The Sunlight Foundation is committed to helping citizens, bloggers and journalists be their own best watchdogs, by improving access to existing information and digitizing new information, and by creating new tools and Web sites to enable all of us to collaborate in fostering greater transparency.
The Sunlight Foundation is also supporting a new effort, the Sunlight Lab,which seeks to make more government information available to the public in usable form.
Usable Government Information
Both of the key leaders at the Sunlight Foundation are being added to our Who's Who.
Andrew Raiej is a force behind Personal Diplomacy
Personal Democracy Forum
Micah Sifry wrote Spoiling for a Fight: Third Party Politics in America, which the #1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction said was “Beyond Five Stars–a Foundation Stone for Third Party Bid”
Click on the covers to reach the original postings (dated to conform to the date of the issuance of each document) with today's Phi Betea Iota Editorial Comments on each of the two documents.
Of special relevance is the fact that this document assigns chairmanship of the National Open Source Council (NOSC) to the ADDNI/OS, who has delegated that role to the Director of the CIA/DNI Open Source Center. We recommend the ADDNI/OS rescind that delegation immediately in as much as it is in explicit violation of Intelligence Community Directive 300 E.2.d.
Phi Beta Iota has begun a review of all publicly-available documents and directives pertaining to the hybrid discipline of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). Click on the cover to access both the full document online and the Phi Beta Iota comment.
OSINT is a hybrid discipline, unique in that it is both a complete discipline in its own right, while also being the essential foundation for both the traditional collection disciplines and the long-suffering consumer missions that have never gotten decision-support from the secret world–Agriculture, Commerce, Energy are but a few of them.
Vision 2015 is sheer genius, gifted articulation, and
Click to Read Full Comment
implementable now, but not within the US Intelligence Community (US IC). It is time for the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to work with the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence (USD(I)) to fully fund the Open Source Agency under diplomatic auspices with an Office of Information Sharing Treaties and Agreements, a UN Assistant Secretary General for Decision Support, a Multinational Decision Support Center that implements Vision 2015 at the unclassifed level as a baseline for unilateral all-source advances on that foundation; and regional mission-oriented Whole of Government/broad coalition networks and centers corresponding to each Combatant Command (COCOM), each of whom should become both a US Whole of Government integrated campaign management center, and a regional multinational stabilization & reconstruction information-sharing and decision-support hub.
The United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) and its formal but free online publication, Diarmament Forum, the cover is shown to the left here, linking to the Forum's home page, is the model for the Journal of Public Intelligence.
Today we are creating a new section for the Journal, “Worth a Look,” which will point to relevant scholar-practitioner publications that make a contribution to the emerging and converging disciplines of Collective Intelligence, Public Intelligence, Cognitive Science, and Global from Local Public Administration, the latter the ultimate constituency for the Journal of Public Intelligence.
Below is the first page and link to the seven-page UNIDIR article, “Learn, adapt, succeed: potential lessons from the Ottawa and Oslo processes for other disarmament and arms control challenges.”
We note with special interest the importance of informal trust networks that are by, with, of, and BEYOND all bureaucratic entities.
“Losing the Long War” is a common refains among the chattering pundits, but they are making one fundamental mistake: those of us with brains and eyes and ears all knew this in 1988 and gave voice to our views in 1998. The problem is the chasm between those in power, who live in a “closed circle,” and those with knowledge, who actually follow the multicultural nuances of cause and effect and inputs and outcomes. Below is a quote from Daniel Elsberg speaking to Henry Kissinger–the same could be said today to the National Security Advisor now serving:
The danger is, you’ll become like a moron.You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours” [because of your blind faith in the value of your narrow and often incorrect secret information].
Daniel Ellsberg
Daniel Ellsberg, SECRETS: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (Viking, 2002).This is his recollection of his words to Henry Kissinger, then National Security Advisor to President Richard Nixon.The three pages on the pathological effects of falling prey to the cult of secrecy, on pages 237-239, should be forced rote memorization for all who receive clearances. Click on the book cover to read our complete summative review of SECRETS: A Memoir.
The Administration does not lack for solutions. It lacks for openness and outreach to those who do know, and it lacks for independence from Goldman Sachs specifically and Wall Street generally.
The US taxpayer is starting to figure this out, and over half those eligible to vote are now contemplating an end to the two-party bi-nopoly of the White House and Congress through massive Independent turn-out.
It also bears mention that the good Mr. May appears to have no clue as to the actual cause of the global economic collapse, namely Goldman Sachs, the Federal Reserve, and the Russian Roulette that Wall Street has been playing with the US and the Global economies–at our expense. See my review of Webster Griffin Tarpley's revied and updated edition of Surviving the Cataclysm: Your Guide Through the Greatest Financial Crisis in Human History. The American taxpayer does not just need a new government–we need to flush all the “think tanks” down the toilet, for they have clearly lost any semblance of the ability to actually THINK.
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Full Story
Below is an excerpt from a Washington Times story, and a link to the book being discussed.
Losing the Long War by Clifford D. May, Saturday, July 25, 2009
In 1993, R. James Woolsey, about to become President Clinton's first director of Central Intelligence, remarked to a Senate committee on the defeat of international communism: “We have slain a large dragon.”
He then added: “But we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes. And in many ways, the dragon was easier to keep track of.”
Years later, we still seem bewildered. America's military has demonstrated astonishing ingenuity and adaptability. But have other instruments of government power risen to the challenges posed by international jihadism?
In his new book, “Winning the Long War,” Ilan Berman, vice president for policy at the American Foreign Policy Council, makes a persuasive case that they have not, that the United States instead has lost “the initiative on the dominant battlefields of today's conflict: ideology, strategic communications, economics, law and development.” Regaining the initiative, he urges, should be among the highest priorities of the new administration.
Amazon Page and Full Review
Click on the book cover to reach its Amazon page.
It turns out the Washington Times is just pulling the whole thing from Scripps News, so below is a second excerpt, click on the Scripps News logo to read their entire original version.
ScrippsNews
Berman gives higher marks to the U.S. Treasury Department, which has waged economic warfare by seizing or freezing hundred of millions of dollars that otherwise would have gone to al-Qaeda and similar organizations.
But there has been no serious effort to “make the international economy as a whole inhospitable to exploitation by terrorist groups and radical regimes,” to prevent multinational companies from carrying out “business as usual with terror-sponsoring regimes,” or even to stop American taxpayer dollars from ending up assisting regimes such as that in Iran. The Bush administration never aimed at Iran's Achilles' heel: its dependence on foreign supplies of gasoline. Congress and the Obama administration are now, finally and rather hesitantly, considering this last, best option to peacefully pressure Iran's rulers.
“If we are to stem the tide of Islamic radicalism, then we must do more than simply continue down the path we are currently on,” notes former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in the foreword to Berman's book. First and foremost, winning the long war will require re-thinking the conflict being waged against the West, and learning how to utilize non-military instruments of national power much more effectively than we have done to date.
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Long War Journal
Long War Journal and Counterterrorism Blog
Worth a look. Includes contributions from Zachary Abuza and many others outside the US Government war college and think tank circuit.
