Public Intelligence Blog

Marcus Aurelius

When in doubt create another layer.

Keystroke Crackdown, page 1 of 2, Army Times 07May12

Keystroke Crackdown, page 2 of 2, Army Times 07May12

Phi Beta Iota:  First off, keystroke monitoring and download monitoring are already fully developed (as well as remote virtual screen replication).  If Army really thinks they are investing in something new, this is a terrible indicator of how little Army knows.  The idea that some contractor out there can be paid to feed “fake data” to a real-time possible suspect, is a foundation for expensive fraud.  Army continues to do the wrong thing righter, while completely avoiding the right thing: human education and system design from the bottom up.

See Also:

Who’s Who in Cyber-Intelligence: Robert Garigue

Click on Image to Enlarge

Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

Bin Laden’s last stand: In final months, terrorist leader worried about his legacy

Steven Aftergood

NEW ARMY DOCTRINE ON “INFORMATION COLLECTION”

An Army field manual published last week explains the Army’s conduct of information collection activities in military operations.

“In this manual, the term ‘information collection’ is introduced as the Army’s replacement for ‘intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance’ (also known as ISR),” the manual says.

“This publication clarifies how the Army plans, prepares, and executes information collection activities within or between echelons.”

“As the Army fields new formations and equipment with inherent and organic information collection capabilities, it needs a doctrinal foundation to ensure their proper integration and use to maximize their capabilities.”

See Information Collection, U.S. Army Field Manual (FM) 3-55, April 23, 2012.

EXCERPTS & COMMENT BY PHI BETA IOTA:

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Mario Profaca

Must read this!

Tynt, the Copy/Paste Jerks

Daring Fireball

Friday, 28 May 2010

Marcus Aurelius

LYONS: How smart is intelligence bureaucracy?

Post-9/11 reform still results in erroneous threat assessments

The 9/11 Commission concluded in its final report in 2004 that the U.S. intelligence community (IC) organization, as it was structured then, had contributed to a failure to develop a management strategy to counter Islamic terrorism. The report concluded that the traditional existing IC agencies’ stovepipes had to be eliminated and a position should be established for an administrator who would have powerful oversight authority. To accomplish this urgent task, one of the commission’s principal recommendations was establishment of the position of director of national intelligence (DNI), which would be separate from the director of the CIA. There were many arguments against establishing the position of DNI. Some asserted that had it existed before the Sept. 11 attacks, it would not have prevented them. That remains an open question. It should be recalled that the 9/11 Commission staff discovered just before its final report went to the printers in July 2004 a six-page National Security Agency (NSA) analysis summarizing what the intelligence community had learned about Iran’s direct involvement in the attack. Was this information collected before or after the attacks? As of now, we don’t know because there has been no follow-up investigation by any congressional committee or the newly established DNI.

Admiral James A. Lyons, USN (Ret)

This issue is similar to one of an NSA intercept of the Iranian ambassador in Damascus reporting back to the foreign ministry in Tehran on instructions he had given terrorist groups in Beirut to concentrate their attacks on the Multi-National Force but undertake a “spectacular action” against the U.S. Marines. This intercept was issued by the NSA in a highly classified message on Sept. 27, 1983, almost four weeks before the Marine barracks bombing. I was the deputy chief of naval operations then and did not get to see this critical message until two days after the bombing. Most key decision-makers have never seen this message.

Would a DNI have ensured that such a critical message was brought to the attention of key decision-makers? That also remains an open question. The bottom line is that personnel performance at all levels must recognize the critical nature of key intelligence and not worry about who gets the credit.

Interviews of former 9/11 Commission members showed they thought the structure of the DNI’s support should remain small, but it has evolved into essentially a new intelligence agency. It has expanded rapidly, with many large offices and a staff of at least 1,600 (as of 2010), plus untold numbers of contract personnel.

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DefDog

Interesting…..as pointed out in the article, most people defer to the eminence of the individual and not to the substance of the message…..and then there is the criminal obfuscation of Wall Street.

Neal Koblitz: “Mathematics as Propaganda”

This is an excerpt from Volume III of Mathematics: People, Problems, Results that had to be shared.

Johnny Carson was in top form, but the show could have bogged down if his guest had delved into subtleties or overly serious discussion. However, Ehrlich had the perfect solution. He took a piece of posterboard and wrote in large letters for the TV audience:

D = N * I

“In this equation,” he explained, “D stands for damage to the environment, N stands for the number of people, and I stands for the impact of each person on the environment. This equation shows that the more people, the more pollution. We cannot control pollution without controlling the number of people.”

Johnny Carson looked at the equation, scratched his head, made a remark about never having been good at math, and commented that it all looked quite impressive.

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Richard Stallman

UPDATE: Submission deadline is now June 4th

The UK government is holding a consultation about what sort of patent licenses an “open” standard should require. Anyone that develops free software (free as in freedom, not a matter of price) and would like it to be used in the UK has reason to be concerned with this, along with anyone that uses or distributes free software in the UK.

One option under consideration is to demand the patent holder give everyone a royalty-free patent license for implementing the standard. That at least permits free software to support the standard.

The other option is a criterion called “FRAND”, which claims to mean “Fair, Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory”. What it really means is that the patent holder must publish terms and allow anyone to buy a license on those terms. The terms are often such as to exclude free software entirely from implementing the standard.

For instance, these terms can (and in many cases do) require anyone distributing the software to pay a license fee per copy of the program distributed. If you receive a program with a requirement to pay someone if you redistribute it, you do not have freedom #2, so the program is not free software. In effect, these terms discriminate against free software, which is neither fair nor reasonable.

The term “FRAND” is a FRAUD.

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Chuck Spinney

Warning Signs for the US

In the aftermath of the world’s worst nuclear power disaster, the news media is just beginning to grasp that the dangers to Japan and the rest of the world posed by the Fukushima-Dai-Ichi site are far from over.   After repeated warnings by former senior Japanese officials, nuclear experts, and now a U.S. Senator, it is sinking in that the irradiated nuclear fuel stored in spent fuel pools amidst the reactor ruins may have far greater potential offsite consequences  than the molten cores.

After visiting the site recently, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) wrote to Japan’s ambassador to the U.S. stating that, “loss of containment in any of these pools could result in an even greater release than the initial accident.”

This is why:

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota:  This is a classic illustration of how dangerously useless it is to have a massively expensive secret intelligence and “heavy metal” military, without capacity for global coverage, true cost economics, and so on.   Until governments make the shift toward future-oriented hybid governnance — embracing the core ideals of clarity, diversity, and integrity — it will not be possible to get a grip on the challenges and the possibilities facing the human species on Earth.  We have been here before: in the 1970′s when Peak Oil, Peak Water, and AIDs were all briefed to the US Senate and to the White House.  The reality is that the corruption characteristic of those bodies then is still with us–there is only ONE serious approach to this and all other issues, and that is the creation of the World Brain and Global Game and a commensurate commitment to integrate true cost economics into every decision, and to make every decision as indigenous communities have done for thousands of years: future-oriented — Seventh Generation.

See Also:

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Got Crowd? BE the Force!

Maybe we should stop worrying about analysts w second language capabilities and insist that policymakers have a second language.

Thinking in foreign language makes decisions more rational

To judge a risk more clearly, it may help to consider it in a foreign language.

A series of experiments on more than 300 people from the US and Korea found that thinking in a second language reduced deep-seated, misleading biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived.

“Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue?” asked psychologists led by Boaz Keysar of the University of Chicago in an April 18 Psychological Science study.

“It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a foreign language would make decisions less systematic. We discovered, however, that the opposite is true: Using a foreign language reduces decision-making biases,” wrote Keysar’s team.

Psychologists say human reasoning is shaped by two distinct modes of thought: one that’s systematic, analytical and cognition-intensive, and another that’s fast, unconscious and emotionally charged.

In light of this, it’s plausible that the cognitive demands of thinking in a non-native, non-automatic language would leave people with little leftover mental horsepower, ultimately increasing their reliance on quick-and-dirty cogitation.

Equally plausible, however, is that communicating in a learned language forces people to be deliberate, reducing the role of potentially unreliable instinct. Research also shows that immediate emotional reactions to emotively charged words are muted in non-native languages, further hinting at deliberation.

. . . . . . .

The researchers believe a second language provides a useful cognitive distance from automatic processes, promoting analytical thought and reducing unthinking, emotional reaction.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota:  Integrity is not just about people making decisions.  It is about the whole — the context, the clarity of communication, the diversity of views, the integrity of all feedback loops.  Today there is very little integrity in the process of intelligence – on those rare occasions when it actually exists — and there is zero integrity in the policy process, something Paul Pillar and Morton Halperin (among many others) have documented nicely.

See Also:

Morton Halperin, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy (Brookings, 2006)

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011)

Paul Pillar, Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform (Columbia, 2011)

Phi Beta Iota: Journal: Politics & Intelligence–Partners Only When Integrity is Central to Both

DefDog

Still fixation on monolithic threats…..where are errors and ommissions, poor coding, etc?

Rethinking cyber warfare

Scott Borg:  Cyber warfare will require us to rethink every aspect of defence.  Our current weapons and defence systems will still be needed, but the way we use them will become very different.  A major cyber assault could completely bypass our military forces.  It would not require incoming airplanes, missiles, ships, or troops.  The attack could suddenly appear inside the computerized equipment of our major industries.  The identity of the country or organization that was responsible could be impossible to determine quickly or with complete confidence.  The cyber assault could cause almost any kind of damage that could be produced by the human operators of computerized equipment.  In fact, a cyber attack could cause many kinds of damage that the human operators of industrial equipment could only achieve by reprogramming their controls.

Phi Beta Iota:  Nobody has learned anything since NSA first learned about hackers and then was told to focus on both the security of corporation communications and the need for a national secure information infrastructure.  The above perspective is uninformed, and also dangerous for its idiotic suggestion that we should militarize all domestic systems.

See Also:  Graphic: Cyber-Threat 101