Massive and astonishingly rapid Convergence is emergent in the USA, and the Tea Party–now morphing from numoerous dispart local organizations in to a national network of networks–is the center of the Perfect Storm.
To left is orginal art by Damien M. Jones, available for sale in print. Do check out his entire collection.
Here is a short list of the convergence elements we are seeing in motion:
Robert, I had lunch with an old friend, Herb REDACTED, a retired intelligence officer and military judge (Air Force). The subject of OSS and your role in the IC came about, and my friend sent me a very interesting, brief, story about the open source back channel in the Cuban Missile Crisis I want to share with you. You may well be aware of this, given your knowledge of history, but I wanted you to have this in case it, or my friend Herb, has potential utility to your initiatives. Perhaps the current environment, in DC, will result in a change in policy and effectiveness in the IC. In his note to me, he is commenting about the paper I presented at OSS '94, as a result of your gracious invite. I still tell people about the role you have played in bringing the intelligence community into the limelight, open source into greater adaptation. – REDACTED
Great to visit with you in Tampa-
Your OSS presentation is not simply impressive, it recognizes and highlights a very real and valuable component of intelligence currently as well as in those long distance days when I was immersed in the discipline. It was an open intelligence source that was the first indication that the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 was resolved.
It's a rather long story but to offer a brief synopsis: A Reuters News Service correspondent posted to The Kremlin was close to Khrushchev (Big K), close enough to be the only correspondent to gain a private audience during the crisis. On Oct. 27th (I think it was) Big K. told the Reuters' fellow that: “I will do anything to prevent the world's destruction over Cuba.” The reporter then asked incredulously: “Mr. President, do you really mean ‘anything?” The reply was: “Yes, I will not be the cause of the death of millions of Soviet citizens and radiating the world.”
In the USAFE Command Room in Wiesbaden, we intelligence wennies had every news service and major newspaper teletype machine known to mankind for open source material. Apparently the reported took a fast cab ride back to his office and put the conversation on the wire. We had a method of verification, used it and confirmed the fact that he had placed the story on the wire. Presuming it accuracy, we passed it on the Situation Room at the White House. In mere moments we (in the intel. Secure office) received a secure red phone (secure with those punched IBM cards) call from the WH (MacGeorge Bundy on the other end) asking me (since I picked up the phone) was the wire story accurate. I answered yes and handed the phone to Brig. General Julius Gibbons ( CoS for Intel. USAFE) and he spoke to RFK.
Within minutes the deal between JFK and Big K made in Washington was announced. But they knew the deal was to get closed by the USAFE report a few minutes earlier. And don't overlook the excellent ploy hatched by RFK to ignore Big K's second letter that he was forced to write by his military goons.
The play-by-play version is suitable for a beer or two, it's a little longer.
Thus, your open source presentation was well appreciated as an old intel wennie.
CHICAGO (AP) – A would-be terrorist tries to board a plane, bent on mass murder. As he walks through a security checkpoint, fidgeting and glancing around, a network of high-tech machines analyzes his body language and reads his mind.
Screeners pull him aside.
Tragedy is averted.
As far-fetched as that sounds, systems that aim to get inside an evildoer's head are among the proposals floated by security experts thinking beyond the X-ray machines and metal detectors used on millions of passengers and bags each year.
Why intelligence-sharing can't always make us safer
By Jennifer Sims and Bob Gallucci
Friday, January 8, 2010; A19
Phi Beta Iota: This Op-Ed is stunningly irrelevant to the problem at hand: a secret intelligence community that over-emphasizes cash inputs and secret remote collection, and simultaneously fails to exploit machine-speed all-source geospatially and time tagged processing, multi-lingual open sources, or analysts that actually know anything in the way of historical, cultural, and linguistic context. Intelligence-sharing–as the CIA Mid-Career Course teaches so very well–is a cultural trait that ultimately can only be achieved by humans who know each other, walk around, and frequently engage in informal non-bureaucratic non-mechanical interaction. We're not there. The alternative below is what was done when Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski (two sides of the same coin) tried to be their own intelligence analyst, with the futher unprofessional crime of not sharing what they gathered with their intelligence support team. As Ellsberg lectured Kissinger, this ultimately made him “like a moron,” a phrase that will be instantly pushed back by those who have “bought in” to the Potemkin Village (or what Chuck Spinney calls “Versailles on the Potomac”) but instantly embraced by those who live in the real world and understand Whole Systems.
Three representative sentences from their Op-Ed:
To win against a networked adversary, the intelligence community must share critical information with decision makers but not always with every element of its own community first. . . . . . . .
Yet if this instance suggests that single, timely tips can be enough, psychological research suggests that intelligence-sharing can be downright bad. . . . . . . .
To win in network warfare, then, decision makers must think of themselves as collectors and analysts, too.
Heads set to roll as Obama goes on attack over security failures that allowed Christmas Day bomber on to plane
A senior aide said Obama would seek accountability at the highest levels for the failure, a remark some observers took to mean that heads would roll.
The terrorist plot to bring down Northwest Airlines Flight 253 exposed a near-catastrophic failure at every level of our government,' the Republican leader in the House of Representatives, John Boehner, said in a statement.
Phi Beta Iota: This would be a good time for President Barack Obama, President in name only, to either be the President and introduce the Electoral Reform Act of 2010, or to resign in ackinowledgement of the fact that he simiply is not up to the job because we live in a two-party tyranny that makes decisions on the basis of nakedly amoral partisan interests, not the public interest. If he also introduced the Smart Nation – Safe Nation Act, with a nod of respect to Congressman Rob Simmons, then (R-CT-02) and today the challenger to Wall Street fixer Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT), he would instantly restore the integrity of the Constitution, the Republic, and the US Government.
We do not lack for knowledge of what to do. HUNDREDS of authorities are on record with good ideas that have not been implemented (e.g. the Aspin-Brown Commission). We lack for INTEGRITY in acknowledging reality and getting a grip on all that we need to do that is markedly different from the past.
We predict that President Obama will do something really stupid, such as fire Blair (who is non-partisan) and promote partisan Panetta to his maximum level of incompetence, while ignoring the reality, as we pointed out in ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World (AFCEA, 2000), that firing the engineer does not change the train built to run on a single track between Moscow and DC into what we really need–10,000 open source bicyles, 1,000 open source motorcycles, and 100 assorted small-size secret cars, most of them with multinational passengers. What is new is that Homeland Security was built on the old train model, and is just as useless. The USA today is on the cusp of a historic era where we can stick with the simple-minded Weberian stove-pipes of the past, Epoch A command & control “central planning,” or we can ride the wave and embrace bottom-up Epoch B collective intelligence and distributed resilience. From where we sit, no one in Congress or the White House reads or thinks–they are all on auto-pilot, and their definition of progress is to take that next step over the cliff.
The truth at any cost reduces all other costs. We're not there.
The full title is “The Civil Military Operations Center (CMOC) in Operation Uphold Democracy (Haiti). Although dated March 1997, this is a very fine contribution that maintains its relevance, not least because of its descriptions of both the functions and the effect of the functions in dealing with NGOs (like herding turkeys).
