The inherent tension between the state secrets privilege and the rule of law reached the breaking point last week when an appeals court dismissed the claims of several persons who said they were illegally transported and tortured through a CIA “extraordinary rendition” program. They would not be permitted to litigate their case, the court decided, because to do so would place “state secrets” at risk.
“This case presents a painful conflict between human rights and national security,” the 9th circuit court of appeals noted in its September 8 opinion (pdf) in Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, and by a 6-5 majority the judges determined that security considerations would take precedence.
Phi Beta Iota: We recommend the full editorial commentary by Steve Aftergood. This puts the USA on a level with the Guatemalan era of genocide against the indigenous, the “patriotic wars” in which “anything goes.”
Widgets, maps and an API make World Bank data sing
The new data.worldbank.org looks to improve data-driven decisions.
The new data.worldbank.org website that's launching today is designed to make the vast wealth of open data easier to use. The Bank is increasing the number of indicators available on the site from 339 to more than 1,200, and it has substantially improved its API. Four different languages are supported on the site, along with an improved data browser, feedback buttons, instant search, and embeddable widgets.
International Association for Intelligence Education – Washington D.C. Chapter
Tuesday, September 14, 2010 3:00 PM
Interviewer: Randy Pherson
The Exchange
Pherson Associates, LLC
1890 Preston White Dr., Suite 200
Reston, VA 20191
Non-members welcome! Washington Area Chapter meeting follows presentation. To register, contact Bill Spracher at (202) 231-4193 or william.spracher@dia.mil
Right now the Categories include, in this order: Video Games, Television, Commercials, Current Events, Sports, Movies, Music.
Phi Beta Iota: Now imagine this in all languages, available on the cell phone, as an educational tool that also harnesses the cognitive surplus–the distributed intelligence–of the Whole Earth. Our view of YouTube is now such that we consider it more important than Google.
This yields three adequate results, but the human in the loop can do better.
Step One: Acknowledge and embrace the eight tribes of intelligence as stakeholders. Create, as Sweden did, a Cooperation Committee (the Swedes get annoyedwhen you call it a Coordination Committee).
Step Two: Use the military, and particularly the National Guard or law enforcement officers who are also in the military reserve, as the cadre for the national watch centre. This allows integrated access to domestic law enforcement and national foreign intelligence in the inner sanctum.
Step Three: Embrace foreign contributions–communities (national, state, local) with high Vietnamese, Russian, Korean, Chinese, or other ethnic minorities should have a mink-lined suite of offices for intelligence officers from those countries invited to serve on rotation who should be full participants in monitoring and interdicting white-collar crime, organized crime, crime alliances of convenience, and street crime.
Step Four: Adopt the Open Source Triad (pun intended)–Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS), Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), and Open Spectrum. The cell phone, Twitter, and RapidSMS should be planned elements of the network from day one. 114 and 119 numbers should be operational from day one, and multilingual.
Step Five: Organize centers along the same lines, ultimately integrating local community intelligence networks of the eight tribes with similar networks at provincial, national, regional, and global levels. The federal government can safely be ignored. A hybrid center that can leverage legally available federal information will be vastly more effective than any center bound by the unethical and unconstitutional institutionalized ineptitude that prevails in the federal bureaucracy today. Plan for the day when the CIA's Open Source Center (OSC) eliminates contractors from the federal OSINT budget, and then fails to deliver.
Step Six: Adopt the Strategic Analytic Model, recognize that education, not regulation, is the primordal medium for maintaining legitimacy and stability, and develop all collection plans with full consciousness of the ten high-level threats, the urgency of understanding true costs of every product and service, and the vital need to harmonize plans, programs, policies, budgets, and behavior across all twelve core domains.
Step Seven: Follow the 80-20 rule–80% of what is produced should be OSINT that can be shared; the other 20% should be as lightly controlled as possible, using time-based risk management rather than stone-age security before sensibility rules.
There's more, but this is a start. If anyone out there wants to get serious and responsible about planning, programming, and budgeting for a sustainable future–a prosperous world at peace–we know how to do that.
The Internet Archive, one of the fastest-growing digital libraries in the world, has migrated its massive amount of content into a new Sun Microsystems-built portable data center loaded with 60 Sun X4500 Thumper arrays that each have 48TB of storage capacity. Sun staged a launch event at its Santa Clara, Calif., headquarters on March 25.
“It's amazing to think that the whole Web collection, which is about 2PB compressed and from 4PB to 5PB uncompressed, can live in a 20-foot-by-8-foot-by-8-foot shipping container, which, from our standpoint, is a computer,” Brewster Kahle, digital librarian and founder of the Internet Archive, told eWEEK.
The archive, which employs the equivalent of only three system administrators, goes back to 1996 and stores more than 150 billion Web pages, Kahle said. It is accessed 500 times per second. Archive.org also houses the Wayback Machine, 1 million books, 100,000 movies and about 200,000 audio recordings, Kahle said. “It is a full-on library. This technology we see as another step toward a manageable system for dealing with enormous amounts of information safely.”
Phi Beta Iota: Don't miss the eight-shot slide show above. Brewster spoke at OSS '92–we have wasted the past twenty years, he has not. Now imagine this combined with the C Drives of participating members of the Global Game, and all the insurance data, and true cost information overlain on all credit purchases…..
