In Daemon, a renegade Ai program, “the Daemon” orchestrates and serves a darknet of human agents partly through the medium of augmented reality technology. Glasses were the most typical augmented reality interface with the darknet in the novel and they were just slightly ahead of their time.
Lumus is marketing a similar consumer device, which appears to be reaching the early adapter level with the movement towards stylish, sunglasses, design (as opposed to walking around with giant goggles attached by a plethora of wires to a spaghetti collander-like helmet). The crossover from uber-nerdom to cool kidz demographic is a key milestone.
Secondly, if you are a user of Kindle and an avid reader of zenpundit.com, you are now able to subscribe to ZP on your Kindle.
This was in response to a reader request, so perhaps there is more interest out there for this option. I hadn’t considered it before, but it is easy to do, so if you are a blogger, you might want to sign your blog up as well. Can’t hurt.
Congrats to Dave Dilegge, Bill Nagle, Robert Haddick and Mike Few for the bold new look at Small Wars Journal, stil the best site for military and national security affairs on the web!
We are live now with the SWJ Blog and Journal. All posts, articles, and user comments have been migrated into our new system. You can still find feeds of recent activity on our Home page, more recent activity on the main pages of the SWJ Blog and Journal sections.
The Journal and SWJ Blog are now separate features instead of a cross-threaded stream. Search is site-wide and the home page gives a cross-site view, but the archives views within the SWJ Blog and Journal sections are section-specific. We will be evolving out publishing over the next few months to place more commentary and Op-Ed in the SWJ Blog, and the analytical and/or feature length works in the Journal.
The Library section as it exists now is a shadow of its former relevance but a placeholder for future greatness. We brought the old Reading List and Reference Links pages into the library are outdated and full of dead links, yet they are not completely useless so we didn’t completely destroy them. More below on future changes there.
Almost There Items
All the existing SWJ content has been migrated, but it will take us some time to get some of it out of its legacy format and into the new system.
The new system has much better support for guest author bylines and author archives. Over time, we’ll move the author’s byline, bio, etc. in the old content out of the article out of the body content and into the new system. We will reach out to past authors soon to provide info on how to submit any updates you want to provide.
The new system will support us publishing Journal Articles fully in-the-system rather than as PDF links. We hope to be doing that within a few weeks. Readers will have the option of generating print-optimized or PDF versions on-the-fly, content will be more searchable, and we’ll be able to offer full length Journal Articles via a Kindle feed. We are not sure how far back into the legacy articles we’ll update things, but we should be rid of PDFs for future articles.
We will continue to publish Journal Issues as a PDF. Our new Journal Issues feature an automatic index of the month’s individual articles, plus the cover, table of contents, and download link for the PDF Journal when it exists for a given month. The index portion is live now, and we should have the PDFs added within a week or so. We hope to bring more features into future Journal Issues.
The way-back issues of the Journal (2005-2007) are only available here for now, and the articles are only in the PDF. We will eventually get those articles into the system as individual articles and a complete issue.
Of course there are tons of little things that need doing for your usability and our efficiency. Kai zen, and all that.
Coming (Soon?)
As we move in and clean up in our new site, we’ll also be taking advantage of new features. Look for these developments in the future:
We will have a new content section on Latin America where we integrate content published here and from all over. We have a lot of talented people signing on for the effort and we are very excited about this new feature on a hugely important topic.
In the next few months we will be changing the way we publish the News, moving from the blog-based Roundup to a more effective and user friendly display. We know that feature is very popular, and we’ll do you justice with it while making it something that is more sustainable for us.
Library 2.0 is coming. Instead of updating our dusty old flat files, we’ll be moving the Library into a system that allows for mutliple views, tagging, search, your comments and ratings, editors picks, etc. That will be rolled out with new News section, and will continue to grow as we do.
Who says Apple and Microsoft can’t work together? They certainly do, at least when it involves the ingenuity of their users, the more inventive of whom use technologies from both companies (and others).
Here’s a neat example, “a just-for-fun experiment from the guys at Laan Labs” where they whip up a neat Augmented Reality recipe: take one iPad, one Kinect, and stir.
Some technical detail from the Brothers Laan, the engineers who did the work:
We used the String Augmented Reality SDK to display real-time 3d video+audio recorded from the Kinect. Libfreenect from http://openkinect.org/ project was used for recording the data coming from the Kinect. A textured mesh was created from the calibrated depth+rgb data for each frame and played back in real-time. A simple depth cutoff allowed us isolate the person in the video from the walls and other objects. Using the String SDK, we projected it back onto a printed image marker in the real world.” – source, Laan Labs blog.
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:
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.
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.
Zenpundit is a blog dedicated to exploring the intersections of foreign policy, history, military theory, national security,strategic thinking, futurism, cognition and a number of other esoteric pursuits.
