Alexander Hitchens on history of AQ media
Grandpa Patriot Claims Credit for Taking Down Al Qaeda Websites
Paul Craig Roberts: ObamaCare — and TSA Searching Traffic on Easter Sunday
07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, DHS, Government
Growing up in the post-war era (after the Second World War), I never expected to live in the strange Kafkaesque world that exists today. The US government can assassinate any US citizen that the executive branch thinks could possibly be a “threat” to the US government, or throw the hapless citizen into a dungeon for the rest of his or her life without presenting any evidence to a court or obtaining a conviction of any crime, or send the “threat” to a puppet foreign state to be tortured until the “threat” confesses to a crime that never occurred or dies at the hands of “freedom and democracy” while professing innocence.
It has never been revealed how a single citizen, or any number thereof, could possibly comprise a threat to a government that has a trillion plus dollars to spend each year on security and weapons, the world’s largest navy and air force, 700 plus military bases across the world, large numbers of nuclear weapons, 16 intelligence agencies plus the intelligence agencies of its NATO puppet states and the intelligence service of Israel.
Nevertheless, air travelers are subjected to porno-scanning and sexual groping. Cars traveling on Interstate highways can expect to be stopped, with traffic backed up for miles, while Homeland Security and the federalized state or local police conduct searches.
I witnessed one such warrantless search on Easter Sunday. The south bound lanes of I-185 heading into Columbus, Georgia, were at a standstill while black SUV and police car lights flashed. US citizens were treated by “security” forces that they finance as if they were “terrorists” or “domestic extremists,” another undefined class of Americans devoid of constitutional protections.
Continue reading “Paul Craig Roberts: ObamaCare — and TSA Searching Traffic on Easter Sunday”
Event: 28-29 Apr Washington DC International Drone Summit: Killing and Spying by Remote Control
07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, DoD, Military, Peace IntelligenceJoin us in Washington, DC on April 28 and 29 for an “International Drone Summit: Killing and Spying by Remote Control” hosted by CODEPINK, Reprieve, and the Center for Constitutional Rights.
US drone strikes have killed an estimated 3,000 people around the world, including hundreds of civilians, without any judicial process or meaningful oversight, and without any transparency or accountability. The summit's dual objectives are to better inform the public about the reality and significance of the US government's expanding use of both killer and surveillance drones, and to facilitate networks and strategies to resist this expansion.
The Saturday, April 28 program is open to the public and brings together human rights advocates, robotics technology experts, activists, lawyers, scholars and journalists, and shares the stories of people whose families and lives have been directly impacted by remote-controlled drone strikes. This is an all day event with multiple panels beginning at 9am at Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church, 900 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington, DC. See this site for updates on the program, and register here today!
The Sunday, April 29 program is a strategy session for organizations and individuals to network and plan advocacy efforts focused on various aspects of drones, targeted killings and expanding US covert wars. If you are interested in attending this session, please email Ramah Kudaimi at rkudaimi(@ symbol)gmail.com.
Berto Jongman: Interesting National Security Links
Articles & ChaptersWinston Wheeler: Lies, Damn Lies, & Panetta-Pentagon Criminal Insanity
Budgets & Funding, Corruption, DoD, Government, Military
Cost growth in the last year in DOD's acquisition system was $74 billion, 34 percent more than the $55 billion presumed to occur in the sequester in January; while the time frames are different (see discussion below), so much for Secretary of Defense Panetta's asinine rhetoric that sequester would be a “Doomsday.”
Analysis of two recent acquisition reports is available at Time's Battleland blog at http://battleland.blogs.time.
Cost growth in the last year in DOD's acquisition system was $74 billion, 34 percent more than the $55 billion presumed to occur in the sequester in January; while the time frames are different (see discussion below), so much for Secretary of Defense Analysis of two recent acquisition reports is available at Time's Battleland blog at http://battleland.blogs.time.
Lies, Damn Lies, and The Pentagon's Latest Budget Numbers
By Winslow Wheeler | April 9, 2012 | +
There's a pair of must-reads just out for anyone paying attention to the Pentagon's acquisition nightmare: one is a routinely scheduled, but important, report from the Defense Department; the other comes from one of the very few entities doing even minimal oversight of the Department of Defense these days, the Government Accountability Office.
Reviewing the reports separately results in a muddled picture of how the Pentagon buys its weapons. Happily, each report fills some of the data missing in the other. But, the two reports still leave some gaping holes, while providing a false impression of progress in the way the Defense Department buys weapons.
The two reports are GAO's annual review of major hardware acquisition, Defense Acquisitions: Assessments of Selected Weapon Programs, and DoD's new Selected Acquisition Report (SAR), both released March 30. What follows is my own After-Action Report – including the gaps, contradictions, and false assurances – after studying the data they do – and don't – contain.
The Death Spiral is Alive and Well
Continue reading “Winston Wheeler: Lies, Damn Lies, & Panetta-Pentagon Criminal Insanity”
Ayesha Khanna: Our Intelligent Future
Blog Wisdom, IO Impotency, Mobile
Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies, 9 April 2012
In just three decades between 1990 and 2020, the internet will have grown from linking just a few experts in labs to connecting the entire human species through computers and mobile phones as well as billions of objects into an “Internet of Things,” a seamless web of infinite data. As a result, we have transitioned from the familiar Information Age into the uncertain Hybrid Age, an era in which technology is rapidly becoming ubiquitous, intelligent, and social, radically transforming our societies, markets, and governance.
Intelligent Energy & Infrastructure
Sustainability has become the dominant theme of the early 21st century. To successfully transform societies toward lower consumption and greater productivity requires, first and foremost, increasing our urban intelligence through smart grids that connect offices, homes, and traffic lights into an energy saving and generating eco-system. “Smart cities” are emerging all over the world, from greenfield developments such as Songdo in Korea and Tianjin Eco-City in China to retrofit districts in Stockholm, Hamburg, and Rio de Janeiro.
Intelligent Markets & Consumers
Innovation is once again a buzzword among leading corporations, yet many have failed to realize that the future lies not just in innovating products but, more importantly, in innovating experiences. Based on growing online interaction, consumers now expect a real-time, personalized, and social experience as part of the every product offered. Augmented reality, collaborative consumption, game-ification, and sensors embedded in apparel are all examples of how products are being tailored to location, personality, and preferences, while also allowing consumers to share feedback through social networks.
Intelligent Work
Corporate management faces dramatic challenges today: an aging workforce, talent shortages, and rising competition from emerging markets. The only way to maximize the skills and ambitions of employees is to enable systems of collaboration called “virtual teams” irrespective of division or geography. The new “soft architecture” of the workplace includes Telepresence monitors, social robots, and software platforms which allow for virtual networked cooperation among globally mobile employees and contractors.
Intelligent Living
In an age of information overload, we now need interactive machines to help us analyze and extract maximum value from all the data we collect about ourselves. From the smart home to the smart car, we are moving beyond a one-way relationship with technology towards interacting with machines using natural gestures and voices, and even trusting them with personal information. The most significant impact of such machines will be felt in healthcare, where data collected from wearable devices will monitor everything from our blood pressure to our moods. In order to partake of the intelligent revolution, each of us must consciously fashion our daily lives and personal living spaces to accommodate and take advantage of new data streams and applications rapidly coming to market.
Intelligent Governance
Social networks have unleashed citizen revolutions from Barack Obama’s presidential campaign to the Arab Spring in the Middle East. Rather than succumb to waves of unforeseen pressure, clever mayors from New York and Paris to Dubai and Singapore are deploying elaborate digital strategies to streamline government services and create citizen engagement platforms. An entirely new kind of governance is emerging: through partnership with private sector entrepreneurs, software programmers, and bottom-up social movements, government increasingly operates through interactive dashboards that identify policy and investment needs and respond efficiently.
Ayesha Khanna is Managing Partner of Hybrid Realities, a consulting firm specializing in scenario analysis, technology trends, future cities, and geostrategy. She is also Founder and Principal of the Hybrid Reality Institute, which explores human/technology co-evolution and its implications for society, business and politics.
Phi Beta Iota: Elegant and worthwhile but missing the larger point, that all of these applications of technology are still controlled by the status quo ante powers, doing the wrong things righter, not the right thing. Absent an autonomous Internet and Open Everything, the Internet will be degraded the way Occupy was so quickly degraded.
See Also:
THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust
2012 PREPRINT FOR COMMENT: The Craft of Intelligence
- Advanced Cyber/IO (789)
- Autonomous Internet (135)
Patrick Meier: Does the Humanitarian Industry Have a Future in The Digital Age?
Blog Wisdom, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Geospatial, Gift Intelligence, Government, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), International Aid, IO Impotency, Methods & Process, microfinancing, Mobile, Non-Governmental, Peace Intelligence, Threats
Does the Humanitarian Industry Have a Future in The Digital Age?
I recently had the distinct honor of being on the opening plenary of the 2012 Skoll World Forum in Oxford. The panel, “Innovation in Times of Flux: Opportunities on the Heels of Crisis” was moderated by Judith Rodin, CEO of the Rockefeller Foundation. I've spent the past six years creating linkages between the humanitarian space and technology community, so the conversations we began during the panel prompted me to think more deeply about innovation in the humanitarian space. Clearly, humanitarian crises have catalyzed a number of important innovations in recent years. At the same time, however, these crises extend the cracks that ultimately reveal the inadequacies of existing humanita-rian organizations, particularly those resistant to change; and “any organization that is not changing is a battle-field monument” (While 1992).
These cracks, or gaps, are increasingly filled by disaster-affected communities themselves thanks in part to the rapid commercialization of communication technology. Question is: will the multi-billion dollar humanitarian industry change rapidly enough to avoid being left in the dustbin of history?
Crises often reveal that “existing routines are inadequate or even counter-productive [since] response will necessarily operate beyond the boundary of planned and resourced capabilities” (Leonard and Howitt 2007). More formally, “the ‘symmetry-breaking' effects of disasters undermine linearly designed and centralized administrative activities” (Corbacioglu 2006). This may explain why “increasing attention is now paid to the capacity of disaster-affected communities to ‘bounce back' or to recover with little or no external assistance following a disaster” (Manyena 2006).
Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Does the Humanitarian Industry Have a Future in The Digital Age?”
