Waste (materials, food, etc) – Page 10 – Public Intelligence Blog

2011/01/022011/01/02

Journal: Gorgon Stare (All Eyes, No Brain)

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, Advanced Cyber/IO, Corruption, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Methods & Process, Military, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Strategy, Waste (materials, food, etc)

BELOW REFERS TO PREVIOUS POST:

Reference: Gorgon Stare–USAF Goes Nuts (Again)

Another Technical Showboat

Chuck Spinney and Robert Steele have pretty well identified the new U.S. Air Force (USAF) drone program for what it is, but here are some ancillary remarks on the subject.

The Gorgon Stare, a new UAV built presumably to USAF specifications is a technological marvel and does indeed multiply not only surveillance capabilities, but store and forwarding capabilities as well. In the excitement over this new collection platform several essential questions are being ignored.

The most important is how much help is this device going to be in actually fighting enemy forces in Afghanistan. Is it going to help the U.S. or Coalition High Commands understand that what they call the “Taliban” is not a monolithic force with an elaborate hierarchy using a Soviet era command and control systems? But is actually a rubric for disparate tribes, groups, and gangs that engage the foreigners when they fell like it or to protect their opium trade or home village or to up grade their armament. I don’t think so.

Perhaps it will help the actual U.S. and Coalition fighters (boots on the ground) by providing heads up warnings of impending attacks or dangerous stretches of road. Perhaps but this will depend not simply on enhanced surveillance, but as Robert Steele has observed enhanced processing as well.

Thus the second important question is how will all the extra data being down linked from the Gorgon be processed, analyzed, and disseminated in a timely manner? It may not be, but it can be certain with all the extra data coming in the USAF will argue for greatly increased processing staffing along with new information handling systems with impressive, if expensive, bells and whistles. This of course will be a hidden, but real addition to the cost of the Gorgon. So will enhanced processing and analytic capabilities mean that Gorgon data may actually get to the war fighters in time to save lives and materially aid in defeating enemy forces? My guess is it won’t make a bit difference.

Unfortunately the whole Gorgon Stare Program is one more example the increasing tendency to use technology as a substitute for target knowledge and analysis (what Chuck Spinney calls synthetic as opposed to analytic thinking). As one who designed my share of ‘Gold Plated Shovels with Rope Handles’, I suspect the Gorgon falls into that category.

Phi Beta Iota: See the three graphics below. Historically the excess profit is in collection with few humans, and both government managers and contractor carpet-baggers shy away from the processing challenge–the contractors don't do processing well (a major problem with single-point of sale snake oil salesmen) and humans are “messy” and there are not enough of them to go around if you insist they have clearances. The future is HUMAN, Multinational, Ezight-Tribe Sharing, and THINKING. Gorgon Stare has no brain and neither does the US Air Force. This web site contains all of the information the US Government refuses to take seriously. Until at least one element of the US Government gets serious about creating intelligence for every level of command across all mission areas, Gorgon Stare will continue to be the norm: expensive, useless, and harmful to the infantry that take 80% of the casualties because 96% of the Pentagon's budget continues to be spent irresponsibly (and without being accounted for in a responsible manner either).

Graphic: OSINT and Lack of Processing

Graphic: OSINT, We Went Wrong, Leaping Forward

Graphic: OSINT and Missing Information

2011/01/022011/01/02

Reference: Gorgon Stare–USAF Goes Nuts (Again)

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Augmented Reality, Budgets & Funding, Geospatial, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Maps, Methods & Process, Military, Misinformation & Propaganda, Officers Call, Policy, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Reform, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Standards, Strategy, Technologies, Waste (materials, food, etc)

editor spinney time — Chuck Spinney Sounds Off

The American Way of War: If You Can See Everything, Can You Know Anything?

With Air Force's new drone, ‘we can see everything,' in today's Washington Post (attached below) is a good example of how the high-cost addiction to techno war is running amok. One thing ought to be clear in Afghanistan: A tiny adversary armed with the most primitive weapons, and a command and control system made up of prayer rugs and cell phones, has brought the high tech US military to a stalemate … or even worse, the looming specter a grand-strategic defeat, because we are becoming economically and morally exhausted by the futility of this war. It does not matter whether it is President Obama presiding over a vapid strategic review or a low ranking grunt on point in Afghanistan — the central problem facing the United States in Afghanistan is the absence of what the Germans call fingerspitzengefühlor the feeling in the fingerprints needed for an intuitive feel for or connection with one's environment.

As the American strategist Colonel John Boyd (USAF Ret.) showed, fingerspitzengefühl is absolutely essential to the kind of synthetic (as opposed to analytic) thinking that is necessary for quick, relevant, and ultimately successful decision making in war, where quick decisions and sharp actions at all levels must be made and harmonized in an ever-present atmosphere of menace, uncertainty, mistrust, fear, and chaos that impedes decisive action.[1]

To paraphrase Clausewitz, these difficulties multiply to produce a kind of friction, and therefore, even though everything in war is simple, the simplest thing is difficult. Clausewitz considered friction is the atmosphere of war. Nevertheless, according to the Post, the Air Force is about to deploy to Afghanistan a “revolutionary airborne surveillance system called Gorgon Stare, which will be able to transmit live video images of physical movement across an entire town.”

Quoting Maj. Gen. James O. Poss, the Air Force's assistant deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, “Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we're looking at, and we can see everything.” Nirvana. While the Post dutifully reports a smattering of opposing views, it misses the ramifications of the central idea epitomized by General Poss's confident assertion: namely, how the American ideology of techno war assumes it can negate the human need for fingerspitzengefühl on a battlefield.

General Poss's confidence suggests quite clearly he believes seeing everything enables one to know everything. This a stunning theory of knowledge. It is also a classic example of the American military's unquestioned belief that complex technologies coupled to step-by-step analytical procedures can negate the friction of combat to solve any problem in war. Lifting the fog of war is, in fact, a phrase frequently used in contractor brochures touting the efficacy of these technologies. This reflects theory of knowledge — really an unquestioned ideology — that views war as fundamentally a procedural problem of methodical analytical thinking, as opposed to its messy reality of being in large part an art of synthetic thinking.

Continue reading “Reference: Gorgon Stare–USAF Goes Nuts (Again)”

2011/01/022011/01/02

Journal: Detriot in Ruins–End of Empire From 1960’s…

03 Economy, 04 Education, 05 Energy, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Commercial Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Corporations, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, info-graphics/data-visualization, IO Sense-Making, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Waste (materials, food, etc)

Detroit in ruins: the photographs of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre

Guardian, Sunday 2 January 2011

Sean O'Hagan

Article

Photo Gallery Direct

In downtown Detroit, the streets are lined with abandoned hotels and swimming pools, ruined movie houses and schools, all evidence of the motor city's painful decline. The photographs of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre capture what remains of a once-great city – and hint at the wider story of post-industrial America

. . . . . . .

Cumulatively, the photographs are a powerful and disturbing testament to the glory and the destructive cost of American capitalism: the centre of a once-thriving metropolis in the most powerful nation on earth has become a ghost town of decaying buildings and streets. There is a formal beauty here too, though, reminiscent of Robert Polidori's images of post-hurricane Katrina New Orleans. “It seems like Detroit has just been left to die,” says Marchand, “Many times we would enter huge art deco buildings with once-beautiful chandeliers, ornate columns and extraordinary frescoes, and everything was crumbling and covered in dust, and the sense that you had entered a lost world was almost overwhelming. In a very real way, Detroit is a lost world – or at least a lost city where the magnificence of its past is everywhere evident.”

. . . . . . .

The Ruins of Detroit tells the city's story so far in one starkly beautiful photograph after another, all of which add up to nothing less than an end-of-empire narrative. Or as Sugrue puts it: “The abandoned factories, the eerily vacant schools, the rotting houses, and gutted skyscrapers that Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre chronicle are the artefacts of Detroit's astonishing rise as a global capital of capitalism and its even more extraordinary descent into ruin, a place where the boundaries between the American dream and the American nightmare, between prosperity and poverty, between the permanent and the ephemeral are powerfully and painfully visible. No place epitomises the creative and destructive forces of modernity more than Detroit, past and present.”

2010/12/21

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.

2010/12/16

Reference: The Fraud-Based US Economy

07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, Analysis, Articles & Chapters, Blog Wisdom, Budgets & Funding, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Congressional Research Service, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, General Accountability Office, Intelligence (government), Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Methods & Process, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Office of Management and Budget, Officers Call, Policies, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Reform, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Strategy, Waste (materials, food, etc)

The attached blog, “Failing to Prosecute Wall Street Fraud Is Extending Our Economic Problems,”

is a cut-and-paste accumulation of a variety of outlooks. Most are based on analyses or accumulated wisdom, but some appear based on hunches, ideologies, etc. Taken together, however, they paint a horrifying picture of the American political economy and our prospects for the future. Moreover, that picture does not change materially if you throw half of the pastings away. While the implications of fraud, per se, are clear, the horrifying picture of what is happening emerges when one tries to generalize on the description.

The anonymous guest author is telling us, in effect, that the neural network of our political-economy — i.e., the information system that provides the wherewithal for implicit and explicit homeostatic guidance and control – – has become so corrupted by fraud and disinformation that a pervasive atmosphere of confusion, menace, fear, mistrust, and alienation is breaking down the system into non-co-operative activities, thereby creating a kind of paralysis of will that, left unchecked, will prolong and deepen our economic crisis. <

One psychologist insightfully likened the situation to trauma and post traumatic stress disorder on a national scale.

Any student of Colonel Boyd's theory [1] of competition and conflict (Patterns of Conflict) and his idea of the OODA loop will immediately recognize the symptoms of confusion, menace, fear, mistrust, and alienation, expressed below. These are the emergent properties of decision cycles, or Observation – Orientation – Decision – Action (OODA) Loops, that have been folded back inside themselves and have become focused inward and are disconnected from their environments, but connected to some kind of internal dynamic that feeds on itself. Of course, Boyd was discussing military strategy and the art of winning by wrecking his adversary's OODA loops to undermine his adversary's organic cohesion, while preventing his adversary from doing the same thing to him.

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to dismiss his ideas as applying only to the art of war. That is because Boyd's aim was to describe in a generalized sense how the human mind works in any conflict involving a clash of independent wills, what the mind's strengths and weaknesses are, and how these strengths and weaknesses play out in the competition that is the essence of life.

So, it should not be surprising that many politicians, businessmen, and scholars have recognized that Boyd's general ideas can be tailored to any kind of competition or game (just google “OODA loop”) and have sought gain by exploiting these ideas against others. Most people, however, instinctively evolve similar if less well defined ideas, because if Boyd's synthesis of the OODA loop is correct, these dynamics are innate in the evolved wiring of left and right hemispheres of our brains [2], and therefore will exhibit their outward manifestations in repetitive patterns in conflicts over time — which brings back to the tapestry of confusion, menace, fear, mistrust, and alienation and the counter weights that are necessary to overcome them.

Viewed through the lens of Boyd's theory of competition and conflict, the attached blog clarifies one question about the players in the economic game in particular: The information assembled below clearly shows who is the hoser and who is the hosee.

One final point, history has shown that once an nation's political-economic OODA loops become infected by the virus of corrupted information it is very very hard to clean it out. The hosing will continue unless ruthless action roots it out, otherwise, we will experience continued disintegration ending in a sudden collapse, like what happened to Rome on a grand time scale or to France's Third Republic [3] on a more tangible time scale.

With this background in mind, now read the attached blog and draw you own conclusions about what is needed to re-oreint the corrupted political-economic OODA loops that are leading America to ruin.
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NOTES:

[1] A short bio of Boyd and his theories as well as the briefing slides he used to explain his theories can be found in the Boyd folder here. Robert Coram's excellent biography of Boyd and his theories can be found here.

[2] See, for example, my analysis of how Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton and John McCain here.

[3] William L. Shirer's Collapse of the Third Republic, is a case study in how the dry rot of inward focus in the 1930s set France up for its sudden collapse in during the German invasion of May 1940. His description of how the flow information among the military and political leaders became corrupted during the invasion is a microcosm of how inwardly focused OODA loops, lubricate by menace, mistrust, and fear result inevitably in the breakdown of cohesion, paralysis, chaos, and collapse.

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ATTACHED BELOW THE LINE IN FULL for Information Availability Assurance Into the Future

Failing to Prosecute Wall Street Fraud Is Extending Our Economic Problems

Posted By Guest Author On December 15, 2010 @ 8:30 am In Think Tank

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/12/failing-to-prosecute-wall-street-fraud-is-extending-our-economic-problems/print/

Continue reading “Reference: The Fraud-Based US Economy”

2010/12/142010/12/14

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

2010/11/282010/11/28

Reference: The Modern Big Picture–Two Minds

Analysis, Articles & Chapters, Collective Intelligence, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Geospatial, History, InfoOps (IO), IO Sense-Making, Key Players, Methods & Process, Officers Call, Open Government, Peace Intelligence, Policies, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Real Time, Reform, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Strategy, Technologies, Threats, Tools, Waste (materials, food, etc)

Extract from Conclusion in the Above: I have observed the World Game as a student-participant, and wish it well. I have also observed Bob Pickus's work, as a student-participant in Turn Toward Peace, and wish him well. There are still other alternatives, but whichever road leads us faster into a world without war, what I gain most from Pickus and Fuller is their sense of the Big Picture. No one else can match their indefatigable and comprehensive efforts to see the problem whole, and to steer the world's energy into a grand design of peace.

See Also:

Who's Who in Collective Intelligence

Who's Who in Peace Intelligence

BigPictureSmallWorld

BigPicture Consulting

Design Science Lab

Global Education Lab

EarthGame