Journal ISSN 1078-1935 – Page 2054 – Public Intelligence Blog

2013/02/09

Worth a Look: Hacking Politics – How Geeks, Progressives, The Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet

Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet

Edited by DAVID MOON, PATRICK RUFFINI, and DAVID SEGAL

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About the Book

Hacking Politics is a firsthand account of how a ragtag band of activists and technologists overcame a $90 million lobbying machine to defeat the most serious threat to Internet freedom in memory. The book is a revealing look at how Washington works today – and how citizens successfully fought back.

Written by the core Internet figures – video gamers, Tea Partiers, tech titans, lefty activists and ordinary Americans among them – who defeated a pair of special interest bills called SOPA (“Stop Online Piracy Act”) and PIPA (“Protect IP Act”), Hacking Politics provides the first detailed account of the glorious, grand chaos that led to the demise of that legislation and helped foster an Internet-based network of amateur activists.

Included are more than thirty original contributions from across the political spectrum, featuring writing by Internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz; Lawrence Lessig of Harvard Law School; novelist Cory Doctorow; Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA.); Jamie Laurie (of the alt-rock/hip-hop group The Flobots); Ron Paul; Mike Masnick, CEO and founder of Techdirt; Tiffiniy Cheng, co-founder and co-director of Fight for the Future; Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit; Nicole Powers of Suicide Girls; Josh Levy, Internet Campaign Director at Free Press, and many more.

Publication March 2013 • 216 pages

2013/02/092013/02/09

Marcus Aurelius: Army Talking Points on Sequesters — REVISED to Respect Push-Back

Corruption, Ineptitude, Military

This is UNOFFICIAL at this time, it has NOT been validated as an official document. The depiction of most Army contractors as small to mid-size businesses with moderate to severe risk of bankruptcy if sequester cuts take place, is a useful point for investigators. What is missing is a global “picture” of what different kinds of cuts mean in terms of mission effectiveness and response times. Absent forward basing, most CONUS-based responses packages will take up to nine days to deliver.

2013 Army TP on Sequestration

Continue reading “Marcus Aurelius: Army Talking Points on Sequesters — REVISED to Respect Push-Back”

2013/02/082013/02/08

Owl: Naomi Wolf — JSOC Obama’s Secret Assasins

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Ethics, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, Military

JSoc: Obama's secret assassins

The president has a clandestine network targeting a ‘kill list' justified by secret laws. How is that different than a death squad?

The film Dirty Wars, which premiered at Sundance, can be viewed, as Amy Goodman sees it, as an important narrative of excesses in the global “war on terror”. It is also a record of something scary for those of us at home – and uncovers the biggest story, I would say, in our nation's contemporary history.

Though they wisely refrain from drawing inferences, Scahill and Rowley have uncovered the facts of a new unaccountable power in America and the world that has the potential to shape domestic and international events in an unprecedented way. The film tracks the Joint Special Operations Command (JSoc), a network of highly-trained, completely unaccountable US assassins, armed with ever-expanding “kill lists”. It was JSoc that ran the operation behind the Navy Seal team six that killed bin Laden.

Scahill and Rowley track this new model of US warfare that strikes at civilians and insurgents alike – in 70 countries. They interview former JSoc assassins, who are shell-shocked at how the “kill lists” they are given keep expanding, even as they eliminate more and more people.

Read full article.

Continue reading “Owl: Naomi Wolf — JSOC Obama's Secret Assasins”

2013/02/082013/02/08

SchwartzReport: FDA Corruption, Republicans & Rape, US Drop from #1

Corruption, Government, Ineptitude

The FDA Forbids Labelling Non-GM Salmon
Liberty Beacon Staff

Iowa Bill Would Jail Raped Women for ‘Murder’ of Single-cell Zygotes
DAVID EDWARDS – The Raw Story

America Is Far From #1
ERIC ZUESSE – AlterNet (U.S.)

2013/02/072013/02/07

Reference: John Brennan’s Opening Statement — Extreme Fluff + CIA Meta-RECAP

Government, Ineptitude

PDF 8 Pages: Statement for the Record to the SSCI of 7 Feb 2013 (John Brennan)

One useful insight: “Trust deficit” between Congress and CIA has never been greater.

One questionable rah rah: 103 stars on the wall. Counting Khost Kathy, at least half and probably more like two thirds are deaths that resulted from bad judgment on the part of CIA managers with more hubris than common sense.

First major promise, no chance of being honored: “If confirmed, I would make it my mission — in partnership with the Congress — to ensure that the men and women of the CIA have the training, tradecraft, linguistic skills, technical tools, guidance, supervision, and leadership they need to do their jobs. That's seven current failures, there is ZERO prospect of his getting CIA to anything better than a C- in the next three years, and much more likely he will float at a D+.

Second and final promise, no chance of being honored: “And if given the honor to serve as the 21st Director of the CIA, I would take it as a sacred obligation to do everything in my ability to make sure the Central Intelligence Agency is the absolute best intelligence service it can be and one that makes all Americans proud. Never. Ever. He does not know what he needs to know and he does not have the juice he needs to actually fix the place.

Strike One: 80% Fluff, draconian inflation and overstatement of CIA service and risk

Strike Two: Nothing wrong with CIA

Strike Three: Nothing wrong with DNI

Bottom line: Like Chuck Hagel, he has blown a chance to give his prospective fiefdom a fresh start. If he had come in all substance, leading with “drones go to the military, we are out of the drone business from the day I arrive,” and then had something serious to say about each of the CIA's mission areas, he might have mustered a tiny bit of gravitas. If he is confirmed, it is because CIA does not matter and no one cares about its future.

Directly Related:

Berto Jongman: SSCI Pre-Hearing Q&A — Superb Questions, Cloudy Answers — Robert Steele Answers 6 of 40 Questions Honestly + IC/CIA Health RECAP

2013/02/072016/03/25

Berto Jongman: SSCI Pre-Hearing Q&A — Superb Questions, Cloudy Answers — Robert Steele Answers 6 of 40 Questions Honestly + IC/CIA Health RECAP

Hill Letters & Testimony, Officers Call

SSCI Pre-Hearing Questions for John Brennan

28 Pages, 40 Questions

ROBERT STEELE: CIA was clearly a full participant in the drafting of these answers, many of which are utter nonsense (being effective at clandestine intelligence, all-source analysis, and open source intelligence, to take three fairly pertinent examples). The questions are the best I have ever seen over 30 years of watching this theater of the absurd. Brennan's answers are a mix of world-class dissembling, avoidance of substance, and specious assurances. Harry Truman would be aghast at what the CIA has become. Below I offer honest answers to 6 of the 40 questions. I am always available for staff or Member testimony.

1A. How well do you think the CIA has performed recently in each of its primary missions:

CIA is broken beyond repair, and pathologically harmful in its present state. Drones and extrajudicial killings dominate its clerk-leaders' time, its budget, and its culture. 90% of what CIA claims as clandestinely acquired information is actually a mix of hand-outs from foreign liaison services and domestically-acquired information. CIA does not do all-source analysis, its inexperienced analysts do cosmetics on very thin streams of technical collection on a handful of hard-targets, and know nothing at all about Global Coverage (e.g. Mali at the tribal level). CIA counterterrorism is non-existent, outside of prisoner interrogation in partnership with JSOG at secret prisons that still do exist (e.g. Somalia), and direct support to Mossad false flag operations intended to keep the public distracted from domestic issues. There is no CIA counterintelligence function to speak of, that remains the final career stop for those who cannot be found work anywhere else. Covert action continues to consist of contractors running drugs into the US via US military bases and rural strips in Texas and elsewhere, and a tiny handful of truly extraordinary very small operations that defy imagination and merit fulsome praise–those who do the latter are the real heroes at CIA. CIA is not central — it does NOT have access to most of the information that the National Security Agency and National Geospatial Agency collect, nor does it do more than 10% of what is possible in either clandestine collection or multilingual analog and human open source acquisition. CIA is not intelligent, its back office and desktop processing are still closer to the Soviet gulag (John Perry Barlow said this first) than Silicon Valley, and CIA is not an “agency,” there are at least seven different CIAs, only three of them legitimate.

2. What do you consider to be the appropriate role for the CIA in the collection of human intelligence, given that human intelligence also is collected by the Department of Defense and others parts of the Intelligence Community?

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: SSCI Pre-Hearing Q&A — Superb Questions, Cloudy Answers — Robert Steele Answers 6 of 40 Questions Honestly + IC/CIA Health RECAP”

2013/02/072013/02/07

Reference (2010): Inteligencia: La <> de la Union Europea

Articles & Chapters

PDF 22 pages: 2010 Intelligence as Sap of European Union Spanish

Abstract: This article reflects the importance of the consolidation of structures of Intelligence, able of canalizing the flows in the support and exchange of information that provide the preventive measures to the decision making that serves like fortification of the UE. The Intelligence considered like the sap, the food of the Union, must be had present like part fundamental in the vanguard of any policy to develop.