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.
The revision expanded the government’s surveillance authority, permitting intelligence agencies to collect information on U.S. soil without a warrant identifying a particular individual — as long as the government could assure a surveillance court that its targeting procedures are designed to find people who are not U.S. persons and who are overseas.
U.S. government has typically attempted to block such challenges by arguing that litigation would reveal state secrets or that the plaintiffs lack standing to sue. But in March, a three-judge panel accepted the argument of the plaintiffs, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, that the law had harmed them by forcing them to take draconian measures to avoid government interception of their phone calls and e-mails to overseas clients.
Despite intense focus on Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Middle East in the last decade, U.S. spy agencies are still lacking in language skills needed to talk to locals, translate intercepted intelligence and analyse data, according to top intelligence officials.
Telegraph, 20 September 2011
The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks prompted a major push for foreign language skills to track militants and trends in parts of the world that were not a Cold War priority.
But intelligence agencies have had to face the reality that the languages they need cannot be taught quickly, the street slang U.S. operatives and analysts require is not easy, and security concerns make the clearance process lengthy.
As recently as 2008 and 2009, intelligence officials were still issuing new directives and programs in the hopes of ramping up language capability.
“Language will continue to be a challenge for us,” Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said at a congressional hearing last week.
“It's something we're working at, and will continue to do so, but we're probably not where we want to be,” he said.
Phi Beta Iota: Languages are not hard–what is hard is the “leadership” culture incapable of leading. US citizens by birth are never going to learn foreign languages as needed. There are just TWO solutions, both executable today, all it takes is integrity at the top, long missing:
1. Exempt case officers and others “on the street” from the idiotic security clearance requirements. Hire to qualifications and manage to risk. This includes restoration of the “principle agent” category as well as the third-country subject-matter expert category. They never see secrets, they just do what they do, very well.
2. Adopt the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) model of regional field stations in which multinational cadres of case officers and analysts are supported by US money and US technology. Again, they never see secrets and are firewalled during active ops.
Announcing a new Rheingold U course: Toward a New Literacy of Cooperation
For the past ten years, I've worked with Institute for the Future to track the emergence of a new story about how humans get things done together. The old story of survival of the fittest, competition, rational self-interest is changing as new knowledge comes to light about cooperative arrangements and complex interdependencies in cells, ecosystems, economies, and humans. In 2005, I delivered a TED talk about this subject; the video has been viewed more than 182,000 times. In the same year, I co-taught a seminar at Stanford with Andrea Saveri of Institute for the Future, “Toward a Literacy of Cooperation.” This six week Rheingold U course builds on the texts, videos, and other materials developed over the past ten years. Under my direction, co-learners will inquire, collaborate, discuss, co-construct knowledge about the building blocks and conceptual frames of a new literacy of cooperation. The course will run September 30 – November 11
The number of persons who held security clearances for access to classified information last year exceeded 4.2 million — far more than previously estimated — according to a new intelligence community report to Congress (pdf).
The report, which was required by the FY2010 intelligence authorization act, provides the first precise tally of clearances held by federal employees and contractors that has ever been produced. The total figure as of last October 1 was 4,266,091 cleared persons. See “Report on Security Clearance Determinations for Fiscal Year 2010,” Office of the Director of National Intelligence, September 2011.
In 2009, the Government Accountability Office had told Congress that about 2.4 million people held clearances “excluding some of those with clearances who work in areas of national intelligence.” (“More Than 2.4 Million Hold Security Clearances,” Secrecy News, July 29, 2009). But even with a generous allowance for hundreds of thousands of additional intelligence personnel, that estimate somehow missed more than a million clearances.
Likewise, one of the many startling findings in the 2010 Washington Post series (and 2011 book) “Top Secret America” by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, was that “An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.”
But remarkably, that too was a significant underestimate, according to the new report. In actual fact, as of October 2010 there were 1,419,051 federal employees and contractors holding Top Secret clearances.
As high as the newly determined total number of clearances is, it may not be the highest number ever. In the last decade of the cold war, a comparable or greater number of persons seems to have had security clearances. In those years the size of the uniformed military was much larger than today, and a large fraction of its members were routinely granted clearances. Thus, as of 1983, there were approximately 4.2 million clearances, according to 1985 testimony (pdf) from the GAO. But that was an estimate, not a measurement, and the actual number might have been higher (or lower). By 1993, the post-cold war number had declined to around 3.2 million clearances, according to another GAO report (pdf) from 1995.
The unexpectedly large number of security clearances today can presumably be attributed to several related factors: the surge in military and intelligence spending over the past decade, increased government reliance on cleared contractors, and intensive classification activity that continues today.
Phi Beta Iota: For $80-90 billion a year, $15 billion or so of which is the cost of maintaining one of the most extraordinarily inept and unreliable secrecy systems on the planet (much much larger than those of all dictators combined), we get, “at best” 4% of the intelligence (decision-support) that the President or a major commander needs, and nothing for everyone else.
Researchers at Michigan State University have developed a laser that could be used to detect roadside bombs, also known as improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
The device is no stronger than a typical presentation pointer, but it has the sensitivity and selectivity to scan large areas and detect the chemicals used in these deadly bombs, which have accounted for about 60 percent of soldier deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Phi Beta Iota: In 1988, when the Marine Corps Intelligence Center (today a Command) was created, Measurements and Signatures Intelligence (MASINT) was just getting started. The #1 officially-stated Marine Corps requirement for MASINT in 1988 was precisely this: the ability to detect ground explosives at stand-off distance regardless of the containers. Nearly a quarter century later, and billions–not just one billion–later, the US Government still cannot do this. This Israelis solved the problem for themselves in the 1960's, using trained dogs that were expendable. The US Government learned of this solution in 1988, but refused to take it seriously (dogs are not an expensive enough solution). As General Robert Scales has pointed out, 4% of the force (infantry) takes 80% of the casualties, but receives less than 1% of the funding. This is, in one word, corruption. The Department of Defense lacks integrity in every sense of the word.
A remarkable talk by Wesley Clark–4-Star General in the U.S. military: he reveals his reaction to informaton that the U.S.was going to attack and destroy the governments in 7 countries in 5 years–Iraq, Syria,Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iran. He goes on to say, “These people [from the Project for a New American Century] took control of the policy of the United States” and recalls a 1991 meeting he had with Paul Wolfowitz who at that time held the number three position at the Pentagon. Pay close attention to what Wolfowitz told him. This talk by Wesley Clark made my jaw drop.
Below is a dynamite op-ed on the cost of the so-called war on terror by Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz. Without being critical, I think at least two additional aspects to these costs make the picture even worse than they say.
1. Some people in this [let them eat] cake walk became — and are still becoming — filthy rich spending other people's money and spilling other people's blood — the acknowledgement of which takes one into the murky question of what moral values are shaping this political-economic meltdown.
2. While not directly caused by the war on terror, the ramping up of defense expenditures magnified the the rate of distorting spillovers (the Melman* effects) that the MICC's politicization of R&D and manufacturing have on diminishing America's overall commercial manufacturing efficiency and industrial competitiveness. The costs may be incalculable, but that does not make them less real.
Fighting the war on terror compromises the economy now and threatens it in the future.
By Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz
Ten years into the war on terror, the U.S. has largely succeeded in its attempts to destabilize Al Qaeda and eliminate its leaders. But the cost has been enormous, and our decisions about how to finance it have profoundly damaged the U.S. economy.
Many of these costs were unnecessary. We chose to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan with a small, all-volunteer force, and we supplemented the military presence with a heavy reliance on civilian contractors. These decisions not only placed enormous strain on the troops but dramatically pushed up costs. Recent congressional investigations have shown that roughly 1 of every 4 dollars spent on wartime contracting was wasted or misspent.
Phi Beta Iota: We judge defense to be 75% fraud, waste, and abuse (3 out of 4 dollars, not 1 out of four). The infantry is 4% of the force, suffers 80% of the casualties, and receives 1% of the budget. Our starting position is that 20% of the Pentagon budget can be justified in conference, everything else is on the table for draconian cuts toward a balanced budget. Agriculture, energy, and health are documented at 50% waste–the Pentagon is much less relevant to the society and the economy than those three, ergo we speculate that defense is half again as wasteful as these other core sectors.
