Au moment où vous lisez ces lignes, une cinquantaine d’invitations sont en train d’arriver chez des membres de la société civile: organisations de citoyens, syndicales, d’entreprises, chez des chercheurs, des journalistes spécialisés. des élus du gouvernement et de l’opposition.
Ils sont invités par mon collègue des Finances Nicolas Marceau et moi-même à un exercice de transparence.
Au cours des prochaines semaines, la négociation visant un accord de libre-échange dit de « nouvelle génération » entre le Canada et l’Europe pourrait arriver à destination. Fortement initié par l’ex Premier ministre Jean Charest, l’accord a été négocié depuis deux ans dans une relative opacité, soulevant craintes et grincements de la part de plusieurs, y compris de l’opposition péquiste.
The state and local fusion centers supported by the Department of Homeland Security have produced little intelligence of value and have generated new concerns involving waste and abuse, according to an investigative report from the Senate Homeland Security Committee Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. (NYT, WP)
“It's troubling that the very ‘fusion' centers that were designed to share information in a post-9/11 world have become part of the problem. Instead of strengthening our counterterrorism efforts, they have too often wasted money and stepped on Americans' civil liberties,” said Senator Tom Coburn, the ranking member of the Subcommittee who initiated the investigation.
While it may not be the last word on the subject, the new Subcommittee report is a rare example of congressional oversight in the classical mode. It was performed by professional investigators over a two-year period. It encountered and overcame agency resistance and non-cooperation. And it uncovered — and published — significant new information that demands an executive branch response. That's the way the system is supposed to work.
Imagine having all the downsides of Big Brother and none of the benefits: That's what you get with the Department of Homeland Security's vast network of “fusion” centers, according to a damning new report by the Senate's bipartisan Subcommittee on Investigations.
The fusion centers, described by Janet Napolitano as “one of the centerpieces of our counterterrorism strategy,” allegedly invade the privacy of Americans while producing “shoddy” reports that are typically “irrelevant” and “useless.” It's the sort of report that will find a home on every Ron Paul fan forum and, according to reporters, with good reason: The 77 centers, which have cost an estimated $289 million to $1.4 billion, have a pretty questionable track record. Here are some of the more surprising elements journalists have dug up from the report:
(NOTE: In this essay I intentionally subsume the thinking processes of official decision-makers into the thinking processes of the citizenry as a whole. I realize that official decision-makers can and do make decisions independently of the will of the people, unless that public will is united and organized. But elite decisions made independently of the public do not qualify as “public thinking” – at least in any democratic sense – and in this essay I am attempting to explore the nature of public thinking so that it can be upgraded and empowered to impact public policy. So here we will look at the thinking processes of the entire population and mini-publics thereof as they go about living a relatively democratic life.)
How can we think clearly about the collective thinking processes of a whole population in a democracy? How do populations reflect on public issues and come to conclusions about collective action and public policy? What follows is one framework for sorting out the different dimensions of public thinking and the quality of that thinking process.
Click on Image to Enlarge
The most basic form of public thinking is, of course, what goes on in the minds of individual citizens as they think about public affairs. We see manifestations of this – commonly called “public opinion” – in polls, in voting, in online “citizen input” sites, and in various other visible forms of citizenship that reflect the opinions of individual citizens in the population as a whole.
Public opinion evolves in a message-rich environment that includes – at the next higher level of public thinking – news media and commentaries from pundits and partisans, on talk shows and blogs, and in online forums, letters to the editor, and public hearings. This public thinking often takes the form of mediated or witnessed conversations: Diverse (often polarized) voices express their views to each other while being directly or indirectly witnessed by the public. Our society depends heavily on this kind of media-driven interaction to collectively reflect on its public issues and shape the views of its citizens and decision-makers.
Americans have been repeatedly told a series of lies about accommodating renewables onto the power grid: That it can’t handle large amounts of intermittent power generation. That standby fossil-fueled capacity must be maintained at 100 percent of demand for those times when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. That brownouts and blackouts will inevitably result from depending on renewables. That nuclear is the only power source that can meet our needs in the future. And so on.
Europeans beg to differ.
An August 31 article by James Conca in Forbes (”Germany — Insane or Just Plain Stupid?“) regurgitated these hoary tropes, claiming that Germany’s decision to shut down nuclear plants and transition to renewables was a colossal mistake, because “the grid can’t handle it, the transmission system is not there, and the power disruptions and brownouts are wreaking havoc on the country’s energy reliability.”
The fact is that none of what is happening in Germany fits what Americans think, and the only regular source of news from Germany in English is Spiegel Online, a laughable source of energy news (the Forbes article cites Spiegel). Germany is switching to renewables quickly, without raising its carbon emissions, with probably the most reliable grid in the world, on a market with freedoms Americans don’t even know they lack, with a job market that continues to strengthen (even during the ongoing economic crisis), and in combination with a nuclear phaseout. None of this makes sense to Americans, who respond not by accepting the facts and changing their minds but by getting the picture wrong.
Morris highlighted a 2010 study I mentioned in March (”Why baseload power is doomed“), which found that nuclear power plants are fundamentally “incompatible with renewable energies.” Because renewables enjoy priority dispatch on the grid, conventional generators need to be cut back when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining. Older nuclear and coal power plants, which cannot be ramped up and down easily, are ill-suited to a grid with large amounts of variable renewable power.
Morris proceeded to dismantle the reliability argument, pointing out that instead of power disruptions, Germany’s grid is now the most reliable of the EU member states.
Phi Beta Iota: The article focuses on macro or nation-wide grids. The other half of the renewables coin is at the micro-level — self-sufficient neighborhoods focused on optimization of localized wind, solar, and biomass.
Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is predominantly a Human Intelligence (HUMINT) endeavor. The US Government (USG) has not only failed to be serious about OSINT (and thereby deliberately foresaken all possibilities of doing intelligence with integrity for Whole of Government), but it appears to have eliminated all possibilities for OSINT progress by eliminating all positions with any form of integrity, and relegating OSINT back to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) where OSINT is known at “Open Sores.”
Anyone who focues on tools for data collection in the OSINT world gets a failing grade. 80% or more of the needed OSINT is not online. Apart from the fact that the USG still has not taken Deep Web seriously, contenting itself with the 2% covered by the various search engines (selected deep penetrations not-withstanding, most not processed, just collected), the USG has also failed to be serious about “full-spectrum HUMINT” which is the primary channel to OSINT that is relevant, not online, and not expensive.
