Public Intelligence Blog – Page 2567 – The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.

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Peter Gill and Mark Phythian

4.0 out of 5 stars Best in Class Strongly Recommended, January 6, 2013

I am a huge fan of Peter Gill's work, and if you are looking for the best possible to reflect on intelligence as it is generally defined today (the province of governments and to a lesser extent the corporate world), this is both the most recent and the best book to get. I also recommend Mark Lowenthal's Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy, 5th Edition.

Use Look Inside feature above to get a feel for the book. Of all the books I have reviewed, this is the one that comes closest to my own concept for a book I am working on now, and I very much like the manner in which the authors have organized the work, to include their section on “Why Does Intelligence Fail,” which happens to be what I have been focusing on since 1988.

Where the book fails, as do all books in this genre, is in not acknowledging that intelligence is decision support defined by its outputs, not its inputs. This is a book that is still state-centric, assumes secrecy is a dominant force, and that policy is the intended beneficiary. It does at least make a stab at acknowledging corporate intelligence, but see my list of recommended readings below. More properly understood, decision-support is a craft that can be applied by all eight “tribes” of intelligence (academic, civil society, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-governmental/non-profit), and our greatest challenge today is the need to move beyond the government-secret-policy view of intelligence, and instead advance toward M4IS2 (see the graphic above with the book cover), Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making.

Continue reading “Review: Intelligence in an Insecure World”

2013/01/062013/01/08

Review: Improving Intelligence Analysis: Bridging the Gap between Scholarship and Practice

4 Star, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Intelligence (Commercial), Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public)

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Stephen Marrin

4.0 out of 5 stars Analysis in Isolation from Reality, January 6, 2013

This book is insanely expensive. The author of the book has material published online that I recommend be accessed and considered before making any investment here. One starting point is my list to 2011 article and my lengthy comment, easily found by looking for

Stephen Marrin: Evaluating the Quality of Intelligence Analysis: By What (Mis) Measure? With Comment by Robert Steele

This is a book, that like economists trapped on a desert island with a can of food and no can-opener, begin their plan with “assume a can-opener.” Now having said that, I must also give the author credit: this is as good as it gets at the PhD level when writing in isolation from decades of experience. This is the “clean room” version of the craft of analysis.

Here is a short extract from my review of the article that was built into this book:

ROBERT STEELE: Interesting, certainly worth reading, but divorced from the fundamentals and out of touch with the real masters. Any publication that fails to cite Jack Davis, the dean of analytic tradecraft in the English language, is fatally flawed. Of course it would help if one were also in touch with the “new rules for the new craft of intelligence,” but that may be too much to expect from a junior academic with limited real-world analytic experience who seems intent on citing only “approved” sources-a lack of source integrity that is also fatal. The article assumes that the four preconditions for sound analytics exist, and since they do not, at least in the US and UK and most other government intelligence communities, it is necessary to spell them out. Analysts are toads absent the following:

Continue reading “Review: Improving Intelligence Analysis: Bridging the Gap between Scholarship and Practice”

2013/01/062013/01/06

Berto Jongman: Jared Diamond’s Books Summarized

Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence

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Focused on new book, but in passing provides very good summaries of past books.

Jared Diamond: what we can learn from tribal life

The west's dwindling connection with the natural world puts it in increasing peril, says the distinguished anthropologist in his new book. Many of the practices of tribal cultures can help us to rediscover our way, he argues – from respecting the environment to letting toddlers play with knives

EXTRACT

Since moving to LA, Diamond has produced a series of books that have propelled him to fame. The first, The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, appeared in 1992, its title referring to Homo sapiens, who are depicted by Diamond as a species of chimpanzee that is increasingly out of kilter with the natural world, particularly since the invention of agriculture, “a catastrophe from which we have never recovered”. With the arrival of farming, Diamond argues, women were subjected to domestic drudgery; people started to hoard resources and wealth; and our proximity to animals triggered disease epidemics that still threaten to overwhelm us. “With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence,” he states. The Third Chimpanzee won the Royal Society prize for science books that year.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Jared Diamond's Books Summarized”

2013/01/06

Berto Jongman: Perceptions of USA as a Police State

10 Security, 11 Society

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Sorcha Fall is a known disinformation source for provocative interpretations of current events.

Obama Death Squads Fan Out Across America As Rebellion Looms

EXTRACT

The “death squads” being deployed throughout the United States under Obama’s orders, this memo continues, are frighteningly called VIPER teams, which is the acronym for Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response Team, a programme run by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and whose agents terrify millions of Americans with Nazi-like Gestapo tactics on a daily basis at airports and who report to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

So frightening have these TSA agents become that London’s Guardian News Service, this past April, in their article titled “The TSA's Mission Creep is Making the US a Police State,” warned that these Obama regime henchmen are spreading out across the entire United States in order to control every aspect of American citizens life… “never in response to actual threats, but apparently more in an attempt to live up to the inspirational motto displayed at the TSA's air marshal training center since the agency's inception: “Dominate. Intimidate. Control.”

And to how these TSA VIPER Team “death squads” will “dominate, intimidate and control” dissident Americans, this memo says, was made even more chillingly clear this past week when the DHS ordered another 200,000 rounds of hollow point ammunition on top of the 1.6 billion rounds of this internationally banned ammunition already secured by them over the last 9 months alone. These nearly 2 billion rounds of ammunition stand in sharp contrast to US military forces who use only 70 million rounds of ammunition per year in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Phi Beta Iota: Analysts of this situation must distinguish between normal bureaucratic mission creep and special interest “grow the base” imperatives (bigger mission, more pork), and such hidden agendas as may or may not be in existence.

2013/01/06

Sepp Hasslberger: Wireless Charging of Electric Bus

05 Energy

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University Uses Tesla Technology to Wirelessly Charge Electric Bus

Utah State University presented a first-of-its-kind electric bus that is charged through wireless charging technology in a demonstration Nov. 15, 2012.

The Aggie Bus rolled onto the streets carrying passengers today; just 16 months after USU demonstrated the first high-power, high-efficiency wireless power transfer system capable of transferring enough energy to quickly charge an electric vehicle. In July 2011, the USU Research Foundation demonstrated 90 percent electrical transfer efficiency of five kilowatts over an air gap of 10 inches. The demonstration validated that electric vehicles can efficiently be charged with wireless technology.

. . . . . . . . .

USU’s Aggie Bus has achieved several significant milestones. It is the first bus developed and designed by a North American organization that is charged with wireless power transfer technology and is the world’s first electric bus with WPT technology combining the three following performance metrics: A power level up to 25 kilowatts, greater than 90 percent efficiency from the power grid to the battery and a maximum misalignment of up to six inches.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: “Low” technologies capable of providing free power and clean water to the masses have been repressed for decades. They are finally creeping out of their corporate patent prisons. Free localized energy and wireless energy recharging of free cell phones (OpenBTS) are the first priority. Everything else follows from those two.

2013/01/06

SchwartzReport: 2012 Summary of Mainstream Media Malpractice and Self-Censorship

Corruption, Media

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2012: Another Year in Mainstream Media Malpractice

amerigus Monday December 31, 2012

As we ring in 2013, it’s time to recognize how the major media buries the issues most important to Americans. With newsrooms focusing so much right now on the fiscal cliff and gun rights, it’s instructive to see nobody looking at the heart of either issue.

But even bigger issues face us, now in the fifth year of prolonged recession and the second decade of a debt-fueled war on terror. It’s more evident each year how “professional” journalists are unable or unwilling to report on reality-based news, making them ever more feeble.

The major media is not useless to you just because of billionaire ownership, it’s also the non-disclosure clauses in contracts that prevent anchors or reporters from telling the story behind the story. Final editorial control over what goes out over the air causes major behind-the-scenes conflict. Even when marquee names try to blow the whistle, the contractual gags always hold in the end.

List Only (Commentary for Each in Article):
The Fiscal Cliff
Gun Control
Obama's Non-Prosecution of Fraud
Industry Ads Trump Science in Hydrofracking Debate
FCC Unaware of Federal Communications Law
Top Media Covers Up for the “ACORN Pimp”
Ignoring the Bigger Picture: Our Constitution Under Attack
The Sixth Amendment
The First Amendment
The Fourth Amendment
“Sons of Citizens United” Creeping in Every Direction

I Said It Last Year And I’ll Say It Again This Year
I’m not sure what you saw, read or wrote that was under-reported in media this year, but feel free to share it in the comments below.

I’ll bet however, that regardless what your foremost burning issue is, whether it’s war, income disparity, health care, energy, the environment, education, civil liberties, corporate personhood, food safety, human rights, LGBT equality or anything else, I guarantee the problem stems from the bigger issue of money in politics and cannot be fixed until our elections are fixed first.

Read full article.

2013/01/05

Theophillis Goodyear: Short-term Adaptation Can Be Long-Term Maladaptation

Resilience

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It occurred to me as I was reading Beatrice Benne's article, “Demystifying Pattern(s) of Change: A Common Archetype,” that America is facing calamity now because we've been so wildly successful at going through the adaptive change cycle, over and over. But the successes were short-term, and now all these short-term successes are adding up to a dead-end long-term strategy.

So it's not only important to successfully adapt, it's also important how you adapt. It's not only change itself but the quality of change that's important; and we can only measure quality by thinking in eons rather than years, decades, and centuries. Today's joyous rebirth can be tomorrow's problem child.

So Benne's patterns made me think of fractals because fractals repeat patterns in successively larger scales. Short-term patterns add up to larger long-term patterns. So successful change, in and of itself, can be extremely misleading. Of course this is common knowledge to systems thinkers.

It's the success of humans that is killing us as a species. We're similar to the rabbit plague of Australia. We have no natural predators to speak of except for our own species.

But the main point I wanted to make about the patterns illustrated in Beatrice Benne's article, is that each pattern can be a small section of a larger fractal pattern. Short-term successes can be collectively heading to long-term failure.

So the kind of insights required to solve short-term problems are often not enough. We need to start seeing these short-term patterns as small waves adding up to form a larger wave. And of course that's exactly what systems thinkers are doing. But sometimes it's good to state the obvious out loud.

Phi Beta Iota: In order words, the corruption of short-term deal-making is the cancer of long-term resilience. We've not only eaten our seed corn, we've been crapping in our water well.