Human-driven information curation is the antidote to this algorithmic disconnect between access and accessibility:
The primary purpose of an editor [is] to extend the horizon of what people are interested in and what people know. Giving people what they think they want is easy, but it’s also not very satisfying: the same stuff, over and over again. Great editors are like great matchmakers: they introduce people to whole new ways of thinking, and they fall in love.
Phi Beta Iota: Mr. Johnson is the author of Integrity at Scale, free online, whose many ideas are being integrated into the vision for a Smart Nation Act and the hub of the Smart Nation, an Open Source Agency and global Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making (M4IS2) network of networks. He is a party to the on-going push to establish the Open Source Agency and create a more competent and ethical America.
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As I look at the Open Source idea, I find myself experiencing a fair amount of dissonance between a methodological vision of open source intelligence, at one level, and at a very different level, an aspirational vision that sees it as a way of disinfecting a misguided and corrupt set of bureaucracies.
One mission is potentially endorsable by the powers-that-be. The second mission is not. Ask people to endorse both and it isn’t likely that either will move forward. If corruption prevention is to be the mission, the open source agency will have to find a home outside of government. If transparency of intelligence is the mission, then perhaps it can find a home inside government.
My second source of dissonance has to do with design and scale. Open source intelligence is potentially as vast as all the server farms Google will ever own. How does a relatively modest site, squeezed in between State and Watergate, ever acquire the heft to handle the challenge? The scope of the mission and the scope of the agency seem out of sync with the scope of the real estate footprint.
Item 1 is an insightful essay by Patrick Seale outlining the common characteristics of the political instabilities and revolutionary pressures now sweeping Europe and the Middle East. Although Seale uses the term Global Intifada to describe these instabilities, the term Intifada evolved out of the Palestinian struggle against occupation. He suggests the instabilities may be following a more general dynamic. The common causal factors he describes in the second paragraph also bring to mind a very loose comparison of the unrest unleashed in 2011 to the explosion of revolutions in 1848 across Europe. That many of Seale's common factors also exist in varying degrees in the United States makes one wonder why the politics of rage in the US remain confined to the right side of political spectrum. Item 2, “The World Consequences of US Decline,” is an equally insightful essay by Immanuel Wallerstein that suggests obliquely that this may be a temporary condition.
Status check on Brazil's specialized police units trying to supplant illicit drug governance in the favelas. Per an upcoming law, these units will be in place for 25 years. “Many communities previously relied on the drug gangs for services from water to wireless internet, and critics have pointed out that the state has been slow to replace them.”
Phi Beta Iota: The program has been successful in applying ruthless pervasive special violence to displace the drug gangs and insert permanent police presence. The program has FAILED in two respects: it has not been accompanied by the rapid provision of normal services from water to wireless; and it has not provided for the education of the people, something that requires call centers and free cell access to the Internet (they don't have the time to sit in a classroom for N years).
In their own words:
“People in the favela don't believe in themselves. What is really needed in the long term is more education.”
Here’s the plan. He talks to UNOSAT and Google about acquiring high-resolution satellite imagery for those geographic areas for which they need more information on. A colleague of mine in San Diego just launched his own company to develop mechanical turk & micro tasking solutions for disaster response. He takes this satellite imagery and cuts it into say 50×50 kilometers square images for micro-tasking purposes.
We then develop a web-based interface where volunteers from the Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF) sign in and get one high resolution 50×50 km image displayed to them at a time. For each image, they answer the question: “Are there any human shelters discernible in this picture? [Yes/No].” If yes, what would you approximate the population of that shelter to be? [1-20; 21-50; 50-100; 100+].” Additional questions could be added. Note that we’d provide them with guidelines on how to identify human shelters and estimate population figures.
EXTRACT: A new paper, The Network of Global Corporate Control by Vitali et. al. from ETH in Zurich. This paper finds, through extensive network analysis, that a small group of tightly intertwined financial institutions control the bow of the global financial system. It is in effect, the world's first super-organism. 147 trans-national companies that the global core that is owned by itself (3/4 of the ownership of firm's in this organism are owned by firms in the organism). This organism is beyond governments. If it is self serving (and this shouldn't be too hard to assume), it is the equivalent of a biological cancer that has metastasized.
Phi Beta Iota: The day will come when the executives of the 147 transnational companies find themselves kidnapped, renditioned, and tortured until they make restitution by giving up the majority of their ill-gotten gains. We anticipate a mix of vigilante, criminal, and third world governments getting into this business. On the other end of the spectrum, we anticipate a massive withdrawal of normal people from the fraud-ridden world of banking and government-printed money. The two go together.
Below is an exact reprint from the Association For Intelligence Officers (AFIO). HOWEVER, AFIO does not endorse the tone of the article, only the fact of its appearance.
The CIA Should be a bit more ‘CAIR'less. This week, a three-day conference hosted by the CIA on “homegrown radicalization” was supposed to have taken place at CIA headquarters. It did not. The conference was abruptly canceled – or, softening the blow, “postponed.” Question: Did pressure from what we might (and should) call a certain “homegrown radical” group – the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) – make this happen?
Here is what we know.
On Monday, July 18, CAIR issued a press release headlined: “CAIR Asks CIA to Drop Islamophobic Trainer.” It revealed that CAIR national executive director Nihad Awad wrote a letter to now-former CIA Director Leon Panetta to that effect. The rest of the release is more opaque. In referencing an NPR report that slammed one counterterrorism trainer by name, former FBI agent John Guandolo, for “allegedly smearing” an “Ohio Muslim” in a presentation, CAIR noted that an entirely different trainer, unnamed, was “scheduled to hold a similar session in August for the CIA.” (Full disclosure: Guandolo and I are among 19 co-authors of Shariah: the Threat to America.) The August CIA “session” appears to be the driver of both the CAIR release and letter asking the CIA, as the headline put it, to “Drop Islamophobic Trainer.”
