Mini-Me: End of the Delusional UAV Era

05 Iran, 08 Wild Cards, Corruption, DoD, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), IO Deeds of War, Methods & Process, Military, Technologies
Who? Mini-Me?

The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) rose to prominence in an era of uncontested budget growth (including a borrowed trillion dollars a year) and uncontested airspace.  That era is now over.

There will still be a place for mico-UAVs, especially in direct support of small unit operations, but neither the US military nor the US secret intelligence world consider infantry solutions to be “expensive enough” to be worth doing well.

For those who lack the sophistication to hack control over a UAV and force its undamaged landing, Electromagnetic Pulse rays remain the generic counter-measure that will proliferate rapidly.

NIGHTWATCH:

Point and Shoot...

Pakistan: Any unmanned aerial vehicles, including US UAVs, entering Pakistani air space will be treated as hostile and shot down per a new defense policy, a senior Pakistani official said on 10 December.

Comment: Pakistani forces lack the capabilities to execute the directive as announced, but the loss of one or two drones would be enough to curtail the program because of the expense from multiple aircraft losses. The program is not sustainable in contested airspace. This declaration has been coming for a very long time.

Algeria-US-France: For the record. US and French unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) will not be allowed to fly over Algeria's southern airspace to counter weapons smuggling from Libya, according to El Khabar newspaper. Algeria will increase its reconnaissance of UAV air surveillance operations.

Comment: The Iranians will be quick to disseminate any insights they developed in downing a US reconnaissance drone. Algeria might not yet have Iran's insights but it is showing that it is open to Iranian help.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

See Also:

DefDog: Iran Hijacks US Drone Shows Film + RECAP

Dolphin: Their Drones, Our Drones, and EMP Rays

Robert Steele: Twitter Burns Google / Facebook

03 Economy, 04 Education, 11 Society, Commerce, InfoOps (IO), Strategy, Technologies
Robert David STEELE Vivas

This is fascinating at multiple levels.  Neither Google nor Facebook have been effective at helping humans “make sense,” now it appears that Twitter–perhaps combined with Hypothes.is–just might be a hair away from creating the skeleton of the World Brain.

Twitter Just Fired A Cannonball At Facebook And Google+

Matt Rosoff

Business Insider, 8 December 2011

Twitter is revamping the service with personal Twitter profile pages, a new timeline that includes rich media and other related informationembedded into tweets, and easier search for information based on @ symbols (usernames) and hash tags.

Talking at Twitter's unfinished new headquarters building in San Francisco, founder Jack Dorsey and CEO Dick Costolo explained that the changes are meant to make Twitter more accessible to everybody.

Their three goals:

  • Expose the “universe within every tweet.” Tweets aren't just 140 characters — there's also context like retweets and replies, and embedded content like videos, images, and songs. Today, accessing this material still feels like opening a “side drawer,” said Costolo.
  • Make Twitter less obscure to use. Today, the @ and # symbols are too obscure — people don't know what they mean. This contributes to a lot of people visiting Twitter but not really participating actively. The redesign surfaces these symbols and makes them the gateway to find out more infrmation about people and topics on the surface.
  • Share it with everybody. The world has 7 billion people. Most of those people are “not yet on Twitter,” said Costolo. The redesign will roll out to mobile devices simultaneously, and is streamlined to load up to 500% faster.

The trick is doing this without adding too much complexity. As Dorsey put it, “simplification is the key here.”

 

DefDog: Iran Hijacks US Drone Shows Film + RECAP

05 Iran, Corruption, DoD, InfoOps (IO), IO Impotency, Military, Officers Call, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Technologies
DefDog

An outstanding piece of bargaining power for Iran with both Russia and China….don't expect UN sanctions anytime soon…..

Updated 11 Dec 2011 to add more stories with photos and comment.

Iran won't return U.S. drone it claims to have

Iran Shows Video It Says Is of U.S. Drone

Zakaria and Baer: Downed U.S. drone an intel catastrophe

Phi Beta Iota:  Variants of this stuff are for sale at Brookstone and Best Buy. The US has consistently refused to be serious about emission control, downlink security, and real-time processing.  This is a “disaster” only to the degree that it reveals–once again–how immature the US “intelligence” archipelago of fiefdoms actually is.

Iran shows film of captured US drone

BBC, 8 December 2011

Iranian TV has shown the first video footage of an advanced US drone aircraft that Tehran says it downed near the Afghan border.

Images show Iranian military officials inspecting the RQ-170 Sentinel stealth aircraft which appears to be undamaged.

US officials have acknowledged the loss of the unmanned plane, saying it had malfunctioned.

However, Iranian officials say its forces electronically hijacked the drone and steered it to the ground.

Click on Image to Enlarge

BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner says the intact condition of the Sentinel tends to support their claim.

Iran's Press TV said that the Iranian army's “electronic warfare unit” brought down the drone on 4 December as it was flying over the city of Kashmar, about 140 miles (225km) from the Afghan border.

Nato said at the weekend that an unarmed reconnaissance aircraft had been flying a mission over western Afghanistan late last week when its operators lost control of it.

Pentagon officials have said they are concerned about Iran possibly acquiring information about the technology.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: Our first impression has been that Iran has downed the UAV with an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) beam.  This is much cooler.  As with the Taliban in Afghanistan able to hijack the downlinks, the Iranians simply hijacked the entire aircraft.  From where we sit, the Chinese (who ride electric power circuits into “isolated” computers) and the Iranians [Persians, more PhDs per capita than most] are laughing at us, while the Russians simply ignore us.  Newsflash for the Pentagon: our technology is not that great.  Classifying the idiot vulnerabilities does not work–something we have been pointing out for twenty years.

Bob Seelert, Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide (New York): When things are not going well, until you get the truth out on the table, no matter how ugly, you are not in a position to deal with it.

See Also:

Dolphin: Their Drones, Our Drones, and EMP Rays

Journal: Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones

Journal: Gorgon Stare (All Eyes, No Brain)

Journal: Running Interference On Interference

Journal: U.S. Air Force–Remote from War & Reality

Theophilis Goodyear: Equal Voice! Break the Corporate Mega-Media Dictatorship by Reintroducing the Wagner-Hatfield Amendment

07 Other Atrocities, Civil Society, Commerce, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, InfoOps (IO)
Theophilis Goodyear

Equal Voice! Break the Corporate Mega-Media Dictatorship by Reintroducing the Wagner-Hatfield Amendment

The Wagner-Hatfield Amendment was a proposed amendment to the Communications Act of 1934, sponsored by senators Robert F. Wagner, Democrat, of New York and Henry D. Hatfield, Republican, of West Virginia. The amendment would have reserved 25% of all radio stations for non-profit radio broadcasters, including universities. The amendment was enthusiastically supported by educators. Of course it was vigorously attacked by the for-profit radio lobby.

The amendment almost passed but was defeated. If the amendment were reintroduced and passed, it would effectively break the corporate mega-media monopoly. Universities would be more likely than corporations to give alternate voices a chance to be heard.

Using the internet to challenge the corporate mega-media view of things is an admirable use of the internet. But why should we accept that inherent disadvantage? Reintroduce the Wagner-Hatfield amendment and pass it, and the disadvantage will disappear overnight. There were no TV stations when the amendment was proposed. But today it would have to include them to be fair. If universities had their own TV stations they could reach far more people than the average blog. And if they had of had equal access to media since 1934, American history might be quite different.

“Equal Voice” should become an issue of emergent democracy. The average voter doesn't have an equal voice even with their elected representatives, because campaign contributions talk louder. And media outlets have an even louder voice than politicians, who are limited to C-SPAN and periodic coverage by mainstream media of things like press conferences and State of the Union addresses. The public voice is effectively stifled by the arrangement.

No. Equal voice needs to mean equal access to media! That's the only way voters will ever be able to effectively challenge a system that is stacked against them. All we need is a little volume so that our voices can be heard as loudly as the collective voice of mega-media corporations. The Wagner-Hatfield amendment might be just the crowbar we need to pry an opening in the iron wall of corporate mega-media control and give disenfranchised American voters the voice they have long been denied.

Owl: Visual Analytics – corruption, fraud, waste and abuse

Advanced Cyber/IO, Corruption, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process
Who? Who?

Screen-friendly report: Visual analytics; Revealing corruption, fraud, waste and abuse PDF logo to download Anti-Corruption report

For entities around the globe, identifying potential fraud and corruption activities in large volumes of data has historically been difficult and quite costly. More often than not, the rich insights within that data may be difficult to identify by traditional means and remain hidden.

Against this backdrop, practitioners are turning to visual analytic tools and techniques. Graphically representing and exploring data can bring clarity to executives’ concerns and to performance improvement opportunities.

Visual analytics tools and techniques, including social networking diagrams, link analysis, geospatial analysis and tree maps, can help to focus investigations on particular activities and connect disparate pieces of information to form a cohesive story. Entities should consider equipping their personnel to employ these techniques to meet the growing challenge of reducing corruption, fraud, waste and abuse in the enterprise.

Download the PDF below to learn more. Two versions are provided to accommodate your viewing preferences: a standard version for printing and a screen version for reading on your computer or mobile device.

Phi Beta Iota:  This is not new–they are roughly fifteen years behind Dr. Bert Little, who pioneered this work for the Department of Agriculture, virtually eradicating crop insurance fraud ($4 million invested stopped $80 million a year in fraud).  Dr. Little received a Golden Candle Award at OSS '94 and continues to do extraordinary detection of corruption with clever computing across the Texas A&M University System.

Behavioural Conflict: Why Understanding People and Their Motives Will Prove Decisive in Future Conflict by Andrew Mackay and Steve Tatham ; foreword by Stanley McChrystal.

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 06 Genocide, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Terrorism, 10 Transnational Crime, Cultural Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), Information Operations (IO), Peace Intelligence, Public Intelligence, Uncategorized, Worth A Look

        The Small Wars Journal Blog has a post previewing a new book by Andrew Mackay and Steve Tatham. Behavioural Conflict: Why Understanding People and Their Motives Will Prove Decisive in Future Conflict considers how the West's Post Cold War conflicts have been fought amongst people rather than between armies. From publisher's description:

“These people, amongst others, have been Mendes, Kissis and Konos (and the 13 other tribes of Sierra Leone), they have been Serbo-Croats, Bosnians, Kosovars, Albanians, Unizzahs, al-Ribads, al-Zobaids, Kurds, al-Montifig (and the other tribal groups of the nearly 40 that make up Iraq), Pashtuns, Hazaras, Uzbecks (and the other 6 ethnic groupings that make up Afghanistan's rich tapestry of population), they have been Sunni, Shia, Orthodox, Agnostic, Christian, Catholic; they have been farmers, politicians, police, administrators, businessmen, narco khans, war lords, men, women and children. In fact you can divide them in any one of a hundred or so different ways but the only certainty is that all of these groups and people will exhibit behaviour, that may appear utterly irrational but for better or worse will have profound effects upon the manner in which military missions are conducted.” 

The book is based on a paper written in 2009 for the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom. The tale of the lone Afghan farmer sowing seeds in a field near the Kajaki Dam should be a warning to those from the developed world who underestimate the intelligence of people just because they don't speak English or have grown up without electricity and running water.

This book will have utility for anyone working in military, peacekeeping, policing or any other other cross cultural situation.

Tom Atlee: #Occupy Weekly Sparks = We Can Do It All

Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Augmented Reality, Blog Wisdom, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Hacking, InfoOps (IO), IO Deeds of Peace, Methods & Process, Policies, Policy, Reform, Strategy, Threats
Tom Atlee

Random Communications from an Evolutionary Edge

 

#Occupy Weekly Sparks = We Can Do It All

Much has been said about the Occupy movement's lack of demands and vision. Some say it will have no impact unless it makes demands and organizes to make sure those demands are met.

Others respond that the People should just take charge of their democracy rather than petitioning official powers-that-be to do this and that. Still others say that any list of demands – any effort to focus OWS more narrowly and explicitly – could weaken the movement because Occupy Together is a broadly inclusive initiative that's about (a) changing whole systems and/or (b) creating microcosms of a better society in the occupation zones and/or (c) stimulating transformational conversations out in society at large and/or (d) passionately building and forcefully demonstrating the Power of the People to resist illegitimate, corrupt authority.

Others note that the disturbing lack of demands spreads OWS' surprising impact through a “blank slate effect” – OWS becomes a mystery or a mirror into which diverse individuals and groups project their various desires, hopes, frustrations, and agendas. Furthermore, that mystery helps by enhancing the movement's uncommon anarchic power that makes it so hard for authorities and others to figure out how to control, undermine or use it. Others insist that a shared vision – articulating what the 99% actually want – would be much more powerful than focusing on a laundry list of demands that many 99%ers might well disagree with. Simultaneously, many Occupiers are chronically frustrated with all this talk and want Action!! Their more thoughtful colleagues reply that pulling so many diverse people together in consensus requires taking the time to hear each other and generate collective wisdom.

Read balance of very deep and provocative commentary.