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Richard Wright: Proposal for an Open Source Agency

Advanced Cyber/IO, Collaboration Zones
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Richard Wright

Document (5 Pages): Richard Wright Proposal for an Open Source Agency

Proposal for an Open Source Agency

Executive Summary

This proposal argues that the strategic intelligence needs of U.S. Policy Makers, including the President and National Security Council, can best be met by establishing an independent Open Source Intelligence Agency (OSA) as recommended by the 9/11 Commission (Figure 1) but external to the secret world, under diplomatic auspices as agreed by senior staff in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

Such an agency is needed for two reasons:

First, as President Harry Truman has confirmed, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has not evolved to be what he wanted it to be – an all-source analytical service of common concern.

Second, as has been argued for decades (since the late 1960’s) by US intelligence community pioneers, and most recently in a white paper from the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA), the fact is that unless a means is found to acquire and integrate into the secret world’s intelligence process, the 80% or more information that is not secret, not in English, and not now accessed, the secret world will be even less relevant than it is now – to the point of calling into question its extraordinary budget, over $70 billion a year, that produces almost nothing for the President and nothing at all for everyone else.

An Open Source Intelligence Agency would not impact the missions and functions of existing secret intelligence agencies (CIA, DIA, NGA, NSA), but would provide a unique type of intelligence specifically tailored to the needs the senior U.S. policy making establishment.

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Chuck Spinney: Pentagon Escaping Fiscal Cuts — To No Good End

Commerce, Corruption, Government, Military
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Chuck Spinney

TIME BATTLE BLOG: MILITARY SPENDING

Business As Usual Inside Obama’s Pentagon

By Chuck Spinney, Time.com, Dec. 06, 2012

Winslow Wheeler’s three-part series on the Navy that wrapped up on Battleland Wednesday shows that the sea service is up to its old tricks.

To wit, it is impregnating President Obama’s five-year defense program by front-loading today’s budget in a way that creates irresistible pressure to grow its future budgets –even if it takes a marginal reduction in the near term.

Think of this as an emerging right to programmatic life issue, because, for reasons explained by Wheeler, abortion is out of the question, even though a programmatic miscarriage is inevitable.

Any one who doubts this, or thinks this future pathway is unlikely or accidental, need only recall the braggadocio of Ronald Reagan’s chief navy stud, Navy Secretary John Lehman, when he told a seminar in January 1983 at the Brookings Institution, that it was “too late” to stop the buildup to a 600-ship navy.

“We’ve already accomplished it,” he continued, “because we front-loaded (emphasis added) the budget.”

Predictably, Lehman’ 600-ship navy miscarried a few years later in the late 1980s in terms of fleet size, if not money.

Read full article.

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Lynn Wheler: NASA Adopts IC Security Standards, Loses 100 Scientists Doing Unclassified Work

Government, Idiocy
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Lynn Wheeler

Security Obsession Drives 100 Scientists from NASA

Top Security Clearance Needed to Help Steer the Curiosity Rover?

EXTRACT 1:

Thanks to the zealous wackos at the Department of Homeland Security, back in 2007 during the latter part of the Bush administration an order went out that all workers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena–an organization that is run under contract to NASA by the California Institute of Technology, had to be vetted for high security clearance in order to continue doing their jobs. Never mind that not one of them was or is engaged in secret activities (NASA is a rigorously non-military, scientific agency which not only publishes all its findings, but which invites the active participation of scientists from around the world). In order to continue working at JPL, even scientists who had been with NASA for decades were told they would need a high-level security badge just to enter the premises. To be issued that badge, they were told they would need to agree undergo an intensive FBI check that would look into their prior life history, right back to college.

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Dolphin: Climate Change Meme Project

03 Environmental Degradation, Crowd-Sourcing
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YARC YARC

Sort of nice, but will it scale?

Climate Meme Project

The Climate Meme Project is a crowd funded, open collaboration initiative to reveal the meme landscape for climate action.

“Our one-day elementary school project, Climate Change is Elementary, bypasses the usual negative discourse by assuming that every educated person agrees that it is a scientific “fact” that the climate is changing and that man is largely to blame.  We do not confront the deniers and skeptics, we circumvent them by taking the school family  directly to a vision of a clean and green future.  We also focus on working with the innovators, the early adopters, and the early majority, who tend to agree with us.  We ignore the late majority and the laggards, or deniers, who will only hold our program back.”

– Dave Finnigan, Founding Director

Visit web site.

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Yoda: Peter Skillen on Scaffolding for Deep (Collaborative) Understanding

Knowledge
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Got Crowd? BE the Force!

With him, force is…

Scaffolding for Deep Understanding

Posted by on Nov 30, 2012 in The How of 21st Century Teaching,

How CAN we help our students be the kind of thinkers we want?

Several years ago, my friend and colleague, @brendasherry, wrote a thoughtful post called What is Deep Understanding?  She asked several excellent questions:

  • what kind of thinkers do we want our students to be?
  • what is deep understanding?
  • can schools really provide the learning environment to nurture and develop it?

In thinking about these questions, I would like to also ask: “How can we help novice learners become more expert learners?”

Novice Learners versus Expert Learners

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Berto Jongman: Joshua Foust on Chaotic Intelligence Community

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude
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Berto Jongman

Chaotic Intelligence Community

American Security Project Flashpoint Blog

posted by Joshua Foust on December 5, 2012 at 11:56 am

The Washington Post reported over the weekend that the Pentagon is sendinghundreds of spies overseas as part of its rapid expansion into espionage- an endeavor rivaling the CIA. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) will oversee this effort, expected to top the deployment of 1,600 agents worldwide. And it is the wrong approach.

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