Public Intelligence Blog – Page 2517 – The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.

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Why The Elite Would Lose a Civil War

“Despite the fact that the banking elite wants to generate riots and stir social disorder in order to collapse the U.S. economy so they can buy up real assets on the cheap, if such chaos was to spill over into a full blown civil war, the consequences for the technocrats would be disastrous… In reality, even if a tiny minority of armed Americans chose to resist government oppression – the odds would be stacked hugely in their favor. Consider the fact that there are almost 100 million gun owners in the United States, who in total own over 300 million firearms and rising. There are only around 1.4 million active duty personnel in the entire US military – that includes the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard. Even if you include national guard reserves, the total figure is less than 2.3 million. Even if just five per cent of American gun owners actively resisted in a civil war, that would be five million Americans – more than double the entire US military and national guard, many of whom are already engaged overseas. So even if the government used the military to fire upon U.S. citizens, the troops would be easily outnumbered.”

This part of the article reminds one of John Robb's super-empowered global guerilla*:

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2013/02/152013/02/15

Jock Gill: CIA as the Good Guys — From Seymour Hersh!

Ethics, Government

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Annals of National Security

The Gray Zone

How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib

by Seymour M. Hersh

The New Yorker, 24 May 2004

EXTRACT

By fall, according to the former intelligence official, the senior leadership of the C.I.A. had had enough. “They said, ‘No way. We signed up for the core program in Afghanistan—pre-approved for operations against high-value terrorist targets—and now you want to use it for cabdrivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets’ ”—the sort of prisoners who populate the Iraqi jails. “The C.I.A.’s legal people objected,” and the agency ended its sap involvement in Abu Ghraib, the former official said.

The C.I.A.’s complaints were echoed throughout the intelligence community. There was fear that the situation at Abu Ghraib would lead to the exposure of the secret sap, and thereby bring an end to what had been, before Iraq, a valuable cover operation. “This was stupidity,” a government consultant told me. “You’re taking a program that was operating in the chaos of Afghanistan against Al Qaeda, a stateless terror group, and bringing it into a structured, traditional war zone. Sooner or later, the commandos would bump into the legal and moral procedures of a conventional war with an Army of a hundred and thirty-five thousand soldiers.”

The former senior intelligence official blamed hubris for the Abu Ghraib disaster. “There’s nothing more exhilarating for a pissant Pentagon civilian than dealing with an important national security issue without dealing with military planners, who are always worried about risk,” he told me. “What could be more boring than needing the coöperation of logistical planners?” The only difficulty, the former official added, is that, “as soon as you enlarge the secret program beyond the oversight capability of experienced people, you lose control. We’ve never had a case where a special-access program went sour—and this goes back to the Cold War.”

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2013/02/15

Rickard Falkvinge: Swarmwise – Tactical Manual for Changing the World – Chapter One

Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, P2P / Panarchy, Politics

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Swarmwise – The Tactical Manual To Changing The World. Chapter One.

Swarm Management: Somewhere today, a loose-knit group of activists who are having fun is dropkicking a rich, established organization so hard they are making heads spin. Rich and resourceful organizations are used to living by the golden rule – “those with the gold make the rules”. New ways of organizing go beyond just breaking the old rules into downright shredding them – leaving executives in the dust, wondering how that band of poor, rag-tag, disorganized activists could possibly have beaten their rich, well-structured organization.

On June 7, 2009, the Swedish Pirate Party got 225,915 votes in the European Elections, becoming the largest party in the most coveted sub-30 demographic. Our campaign budget was 50,000 euros. Our competitors had spent six million. We had spent less than one per cent of their budget, and still beat them, giving us a cost-efficiency advantage of over two orders of magnitude. This was entirely due to working swarmwise, and the methods can translate to almost any organized large-scale activity. This book is about that secret sauce.

A swarm organization is a decentralized, collaborative effort of volunteers that looks like a hierarchical, traditional organization from the outside. It is built by a small core of people that construct a scaffolding of go-to people, enabling a large number of volunteers to cooperate on a common goal in quantities of people not possible before the net was available.

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2013/02/15

SchwartzReport: Smart Sea versus Corporate Dark Money

11 Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Earth Intelligence, IO Deeds of War

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Little by little science is showing us that all life is interconnected and interdependent, refuting the corporate exploiters' proposition that nature is just an unconscious bank account of resources. This is one of the major reasons the Right's disinformation machine has sought to unde! rmine a fact based world.

Could the Sea Be Conscious? Research Reveals how Tiny Plankton Behave Like a Marine ‘Megamind'
DAMIEN GAYLE – The Mail (U.K.)

versus

This is why the U.S. has been so slow to deal with climate change. This is the funding source of the disinformation campaign that has crippled good sense. This is also a significant part of the reason the Republican Party has become what it is today. Notice that once again to get an accounting of what is going on I had to go to a non-U.S. source.

Secret Funding Helped Build Vast Network of Climate Denial Thinktanks
SUZANNE GOLDENBERG, US Environment Correspondent – The Guardian (U.K.)

and

Yet another facet of the vast Far Right funding apparat that is responsible for changing the fabric of America. This is what Citizens United permitted to blossom like an evil growth.

Big Corporations Put Up Seed Funding for Republican Dark Money Group
JUSTIN ELLIOTT – Pro Publica

2013/02/152013/02/15

NIGHTWATCH: AP Discovers “Al Qaeda” Document (Only First Page) — Or A Covert Action Disinformation Document?

Corruption, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military

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Mali: Special comment. Western news reporters have discovered in Timbuktu confidential guidance documents that the fleeing jihadists failed to destroy.

On the 13th The Telegraph reported that one of its reporters had discovered some confidential documents in the building used by the jihadists in Timbuktu as their command post. One was an account of a meeting in March 2012, but only the first page survived.

According to The Telegraph, the one page document confirmed that al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb had decided to take command and control of all operations in the Sahara. The Telegraph reporter observed that al Qaida seemed to be very bureaucratic.

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2013/02/14

Yoda: Mobile Signal Crisis Only a Crisis of Integrity

Commerce, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Media

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Dark, their force is.

Mobile’s dawning signal crisis

Roland Pease

BBC, 13 February 2013

EXTRACT

To understand the scale of the problem, you only need to look at the numbers.

For example, the mobile giant Ericsson has been tracking the growth in mobile traffic for years. But 2009 was a landmark year, according to the firm’s Patrik Cerwall: “That year saw more data traffic than voice traffic over the mobile networks”. And the data traffic has been doubling every year since – far outracing Cooper’s law.

The big accelerator was the smartphone, which suddenly made the data-carrying capacity of 3G networks attractive. “People didn’t really understand the benefit of 3G until the app concept changed everything,” Cerwall elaborates.

Data-hungry video is also driving demand. Networking firm Cisco has just reported video downloads last year crossed the 50% threshold, accounting for half of all data transferred over the mobile networks.

At the moment, there are around 1.1 billion smart phones across the world; by 2018 (the horizon for the Ericsson forecasts) that will treble to 3.3 billion. If you think that in 2012, smartphones represented only 18% of total global handsets, but represented 92% of total global traffic, you begin to see the problem.

And the growth will continue relentlessly, according to the Cisco analysis. In 2012, for example, global mobile data traffic grew 70% from 2011, to 885 petabytes per month – that is 885 million gigabytes of data. And in the next five years, it is expected to increase 13-fold, eventually reaching 11.2 exabytes (11, 200 million gigabytes) per month by 2017, according to Cisco.

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2013/02/142015/05/10

Owl: Tea Party Spawned by Tobacco Years Ago, Trotted Out by Koch Brothers a Decade Later + Tea Party RECAP

Civil Society, Corruption, Government

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Study Confirms Tea Party Was Created by Big Tobacco and Billionaire Koch Brothers

“A new academic study confirms that front groups with longstanding ties to the tobacco industry and the billionaire Koch brothers planned the formation of the Tea Party movement more than a decade before it exploded onto the U.S. political scene.Far from a genuine grassroots uprising, this astroturf effort was curated by wealthy industrialists years in advance. Many of the anti-science operatives who defended cigarettes are currently deploying their tobacco-inspired playbook internationally to evade accountability for the fossil fuel industry's role in driving climate disruption. The study, funded by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institute of Health, traces the roots of the Tea Party's anti-tax movement back to the early 1980s when tobacco companies began to invest in third party groups to fight excise taxes on cigarettes, as well as health studies finding a link between cancer and secondhand cigarette smoke.

Published in the peer-reviewed academic journal, Tobacco Control, the study is titled, ‘To quarterback behind the scenes, third party efforts': the tobacco industry and the Tea Party.”

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