Public Intelligence Blog – Page 3626 – The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.

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Adequate but disappointing, May 3, 2010

I was greatly looking forward to this volume reaching me, and must confess to being disappointed. It is an adequate beginning, nothing more. Here is the page count for the time span covered:

1954-1999 10 pages
2000 03 pages
2001 05 pages
2002 08 pages
2003 09 pages
2004 12 pages
2005 16 pages
2006 26 pages
2007 22 pages

The index is useful, but after a couple of hours going through the book I thought to myself this should never have been a book, it should have been an online spreadsheet that could be sorted by country, issue area (agriculture, industry type, water), and timeframe. It complements what Transparency International does with its Corruption Perceptions Index, but on balance this is a very elementary start.

I found it most interesting that the earliest references to anti-corruption efforts were in India and Pakistan and then Indonesia, that this is primarily an English-language survey (e.g. not covering the extensive Chinese anti-corruption endeavors over quite a long time), and that the final two years are largely news hits that could be better explored with structured online searching.

The first conference on corruption and anti-corruption that is noted started in 1987. Today there are multiple conferences including those managed by Transparency International and those managed by law firms seeking to help clients comply with Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and other similar legislation.

What the book does not provide, and I for one would welcome a re-issuance–is any kind of analytic synthesis, region by region review, type by type review (e.g. corruption in the water cycle should be huge today and is not, yet) that also includes a “best practices” and “lessons learned” compendium of structured knowledge. I will be reviewing other books on anti-corruption (those that are priced fairly) and am creating a new section at Phi Beta Iota, the Public Intelligence Blog, to focus exclusively on corruption and anti-corruption books and references and links.

Here is what we need: a global online database that leverages what UNICEF is doing with RapidSMS, that does two things:

1) Provides an online repository for all documents in all languages pertaining to corruption and anti-corruption, sorted in relation to the ten High Level Threats to Humanity as identified by A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change; and also by each of the twelve core policies from agriculture to water as identified by the Earth Intelligence Network in INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainaabilty, in turn sorted by country, province, and postal district.

2) Provides an online repository with a back office database for RapidSMS reporting from any cell phone on the planet to LOCAL web receiving sites that in turn compile the global to local database of corruption reports from citizens as witnessed, in text form, photo form, or video form.

The good news is that anti-corruption is here to stay, and the business world and governments are finally figuring out that a 20% surtax for corruption is bad for business, bad for the economy, and bad for citizens. In this the UN has done well, along with the US Agency for International Development and a number of organizations from Malaysia to many points in Africa including South Africa.

2010/05/032010/05/09

April Post Re-Cap

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The following headlines and links are extracted from the Earth Intelligence Network Twitter feed while this site was down in April:

» FOIA document on counterfeit $100 note connection to North Korea http://is.gd/bRq31 + US dept of Treasury & ‘federal' Reserve reveal new $100 bill design to combat counterfeiting (newmoney.gov) http://is.gd/bDDvQ

» New global CrisisWatch report for May updating the most significant situations of conflict or potential conflict http://is.gd/bQkg9

» Conflict Risk Alert: Thailand http://is.gd/bPqr0

» Draft of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and preliminary analysis http://is.gd/bOWhX

» Video (47 min) on Brazil, Russia, India, China (BRIC) summit showing “agents of change” powers uniting & conflicting http://is.gd/bNhiA

Continue reading “April Post Re-Cap”

2010/05/032010/05/25

CIA retired Carmen Medina on Info-tech & Openness

Government, Intelligence (government), Open Government, Privacy

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read the interview

Interview where she responds to the following questions/issues:

+ Social media and extreme views
+ How our ideas about privacy have to change
+ How failure to share information leads to more failure
+ Why previous attempts to share intelligence have failed
+ The way government adopts technology is broken
+ Can we crowdsource intelligence gathering?

2010/05/032010/05/03

Journal: Death of America–No One Cares

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No One Cares

By Chris Hedges 3 May 2010

We are approaching a decade of war in Afghanistan, and the war in Iraq is in its eighth year. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands more Afghans and Pakistani civilians have been killed. Millions have been driven into squalid displacement and refugee camps. Thousands of our own soldiers and Marines have died or been crippled physically and psychologically. We sustain these wars, which have no real popular support, by borrowing trillions of dollars that can never be repaid, even as we close schools, states go into bankruptcy, social services are cut, our infrastructure crumbles, tens of millions of Americans are reduced to poverty, and real unemployment approaches 17 percent. Collective, suicidal inertia rolls us forward toward national insolvency and the collapse of empire. And we do not protest. The peace movement, despite the heroic efforts of a handful of groups such as

The roots of mass apathy are found in the profound divide between liberals, who are mostly white and well educated, and our disenfranchised working class, whose sons and daughters, because they cannot get decent jobs with benefits, have few options besides the military. Liberals, whose children are more often to be found in elite colleges than the Marine Corps, did not fight the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and the dismantling of our manufacturing base. They did nothing when the Democrats gutted welfare two years later and stood by as our banks were turned over to Wall Street speculators. They signed on, by supporting the Clinton and Obama Democrats, for the corporate rape carried out in the name of globalization and endless war, and they ignored the plight of the poor. And for this reason the poor have little interest in the moral protestations of liberals. We have lost all credibility. We are justly hated for our tacit complicity in the corporate assault on workers and their families.

Our passivity has resulted, however, in much more than imperial adventurism and a permanent underclass. A slow-motion coup by a corporate state has cemented into place a neofeudalism in which there are only masters and serfs. And the process is one that cannot be reversed through the traditional mechanisms of electoral politics.

Iraq Veterans Against the War, the Green Party and Code Pink, is dead. No one cares.

Chuck Spinney Sends

2010/05/032010/05/04

ADMIN: Malware Defeated, Google Helped, Lessons Learned

Collective Intelligence, Computer/online security

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We have eradicated the Malware that snuck in with a comment. It was a two-step process.

1) Delete all comments and then Close Comments.

2) Find the infected file that reactivated itself each time an unsecured computer visited Phi Beta Iota–evidently the robots are resident everywhere.

We should have reacted to Google's warning signals sooner. We could not replicate the issue here and that is why we were slow. In the process of eradicating the malware, Google's interactive help was both essential and easily available.

This was NOT, as some of you have suggested, an attack by the US Government unit that resides at Google. We are satisfied that this was a completely random attack by robot software that found a hole Word Press had not plugged, and nature took its course.

We continue to believe that both Google and the National Security Agency (NSA) should spend more time helping create hardware and software impervious to attack, and if they will not do it, we certainly hope Microsoft will wake up and smell the roses–the first totally reliable cloud-handheld environment is a win-win for all.

Event/Expo: May 1-Oct 31 2010, Shanghai World Expo

02 China

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(from the expo website)
With a long civilisation, China favours international exchange and loves world peace. China owes its successful bid for the World Exposition in 2010 to the international community's support for and confidence in its reform and opening-up. The Exposition will be the first registered World Exposition in a developing country, which gives expression to the expectations the world's people place on China's future development.

The prospect of future urban life, a subject of global interest, concerns all nations, developed or less developed, and their people. Being the first World Exposition on the theme of city, Exposition 2010 will attract governments and people from across the world, focusing on the theme “Better City, Better Life.” For its 184 days, participants will display urban civilisation to the full extent, exchange their experiences of urban development, disseminate advanced notions on cities and explore new approaches to human habitat, lifestyle and working conditions in the new century. They will learn how to create an eco-friendly society and maintain the sustainable development of human beings.

Expo 2010 Shanghai China will centre on innovation and interaction. Innovation is the soul, while cultural interaction is an important mission of the World Expositions. In the new era, Expo 2010 Shanghai China will contribute to human-centred development, scientific and technological innovation, cultural diversity and win-win cooperation for a better future, thus composing a melody with the key notes of highlighting innovation and interaction in the new century.

2010/05/02

Event: 8-12 June Narobi Africa Agriculture GIS Week 2010

01 Agriculture, 03 Economy, Africa, Geospatial

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Jointly organized by the Consortium for Spatial Information (CSI) of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), HarvestChoice, and the Agricultural Geospatial Commons (AGCommons) Program, the event builds on the success of last year’s meeting. However, AAGW 2010 has a broader scope and will be presented as a “GIS ShareFair”, complete with a market place that will include exhibitors, training sessions, thematic workshops, presentation sessions, CGIAR Spatial Science Sessions, the third gathering of WhereCampAfrica, and the unveiling of the AGCommons service bureau.