Conceived and facilitated by Douglas Rushkoff, Contact seeks to explore and realize the greater promise of social media to promote new forms of culture, commerce, collective action, and creativity.
Bringing together technologists, artists, activists, businesspeople, funders, and other stakeholders in the networked future, this summit will hatch new ideas, connect collaborators, and forge an ongoing community for innovating social media and beyond. See the new event forums.
Phi Beta Iota: Whether or not Facebook and GroupOn are paying attention, this event has the potential to turn into the seed crystal for a self-organizing World Brain and Global Game.
Secrecy News reported Monday on strange new guidance from the Air Force Materiel Command declaring that Air Force employees and even their family members could be prosecuted under the Espionage Act for accessing the WikiLeaks web site. On Monday night that new guidance was abruptly withdrawn.
Lt. Col. Richard L. Johnson of Air Force Headquarters released this statement: read statement….
“[I]f a family member of an Air Force employee accesses WikiLeaks on a home computer, the family member may be subject to prosecution for espionage under U.S. Code Title 18 Section 793,” the legal guidance reads. “The Air Force member would have an obligation to safeguard the information under the general guidance to safeguard classified information.”
Phi Beta Iota: We do not make this stuff up. If SecDef wants an excuse to dismiss Air Force leadership down to the one-star level, this is it. This is utterly insane, and a clear demonstration of moral and intellectual and leadership vacuum that exists in the US Air Force.
Phi Beta Iota: Below the line is an excellent overview from NIGHTWATCH. Here are the key points:
1. Muslim Brotherhood was caught by surprise, not just the US Intelligence Community.
2. This is a revolution of young people focused on fundamentals, NOT an Islamic uprising.
3. There is no overt anti-US aspect within the young, but Hezbollah and others are trying to tie the US to the dictators it supports–left unsaid is that if the US cannot turn on a DIME (pun intented) it will be skewered with its own sword.
4. Dictator Mubarak may be shopping for an exile estate in Egypt.
INSIGHT: The US Government has no one thinking strategically–certainly not the Goldman Sachs lobbyist now enjoying the corner office and pretending to be national security advisor to the President, and certainly not the Department of State, which has lost its one strategic thinker back to Princeton and has no bench. NOW IS THE TIME for President Barack Obama to decide he wants to create a Smart Nation with Whole of Government strategy and operations resting on a foundation of intelligent intelligence. See ON INTELLIGENCE: Open Letter to the President.
Maj. Nidal Hasan, accused in the murders of 13 people and the attempted murders of 32 others in the shooting spree at Fort Hood, Tex., in November 2009, appears to be the toughest kind of terrorist to spot: a lone wolf who plots without the overt support of domestic cells or foreign sponsors.
Still, the attack did not come as a complete surprise to some in the Army and the FBI, and that makes this incident all the more tragic. Our Senate committee's 14-month investigation of the Fort Hood killings has concluded that the Department of Defense and the FBI “collectively had sufficient information to have detected Hasan's radicalization to violent Islamist extremism but failed both to understand and to act on it.”
The deaths at Fort Hood could and should have been prevented. The Defense Department's failure to acknowledge the threat of violent Islamist extremism within its ranks, coupled with organizational and communication flaws in the FBI's counterterrorism operations, contributed to the tragedy.
To understand how far ordinary Chinese have been priced out of their country's property market, you need to look not upwards at the Beijing's shimmering high-rise skyline, but down, far below the bustling streets where nearly 20m people live and work.
There, in the city's vast network of unused air defence bunkers, as many as a million people live in small, windowless rooms that rent for £30 to £50 a month, which is as much as many of the city's army of migrant labourers can afford.
1. He quotes Madison, as we have, on the importance of public knowledge as the basis for the Republic keeping the government accountable and in check.
2. He points out that the defense budget has never been audited, cannot be audited, and is both totally “out of control” and irresponsibly chaotic and grotesquely excessive.
3. He proposes regular persistent cuts in the defense budget until such time as it can actually pass an audit.
By Heidi Blake and Christopher Hope, The Daily Telegraph February 1, 2011
Al-Qaida is on the verge of producing radioactive weapons after sourcing nuclear material and recruiting rogue scientists to build “dirty” bombs, according to leaked diplomatic documents.
A leading atomic regulator has privately warned that the world stands on the brink of a “nuclear 9/11”.
Security briefings suggest that jihadi groups are also close to producing “workable and efficient” biological and chemical weapons that could kill thousands if unleashed in attacks on the West.
UPDATED TO PROVIDE OPEN WIKI PAGE
