The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
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.
30 Resources to Find the Data You Need
Let's say you have this idea for a visualization or application, or you're just curious about some trend. But you have a problem. You can't find the data, and without the data, you can't even start. This is a guide and a list of sources for where you can find that data you're looking for. There's a lot out there.
Continue reading “Reference: Online Public Information and Data Sources”
What Bradley Manning Means to Us
By David Swanson
Chase Madar's new book, The Passion of Bradley Manning, pulls together the essential facts that we should try to somehow deliver to television viewers and victims of our education system. The subtitle is “The Story of the Suspect Behind the Largest Security Breach in U.S. History.”
The book looks at Manning's life story, his alleged action (leaking voluminous materials to Wikileaks), the value of the material he made available to us, the status of whistleblowers in our country, the torture inflicted on Manning during his imprisonment, the similar treatment routinely inflicted on hundreds of thousands of U.S. prisoners without the same scandal resulting, and the value of running a society in accordance with written laws.
The table of contents sounds predictable, but the most valuable parts of Madar's book are the tangents, the riffs, the expansions on questions such as whether knowing the truth does or does not tend to set us free. Does learning what our government is up to help to improve our government's behavior? Has the rule of law become an empty phrase or worse? Who is standing up for Bradley Manning, and who should be?
Aon downgrades 37 countries for terrorism and political violence
Future Trends and Challenges Middle East and North Africa Toward 2030
Iran & Israel: What the West should and can do
“Targeting Top Terrorists: How Leadership Decapitation Contributes to Counterterrorism”
Huh?
NIGHTWATCH
Mali-US: For the record. US Africa Command announced that on 20 April three US soldiers and three civilians died in an automobile crash in Bamako. One was from the Army's intelligence and security command and two were from special forces – Special Operations Command. The civilians were not identified, but almost certainly were clandestine agents.
Comment: This announcement is the first US admission since the government overthrow that US military and government civilians are present and active in Mali. The US has sent military and apparently civilian intelligence personnel to assist and improve the counter-terrorism capabilities of several Sahelian African states, including Mali.
Some people in Mali will interpret this announcement as confirming early news service accusations that US military personnel encouraged the US-trained Mali Army captain to overthrow his government.
Pentagon increasing spy presence overseas
Defense Department Plans New Intelligence Gathering Service
Phi Beta Iota: People don't die in car crashes in Mali — especially six at a time. Dover AFB has been getting body bags from all over the world for some time now. We have to say this: the only thing stupider than CIA doing a “Khost Kathy” all over the place is DIA trying to get into the spy business. CIA has been living immunity and a lack of accountability to include ignoring all DoD requirements for anything outside any capital city. CIA is not a spy service. It is a bureaucracy that begs at two tables: the foreign liaison table and the US legal traveler table. It has survived (kept the myth alive) on foreign liaison hand-outs and the use of secrecy to conceal gross ineptitude. DIA spying–apart from being totally unnecessary–must by definition get into the provinces. There are four solutions, but no one at DIA or INSCOM (or CIA for that matter–CIA has no bench) has the depth of understanding and experience to get it right, so General Flynn is going to blow his entire tenure dealing with kindergarten kids playing dress-up. Here are the four solutions:
International Symposium on Online Journalism: New approaches in engaging with the news community
ISOJ Program
Angela Lee: Audience preference and editorial judgment: a study of time-lagged influence in online news
To what extent are audiences influencing editors and journalists, and vice versa? Editorial judgement measured based on placement on paper; audience preference measured by clicks, looking at a 3-hour interval. Audience preference influences editorial decisions three hours later (which suggests editors are watching behavior and responding). However not seeing a reciprocal effect of editorial judgement on audiences.
I’m wondering if the results are influenced by assumptions embedded in the structure of the methodology for the report.
Some popular stories get pushed down on the home page, not sure why? Could be relevance of speed and immediacy – stories might be pushed down to make room for fresh content. Lee calls for input from journalists at the conference.
Alfred Hermida (who’s also been live blogging the conference, and who wrote the book on Participatory Journalism).
Sourcing the Arab Spring: A case study of Andy Carvin’s sources during the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions. How is sourcing evolving in the networked social sphere?
“We looked at sourcing, because sourcing matters.” Who we talk to as journalists affects not just what we report, but the meaning we derive from the reporting. When journalists cite non-elite sources or alternative voices, we treat them as deviant, as the others. Powerful and privileged dominate sourcing.
Carvin was doing a very different type of reporting, messaging and retweeting on Twitter. Carvin was like a “must-read newswire” (per Columbia Journalism Review). 162 sources in Tunisia, 185 sources in Egypt. Coded into categories: mainstream media, institutional elites, alternative voices, and other. Alternative voices included people involved in the protests.
Continue reading “Jon Lebkowsky: 21st Century New Sources & Methods for Journalism”
Certainly worth a read. As time goes by, but only retrospectively, long after everyone has retired or died, accountability in terms of cost versus gain will eventually come to the fore.
Phi Beta Iota: There are two forms of accountability, neither of which is achievable today. The first is as mentioned above, cost-benefit analysis. General Tony Zinni has nailed it with his assessment that today's $80 billion a year community produces “at best” 4% of what a major commander needs — General Mike Flynn documented results even worse than that for Afghanistan. The other form of accountability has to do with laxity in counterintelligence and operations security. NSA biggest dirty secret for the past 50 years is that the Soviets captured core crypto machines in Viet-Nam, and then got the key cards from penetrations of the US Navy. The raw fact is that secrecy is used to hide fraud, waste, and abuse 90% of the time. Best quote on the latter point:
“Everybody who's a real practioner, and I'm sure you're not all naive in this regard, realizes that there are two uses to which security classification is put: the legitmate desire to protect secrets, and the protection of bureaucratic turf. As a practitioner of the real world, it's about 90 bureaucratic turf, 10 legitimate protection of secrets as far as I am concerned.”
Rodley B. McDaniel, then Executive Secretary of the National Security Council, on page 68
C3i: Issues of Command and Control (NDU Press, 1991)
