Public Intelligence Blog

Dr. Walter Dorn

Peacekeeping Technology for the Protection of Civilians

The goal of the forum is to increase awareness of peacekeeping technologies and how they are being used in practice.  While much attention has been given to providing the UN with helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), Dr. Dorn emphasizes the importance of basic tools such as smart phones, night vision goggles, video surveillance, and tethered balloons. The forum will include two panels  of experts to explore how the UN and African militaries might go about pilot projects to make use of these innovations.

Keynote Address by: Dr. Walter Dorn, Author of Keeping Watch: Monitoring Technology and Innovation in UN Peace Operations and editor of the forthcoming

Panelists Include:
Colonel Thomas Dempsey, African Center for Strategic Studies (ACSS)
Dwight Raymond, Peacekeeping and Stability Operations institute (PKSOI)
Sarah Williamson, Protect the People (PTP)
David Rogers, MobileGov
Alison Giffen, Stimson Center

Wednesday, May 29, 2013, Time: 10:00am-12:00pm
National Defense University, Lincoln Hall Room 3305, Ft. McNair, Washington, D.C.

This is a part of the TIDES Speaker Series.  Please RSVP to Nelly Mobula 202-685-1971 nelly.mobula@ndu.edu
or register online at: http://www.ndu.edu/CTNSP/Event_Registration/register.cfm

DOWNLOIAD PDF FLYER FOR LOCAL BULLETIN BOARD:
NDUMay29 PeacekeepingTechnology_29May2013

Stephen E. Arnold

Potentially New Web Page Data Mining Tool

Extracting content from a Web page can be a maddening process, requiring specialized scripts and time spent coding them. Taking a look at available tools, Softpedia touts “FMiner Pro 7.05.” FMiner Pro is advertised as a reliable application that allows users to easily handle Web content without scripts. The software can pull data from any page type, including https, plugins, JavaScript, and even complete data structures.

After the data is extracted much can be done with it:

“Extracted results can be saved to csv, Excel(xls), SQLite, Access, SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and can specify the database fields’ types and attributes(eg, UNIQUE can avoid duplication of the extracted data). According to the setting, program can build, rebuild or load the database structure, and save the data to an existing database. Professional edition support incremental extraction, clear extraction and schedule extraction.”

FMiner Pro is available for a free fifteen-day trial to see how well it can perform. After viewing the specs, FMiner Pro is worth a shot. It can probably save coders hours by not having to write scripts and organizing Web content is a tedious job no one likes to do. Having a program to do it is much more preferable.

Whitney Grace, May 22, 2013

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search

Neal Rauhauser

National Defense University’s Convergence

I have been writing on attention conservation for the last four years, having first heard of the concept within Bruce Sterling’s Viridian Design Notes. Sterling used this term as a label for an initial few lines of summary on each note, basically negative information regarding the content, permitting those who would not be interested to ‘conserve their attention’. I use the phrase more broadly, in the sense that we are overloaded by media, overloaded by data, and overloaded by a world that is about to change dramatically.

Part of my personal attention conservation this year has been an effort to take the time I used to spend on short, reactive social media – like Twitter – and redirect it into more weighty reading. I just finished the National Defense University’s Convergence: Illicit Networks and National Security in the Age of Globalization, and I strongly recommend this tome for anyone seeking to better understand the nature of conflict between hierarchies and networks.

Read full post.

Contents

• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction

Chapters (Links to Each):

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India has 900 million mobile users, but only 8 percent of those enjoy mobile Internet access. Thanks to four college drop-outs, the other 92 percent can now search the Web, too–by text. Read on.

In India, browse the web through texts

By Betwa Sharma | May 20, 2013

DELHI — In 2009, four students dropped out of an engineering college in a small town in southern India to pursue their dream. They wanted to channel the vast sea of knowledge floating on the Internet through text messages to millions of people who don’t have access to the web.

Now their creation, called SMS Gyan (gyan means knowledge), a search engine available on mobile phones, has 120 million users in India, the Middle East and Africa submitting over five million queries every day. And their company Innoz Technologies has expanded to 45 employees, and it earned $2.5 million worth of revenue last year.

The company’s founders say that Innoz is set to become the world’s largest offline search engine in 2015, with projections of 10 million monthly unique users and more than 55 million searches per day.

. . . . . . . .

Air Tel made the service available to its users in India (it has total of 230 million in 19 countries) who can text questions to 55444 for one rupee, or two cents.

Mohammed Hisamuddin, 26, another co-founder, said that Innoz had designed a special algorithm that crawls their Internet partner sites like Wikipedia and Zomato for information, and then optimizes the most relevant bits into a text-response of 480-characters to make it user friendly.

Read full article.

Neal Rauhauser

Confusion & Disinformation

I published What 2013 Has In Store 166 days ago and summed up my discoveries in Professionalism & Propaganda a week ago. This 1,800+ word piece with descriptive links to over thirty posts covers everything from my network of now over 3,000 Facebook Anonymous supporters through the CIA’s application of mindfulness to the analysis process, a direction taken in response to network threats.

During that time I completed a social network analysis class offered by Coursera and I curated nineteen related documents in my SNA Class collection. Humans exhibit a variety of interconnected ways of making decisions, information itself has a network of precursors and successors, and the flow of information through human networks can often be modeled as a spreading contagion.

There are a variety of problems that professional analysts face which have been studied in-depth by the Central Intelligence Agency‘s internal think tank, the Center for the Study of Intelligence. A distributed, grassroots network shares some characteristics with a professional cadre of analysts, but organizing, motivating, and assessing their progress is dramatically different from that of a hierarchical organization.

Here is an overview of the universe for the next stage in my inquiries. This Maltego graph displays five major components. The large group with the most diverse colors is representative of my place in the scheme of things – people who engage me in a bi-drectional fashion and organizations to which I subscribe. The cluster of people(lavender) and Twitter accounts(green) at the lower left represents e-International Relations, which is open and academic in nature. The similar looking cluster at the upper right are the Twitter users among the 156 analysts for Wikistrat. A larger graph of their complete network is seen in the next image. The cluster at the lower right is the LinkedIn-centric International Security Observers, an open, web based think tank.

. . . . . . . . .

If I had to distill what I am trying to get at here in one paragraph, it would be this:

Groups of analysts need a shared context that can store and display information in chronological order, recognizing entities in the field ranging from states to naval vessels to individuals. The system needs to be able to store documents, images, URLs, and other internet accessible content. The system need not perform link analysis, but it must be amenable to doing so with its content using a tool like Maltego or Gephi, and then making the analysis available as an integral part of the overall offering.

Read full post with many links and graphics.

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Stephen E. Arnold

Connecting the Dots Yields Spotty Results

Posted: 10 May 2013 05:30 AM PDT

In the aftermath of the Boston bombing, many have discussed whether or not the FBI should have had the capabilities to “connect the dots” to identify and prevent the bomber from following through. Boing Boing reiterates the point that Bruce Schneier made in a recent CNN op-ed in their post, “Why ‘Connecting the Dots’ is the Wrong Way to Think about Stopping Terrorism.”

It goes back to the old adage: hindsight is 20/20. It takes a future perspective to look at an event and create a narrative amongst dots of data. The concept of the “narrative fallacy” is what makes a past event seem like a neat story where the dots to be connected should have been obviously illuminated the entire time.

The article tells us:

“Rather than thinking of intelligence as a simple connect-the-dots picture, think of it as a million unnumbered pictures superimposed on top of each other. Or a random-dot stereogram. Is it a sailboat, a puppy, two guys with pressure-cooker bombs or just an unintelligible mess of dots? You try to figure it out. It’s not a matter of not enough data, either. Piling more data onto the mix makes it harder, not easier. The best way to think of it is a needle-in-a-haystack problem; the last thing you want to do is increase the amount of hay you have to search through.”

No one can deny that connecting dots is an important way to increase knowledge. However, as good of a technique — and phrase — that it is, spotty results are invariable.

Megan Feil, May 19, 2013

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search

Michel Bauwens

People are raving about this as a possible alternative command and control system for the public to use.

Civilized Discourse Construction Kit

Jeff Atwood

Coding Horror, February 5, 2013

EXTRACT:

After spending four solid years thinking of discussion as the established corrupt empire, and Stack Exchange as the scrappy rebel alliance, I began to wonder – what would it feel like to change sides? What if I became a champion of random, arbitrary discussion, of the very kind that I’d spent four years designing against and constantly lecturing users on the evil of?

I already built an X-Wing; could I build a better Tie Fighter?

Today we announce the launch of Discourse, a next-generation, 100% open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet.

The goal of the company we formed, Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc., is exactly that – to raise the standard of civilized discourse on the Internet through seeding it with better discussion software:

• 100% open source and free to the world, now and forever.
• Feels great to use. It’s fun.
• Designed for hi-resolution tablets and advanced web browsers.
• Built in moderation and governance systems that let discussion communities protect themselves from trolls, spammers, and bad actors – even without official moderators.

Our amazingly talented team has been working on Discourse for almost a year now, and although like any open source software it’s never entirely done, we believe it is already a generation ahead of any other forum software we’ve used.

Read the rest of this entry »

Jean Lievens

Revolutionize Corporate Learning: Beyond Formal, Informal, Mobile, Social Dichotomies

by Marcia Conner on May 10, 2013

A report for business decision makers interested in abolishing traditional corporate training functions, creating instead vibrant modern collaborative cultures. Why? The corporate learning field is in dire need of bravery, insight, creativity and boldness. It has been stuck in an antiquated rut for too long. Full classrooms and smile-sheet summaries only indicate employees can successfully sit through training, not that these strategies demonstrate value or engender growth in competitive organizations. With a nod toward early twentieth-century innovations, moving the art world toward natural forms, the corporate education function should aim to become learning nouveau. The people responsible for fostering education throughout organizations ought to consider becoming artists. Here’s how. [Additional information at http://www.marciaconner.com/learning-nouveau/]

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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Parag Khanna

Edging toward the sweet spot of new-century governance

Enter the info-state. The info-state – today one of a growing number of dynamic and entrepreneurial cities, city-states or small nations scattered around the world – governs as much through data as via democracy.

Scholars have for decades appreciated political mutations that drive international competition and result in new forms of governance. In 1941, Harold Lasswell emphasized the rise of politico-military elites, such as in Imperial Japan, that shaped the ideology of ‘garrison states.’ In 1996, Richard Rosecrance forecasted a transition toward ‘virtual states’ that downsized geography and outsourced production, while investing more in human and portfolio capital than territorial expansion. Building on this logic of the economic over the political, Philip Bobbitt’s Shield of Achilles (2002) traced the advent of the ‘market state’ era, in which the maximization of individual commercial opportunity defines national power and success. Japanese business strategist Kenichi Ohmae then set the stage for the info-state era in The Next Global Stage (2005), which argued that urban agglomerations of city-states resembling the medieval Hanseatic League would become the world’s power centres.

The info-state draws on numerous important attributes of these previous – and still co-existing – units. The economic footprint supersedes the territorial, the urban industrial core and its human capital pool are the locus of value, and diplomacy is exercised by commercial and knowledge centres as much as by national capitals.

But the info-state also presents new mutations that were not conceivable in previous technological periods – a peculiar convergence of the Information Age and the devolved authority of city units and clusters. The critical shift lies in the manner of policy-making enabled by new technologies: governance is practiced in ‘real-time’ – through constant consultation, rather than through traditional, staggered democratic deliberation. In a sense, this is a post-modern democracy – or even ‘post-democracy’ – that combines popular priorities with rationalist or technocratic management. On this logic, data-driven policy might mean more objective measurement of progress, more evidence-based policy, and more accountability of leadership.

In order to thrive, an info-state must provide both the security of the garrison state model and the connectedness of the virtual state. In other words, the essence of the info-state is secure connectedness. And, to be sure, this existential reliance on secure connectedness is potentially the info-state’s most prominent vulnerability.

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