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.
Thank you, Tom, for that introduction. It was almost exactly a year ago today that my former boss, Secretary Gates, spoke to you on the eve of his departure as Secretary of Defense. In looking back on his tenure as Secretary, he chose to highlight two major themes. The first was his effort to turn the tide in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He spoke to you about his laser-like focus on delivering urgent battlefield needs to the warfighter in Iraq and Afghanistan. When Secretary Gates first hired me in 2009, he told me that the “country’s at war, Ash, but the Pentagon is not.” My job, he explained, was to help him get the Pentagon onto a war footing, especially in acquisition technology and logistics, the part that I was about to take over.
And that has been my focus as well as his, first as AT&L and now as Deputy Secretary of Defense. Under his leadership, we set up a fast lane to get urgent requirements onto the battlefield unhindered by the bureaucracy. We needed better persistent ISR, he said, as did General Petraeus, General Mattis, General McChrystal, General Austin, General Allen. So we worked hard to deliver capabilities like Aerostats with wide-area lenses, and more UAVs, including small UAVs that could be operated by a patrol along their line of march.
Phi Beta Iota: Disinformation. Israeli's did it, US has no clue. A political move, David Axelrod being the most likely source of the insane guidance to let this disinformation “leak.”
The CIA has released nearly 800 pages of newly declassified documents on Al Qaeda and the September 11 attacks. The documents were released in response to an INTELWIRE Freedom of Information Act request for material referenced by the 9/11 Commission.
Ferguson notes the Clinton administration oversaw the most important financial deregulation, and since then, “We’ve seen in the Obama administration very little reform and no criminal prosecutions, and the appointment of a very large number of Wall Street executives to senior positions in the government, including some people who were directly responsible for causing significant portions of the crisis.”
In her #OFF12 remarks, Egyptian-American journalist Mona Eltahawy pays tribute to Václav Havel and the power of words, reviews dangerous global censorship trends, and highlights the abuses of the Egyptian military junta.
Today, we look at the aspect that Consciousness plays in the role of Evolution, and the evolution that's happening to us right now as a species on planet earth.
“Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their peoples in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was their object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.”–Abraham Lincoln
I recently did a series of interviews for an international venture investing newsletter called Capitalist Exploits. Here's a question I got that I thought we be of interest to GG readers. I've extended the answer a bit from the original in the interview.
Mark: Switching gears just a bit… We've watched the SOPA/PIPA controversy, now its CISPA; the “Stellar Wind” project was featured in Wired last month, and recently an NSA whistleblower, former Director William Binney, came out and said flat out that the government is lying, they intercept and store everything we do, Constitution be damned. It seems the government won't stop until it completely controls the flow of information on the Internet and has the ability to monitor and record everything we say and do online. You're a counter-terrorism expert, how much of this is hype and how much of it is really necessary to safeguard national security, in your opinion. And what about our civil liberties and right to privacy?
John: It’s a mixed bag. There’s certainly lots of concern in regards to how the NSA gathers data on US citizens. Added to what the private sector is gathering, its safe to conclude that we don’t have any privacy.
For example, nearly every new phone sold today has a GPS chip in it. It’s constantly gathering data on where that phone is and sending it to the phone company. All of that phone company data, from all of the phone companies across the world, is aggregated and provided to select governments for use in counter-terrorism. In short, the three billion people that are using cell phones are being tracked in order to help find and kill a couple hundred terrorists (its contribution is probably limited to being the primary source for neutralizing a couple of terrorists a year).
