References – Page 79 – Public Intelligence Blog

Some random items of interest:

Study. Scientists finally realized the US electrical grid is too much of a patchwork to collapse with a small disruptive event. As in: the US grid doesn't have a single systempunkt. Not sure that matters much to global guerrillas. Why? Basically, an attack on a high level electrical systempunkt still works well regionally (as in 50-70 m people).

Greece fires its generals.

Anonymous cancels Operation Cartel. This entire thing was hilarious.

Interesting to see how much participation Occupy Oakland gets in its ‘general strike' today. Posters. Oakland's dynamics evolved the movement faster than what we've seen nationally. (as in: Police get violent with the movement, including some petty thuggery. Community pushback forces the mayor to back down and vacillate. Police confused….)

Open letter from Oakland PD

Horizontal gene transfer happens over much greater distances with greater frequency than expected.

Congress declares war on the Internet. Inevitable as the economy goes into perpetual reverse.

Coffee and Power. Another microwork startup.

Illicit cigarette sales on the rise. If you need to act like a criminal to smoke, why not be one?

Stuxnet blowback. It's very cool how the US/Israeli gov'ts demonstrated (with its use against Iran) the plausible promise of building cyber weapons that can damage, disrupt, or explode factories. They've set the bar, it's up to the global community of hackers and tinkerers to bring it to the next level. (The same is going to be true with military drones — particularly the small/cheap/smart ones).

Facebook builds new data center in Sweden, where no warrant is needed to intercept internet traffic.

Congress' net worth increased by at least 25% in the last two years.

2011/11/032011/11/04

Marcus Aurelius: Death Notice for Counterintelligence

07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, Corruption, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Government, Intelligence (government), IO Impotency, Military, Officers Call

Marcus-Aurelius-150x150 — Marcus Aurelius

Combat Commanders Gain Control Of Counterintelligence Ops

By Carlo Munoz

AOL Defense, November 1, 2011

Washington: The Pentagon is offering field commanders control of counterintelligence operations to cope with the never-ceasing efforts by countries such as China, Iran and Israel to gain access to classified information and technology.

Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Mike Vickers approved the plan in an Oct. 5 memorandum. Groups such as Central Command and Special Operations Command can now choose to do their own CI work within their organizations, according to the memo. Formal investigations are still handled by the services.

“We gave the [combat commands] an option to develop an organic CI capability… or to rely on [the Defense Department],” Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. James Gregory said. “We did not want to legislate either way but instead wanted to give [them] an option.” The decision comes as the Pentagon and intelligence community are preparing for a $25 billion to $40 billion budget cut over the next decade.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: At the tactical level intelligence has always been the runt, generally one rank down from operations, and within intelligence, counterintelligence is where the runts of the runts go. Marty Hurwitz destroyed tactical intelligence with his consolidation of the General Defense Intelligence Program (GDIP) and the well-intentioned but badly conceived Joint Intelligence Center (JIC) concept. While Jim Clapper destroyed Marty Hurwitz, he did not make tactical intelligence (counterintelligence silent as in non-existent) healthy again, going on to make national consolidation every worse. There is a huge difference between security and defensive counterintelligence – they are not the same but ignorant commanders will treat them as one. There is a huge difference between defensive counterintelligence and offensive counterintelligence – no one in the US national intelligence community is competent as offensive counterintelligence, and the commanders will be oblivious to this until such time as we finally eliminate the regional commands and reset national defense and multinational information-sharing and sense-making. The budget cuts are trivial – $40 billion over ten years is $4 billion a year, that is a 4% cut on $90 billion a year, while at least 50% of what the IC spends now is fraud, waste, and abuse, 70% of that on contractor vapor-ware. The greatest enemy of America is a dishonest intelligence community that cannot do holistic analytics relevant to everything we need to know.

More practically, COCOMs consist of headquarters staffs and operational units sourced from the Services. Counterintelligence is currently a functional support service provided to the COCOMs by the Services and perhaps DIA. I know of no joint CI force structure designed for COCOMs. So, for COCOMs to run their own CI operations, they will require resources to be sourced, either permanently or temporarily, from the Services or from DIA, which itself gets its military personnel from the Services and competes with the rest of the Intelligence Community to hire civilians. That would serve principally to exacerbate existing shortages in counterintelligence personnel and force structure. In other words, Mike Vickers is not leading, he is scamming.

2011/11/022011/11/02

Cynthia McKinney: More Truth on Libya

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 06 Genocide, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, Corruption, Government, Military, Movies, Officers Call

It's really sad when journalists want to print the truth, but are prevented from doing so because of concerns about keeping their jobs. It seems that is the situation today with the video that shows that all of the Libya destruction was built on a pack of lies. The video done by Julien Teil called “The Humanitarian War” demonstrates, in the words of the author of the original lie, that there was no evidence at all to back up the allegation that thousands were killed by the Jamahirya government, but that instead, a small circle of friends “worked” that lie throughout the various organs of the United Nations and the result is genocide of a people and contamination of a land.

Now, here's my request to you. Can you become a journalist for a day and post the video link to just a few of the sites that you visit regularly? If the real journalists won't do it, then could you? It is clear that we have to become the journalists that we seek.

Please post this video link to Daily Kos, Common Dreams, OpEd News, Democracy Now!, and the rest that we visit regularly. But could you also please visit FOX, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBC, Russia Today, PRESS TV, etc. and post it there?

I'll do my part, too, and make sure that it's posted to my sites or sites that I'm supposed to have control over. Only, I have to learn how to post! (That's another matter!)

Finally, if you haven't taken the time to watch this video, please do. It will take your breath away that all of this has been done by NATO to Libya and its foundation is a lie. What kind of people would do that to their own country?

Click here to have a look at Julien (not Jonathan) Teil's, “The Humanitarian War:” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gJz45K4Q50

(Those of you in Europe, Africa, and Asia might want to use this link instead: http://www.laguerrehumanitaire.fr/english

)

2011/11/022011/11/02

Howard Rheingold: Mindfulness for Executives

Advanced Cyber/IO, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Movies

Webinar: “Cultivating the Executive Mind: Is Mindfulness the Key to 21st Century Economic Survival?”

Peter Drucker, the founder of the discipline of modern management, asserted that making knowledge workers productive was the key to economic survival for the developed economies. Though knowledge workers use their minds to make a living, are they ever taught to use their minds more effectively? This webinar discusses my decade-old mindfulness program at the Drucker School of Management designed to teach managers to manage themselves.

See Also:

The Knowledge Executive

2011/11/02

Reference: System D – The Global Black Market

03 Economy, 11 Society, Articles & Chapters, Civil Society, Commerce, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Hacking

The Shadow Superpower

Forget China: the $10 trillion global black market is the world's fastest growing economy — and its future.

Robert Neuwirth

Foreign Policy, 28 October 2011

It wasn't a matter of technology. David is not an inventor or an engineer, and his insights into his country's electrical problems had nothing to do with fancy photovoltaics or turbines to harness the harmattan or any other alternative sources of energy. Instead, 7,000 miles from home, using a language he could hardly speak, he did what traders have always done: made a deal. He contracted with a Chinese firm near Guangzhou to produce small diesel-powered generators under his uncle's brand name, Aakoo, and shipped them home to Nigeria, where power is often scarce. David's deal, struck four years ago, was not massive — but it made a solid profit and put him on a strong footing for success as a transnational merchant. Like almost all the transactions between Nigerian traders and Chinese manufacturers, it was also sub rosa: under the radar, outside of the view or control of government, part of the unheralded alternative economic universe of System D.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: The old estimate was $2 trillion a year, of which half went to bribes paid to government officials. To put this in a larger context, governments have failed to adapt and failed to represent the bulk of their populations — they have been captured at the upper levels by lobbyists, “experts” and the elite 1%, and at lower levels by common one to one bribes. Hence, in the new economy, the 99% are routing around government, and creating their own hybrid forms of governance, generally driven by information and reality instead of ideology and greed. It can be said that the illegal economy is more honest than the “legalized crime” economy.

Cartoon Source

2011/11/022011/11/02

Reference: Why Spy? The Uses and Misuses of Intelligence

Corruption, Government, IO Impotency, White Papers

Search led to this. Thank you.

Why Spy?
The Uses and Misuses of Intelligence

by Stanley Kober

Stanley Kober is a research fellow in foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute.

Executive Summary

America's intelligence agencies should devote their resources to the most serious security threats, principally international terrorism and adverse political trends. Instead, the Clinton administration has diverted the intelligence community to economic espionage.

The economic espionage mission is based on faulty assumptions and damages relations with governments whose cooperation we may need in dealing with significant security threats. Indeed, Washington's use of the Central Intelligence Agency for economic spying has already led to ugly incidents with Japan and France. The focus on commercial espionage also creates a myopic perspective from which developments such as massive corruption in another country are seen as merely economic factors, rather than harbingers of political instability.

There are more than enough bona fide security problems in the world to command the full attention of the intelligence community. The most serious is international terrorism. Penetrating and neutralizing shadowy and secretive terrorist organizations will pose a daunting task for the intelligence agencies. There are also disturbing political trends that warrant close scrutiny, including the continuing turbulence in Russia; China's emergence as an assertive, if not abrasive, great power; and early signs of a Beijing-Moscow axis motivated by hostility toward the United States.

It is essential, not only that the intelligence agencies focus their efforts on such actual or potential security problems, but that policymakers listen to the agencies' assessments, especially when those assessments raise questions about the wisdom of current U.S. policy. Unfortunately, the Clinton administration all too often seems indifferent if not hostile to such valuable early warnings.

Read full essay at CATO.

Phi Beta Iota: There are some gems in here, for example, the US policy of demanding weak encryption in commerce so NSA does not have to work hard, only stupid. NSA is a monstrous tragic comedy, an expensive albatross that corrupts US intelligence in the extreme. The essay is wrong-headed on other point, not least of which is the raw fact that what our politicians and appointed policy people do every day in the way of treason against the public interest is THE greatest threat to the Constitution and the Republic.

2011/11/01

DefDog: Afghan Surge Flops, Viet-Nam Deja Vu

08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military, Officers Call

More evidence, as if we needed it, of the lack of integrity of this administration…..

New Afghan War Plan Concedes the Surge Fell Short

Spencer Ackerman

WIRED, 1 November 2011

As the Obama administration winds down its troop surge in Afghanistan, it’s adopted a new political strategy for ending the war. And that new strategy represents a tacit concession that the best the surge could accomplish was rescuing Afghanistan from from the brink of total failure.

What was the surge for, anyway? In one sense, as explained by President Obama, it was merely designed to stop the Afghanistan war from deteriorating. But Obama’s generals promised that it would do more — that it would whup the Taliban into suing for peace. And in the broadest sense of all, it would contribute to the Obama team’s ultimate objective for the region: to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat” al-Qaida.

Judged in the narrowest sense, then, the surge worked. Afghanistan is no longer spiraling into greater violence. But it’s failed to accomplish anything beyond that.

Read longer than usual, very pointed analysis of lies, delusions, and failure.

Phi Beta Iota: We've learned to expect a complete lack of integrity in our political, operational, and intelligence leaders. This is so “deja vu” of Viet-Nam. There is no accountability for failure in the US Government.

See Also:

Chuck Spinney: Time Favors the Taliban

Afghanistan Ground Truth: Deja Vu & Nested RECAP

Bob Gates: Flat Out Liar or Just Feeble? + RECAP

US Intelligence Lies to “Defer” to General Petraeus

Journal: Taliban Ramps Up North, Holds South + RECAP

Journal: Putin to Obama–Stay in Afghanistan + RECAP

Journal: William Polk on Afghanistan Non-Strategy Plus Consolidated Journal, Review, and Reference Links for Afghanistan

Chuck Spinney: Bin Laden, Perpetual War, Total Cost + Perpetual War RECAP

Marcus Aurelius: US at Permanent “War” + War RECAP

1961-2011: 50 Years of The Military-Industrial Complex

David Isenberg: Jim Clapper Claims Transformation — Robert Steele Comments on Each Misrepresentation