Circulating among retired SOF via email.
Marcus Aurelius: POTUS on Syria (Cartoons)
Offbeat FunBerto Jongman: Twitter and the Transformation of Democracy
Collective Intelligence, Ethics, Idiocy, IO Impotency
Twitter and the transformation of democracy
The social networking service has the power to control the expression of public opinion in political debate
The news that Twitter has taken the first steps towards a stock marketflotation has triggered a predictable storm of speculation about the valuation of the company. How much is a corporation with 200 million monthly users actually worth? How does it compare with Facebook, with its billion users?
The answer is: nobody knows. But that doesn't matter because it's not the important question. Although Twitter and Facebook are categorised as social networking services, in fact they are as different as chalk and cheese. And, of the two, Twitter is more important in one respect: its impact on the arena in which societies discuss their political issues.
Phi Beta Iota: Not so fast, Cantinflas! Twitter is stupid….Kum Ba Ya on steroids, which is to say, lots and lots of people holding each others hands digitally, but all largely unintelligent in the decision-support sense of the word. Yes, Twitter has the ability to harness collective intelligence, but when that collective intelligence is drugged up, dumbed down, clueless on true cost economics, and largely devoid of ethical holistic understanding of systems dynamics, cause and effect, and so forth, Twitter has to be considered the equivalent of a billion drunk teen-agers all trying to drive the same car via a shared joy-stick. Without an honest Wikipedia and an honest Google (just to be explicit, both corrupt to the bone), Twitter is noise.
Graphic: Global Unions (versus Global Networks or Global Confederations)
Advanced Cyber/IO, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics
Phi Beta Iota: This simple graphic has enormous implications for the evolving craft of intelligence (decision-support). When considered in relation to absolute scale limits on the depletion of non-renewable resources, and the absolute valuation of diversity of life forms, it recasts how “truth” should be considered in the context of the whole, distinguishing between truth for the whole versus truth for the individual and truth for the nation-centric collective. This is a variation of the discovery made by Robert Steele when he co-founded the Marine Corps Intelligence Center and led the study on planning and programming factors for expeditionary operations in the third world: the threat changes depending on the level of analysis. This degree of sophistication and accomplished holistic reasoning is not yet present in any intelligence community that we know of.
See Also:
Source: 2012 PREPRINT: The Evolving Craft of Intelligence 3.5
Source: Graphic: Threat Level Changes Depending on the Level of Analysis
Jean Lievens: Creating Global Unions Crossing All Boundaries
Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Peace Intelligence
Discussing Global Unionism II: The Social Network Model
Below we are re-posting the second paper of the very timely discussion on how to form truly global unions -instead of international federation of national unions. The discussion has been recently launched by the New Unionism Network and you can read other papers here.
The union movement and FaceBook are about the same size, as of October 2012. That’s about one billion members, or one seventh of the world’s population[1]. It’s a milestone that has attracted very little attention because, frankly, the comparison ends there.
But why?
In this discussion the author argues for a new type of social networking — one which takes great care to protect the user while actively promoting honesty and openness. This combination of safety and collegiality is vital if working people are to build international networks; it is all too easy to forget the real hazards faced by many who need a collective voice. Adding a social network layer to our existing model of unionism would also create a horizontal base, and bring tremendous new strength to the existing vertical structures.
Unlike FaceBook, the union movement grew organically, almost always in the face of resistance. The “new unionism” of the late 19th century ushered in an age of industrial unions, and by the beginning of the 20th century we were uniting workers and federating their unions along regional, sectoral and national lines. The first experiments with international structures began to appear in the very earliest years of the twentieth century. Back then, comparisons with FaceBook might have made sense.
Berto Jongman Et Al: NSA & Digital Malfeasance
Ethics, IO ImpotencyCloud Services Cannot Be Trusted
Data Brokers — Opening the Kimono
How NSA Puts All of Us (and US Commerce & Technology) At Risk
NSA Not Behind the Diginotar Hack
NSA Undermining Internet Security
USG (NIST) Warns Against Using USG (NSA) Weakened Encryption
US Standards Agency Strongly Suggests Dropping Its Own Encryption Standard
Berto Jongman Et Al: Syria Round-Up 7.4
08 Wild Cards, EthicsNEW IN BOLD
4th Media: AP Sources: CIA Delivering Light Weapons to Syria
4th Media: Preempting The Next Round of Lies Against Syria
Berto Jongman: 10,000 Foreign Fighters in Syria
Berto Jongman: Agreement on Destruction of Syrian CW
Berto Jongman: Brown Moses on Chemical Munitions
Berto Jongman: Developments on the Ground in Syria
Berto Jongman: FBI files reveal al-Qaeda leader invited to visit Pentagon (Text +Video)
Marcus Aurelius: Al Qaeda Calls for Attacks Within USA
09 Terrorism
Personal view–cannot confirm or refute press report below but certainly think it's possible, if not by AQ, then by Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (Quds Force) or by Lebanese Hezbollah. There is a war going on in northern Mexico over control of drug smuggling routes into United States. Narcos and terrorists have worked together previously in LATAM and I think we almost have to expect that AQ. IRGC/QF, and LH are working hard to exploit drug channels to insert assets into US. Again, cannot confirm or refute but personally believe possible.
NewsmaxWorld
Al-Qaida Chief Zawahiri Calls for Attacks Inside the US
Friday, September 13, 2013 03:44 AM
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri urged small-scale attacks inside the United States to “bleed America economically,” adding he hoped eventually to see a more significant strike, according to the SITE monitoring service.
In an audio speech released online a day after the 12th anniversary of the 9/11 strikes, Zawahiri said attacks “by one brother or a few of the brothers” would weaken the U.S. economy by triggering big spending on security, SITE reported.
Western counter-terrorism chiefs have warned that radicalized “lone wolves” who might have had no direct contact with al-Qaida posed as great a risk as those who carried out complex plots like the 9/11 attacks.
“We should bleed America economically by provoking it to continue in its massive expenditure on its security, for the weak point of America is its economy, which has already begun to stagger due to the military and security expenditure,” Zawahiri said.
