Topics (All Other) – Page 248 – Public Intelligence Blog

2010/01/172010/01/17

Journal: US Response to Haiti Reveals Old Mindsets

Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Geospatial, InfoOps (IO), Key Players, Methods & Process, Mobile, Policies, Real Time, Reform, Strategy, Threats, Tools

The Right Testicle of Hell: History of a Haitian Holocaust

By Greg Palast

Blackwater before drinking water

6. From my own work in the field, I know that FEMA has access to ready-to-go potable water, generators, mobile medical equipment and more for hurricane relief on the Gulf Coast. It's all still there. Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, who served as the task force commander for emergency response after Hurricane Katrina, told the Christian Science Monitor, “I thought we had learned that from Katrina, take food and water and start evacuating people.” Maybe we learned but, apparently, Gates and the Defense Department missed school that day.

7. Send in the Marines. That's America's response. That's what we're good at. The aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson finally showed up after three days. With what? It was dramatically deployed — without any emergency relief supplies. It has sidewinder missiles and 19 helicopters.

8. But don't worry, the International Search and Rescue Team, fully equipped and self-sufficient for up to seven days in the field, deployed immediately with ten metric tons of tools and equipment, three tons of water, tents, advanced communication equipment and water purifying capability. They're from Iceland.

Phi Beta Iota: This is what we were thinking of when we laid out the CAB 21 Peace Jumpers scenario. The Pentagon is out of touch with reality because they have such a narrow mind-set that is uninformed about the possibilities and simply does not compute Whole of Government resourcing or clean drinking water as a security device vastly more effective than a Marine standing guard over nothing. With all humility, if DIA goes not get its act together in the Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and Multinational Engagement arena, and help the Pentagon learn about the new craft of waging peace with Whole of Government non-secret campaign plans and multinational virtual harmonization of resource needs identification and fulfulfillment at the Twitter level, we will continue to fail ourselves and everyone else. As we pointed out early on, Haiti's disaster was/is an OPPORTUNITY. Evidently no one in the Pentagon is thinking that way.

2010/01/162010/01/16

Journal: DARPA Catches Up with 1994

10 Security, Academia, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence, Computer/online security, Cultural Intelligence

Darpa: U.S. Geek Shortage Is National Security Risk

Darpa’s worried that America’s “ability to compete in the increasingly internationalized stage will be hindered without college graduates with the ability to understand and innovate cutting edge technologies in the decades to come…. Finding the right people with increasingly specialized talent is becoming more difficult and will continue to add risk to a wide range of DoD [Department of Defense] systems that include software development.”

Phi Beta Iota: Great insight….only 16 years behind the point made by the opening speaker at Hackers on Planet Earth 1994. He said “When the Israeli's catch a hacker, they give him a job. When we catch a hacker, we kick them in the teeth and throw them in jail.” We wait with bated breath for DARPA to reach 1998.

Journal: Cyber-War, Cyber-Peace, Cyber-Scam

Journal: Cyber-Security Etc. & Multinational Engagement

Reference: Are Hackers Pioneers with the Right Stuff or Criminal Pathological Scum? Mitch Kabay Reprises

Journal: German Hackers Point to 9-11 Text Messages

Journal: Climate Change and “Hacktivism”

2010/01/162010/01/16

Journal: Haiti Highlights Death of US C4I

Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Key Players, Methods & Process, Mobile, Policies, Real Time, Threats

Full Story Online

Things are going to get a lot worse in Haiti before they get better, and that was never clearly articulated by the President, State Department, SOUTHCOM, or Rajiv Shah to the American people, who may begin to doubt our governments efforts in the very near future. President Obama is positioned to take a political hit for what happens over the next 48-72 hours for apparently having advisors who are treating Haiti as anything but the most important event of his political career to date.

Phi Beta Iota: The USG, the US IC, and DoD have been told for 21 years, beginning with General Al Gray's 1989 article, “Global Intelligence Challenges in the 1990's,” and ending most recently with General Mike Flynn's Fixing Intel–A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan, that they are not being serious about Open Sources, Multinational Engagement, the Eight Tribes, and on and on and on. We need a Defense Open Source Center (DOSC) with an embedded Multinational Decision Support Center (MDSC) that simultaneously creates a global grid with the 90 countries that have OSINT centers within their military C4I structure, and regional grids that are under the control and in the service of the various regional unions, beginning with UNASUR and then AU and SCO and ASEAN, and so on–our money, their information. Haiti is Obama's Katrina–not because he's a bad President or has an inattentive Cabinet, but because the “system” of governance is Industrial-Era C4I totally out of touch with modern possibilities.

2010/01/162010/01/16

Worth a Look: UNICEF RapidSMS

Methods & Process, Technologies, Tools, Worth A Look

UNICEF Innovation RapidSMS

RapidSMS is UNICEF's open source platform for data collection, logistics coordination and communication allowing any mobile phone to interact with the web.

About UNICEF

UNICEF is on the ground in over 150 countries and territories to help children survive and thrive, from early childhood through adolescence. The world's largest provider of vaccines for developing countries, UNICEF supports child health and nutrition, good water and sanitation, quality basic education for all boys and girls, and the protection of children from violence, exploitation, and AIDS. UNICEF is funded entirely by the voluntary contributions of individuals, businesses, foundations and governments.

2010/01/162010/01/16

Journal: Haiti Public Intelligence Emergent

08 Wild Cards, Analysis, Budgets & Funding, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Geospatial, InfoOps (IO), IO Mapping, Methods & Process, Mobile, Policies, Real Time, Threats, Tools

haiti google side by side — Full Story Online

Google Maps updates with new Haiti pics: Hours-old satellite images show destruction

Google has released a new KML overlay — tech speak for map layer — that includes fresh images of Port-au-Prince.

According to GeoEye , the satellite imagery company that provided the photos, they were taken at 10:30 a.m. yesterday from a satellite 423 miles up.

By toggling the new image layer on and off, it’s easy to compare what the city looked like before the earthquake with the way it looks now.

Aside from the obvious destruction, one of the most striking features of the new images is the large number of presumably homeless people in the streets of the ruined neighborhoods.

Click here to see the new images in Google Maps.

Phi Beta Iota: Finally, but kudos never-the-less. This should always be the first thing done, perhaps with a global arrangement that has regional cost-sharing in place and can use military air breathers where commercial are not immediately available, but respecting Google's software and end-user delivery offering. There is still the matter of getting to shared Spacial Reference Systems (SRS). This could and should be used to “plot” Twitter messages that identify need, and in the back office, matching RapidSMS messages that can be aggregated to fund need resolution.

Where Are Haiti Earthquake Relief Funds Going?

Millions in donations have been raised since the earthquake in Haiti on Tuesday, but where is the money going?

Like Wyclef Jean's Yele Haiti which is urging people to text “Yele” to 501501 to donate $5 to the cause — which has raised more than $2 million so far — many other relief organizations have used mobile messaging to quickly gather funds.

Phi Beta Iota: What is most interesting about this is the fact that fund-raising (financial incentive for the organizers that take a 5% to 50% “cut) is very well developed and moving money, while the other end (requirements definition, logistics coordination, and “by household” delivery” is NOT developed at all. This is a good start toward the Global to Local Range of Needs Table, when that is developed, this will “flip” in that people will give for SPECIFIC itemized needs, not as a leap of faith in intermediaries that generally do NOT deliver full value.

What is LACKING is a single trusted Multinational Decision Support Center with both regional and global non-profit “cachet” as well as two-way reachback into all eight tribes of all nations, that can be the single point orchestrating the receipt and integration of all information in all languages in near-real-time, and the trusted point for validating both needs and the resolution of needs through the application of fundss.

2010/01/152010/01/15

Worth A Look: MobileIron C4I in the Cloud

Methods & Process, Technologies, Tools

Company Home Page

Network World Names MobileIron a Top 10 Start-up to Watch (Company Press Release)

MobileIron's Innovative Solution for Smartphone Management Drives Selection

Smartphone usage in the enterprise continues to grow rapidly. Forrester Research recently released data showing that 78 percent of information workers across the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. either already use or would like to use smartphones to do work. However, smartphones introduce security, cost, and usability challenges that traditional mobile device management strategies cannot address. MobileIron's patent-pending Virtual Smartphone Platform moves smartphone data to the enterprise cloud and gives IT and users unprecedented, real-time intelligence and control while saving 10-20 percent off wireless bills and delivering a compelling new mobile experience.

MP4_movie_glasses_11319 — Peace Jumper Peripheral

Phi Beta Iota: This leads to a press release, but we like it. We envision the Army Civil Affairs Brigade as the hub for a global network of Peace Jumpers, each armed with a SmartPhone that has reach-back capabilities to a Multinational Decision Support Center and a global grid of 24/7 on call interpreter-translators skilled in 183 languages and all sitting in front of an Internet terminal.

In combination with existing eyeglasses as well as embedded projection capabilities, we see no reason why we cannot enable Smart Multinational Multifunctional Operations within the year.

Haiti should be an information operation, not a physical cluster-dump or financial sink-hole….in our humble opinion.

2010/01/142010/01/14

Journal: America’s Debt to–and Incapacitation of–Haiti

07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, Cultural Intelligence, History, IO Sense-Making

How easily we forget the balance books of history. Below are two pieces, one from the colonial era written in 2006, the other from the recent “neo-colonia” era in which the author examines the specifics of the Clinton Administration's policies toward Haiti. Chuck

Full Story Online

America's Historic Debt to Haiti

By Robert Parry February 10, 2006

As Haiti intrudes again on the U.S. consciousness with a new round of troubled elections, Americans see a violent, backward, poverty-stricken country run by descendants of African slaves. There are feelings of condescension mixed with a touch of racism.

But what few Americans know is that they owe this Caribbean nation a profound historical debt. Indeed, perhaps no nation has done more for the United States than Haiti and been treated as badly in return.

If not for Haiti – which in the 1700s rivaled the American colonies as the most valuable European possession in the Western Hemisphere – the course of U.S. history would have been very different. It is possible that the United States might never have expanded much beyond the Appalachian Mountains.

Full Story Online

Before and After the Quake

The Incapacitation of Haiti

By ASHLEY SMITH January 14, 2010

Why were 60 percent of the buildings in Port-au-Prince shoddily constructed and unsafe in normal circumstances, according to the city's mayor? Why are there no building regulations in a city that sits on a fault line? Why has Port-au-Prince swelled from a small town of 50,000 in the 1950s to a population of 2 million desperately poor people today? Why was the state completely overwhelmed by the disaster?

To understand these facts, we have to look at a second fault line–U.S. imperial policy toward Haiti. The U.S. government, the UN, and other powers have aided the Haitian elite in subjecting the country to neoliberal economic plans that have impoverished the masses, deforested the land, wrecked the infrastructure and incapacitated the government.

The fault line of U.S. imperialism interacted with the geological one to turn the natural disaster into a social catastrophe.

Continue reading “Journal: America's Debt to–and Incapacitation of–Haiti”