Hess – Public Intelligence Blog

2014/03/112018/02/26

Mini-Me: 9/11 Convergence 15th Anniversary — Silverstein Briefed Jews on Plans for New Towers 17 Months Before 9/11

Huh?

SHORT URL:
http://tinyurl.com/911-Cheney

NEW 2018-02-25

Paul Adams: As I was listening to the 9/11 segment of the interview, you should know I just viewed a documentary where Larry Silverstein in front of a group of Jews, explained how in April 2000 – 17 months before 9/11 – he was reviewing the blueprints for the new WTC towers which were to be rebuilt, and on which construction did not start until 2002. Here's the clip. Action starts at 34:54

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2009/11/292009/12/05

Review: Understanding Knowledge as a Commons–From Theory to Practice

4 Star, Censorship & Denial of Access, Communications, Education (Universities), Information Society, Intelligence (Public)

Almost a Three–Ambitious Title, Narrow Focus

November 29, 2009

Charlotte Hess

An MIT publication from 2007, this is actually knowledge from the 2000-2004 timeframe, and it is annoying narrow knowledge written from legal-economic point of view. Well-intentioned, no doubt, this is not the “inter-disciplinary” work that it claims to be, and I demonstrate restraint in not scoring it as a three. Despite references to Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom and Lawrence Lessig's The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, these folks are largely out of touch with Web 2.0 to Web 4.0, collective intelligence, wealth of networks, and tao of democracy concepts, authors, and works. This is not a substantive contribution to evolutionary anything (cultural evolution, evolutionary activism, conscious evolution). The index STINKS and there is no consolidated bibliography.

This is not a book that focuses on innovation as much as on structured processes and conventions. I left it at four in part because this is a very good job on one part of the elephant (the anus or intellectual property of old part) and I really appreciated the six of the twelve contributions by Nancy Kranich, James Boyle, Peter Suber, Shubha Ghosh, Peter Levine, Charles M Schweik.

My fly-leaf notes (useful stuff from the book):

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2009/08/312009/09/06

Journal: Why Do We Need a CIA At All?

10 Security, Government

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Monday, August 31, 2009

By Adam Goldman and Pamela Hess

Secret CIA program used Blackwater recruits

“The question remains: Why do we need Blackwater?” said Charles Faddis, a former department chief at the CIA's Counter-terrorism Center who retired in 2008 and was not involved in the secret program. “I remain mystified. This is quintessential CIA work. You wonder what it means that the CIA has to rely on Blackwater? Why are we still funding the CIA?”

Phi Beta Iota: Restore CIA ownership of the South-Central Campus (or give it back to the estate that granted it to CIA in perpetuity); three SMALL towers there with an over-arching top floor: DNI; Open Source Agency; Multinational Decision-Support Agency. Turn CIA HQS into a technical collection agency with one floor per discipline. Split the CIA analysts between DIA (two all-source analytic centers per floor in now vacated DNI spaces) and Open Source Agency. End all contracting of inherently-governmental functions. Re-boot the clandestine service with an emphasis on multinational clandestine operations run out of regional multinational field stations. CIA has been so badly-managed by a series of Directors going back to George Bush the Pater, it might as well not have existed all these years. How's that for an epitaph?