Public Intelligence Blog – Page 4102 – The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.

0Shares

Huge Helping of Reason, Needs Salt,

December 2, 2002

Cass R. Sunstein

The bottom line on this book is clear: our governance of risk to the public tends to be managed by political gut reaction rather than informed investigation; there is no clear doctrine for studying and articulating risk (for example, distinguishing between high risks to a few and low but sustained risks to the many, or between three levels of cost-benefit analysis so that choices can be made); and the best form of risk management may be through the effective communication of risk information to the public rather than imposed costs on private sector enterprises.As reasoned as the book is, it also constitutes a direct attack on all those who expouse the “precautionary principle.” While I do not agree completely with the author, who seems to feel that rational study allows for the discounting of any risk to the point where it can be economically and politically managed at an affordable cost, he certainly take the debate to an entirely new level and his book is–quite literally–worth tens of billions of dollars in potential regulatory risk savings.

Most compelling is his methodical aggregation of data from several sources to show that the cost of saving one life (he notes that we fail to distinguish adequately between a life saved for a few years and a life saved for many years, or between young lives saved for a lifetime and old lives saved for a brief span of time). Table 2.1 on page 30 is quite astonishing–of 45 major regulated risks, one (drinking water) costs over $92 billion per premature death averted; eight including asbestos cost between $50 million and $4 billion; seven including arsenic and copper cost between $13 million and $45 million; 14 including various electrical standards cost between $1 million and $10 million per death averted; and 15 cost less than $1 million per death averted.

What cost human life? Even on this there is no standard, and even within a single regulatory agency (e.g. the Environmental Protection Agency) there are different calculations used in relation to different risks being regulated. The author does a really fine job of comparing the public perception of the value of a life saved ($1.3 million for automobile-related risks, $103 million for aviation-related risks) with the values used by the government and the courts, which vary widely (into the billions) but seem to hover between $10 million and $30 million per life saved and without regard the the number of life-years actually involved.

The heart of the book is in its conclusion, where the author proposes a four-part strategy for dramatically reducing the cost of regulatory risk management, suggesting that we focus on 1) disclosure of information to the public; 2) economic incentives; 3) risk reduction contracts; and 4) free market environmentalism. With respect to the latter, he is strongly supportive of allowing the “sale” of pollution privileges between nations and industries and companies.

For additional observations on reducing risk to the future of life see my reviews of Joe Thorton on “Pandora's Poison,” Raffensperger and Tickner on “Protecting Public Health & The Environment,” Novacek on “The Biodiversity Crisis,” Czech on “Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train,” Lomberg on “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” Helvarg on “Blue Frontier,” and Wilson's “The Future of Life.”

Cass Sunstein and Lawrence Lessig join Jerry Berman and Marc Rotenberg and Mike Godwin as America's “top guns” in responsible law-making. This book makes a great deal of sense, is worth a great deal of money, and should guide the future evolution of regulatory and information-driven risk management.

2002/12/012009/12/04

Review: Timeline (Fiction)

3 Star, Cosmos & Destiny

0Shares

Great Idea Formula Fails On This One,

December 1, 2002

Michael Crichton

Michael Crichton and Robin Cooke are my two favorite entertainers, so this is a fan being straight up. This one failed. The idea of writing about the technologies involved in teleportation (which is indeed a credible possibility, one Charles Platt did a great job discussing in a past issue of WIRED Magazine) is a good one, but then the author spent three-quarters of the book with “filler” material about people actually stuck back in time and wandering hither and yon. Airframe and Prey, both of which spend most of the time focusing on the minutia of the technology, are much superior.

2002/12/012009/12/04

Review: The Fifty Year Wound–The True Price of America’s Cold War Victory

6 Star Top 10%, Atrocities & Genocide, Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Crime (Government), Diplomacy, Environment (Problems), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Force Structure (Military), History, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Security (Including Immigration), True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

0Shares

A Breath of Sanity–Hard Look at Cost of Cold War,

December 1, 2002

Derek Leebaert

This is an extraordinary book, in part because it forces us to confront the “hangover” effects of the Cold War as we begin an uncertain path into the post 9-11 future. It begins by emphasizing that the Cold War glorified certain types of institutions, personalities, and attitudes, and ends by pointing out that we paid a very heavy cost–much as General and President Eisenhower tried to warn us–in permitting our society to be bound by weaponry, ideology, and secrecy.Two quotes, one from the beginning, one from the end, capture all that lies in between, well-documented and I would add–contrary to some opinions–coherent and understandable.

“For the United States, the price of victory goes far beyond the dollars spend on warheads, foreign aid, soldiers, propaganda, and intelligence. It includes, for instance, time wasted, talent misdirected, secrecy imposed, and confidence impaired. Particular costs were imposed on industry, science, and the universities. Trade was distorted and growth impeded.” (page xi)

“CIA world-order men whose intrigues more often than not started at the incompetent and went down from there, White House claims of ‘national security' to conceal deceit, and the creation of huge special interests in archaic spending all too easily occurred because most Americans were not preoccupied with the struggle.” (page 643)

Although the author did not consult the most recent intelligence reform books (e.g. Berkowitz, Johnson, Treverton, inter alia), he is consistently detailed and scathing in his review of intelligence blunders and the costs of secrecy–in this he appears to very ably collaborate the findings of Daniel Ellsberg's more narrowly focused book on “SECRETS: A Memoire of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.” He points out, among many many examples, that despite Andropov's having been head of the KGB for fifteen years, at the end of it CIA still did not know if Andropov has a wife or spoke English. He also has a lovely contrast between how little was learned using very expensive national technical means (secret satellites) and open sources: “So much failure could have been avoided if CIA has done more careful homework during the 1950s in the run-up to Sputnik; during the 1960s, when Sovieet marshals were openly publishing their thoughts on nuclear strategy; or during the 1970s and 1980s, when stagnation could be chronicled in the unclassified gray pages of Soviet print. Most expensively, the CIA hardly ever learned anything from its mistakes, largely because it would not admit them.” (pages 567-568).

The author's biographic information does not include any reference to military service, but footnote 110 suggests that he was at least in Officer Candidate School with the U.S. Marine Corps during the Vietnam era. The biography, limited to the inside back jacket flap, also avoids discussing the author's considerable experience with information technology. Given the importance of this critique of all that most Republicans and most 50-70 year olds hold very sacred, we need to more about the man goring the ox. Future editions should have a much expanded biography.

Bottom line: America muddled through the Cold War, made many costly mistakes, and developed a policy-making process that is, to this day, largely uninformed due to a lack of a comprehensive global intelligence capability, or a sufficient means of consulting diverse experts (as opposed to the in-town intellectual harlots). If ever we needed a clean-sheet look at how we make policy and how we provide decision-support to that policy process, this is the time. The “fifty-year wound” is still open, and the author warns us it will not heal without a reappraisal of how we do the business of national security.

2002/12/012009/12/04

Review: Longitudes and Attitudes–Exploring the World After September 11

5 Star, Atlases & State of the World

0Shares

“Net Assessment” of 9-11, Arabs, & Prospects for Peace,

December 1, 2002

Thomas L. Friedman

Although the entire book is rife with gems of insight, it is page 300 that richly rewards the reader who accepts some of the inevitable repetition between the columns and the diary to complete the book: “The Israeli army terrorism experts confided…(that) you can have the best intelligence network in the world, but there is no way that Israelis will ever be able to penetrate Palestinian society better than Palestinians. .. Only the host society can penetrate itself enough to effectively restrain or delegitimize its own suicide bombers. Outsiders can't.”In one paragraph, this thrice-winning Pulitzer Prize winner has marked the third major failure in the Administration's strategy against global terrorism (the first was the failure to cordon off Tora Bora in Afghanistan with reliable U.S. troops, because the U.S. Army can't do mountains; the second was to declare war on Iraq against the President's best instincts but yielding to the Vice President's obsession, if Bob Woodward's account in “Bush at War” is correct). Although the U.S. is spending upwards toward $200M to destabilize Iraq, and perhaps another $100M in global bribery of local liaison services (themselves penetrated by terrorists, or supporting terrorism), we have failed to establish the kind of deep credible relations that lead to sustained and effective counter-terrorism by the host countries. Pakistan is an excellent case in point–it consistently gives lip service to US demands, and fails to bring home the Al Qaeda leaders passing in and out of Pakistan at will.

Across many columns, the author hits again and again at the basics: “we have been allowing a double game to go on with our Middle East allies for years, and that has to stop.” Either they cease supporting terrorists in return for a dubious poverty-ridden peace at home, or they join the target list; we must invest heavily in both a Marshall Plan and a Voice of America *in Arabic* that consistently and constantly counters all of the lies about America and against America that the Arab regimes permit as part of their strategy for peace at home; lastly, more subtly, we must get serious about standing up for our values and not allowing rogue governments to abuse our friendship and tolerance while fostering hatred of America among their repressed, using America as the opiate of the down-trodden. The author seems to agree with Ralph Peters, author of “Beyond Terror” and “Fighting for the Future” in focusing on the importance of the Muslim outlands from Pakistan and India down through Malaysia and Indonesia, and he is especially strong at documenting the severe misunderstandings and misimpressions of America that persist across the Muslim world but especially in Arabia–otherwise serious people who really believe that bin Laden is good, 9-11 was justified, and everything will get better if America stops supporting Israel.

This particular book, down to earth and based on very direct observations, is a useful counter-balance to Bernard Lewis, “What Went Wrong.” Both distinguished authors agree that the Arab regimes are their own worst enemies and have brought their poverty on themselves–but where the historian seems to deem this sufficient to permit disengagement, the correspondent takes the other tack and calls for major generational-changing engagement, utilizing all the instruments of national power, from coercive diplomacy backed up by the very real threat of military intervention amongst our pupported allies, to massive economic, educational, and cultural assistance and outreach.

Toward the end of the book, quoting the deputy editor of New Isvestia in Moscow, the author hits the final nail on the head: “It is not East versus West anymore. It is the stable versus unstable worlds…”

China, Russia, Islam, water, disease, crime–terrorism, I conclude, is a very small part of the threat, and our greatest challenge right now is to devise a holistic national security strategy that does not lose sight of the forest for the one burning bush. Overall, the author has provided as fine a net assessment as any President could ask for.

2002/12/012009/08/10

2002 Global Futures Partnership–Vision of Lasting Value

Analysis, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence, Global Futures Partnership, Historic Contributions, Methods & Process, Peace Intelligence

0Shares

The Global Futures Partnership (GFP) is a strategic “think and do tank” that undertakes unclassified global outreach for CIA and other Intelligence Community elements on the most important issues facing the intelligence community today and in coming years. It conceptualizes and implements interdisciplinary and multi-organizational projects on key intelligence issues with leading thinkers from academia, business, strategy, and intelligence consultants.

Below is the citation for the award given to the visionary, founder, and core catalyst within the GFP, followed by two CIA seals: the one on the left leads to the pro forma page on GFP, sadly not offering access to its unclassified and often brilliant productions over the past several years, and the one on the left offers a link to a presentation on “Meeting 21st Century Transnational Challenges: Building a Global Intelligence Paradigm” by Roger George, possibly the most tangible evidence of GFP's influence on CIA's leadership.

OSS '02: 21st Century Emerging Leadership Award. Global Futures Partnership, Central Intelligence Agency. Under the leadership of Carol Dumaine with her extraordinary vision, the Global Futures Partnership has created strategic learning forums bringing the rich perspectives of the outside world into the classified environment in a manner never before attempted. This official but revolutionary endeavor nurtures an outside-in channel for integrating a diversity of perspectives. It is a vanguard toward a future in which the lines between national and global intelligence, and between governmental and nongovernmental intelligence, are blurred into extinction.

Global Futures Partnership

Meeting 21st Century Transnational Challenges: Building a Global Intelligence Paradigm

The GFP is not to be confused with the Open Source Center (OSC). The first is a visionary outreach elements that seeks to share information and achieve multi-national sense-making, in one instance working with up to 35 countries. The OSC is a bureaucratic unit that classifies everything it creates and refuses to engage with any countries other than the standard English-speaking allies and a couple of others totalling eleven including the USA, Canada, the UK, Australia, you get the idea….

The CIA leadership never properly supported the GFP. Its vision

2002/11/302009/08/11

2002: Visions of the Information Society: A developing world perspective (UN ITU)

United Nations & NGOs

0Shares

ABOUT

There are two ways of looking at ICTs: as an instrument, and as an industry. As an instrument, affordable and usable ICTs can indeed transform the way societies work, entertain, study, govern and live – at the individual, organizational, sector, vocational and national levels. As an industry, ICTs represent a major growing economic sector covering hardware, software, telecom/datacom and consulting services.

Through both lenses – industry and instrument – the performance of developing nations lags that of developed nations, but interesting patterns of variation and pockets of excellence are emerging. For instance, countries like India and the Philippines have ICT industries that are exporting software and attracting outsourcing contracts – but they also have looming digital divides where ICTs are not accessible or affordable as instruments for a majority of the population.

This paper charts the industry and instrument aspects of ICTs in developing nations, using a comparative framework developed over the years by the author called the “8 Cs” of the digital economy (words beginning with the letter C): connectivity, content, community, commerce, culture, capacity, cooperation and capital (see below).

2002/11/292009/08/11

2002 The Information Society: An industrialized world perspective (UN ITU)

United Nations & NGOs

0Shares

ABOUT

What does the twenty-first century “information society' mean for all of us? This paper will examine information society developments primarily from an industrialized country perspective. However, it will acknowledge that the spread of networks means that developments in the industrialised countries have major implications for developing countries.

The paper will consider: 1) the key determinants of a ‘knowledge-driven economy' and what this means for the broader concept of an ‘information society' including the structure of information and communication technology investment, the system features of the new networks, the role of learning and new information exchange models and the weak links in the diffusion pathway. 2) the diffusion pathways for information and communication technologies and advanced networks will include an examination of business, government and citizen use of the new networks. 3) policy and regulatory priorities will emphasise the need for learning to acquire new skills and competencies, the need to reduce constraints on e-service delivery markets, and importance of improved monitoring of information society developments. 4) the potential for fostering public/private partnerships for mobilising information society developments for social and economic benefit. This section will give particular attention to the structure of incentives for public and private organisations to engage in such partnerships and the likelihood that such partnerships can substantially stimulate investment in sustainable network applications and services. 5) The paper will conclude with some observations on the dominant trends and the extent to which the twenty-first century ‘information society' is likely to perpetuate existing asymmetries or give rise to a more equitable distribution of resources.