Key Players – Page 259 – Public Intelligence Blog

PBS Taliban Program Home Page

Afghanistan: Special note. Lessons from the PBS show, Frontline, titled Behind Taliban Lines.

The first-hand video by Najibullah Quraishi is worth viewing on the PBS home page where it was posted today. Quraishi accepted an invitation by a Hizbe Islami Gulbuddin (HIG) commander to live with a HIG anti-government fighting unit in Baghlan Province. Until the arrival of two men from Pakistan on his tenth day, he had unrestricted permission to video record the fighters.

During his ten days with the fighters, they attacked once. Their primary task was to detonate two homemade bombs on an improved road and destroy “enemy” vehicles.

A few points are worth noting.

Identification of the force. First, this video is the first open source medium to identify the affiliation of the fighters in Baghlan Province, a northern province south of Konduz that has experienced a rise in fighting in the past two years. They are not Taliban, but they are Pashtuns. They called themselves the Central Group, in the sense of the leadership or coordinating group, though no significant coordination with other groups took place in the ten days.

Leadership. The video confirmed that the Central Group is led by a local man and at least some of its members were locals. They were protected or given refuge by villagers who formed for the camera at least a part time militia that claim to support the Central Group.

Walk to work. It also showed that the men walk to their attack sites, sometimes six to ten kilometers. Vehicles in this video were for courier duties or for travel to meetings, to get guns and so on. The HIG are bureaucratic and decentralized.

Continue reading “NIGHTWATCH on Afghanistan Open Source Video”

2010/02/242010/02/24

Journal: US Counterterrorism Hosed, EOP/OMB AWOL

08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 11 Society, Ethics, Government, Law Enforcement, Methods & Process, Military, Peace Intelligence

Hurdles Stymie Counterterrorism Center

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER, The New York Times (Syndicated)

WASHINGTON — The nation's main counterterrorism center, created in response to the intelligence failures in the years before Sept. 11, is struggling because of flawed staffing and internal cultural clashes, according to a new study financed by Congress.

The result, the study concludes, is a lack of coordination and communication among the agencies that are supposed to take the lead in planning the fight against terrorism, including the C.I.A. and the State Department.

. . . . . . .

Continue reading “Journal: US Counterterrorism Hosed, EOP/OMB AWOL”

2010/02/242010/02/24

Journal: Individual Dignity & Collective Defense

07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, Civil Society, Law Enforcement, Mobile, Tools

Google execs convicted in Italy for Down syndrome video

MILAN (Reuters) – A Milan court convicted three Google Inc executives on Wednesday for violating the privacy of an Italian boy with Down's syndrome by letting a video of him being bullied be posted on the site in 2006.

Phi Beta Iota: The Italians made a mistake. Instead of using the video to aggressively convict the bullies of the Down's syndrome boy, they are shooting the messenger. This is just as ignorant and ill-advised as the police trying to criminalize Twitter texts and cell phone video of police brutality. The right of the people to bear witness cannot be undermined by the courts, IOHO.

2010/02/232010/02/23

Journal: Multi-Lingual Social Networking, Arabic First

04 Inter-State Conflict, 08 Wild Cards, Civil Society, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process, Technologies, Tools

a social translation — Full Story Online

Site Hopes Automatic Arabic-English Translation Translates into Peace

A new site hopes the seemingly simple idea of eliminating the language barrier, letting you write in English and be read in Arabic — and vice versa — will cultivate citizen diplomacy between the Middle East and the West. It aims to reduce tensions at the grassroots level between two cultures that increasingly co-exist but seem a world apart.

Meedan, which officially launches Monday, lets users post stories and comments in English and have them automatically translated into Arabic, or the opposite. People who don’t share a common language can have an online discussion in near real time. The name, appropriately, means “gathering place” or “town hall” in Arabic.

Think of it as a social network filled with people you don’t know, but want to understand.

Phi Beta Iota: This is righteous, but as Howard Bloom addresses in Global Brain, it will taqke 50 years and it will not achieve the intended result until the children who START with this are adults in power. In the meantime, the adults in power who are both digitally and ideologically impaired, will continue to favor war to profit the few over peace to provide prosperity to the many.

2010/02/23

Journal: Free Twitter Rocks, People Rule in Haiti

Collaboration Zones, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Geospatial, InfoOps (IO), Key Players, Methods & Process, Mobile, Policies, Real Time, Reform, Strategy, Technologies, Threats, Tools

Twitter Teams with Haiti Telco To Provide Free Text Tweets

WIRED 22 February 2010

Text messages have already raised $32 million for Haiti relief. Now Twitter is partnering with the devastated nation’s dominant telco to provide free text Tweets to Haitians so they can better keep in touch with each other and the outside world.

“Kevin Thau and our mobile team have recently arranged free SMS tweets for Digicel Haiti customers,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone writes on the company’s blog. “To activate the service, mobile phone users in Haiti can text follow @oxfam to 40404. Accounts are created on the fly and any account can be followed this way.”

The move is much more than a gesture, as it might seem in place where limitless text plans abound and the standard of living is much higher. Under Digicel’s pre-paid plan Haitians pay $0.08 to text locally, $0.15 to text internationally and $0.23 to send an MMS. But considering that the country’s per capita income is about $1,300, that would be the equivalent of $2.46, $4.62 and a whopping $7.07 in the U.S. (which had a 2008 per capita income of about $40,000).

As has become almost routine now, the initial flood of information and pictures to emerge from the disaster zone reached the world via Twitter, and the use of texting is an especially crucial lifeline in the underdeveloped world.

Phi Beta Iota: BRAVO TWITTER! Who would have thought Haiti would be the silver lining for the poor. At one stroke Twitter hass connected scharitable giving from the 80% that do not normally give, with the bottom-up needs of the poor articulated via Twitter for free. Now if Twitter can team with others such as Nokia, Microsoft, and IMB to offer free cell phones to the five billion poor, with back office harvesting of the data and a global grid of volunteer translator educators in 183 languages, we save the world quick time.

2010/02/22

Contributing Editor: Marcelo Henrique de Ávila (Brazil)

01 Brazil, Authors & Editors

Marcelo_Avila_photo — Marcelo Henrique de Ávila

“I believe Logics, Linguistics, Semiotics, Philosophy and Information Science are disciplines that play key roles in Intelligence. As an Intelligence student and researcher, I am interested in investigating the foundations of Intelligence, focused on Intelligence Analysis, according to an inter and transdisciplinary approach, inspired by Biology and guided by Critical Thinking”.

Brazilian ISR Auditor with interdisciplinary background. Former Chancellery Officer at Brazilian Ministry of External Relations. Bachelor Degree in Agronomist Engineering at the Federal University of Uberlândia, Estate of Minas Gerais. Master Degree in Molecular Biology at the University of Brasilia. Diploma in Strategic Intelligence (CSIE 2009), and in Defence Resources Management (CGERD 2008), both at the Brazilian National War College (Escola Superior de Guerra/Ministry of Defense). Diploma in Intelligence Analysis at the Brazilian Intelligence Agency School. Associate student of the Centre for Research on Architecture of Information at the University of Brasília.

Chief Editor of the Blog Inteligência Brasil and Coordinator of InteLingua Project, a not-for-profit international mass collaboration initiative aimed to translate open source Intelligence literature. Curriculum Lattes Online

2010/02/222010/02/22

Journal: 21 Years Late, An Inkling of Discovery

08 Wild Cards, Methods & Process, Military

Military Launches Afghanistan Intelligence-Gathering Mission

Full Story Online

By Joshua Partlow

KABUL — On their first day of class in Afghanistan, the new U.S. intelligence analysts were given a homework assignment.

First read a six-page classified military intelligence report about the situation in Spin Boldak, a key border town and smuggling route in southern Afghanistan. Then read a 7,500-word article in Harper's magazine, also about Spin Boldak and the exploits of its powerful Afghan border police commander.

The conclusion they were expected to draw: The important information would be found in the magazine story. The scores of spies and analysts producing reams of secret documents were not cutting it.

“They need help,” Capt. Matt Pottinger, a military intelligence officer, told the class. “And that's what you're going to be doing.”

The class that began Friday in plywood hut B-8 on a military base in Kabul marked a first step in what U.S. commanders envision as a major transformation in how intelligence is gathered and used in the war against the Taliban.

Last month, Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the top U.S. military intelligence officer in Afghanistan, published a scathing critique of the quality of information at his disposal. Instead of understanding the nuances of local politics, economics, religion and culture that drive the insurgency, he said, the multibillion-dollar industry devoted nearly all its effort to digging up dirt on insurgent groups.

“Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy,” he wrote in a paper co-authored by Pottinger and another official and published by the Center for a New American Security.

Phi Beta Iota: DoD mind-set time lags are quite consistent with those of other bureaucracies. They are just 21 years late. See the two original publications below:

1988 Commandant of the Marine Corps “Global Intelligence Challenges of the 1990's“

1992 USMC GM-14 “E3i: Ethics, Ecology, Evolution, and Intelligence–An Alternative Paradigm“

and so on…..sadly, DoD is still in lip service mode and is about to implode DIOSPO. In Ripley's “Believe It Or Not” column, the joint briefing created by Joe Markowitz and Robert Steele, with help from loyal frustrated DoD personnel who do want to get it right, has not been read and is not being acted on. If anyone is interested, see both briefings here:

2009 DoD OSINT Leadership and Staff Briefings