The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
The Battle for Tora Bora
How Osama bin Laden slipped from our grasp: The definitive account.
PeterBergen
I am convinced that Tora Bora constitutes one of the greatest military blunders in recent U.S. history. It is worth revisiting now not just in the interest of historical accuracy, but also because the story contains valuable lessons as we renew our push against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Continue reading “Journal: Tora Bora Revisited by Peter Bergen”
INTELLIGENCE is DECISION-SUPPORT. The process of intelligence is separate from whether the sources and methods are secret or not. There is nothing secret, unethical, or illegal about the process of intelligence as decision-support.
Original “Class Before One” (2010 Class 001 in Planning)
2007 United Nations “Class Before One” Infomation-Sharing and Analytics Orientation
Other references:
Continue reading “Search: United Nations Intelligence Training”
A 9/11 in Indonesia: JI's planned aviation attack: info Noordin Top's laptop
Countering terrorist ideology: the ideological response unit (Singapore)
Global (Terrorism) Pathfinder (Singapore)
The ICPVTR Terrorism Database – Global Pathfinder – is a one-stop repository for information on the current and emerging terrorist threat. The database focuses on terrorism and political violence in the Asia-Pacific region – comprising of Southeast Asia, North Asia, South Asia, Central Asia and Oceania.
In addition to providing the latest information on terrorist attacks and pronouncements, Global Pathfinder also includes over a hundred terrorist training manuals, counter terrorism legislations and conventions, analytical papers on terrorist ideologies, commentaries on terrorist trends and patterns, transcripts of landmark cases, interviews with terrorists as well as photographs from different conflict zones across the world. Further, Global Pathfinder also has a huge collection of jihadi websites, the contents of which are routinely translated and analysed by our analysts.
The Global Jihad Network: Why and How al–Qaeda UsesComputer Technology to Wage Jihad
One of the main architects of the new al-Qaeda is a man named Abu Musab al-Suri. He put down his vision for the future of jihad in a book entitled Call for Worldwide Islamic Resistance, a one-thousand six-hundred page manifesto published on the Internet in 2004.
…he sought “…to transfer the training to each house of each district in the village of every Muslim….making appropriate training materials available to more than a billion Muslims….
Systems Approach To Terrorism: Countering The Terrorist Training Subsystem
Celebi's thesis focuses on the use of the Internet both in general and in the case of the Kurdish group PKK. The work is strongest in its discussion of what the author calls the training subsystem, and in his explication of that system as involving more than tradecraft and being increasingly based online. This training subsystem is seen as having four core functions:
1. The training subsystem creates, intensifies and sustains the competence, commitment and the skills that the terrorists will apply to reach their goals.
2. The training subsystem not only teaches the ways and means, but also justifies them by means of intensive indoctrination.
3. The training subsystem establishes ties to the group and creates a sense of belonging.
4. The training subsystem enables knowledge to be stored inside the boundaries of the system, and facilitates its passing through generations.
Kudos should be given to the UN’s Counter Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate (CTED) for producing what is perhaps the most comprehensive and frank assessments to date of the international community’s implementation of Security Council Resolution 1373 and the measures adopted to combat international terrorism. Their report was presented to the Security Council by CTED Executive Director Mike Smith on December 16th and provides detailed information on what is actually being done, on the vulnerabilities, and on the technical assistance required. It provides a thematic overview of the laws and actions taken in the areas of enforcement, border control, countering the financing of terrorism, and international cooperation as well as a region by region assessment. Human rights considerations are also addressed. The report should be read closely.
Deep Web Implements the Multilingual Search that Google Imagines
In an interview with the U.K. newspaper The Daily Telegraph, Google vice president for search products Marissa Mayer challenged the readership to “Imagine what it would be like if there was a tool built into the search engine which translated my search query into every language and then searched the entire world’s websites.” We spoke with Abe Lederman, CEO of Deep Web Technologies, a technology supplier that already offers this multilingual search.
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The bottom line: Multilingual search is not just a figment of Google’s imagination. It’s already here — you just have to dig a bit deeper to find it.
SANTA FE, N.M., Sept. 3, 2009 — Deep Web Technologies is proud to announce development of a prototype of a multilingual translation capability for clients using its federated search applications. An early prototype of multilingual searching was demonstrated to the members of the WorldWideScience Alliance in June of 2009. This new feature, when fully developed and implemented, will translate a user’s search query into the native language of the collections being searched, will translate result titles and snippets back to the user’s original language and aggregate and rank these results according to relevance. The translation process will be seamless, making it simple to search collections in multiple languages from a single search box in the native language of the user.
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Deep Web Technologies (http://www.deepwebtech.com) creates custom, sophisticated federated search solutions for clients who demand precise, accurate results. The tool of choice when needing to access the deep web, federated search performs real-time, parallel searches of multiple information sources, merging the results into one page. Serving Fortune 500 companies, the Science.gov Alliance (http://www.science.gov), the U.S. Dept. of Energy, the Dept. of Defense, Scitopia.org (http://www.scitopia.org), Nutrition.gov, WorldWideScience Alliance (http://www.worldwidescience.org) and a variety of other customers and partners, Deep Web Technologies has built a reputation as the “researcher’s choice” for its advanced, agile information discovery tools
Continue reading “Worth a Look: Deep Web Multilingual Federated Search”
Iraq Swears by Bomb Detector U.S. Sees as Useless
The small hand-held wand, with a telescopic antenna on a swivel, is being used at hundreds of checkpoints in Iraq. But the device works “on the same principle as a Ouija board” — the power of suggestion — said a retired United States Air Force officer, Lt. Col. Hal Bidlack, who described the wand as nothing more than an explosives divining rod.
Still, the Iraqi government has purchased more than 1,500 of the devices, known as the ADE 651, at costs from $16,500 to $60,000 each. Nearly every police checkpoint, and many Iraqi military checkpoints, have one of the devices, which are now normally used in place of physical inspections of vehicles.
Schneier on Security: A blog covering security and security technology November 6, 2009
The Doghouse: ADE 651: A divining rod to find explosives in Iraq:
ATSC’s promotional material claims that its device can find guns, ammunition, drugs, truffles, human bodies and even contraband ivory at distances up to a kilometer, underground, through walls, underwater or even from airplanes three miles high. The device works on “electrostatic magnetic ion attraction,” ATSC says.
To detect materials, the operator puts an array of plastic-coated cardboard cards with bar codes into a holder connected to the wand by a cable. “It would be laughable,” Colonel Bidlack said, “except someone down the street from you is counting on this to keep bombs off the streets.”
Complete quackery, sold by Cumberland Industries:
Still, the Iraqi government has purchased more than 1,500 of the devices, known as the ADE 651, at costs from $16,500 to $60,000 each. Nearly every police checkpoint, and many Iraqi military checkpoints, have one of the devices, which are now normally used in place of physical inspections of vehicles.
Continue reading “Journal: Fraudulent Security Device Popular in Iraq”
UPDATE: Superceeded by final published version a tReference: Intelligence-Led Peacekeeping
Phi Beta Iota: Dr. Walter Dorn is one of a tiny handful of truly authoritative academic observers of UN intelligence, a pioneer in his own right, and perhaps the only person who has followed UN intelligence from the Congo in the 1960's to the creation of new capabilities in Haiti and elsewhere in the 21st Century. He is the dean of UN intelligence authors. See also Who’s Who in Peace Intelligence: Walter Dorn.
