Category: Information Operations

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Review: Counterterrorism and Open Source Intelligence

5 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Games, Models, & Simulations, Information Operations, Intelligence (Commercial), Intelligence (Government/Secret), Terrorism & Jihad
Amazon Page

Uffe Kock Wiil (ed)

5.0 out of 5 stars , Innovative, Technical, Leverages Open Sources to the Fullest July 27, 2011

Springer needs to make it clear to Amazon that the book ships from a US-based warehouse. I have urged the lead editor and conference organizer to ask Springer to correct the error. The book is available within the US and should be delivered within the week once Springer corrects the way the book has been registered on Amazon. I anticipate that a paperback version will be offered at a more affordable price for individuals–this is the library or institutional “trade” price.

I am very glad to see the publisher make use of Look Inside the Book, and encourage all interested parties to use that feature and study the table of contents. I have to articulate my profound respect for the conference organizer and senior book editor and for those contributing to this book, all of whom I met at the conference for which this content was created.

I have never seen a better collection of scientific and mathematical approaches to leveraging open sources of information to identify precursors and patterns of terrorism. This is an original book, and the first major effort of the new counterterrorism center at the University of Southern Denmark.

Including my alternative perspective, as one other senior participant put it, “makes our job harder.” One reason I particularly like Nordic professionals is because of their integrity. There is a great deal of intelligence and total integrity in this book; it is an honor for me to have been included. I am not competent in the way the other authors are, and my regard for their pioneering is unlimited.

Also just published, very US centric but a really original study, is No More Secrets: Open Source Information and the Reshaping of U.S. Intelligence (Praeger Security International). I have provided a lengthy review at the Amazon page for that book.

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Review: Intelligence Analysis – Behavioral and Social Scientific Foundations

5 Star, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Information Operations, Intelligence (Government/Secret)
Amazon Page

Baruch Fischhoff and Cherie Chauvin (eds.)

5.0 out of 5 stars Insider/Academic/Psychology Overview, Avoids the Negatives,July 25, 2011

First off, this book is not being offered by Amazon but rather by third party sellers seeking to leverage public ignorance. The book is available for $70 instead of $130 at National Academies Press, where it is also available for free by the chapter–every chapter–which gladens my heart. That is how it should be, and earns the book a fifth star despite the rather narrow view offered by the insider/academic authors in the aggregate, all focusing on the psychology of intelligence analysis.

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Review: No More Secrets – Open Source Information and the Reshaping of U.S. Intelligence

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Best Practices in Management, Budget Process & Politics, Change & Innovation, Communications, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Country/Regional, Culture, Research, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Information Operations, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Public Administration, Security (Including Immigration)

Hamilton Bean

5.0 out of 5 stars Spectacular Integrative and Pioneering Work, July 27, 2011

This is a pioneering work that not only explains the true worth of open source intelligence, but also illuminates the institutional bias against it and the pathologies of a culture of secrecy. The use of primary data from interviews makes this an original work in every possible sense of the word. I strongly recommend the book to both professionals and to faculty seeking a provocative book for students.

The book opens with a Foreword from Senator Gary Hart, who cites Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's point that secrecy is used against the US public more often than it is used to withhold information from the alleged enemy. He also makes the observation that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the web occurred almost simultaneously (1990-1991). See Senator Hart's three most recent books, The Thunder and the Sunshine: Four Seasons in a Burnished Life; The Shield and the Cloak: The Security of the Commons, and my favorite The Minuteman: Returning to an Army of the People. The concept of an “intelligence minuteman” is at the foundation of the Open Source Intelligence movement, and highly relevant to this book by Dr. Hamilton Bean.

In his Preface Dr. Bean makes the point that his book is about institutional change and resistance, and the open source intelligence story is simply a vehicle for examining both the utility of his methods with respect to the study of communications and discourse, and the ebbs and flows of institutional change.

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Review: Critical Choices – The United Nations, Networks, and the Future of Global Goverance

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Civil Society, Complexity & Resilience, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Diplomacy, Economics, Environment (Solutions), Future, Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Priorities, Public Administration, Security (Including Immigration), Stabilization & Reconstruction, Strategy, Survival & Sustainment
Amazon Page

Wolfgang H. Reinicke (Editor), Francis Deng (Editor), Jan Martin Witte (Editor), Thorsten Benner (Editor), Beth Whitaker (Editor), John Gershman (Editor)

5.0 out of 5 stars Global Hybrid Network Governance Primer for UN+, July 21, 2011

By  Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) – See all my reviews

Last week I reviewed the first book on this topic by the first author (Wolfgang Reinicke), Global Public Policy: Governing Without Government. I overlooked that book published in 1998, and this book in 2000, for lack of consciousness. Evidently others did as well given the lack of reviews. What makes both these books even more important now is the appointment of the primary author, Wolfgang Reinicke, to the position of inaugural dean of the school of public policy at the Central European University founded and richly endowed by George Soros. To understand how much George Soros has broken away from the government-financial crime axis, his essay free online and also the first fifty-seven pages of The Philanthropy of George Soros: Building Open Societies is essential reading.

I read this book at three levels: for content on its merits; for insight into the specific individuals and agencies behind the book; and for insight into where George Soros might be hoping that Dean Reinicke will go with network governance, what some of us call Panarchy, which is rooted in what we call M4IS2 (Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making). In other words, secrecy is out, transparent true cost information about everything is in–transparency breeds truth, truth breeds trust, and this is how we achieve a non-zero prosperous world at peace that works for all, not just the top 1%.

On page 91 one finds a quote better suited to the front matter, from Kofi Annan:

QUOTE (91): The United Nations once dealt only with governments. By now we know that peace and prosperity cannot be achieved without partnerships involving governments, international organizations, the business community, and civil society.

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Stephen E. Arnold : The Landscape of Enterprise Search

5 Star, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Catastrophe, Education (General), Information Operations
Stephen E. Arnold

Stephen E. Arnold: The New Landscape of Enterprise Search. A Critical Review of the Market and Search Systems. Published by Pandia, Oslo, Norway, 2011.
ISBN: 978-82-998676-0-3

Pandia Book Page

The following enterprise search companies are covered in detail:

Autonomy
Endeca
Exalead
Google Search Solutions
Microsoft and Fast
Vivisimo

Book Page

 

Phi Beta Iota:  For over fifteen years Stephen E. Arnold has been the “virtual CTO” for OSS.Net (ceased operations at end of 2010) and Earth Intelligence Network, of which he is a founding partner.  We have reviewed the 154-page document, and as with all publications by Stephen E. Arnold, author of the still-trenchant Google Trilogy, have found it to be deeply helpful including sharp but polite eviseration of both Google and Microsoft (Microsoft comes out ahead of Google, but has its own sucking chest wounds).  What is clear to us is that none of the major vendors are serious about  the necessary migration to open source software that integrates information sharing, multi-media analytics, cross-disciplinary directories, and deep web applications, for example, integrating c drives and emails across all poverty stakeholders.  The big new trend in this book–and in our own research–is the compelling nature of five minute videos as documents of lasting value.  We are seeing this in open education and non-government decision-support.  Combine that with on demand translation and the way is open for someone to create the M4IS2 system of the future.  We doubt it will be Google, and we are certain it will include OpenBTS for the three billion poor, the center of gravity for future knowledge.

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Review (Guest): On Purposeful Systems – An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Individual and Social Behavior as a System of Purposeful Events

5 Star, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Economics, Environment (Solutions), Information Operations, Intelligence (Public), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design
Amazon Page

Russell Ackoff, Fred Emery

5.0 out of 5 stars A masterful guide to designing a better world, December 25, 2002

ByW. C. Priest “Dr. W. Curtiss Priest” (Boston, MA United States) – See all my reviews

In 1970 I taught from this book when it was entitled
“Choice, Communication and Conflict”

What makes this book “magical” is Ackoff (from his
management and behavioral science roots) provides
“operational definitions” for many ill-defined words
and concepts — from defining ‘knowledge' & ‘understanding' to providing definitions of feelings/emotions that — operationally — you know — that if certain events take place in a person's life, that you know the feeling they have.

This is only a glimmer of what this book is about. In terms of Kuhn's idea of “paradigm shifts” — this book
represents a shift that has yet to be appreciated, thirty years later!

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Review: The Threat on the Horizon

5 Star, Budget Process & Politics, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Culture, Research, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Information Operations, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Military & Pentagon Power, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Public Administration, Science & Politics of Science, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, True Cost & Toxicity
Amazon Page

Loch Johnson

5.0 out of 5 stars Scholarly Reference–Does Not Add Weight to Reform, June 10, 2011

By Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) – See all my reviews

The author of this book, Loch Johnson, is one of two people who also served on the Church Commission-Brit Snider is the other, and he was, at the recommendation of Loch, joined to the Commission by Les Aspin and then appointed Staff Director on his merits. For this reason, what the book does not do is deliberate. The focus on the book is on rendering a historical account of a major endeavor to study the need for reform of the US Intelligence Community.

What the author misses up front is the reality that the Commission was the way in which Senator John Warner (R-VA) and then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney blew up the rather well-crafted efforts of Senator Dave Boren (D-OK) and Representative Dave McCurdy (D-OK-04), each the chairman of their respective Senate and House Intelligence Communities. The National Security Act of 1992 (I summarized the Act for the American Intelligence Journal) was a well-crafted endeavor. It was destroyed because Senator John Warner refused to consider anything that might reduce intelligence budget and personnel in Virginia (both a bloated at all locations), and Secretary Cheney was willing to tell any lie, oppose any good idea, that might reduce the military's growing ownership of secret intelligence. Today, under DNI James Clapper, we have the most expensive and most ineffective intelligence community on the planet-only the vendors of vaporware get rich-the deal is that all retired IC leaders and most IC retirees get to double-dip with their clearances intact-good for them, very bad for the public.

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