Lack of Integrity: ASSUME Secrecy IGNORE Open

Corruption
DefDog Recommends...

The power of Open Source……..

Secret Space Plane Can’t Hide From Amateur Sleuths

Noah Shachtman, March 30, 2011

WIRED

The U.S. military likes to be a little sneaky with its robotic space planes. Unlike typical spacecraft, these vehicles can shift their orbits, frustrating the global network of skywatchers who keep track of just about
every man-made object rotating the planet.

But the sleuths have their tricks, too. They’ve tracked down the X-37B on its second secret mission. And the information the skywatchers are finding says quite a bit about the classified operations of this mysterious
spacecraft.

Click on Image to Enlarge

It took the amateur sleuths nearly a month to hunt down the first X-37B after it launched on its inaugural mission. That’s an eternity in sky-spotting time.

The second time around was easier. The U.S. space plane was discovered just four days after it blasted into orbit, earlier this month. Cape Town, South Africa’s Greg Roberts — “a pioneer in using telescopic video cameras to track spacecraft, chalking up exceptional results over the years,” according to Space.com — spotted this second secret spacecraft, just like he found the first.

Read full article….

Phi Beta Iota: $80-90 billion a year for secret waste that provides “at best” 4% of what key decision makers need to know and nothing at all for everyone else.  The lunacy continues.

See Also:

Continue reading “Lack of Integrity: ASSUME Secrecy IGNORE Open”

Lack of Integrity = Jim Clapper Blows Off GAO

Corruption

Secrecy News

DNI DRAGS HEELS ON GAO ACCESS TO INTELLIGENCE

The Director of National Intelligence has prepared a draft intelligence directive on access by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to intelligence information, but it is “shockingly bad,” a congressional official said.

The GAO is an investigative arm of Congress that performs audits and reviews in support of congressional oversight and the legislative process.  But GAO access to intelligence information has often been frustrated by resistance from the executive branch, which has sought to strictly limit the conduct of intelligence oversight to the congressional intelligence committees.

Continue reading “Lack of Integrity = Jim Clapper Blows Off GAO”

Lack of Integrity = Obama Loves GE, No Taxes Okay!

Corruption
Chuck Spinney Recommends...

This is really disgusting.  Chuck

Published on Wednesday, March 30, 2011 by Truthdig.com

Obama's Fatal Corporate Addiction

by Robert Scheer

If it had been revealed that Jeffrey Immelt once hired an undocumented nanny, or defaulted on his mortgage, he would be forced to resign as head of President Barack Obama’s “Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.” But the fact that General Electric, where Immelt is CEO, didn’t pay taxes on its $14.5 billion profit last year—and indeed is asking for a $3.2 billion tax rebate—has not produced a word of criticism from the president, who in January praised Immelt as a business leader who “understands what it takes for America to compete in the global economy.”

Rest of commentary….

General Electric 2010: No Taxes, Claimed 3.2B Credit

Lack of Integrity = Being on Wrong Side of History

07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Officers Call
Chuck Spinney Sounds Off....

There is no question that the sudden emergence of the Arab Revolution caught the Obama Administration flatfooted.  While it is easy to blame President Obama for being asleep at the switch, he is dependent on the professional government for information about the world — specifically, that provided by the $80 billion a year intelligence services.

The American intelligence apparat – CIA, DIA, NSA, NRO, etc. — has missed just about every important international development/opportunity in the last 30+ years: The Iranian Revolution, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, 9-11, WMDs in Iraq, the Taliban's tentative overtures with respect to dumping Osama bin Ladin, and now the Arab Revolt. Given this history, Obama is not entirely blameless for being caught napping. To date has not even attempted to correct what is a horrendous problem that clearly threatened to capture him and distort his decision making.

Why are the $80 billion a year intelligence activities so blind to important events and so resistant to reform?

Continue reading “Lack of Integrity = Being on Wrong Side of History”

Ushandi Moves Forward with Crisis Mapping Check-In

Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Civil Society, Earth Intelligence, Gift Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), IO Mapping, Mobile, Non-Governmental, Peace Intelligence, Real Time
Michael Ostrolenk Recommends...

Crisis Mapping Meets Check-in

New features could make a Web tool that has helped track events in Japan and the Middle East even more useful.

Monday, March 28, 2011, By David Talbot

MIT Technology Review

EXTRACT:  The new feature is known as “check-in,” also used by social sites like Foursquare—in that case as a way of alerting friends to your presence at a particular location.

Click on Image to Enlarge

For Ushahidi, this is “a pretty powerful step forward,” says Ethan Zuckerman, a board member of the nonprofit, and a senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. “Adding check-in to this equation allows me to pull my data apart from the whole. That makes maps usable for multiple purposes—group reporting as well as tracking of my own movements.”

Enabling such tracking simply requires a GPS-equipped phone to allow a quick log-in to record whereabouts

Public Itemization of US Hypocrisy on Libya

08 Wild Cards, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency, Military
Who, Me?

There's no business like war business

By Pepe Escobar

Asia Times, 29 March 2011

To follow Pepe's articles on the Great Arab Revolt, please clickhere.

Lies, hypocrisy and hidden agendas. This is what United States President Barack Obama did not dwell on when explaining his Libya doctrine to America and the world. The mind boggles with so many black holes engulfing this splendid little war that is not a war (a “time-limited, scope-limited military action”, as per the White House) – compounded with the inability of progressive thinking to condemn, at the same time, the ruthlessness of the Muammar Gaddafi regime and the Anglo-French-American “humanitarian” bombing.

Read full article….

Phi Beta Iota: A good review.  See especially the conclusion on water beneath Libya as a factor.   See also the author's various articles on “The Great Arab Revolt.”

Infinite Games–Play with Rules and Boundaries

Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Budgets & Funding, Cultural Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), Serious Games
Jon Lebkowsky Bio

Infinite Games

by jonl on March 29, 2011

Via Flemming Funch, a review of “Finite and Infinite Games – A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility” by James P. Carse: “A finite game is a game that has fixed rules and boundaries, that is played for the purpose of winning and thereby ending the game….An infinite game has no fixed rules or boundaries. In an infinite game you play with the boundaries and the purpose is to continue the game.”

All finite games have rules. If you follow the rules you are playing the game. If you don’t follow the rules you aren’t playing. If you move the pieces in different ways in chess, you are no longer playing chess.Infinite players play with rules and boundaries. They include them as part of their playing. They aren’t taking them serious, and they can never be trapped by them, because they use rules and boundaries to play with.

Phi Beta Iota: This is a perfect “capstone” commentary from Jon–himself a hacker pioneer–Epoch A is over.  Epoch B has begin.  Epoch B changes everything, including the rules.   It bears emphasis, over and over again, that INTEGRITY is essential for infinite games to create infinite wealth.  Corruption is a cancer.

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