Google Wave is a web-based application that represents a rethinking of electronic communication. Users create online spaces called “waves,” which include multiple discrete messages and components that constitute a running, conversational document. Users access waves through the web, resulting in a model of communication in which rather than sending separate copies of multiple messages to different people, the content resides in a single space. Wave offers a compelling platform for personal learning environments because it provides a single location for collecting information from diverse sources while accommodating a variety of formats, and it makes interactive coursework a possibility for nontechnical students. Wave challenges us to reevaluate how communication is done, stored, and shared between two or more people.
Source: EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative via resourceshelf
2. In the 8 years that the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission has been reporting on the state of the Chinese military, this is by far the best report that it has ever issued in the area of Information Warfare (aka Cyber Warfare). Kudos to Northrup Grumman who won the contract to write this special report, and to Steve DeWeese (Project Manager), Bryan Krekel (principal author), George Bakos and Christopher Barnett (Subject Matter Experts). My only objection is that the team didn’t pursue the relationship between the PRC and the Chinese hacker community far enough. Other than that, this is really outstanding work. It will certainly be required reading for our upcoming Cyber Threat Analysis online graduate course at Mercyhurst College Institute of Intelligence Studies.
This Week BLOSINT Brief (WBB) contains the following information:
1. The Americans are smart enough to go forward with enhancing OSINT as Open Intelligence to the Academic field.
“U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said Thursday that the committee has approved $1 million for open source intelligence and intelligence analysis at Sam Houston State University.
The bill is now ready to be considered by the full Senate.
“America’s military and intelligence services are constantly on guard for potential threats against our homeland,” Hutchison said.
SHSU will use the funding to expand open source intelligence collection and analysis efforts and training for Foreign Military Studies Office elements at the El Paso Intelligence Center.” Source: The Huntsville Item
2. MySpace is going on with Qizmt [kiz-mit]
“MySpace on Tuesday will release as open source a technology called Qizmtthat it developed in-house to mine and crunch massive amounts of data and generate friend recommendations in its social-networking site.
Qizmt is a distributed computation framework based on the MapReduce programming model for processing large data sets in processor clusters.” Source: PCWorld
4. Robert Steele, the longtime proponent of a robust open source intelligence program, has a new web site which notably includes an archiveof intelligence-policy related documents, several of which I had missed. The collection is accompanied by his own occasionally tart commentary. via Secrecy News
5. Intelligence Event: “Intelligence for the Twenty First Century. Intelligence for Everyone.” Madrid 22nd-23rd September 2009, Interligare 1st International Forum, via Public Intelligence Blog
Good idea in osint realm: “For those of who you don’t know the work of the OSC, they have in my opinion single-handedly elevated the profession of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) collection and analysis from getting no respect inside the Intelligence Community (IC) to one that every agency is designating as a must-have.
The conference was only open to current members of the IC plus invited speakers, and the speakers came from very diverse backgrounds. In fact, I was the only speaker who focused on the Russian Internet from a cyber warfare perspective (i.e., the Internet as an attack platform and Social Networks as target-rich environments). Others were academics, journalists, and a few security and intelligence professionals, and everyone focused on a different area. It was very stimulating with lots of audience interaction both during the sessions (lots of time provided for Q&A), during the breaks, and afterwards.
Fortunately, Sensa Solutions who handled the logistics for the OSC has posted some of the presentations on their Website. I particularly enjoyed Persephone Miel (Which came first, Russian Media or Russian Reality) andMikhail Alexseev (Internet Search Traffic and Ethnic Relations in Russia), but they are all worth reading.” via IntelFusion
Intellipedia, the intelligence community’s version of Wikipedia, hummed in the aftermath of the Iranian presidential election in June, with personnel at myriad government agencies updating a page dedicated to tracking the disputed results. Read the rest of this entry »
“There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.” – Victor Hugo
The availability of geospatial data sets is exploding. New satellites, aerial platforms, video feeds, global positioning system (GPS) tagged digital photos, and traditional geographic information system (GIS) information are dramatically increasing across the globe. These raw materials need to be dynamically processed, combined and correlated to generate value added information products to answer a wide range of questions. Read the rest of this entry »
Paris Dilemma Over Security at Electricite de France
Accusations of spying on Greenpeace have led to the suspension of two of EDF’s security executives. However, the group can’t turn a blind eye to movements that oppose it.
Source: IntelligenceOnline.Com /30/04/2009
Regardless of how it organizes its security service in future, France’s EDF group can’t overlook the critical function carried out at present by Pierre-Paul Francois (under formal investigation) and his immediate superior, former retired rear-admiral Pascal Durieux (a material witness in the case). Assigned to the security service of the group’s nuclear production division, the two have top secret government security clearance and their job consists mainly of preventing leaks of classified data. It was in that framework that they retained the services of Kargus Consultant headed by Thierry Lohro (also under investigation) to keep an eye on anti-nuclear movements. EDF has long monitored the NGO’s and other groups opposed to its business. Already in 1999, a Security Mission at the group’s industry center in the Paris suburb of St. Ouen was tasked with infiltrating eco-terrorist groups and building up a data base on anti-nuclear NGO’s and associations, as well as keeping tabs on the most outspoken members of unions. Headed at the time by a former director of a Nuclear Power Production Center, it employed a former commando from the 17th Regiment du Genie Parachutiste and an ex-gendarme who had headed an intelligence unit. The latter was also asked to see to the physical protection of nuclear installations. The unit was downgraded following the arrival of a new security boss of the group in 1999, Dominique Spinosi, who also retained a private strategy consultancy to conduct an audit of EDF’s security set-up. EDF’s current business intelligence unit, now under the orders of the group’s risk management director Pierre Beroux, was created as part of Spinosi’s department. Spinosi was replaced in 2007 by Jean-Marc Sabathe.
“Depending on who you ask, there are 195 countries in the world today. While the majority of economic resources are controlled by a small, yet very powerful subset of global corporations and sovereign nations, the impact of their actions is felt by the entire world community. That the recent economic crisis was triggered by a variety of factors including faulty assumptions, greed, malfeasance, ineptitude, lack of oversight and a host of other causes is not surprising in retrospect.”
Source: Michael Brooks – http://www.b-eye-network.com/view/10180
From IntelliBriefs: The recent discovery of Chinese cyber warfare attacks on foreign computers, on communication computers of visiting dignitaries, and espionage activities to assist a friendly country is building weapons of mass destruction (WMDI) has refocused international attention on the developing spectrum of China’s military doctrine. Read the rest of this entry »
“When you think about how the system will change, it may be helpful to picture national intelligence as a baseball game. In the old days, government bureaucrats accustomed to unlimited budgets and secret methods would try to win a game simply by bribing a player (Clandestine Intelligence), putting a “bug” in the… Read the rest of this entry »
“A colleague alerted me a couple of days ago to a massive DDOS attack against Kyrgyzstan ISPs www.ns.kg andwww.domain.kg which essentially shut them down on January 18, 2009. There are only 4 ISP providers for the entire country so this attack was clearly sending a message. Since the attacking IPs were Russian, and since the Russian government supports the current Kyrgyzstan President, I’m thinking that its a message to the opposition party.” …Read the rest of this entry »
I’m not sure but I think the processing phase is becoming visual intelligence in osint realm; in fact, the visual intell is much more…if we think the intell / osint cycle as a network process.
“One of the exercises we routinely assign in our Intelligence Communications and Intelligence Writing And Presentation classes is a “visual” short form analytic report.” and more…
“5GW is what happens when the world’s disaffected direct their desperation at the most obvious symbol of everything they lack, taking advantage of the tactics and battlefields pioneered by more highly organized fourth-gen warriors. The symbol is the United States, the world’s sole super-power. And the fifth-gen fighters’ weapon of choice is political “stalemate,” contends Marine Lt. Col. Stanton Coer, in a new piece inMarine Corps Gazette. “5GW fighters will win by … point[ing] out the impotence of secular military might. … These fighters win by not losing, while we lose by not winning.”
The battlefield will be something strange — cyberspace, or the Cleveland water supply, or Wall Street’s banking systems, or YouTube. The mission will be instilling fear, and it will succeed.
5GW is anchored in the global Islamic jihad espoused by Al Qaeda, Coer writes. But that doesn’t mean that fifth-gen warriors necessarily are clearly ideological, with aspirations of setting up alternative political systems. They’re opportunists, intent only on destruction. But even seemingly pointless violence can have a perverse logic, for the sudden, irrational destruction undermines the idea that nations — and especially the most powerful nation, the U.S. — are viable in the modern world.
So how do you beat a fifth-gen enemy? By not fighting, first of all. Beebe says ending the vortex of violence in Africa means alleviating “the conditions of human beings that create these insecurities across state borders.” In other words, focus on economic development, humanitarian assistance and communication, with nary an M-16 or Abrams tank in sight.
In Coer’s words, “success will vary inversely to exported violence.”"
And, because some part of this war is about cyberspace…
“According to Bloomberg – Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co., the world’s biggest defense companies, are deploying forces and resources to a new battlefield: cyberspace.”
INPUT’s Information Security Market Forecast 2008 – 2013 illustrates that demand for vendor-furnished information security products and services by the U.S. federal government will increase from $7.4 billion in 2008 to $10.7 billion in 2013 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.7%.
“There is altogether too much discussion about the deliverables that OSINT [open source intelligence] can produce,” said Jennifer Sims, a former State Department intelligence official, at a DNI conference on open source intelligence last week.
Open source intelligence refers to intelligence that is derived from unclassified, legally accessible information sources. Read the rest of this entry »
2008 was an eventful, breakthrough year for many open source companies, and 2009 will be even more so, especially in terms of business purchasing patterns, software business model shifts, and enterprise software stack evolution. The current economic conditions will certainly prompt businesses to look more closely at alternative IT solutions — and open source technology will be one of the big winners next year. Read the rest of this entry »
There is no standard definition of “intelligence”. Popular thinking and the best efforts of legislatures, agencies and academics to the contrary, no generally agreed upon definition of intelligence exists. This problem is exacerbated when the newly formed intelligence communities in law enforcement and the private sector are included. Read the rest of this entry »
Earlier this week, the Pentagon announced the first Minerva Research Initiative awards, which will fund social science research on key strategic issues.
Seven projects were selected out of a total of 211 proposals. The Pentagon will commit a total of up to $50 million to those research efforts. (Source: Danger Room)
