Public Intelligence Blog

Stephen E. Arnold

Are Search and Business Intelligence Merging?

Wrong tense. Search has been sucked into business intelligence as a subordinate or utility function.

Consultants and “experts” suggest that search and business intelligence are converging. Information Builders, based in New York City, suggests that the alleged convergence looks like two equally-sized markets merging like a math book’s illustration of a Venn diagram. The picture is symmetrical and appears to make sense. In my opinion, the presentation of “worlds’ merging” in an orderly manner is misleading at best and downright silly at worst.

. . . . . . . .

In the somewhat untidy worlds of search and business intelligence, not much has changed. Terminology and the fervent belief that new phrases will solve information problems is more important than tackling more fundamental, less zippy issues.

We have entered an era of same old, same old, and there is no turning back. The problem of computational limits force systems to work as they have for many years. The methods and the math is the same. The content types and the marketing lingo are different.

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David Swanson

Connecticut Advances Conversion from War to Peace Economy

The Connecticut legislature has sent to the governor to sign a bill that would create a commission to develop a plan for, among other things:

“the diversification or conversion of defense-related industries with an emphasis on encouraging environmentally-sustainable and civilian product manufacturing. On or before December 1, 2014, the commission shall submit such report to the Governor and, in accordance with the provisions of section 11-4a, to the joint standing committee of the General Assembly having cognizance of matters relating to commerce.”

The commission “shall Advise the General Assembly and the Department of Economic and Community Development on issues relating to the diversification or conversion of defense-related industries” among other things.

Read the full text.

According to Peace Action, sponsor State Senator Toni N. Harp from New Haven has said,

“The proposed Futures Commission will set up a framework that allows us to convert many of our military related jobs and infrastructure into non-military industries.”

This is a remarkable breakthrough that didn’t just come out of nowhere:

“In November 2012, a ballot referendum passed in New Haven that called for moving the money from war to jobs rebuilding our infrastructure and human needs. This referendum won support nearly 6 to 1! This winter in Connecticut, the US Peace Council, No Nukes No War, the City of New Haven Peace Commission with the support of the state AFL-CIO and International Association of Machinists worked to get  SB619 introduced in the state legislature calling for a Futures Commission whose goals is to investigate how to convert the weapons manufacturing industries to producing civilian, green products and retain and develop manufacturing in the state. The Commission that this bill creates will include representatives of labor, peace and environmental organizations.”

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Chuck Spinney

The popular perception of Hezbollah as simply an Islamic terrorist organization has been colored by American-Israeli propaganda (particularly wrt to relations with Iran and Syria), sloppy reporting, and a growing sense of Islamophobia in American culture.

Rami Khouri is a prolific Lebanese intellectual who writes widely on the Middle East.  His austere, direct form of writing lays out arguments clearly and concisely.  Like all writers of Middle Eastern affairs, his predictions are often wrong, but unlike most, his fault lines, when they occur, are easily traced.  In short, Khouri is always a good read and well worth following, because even if his arguments turn out to be erroneous, they are a fount of useful information.

Attached below is his fascinating take on Hezbollah.  I reformatted it to highlight his points but have not changed a word or the order of his words.  Some readers find my highlighting distracting, others like it; if you are one of the former, the link below will take you to the original.

Chuck Spinney

Hezbollah’s Moment of Reckoning in Qusayr

22 May 2013

BEIRUT — The most fascinating aspect of the war in Syria this month — and perhaps also the most significant in terms of long-term regional geo-politics — is the direct involvement of Hezbollah, the powerful Lebanese Shiite party and resistance group that is closely allied to Iran and Syria. The significance of Hezbollah’s participation in the battle for the Syrian town of Qusayr comprises several distinct elements:

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Sterling Seagrave

Responding to 2013 Robert Steele Answers on OSINT to PhD Student in Denmark

You refer several times to what you call “unethical private sector parties whose only focus is on money in, not intelligence out.” This is what corrupted Truman’s initiative. Covens like this go way back in history, but in the US more recently it coalesced around the group that set up the Fed, expanded to include globetrotters like Wild Bill Donovan and the Dulles Brothers. They, in turn, brought in collusion with Meyer Lansky, a merger of Mafia with highest level Masons, and a very powerful group of attorneys (Paul Helliwell, etc), financiers (Averell Harriman, etc), who were vigorously engaged in financing the Bolsheviks, the Nazis, the Fascists, Imperialists, and eventually Neo-Cons.  While financing these groups to put power into dictatorship-of-the-State (everyone else being disposable serfs), they profited from moving heroin and other drugs, and siphoned off all the gold they could to personal offshore caches. In effect, this created a covert government-within-a-government, enabled them to take over mass media, and to use pharmaceuticals to stupefy the general public.  The formal government of the US is now 90% corrupted into what’s been called “a parliament of whores”. Huge sums provided to “rescue” Greece, etc., vanish. The coven has brought together as many fascist foreign governments as possible, so in effect it is attempting to set up its “invisible government” as the new global government. In doing so it has subverted the UN, and virtually all global organizations such as the FAO.  This is why OSINT is having such a difficult time, reversing the poisonous current.  The last thing the coven wants is an honest, moral, and open source of truthful information for the public.

How many and which fascist governments?

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Neal Rauhauser

The Only Red Line That Matters

Conclusion:

Here are what I hope are a fairly complete laundry list of the issues:

• NATO member Greece has collapsed, triggering regional banking meltdown concerns
• Banks of Cyprus collapsed, Russian offshore banking haven taken out by Greek troubles
• Russian ally Assad’s Syria is failing, loss of Tartus would exclude them from the Med
• Assad regime is the only Iran friendly outpost in the area
• Syrian revolt is funded in part by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, other Sunni majority regimes
• KSA & Qatar funds come /w Salafist radicalization built into the deal
• NATO members Greece & Turkey are at odds over Cyprus partition
• Syrian instability is spilling into Iraq, fueling Sunni/Shia violence, some refugees
• Syrian instability is spilling into U.S. ally Jordan, many refugees
• Syrian instability is spilling into NATO member Turkey, many refugees
• Israel is concerned over weapons transport to Hezbollah in Lebanon

Click on Image to Enlarge

The Syrian civil war has been metastasizing into all of its immediate neighbors – Iraq, Turkey, and Lebanon have all seen violence precipitated by this festering conflict. Regional powers Iran and Russia have connections to the failing Assad regime and have taken indirect steps to protect the status quo. Regional Salafist funders Saudi Arabia and Qatar are funneling support and pushing ideology on Sunni Syrian rebels. I do not envy Israeli policy makers and the menu of unpleasant options that reality has provided them.

Russia has drawn a red line of their own – no NATO intervention in Syria. They’ve backed it up with a naval presence and the transfer of advance anti-aircraft systems to the Assad regime. The Syrian civil war is a multifaceted, multipolar regional issue and there are no soundbite sized prescriptions that will end it.

Read full post with maps.

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YARC YARC

‘Six Americans’ killed in suicide bomb in Afghanistan as Taliban target NATO workers

Muslim militant group, Hizb-e-Islami, claimed responsibility for attack
U.S. Defense Secretary confirmed two of the dead are US soldiers
Nationality of four civilian contractors not yet officially announced
Powerful explosion rattled buildings on the other side of Kabul
Identity of dead Americans has not yet been released

By Anna Edwards

MailOnline, : 01:40 EST, 16 May 2013

Click on Image to Enlarge

Read full article with video and more photographs.

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Berto Jongman

This Is What Winning Looks Like – Full Length

VICE News

NEWS

This Is What Winning Looks Like

My Afghanistan War Diary

Amazon Page

By Ben Anderson

I didn’t plan on spending six years covering the war in Afghanistan. I went there in 2007 to make a film about the vicious fighting between undermanned, underequipped British forces and the Taliban in Helmand, Afghanistan’s most violent province. But I became obsessed with what I witnessed there—how different it was from the conflict’s portrayal in the media and in official government statements.

. . . . . . .

In February 2013, on his last day at the helm of NATO forces in Afghanistan, General John R. Allen described what he thought the war’s legacy will be: ‘‘Afghan forces defending Afghan people and enabling the government of this country to serve its citizens. This is victory, this is what winning looks like, and we should not shrink from using these words.’’ 

The US and British forces are preparing to leave Afghanistan for good (officially, by the end of 2014), and my time in the country over the last six years has convinced me that our legacy will be the exact opposite of what Allen posits—not a stable Afghanistan, but one at war with itself yet again. Here are a few encapsulated snapshots of what I’ve seen and what we’re leaving behind.

Read full article.

Marcus Aurelius

Invite your attention to following article, which comes, obviously, from an author with an agenda.

Matthew Leavitt, South of the Border, A Threat from Hezbollah (The Journal of International Security Affairs, 2012-05-15), pp. 77-82

Suggest you keep following in mind as you read article:

1.  There is a war going on south of the US-MX border among drug cartels for control of network of smuggling routes into and within the United States.

2.  There are long-established nexes between narco-trafficking and terrorism.

3.  Hezbollah receives significant support and operational direction from Iran, particularly through Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Draw your own conclusions…

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Robert David STEELE Vivas

I have been reflecting on the past twenty years, and the remarkable resistence of the US Intelligence Community, seemingly impervious to all manner of reform recommendations, be they presidential, congressional, or public.  Reform is not transformation.  This from Dr. Russell Ackoff, a pioneer in systems thinking and reflexive practice:

Reformations and transformations are not the same thing.  Reformations are concerned with changing the means systems employ to pursue their objectives.  Transformations involve changes in the objectives they pursue.

And now this from Ada Bozeman:

(There is a need) to recognize that just as the essence of knowledge is not as split up into academic disciplines as it is in our academic universe, so can intelligence not be set apart from statecraft and society, or subdivided into elements…such as analysis and estimates, counterintelligence, clandestine collection, covert action, and so forth. Rather … intelligence is a scheme of things entire. (Bozeman 1998: 177):[1]

The recent NATO Innovation Hub initiative in leveraging social media is a tiny but potentially potent transformation starting point.  It reflects clarity, diversity, and integrity.  After an open brainstorming session that identified 32 opportunity areas, enablers, and concerns, the team nurturing the NATO Innovation Hub settled on three areas for focus where concept papers will be developed:

-­‐ Education and Training through New Media
-­‐ Alternative Command and Control
-­‐ Social Media Users Training

As one of the early invited participants contributing to the process, I offered the below comments toward the first draft of the concept paper for Alternative Command and Control, and am now adding to that a section on four forcing concepts or functions for transforming strategy, policy, acquisition, and operations via the alternative command and control concept.

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Chuck Spinney

Below is a very interesting summary of the political tensions among secularism and religion and modernism and tradition in Tunisia.  I think the author, who I do not know but whose writings I have followed, is one of the most knowledgeable observers of the Arab Spring.

Chuck Spinney

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs

April 2013, Pages 41-42

Tunisia in Turmoil:What Next?

By Esam Al-Amin

THE SPARK THAT ignited the Arab Spring over two years ago came from Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia. For 28 days people across the country revolted against the repression and corruption of the 23-year authoritarian regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Finally, on Jan. 14, 2011 Tunisians celebrated their victory and resilience over tyranny and oppression when Ben Ali fled the country. But if getting rid of the dictator was relatively short and easy, the dismantling of his regime and its corrosive effects on society has proven to be very challenging indeed.

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