Mini-Me: The Bin Laden Road Show – Toward November 2012

Huh? Bin Laden’s last stand: In final months, terrorist leader worried about his legacy Joby Warrick Washington Post, April 30, 9:01 PM A few months before Osama bin Laden’s death, Web sites linked to al-Qaeda ran excited commentary about a proposed new killing machine dubbed the “human lawn mower.” The idea was to attach rotating blades to …

David Isenberg: Private Military Corporations – Chapter Twelve

Chapter 12 David Isenberg Huffington Post, 29 April 2012 After ten years of operation by private military and security (PMSC) contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq, what ethical lessons should we draw from their use? Namely, that private sector contracting has become an integral part of modern international operations, and in Afghanistan and Iraq contracting has …

David Swanson: 1939 Essay Predicted Hitler, Predicts US Dictatorship

The Global War on Terror, in the Original German By David Swanson In 1939, Sebastian Haffner sat down and wrote a pre-history of Nazism. Nazism had not been inevitable. It had not progressed steadily without setbacks. But it had been growing for many years, even before the name for it existed. It had been coming …

Chuck Spinney: US Senate Notices Next Atomic Disaster in Japan

Warning Signs for the US Why Fukushima is a Greater Disaster Than Chernobyl by ROBERT ALVAREZ, Counterpunch, APRIL 24, 2012 In the aftermath of the world’s worst nuclear power disaster, the news media is just beginning to grasp that the dangers to Japan and the rest of the world posed by the Fukushima-Dai-Ichi site are …

DefDog: Counter-IED Network Analysis – Works for Law Enforcement, Ignored by US Military

When we worked on the Manhunting Project for SOCOM, the US Marshall’s Service said that fugitive hunting was all about network analysis. The IC doesn’t understand network analysis as the bean counters push for numbers….they focus on low hanging fruit and as a result there is always some guy out there ready to step up …

Yoda: Real-Time Crowd-Sourcing + Twitter Meta-RECAP

How to Perfect Real-Time Crowdsourcing The new techniques behind instant crowdsourcing makes human intelligence available on demand for the first time. One of the great goals of computer science is to embed human-like intelligence in common applications like image processing, robotic control and so on. Until recently the focus has been to develop an artificial …