Journal: From WikiLeaks to OpenLeaks–and Local News

07 Other Atrocities, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Corporations, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, InfoOps (IO), Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Media, Open Government, Real Time, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Tools

Micah L. Sifry | December 17, 2010 – 4:01pm

Back in 2009, Daniel Domscheit-Berg applied to the Knight News Challenge in the name of Wikileaks for $532,000 to fund a project to “improve the reach, use and impact of a platform that allows whistle-blowers and journalists to anonymously post source material.” At the time Domscheit-Berg was known to the world by the pseudonym “Daniel Schmitt” and made frequent appearances on behalf of Wikileaks alongside its editor-in-chief Julian Assange (including at the October 2009 Personal Democracy Forum Europe conference in Barcelona). Now, as is widely known, he and Assange have parted ways and Domscheit-Berg is part of a group organizing the launch of OpenLeaks.org, which is being described as more of a technological service provider to media organizations than as a central hub for leaks, and which is promising to roll out a detailed description of its organization and plans in January 2011.

It's illuminating to compare the 2009 Wikileaks News Challenge proposal–which made it to the final round of the prestigious program but was ultimately rejected by the Knight News Challenge judges–to Domscheit-Berg & Co's current plans for OpenLeaks. Obviously, until OpenLeaks starts functioning, we are comparing two different versions of “vaporware,” but in the same way that Wikileaks itself has evolved over the last year, I think you can see a parallel evolution how Domscheit-Berg and the others in his group are thinking about how best to expand the open information model as well.

Read fascinating article and entirety of the original WikiLeaks proposal….

Journal: Wind Power Boondoggle–and the Information Operations (IO) Challenge of Energy and Time in Relation to Policy, Acquisition, and Operations

Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Budgets & Funding, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, History, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), IO Multinational, IO Sense-Making, Key Players, Methods & Process, Officers Call, Open Government, Peace Intelligence, Policies, Strategy, Threats
Chuck Spinney Recommends...

My good friend Robert Bryce, author of the must-read Power Hungry: The Myths of ‘Green' Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future just launched this little torpedo.

A Wind Power Boonedoggle

T. Boone Pickens badly misjudged the supply and price of natural gas.

By ROBERT BRYCE, Wall Street Journal, 22 December 2010

After 30 months, countless TV appearances, and $80 million spent on an extravagant PR campaign, T.

Boone Pickens has finally admitted the obvious: The wind energy business isn't a very good one.

Read full article….

Click to Enlarge

Phi Beta Iota: Buckminster Fuller and Russell Ackoff nailed it–everything has to be evaluated in relation to energy source and cost and time cost, and you have to focus on doing the right things, not doing the wrong things righter.  Where Mr. Pickens went wrong was in sticking with the centralized ownership concept.  Wind power and solar power are best for localized applications.  The central grid–the Industrial Era top down control grid, is DEAD.  Similarly, water and sewage should not be centralized grids demanding massive investments in collection and processing.  The graphic to the right shows corruption in the center–when analytics and decision-making lose their holistic integrity, they inevitably fail to achieve the desired outcome while creating cascading costs everywhere else.  Military spending in the USA is at the beginning of a nose dive–our military leaders would be wise to get a grip sooner than later, and “beat the dive” by making evidence-based decisions (Advanced IO) sooner than later.  Now a really advanced thought: 21st Century national security is about eradicating corruption at home and abroad–this makes possible the creation of a prosperous world at peace.  The breadth of that challenge is in the graphic below.  That is an IO challenge, not a kinetic challenge.  IO must be co-equal to kinetics beginning immediately.  In our humble opinion.

Click to Enlarge

See Also:

Journal: ‘Systemic Corruption’–Daunting Challenge in Globalized Era

Reference: Frog 6 Guidance 2010-2020

Reference: Transparency Killer App Plus “Open Everything” RECAP (Back to 01/2007)

Reference: Cultures of Resistance–A Look at Global Militarization

Reference: Truth & Nuance as an Information Operations (IO) Mission

Analysis, Articles & Chapters, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Ethics, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), IO Sense-Making, Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Methods & Process, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Officers Call, Open Government, Policies, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Real Time, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Strategy, Threats
Kelley Vlahos

Aldous Huxley Would Be Proud

by Kelley B. Vlahos, December 14, 2010

EXTRACT:  British novelist Aldous Huxley was a social critic and futurist, who is best known for penning Brave New World, which, aside from being a nearly 80-year-old science fiction masterpiece, is both an allegory and prophecy for 21st Century western society.

Huxley’s finger was on the pulse of human freedom, and he warned us over 50 years ago that it was fading fast. In 1958, he predicted that when concentrated in the hands of the “Power Elite,” rapidly evolving “mass communication” like television would be a critical tool of social and political conformity. Technology is only the medium, and it is “neither good nor bad,” Huxley wrote, but when in the wrong hands it can be “among the most powerful weapons in the dictator’s armory.” Propaganda, the suppression of the truth, particularly in democratic societies, Huxley argued, would bring upon an age of human enslavement, where instead of yokes and chains, people in celebrated “free” societies like America would be bound by the soft restraints of ignorance, incuriousness, distraction and irrationality.

. . . . . . .

EXTRACT:  In his 1958 interview with Mike Wallace, Huxley explained his concept of velvet totalitarianism:

“’If you want to preserve your power indefinitely, you must get the consent of the ruled,’ he said. Those in power will do this primarily through ‘techniques of propaganda,’ by ‘bypassing the rational side of man and appealing to his subconscious and deeper emotions’ and ‘making him love his slavery.’”

I would submit that Mr. David Brooks loves his slavery, and furthermore, is the perfect “alpha caste” prototype from Brave New World – he uses the good brains God (Ford) gave him to reflexively sustain the status quo, barking and nipping like a loyal lapdog when something or someone threatens it. The same goes for the rest of the so-called journalistic elite who have taken to the Net and on the television to discredit Assange in recent days, either through bald ad hominem or discrediting his work as “not journalism,” or “criminal.” Proto-elite scrambling among the herd of pundits across the mediascape are the worst, feeling they have to be more red-faced and extravagant in their commentary in order to stand out.

. . . . . . .

EXTRACT:  They aren’t even necessarily things we shouldn’t be reading or have some level of access to. Officials and journalists of every ilk spent the better part of this decade bemoaning the “over classification” of government information before, and especially after, 9/11. When pouring over the reams of information for the 9/11 Commission, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, who was chairing the commission said, “Three-quarters of what I read that was classified shouldn’t have been.”

Read this entire brilliant piece being categorized as a Historic Contribution.

Phi Beta Iota: Since starting this fight in 1988, the single most valuable body of knowledge we have acquired over those 22 years has been our little black book of great minds that speak the truth across all functional domains.  Kelley Vlahos is married to Michael Vlahos, and they are two of the most nuanced thinkers we know.  The era of secrecy and top-down micro-management for the benefit of the few is over.  It will not be replaced by communism or anarchy, it will be replaced by moral communitarian capitalism and panarchy.  It will focus–as we should have been focused since the end of World War II–on the needs and gifts of the five billion poor who can create infinite wealth, especially when we achieve infinite free energy by turning away from the corruption associated with the scarcity of fossil fuels, and instead tap into the free cosmic energy that Buckminster Fuller addressed so ably.  INTEGRITY IS BACK IN VOGUE.  That's a good thing.

Journal: NSA Assumes It Has Been Compromised…Correct!

Computer/online security, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Methods & Process, Open Government, Reform, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Standards, Strategy, Technologies, Waste (materials, food, etc)

U.S. Code-Cracking Agency Works As If Compromised. The U.S. government's main code-making and code-cracking agency now works on the assumption that foes may have pierced even the most sensitive national security computer networks under its guard.

“There's no such thing as ‘secure' any more,” Debora Plunkett of the National Security Agency said on Thursday amid U.S. anger and embarrassment over disclosure of sensitive diplomatic cables by the website WikiLeaks.

“The most sophisticated adversaries are going to go unnoticed on our networks,” she said.

Plunkett heads the NSA's Information Assurance Directorate, which is responsible for protecting national security information and networks from the foxhole to the White House.

“We have to build our systems on the assumption that adversaries will get in,” she told a cyber security forum sponsored by the Atlantic and Government Executive media organizations.

The United States can't put its trust “in different components of the system that might have already been violated,” Plunkett added in a rare public airing of NSA's view on the issue. “We have to, again, assume that all the components of our system are not safe, and make sure we're adjusting accordingly.”

The NSA must constantly fine tune its approach, she said, adding that there was no such thing as a “static state of security.”

More than 100 foreign intelligence organizations are trying to break into U.S. networks, Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn wrote in the September/October issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. Some already have the capacity to disrupt U.S. information infrastructure, he said. Plunkett declined to comment on WikiLeaks, which has started releasing a cache of 250,000 diplomatic cables, including details of overseas installations that officials regard as vital to U.S. security.

Official have focused publicly on Army Private Bradley Manning, who is being detained at a Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, as the source of the leak.

NSA, a secretive Defense Department arm that also intercepts foreign communications, conceives of the problem as maintaining the availability and assuring the integrity of the systems it guards, rather than their “security,” she said.

NSA – which insiders jokingly used to say referred to “No Such Agency” – also focuses on standardization and auditing to hunt for any intrusions, Plunkett said. She referred to the development of sensors for eventual deployment “in appropriate places within our infrastructure” to detect threats and take action against them.

Mike McConnell, a retired Navy vice admiral who headed the NSA from 1992 to 1996, told the forum he believed no U.S. government network was safe from penetration.

A third-party inspection of major computer systems found there was none of consequence “that is not penetrated by some adversary that allows the adversary, the outsider, to bleed all the information at will,” said McConnell, director of national intelligence from 2007 to 2009 and now leader of the intelligence business for the Booz Allen Hamilton consultancy.[Wolf/Reuters/18December2010]

Phi Beta Iota: In 1992 NSA knew that shrink-wrapped hardware and software coming across its loading dock was pre-compromised with both hardware and software viruses, Trojan Horse backdoors, and so on.  In 1994 the National Information Infrastructure “leadership” refused to address the need for a $1 billion a year national cyber-security program.  Since then it has simply gotten worse, with the latest (in the last four years) being the ability of the Chinese to ride the electrical circuits into any computer (think of your Best Buy ethernet extender that uses the wiring as a pass through).  The good news is that 90% of what we have behind the green and black doors is not really secret or in such obscure minutia as to be immaterial to national security.  What we should be doing, in our view as the proponent for public intelligence, is this:

1.  Default both Whole of Government and Multinational Engagement to unclassified.  Civil Affairs can lead the way with the Joint Civil Affairs Information Management Sytem that feeds the high side everything, but keeps the open system open.

2.  Set a notional limit of 10% of what can be classified secret within any Embassy, roughly 8% for the spies and 2% for everyone else.

3.  Take the most sensitive stuff completely off the electrical grid (the real reason NSA wants its own power station at Fort Meade and in Utah).

4.  Invest one third of the cyber-war budget, whatever it ends up being (probably half), in education & research relevant to all stakeholders, not just the national security community.  It is not possible to have smart safe spies within a dumb unsafe nation.  It's all connected.

Turning away from secrecy is the single best thing we can do as a government, as a military, as a nation.  It will yield productivity and innovation and foreign relations dividends beyond our dreams.

Everybody who's a real practitioner, and I'm sure you're not all naïve in this regard, realizes that there are two uses to which security classification is put: the legitimate desire to protect secrets, and the protection of bureaucratic turf. As a practitioner of the real world, it's about 90 bureaucratic turf; 10 legitimate protection of secrets as far as I am concerned.

Rodney McDaniel, then Executive Secretary of the National Security Council, to a Harvard University seminar, as cited in Thomas P. Croakley (ed), C3I: Issues of Command and Control (National Defense University, 1991). Page 68.

Reference: Quadrennial Diplomacy & Development Review

About the Idea, Communities of Practice, Ethics, History, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), International Aid, IO Multinational, IO Sense-Making, Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Maps, Methods & Process, Officers Call, Open Government, Peace Intelligence, Policies, Real Time, Reform, Strategy, Threats
Document Online

Phi Beta Iota: The US Government continues to be chaotic in part because its civilian leaders simply do not know what they do not know.  They have the best of intentions, but have been promoted into a new world far removed from the world imprinted on them in their formative years.  There are four ways to address global engagement needs:

1.  With government employees performing inherently governmental functions.  PROBLEM:  The US Government has become hollow, with most of the experienced personnel scheduled for retirement in 2012 (if they don’t retire we lose what is left of the middle), and the bulk of the population, e.g. at CIA, having less than six years experience and being phenomenally ignorant of the real world.  An inter-agency cadre for D&D does not exist.

2.  With contractors hired to government specifications on a cost plus basis.  This is what killed the Pentagon–decades of engineering responsive to military specifications on a cost plus basis, with no accountability anywhere.  As we have seen in Iraq and elsewhere, individual instances aside, contractors are generally too expensive, very under-qualified, and often a major political risk hazard.  They also loot our qualified manpower–in both intelligence and special forces, we have lost too many good people to bad jobs with too much money.

3.  Multinational government task forces in which we plan, program, and budget for using the US military as a “core force” to provide intelligence, operations (mobility, logistics), and communications, and we default to unclassified information-sharing and sense-making.  This allows culturally and linguistically qualified individuals to work at the highest levels of performance for the lowest per capita cost.

4.  Multinational hybrid task forces in which we plan, program, and budget for using the US military as the “core force” to provide intelligence, operations (mobility, logistics), and communications, and we default to unclassified information-sharing and sense-making.  This increases by a factor of SEVEN the number of culturally and linguistically qualified individuals to work at the highest performance levels for the lowest per capita cost with the greatest possible flexibility in covering all needs–the “eight tribes” (academia, civil society, commercial, government–all levels, law enforcement, media, military, non-governmental) become a “whole” force, using shared information and shared mostly unclassified decision support (intelligence) to achieve both a common view of the battlefield, and to most efficiently connect micro-needs in the AOR with micro-gifts from an infinite range of givers.

The Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review is at least 20 years too late.  It means well.  It is both delusional and incomplete.  Delusional because no one part of government can become effective until the Office of Management and Budget (OmB) learns to manage again, and incomplete because State simple does not “get” bona fide multinational operations or recognize the “eight tribes.”  There is a small seed crystal here, one that could flourish if the Department of Defense (DoD)–or any significant element of DoD such as the US Army–were to “flip the tortilla” and recognize that the greatest contribution DoD can make in the next 20 years is to get a grip on reality, get a grip on open spectrum, open source intelligence, and open source software, and serve as the “center” for Whole of Government planning, programming, and budgeting, toward the end of creating a prosperous world at peace via low-cost low-risk multinational hybrid task forces that use information and intelligence as a substitute for wealth, violence, time, and space.

NOTE:  On some systems links above appear to be underlining, they are actually links.

See Also [Broken Link Fixed]:

Continue reading “Reference: Quadrennial Diplomacy & Development Review”

Journal: GroupOn’s Potential Part II

Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence, Corporations, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), International Aid, Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Methods & Process, microfinancing, Mobile, Open Government, Policies, Real Time, Reform, Strategy, Technologies, Waste (materials, food, etc)

Not many know that GroupOn, Andrew Mason‘s initiative funded by Eric Lefkofsky, started as Policy Tree “Taking People Out of Politics”.  Citizens were not interested in Policy Tree back then for two reasons: the outrage at mortgage fraud, Wall Street derivatives fraud, and Federal Reserve fraud had not peaked yet, and the power of GroupOn to move markets and nations had not been demonstrated.  Now that GroupOn has turned down Google's offer of six billion, there is no doubt.

Put simply, GroupOn now has more power than George Soros, to take one example.  GroupOn can:

1)  Publish true costs for any product or service that is seriously harmful to all of us, and kill it.

2)  Publicize a product or service that is good for the community, and make it a standard.

3)  Organize micro-giving across an entire nation (e.g. Haiti) using a Global Range of Nano-Needs Table.

4)  Organize citizens to do participatory legislation and participatory policy and participatory budgeting and participatory regulatory and propriety oversight in relation to specific issue areas, zip codes, countries, or states, and empower them as a group that cannot be ignored.

GroupOn has done what all others have failed to do: harnessed citizens in the aggregate.  They have just begun.  When combined with the emergence of digital natives as a political force whose outrage is now maturing (see Jon Lebkowsky's “The Kids Are All Right“), GroupOn is the game changer–not MoveOn.org, not No Labels, not Americans Elect, not IndependentVoting.org–all “old” models dominated by apparatchicks and not at all open to the collective.  GroupOn.  As in Group ON, dude!

See Also:

Journal: GroupOn’s Potential Part I

Reference: Engaging Emergence in 824 Words

Augmented Reality, Blog Wisdom, Collective Intelligence, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process, Open Government, Policies, Strategy, Threats
Image by David Kessler

My book, Engaging Emergence, in 824 words

Posted on December 12, 2010 by PeggyHolman

I did a guest post for Pegasus Communications last week, providing an appetizer for my book.  Below is a slightly longer version — with examples restored.  If you’re looking for a taste of what it’s about, read on.

What would it mean if we knew how to face challenging situations with a high likelihood of achieving breakthrough outcomes?

EXTRACT:  Since the early nineties, I’ve sought to understand how we turn difficult, often conflicted issues into transformative leaps of renewed commitment and achievement.  I’ve used whole system change practices — methods that engage the diverse people of a system in creating innovative and lasting shifts in effectiveness.  I’ve co-convened conferences around ambitious societal questions like: What does it mean to do journalism that matters for our communities and democracy?  And I’ve delved into the science of complexity, chaos, and emergence – in which order arises out of chaos – to better understand human systems.  In the process, I have noticed some useful patterns, practices, and principles for engaging the natural forces of emergent change.  Here are a few highlights:

All change begins with disruption.

Engaging disruption creatively helps us discover differences that make a difference.

Wise, resilient systems coalesce when the needs of individuals and the whole are served.

EXTRACT:  The practice of collective reflection helps surface what matters to individuals and the whole.  It can generate unexpected breakthroughs containing what is vital to each and all of us.

EXTRACT:   Joel de Rosnay, author of The Symbiotic Man, introduced the notion of “the macroscope”. Just as microscopes help us to see the infinitely small and telescopes help us to see the infinitely large, macroscopes help us to see the infinitely complex.

Read all 824 words (strongly recommended)….