Category: Methods & Process

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Journal: Cheery Waves Flags ‘Terrorist Facebook’ – the new weapon against al-Qa’ida

09 Terrorism, Methods & Process
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Social networking is not just for the MySpace generation. Intelligence agencies are adopting a controversial new technique to identify terrorist masterminds

By Steve Connor, Science Editor

Wednesday, 19 August 2009

Intelligence agencies are building up a Facebook-style databank of international terrorists in order to sift through it with complex computer programs aimed at identifying key figures and predicting terrorist attacks before they happen.

By analysing the social networks that exist between known terrorists, suspects and even innocent bystanders arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, military intelligence chiefs hope to open a new front in their “war on terror”.

The idea is to amass huge quantities of intelligence data on people – no matter how obscure or irrelevant – and feed it into computers that are programmed to make associations and connections that would otherwise be missed by human agents, scientists said.

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Journal: MILNET Flags Sorting It Out: New Tools Wrestle Mountains of Data Into Usable Intelligence

Communities of Practice, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process, Technologies, Tools

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August 24, 2009

Pg. 11

By Kris Osborn

In 2008, U.S. military forces collected 400,000 hours of airborne surveillance video, up from several thousand hours 10 years ago. So the Pentagon is turning to computers to help save, sort and search it all.

“The proliferation of unmanned systems across the battlefield is not going to lessen in the future. We saw it happen in the first Gulf War. Once commanders have it, there is an insatiable appetite for FMV,” or full-motion video, said Maj. Gen. John Custer III, who commands the U.S. Army Intelligence Center, Fort Huachuca, Ariz.

“You not only need the tools to exploit that, you need storage because commanders don’t only want to see a building now but what it looked like yesterday, six weeks ago and six months ago,” Custer said. “When you have 18 systems up for 18 hours a day, you get into terabytes in a week. We are going to be in large data-storage warehousing for the rest of time.”
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Journal: Tom Atlee Needs Your Help

Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Methods & Process, Policy, Reform
Tom Atlee
Tom Atlee

Tom Atlee is the single most important person responsible for introducing Robert Steele to the emerging concepts of Public Intelligence and Collective Intelligence.  Apart from all the books (Smart Mobs, Here Comes Everybody, Groundswell, Army of Davids , Here Comes Everybody, etcetera), it is Tom Atlee who has been the catalyst for convergence across all the issue areas.  He is to People what Paul Ray is to polling.  Tom is the god-father of the American Public Renaissance, and if we do ultimately take back the power and restore sanity to the Republic and the federal government that is a SERVICE, nothing more, it will be because Tom Atlee was himself.  Please support him.  Below are a number of headlines from his latest effort to raise funds for the Co-Intelligence Institute.  Tom Atlee personifies the center of gravity for America the Good.  Please donate as little or as much as you are inspired to give to this national hero.

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Journal: Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon band together to oppose Google Books settlement

Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Methods & Process, Reform
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August 20, 2009

Allex Pham

Three powerful technology companies have banded together to oppose Google's proposed settlement with the Authors Guild and the Assn. of American Publishers over the Mountain View, Calif., search giant's book scanning project.

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Journal: DNA Evidence Can Be Fabricated, Scientists Show

Methods & Process, Technologies
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By ANDREW POLLACK

Published: August 17, 2009

Scientists in Israel have demonstrated that it is possible to fabricate DNA evidence, undermining the credibility of what has been considered the gold standard of proof in criminal cases.

. . . . . . .

Tania Simoncelli, science adviser to the American Civil Liberties Union, said the findings were worrisome.

“DNA is a lot easier to plant at a crime scene than fingerprints,” she said. “We’re creating a criminal justice system that is increasingly relying on this technology.”

. . . . . . .

From a pooled sample of many people’s DNA, the scientists cloned tiny DNA snippets representing the common variants at each spot, creating a library of such snippets. To prepare a DNA sample matching any profile, they just mixed the proper snippets together. They said that a library of 425 different DNA snippets would be enough to cover every conceivable profile.

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Journal: High-Fat Diet May Make You Stupid and Lazy

Communities of Practice, Methods & Process
Fat Handicaps
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LiveScience.com livescience Staff

livescience.com – Wed Aug 12, 3:03 pm ET

By now, we've all heard that high-fat diets are bad for our health in the long run. But what about the short-term?

A new study on rats finds that 10 days of eating a high-fat diet caused short-term memory loss and made exercise difficult. While the finding may not seem a big surprise, the researcher say it might suggest that high-fat diets make humans lazy and stupid.

. . . . . . .

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Journal: Human Intel Or Technical Intel?

Methods & Process, Military, Peace Intelligence

DoDBuzz,com
August 5, 2009

Human Intel Or Technical Intel?

By Greg Grant

Some of the leading doyens of the Washington national security set recently returned from Afghanistan where they were part of new Afghan commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s strategy review. CSIS’s Anthony Cordesman reported back last week with a generally pessimistic take on the state of affairs on that front.

One point Cordesman made in his briefing to Washington reporters really jumped out: the surprisingly poor intelligence we have on the enemy. How is it that eight years into this war we don’t have better intelligence on exactly who we’re fighting?

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