Invite your attention to attached — contains a couple of interesting observations about Open Source Intelligence (OSINT):
“…open source intelligence — catapulting it to primary place for new adversaries and increasingly for the U.S. military — and also rapid organizational learning and assembly of capabilities…” [page 9]
“…There are strong indications that Hezbollah made significant use of OSINT — gathering valuable intelligence from Israeli press and news broadcasts as well as websites. Reports suggest that Hezbollah used Israeli press reports to plot the location of its rocket strikes in Israel and may have used Google Earth to help re-calibrate the accuracy of its fire….” [page 56]
Unlike Facebook, whose builders strive to make it an ever more organized social network, Twitter seems to thrive on being a jumble. It is an egalitarian sort of mess: Twitter does not sort its users into categories, does not tag some as celebrities, does not map out who does lunch with whom in the real world. You and Shaquille O’Neal are Twitter equals, only he has an extra 2.8 million followers.
There is also a Web site, Listorious listorious.com where volunteers publish personally chosen lists of posters to follow based on specific themes. But it is hit or miss. The Best of Photography list is a sharp collection of 29 eye-catching feeds, but Tech News People is a pile of 499 journalists for you to sort through.
So, how do you figure out who to follow? Start with a sweeping generalization: Twitter users can be grouped into different categories. For each, there is an automated site somewhere that lets you follow the genre without having to find and follow dozens, or even hundreds, of individual Twitter streams.
Phi Beta Iota: This article provides an extraordinary bridge to the future, when Twitter could become the real-time feed for inputs easily sorted in an infinite number of “back offices” that remix the information by threat, policy, player, and zip code. The difference between Google and Twitter is that Twitter empowers the end-user, Google ravages the end user (intellectually and metaphorically speaking).
Shortly after we posted the original Project 4636 info graphic, a few folks involved in the project got in touch to see if we could clarify the process. There are a lot of moving parts, many of which are constantly changing, and so the original graphic didn’t quite reflect the exact process as well as it could have. With that in mind, we worked with Josh Nesbit of Frontline SMS Medic and Nicolás di Tada of InSTEDD to make sure the graphic reflected the process as accurately as possible. The biggest update that we made is that InSTEDD’s Nuntium SMS Gateway and the Thomson Reuters Foundation Emergency Information System are now the first entities that receive and process incoming SMS’s. Everything else is pretty much the same.
Phi Beta Iota: Google is now seriously evil. If you thought the blue screen of death was bad under Microsoft, just wait for the multi-colored cloud of death from Google, with toll gates everywhere, and of course you only see search results that someone else has paid to put in front of you. Microsoft is blowing a once in a lifetime opportunity to cut Google off at the knees by going directly to infrastructure-independent OS3: open source software, open source intelligence, and open spectrum, all in generative devices that embrace open source hardware and all the other opens.
At every level, across every domain, a battle for the soul of America is raging. We addressed the “Paradigms of Failure” in 2008; more recently Peggy Noonan has spoken and written about the collapse of all of our institutions, and Thom Hartmann has written aboutThe Crisis of Western Culture at the same time that others write of the Broken Branch, the Cheating Culture, Running on Empty, and so on. The Tea Party Partiots movement is catching on in a manner that the Committee for a Unified Independent Party (CUIP) has not caught on. The reason is simple: the first is a bottom-up deeply felt populist movement, while the latter is a top-down umbrella organization loath to break completely with the two-party monopoly.
Below is a story on how Ron Paul, arguably the longest running voice for Constitutionalism within the Republican Party, and Sarah Palin, the very likeable “First Mom” so badly handled by the Bushies striving to undermine John McCain's candidacy, are fighting for the soul of the Tea Party.
The answer is the same answer that gets A's in Comparative Economics–this cannot be about one or the other, it must be about “all of the above” coming together. There is one thing, and one thing only, that all of the independent candidates can and must agree on: Electoral Reform in time for 2010 (four reforms including instant run-off) and 2012 (another four including tightly drawn districts and an end to winner take all control of Congress).
Ron Paul, Sarah Palin, Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney, even the Average American whose integrity and non-partisanship is wildly superior to what both the Bush-Cheney and Obama-Biden Administrations have demonstrated–must come together on this one fundamental, or they will be defeated in detail.
There's trouble brewing between the Ron Paul libertarians who staged the the first modern tea party in 2007 by dumping tea into Boston Harbor, and the neocon war hawks led by Sarah Palin who are furiously trying to hijack their message.
After I appeared on MSNBC talking about Sarah Palin's appearance at the Nashville tea party convention, several libertarians told me they were unhappy with the exchange.
I said that Sarah Palin's hawkish message on Iran was oddly out of place in a group whose roots belong to the Ron Paul libertarians, particularly as the anti-interventionist
New Details Emerge in Salomi Hostage Case: High Drama in HTS
by John Stanton
Observers indicate that two individuals in HTS leadership positions on the ground in Iraq—Lieutenant Colonel Byrd (Program Management Office – FWD) and Michael Goains, GG-15 (Theater Coordination Element) had direct knowledge of Issa Salomi's prior forays outside Camp Liberty/Victory Base Complex in Iraq unaccompanied by his teammates (team designation IZ-02,) or US military personnel. Salomi was apparently taken by an Iraqi insurgent group in January 2010 and a video of him recently appeared in global media outlets in February 2010.
Observers have also pointed out that Salomi is not, in fact, a contractor but is instead a temporary US Army Civilian employee. In 2009, HTS reverted to a government program and contractors were forced to choose between leaving or converting to US government civilian status.
“There is so much drama within the HTS program right now that it is unbelievable. Many, many people are being fired, rearranged and moved around due to management incompetence and personality problems,” said observers. “The amount of money being squandered is ridiculous.”
Description: A hot linked and annotated list of social search systems.
Feature text below:
One of the first steps in Strategic Social Networking is to know where to look for information from social systems. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo include content from high-profile social content sources like Facebook. Here at SSN, we need to look for fresh social information from different angles, from different services.
Phi Beta Iota: Stephen E. Arnold has been the “virtual CTO” for the modern Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) community and is generally ten years ahead of the private sector and twenty years ahead of any government.
