By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER, The New York Times (Syndicated)
Full Story Online
WASHINGTON — The nation's main counterterrorism center, created in response to the intelligence failures in the years before Sept. 11, is struggling because of flawed staffing and internal cultural clashes, according to a new study financed by Congress.
The result, the study concludes, is a lack of coordination and communication among the agencies that are supposed to take the lead in planning the fight against terrorism, including the C.I.A. and the State Department.
Site Hopes Automatic Arabic-English Translation Translates into Peace
A new site hopes the seemingly simple idea of eliminating the language barrier, letting you write in English and be read in Arabic — and vice versa — will cultivate citizen diplomacy between the Middle East and the West. It aims to reduce tensions at the grassroots level between two cultures that increasingly co-exist but seem a world apart.
Meedan, which officially launches Monday, lets users post stories and comments in English and have them automatically translated into Arabic, or the opposite. People who don’t share a common language can have an online discussion in near real time. The name, appropriately, means “gathering place” or “town hall” in Arabic.
Think of it as a social network filled with people you don’t know, but want to understand.
Phi Beta Iota: This is righteous, but as Howard Bloom addresses in Global Brain, it will taqke 50 years and it will not achieve the intended result until the children who START with this are adults in power. In the meantime, the adults in power who are both digitally and ideologically impaired, will continue to favor war to profit the few over peace to provide prosperity to the many.
Twitter Teams with Haiti Telco To Provide Free Text Tweets
WIRED 22 February 2010
Text messages have already raised $32 million for Haiti relief. Now Twitter is partnering with the devastated nation’s dominant telco to provide free text Tweets to Haitians so they can better keep in touch with each other and the outside world.
“Kevin Thau and our mobile team have recently arranged free SMS tweets for Digicel Haiti customers,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone writes on the company’s blog. “To activate the service, mobile phone users in Haiti can text follow @oxfam to 40404. Accounts are created on the fly and any account can be followed this way.”
The move is much more than a gesture, as it might seem in place where limitless text plans abound and the standard of living is much higher. Under Digicel’s pre-paid plan Haitians pay $0.08 to text locally, $0.15 to text internationally and $0.23 to send an MMS. But considering that the country’s per capita income is about $1,300, that would be the equivalent of $2.46, $4.62 and a whopping $7.07 in the U.S. (which had a 2008 per capita income of about $40,000).
As has become almost routine now, the initial flood of information and pictures to emerge from the disaster zone reached the world via Twitter, and the use of texting is an especially crucial lifeline in the underdeveloped world.
Phi Beta Iota: BRAVO TWITTER! Who would have thought Haiti would be the silver lining for the poor. At one stroke Twitter hass connected scharitable giving from the 80% that do not normally give, with the bottom-up needs of the poor articulated via Twitter for free. Now if Twitter can team with others such as Nokia, Microsoft, and IMB to offer free cell phones to the five billion poor, with back office harvesting of the data and a global grid of volunteer translator educators in 183 languages, we save the world quick time.
KABUL — On their first day of class in Afghanistan, the new U.S. intelligence analysts were given a homework assignment.
First read a six-page classified military intelligence report about the situation in Spin Boldak, a key border town and smuggling route in southern Afghanistan. Then read a 7,500-word article in Harper's magazine, also about Spin Boldak and the exploits of its powerful Afghan border police commander.
The conclusion they were expected to draw: The important information would be found in the magazine story. The scores of spies and analysts producing reams of secret documents were not cutting it.
“They need help,” Capt. Matt Pottinger, a military intelligence officer, told the class. “And that's what you're going to be doing.”
The class that began Friday in plywood hut B-8 on a military base in Kabul marked a first step in what U.S. commanders envision as a major transformation in how intelligence is gathered and used in the war against the Taliban.
Last month, Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the top U.S. military intelligence officer in Afghanistan, published a scathing critique of the quality of information at his disposal. Instead of understanding the nuances of local politics, economics, religion and culture that drive the insurgency, he said, the multibillion-dollar industry devoted nearly all its effort to digging up dirt on insurgent groups.
“Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy,” he wrote in a paper co-authored by Pottinger and another official and published by the Center for a New American Security.
Phi Beta Iota: DoD mind-set time lags are quite consistent with those of other bureaucracies. They are just 21 years late. See the two original publications below:
and so on…..sadly, DoD is still in lip service mode and is about to implode DIOSPO. In Ripley's “Believe It Or Not” column, the joint briefing created by Joe Markowitz and Robert Steele, with help from loyal frustrated DoD personnel who do want to get it right, has not been read and is not being acted on. If anyone is interested, see both briefings here:
Starting in the fall of 2008, the Center for Investigative Reporting and The Center for Public Integrity fielded a team of reporters to examine how effectively governments at all levels had managed money and programs dedicated to homeland security. The result was a series of stories — and an interactive map — that have been combined into a single collaborative website
Phi Beta Iota: What we really admire is the team's organization: Editoral Team, Reporting Team, Fact Checking, Data Analysis, Web/Multimedia, Web Design, Media, and Funding.
As a way of dealing with cross-town crime and drug use, Scituate police have banded together with other local departments to pursue cases beyond individual town borders.
Marshfield Police Capt. Phil Tavares founded the coalition, formally known as the Old Colony Police Anti-Crime Task Force, or OcPac.
“The most logical approach to combating fiscal hardships and a surge in crime is to make available and consolidate our tangible and intangible resources, as well as real-time intelligence sharing,” said Tavares.
