I will not replicate all that is at www.oss.net and to a much lesser extent, www.earth-intelligence.net, but do want to recognize a handful of extraordinary individuals by isolating their especially meritorious contributiions to the long-running debate about national intelligence reform and re-invention.
Phi Beta Iota: Coincident with the emergence of the Collective Intelligence and Open Everything movements, and despite the enormous fragmentation of human knowledge by an academy that has lost sight of the importance of multi-disciplinary or “holistic” human intelligence, the field of Evolutionary Psychology is maturing rapidly while also branching to connect to Neuroscience. On the fringe, Cyber-Idiocy is a growth industry, as the mandarins of the past strive to achieve “Full-Spectrum Dominance” not realizing that all they are doing is accelerating push-back from an increasingly self-aware humanity that cannot be repressed.
I am cheerfully optimistic that truth and trust will be the common currency of the 21st Century. This effort out of Hungary offers useful reflections on the degree to which privacy and anonymnity are necessary to “out” the old sovereignty and achieve a new sovereignty of the whole.
Wikileaks represents a new type of (h)activism, which shifts the source of potential threat from a few, dangerous hackers and a larger group of mostly harmless activists — both outsiders to an organization — to those who are on the inside. For insiders trying to smuggle information out, anonymity is a necessary condition for participation. Wikileaks has demonstrated that the access to anonymity can be democratized, made simple and user friendly.
Being Anonymous in the context of Wikileaks has a double promise: it promises to liberate the subject from the existing power structures, and in the same time it allows the exposure of these structures by opening up a space to confront them.
. . . . . .
The true potential of the cyberspace is not that it enables anonymous observation of the state power, but that it offers its citizens the chance to hide from observation. In other words the identity-protecting side of technology has more emancipatory power than its capability to obtain and expose secrets. Maybe less, and not more transparency is the path that leads to the aims of Wikileaks.
If it's stats you want, this is an interesting insight. A wide variety of sources from around the Web were used to put this post together and Pingdom.com also did some additional calculations to get even more numbers to chew on – this is as at January 12, 2011. It's a good kind of information overload!
Email
* 107 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2010.
* 294 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
* 1.88 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
* 480 million – New email users since the year before.
* 89.1% – The share of emails that were spam.
* 262 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 89% are spam).
* 2.9 billion – The number of email accounts worldwide.
* 25% – Share of email accounts that are corporate.
By the end of the attack, Barr's iPad was reputedly erased, his LinkedIn and Twitter accounts were hijacked, the HBGary Federal website was defaced, proprietary HBGary source code was stolen and with over 71,000 private emails now published to the internet, HBGary was laid bare.
In this, was our first lesson: The asymmetry of cyber warfare.
Phi Beta Iota: Worth reading, candid, interesting at multiple levels, not least of which is that the New York Times is still his source of record, and he assumes that CIA has a grip on social media–never mind that Jim Clapper just got slammed for not having a clue on precisely that. Good people trapped in a bad system…
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's chief spokesman resigned Sunday, three days after he publicly criticized the treatment in confinement of WikiLeaks suspect Army Pfc. Bradley Manning as “counterproductive and stupid.”
Phi Beta Iota: This man should have been honored for telling the truth. You can tell a great deal about a government by how it handles such situations.
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Phi Beta Iota: We highlight with great regard the contribution of Berto Jongman from The Netherlands, whose map of World Conflict & Human Rights remains a classic reference work.
