Martin Petersen Studies in Intelligence Vol 55 No 1
An advantage of getting older is increased perspective. I have been doing, thinking and writing about intelligence and intelligence analysis for almost 40 years now. The business we are in has changed a great deal in that time, but more in its form than in its fundamentals. I want to focus on three broad topics: understanding the customer, the importance of a service mentality, and the six things I learned in doing and studying intelligence analysis during my career in the DI. While these experiences are drawn from work in the CIA, I believe the principles apply across the Intelligence Community (IC).
Understanding the Consumer: Five Fundamental Truths
The last time the price of oil topped $100 a barrel for an extended period, we ended up in a global financial meltdown. Is this time any different?
Not much.
All of the excessively financial leverage and fraudelent derivative wealth we had during the last melt down is still in place. Total debt to GDP levels in the US are about the same (370% of GDP or so). No reforms were made on Wall Street. Nobody at fault for the fraud that led to the last melt down went to jail, so behaviors haven't changed.
This is classic Tainter (the excellent anthropoligist/historian). He posited that complex societies only collapse when the costs of basic inputs increase at the same time the returns on investments in complex institutions/etc. turn negative. So, with oil going up again, we are seeing basic input costs rise. It's also clear that our twin overheads Government and Global Finance are well past the point they delivered positive returns for additional complexity. Worse, they are colluding, via cronyism, to prevent any meaningful changes.
The first is “A revolution against neoliberalism” by Abu Atris, it appeared in Al Jazeera on 24 Feb. The second is “Of the 1%, by the 1%, and for the 1%” by Joseph Stiglitz. One is about the Arab Revolt in Egypt and the other is about income inequality in the United States … they raise stunningly similar — and very disturbing — themes when compared to each other. I urge readers to read each carefully and think about the likenesses and differences between them.
Americans have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.
New features could make a Web tool that has helped track events in Japan and the Middle East even more useful.
Monday, March 28, 2011, By David Talbot
MIT Technology Review
EXTRACT: The new feature is known as “check-in,” also used by social sites like Foursquare—in that case as a way of alerting friends to your presence at a particular location.
Click on Image to Enlarge
For Ushahidi, this is “a pretty powerful step forward,” says Ethan Zuckerman, a board member of the nonprofit, and a senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. “Adding check-in to this equation allows me to pull my data apart from the whole. That makes maps usable for multiple purposes—group reporting as well as tracking of my own movements.”
Enabling such tracking simply requires a GPS-equipped phone to allow a quick log-in to record whereabouts
For the U.S., democracy's fate in the region matters much less than the struggle between the Saudis and Iran
Robert D. Kaplan
Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2011
Despite the military drama unfolding in Libya, the Middle East is only beginning to unravel. American policy-makers have been spoiled by events in Tunisia and Egypt, both of which boast relatively sturdy institutions, civil society associations and middle classes, as well as being age-old clusters of civilization where states of one form or another have existed since antiquity. Darker terrain awaits us elsewhere in the region, where states will substantially weaken once the carapace of tyranny crumbles. The crucial tests lie ahead, beyond the distraction of Libya.
The United States may be a democracy, but it is also a status quo power, whose position in the world depends on the world staying as it is. In the Middle East, the status quo is unsustainable because populations are no longer afraid of their rulers. Every country is now in play.
Phi Beta Iota: Perhaps his meeting with Barack Obama served kool-aid, and he drank it. This article, which can certainly be considered to be an authoritative depiction of the prevailing views in Washington, is disappointing at multiple levels. The author lacks a strategic analytic model, an ethical model, and a process model, as well as an appreciation for how the tortilla has flipped. Epoch B was born in the 1970's coincident with Peak Empire when the US was thrown out of Viet-Nam by indigenous people's with stronger ethics, a stronger culture, and an unconquerable will. Today Epoch B is a young teen-ager, just beginning to flex its muscles. “Dad” can no longer win a physical contest with this young teen-ager, nor can “Dad” understand the nuances of the digital age the way this teen-ager–the first generation not to be a “mini-me” of “Dad”–does. Most of us never imagined that Wall Street and the two-party “front” for corporations would last as long as it did after the 1980's meltdown. We all under-estimated the placidity of the American public. Now the American public's perceptions are secondary. The five billion poor are on the march, and Washington has absolutely no clue what to do next.
I just completed a short field mission to Kyrgyzstan with UN colleagues and I’m already looking forward to the next mission. Flipping through several dozen pages of my handwritten notes just now explains why: example after example of the astute resourcefulness and creative uses of information and communication technologies in Kyrgyzstan is inspiring. I learned heaps.
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The degrees of separation needed to verify a rumor was close to one. In the case of the supposed border attack, one member of the chat group had a contact with the army unit guarding the border crossing in question. They called them on their cell phone and confirmed within minutes that no attack was taking place. As for the rumor about the poisoned humanitarian aid, another member of the chat found the original phone numbers from which these false SMS’s were being sent. They called a personal contact at one of the telecommunication companies and asked whether the owners of these phones were in fact texting from the place where the aid was reportedly poisoned; they weren’t. Meanwhile, another member of the chat group had himself investigated the rumor in person and confirmed that the text messages were false.
Troubling End Note: Asia Times Online on 24 March published an article by Syed Saleem Shahzad, who is an insightful commentator on South Asian affairs, as well as the publication's Pakistan Bureau Chief. He has studied al Qaida a long time. He wrote that US intelligence has actionable information that Osama bin Laden has been “criss-crossing” the Pakistan – Afghanistan border region in northwestern Pakistan during the past few weeks.
Shahzad wrote that US officials are “stunned” by bin Laden's visibility and the frequency of his movements. Bin Laden's purposes are not known. Terrorist analysts reportedly think the new level of activity means bin Laden is planning another large attack, though the 9/11 planning was actually not done by bin Laden. The South Asia analysts think he is meeting with friendly Afghan warlords to bring the Afghan War to a favorable conclusion for the Taliban.
What is disturbing is how little mainstream media attention this article has received. Readers are encouraged to read it.
