Journal ISSN 1078-1935 – Page 2703 – Public Intelligence Blog

General Clapper is extremely qualified to be Director of National Intelligence (DNI) in terms of intelligence experience and management skills. Far too many senior management staff at CIA have proven incompetent time servers and selection of the DNI from the upper ranks of CIA would have to be done with extreme care.

The fact is however that no matter who is DNI, it is an untenable job. Although General Clapper supposedly received authority over 80 per cent of the intelligence budget my guess is that DOD and its friends in congress will make sure that he will be unable to exercise any real control over spending. Further no DNI appears to have had the full confidence of either President Bush or President Obama. With Leon Panetta as Director of CIA, that agency will continue to operate pretty much independent of the DNI. Finally the simple fact is that President Obama has apparently placed his full confidence in John Brennan and Brennan apparently thinks nothing of undercutting any intelligence official who might undermine his role as the Intelligence Authority for the President. If General Clapper would have asked me I would have told him to forget the DNI position and get himself a cushy job in private industry.

Harnessing Collective Intelligence to Save Democracy

Journal: Can’t Get No Satisfaction from US Intelligence Community…

2010/12/22

Journal: Warrantless Wiretap Judgment Against USG

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, Government

Warrantless-Wiretap Win Nets Victims a Paltry $40K

WIRED December 21, 2010

David Kravets

A federal judge on Tuesday awarded $20,400 each to two American lawyers
illegally wiretapped by the George W. Bush administration, and granted
their counsel $2.5 million for the costs litigating the case for more than
four years.

It was the first and likely only lawsuit in which there was a ruling
against the former administration’s secret National Security Agency
surveillance program adopted in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terror
attacks.

Read rest of article….

2010/12/22

Journal: Denial of Service Attacks on Humanitarian Sites

07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Computer/online security, Gift Intelligence, IO Multinational, Non-Governmental

berto small — Berto Jongman Recommends...

DDoS Attacks Continue to Plague Human Rights Sites

By: Chloe Albanesius

PC Magazine, 12.22.2010

WikiLeaks and Operation Payback have put distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in the news recently, but independent media and human rights Web sites have been battling these attacks on a consistent basis with no easy solution in sight, according to a Wednesday study.

While major sites can fend off a DDoS or recover quickly, smaller sites can be crippled by these attacks, which often hit in conjunction with other attacks like filtering, intrusions, and defacements, according to the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

“DDoS is an increasingly common Internet phenomenon capable of silencing Internet speech, usually for a brief interval but occasionally for longer,” the report said. “Our report offers advice to independent media and human rights sites likely to be targeted by DDoS but comes to the uncomfortable conclusion that there is no easy solution to these attacks for many of these sites, particularly for attacks that exhaust network bandwidth.”

The report's authors suggest that DDoS attacks will become more common amidst news about similar WikiLeaks and Operation Payback attacks. Even before that, however, DDoS attacks on independent media and human rights sites were quite common during the last year, happening even outside of major events like elections, protests, and military operations.

These sites are being hit with two types of DDoS: application and network. Application attacks exhaust local server resources and can usually be rectified with the help of a skilled system admin. Network attacks, however, exhaust network bandwidth and can usually only be fixed with the (costly) help of a hosting provider.

Read rest of article….

2010/12/222010/12/22

Tom Atlee Proposes distributed-intelligence, crowd-sourcing participatory think tank for popular common-sense policies, unhindered by party affiliations and ideology

Collaboration Zones, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, IO Sense-Making, Mobile, Policies, Threats

Phi Beta Iota: There is no other person we hold in higher esteem than Tom Atlee. For America the Beautiful, at least, he is this generation's Wise Man. Below in his own words. We urge one and all to contribute to his sustenance.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Dear friends,

I have been talking a lot lately with strategists in the Coffee Party movement (CPM). If you don't know much about the Coffee Party, I urge you to check out their website and Wikipedia's well-referenced short article on them.

While the Coffee Party has definite progressive roots, it also features bright transpartisan energies. Most Coffee Party members — and co-founder Annabel Park — promote civil dialogue about public issues. They also promote democracy-building policies, especially ones to address the democracy-degrading influence of money in politics.

I much prefer the Coffee Party's brand of transpartisanship to the more recent No Labels movement whose goal is “to encourage politicians to come together to develop pragmatic and workable solutions.” Politicians? What about We, the People? What about citizen deliberations and stakeholder dialogues? I can't help but wonder what informed citizen deliberative councils would have to say about the issues the No Labels site addresses…

Although I'm still open to evidence to the contrary, it seems to me that No Labels is trying to co-opt the very real frustration most Americans feel for the political polarization and legislative logjam they see every day. I fear No Labels is cleverly reframing the meme of transpartisanship to rally growing populist energies around a hidden special interest agenda — perhaps building a movement to support a Bloomberg presidential bid in 2012.

Check out “No Labels: What’s Behind “Forward?” Pro-Corporate Economic Policy.” While I don't agree with everything Jim Cook writes or implies there, I think it is significant that all three No Labels co-founders are professionally involved in promoting corporate interests, and that they advocate tapping Social Security to reduce the debt — when SS is not actually a part of the federal budget, per se, but is a collective retirement account into which workers have paid for decades which has lately been ripped off for budgetary expenditures. Their budget concerns do not highlight the gigantic portion of the actual budget that goes to military expenditures — to say nothing of the non-budgeted expenditures for the wars in Iraq and Iran which constitute a gigantic part of the federal debt — military expenditures that are greater than all other military budgets in the world combined. Nor do they feature the many forms of corporate welfare and the option of raising taxes on the hyper-wealthy to the 1950s levels. Notably, they depend heavily on the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a very partisan source, as their favorite budgetary reference.

The whole thing doesn't smell right to me. But I do see it as another indicator of how powerful the emerging transpartisan populist trend is, that so much elite attention is being dedicated to co-opting it.

Continue reading “Tom Atlee Proposes distributed-intelligence, crowd-sourcing participatory think tank for popular common-sense policies, unhindered by party affiliations and ideology”

2010/12/222010/12/22

Journal: Brennan Sandbags Clapper? The London 12

Intelligence (government)

Marcus-Aurelius-150x150 — Marcus Aurelius Recommends

Three items here on major DNI flub on national TV new. I saw interview in question — no tricks or BS on part of reporter Diane Sawyer. Lt Gen Clapper was just unprepared and came off looking like a cretin. ODNI staff didn't prep the boss or the boss was stupid. Of course, my personal view is that zone of consideration for the DNI position should start and stop within CIA, with officers who have been either D/CIA or D/NCS.

After Early Administration Denials, Director of National Intelligence Admits He Hadn’t Been Briefed on Alleged Terrorist Arrests in London (ABC News)

National Security Leaders Discuss Terror Threat (ABC News)

White House Admits Intel Chief Was Not Briefed on Britain Terror Arrests (FOX News)

Phi Beta Iota: We do not concur with the assessment above. We were the only ones to publicly defend Jim Clapper with a national press release and other measures when Donald Rumsfeld had the gall to fire him for being honest, and we will again defend him. This is all on John Brennan, hardly an Ollie North but trying never-the-less. As for who should be DNI, we will point to the two memoranda that went to Condi Rice on national intelligence reform unsolicited, the second invited on homeland defense intelligence, to Chapter 13 from Book One and Chapter 15 from Book Two, and to the Technical Preface by Robert Garigue (RIP) in Book Three. We have a proliferation of “czars” because the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has not been able to manage anything since the mid-1980's if not earlier. If the President (or the DNI) ever wants to get it right, he can start right here. We should have a Deputy Vice President for Education, Intelligence, and Research, not a DNI. Everyone, without exception, means well, but they just do not have the mind-sets to actually do the right stuff. The next two years will be largely wasted, in our view.

2010/12/222010/12/22

Search: humint spectrum full spectrum

Searches

HUMINT Full Spectrum B&W Figure 9 page 26 JPEG — Click to Enlarge

Graphic: Updated Full-Spectrum HUMINT

Without the yellow background

Graphic: OSINT and Full-Spectrum HUMINT (Updated)

Primary, with yellow background top and bottom

Continue reading “Search: humint spectrum full spectrum”

2010/12/222010/12/26

Journal: Wind Power Boondoggle–and the Information Operations (IO) Challenge of Energy and Time in Relation to Policy, Acquisition, and Operations

Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Budgets & Funding, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, History, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), IO Multinational, IO Sense-Making, Key Players, Methods & Process, Officers Call, Open Government, Peace Intelligence, Policies, Strategy, Threats

editor spinney time — Chuck Spinney Recommends...

My good friend Robert Bryce, author of the must-read Power Hungry: The Myths of ‘Green' Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future just launched this little torpedo.

A Wind Power Boonedoggle

T. Boone Pickens badly misjudged the supply and price of natural gas.

By ROBERT BRYCE, Wall Street Journal, 22 December 2010

After 30 months, countless TV appearances, and $80 million spent on an extravagant PR campaign, T.

Boone Pickens has finally admitted the obvious: The wind energy business isn't a very good one.

Read full article….

Corruption-Slide-3-Holistic-Analysis-300x225 — Click to Enlarge

Phi Beta Iota: Buckminster Fuller and Russell Ackoff nailed it–everything has to be evaluated in relation to energy source and cost and time cost, and you have to focus on doing the right things, not doing the wrong things righter. Where Mr. Pickens went wrong was in sticking with the centralized ownership concept. Wind power and solar power are best for localized applications. The central grid–the Industrial Era top down control grid, is DEAD. Similarly, water and sewage should not be centralized grids demanding massive investments in collection and processing. The graphic to the right shows corruption in the center–when analytics and decision-making lose their holistic integrity, they inevitably fail to achieve the desired outcome while creating cascading costs everywhere else. Military spending in the USA is at the beginning of a nose dive–our military leaders would be wise to get a grip sooner than later, and “beat the dive” by making evidence-based decisions (Advanced IO) sooner than later. Now a really advanced thought: 21st Century national security is about eradicating corruption at home and abroad–this makes possible the creation of a prosperous world at peace. The breadth of that challenge is in the graphic below. That is an IO challenge, not a kinetic challenge. IO must be co-equal to kinetics beginning immediately. In our humble opinion.