Posts tagged intelligence
“I am going to give what I will call an elementary demonstration. But elementary does not mean easy to understand. Elementary means that very little is required to know ahead of time in order to understand it, except to have an infinite amount of intelligence. There may be a large number of steps that hard to follow, but to each does not require already knowing the calculus or Fourier transforms.”
–Richard P. Feynman
“Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation. Civilization, like intelligence, may serve well, serve adequately, or fail to serve its adaptive function. When civilization fails to serve, it must disintegrate unless it is acted upon by unifying internal or external forces.”
–Octavia E. Butler. Parable of the Sower
“Just over a decade ago, when I was a senior intelligence officer, I spent most of my time in the world of ‘ints’ — signals intelligence imagery, human intelligence — and used just a little bit of open-source information to enrich the assessments that we made. Fast forward to 2014 and the explosion of the information environment in just the last few years alone. Open-source now is a place I spend most of my time. The open world of information provides us most of what we need and the ‘ints’ of old, they enrich the assessments that we’re able to make from open-source information.” Open-source intelligence can take a variety of forms, but among the most voluminous, personal and useful is Facebook and Twitter data. The availability of that sort of information is changing the way that DIA trains intelligence operatives. Long gone are the spooks of old who would fish through trash for clues on targets. Here to stay are the eyes looking through your vacation pictures.
http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2014/07/military-already-using-facebook-track-moods/87793/
So, hacker culture is kind of at a crossroads. For a long time it was totally cool that, you know what, I don’t really want to be political, because I just like to reverse code and it’s a lot of fun, and I don’t really have time for politics cause I spend thirteen hours a day looking at Shell code and socialism takes too long. That was great for a while, but we don’t get to be apolitical anymore. Because If you’re doing security work, if you’re doing development work and you are apolitical, then you are aiding the existing centralizing structure. If you’re doing security work and you are apolitical, you are almost certainly working for an organization that exists in a great part to prop up existing companies and existing power structures. Who here has worked for a a security consultancy? Not that many people, ok. I don’t know anybody who has worked for a security consultancy where that consultancy has not done work for someone in the defense industry. There are probably a few, and I guarantee you that those consultancies that have done no work that is defense industry related, have taken an active political position, that we will not touch anything that is remotely fishy. If you’re apolitical, you’re aiding the enemy.
https://noisysquare.com/ethics-and-power-in-the-long-war-eleanor-saitta-dymaxion/
For correspondents who report from conflict zones or on underground activism in repressive regimes, the risks are extremely high. Recently, two excellent investigative series—by The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News—and the release of a large trove of surveillance industry documents by Wikileaks dubbed “The Spy files,” provided a glimpse of just how sophisticated off-the-shelf monitoring technologies have become. Western companies have sold mass Web and e-mail surveillance technology to Libya and Syria, for instance, and in Egypt, activists found specialized software that allowed the government to listen in to Skype conversations. In Bahrain, meanwhile, technology sold by Nokia Siemens allowed the government to monitor cell-phone conversations and text messages.
http://www.cjr.org/feature/the_spy_who_came_in_from_the_c.php?page=all