Charles Faddis: The United States of Common Sense

TODAY’s INTERVIEW:  Elena Panaritis on Cyprus Elena Panaritis is an institutional economist, property rights expert, and social entrepreneur. In more than a decade as an economist at the World Bank, Panaritis spearheaded several institutional reforms, particularly property rights reform in Peru. Her book Prosperity Unbound: Building Property Markets with Trust recounts her experience and expounds …

Worth a Look: Books on Open Source

2013 Bazzell, Michael (2013).  Open Source Intelligence Techniques: Resources for Searching and Analyzing Online Information.  CreateSpace. 4.0 out of 5 stars A Useful Contribution–See the Table of Contents January 30, 2013 Garbutt, John (2013). Building an OpenStack Cloud: From zero to the cloud with open source technologies.  O’Reilly Media. Publication Date: August 22, 2013 There …

Winslow Wheeler: GAO (A Legislative Entity) Plays Courtesan to Lockheed, DoD, and the Congressional Recipients of Lockheed Largesse + F-35 RECAP

DOD is circling the wagons to keep the F-35 propped up in the declining Pentagon budget.  Importantly, as noted by a prime Lockheed mouthpiece offering his thankfulness for it, GAO’s newest report on the F-35 offers a conclusion that the F-35 is on track for improvement–the data notwithstanding.  In point of fact, what the GAO conclusion …

Chuck Spinney: The Mind of the Decider — Ignorance Plus Arrogance — Disconnected from Reality While All Others Buried Their Integrity

NATIONAL SECURITY Iraq Invasion Anniversary: Inside The Decider’s Head By Chuck Spinney, March 22, 2013 [note: a shorter version of this essay also appeared in Counterpunch here] In the summer of 2002, during the lead up to the Iraq War, a White House official expressed displeasure about with article written by journalist Ron Suskind in Esquire. He asserted people like Suskind were trapped “in …

David Isenberg: GWOT Has Shredded CIA’s Focus and Utility – Plus Renaissance References

Intelligence WOT distorting focus, resource allocation of U.S. intelligence community: experts The U.S. Intelligence Advisory Board, a panel of fourteen highly regarded and experienced experts, many of whom past holder of high-level national security positions, has submitted a secret report to President Obama in which they say that the intense, 12-year focus of the intelligence …

CIA’s CTO Gus Hunt On Big Data: We ‘Try To Collect Everything And Hang Onto It Forever’ — And a Few Things Most CTOs Do Not Compute

CIA’s Gus Hunt On Big Data: We ‘Try To Collect Everything And Hang Onto It Forever’ NEW YORK — The CIA’s chief technology officer outlined the agency’s endless appetite for data in a far-ranging speech on Wednesday. VIDEO 28:30 Speaking before a crowd of tech geeks at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference in New York City, CTO …