References – Page 57 – Public Intelligence Blog

2012/02/10

John Robb: Four Sources of Trust, Crypto Not Scaling….

Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Computer/online security, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Methods & Process, Officers Call, Policies, Threats

Why The Global System is Killing Trust

Posted: 09 Feb 2012 03:35 PM PST

Trust is an essential building block of any economic and social system. Systems that attempt to operate without it inevitably fail. A loss of trust typically preceeds a collapse in legitimacy.

That's our future. Here's why:

Let's start with a philosopher “king” of crypt0-security, Bruce Schneier. He has a new book out called Liars and Outliers: Eneabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive (Wiley, 2012).

The book is all about the mechanisms for building trust. There are four mechanisms:

moral controls,
reputational pressure (shame),
institutional pressure (legal system), and
security controls (encryption, locks, etc.).

He contends (rightly) that in the modern world, we don't typically make/have the personal relationships required to build moral and reputational trust. We typically make impersonal relationships when we interact with a global economic system (you buy stuff made by people you don't know). As a result, we rely up on institutional (legal compliance) and security (to guard against bad behavior) to provide the level of trust necessary to make the global economy work.

There are two massive problems with that.

Legal compliance is increasingly a farce. Take the mortgage settlement the US government and the financial industry reached over rampant fraud in mortgage lending. I wrote a bit more about it on the Resilient Community blog if you want more detail. What does this mean? That even at the national level in a “developed country” it is impossible to use legal means to enforce trustworthiness (let's not even talk about compliance at the global level). It's doesn't work anymore. It's just too easy for anybody with financial means, to buy off country's legal system for pennies on the dollar (to the damage caused). The compliance system is broken.

So, that leaves us with security as the only way to prevent bad actors from running away with the global system. This leads me to a great presentation I heard yesterday by Dan Geer. He's another philosopher “king” of crypto-security (but for the CIA). Very smart guy. He made a convincing case that security is scaling slower than data, bandwidth, node, and user growth. It is falling behind and will continue to fall behind as the global system grows.

Upshot: it's already nearly impossible to secure big organizations. Every Fortune 500 company has and will continue to compromised. The government's systems are already a sieve. There's almost nothing that can be done about it and it will get increasingly worse. Forget about securing a single person trying to connect to the global system. They are just sheep ready for slaughter.

So, what happens now?

The global system will continue to grow. Trust will continue to leak as attempts at compliance and security fail to work effectively. The economic depression we have already started gets worse and worse and worse. Disorder erupts. It grows….

Is there a solution? An alternative form of social order that can provide a scalable global solution?

Yes. Resilient communities. Resilient communities rescale your life down to a rational level. They make personal relationships with the people that economically interact with you possible (again).

Hey, let the rest of the world sink into the squalor of a trust free world. It will make that system easier to trounce in head to head competition for people.

See Also:

Robert David Steele, THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth, & Trust (Evolver Editions, 5 June 2012)

and

Robert Garigue at Phi Beta Iota

2012/02/09

Winslow Wheeler: Sorting Out the Real DoD Budget…

10 Security, Budgets & Funding, DoD, Military, Office of Management and Budget, Officers Call

I thought the short piece below might help people better analyze and report on the defense spending budget that will be released on Monday, February 13. As you know, DOD has already released some numbers; however, they are quite incomplete. They do not even cover all Pentagon spending, let alone all defense-related spending. Using the Pentagon's press release on Monday will likely mean missing the more complete picture. I try to explain below, and I address where you can find a more complete display of the numbers–all of them.

Decoding the Pentagon's Budget Numbers

Winslow T. Wheeler

This Monday, February 13, the Pentagon will release the details of its fiscal year 2013 budget. The press, congressional staff and think tank-types go through an annual routine, scrambling to get out their take on the numbers and some selected issues. Some of these efforts are quite predictable; this year we will surely hear about

Continue reading “Winslow Wheeler: Sorting Out the Real DoD Budget…”

2012/02/092012/02/09

Ralph Peters: Testimony to Congress on Pakistan As a Failing Empire, Focus on Baluchistan

Analysis, Budgets & Funding, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Hill Letters & Testimony, History, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), IO Impotency, Key Players, Methods & Process, Military, Officers Call, Policies, Strategy, Threats, True Cost

Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations
House Committee on Foreign Affairs
Baluchistan Hearing, February 8, 2012
Testimony of Ralph Peters, military analyst and author

“PAKISTAN AS A FAILING EMPIRE”

2012-02-09 Ralph Peters House Testimony, Baluchistan and Pakistan (8 pages, doc)

Introductory remarks: This testimony arises from three premises.

First, we cannot analyze global events through reassuring ideological lenses, be they left or right, or we will continue to be mistaken, surprised and bewildered by foreign developments. The rest of the world will neither conform to our prejudices nor behave for our convenience.

Second, focusing obsessively on short-term problems blinds us to the root causes and frequent intractability of today’s conflicts. Because we do not know history, we wave history away. Yet, the only way to understand the new world disorder is to place current developments in the context of generations and even centuries. Otherwise, we will continue to blunder through situations in which we deploy to Afghanistan to end Taliban rule, only to find ourselves, a decade later, impatient to negotiate the Taliban’s return to power.

Third, we must not be afraid to “color outside of the lines.” When it comes to foreign affairs, Washington’s political spectrum is monochromatic: timid, conformist and wrong with breathtaking consistency. We have a Department of State that refuses to think beyond borders codified at Versailles nine decades ago; a Department of Defense that, faced with messianic and ethnic insurgencies, concocted its doctrine from irrelevant case studies of yesteryear’s Marxist guerrillas; and a think-tank community almost Stalinist in its rigid allegiance to twentieth-century models of how the world should work.

If we do not think innovatively, we will continue to fail ignobly.

Continue reading “Ralph Peters: Testimony to Congress on Pakistan As a Failing Empire, Focus on Baluchistan”

2012/02/09

NIGHTWATCH: Iran-Syria

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 05 Iran, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Blog Wisdom, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices

Iran-Syria: Iran rejected any Yemeni-like scenario in Syria, according to Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Abdollahian who spoke to the press on 8 February at the Iranian Embassy in Damascus. Abdollahian added that Iranians recently kidnapped in Syria were released after Turkish mediation.

Comment: The visit by the Iranian Deputy Foreign Ministry corresponds to reports that the Commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps-Qods Force Major General Sulemani had arrived in Damascus to assist in the defense of the Syrian Alawite government. At least one other news service reported — without good sourcing — that a large number of IRGC forces are present in Damascus.

Open sources are unable to confirm the reports about Sulemani's visit and the presence of Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps soldiers in Damascus. The logic of the situation is that Iran needs to take action to prevent a strategic disaster. The unconfirmed reports suggest it has begun to do so.

However, the deployment of Persians to Syria does not seem a likely first option. On the other hand, Sulemani, in person, might have gone to Damascus to offer his expert advice on destroying subversive movements.

All news services suggest that the struggle to control Homs will determine the future of the anti-al-Asad uprising. If that prediction is accurate, then the Alawites should win, provided that Bashar al-Asad and his generals have the same strength of will that his father and his generals had in ordering the destruction of Hama in February 1982, when Sunni rebels, including the Muslim Brotherhood, held the town briefly.

If the Syrian Sunni uprising hinges on the fate of Homs, it will lose, not only because the Alawites will not hesitate to destroy rebel enclaves in the town, but also because many residents of Homs will side with the government to destroy the outlaw gangs, posing as rebels, according to sources in Homs.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

2012/02/072014/01/18

Robert Steele: The Craft of Intelligence – OLD vs. NEW

Advanced Cyber/IO, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), Earth Intelligence, Ethics, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Key Players, Methods & Process, Officers Call, Policies, Reform, Serious Games, Threats

UPDATED 18 January 2014

Intelligence Chief Describes Complex Challenges. America and the world are facing the most complex set of challenges in at least 50 years, the director of national intelligence told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence here today.

James R. Clapper Jr. said capabilities, technologies, know-how, communications and environmental forces “aren't confined by borders and can trigger transnational disruptions with astonishing speed.”

“Never before has the intelligence community been called upon to master such complexity on so many issues in such a resource- constrained environment,” he added.

CIA Director David H. Petraeus, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, Defense Intelligence Agency Director Army Lt. Gen. Ronald L. Burgess Jr. and others accompanied Clapper during his testimony on Capitol Hill. Clapper spoke for all agencies in his opening statement.

All U.S. agencies are combating the complex environment and making sense of the threats by continuing to integrate the community and “by taking advantage of new technologies, implementing new efficiencies and, as always, simply working hard,” Clapper said.

Still, he said, all agencies are confronting the difficult fiscal environment.

“Maintaining the world's premier intelligence enterprise in the face of shrinking budgets will be difficult,” the director said. “We'll be accepting and managing risk more so than we've had to do in the last decade.”

Terrorism and proliferation remain the first threats the intelligence agencies must face, he said, and the next three years will be crucial. [Read more: Garamone/AFPS/31January2012]

Tip of the Hat to AFCEA.

Below the Line: Craft of Intelligence for the 21st Century

Continue reading “Robert Steele: The Craft of Intelligence – OLD vs. NEW”

2012/02/07

John Robb: When Security is Huge, Stupid, & Out of Control

10 Security, Blog Wisdom, DHS, IO Impotency

Simple equation:

A national security system that is mostly bloat and mission creep instead of real, honest to goodness, security

Badly design social media monitoring tools that are sifting through billions of messages a day?

FAILURE

Here's a simple example. A young British guy makes a tweet to his friends:

Easy to discern the tweet is about hard drinking/partying.

He flies to Los Angeles with a friend. He is promptly arrested. Held in cuffs/cell for 12 hours and deported.

Why? The Department of Homeland Security flagged his tweet as a possible threat to the US.

Huh?

Automated security at its finest.

Add lethal drones that kill people due to “terrorist” signature behaviors and we have a problem Houston.

Phi Beta Iota: Oddly enough, this is the exact unclassified parallel of the National Security Agency (NSA) that processes less than 1% of all traffic, and less than 5% of “high priority” traffic, according to various open source reports. At what point–in the midst of economic collapse–do serious people get to say “enough – let's get real about needs, capabilities, costs, outputs, and trade-offs?” Has anyone been able to find the “M” in OMB? This is what you get when “management” is non-existent, money is printed without pause, and very expensive executive merely channel dollars rather than actually thinking about what they buy, what the produce, and how we might better spend (or not spend at all) those dollars.

2012/02/07

NIGHTWATCH: Syria, Russia, US, Iran, Israel, Lies, & Truth + RECAP

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 05 Iran, 06 Russia, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, Blog Wisdom, Corruption, Government, IO Impotency, Media, Misinformation & Propaganda, Peace Intelligence, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

Syria: Special comment. Readers are rightly perplexed about conditions in Syria. Syrian press restrictions inhibit any neutral or balanced coverage. Everything reported from opposition sources and activists is biased and some reports of massacres include manufactured images, according to eyewitnesses.

International news descriptions of a worsening crisis receive no offsetting coverage of testimony from non-Sunni and non-opposition sources that little is occurring. The massacres are not taking place, occurring to sources that receive messages from Orthodox Christians living in Homs, for example. Life goes on in all of the towns and ports.

Skirmishes at checkpoints are the most common form of clash. That means four or five people fire a few rounds at four or five soldiers or policemen. Defectors are Sunni conscripts. The Syrian Army is about 60% conscript. Desertion is common in conscript armies. Defectors from the professional, full-time, non-conscript core of the force, most of whom are Alawites, have not been reported.

The point is that western media present one side of the struggle — that of the exiled Sunni politicians and activists with cell phones. Clips from social networking media are heavily one-sided and some are not authentic.

Limited communications from people caught in the middle, non-Muslims, suggest there is a lot less fighting and fewer deaths. Reports of carnage and massacres of hundreds do not seem to be accurate, except in opposition propaganda media.

Continue reading “NIGHTWATCH: Syria, Russia, US, Iran, Israel, Lies, & Truth + RECAP”