We received the following contribution from Larry Penslinger, the author of the once-in-a-century masterpiece novel of consciousness, The Moon at Hoa Binh, who is also a former intelligence analyst, regarding the interesting essay in the New York Times Magazine, on the adoption of wiki’s and blogs within the U.S. intelligence communities. The article starts with the story of enthusiastic Web 2.0 generation student, who discovers that, far from being superior to the internet tools, the intelligence agencies are hopelessly mired in silo’s of uncommunicating information.
Larry is also a deep researcher into the nature of distributed money systems.
P2P Security developments are monitored through the P2P-Warfare tag in Delicious.
Commentary from William Penslinger:
“The open-source approach to intelligence production (“Open Source Spying” by Clive Thompson, New York Times Magazine, 3 December 2006) may improve operational/actionable intel but the real failure is strategic intel and the fact that predetermined policy and predetermined strategy, not the information, determines the assessment required of the analyst. A fact that seems, in some measure, to be in the nature
of the nation-state. Moreover, even issues of need-to-know compartmentalization aside, it is not the most popular piece of information you need (i.e., most linked); it is the unpopular piece (no links) which you will NEVER be able to find in a Googled information system. The creative analyst would have to be recreating the Google search engine itself on a daily basis to fit his changing needs — and even that would not be good enough. The engine doesn’t function at all on the levels of abstraction required. You can find that no-link piece better in an uncomputerized information environment: absorption activates the unconscious which is a pretty amazing search engine that functions on all levels of abstraction and even arranges sychronicities with the information required.
Moreover, again, as regards strategic intel, the analyst who generates real insight does not work from information to assessment, he works from intuition to assessment to information. He goes out and seeks the
specific information that supports his assessment that supports his intuition, ignoring everything that doesn’t (the way creative science is done, as contrasted to normal science). And once he has found the pattern that way, if it is the real pattern, then huge amounts of information will suddenly click into place (if it isn’t the real pattern, this won’t happen: throw that pattern away, then). If the task in question is to prevent an event, after the event, finding the pattern that leads you back to the critical pieces of information is relatively easy, but this retrospective exercise doesn’t really help you find algorithms that will insure you find the pattern before the event. And it is not true that before the internet there was no effective social software: for instance, I can recommend the literature on “communities of practice”. The information out there is on the order of a continuum infinity. And all participants, it seems, are finding more and more ways to pull into the given task greater and greater quantities of totally useless information: how many boxes of Cornflakes each of 300-million people buy every month. What you want in the WORKING archive is the smallest amount of information needed to do the job and no more, and the capacity to expand the archive just precisely as needed (i.e., targeted positive collection). Just enough information to feed the intuition and assess the pattern produced by the assessment. Regarding operational/actionable analysis, if you find a click-in pattern, then you seek specific information relative to the pattern: that, again, is called positive collection. The information sought for analysis is not on the level of words and sentences; it is three or four levels of abstraction removed. Once you get that 4th-order abstraction to a recognizable pattern, then you work back to information. When I talk about holographic Musculpt, I’m talking about searching the 4th-order
abstractions, not words and photos. Determination of Essential Elements of Information (what is permitted into the archive); data-basing strategies; analysis; algorithm generation and institutional memory thereof;
search repertoires; positive collection levying; operational and strategic goals, interests, and objectives formulation: these and more require to be synergistically integrated, far less so the information employed and its access permissions.”