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Israeli intelligence officers caught on camera moments before carrying out an assassination of a HAMAS terrorist.

“Information wants to be free” – Stewart Brand

You do not need to be Alvin Toffler or Marshall McLuhan to have noticed that as a result of the information revolution that in the past decade, much like individual privacy, secrecy has taken one hell of a beating. While Wikileaks document dumping demonstrated that much of what governments overclassify as “top secret” are often simply diplomatically sensitive or politically embarrassing material, the covert ops raid that killed Osama Bin Laden was a reminder that some actions, operations and lives are critically dependent on secrecy.

Secrecy in the sense of intelligence agencies and other actors being able to carry out clandestine and covert activities is rapidly eroding in the face of ominpresent monitoring, tracking, hacking, scanning, recognition software and the ability to access such data in real time, online, anywhere in the world. A few examples: 

Col. TX Hammes at Best Defense –The Internet and social networks are making it harder to work undercover

It is virtually impossible for an agency to provide sufficient cover for a false name. If you provide information like where you went to school, what posts you have served before, etc., the information can be quickly checked. (Most yearbooks are online; graduates are listed in newspapers; property records, etc.) If you don’t provide that information, then your bio sticks out.

Giving an intern the list of names of personnel at an embassy and telling them to build the person’s bio from online sources — with cross-checking — will quickly cut through a light cover. It will also challenge even a well-constructed cover. I think this is going to be one of the challenges for human intelligence in the 21st century.

Viewdle is a Two-Edged App and Panappticon

Viewdle – Photo and Video Face Tagging from Viewdle on Vimeo.

Haaretz –Hamas man’s Dubai death was a Mossad-style execution

What makes the security camera shots released last night by the Dubai police interesting is the professionalism exhibited by the suspected assassins of senior Hamas figure Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.

They arrived on separate flights from different destinations; one of them flew in via Munich and Qatar. They stayed in different hotels and were careful to make phone calls using international routers. They wore clothing that makes them difficult to identify. One is seen with a mustache and a hat, others wearing hats and glasses. They try, throughout, to appear to be innocent tourists or business people, there to enjoy themselves and even play some tennis…

Pity the poor intelligence officer operating without diplomatic cover. A false beard and glassses will no longer suffice.

What kind of adaptions are possible or likely to take place by intelligence, law enforcement, military and corporate security agencies in the face of an emerging surveillance society? First, consider what clandestinity is often used for:

• To avoid detection
• To avoid identification even when detected ( providing “plausible deniability” )
• To facilitate the commission of illicit acts or establish relationships under false pretenses
• To conduct covert surveillance
• To collect secret information of strategic significance (i.e. – espionage)
• To facilitate long term influence operations over years or decades

Taking the long term view will be required. Some thoughts:

One effect will be that marginal subpopulations that live “off the grid” will be at a premium someday for recruitment as intelligence operatives. These “radical offliners” who have never had a retinal scan, been fingerprinted, had their DNA taken, attended public school, uploaded pictures or created an online trail, been arrested or worked in the legal economy will be fit to any false identity constructed and, if caught, are unidentifiable.

Another will be the creation of very long term, institutional, “false front” entities staffed by employees who will never know that the real purpose of the enterprise is to provide airtight legitimate covers and that the economic or other activities are merely ancillary. They won’t be standing jokes like Air America or the various business activities of Armand Hammer, but real organizations with only a few key insiders to facilitate periodic use for intelligence purposes. A similar tactic will be intel agencies “colonizing” legitimate entities like universities, law firms, consultancies, media, financial institutions, logistical and transhipping corporations and NGO’s with deep cover officers who are intended to make ostensible careers there. This of course, is part of basic intelligence history but the scale, subtlety and complexity will have to significantly increase if authentic “legends” are to stick.

Then there’s the creepier and less ethical path of intelligence agencies stealing and using the identities of real citizens, which hopefully a democratic state would eschew doing but which bad actors do now as a matter of course in the criminal world.

Speed will also be an option. As with the Bin Laden raid, fast will increasingly go hand in hand with secret, the latter being a transient quality. If you cannot avoid detection, like the Mossad agents out playing tennis on survellance video, beat the reaction time. Clandestine may also come to mean “Cyber” and “Robotic” moreso than “HUMINT”

Being invisible in plain sight is an art that will grow increasingly rare.

Spinning the Law: Trying Cases in the Court of Public Opinion by Kendall Coffey

Just received a courtesy review copy of Spinning the Law from Ruby at FSB Associates. This is not the genre of books that I typically review and I was initially hesitant that it would just be a pop culture title, but in skimming, I am pleased to report that the author, former US. Attorney Kendall Coffey, is engaged in an analysis of how public opinion, shaped by the media, impacts the justice system.

Coffey explains the strategies and tactics that prosecutors, defense lawyers and their clients employ as well as the hazards and mistakes made in playing to the media. Coffee’s reach includes the trials of  Joan of Arc, Socrates and Aaron Burr as well as more recently infamous characters as the American Taliban, John Walker Lind, Jose Padilla and Governor Rod Blagojevic. Spinning the Law would seem to have a great deal of applicability to those readers interested in IO and public diplomacy, as well as those with conventional interest in the legal system and American politics.

I look forward to reading this and eventually posting a full review.

A busy day for blogfriends and associates….want to draw your attention to a few highlights:

First, congratulations to Matt Armstrong of MountainRunner on his new appointment as Executive Director of the US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. It’s hard to think of anyone better qualified than Matt!

There is a new Executive Director of the US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy

The U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy is charged with appraising U.S. Government activities intended to understand, inform, and influence foreign publics. The Commission formulates and recommends to the President, the Secretary of State, and Members of Congress policies and programs to carry out the public diplomacy functions vested in the State Department, Broadcasting Board of Governors, and other government agencies, as well as appraising the effectiveness of the public diplomacy policies and programs carried out by government agencies.

There are seven members on the Commission, with “not more than four members may be from one political party.” In February, the White House sent to the Senate four nominations for the Commission.

Today, Matt Armstrong, author and publisher of MountainRunner.us, was sworn in as the Executive Director of the Advisory Commission. The immediate impact is the suspension of blogging, including the publishing of guest posts, at MountainRunner.us.

Secondly, Steven Pressfield has a new book out, titled Do The Work, in Kindle format and, for a limited time, it is free! One of the great things about Steve is that as an author, he gives back to his readership in myriad ways and isn’t afraid to break new ground:

A Publishing First: General Electric sponsorship for a Best Selling Author’s latest book

Never before done in the history of the publishing industry has this been done before (as far as we know, and we’ve checked) and we are so proud to be offering this phenomenal opportunity to our readership and the world.

General Electric has become our “Launch a Book” sponsor for  Do the Work, our latest release from The Domino Project.

What this means for you, the reader, is that you have access to the digital edition of this book for FREE. It won’t be free forever, so you should act now to grab your free copy. Order it here and it will be automatically delivered on pub date. You can read it on a Kindle, an iPad, an iPhone a PC and more. (If you already ordered your copy, your payment will be credited back to you…

Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett threw some props my way for the Wikistrat futurist simulation on Turkey and managed to find a few sentences from my section that were non-abstruse and jargon-free 🙂 . The nice thing about the analytical process at Wikistrat is that people can grasp the part of the scenario where their strengths are emphasized ( I looked at possible external strategic options and impacts and left Turkish internals to those who could better drill-down):

Turkey – Re-Rise of the Ottoman Empire?

One of the most interesting things we do in Wikistrat is Scenario Planning. Through the use of live collaborative simulations, our analysts and subscribers alike engage in the mapping of scenarios, country interests and policy options on a given issue. We ran such drills on Egypt (The Egypt War Room) and on the “Sudden death of Kim Jong Il“.

Our current Simulation is on Turkey, and deals with its political and economic rise in the Middle East, its implications and potential pathways. So far several interesting scenarios were mapped, as well as interests and policy objectives for major regional and global powers affected by Turkey’s Rise.

Essentially we ask – Will Turkey’s rise continue? Will its relations with the West deteriorate given its “Shift eastward”? And- How should the US, the EU, Israel, Iran and the KSA react? [….]

Join Wikistrat

J. Scott Shipman, the owner of a boutique consulting firm in the Metro DC area that is putting Col. John Boyd’s ideas into action, is a longtime friend of this blog and an occasional guest-poster. Scott has an important report regarding the “war of ideas” against the Islamist-Takfirist enemy in Afghanistan after attending a workshop hosted by DARPA.

DARPA, STORyNet and the Fate of the War

by J. Scott Shipman

 I had the opportunity to attend a DARPA workshop yesterday called STORyNet. The purpose was to survey narrative theories, to better understand the role of narrative in security contexts, and to survey the state of the art in narrative analysis and decomposition tools (see below): 

This STORyNET workshop has three goals:

1. To survey narrative theories.

These empirically informed theories should tell us something about the nature of stories: what is a story? What are its moving parts? Is there a list of necessary and sufficient conditions it takes for a stimulus to be considered a story instead of something else? Does the structure and function of stories vary considerably across cultural contexts or is there a universal theory of story?

2. To better understand the role of narrative in security contexts.

What role do stories play in influencing political violence and to what extent? What function do narratives serve in the process of political radicalization and how do theyinfluence a person or group’s choice of means (such as violence) to achieve political ends? How do stories influence bystanders’ response to conflict? Is it possible to measure how attitudes salient to security issues are shaped by stories?

3. To survey the state of the art in narrative analysis and decomposition tools.

How can we take stories and make them quantitatively analyzable in a rigorous, transparent and repeatable fashion? What analytic approaches or tools best establish a framework for the scientific study of the psychological and neurobiological impact of stories on people? Are particular approaches or tools better than others for understanding how stories propagate in a system so as to influence behavior?

I was alerted to the meeting by a member at one of my “groups” at LinkedIn and just barely made the registration cut-off. It was a good meeting, but not reassuring on our situation in Afghanistan—you’ll see why  below.

As a “hobby” I’ve been tinkering with the implications of patterns with respect to language and communications. Just about every presumption I have articulated over the last several months is being pursued in one way or another—which is good news for our guys. While the on-going research is good, I do believe there is room for better and more imaginative thinking, although I didn’t say anything during the meeting for once, I kept my mouth shut and just listened.

This is exceptionally brief and decidedly non-techincal.  Here are some observations of interest:

• In Afghanistan, stories (those who tell them and those who believe) are central to our geopolitical strategy and policies.
• There is underway, a “battle of the narratives,” where any “counter” narrative developed by the US must have credibility. This seems obvious, but the speaker observed the “story telling” was more important than the story. Given the high illiteracy rate, this makes sense.
• We [DARPA] are reviewing chants (which are wildly popular), video, magazines, poetry, the Internet, and sermons as thematic vehicles for analysis.
• The language of the Taliban is not secular, and not the language of the insurgency—for the Taliban everything hangs on the legacy of jihad and religious struggle.
• The Taliban not willing to negotiate on matters of jihad. They are using a unified vision of Islam giving their struggle a noble foundation against the corruption of outsiders who want to “Christianize” the nation.
• The Taliban uses symbology to portray the struggle as a cosmic conflict against Christian invaders and US puppets (those cooperating with the US). Framing this symbology to communicate clearly the frame of the righteous vs. the infidels.
• The Taliban manipulates the language to connect the current struggle to previous struggles of “warrior poets.” There is hope a “discourse” can be created that will counter this framing [personal note: I’m not optimistic]. The Taliban uses different language to subjugate rural and urban dwellers, and actually have standard operating procedures for dealing with villages that resist.
• The cognitive patterns of rural Afghanistan are “foreign” to most Westerners and they use alien methods of knowledge transfer (chants, often under the influence of hashish).
• We are adding a geospatial element to our analysis of local and personal narratives (which includes subject, verb, object) with respect to identified “master narratives.”
• Internet data is indexed, with an eye toward predictive analysis and situational awareness (and interestingly, “sentiment” analysis). We are finding predictive power from the topology of “networks”  used in models.
• From a neuroscience perspective, there was an amazing talk on empathy. It turns out, based on fMRI testing that empathy is quite predictable across subjects. Research indicates people “care more” about an “in-group” to which they belong more than an “out group.” The speaker defined the brain as a “parliament” of competing parties and nuanced spectrums [personal note: this elegant description tracks with everything I’ve read on the topic.]. 
• One presenter observed that after 10 years of war, we’re finally “getting” the importance of Pashtun culture and language. This presenter also noted US is still in need of people with language skills sufficient to adequately support the effort.

– End

COMMENTARY:

Zen here:

First, I’d  like to cordially thank Scott for letting me share his insights gleaned from the workshop here with ZP readers. This is one of those fascinating events largely unavailable to those folks residing outside a reasonable driving distance from the Beltway.

Secondly, I am heartened that the brilliant folks at DARPA are taking the theological-ideological discourse of the enemy seriously in analyzing the power of narrative. Charles Cameron makes that point here with regularity. Michael Scheuer, Gilles Kepel and Olivier Roy did so even before 9/11. Our political appointees and policy makers remain steadfastly allergic to this reality, unable to process or discuss in public with coherence how religious ideas are a root for political extremism. Col. David Kilcullen, who certainly understands political Islam better than most and whose creative and analytical acheivements in structuring a framework for countering insurgency are second  to none, eschews dealing with the topic in his theoretical writings on COIN where it can be avoided. That is the cost imposed by the political correctness to which our ruling elite are psychologically welded.

 It comes as no surprise to me that only after “10 years of war” are we finally “getting the importance of Pashtun culture”. 

Maybe at the dawn of the 22nd century we will be “old hands”.

Longtime blogfriend Matt “MountainRunner” Armstrong has an important explanatory article up at Foreign Policy.com:

Mind Games:

Why Rolling Stone‘s article on the military’s domestic psy-ops scandal gets it so wrong.

Rolling Stone has done it again with another scoop by Michael Hastings showing the U.S. military’s manipulation of public opinion and wanton disregard for civilian leadership. The article, “Another Runaway General: Army Deploys Psy-Ops on U.S. Senators,” is another example of an officer corps run amok, right?

Not so fast. Both stories expose an altogether different problem once you cut through the hyperbole.

Central to Hastings’s article are charges by Lt. Col. Michael Holmes that he was part of a team of “psychological operations soldiers” ordered to use psychological operations techniques to deceive and manipulate the opinion of senators and other dignitaries visiting the NATO training mission in Kabul. This was done, Holmes describes, under the orders of the commanding general, Lt. Gen. William Caldwell IV (above), and his staff.

The overstatement in the article, stemming entirely from comments by Holmes, has in turn spurred more of the same focused on alleged “mind tricks” against several senators, including John McCain (R-Ariz.), Carl Levin (D-Mich.), and Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), other members of Congress, think-tank analysts, and foreign dignitaries.

Hastings and his supporters are quick to indict the military for allowing another cowboy to go off the reservation to create support for an unpopular conflict people simply want to have disappear. Challenging the narrative by Holmes has been described as a “smear campaign.” Others reacting to these criticisms slam the media as trying to take down the military. ….