Public Intelligence Blog

Public? What Public?

Wikipedia/Plutocracy:  Plutocracy is rule by the wealthy, or power provided by wealth. The combination of both plutocracy and oligarchy is called plutarchy.

Our government is no longer a democracy: ruled by the people. It is a plutocracy: ruled by the wealthy, and it is an oligarchy: ruled by an elite class. The two realities combined form a plutarchy, and are antithetical to a democratic republic. Representative democracy is meant to represent everyone, not just the wealthy and the elite, and not just the wealthiest 1%, as is true today.

Sucks for the 99%.  The good news is that organized people can bury organized money any day of the week – key word organized.

The existing US definitions of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) are severely deficient at multiple levels.  See the official definitions below the line.  Here is a proper definition devised with Joe Markowitz and others who actually know something about the discipline.

Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is decision-support (an output not an input) that integrates open sources and methods including all forms of direct human knowledge elicited by intermediaries without subterfuge.  It combines direct access to indigenous humans, gray literature, and the deliberate exploitation of both published and unpublished (field) human experts, advanced multi-disciplinary and multi-domain processing and integration or deconfliction, and advanced visualization and other methods for communicating context and insight to the supported decision-maker(s).  OSINT is not the same as Open Source Information (OSIF), which is where the official definitions are now–publicly available information, nor is it the same as Open Source Data (OSD) or Validated Open Source Intelligence (OSINT-V), which can only be produced by an all-source analyst generally not a contractor.  OSINT is a human intelligence function, not a technical intelligence function.

OSINT has been superceeded as the center of gravity for the future of intelligence by M4IS2: Multinational, Multiagency, Multidimensional, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making.  90% of M4IS2 is not secret, not expensive, and not federal or controlled by any government.  Outside the wire both OSINT and M4IS should be controlled by the J-3 via Civil Affairs (Human) and Information Operations (IO).  Secret bureacracies (including “cyber-commands”) do not have the knowledge, mind-set, or reliability to manage OSINT and M4IS2 interactions with all manner of humans in every clime and place.  Inside the wire, the J-2 becomes the integrator of all-source information, and Civil Affairs and IO become advisory functions to the J-3 on non-kinetic options.

See Also:

Search: osint vs humint

Official Definitions:

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Secret intelligence is ten percent of all-source intelligence; all-source intelligence is ten percent of Information Operations (IO).  IO is the foundation for Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making (M4IS2), which in turn makes it possible to create a world that works for all.

All entries listed and linked below the line.  Links repaired 21 November 2011

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The white screen of death plague that hit us was NOT an attack.  We finally deactivated the Minify link and compression engine and that cleaned it up.  The latest WordPress release evidently put Minify into a massive disconnect.

There are residual effects–some, not all, of the links in various posts are broken.  We expect that problem to go away but in the interim, simply copy the link words and paste them into the search box, that generally leads straight to the desired item.

Sorry ’bout that.

• World Brain 101
• World Brain 102
• World Brain 103
• World Brain 104

And the conversation at P2P Foundation, Tip of the Hat to Sepp Hasslberger.

Click on Image to Enlarge

Source

Wikipedia on Anhedonia:

In psychology and psychiatry, anhedonia (< Greek ἀν- an-, “without” + ἡδονή hēdonē, “pleasure”) is defined as the inability to experience pleasure from activities formerly found enjoyable, e.g. hobbies, exercise, social interaction or sexual activity.

Anhedonia can be a characteristic of mental disorders including mood disorders, schizoaffective disorder, schizoid personality disorder and schizophrenia. Affected schizophrenic patients describe themselves as feeling emotionally empty.^[1]

Mood disturbances are commonly observed in many psychiatric disorders. Disturbing mood changes may occur resultant to stressful life events and they are not uncommon during times of physical illness. ^[2] While anhedonia can be a feature of such mood changes, they are not mutually inclusive.

DefDog Recommends....

“When even one American – who has done nothing wrong – is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth, then all Americans are in peril. “  – Harry S. Truman

“Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security, will not have, nor do they deserve, either one”  – Thomas Jefferson

“When governments fear the people there is liberty. When the people fear the government there is tyranny.”  – Thomas Jefferson

“The only good is knowledge, the only evil is ignorance.” -Diogenes

See Also:

Joe Bageant Lives — His Light, Our Brains

DefDog Recommends....

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

- George Orwell

See Also:

America’s Core Values: We the People vs. Them Crooks

CURVEBALL: The Interview + Integrity RECAP

Journal: USA Slouching Toward Tyranny

Reference: Empire of Lies & Secrecy

Search: cost of corruption + Corruption RECAP

Strong Signals: Truth or Tyrannicide + RECAP

Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail? + US Fraud RECAP

Jon Lebkowsky Bio

Open Source Politics and Religion

I just sent the following to an email list I’m on (Google Group Next Net), and thought it would be worth sharing here:

I’ve been involved with R.U. Sirius in instigating an International Open Source Party (version 2.0 – we tried it before but it didn’t quite launch). He wrote about it here.  This article includes the principles I came up with for Open Source politics, which I include below. Open Source is not a religion, i.e. not based on faith in something that can’t be observed or experienced. It’s about transparency: when we apply the term Open Source we’re talking about following methods and processes in production and distribution such that whatever we define as “source code” can be observed and experienced, so to me it’s the opposite of religion. Eric Hughes once explained to me, when I was new to Open Source thinking, that a particular encryption tool should be Open Source so that its source could be examined and its effectiveness and integrity verified. Politics should be like this, and if we all insisted on this approach, religion would be transformed into practice (a la Buddhism and 4th Way) rather than dogma (a la much of Christianity).

Principles of Open Source Politics:

Openness

Many of us who are tech-focused have come to understand the power of open approaches and open architectures. Even technologies that aren’t strictly “Open Source” benefit from Open APIs and exposure of operating code (kind of inherent with scripting languages like Perl and PHP). When we know how something works, we know how to work with it. And we know how to transform it to meet our needs.

Government should be as open and transparent as possible. There may be some rationales for closed doors, but few — for the most part, citizens should be able to clearly see how decisions are made. That’s a key component of our political platform: we want to see the actual “source code” for the decisions that affect our lives.

Collaboration

Open Source projects are often highly collaborative and can involve many stakeholders, not just manager and coders. The Open Source Party sees this as a great way to do government. (I’m partial to charrette methodology, personally.)

Emergent Leadership

Effective action and decison-making requires leadership. In an Open Source form of politics, leaders emerge through merit -— by providing real leadership and direction, not by appointment, assignment, or election. Nobody made Linus Torvalds the lead for Linux, or Matt Mullenweg the lead for WordPress. They saw a need, created a project, and found an effective following who acknowledged their vision, expertise, and ability to manage and lead. Emergent leaders aren’t handed authority. They earn it, and if they cease to be engaged or effective, they pass the baton to other leaders who emerge from within the group.

Extensible and Adaptable

Open Source projects and structures are agile and malleable. They can be adapted and extended as requirements changed. Governance should have this kind of flexibility, and our system of governance in the U.S. was actually built that way. We should ensure that bureaucracies and obsolete rule sets don’t undermine that flexibility.

Jon Lebkowsky Bio

From Cory Doctorow:

“To understand techno-optimism, it’s useful to look at the free software movement, whose ideology and activism gave rise to the GNU/Linux operating system, the Android mobile operating system, the Firefox and Chrome browsers, the BSD Unix that lives underneath Mac OS X, the Apache web-server and many other web- and e-mail-servers and innumerable other technologies. Free software is technology that is intended to be understood, modified, improved, and distributed by its users. There are many motivations for contributing to free/open software, but the movement’s roots are in this two-sided optimism/pessimism: pessimistic enough to believe that closed, proprietary technology will win the approval of users who don’t appreciate the dangers down the line (such as lock-in, loss of privacy, and losing work when proprietary technologies are orphaned); optimistic enough to believe that a core of programmers and users can both create polished alternatives and win over support for them by demonstrating their superiority and by helping people understand the risks of closed systems.

“While some free software activists might dream of a world without proprietary technology, the pursuit of free software’s ideology is generally more practical in its goal; like good technologists, they view proprietary technology as a bug, and bugs can’t necessarily be eliminated. It’s just not possible to squash every bug, so programmers track, isolate, and minimize bugs instead.”