Citation: Robert David STEELE Vivas, “Graphic: Nine HUMINT/OSINT Circles,” Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, 17 December 2012
This corrects the earlier oversight of not integrating education & training (our first defense and our most reliable eyes and ears are our own people), along with research & development, must be fully integrated with, not isolated from, the fifteen slices of Human Intelligence (HUMINT) / Open Source Intelligence (OSINT).
This piece quotes Charlie extensively and generally he is supportive of the concept, but noted that it would require strong leadership from the DCI and that a new “business model” for intelligence would be needed. He warned that:
“Specifically, the data connectivity requirements will be huge, Allen said. The intelligence community already has a prodigious appetite for data of all kinds, from live streaming video from unmanned aerial vehicles to signal and data intercepts. All of this data must be collected, processed and analyzed quickly to make operational decisions, he said.”
What he is obliquely referring to is that the inter and intra IT infrastructures of the intelligence agencies are not up to dealing with the volume of data that will be made available through cloud technology. This was the case ten years ago and I suspect the situaiton has not changed.
At that time the scientific advisory board of SSCI warned that NSA's iT infrastructure was “falling apart” and that a major collapse was coming (which is exactly what happened). And NSA had an IT infrastructure better than any other intelligence agency or FBI. Allen knows about this and the processing problems that continue to plague the NSA.
Parts of the intelligence community's cloud effort have reached an initial operating capability, mostly the CIA and NSA portions, but he said the entire system won't be fully operational for at least another five years.
In my “quickie” article published less than an hour after the news broke about the Connecticut school shooting, I tried to inject some historical context into the discussion – and do it as fast as possible. Since we know that many if not most “lone nut” massacres are actually false-flag operations, we might as well assume that this one is too. Getting that message out early, in order to shape public opinion while it is still malleable, should be a top priority of everyone who wants to put the real terrorists out of business.
THEN we can get around to picking apart the details. Enter Lori Price and Clare Kuehn.
Lori Price of Citizens for Legitimate Government quickly and brilliantly deconstructs false-flag massacres. If you are going to subscribe to one email news service, other than VT, it should be CLG News.
Lori asks a very good question here: Was Adam Lanza’s internet record scrubbed?
The ongoing spat between the cyber community and the United Nation’s International Telecommunications Union (ITU) reveals a much larger crisis that the world is increasingly facing – the crisis of the legitimacy of representation.
The UN and the Internet are arguably two of humanity’s greatest accomplishments of the 20th century: both bring the world closer by facilitating dialogue and though each has its flaws most would agree that the world is a better place because of their creation.
With so much in common then, why do the two communities find themselves embroiled in conflict?
The underlying issue, I would argue, is that in the same way the United Nations changed the world’s expectations around how problems are solved, so too is the Internet in bringing about a sea change in how citizens expect to be represented in both government and markets.
The UN was designed based on the principle of representative government. As citizens, our voices are represented via a proxy delegate appointed by the proxy government charged with representing our will.
This system, when implemented well, has succeeded in reducing violent conflict, increasing qualities of life and reducing civil strife by empowering citizens with the means to provide an input into their governance.
The digital revolution and direct popular representation
The conflict we’re beginning to see comes from the fact that the tools of the Internet are enabling individuals to represent themselves in conversations previously managed by proxy representatives.
PARIS — A European court issued a landmark ruling Thursday that condemned the CIA's “extraordinary renditions” programs and bolstered those who say they were illegally kidnapped and tortured as part of an overzealous war on terrorism.
The European Court of Human Rights ruled that a German car salesman was an innocent victim of torture and abuse, in a long-awaited victory for a man who had failed for years to get courts in the U.S. and Europe to acknowledge what happened to him.
Khaled El-Masri says he was kidnapped from Macedonia in 2003, mistaken for a terrorism suspect, then held for four months and brutally interrogated at an Afghan prison known as the “Salt Pit” run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. He says that once U.S. authorities realized he was not a threat, they illegally sent him to Albania and left him on a mountainside.
Khaled El-Masri
The European court, based in Strasbourg, France, ruled that El-Masri's account was “established beyond reasonable doubt” and that Macedonia “had been responsible for his torture and ill-treatment both in the country itself and after his transfer to the U.S. authorities in the context of an extra-judicial rendition.”
It said the government of Macedonia violated El-Masri's rights repeatedly and ordered it to pay (EURO)60,000 ($78,500) in damages. Macedonia's Justice Ministry said it would enforce the court ruling and pay El-Masri the damages.
U.S. officials closed internal investigations into the El-Masri case two years ago, and the administration of President Barack Obama has distanced itself from some counterterrorism activities conducted under former President George W. Bush.
But several other legal cases are pending from Britain to Hong Kong involving people who say they were illegally detained in the CIA program. Its critics hope that Thursday's ruling will lead to court victories for other rendition victims and prevent future abuses.
Syria today resembles Iraq nine years ago in another disturbing respect. I have now been in Damascus for 10 days, and every day I am struck by the fact that the situation in areas of Syria I have visited is wholly different from the picture given to the world both by foreign leaders and by the foreign media. The last time I felt like this was in Baghdad in late 2003, when every Iraqi knew the US-led occupation was proving a disaster just as George W Bush, Tony Blair and much of the foreign media were painting a picture of progress towards stability and democracy under the wise tutelage of Washington and its carefully chosen Iraqi acolytes.
The picture of Syria most common believed abroad is of the rebels closing in on the capital as the Assad government faces defeat in weeks or, at most, a few months. The Secretary General of Nato, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said last week that the regime is “approaching collapse”. The foreign media consensus is that the rebels are making sweeping gains on all fronts and the end may be nigh. But when one reaches Damascus, it is to discover that the best informed Syrians and foreign diplomats say, on the contrary, that the most recent rebel attacks in the capital had been thrown back by a government counteroffensive.