, Relationship, and Contact Analyzer), can use real-world data acquired from arrests and the questioning of suspected gang members to deduce the network structure of a gang.
Understanding and tackling violence that occurs outside of armed conflict settings is essential to improving the wellbeing of some of the world’s poorest communities.
Whilst advances have been made in terms of designing policies that address violence in fragile or conflict-affected countries, progress has been slower in relation to dealing with violence happening outside of these settings.
New forms of violence, such as organised crime and political instability, often arise in states which have undergone rapid economic growth and social transformation. These forms of violence are difficult to address because they are part of the very structures and processes that drive and shape development.
Fresh approaches are required. They need to be driven by communities, civil society and young people, as well as the state and international donors. They must also be underpinned by a better understanding of how violence affects the poor and what works in terms of interventions.
I get a lot of strange stuff in my inbox that’s just not appropriate here, but today was an exception. Someone asked a question and part of the answer was “Kenya Tweet Force”, an irregular cybermilitia supporting the Kenyan government against al Shabaab in Somalia. Their Twitter account, @KTF_press, was only following five others, so this was a good starting clue.
Few outside the intelligence community had heard of activity-based intelligence until December, when the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency awarded BAE Systems $60 million to develop products based on this newish methodology. But ABI, which focuses not on specific targets but on events, movements and transactions in a given area, is rapidly emerging as a powerful tool for understanding adversary networks and solving quandaries presented by asymmetrical warfare and big data.
Indeed, ABI is the type of intelligence tool that could be applied to the vast wash of metadata and internet transactions gathered by the NSA programs that were disclosed in June by a whistle-blower.
