The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Professor Dan Kuehl is perhaps the top authority in the U.S. Government's war college environment on the subject of a national information strategy–the briefing below is balanced, brilliant, and to the point: we do not have a naitonal information strategy, we need a national information strategy.
As we contemplated the reality that the U.S. Government does not have an information strategy, we realized it may not even know what one is. Below is a snippet from an EZine article that captures the broad picture.
Design an Information Strategy
Despite investments of millions of dollars in Information Technology, we seldom come across an organization that has actually designed an information strategy that focuses on collecting and processing information for strategic decision making.
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The Future of Tech
August 27, 2009, 5:00PM EST
By Adrian Slywotzky
Where Have You Gone, Bell Labs?: How basic research can repair the broken U.S. business model
Name an industry that can produce 1 million new, high-paying jobs over the next three years. You can't, because there isn't one. And that's the problem.
Decline in Lab Funding; Job Creation a Huge Challenge; Rebuild Research Labs; Basic Science Gives Way to Fast Payoffs; How to Reignite Innovation; Strong Leadership is Key; Presidential Support Crucial; Critical Mass of Labs Needed; Tax Incentives Could Help; How to Get Back on Track; A Lesson from RCA Labs
Privacy rights are under threat in the House's government health care plan. While plowing through the more than 1,000-page Democratic House bill, Declan McCullagh of CBS News uncovered provisions that would allow startling privacy intrusions. The innermost secrets of people's personal lives would be made available to thousands of government bureaucrats.
Section 431(a) requires the Internal Revenue Service to give detailed taxpayer information to the new health choices commissioner and state health programs. The helpful government just wants to be able to tell citizens when they might be eligible for benefits they somehow might have overlooked. Besides letting all those government bureaucrats know about an individual's income, number of dependents and filing status, the plan has an unlimited catchall that would require disclosure of “other information as is prescribed by” the health commissioner. The IRS would be commanded to provide whatever information about individual taxpayers the health choices commissioner deemed necessary.
Continue reading “Journal: Government Information Policy & Security Not Favoring the Public”
Steve Gorman
Sun Aug 30, 2009
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The Prius hybrid automobile is popular for its fuel efficiency, but its electric motor and battery guzzle rare earth metals, a little-known class of elements found in a wide range of gadgets and consumer goods. . . . . . . .Worldwide demand for rare earths, covering 15 entries on the periodic table of elements, is expected to exceed supply by some 40,000 tonnes annually in several years unless major new production sources are developed.
Phi Beta Iota: The peresistent refusal of the White House and Congress in particular, all governments in general, to create strategic centers that can provide unclassified decision-support in the context of a strategic analytic model that embraces “true cost” accounting and “cross-policy cost harmonization” means that the USA in particular, and all governments generally, are “dumb” and are therefore in automatic betrayal of the public trust. Current references: Intelligence for Everyone; Fixing the White House; Human Intelligence; The Ultimate Hack.
Leif Harmsen, once a Facebook user, now crusades against it. Having dismissed his mother’s snap judgment of the site (“Facebook is the devil”), Harmsen now passionately agrees. He says, not entirely in jest, that he considers it a repressive regime akin to North Korea, and sells T-shirts with the words “Shut Your Facebook.” What especially galls him is the commercialization and corporate regulation of personal and social life.
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(Contact)
Originally published 04:45 a.m., August 31, 2009,
The necessary cadre of U.S. intelligence personnel capable of reading and speaking targeted regional languages such as Pashto, Dari and Urdu “remains essentially nonexistent,” the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence wrote in a rare but stark warning in its 2010 budget report.
Phi Beta Iota: This is, eight years after 9-11 and 21 years after General Al Gray called for redirection toward the Third World in his article “Global Intelligence Challenges in the 1990's,” a failure of leadership in Congress, the White House, and of course within the US IC. It is also a failure of imagination. The private sector works in 183 languages–33 of them core languages including 12 distinct dialects of Arabic. Anybody who thinks they can solve this problem with language training for native Americans who qualify for clearances should not be in a leadership position. And if Leon Panetta thinks “doubling” anything from a base of less than ten is significant, he needs a new staff. OSS/EIN can solve this problem in under 90 days. This will not happen because the lack of integrity in this town, combined with the lack of imagination and the lack of accountability, leaves the beltway bandit mafia as the sole beneficiary of the hard-earned taxpayer dollars (and the newly-printed leap of faith dollars). Our domestic enemies are now a much greater threat to the Republic than any combination of foreign enemies.
