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Reference: Draft Smart Nation Act of 2014

Advanced Cyber/IO, Ethics, Government, IO Deeds of Peace
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DOC (1 Page): Draft Smart Nation Act of 2014

Proposed Legislation: The Smart Nation Act of 2014

• Within the Department of State, expands the capabilities for Open Government, Citizen Engagement, Participatory Budgeting, Global Engagement and Whole of Government planning, programming, and budgeting, by providing the Secretary of State with oversight authority of the Open Source Agency (OSA) and the Office of Information Sharing Treaties and Agreements.

• Creates an Open Source Agency (OSA), redirecting the necessary funds on a non-reimbursable basis from Program 50 to Program 150, as a sister-agency to the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), with the same arms-length independence that Congress wisely mandated to assure journalist independence, but in this case, to assure the integrity of public intelligence in the public interest across Whole of Government and in all exchanges with foreign and non-governmental entities. The small Headquarters will be constructed on the South-Central Campus, adjacent to both the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), which could serve as a partner in global information peacekeeping, and to George Washington University as well as the John F. Kennedy Center conference and parking facilities. All information obtained by open means will be a public good and a copy also provided as acquired to the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), who shall make no claim on the disposition of original open sources and methods. The OSA will be the national proponent for Open Source Everything (OSE) across the education, intelligence (decision-support) and research sectors.

• Creates an Office of Information Sharing Treaties and Agreements, to negotiate no-cost information sharing treaties with Nations, and no-cost information sharing agreements with non-governmental and private sector organizations including universities world-wide, while also adopting OSE standards facilitating both sharing and semantic web sense-making across all languages (33 initially, 183 at full operating capability).

• Creates a Multinational Warning & Decision-Support Center (MWDC) and related global information-sharing and sense-making network.

• Creates a Multinational Multiagency Conference Center to serve as a foundation for local to global outreach and cross-fertilization across all education, intelligence, and research topics.

• In partnership with academic, civil society, and non-profit organizations, creates the World Brain Institute and the Global Game to foster whole systems true cost economics thinking.

• Creates, in partnership with a university providing accreditation and administrative services, a School of Future-Oriented Hybrid Governance, a Horizons College, and a Multidisciplinary Research Consortium.

• Support the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) with an Internet dissemination capability that offers free universal access to all unclassified information acquired by the OSA, with a robust man-machine translation capability that offers free online education in at least 33 major languages and 12 dialects of Arabic as an important new foundation for public diplomacy and information peacekeeping.

• Supports the roles of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the General Services Administration (GSA) as executive level partners of the Open Source Agency, with priority on decision-support from the OSA in support of all federal needs of common concern.

• Expands and enhances the role of the Congressional Research Service (CRS) and the General Accountability Office (GAO) with direct access to all available information, advanced analytic processing tools, and sufficient personnel to provide each jurisdiction of Congress with unclassified decision-support that can be shared with constituents and the media. –o–

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Berto Jongman: DroneShield Invented and In Demand — Will Drones (and Blimps) Lead to a Global Citizen Revolt?

07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Government, Idiocy, IO Deeds of War, IO Privacy, IO Technologies, Law Enforcement, Military
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Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

DroneShield warns of low-flying UAVs with 18 nations demanding the device – inventor

The Voice of Russia, 14 February 2014

In a matter of a few years, tons of drones could be whizzing around residential zones, taking away tiny pieces of privacy people once had. DroneShield is a fresh new concept that alerts of nearby low-flying UAV devices in the area. John Franklin, one of the developers, told the Voice of Russia that 18 countries, including Russia, have already put in orders for the gadget and has been creating buzz ever since.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: DroneShield Invented and In Demand — Will Drones (and Blimps) Lead to a Global Citizen Revolt?”

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Stephen E. Arnold: Google Continues to Capture and Pollute World of Knowledge

Commerce, Corruption, IO Technologies
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Stephen E. Arnold
Stephen E. Arnold

The Growth of Google’s Knowledge Graph

The article titled How a Database of the World’s Knowledge Shapes Google’s Future on MIT Technology Review is an explanation of Google’s Knowledge Graph and the progress made in compiling information to feed into it. The Knowledge Graph began as a database built by Metaweb, which Google acquired in 2010. The article is an interview with Metaweb cofounder and Google employee John Giannandrea, who explains the Knowledge Graph through an analogy with maps.

Read full post.

The Google Revenue Railroad: Whoo Whoo

I don’t pay much attention to mobile anything. I am nosing near 70, and I find life works just fine without checking a mobile device every few minutes.

I read “New Android OEM Licensing Terms Leak; “Open” Comes with a Lot of Restrictions.” The main point is that open does not mean “open.” Since the artful explanation of the meaning of “is,” most of the words used by folks possess fluid definitions.

“Open” is a good example. Open invokes images of free and open source software. As my columns in Online Searcher document, open is usually closed. For software, open is a way to open the door to consulting services.

Open in the Google context is similar. The monetization angle is different. Google has a huge appetite for revenue. The system Google has constructed over the last 13 or so years is an expensive puppy to operate, upgrade, and maintain.

Read full post.

Phi Beta Iota: Google is the Standard Oil or Monsanto equivalent to the world of knowledge. As admirable as their computational mathematics are, they are evil polluters and manipulators of information. Google — like NSA — is not a public service operating in the public interest. It is a monopoly, a predatory monopoly with zero ethics that will eventaully have to be shut out and routed around by alternatives such as the Autonomous Internet.

See Also:

Google @ Phi Beta Iota

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SchwartzReport: Four Ways Human Health is Destroyed by Unethical Corporations and the Governments they Bribe

01 Agriculture, 03 Economy, 07 Health, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Government
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Democracy by design is a zero sum game. Elections are revolutions without the guns. Part of the problem faced by social progressives is that all too many of us have a gut rejection of reality when it is negative. In my view you can't fight a battle if you are unwilling to accurately assess the truth of the battlefield. Here is some truth.

Climate Disaster: Big Oil Is Winning the War for the Future
MICHAEL T. KLARE, Professor of Peace and World security Studies at Hampshire College – Salon

Yet another story are the corruption of our food system. I have begun to think of much of the food in the U.S. as a toxin to be avoided.

Five Messed-Up Things That Are in Your Food
MARTHA ROSENBERG – Truthout

1. Azodicarbonamide in Bread
2. Plastic Microbeads in Fish and Waterways
3. Brominated Vegetable Oil in Soft Drinks and Beverages
4. High Fructose Corn Syrup and Artificial Sweeteners in Soft Drinks
5. Transglutaminase Also Known as “Meat Glue”

Finally, it is becoming impossible to deny that the industrial chemicals that pollute every aspect of our lives are the source many illnesses. Everything shouts to us that we must make national wellness, from the individual to the planet our first priority. Whether we can hear these cries is not clear, at least to me.

Scientists Name 6 More Toxins Affecting Developing Brains
DELTHIA RICKS – Newsday

Where I live about half the women I know live on Gluten-free diets. Here is the back story. It is another tale of corners cut in the name of increased profit and decreased national wellness. Happily the story not only explains something, it provides a solution.

Could This Baker Solve the Gluten Mystery?
TOM PHILPOTT – Mother Jones

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Berto Jongman: GAO – U.S. intelligence agencies can’t justify why they use so many contractors

Corruption, Government, Ineptitude
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Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

GAO – U.S. intelligence agencies can’t justify why they use so many contractors

Brian Fung

Washington Post, 14 February 2014

Private contractors play a huge role in the government, particularly in civilian intelligence services like the CIA. Contracting critics say it's an addiction whose overhead costs drive up the federal budget and leads to data breaches like the kind perpetrated by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

In the wake of last year's NSA revelations, many agencies have been reviewing their contracting policies. But few people have a good grasp on just how many contractors the government employs. What's worse, the country's eight civilian intelligence agencies often can't sufficiently explain what they use those contractors for, according to a Government Accountability Office report.

Every year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is supposed to count how many contractors serve the intelligence community (IC). Due to differences in the way intelligence agencies define and assess their workers, however, the data are inconsistent and in some places incomplete. Out of hundreds of agency records, for example, GAO found that almost a fifth lacked enough paperwork to prove how much a contractor was paid. Another fifth of the records were found to have either over-reported or under-reported the actual cost of the contract work.

But the GAO reserves its harshest judgment for the agencies that couldn't fully explain why they resorted to contractors in the first place.

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Mini-Me: BENGHAZI – Hillary Lied, CIA Complied?

Corruption, Government, Ineptitude
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Who? Mini-Me?
Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

Did CIA official suppress Benghazi narrative? Accounts raise new questions

FoxNews.com, 14 February 2014

Then-Deputy Director Mike Morell, whose own agency lost two employees at Benghazi, former Navy Seals Ty Woods and Glen Doherty, was heavily involved in editing the administration’s internal narrative on what happened – known as the “talking points” – which served as the basis for then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice’s controversial claims about a protest on the Sunday talk shows after the attack.

According to the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report on Benghazi, on Sept. 15, four days after the attack and one day before Rice’s appearance, the CIA's most senior operative on the ground in Libya emailed Morell and others at the agency that the attack was “not/not an escalation of protests.”

Continue reading “Mini-Me: BENGHAZI – Hillary Lied, CIA Complied?”