We were surprised this morning to learn that Ray McGovern, a CIA veteran whose credibility we respect, is saying that Leon Panetta and Barack Obama may be treating CIA with kid gloves for fear of being assassinated by the “insider” CIA that itself fears criminal prosecution for the death of over 100 detainees in CIA custody. Food for thought. Read McGovern's thoughts at The Media Consortium, “Ray McGovern Warns of ‘Two CIA's.'”
There are two sides to this matter. How many CIA's? Does CIA assassinate U.S. citizens including leaders?
Arno Reuser, one of a tiny handful of lifetime leaders of the new disciplines of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and its public service manifestation, Public Intelligence in the service of Collective Intelligence, contributed the below piece in 2008. It is a standard reference. Below is the summary followed by a link to the full-text article online. Summary: Searching for information in order to solve somebody's information problem requires a wide range of skills, methods, capabilities, and knowledge of sources. In other words, it requires strategy and tactics. Unfortunately, many customers think that a simple connection to the Internet and one general-purpose search engine is more than enough to do the trick. Luckily, the well-framed end user knows better, but librarians are often challenged by budget holders and higher management to explain why the Internet is not the ultimate solution for every conceivable information problem. To confront this challenge, the author presents six simple aspects of Internet bias: 1. The Internet is not international. 2. The Internet is not easy. 3. The Internet is not just Google. 4. The Internet is not large. 5. The Internet is not objective. 6. The Internet is not anonymous. Skilled librarians or information professionals can outperform the Internet in many occasions. In the information world, librarians rule. The problem is, they are too modest.
If there is any doubt at all that the terrorists have won – that they have managed with a single day's freakish hits to revamp the most open society on earth into an emerging police state where suspicion and secrecy are the twin watch-towers of government and cowering and conforming the prevailing instincts of an allegedly free press or an even more alleged political opposition – then last week's creation of the Department of Homeland Security should put all such doubts to rest.
. . . . . . .
Secrecy is national security's favored fraud. With rare exceptions, it harms the public interest more than it protects it. Keeping America's atom bomb secret may have been a good idea, but even that failed. Keeping the Pentagon Papers secret, the government's own most damning evidence that the Vietnam War was a known failure even in the early 1960s, needlessly prolonged a needless war at the cost of thousands of American lives (and perhaps a million Vietnamese). Designed around the same principle of prescribing what Americans should and should not know, the new department will incubate just such secrets, covering up what should be known at the risk of prolonging what shouldn't be happening. Substitute Main Street for rice paddies and what's ahead is less reassuring because of the department's existence.
Phi Beta Iota: We testified to the Moynihan Commission, and all of our life's work in the world of secrecy confirms the views of Rodney McDaniel, thenExecutive Secretary of the National Security Council: 90% (we say 80%) of secrecy is bureaucratic turf control (and avoidance of accountability), only 10% (we say 20%) is legitimate portection of sensitive information.
Perhaps your real life is so rich you don't have time for another.
Even so, the US Department of Defense (DOD) may already be creating a copy of you in an alternate reality to see how long you can go without food or water, or how you will respond to televised propaganda.
The DOD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual “nodes” to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and AR.
Called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), it will be a “synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information”, according to a concept paper for the project.
Full Story Online
A ‘Second Life’ for NATO Staffers
Katie Drummond
September 4, 2009
This isn’t the first time NATO has toyed with virtual training programs. In February, they requested a computerized replica of Afghanistan, complete with data on Afghan economics, politics and culture, to be used by war planners in decision-making considerations. And two years ago, the Navy asked for the same thing, but with Iraq as the targeted 3D nation.
Phi Beta Iota: EarthGame by Medard Gabel does all this and more, for no more than $2 million a year, with one caveat: it is unaffordable and unachievable if DoD and NATO insist on everything being Top Secret.
With a tip of the hat to Jean-Francouis Noubel, a pioneer of both Collective Intelligence and Open Money, we point today to the just-launched FLOWPLACE.
Free Currencies
Do not fail to listen to the short briefing. The money economy, based on secrecy, scarcity, and information asymmetries, is on the way out. The open economy, empowering the five billion poor with transparent open means of creating, recording, sharing, and exchanging value, is on the way in.
Professor Loch Johnson is one of two people who have served on both the Church Committee and the Aspin-Brown Commission. The other is Britt Snider, Esquire.
Today he examines the lack of integrity on the Hill, or totthless, inattentive oversight. He does not address two factors that we comment on below the fold:
1. There are five CIAs, and as long as the Wall Street and White House CIAs are doing what they are told to do, no one really cares about the integrity or the pathos of the other three.
2. Leon Panetta could have been the greatest Director in history, just as Barack Obama could have been the George Washington of this century, but both sacrificed their integrity for partisan gain, deliberately ignoring the urgent calls for both reform at CIA and non-partisan reality-based policy-making in the White House. Phi Beta Iota
By Loch K. Johnson
Sunday, August 30, 2009
skip sad story . . . . . . .
The Church Committee discovered that intelligence abuses ran far deeper than initially reported. The CIA had indeed spied on Vietnam War dissenters at home, but the FBI had gone further, disrupting the lives of antiwar protesters and civil rights activists. It was “a road map to the destruction of American democracy,” committee member Walter Mondale said during a public hearing.
Church was equally appalled by the overseas excesses of the CIA, including covert actions against democratic regimes — such as Chile's — and assassination plots. He blasted the agency for “the fantasy that it lay within our power to control other countries through the covert manipulation of their affairs.”
