Bharat Rakshak

China: In the past week, Chinese blogs have spread rumors of anti-government action by the supporters of Bo Xilai, the former party secretary for Chongqing who is almost openly a Maoist, instead of a communist-capitalist. Bloomberg reported a jump in credit default swaps (CDS) owing to the coup rumors.


Comment: The rumors arose from unconfirmed reports of gunfire in Beijing since last Thursday. Private citizens may not possess guns in China. Thus bloggers and analysts have strained to provide an explanation for the reported gunfire exchanges, which might not have happened.


What is known is that Bo Xilai has not been seen in public since his summary ouster last Thursday, which is not unusual. Additionally, a large number of Chinese internet users apparently judge reports of gunfire between powerful political factions to be plausible, which is surprising considering Chinese gun controls.


An analysis of the phenomenology of coups d'etat indicates there has been no coup and that it is extremely difficult to overthrow a collective leadership structure by a coup d'etat. There are six essential components of a coup. If any of them are absent, there is no coup.


The six components of all coups, including Musharraf's in Pakistan in 1999; Bainimarama' s in Fiji in 2006; Colonel Vall's coup in Mauritania in 2008; the Ben Ali coup in Tunisia in January 2011 and the Tantawi coup against Mubarak in 2011, are,


• the existence of a gripe--a motive to overthrow the government;

• the formation of an insider opposition group that opposes the government in power;

• that group's access to guns;

• that group's formulation of a plan;

• its access to transportation; and,

• an opportunity-- most often the absence of the head of state from the national capital.


Applying this template to the China rumors, based on open source reporting, two, possibly three, of the six common characteristics are in evidence. These are the existence of a group with a gripe.

The group with the gripe is the followers of Bo Xilai, in Chongqing and beyond. Maoist sympathizers are likely to reside in Beijing and many other cities, but no reporting or behavior indicate they formulated a plan or developed the capability to hold hostage the nine members of the standing committee of the politburo; nor acquired enough guns to hold off a counter move by the forces loyal to the existing political order.


The coup reporting is simply not credible, if only because it is extremely difficult to capture all the members of a collective leadership and to suppress their supporters in other cities.

The fact of the rumors, however, indicates Chinese bloggers are willing to credit reports that are hostile to the leadership, until they are disproven. That signifies that Chinese persons who are knowledgeable and adept in using social media and the internet have little confidence in the stability of their political system.

Egypt: Update. Spokesmen for the Muslim Brotherhood made two important announcements on 21 March. An unidentified spokesman said the Brotherhood was reconsidering its pledge to not run a Brotherhood candidate in the presidential election on 23 and 24 May 2012. The Brotherhood has not endorsed anyone who has announced his candidacy nor announced its own candidate.


The second announcement is that the Brotherhood wants the Egyptian border with the Gaza Strip opened to unrestricted trade.

Comment: Little-by-little every promise the Brotherhood made about staying out of Egyptian politics is failing, invariably for a variety of reasons. The result has been a steady increase in Brotherhood authority, power and respect plus a steady erosion of civilian secular influences in Egyptian politics.

{This is a creeping or gradual coup by Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Its the template of Islamist rule in Middle East. First the head of state is removed by battle, murder or other means. Then Islamists takeover. However nothing changes for a while. Slowly the adminsitration, the judicary and education are taken over. Then madrassification of education to produce dedicated adherents to the new regime takes place. The process in olden times was about fifity to hundred years: eg. Arab conquestof Persia and others. With modernity its more like a decade or two. Look at TSP under Zia ul haq or Iran under the Khomeine regime}

The opening of full border trade has appeared to be a matter of when, not whether, after the Brotherhood achieved an electoral victory in the Egyptian parliament.

Mali: Troops attacked the presidential palace in Bamako hours after staging a mutiny. They exchanged gunfire with soldiers loyal to the government. A defense ministry official said that a coup d'etat was under way. News services reported "heavy" gunfire in Bamako during the day and armored vehicle deployments to protect the presidential palace.

The mutineers charge that the government is not giving them enough arms to battle a rebellion by ethnic Tuaregs. The Tuaregs have forced the army out of several northern towns in recent months. There have been no reports of casualties.


Comment: The mutineers do not appear to have captured the president. However, their accusations of a failure of support appear to be accurate in light of the loss of several northern towns to Tuareg rebels.

Lack of logistics support, however, most likely is the complaint for public consumption. It probably camouflages a much longer list of army complaints, including late or no pay.

Applying the NightWatch coup template, the actions in Bamako thus far confirm the existence of an anti-government group in the army that has a major gripe against the government. It also has access to arms and vehicles and has given some thought to a plan for taking control, by moving against the presidential palace.

The plan is clearly inadequate because the normal target set for a successful overthrow also includes capturing the national leaders plus the national radio and television stations and any other means of outside communication. A move against the presidential palace is necessary, but not sufficient to overthrow the government unless it has inside support that neutralizes the presidential guards and the rest of the army.

{This is the pre-modern type of coup were the guards seize the king/emperor/sultan and declare their rule like in ancient times times. Not valid anymore in these modern times.}

The major uncertainties are whether the Presidential Guard remains loyal to the President; the relative capabilities of the pro- and anti-government forces in the Army, and the actions of the political leadership.

All things being equal - which they never are, the faction with the most and most effective guns will win. At this point, the relative capabilities of the opposing forces are not clearly described in open source media. In fact, as described, the action looks less like a coup than like a violent protest, which should be negotiable.

Comment: Readers should be suspicious of manipulation when they read any report that mentions a place as a rebel stronghold. The opposition controls no territory at all, much less strongholds. In the Syrian context, press mention of a stronghold in connection with the opposition is spin.

Readers may have confidence that President Asad would not be permitted by his security staff to visit a zone of heavy fighting. The government video of destruction in Homs was more credible than the cell phone video of fighting. Homs is quieter than the opposition wants outsiders to believe. The government does not hesitate to show destruction because it blames the fighting on outside infiltrators and backers.

Finally, the eyewitness testimony about opposition open manipulation of video images reinforces the NightWatch contention that a substantial portion of what the opposition reports is fabricated.

That statement does not imply that government reportage is necessarily more credible. Every reporting entity is and should be skeptical of government statements.

It does mean that sympathy for the apparent underdog can make some media people vulnerable to deception and manipulation. At least some of the images taken by cell phone users are completely phony and staged.

For analysts, it is all information that might be converted into evidence. A lot will be rejected. It must be judged piece by piece. There are no shortcuts.

Note to new analysts: It is important to appreciate a basic rule of evidence law: sometimes liars tell the truth and sometimes honest people lie. An inability to cope with these subtleties can mean the difference between freedom and incarceration; life and death.

Videos are not self-proving and not self-evident since the arrival of the digital age. Images are worth a thousand words, which is why propagandists delight in manipulating them. Superior analysts understand and are skillful in judging the value of information as evidence, regardless of the medium of collection.

PratikDas wrote:

Rahul M wrote:please do elaborate in detail how you came to the conclusion that parakram exposed flaws in what ISSA does.

Thank you for asking. Firstly, let me quote what I said, so I can explain.

PratikDas wrote:And yet when push came to shove during Operation Parakram fundamental flaws were exposed.

I'm saying that flaws in the realm of operations research and game theory were exposed during Parakram. This does not necessarily mean that ISSA didn't know what they were doing. I'm inclined to believe the opposite.

Either the ISSA was not commissioned to study an Indian response to sub-scale Pakistani offence, akin to not choosing the sharpest tool in the shed because it is too complicated, or ISSA did study the Indian reaction but any flaws they may have exposed were ignored, or ISSA failed in exposing some basic flaws. I consider the last option as being least possible because some of the problems had already been exposed earlier, e.g. when IC814 was hijacked.

In chronological order, if one were to model the Indian response and the success thereof to sub-scale Pakistani offence,

• Not factoring the GoI's delay in responding to a Pakistani offence by proxy, a very plausible scenario even prior to Parakram, is one flaw.
• Not factoring GoI's propensity to be conflicted on the course of action, for the lack of strategy, or for fear of international pressure, economic downturn, failure at the polls, etc. is another flaw.
• Not factoring the delay in deploying the Army's various units to the locations prescribed by the doctrine of the time is another flaw.

This list is probably not complete either.

Operations research or game theoretic research would certainly include all the major stakeholders, would attempt to model their actions and would attempt to model the time scale of events. ISSA would certainly know these things inside out. We didn't see the fruits of their labour though.

Notes for analysts:
Introduction to Strategic Intelligence Warning. DIA has announced that reconstitution of Indications and Warning is a key component of its five year plan. Warning failures associated with the Arab Spring were cited as prompting this rediscovery of old truths.

Bravo to DIA for remembering that warning is the foundation of US intelligence. Being smart is less important than being safe, as a government activity.

The Mission

Strategic intelligence warning is the one of the two primary missions of US intelligence, according to the National Security Act of 1947. The first is to use intelligence to help keep the country prosperous and safe under all circumstances. Warning is the second mission. Discussion and debate about these missions may be found in the Congressional debates and legislative history of the National Security Act.

The intent of Congress in 1947, as documented in the legislative history of the National Security Act, was that Pearl Harbor attacks should never occur again. Their prevention was the reason Congress and a very reluctant President Truman approved the US intelligence organizations in the Department of Defense and in the then-new CIA.

Every intelligence analyst who has not read the National Security Act of 1947 and National Security Council Intelligence Directive -1 (NSCID-1) is deficient.

DIA, to its great credit, is trying to get back to the foundations of US intelligence: helping keep the Republic safe by providing intelligence warning.

This and subsequent essays are devoted to presenting to DIA Readers the history and foundation of warning that is in danger of being lost and does not need to be recreated.

These essays are derived from first-hand experience in DIA's own history in the Directorate of Intelligence, J2, Joint Chiefs of Staff; and from the warning experiences of the National Indications Center, the Strategic Warning Staff, the National Warning Staff and, much later, the Office of the National Intelligence Officer for Warning, established following the intelligence failures in 1973.

What is warning?

When NightWatch joined the Strategic Warning Staff in 1979, no one in the Staff or in the office of National Intelligence Officer for Warning could provide a definition of "warning." Warning was presented by a senior DIA warning officer as, "anything anyone wants to make of it."

NightWatch asked how can you ask analysts to do well what their supervisors cannot define?

An interagency group was formed by the National Intelligence Officer for Warning, David Y. McManis, in the aftermath of the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979, which was another major US intelligence and warning failure. The members were intelligence and policy professionals who shared the concern about the lack of precision and the three decades of strategic intelligence failures in warning. They came up with a definition which they coordinated with all intelligence and operational organizations. It was a J2 and J3 definition in the early 1980's.

The definition, which was approved unanimously in multiple National Intelligence Estimates on warning topics and in the Joint Chiefs of Staff Publication No. 1, The Joint Dictionary, is as follows:

"Warning is a communication about a threat in a form, a time and a fashion to decision-makers to enable them to manage the threat by deterring or avoiding it or by preparing for its occurrence."

A threat was defined as damage that will occur in a foreseeable and measurable time frame, unless it is managed.

Every word in the definition is important.


What is Surprise?

Surprise is a multiplier of other effects. It cannot be studied without reference to some other action - such as a surprise tornado or a surprise expulsion of US forces. Surprise cannot be avoided, but the damage can and the multiplier effect can be negated completely. In summary, those are the lessons documented by the DIA J2 between 1998 and 2006.

Background

The radical departure reflected in the 1979 definition of warning can only be appreciated against earlier discussions that governed US intelligence between 1947 and 1970. The National Security Council Intelligence Directive-1 (NSCID -1) in 1950 directed all agencies to engage in warning. DCI directives implementing the NSCID defined warning as all those measures necessary to avoid surprise.

In late 1983, DCI William Casey told NIO/W McManis that he did not want to be surprised by anything. Zero tolerance for warning failure and a seamless web of warning, are the words Casey used. . Casey spoke in the language of policy-makers, not intelligence analysts.

Thirty years of trying to avoid surprise resulted in repeated surprises, during the 1950's, 1960's, and 1970's plus great damage to US national security interests in those decades. The statement by the Deputy DIA Director indicates the same tired, old failures afflicted DIA analysis of the Arab Spring in 2010… needlessly.

The great breakthrough was in the late 1970's when the interagency group recognized that surprise is a multiplier of good and bad developments. In connection with threats, surprise is a multiplier of damage.

Forty years of study by the US Intelligence Community, including ten years by the DIA J2, established that surprised cannot be studied by analysts as a unique topic, but only in connection with threat, which includes damage. Surprise is an adjective in its earliest definition, as in surprise attack or surprise birthday party or surprise condition. It is a noun only in an elliptical or metaphorical sense.

Surprise also refers to the alertness and readiness condition of US intelligence, not the actions of the intelligence target.

Many academic writers and 60 plus years of National Warning Staff and DIA J2 experience in strategic intelligence warning have established that surprise is not avoidable, but damage is.

The lessons of the National Warning Staff and the DIA J2 are that by concentrating on avoiding surprise, as an analytical challenge, the analysts will surely be surprise! However, by focusing on the potential damage --the threat -- the damage and the surprise condition both can be avoided.

Secondly, if damage cannot be avoided or occurs under conditions of surprise but US intelligence and US forces are warned and on alert, damage will be de minimis because early warning enabled readiness.

Indicators …

Analysis of symptoms, or indicators, is the oldest structured analytical technique in US intelligence history and it works with incredible accuracy. -- at least 90% accuracy in the DIA J2 experience.

For example, an indicator of the strength of the al Asad regime is that it not only cleared neighborhoods in Damascus, but also mounted a major attack against neighborhoods in Aleppo. in less than a week. This regime is not yet in danger of collapse. An indicator of its pending collapse would be abandonment of Aleppo to defend Damascus.

Qualitative indicators indicate processes at work. Quantitative indicators do not work. They were tried for three generations after World War II and failed.

Qualitative -- living systems -- indicators indicate that Syria, as a living system, is healthier than western media report. because it can defend its center and its key assets outside the center. The indicators indicate shrinkage, but not that collapse is imminent.

The 60 years of experience in analysis of indicators in US intelligence warning will be addressed in a future essay.

Administrative Note to Readers: Feedback from last night's edition indicates it is time for a reminder of what NightWatch is and how it presents its analytical judgments.

Since 2006, NightWatch has been and remains primarily a threat monitoring and warning publication. That means the subject matter for NightWatch treatment is primarily the constellation of threats to US territory, persons, property and interests. It is not a news publication. It presents original insights, not original news, most of the time.

Its threat analysis is based on techniques that were used successfully in the J2 for 35 years. Its techniques also are applications to intelligence work of the theories in Dr. James Miller's seminal work, Living Systems.

Occasionally, NightWatch contains treatments of opportunities, curious developments and new initiatives that relate to US national security, such as the development of India's nuclear triad and the status of China's first and only aircraft carrier.

NightWatch carries three kinds of analytical statements: comments, special comments and NightWatch special comments. It has maintained this format for presenting analyses for more than six years.

The practice of separating comments from open source reports about international security developments is derived from and an application of principles presented in Neustadt and Mays' work, Thinking in Time. This book is the teaching text for all NightWatch presentations and classes.

The practice also derives from years of experience in the Directorate of Intelligence, J2, Joint Staff in the Pentagon. Senior officers, including prominently General Powell when he served as Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, directed that the J2 always clearly identify and never mix the intelligence facts and the analysis of those facts.

Comments are straightforward breakings apart of the action; differential analyses and diagnoses. When possible, comments will include prognoses, predictions. Comments use a blunt, terse, active voice, executive style that deliberately suppresses caveats, bureaucratic hedges and escape clauses. This style was favored, if not directed, by the Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The style is atypical for intelligence products.

Special Comments are of two types. They are longer explorations of a topic or longer discussions of lessons learned from more than 100 years of NightWatch experience in US intelligence analysis at the national level. The main stylistic features are active voice, transitive verbs, few adjectives and short sentences and paragraphs.

NightWatch Special Comments are editorials or comments derived from the first hand personal experiences of NightWatch. They are infrequent and are always edgy. They are crafted to stir controversy and generate feedback. They apply the stylistic features of special comments.

The NightWatch philosophy, based on long experience and extensive research, is that healthy dispute and competition produce sharper, actionable judgments that can help prevent strategic damage, even under conditions of surprise, and help keep the Republic safe.

NightWatch always invites feedback.

A_Gupta wrote:Worth a read
How to Stop Misinformation from Becoming Popular Belief in the Scientific American
http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... lar-belief

Excerpts:

"You have to be careful when you correct misinformation that you don't inadvertently strengthen it"...

Correcting misinformation, however, isn't as simple as presenting people with true facts....

Another way to combat misinformation is to create a compelling narrative that incorporates the correct information, and focuses on the facts rather than dispelling myths—a technique called "de-biasing."...
...
The most effective way to fight misinformation, ultimately, is to focus on people's behaviors, Lewandowsky says. Changing behaviors will foster new attitudes and beliefs.

More on debiasing:
http://www.desmogblog.com/science-debia ... ers-reason

1. Don’t lead with the wrong view you’re trying to debunk, but rather, with the correct view you want to instill.

2. Don’t overload people with information. Be “lean, mean, and easy to read.”

3. Don’t attack worldviews—either find more persuadable audiences, or defuse deeply seated ideological resistance through practices like framing and self-affirmation, which reduce defensiveness. “Self affirmation and framing aren’t about manipulating people,” write Cook and Lewandowsky, “They give the facts a fighting chance.”

4. Don’t leave someone with nothing to believe—if you want to unseat a myth, you’d better provide a better real explanation in its place. “When you debunk a myth, you create a gap in the person’s mind,” reads the Handbook. “To be effective, your debunking must fill the gap.”

On framing and affirmation
http://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/De ... ffect.html

First, the Worldview Backfire Effect is strongest among those already fixed in their views. You therefore stand a greater chance of correcting misinformation among those not as firmly decided about hot-button issues. This suggests that outreaches should be directed towards the undecided majority rather than the unswayable minority.

Second, messages can be presented in ways that reduce the usual psychological resistance. For example, when worldview-threatening messages are coupled with so-called self-affirmation, people become more balanced in considering pro and con information.

Self-affirmation can be achieved by asking people to write a few sentences about a time when they felt good about themselves because they acted on a value that was important to them. People then become more receptive to messages that otherwise might threaten their worldviews, compared to people who received no self-affirmation. Interestingly, the “self-affirmation effect” is strongest among those whose ideology was central to their sense of self-worth.

Another way in which information can be made more acceptable is by “framing” it in a way that is less threatening to a person’s worldview. For example, Republicans are far more likely to accept an otherwise identical charge as a “carbon offset” than as a “tax”, whereas the wording has little effect on Democrats or Independents—because their values are not challenged by the word “tax”.

Self-affirmation and framing aren’t about manipulating people. They give the facts a fighting chance.

...

Kaplan means to rehabilitate the sort of geography associated with certain Victorian and Edwardian scholars, especially the British historian Halford J. Mackinder. Mackinder, who was born in 1861 and died just after the Second World War, looked at the past thousand years in Europe and proposed a surprisingly simple geographic explanation for everything that had happened. The “heartland” of Europe, he insisted, was not Western Europe, even though it dominated the world; the heartland was the Eurasian flatland. Across those horse-welcoming plains, all the real shapers of history, from Attila’s Huns to Genghis’s hordes, had marched. History was what happened when Italians fled horsemen. Western Europe had largely resisted the Mongol hordes, and had prospered; Russia had been conquered and hadn’t. Eventually, whoever survived this struggle would control what Mackinder called the World Island, by which he meant Eurasia and Africa (true Victorian that he was, he regarded the United States as peripheral).

The West made history, but the East drove it. Though Europe saw itself as the pilothouse of fate, in truth it was more like a fort, which had been shaped by the constant assault of those horsemen. Venice was the model of Western European culture: its founders, driven to the marshes and the lagoon by invaders from the steppes, built the great and beautiful city essentially in retreat. This approach was seconded, in its geographic absolutism, by other pre-First World War space-history explanations. Alfred Thayer Mahan’s theory of world history, for instance, argued that control of the oceans by big navies was mostly what mattered: the best answer to a horseman with a scimitar in his hand was a boat with a cannon in its hold. (Mahan had a not entirely helpful influence on both Churchill and Roosevelt in their conduct of the Second World War.)....
....
For that matter, when Afghanistan makes its inevitable appearance—geographic history always ends in Afghanistan, the way baseball history ends in Yankee Stadium—it is hard not to be struck by the news that Indian trade overland across Central Asia is expected to grow by a hundred billion dollars annually, and that all that stands in the way of this growth is an unstable Afghanistan. Pacify the place, and India’s economic empire would explode. Maybe the Great Game for Afghanistan really is worth playing.....


Geostrategic thinking seems not just resolutely unfalsifiable but cozily improvised at a moment’s need. De Blij’s book reinforces this worry: though far more desk-bound and donnish in tone than Kaplan, he is just as bewildering about causality. He relates, at length, the story of the Little Ice Age, the five-hundred-year period, in the early modern age, when Europe was colder than it has been since or was before. It is, for him, a cautionary tale: “In Europe, there was little respite. The decade of the 1780s brought one crisis after another.” Yet though he grants that the cold helped sharpen farmers’ tools, he doesn’t quite see that the Little Ice Age coincided with the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century era that the historian Ian Morris recently (and rightly) identified as the greatest and most decisive leap forward in human prosperity that has ever taken place. {i]{EIC completed the subjugation of India and used the wealth to launch the Industrial Revolution in Europe. The next stage is in late 19th century when the US industrialization was financed by London stock exchange with more loot from India.}[/i] Cold folks, in this case, made hot ideas. Once again, the link between the geostrategic event and the real-world consequence is, to put it mercifully, attenuated.

Important as geography might be, the idea of geography’s importance seems still more important. Though geography is offered as a sobering up after the intoxications of end-of-history ideology, it soon reveals itself as another brandy bottle, with intoxications of its own. See, the Chinese are making a pincer move there, and—look!—the Indians are once again seeking to dominate the Gurdaspur-Kathiawar salient. Kaplan luxuriates in phrases of this kind: “Some years back I was in Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, from whose vantage point Tehran and Mashad over the border in Iranian Khorasan have always loomed.” It’s the same language that you find in John Buchan novels of the Great War era; the Chinese are on their way here, Russia is probing the hinterland, the Germans conspire with the Balts. “I have reports from agents everywhere—peddlers in Samarkand and bullion dealers in Cologne” is the way Buchan might put it.

Writers dream of playing Risk, but life is more like Parcheesi. One small step, one opportunistic leap, and if you get to the end of the board you become a king. It’s significant that these geostrategic ideas were popular in the years just before the First World War. Mackinder saw history being made on the Northwest frontier of India, but the Empire bled to death on the fields of France in fear of what might happen elsewhere, and by the time it got to India it handed over that frontier, out of exhaustion and a growing reluctance to fight for a possession that did not want to be possessed. The ideas propelled history as much as the geography they concerned; they encouraged people in power to think about the big picture when they might have done better to think small.

The little pictures tell the larger truth. Germany in 1914 would have triumphed if it had continued to be the productive, industrializing country that it was; the notion that Germany needed, or would benefit from, colonies in Africa or a vast naval presence was chimerical. A wise counsellor would have said to the Kaiser, “Keep doing what we’re doing, and, given the productivity and discipline of our people, we’ll be the major power in Europe by default.” But the Kaiser and his generals were intoxicated by the myth of maritime power and the perils of the World Island and the need for space and all the rest of it, and so they woke up to four years of pointless slaughter on the Western Front. The same thing was true on the liberal side. Read the account of the Great Game, the English-Russian conflict in the nineteenth century, and it becomes pitifully clear that the Tsar no more had the ability to take India (or Constantinople) than he did to dance a jig in the Paris Opéra Ballet, but that didn’t stop the British from obsessing over the long-term risk that he might. The geographic turn gets bloody.

Special Comment: Today the Office of the Director of National Intelligence posted and published a new document entitled Global Trends 2030. Attempts to download and read the document proved futile much of the day. However, many news commentators were more successful. Already that document has been cited as important for dozens of reasons.

The document is an examination of various futures 18 years in the future, 2030 having been selected for no apparent reason. There is an odd trait of intelligence analysts that makes them unable to predict great and imminent harm to US interests in the next month or two, but makes them confident about forecasts for the next 20 years.

NightWatch looked backwards to 1994, searching for those analysts who predicted what happened between 1994 and 2012. It is a cautionary tale, still under study, searching for Black Swans. More on this later, but caution is advisable.

NightWatch Special Comment: A Summary Evaluation of the National Intelligence Council's report Global Trends 2010. Last week NightWatch promised to review the earliest Global Trends report it could find. The first report was published in 1997 and was entitled, Global Trends 2010.

NightWatch has been spending a lot of time just trying to understand the prolix and vague political science jargon of 1997, not to mention the meanings of judgments or predictions written in that language.

The language is imprecise, centered on the word "agendas" which is used repeatedly without definition. Every nation's agenda was to have been changed by 2010, the report asserts. It never explains to what that metaphor refers.

NightWatch knows from long experience that the only way to improve intelligence judgments is to evaluate their accuracy in hindsight. No one knowingly goes to a doctor who has a 60% cure rate. In that spirit, NightWatch is confident in asserting that it is hard to imagine a trends assessment that could be so wrong as Global Trends 2010.

If the world had not changed much between 1997 and 2010, some of the forecasts in the report might have been marginally accurate. But the world did change, but not fundamentally. The nation-state system did not decline, as the report predicted. The financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 made nation-state safety nets even more important than ever. It was a world-wide catastrophe that made almost every prediction in the report wrong.

Global Trends 2010 contains an underlying assumption of continuing world economic growth. Almost all of its judgments assumed that without articulating that. The document never examined that assumption. Thus, when the world economy contracted, that assumption failed and every judgment extrapolated from it did as well.

It is not the fault of the writers, necessarily, because US intelligence and most US bankers, high-end investors and financiers failed to predict the economic contraction of 2008. Almost no one saw the train-wreck as early as 1997, but that is the lesson of this retrospective look. Analysts profess greater confidence about the next 18 years than they do about the next 18 days.

The economic crisis in 2008 was a true Black Swan in 1997, in the terms that Taleb defined in his seminal study, The Black Swan. A Black Swan is an unknown event that makes wrong all predictions based on extrapolations from the present and recent past. Thus, the ability to name and define a high impact-low probability threat means by definition that it is not a Black Swan, as Taleb wrote about the topic.

The report Global Trends 2010 report contains no conditions or caveats to its predictions, no examination of low probability-high impact threats. The Global Trends 2030 report, just released, boasts that it has identified six Black Swans during the next 18 years. That assertion should warn NightWatch Readers that the intelligence writers of Global Trends 2030 missed Taleb's lesson.

The second major shortcoming of Gobal Trends 2010, in hindsight, is its insistence that the US was in decline at that time and would be restrained by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the breakdown of the nation-state system. Neither prediction proved accurate. The reasoning for these assertions might have been obvious to readers in 1997, but it is not presented.

Looking back from 2012 one wonders what were they talking about. The contraction of the world economy in 2007-2008 doomed NGOs, who have always depended on handouts from more prosperous nations. Despite world-wide economic contraction, the US remained the only safe investment and the importance of US economic and military strength grew, precisely the opposite of what was predicted in 1997.

A NightWatch check found that every Global Trends report conveys the theme of steady US decline. The reasons for the decline are different in every report, but the facts show the US is still the only indispensable power in the world, the only super power.

There are many more incorrect forecasts in 2010, a significant number of important omissions - things the 2010 report just failed to appreciate as important -- and a handful of accurate extrapolations. There is little point in going over them all, unless readers are interested.

Global Trends 2010 is a cautionary lesson in the hazards and hubris of long term forecasting and scenario-casting without using better techniques than were in use in 1997. The effort might have seemed worthwhile at the time, but the happy world future that the analysts and academics in 1997 predicted would arrive by 2010 never happened. In fact, most of the world trends they described went backwards because of the economic crisis of 2007 and 2008.

Big Data Analytics Using Splunk is a hands-on book showing how to process and derive business value from big data in real time. Examples in the book draw from social media sources such as Twitter (tweets) and Foursquare (check-ins). You also learn to draw from machine data, enabling you to analyze, say, web server log files and patterns of user access in real time, as the access is occurring. Gone are the days when you need be caught out by shifting public opinion or sudden changes in customer behavior. Splunk’s easy to use engine helps you recognize and react in real time, as events are occurring.

Splunk is a powerful, yet simple analytical tool fast gaining traction in the fields of big data and operational intelligence. Using Splunk, you can monitor data in real time, or mine your data after the fact. Splunk’s stunning visualizations aid in locating the needle of value in a haystack of a data. Geolocation support spreads your data across a map, allowing you to drill down to geographic areas of interest. Alerts can run in the background and trigger to warn you of shifts or events as they are taking place.

With Splunk you can immediately recognize and react to changing trends and shifting public opinion as expressed through social media, and to new patterns of eCommerce and customer behavior. The ability to immediately recognize and react to changing trends provides a tremendous advantage in today’s fast-paced world of Internet business. Big Data Analytics Using Splunk opens the door to an exciting world of real-time operational intelligence.
Built around hands-on projects
Shows how to mine social media
Opens the door to real-time operational intelligence
What you’ll learn
Monitor and mine social media for trends affecting your business
Know how you are perceived, and when that perception is rising or falling
Detect changing customer behavior from mining your operational data
Collect and analyze in real time, or from historical files
Apply basic analytical metrics to better understand your data
Create compelling visualizations and easily communicate your findings

ramana wrote:MIT has OICW on System Dynamics Mapping.

Its quite interesting for developing insights and intution.

Syria and Gas: Previously, the US, France and the UK published declassified documents about the 21 August gas attack and Syrian government forces use of gas in the past. Today, Russia published a summary of its findings about a prior attack that was alleged loudly and wrongly to be a Syrian government chemical attack.


This Russian study concerns a gas attack in Aleppo, also attributed to the Syrian government. The Russian document has received no coverage in Western media.


NightWatch reproduces the Russian report below.


"Text of "Commentary by the Information and Press Department of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in connection with the situation concerning the investigations into the use of chemical weapons in Syria" by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs website on 4 September"


"We note a massive injection into the information space of material of different kind with a view to make official Damascus responsible for a possible use of chemical weapons in Syria even before the publication of the results of the UN investigation. "Groundwork" is thus being prepared for the use of force against it. In view of this, we deem it permissible to share the main findings of the Russian analysis of the samples collected at the site of the incident involving the use of toxic warfare substances in Aleppo's Khan al-Assal suburb."


"We recall that that the tragedy, which killed 26 civilians and Syrian army servicemen and left 86 people with injuries of varying severity, took place on 19 March of this year. The results of the analysis of samples carried out by a Russian laboratory certified by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons at the request of the Syrian authorities were on 9 July handed over to the UN secretary-general due to the Syrian authorities' request for him to conduct an independent investigation into that incident. The Russian specialists' main findings are as follows:


- the used piece of ammunition was not a standard issue piece of Syrian army ammunition but a crudely produced one whose type and parameters were similar to those of the unguided rockets produced in Syria's north by the so-called Bashair al-Nasr brigade;


- hexogen, which is not used in standard chemical munitions, was used as the charge to detonate the round;


- non-industrially synthesized nerve agent Sarin and diisopropylfluorophosphate, which Western countries used for chemical weapons purposes in World War II years, were found in round and soil samples."


"We stress that the Russian report is extremely specific. It represents a 100-page scientific-technical document with numerous tables and diagrams reflecting a spectral analysis of samples. We hope that it will be of significant help in the UN's investigation into this incident. Unfortunately, effectively it has not started yet."


"The attention of those who wittingly, and always, seek to place all responsibility for the developments on the Syrian Arab Republic's official authorities has fully shifted to the events in eastern Al-Ghutah. However, in this respect too there is "selectiveness coupled with a shortcoming". Specifically, attempts to forget the data about the exposure of Syrian army servicemen to toxic agents during the discovery on the outskirts of the Syrian capital of materials, equipment and containers with traces of Sarin on 22, 24 and 25 August supplied by official Damascus to the UN are evident. As is known, the condition of the injured servicemen was examined by members of the group of UN experts headed by A. Sellstrom. It is clear that any objective investigation into the 21 August incident in eastern Ghutah is impossible unless these circumstances are taken into account."


"In view of the above, we welcome the statement by the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that the A. Sellstrom group intends to go back to Syria in the near future to continue its work, including in the Khan al-Assal area."


"4 September 2013"


Comment: With this Russian document, there are four national reports about the use of gas in Syria. One each from the US, France, the UK and Russia. The three Western reports provide circumstantial evidence at best. They are not intelligence appraisals because they fail to address contradictory and contrarian evidence that is at least as strong as that which they present in support of their case. They are advocacy, not intelligence.


The only report missing is the only report that really counts to establish some ground truth. That is the UN report. A prior UN report found that the Syrian opposition used gas in July 2012, precisely as described by the Russians.


US- Syria: Special comment. The US government assessment on Syria is not weathering well challenges by open source reports and investigative journalists. Parts are unraveling.


Today, the US admitted that US intelligence did not have intelligence about Syrian Arab Army preparations before the attack on 21 August. That flatly contradicts testimony presented to Congress this week.

In the normal fashion of signals intelligence, the electrons had been intercepted, but they remained inchoate and unprocessed until after the attack. The US had data somewhere, but no information.

The alleged incriminating information was reconstructed and converted into evidence of malevolent Syrian intent for the US Congress after the fact. The way that information was presented was at a minimum dishonest.


Videos from government sources posted to the web showed home-made rebel rockets and a firing system to which only the Russian report refers. Those videos are not discussed by the US report. As illustrations, they are undated, like the rebel videos of casualties from 21 August.


The US analysis of observed so-called symptoms of an attack by nerve agents is also weakening. Multiple reputable experts, including Feedback from six NightWatch Readers, disagree with the "assessment" that the symptoms seen in videos are those of sarin poisoning, even in diluted form. The Russians have a better explanation for the same symptoms, which they evaluated in March.


The Daily Caller published an uncorroborated report that Egyptian intelligence reported the Syrian opposition advised its members of an event on 21 August that would bring the US into the Syrian conflict. No agency has provided an analysis of this report, which might not be true, but also might be highly relevant.


NightWatch cannot corroborate that information, but it provides an alternative explanation for Syrian Army preparations for{against} chemical warfare attacks. That alternative is supported by the fact that the UN visited wounded Syrian Army soldiers in hospital.


The Daily Caller also published excerpts of signals intercepts that provide an alternative to the US assessment of panicky calls to a chemical warfare unit asking about the 21 August attack. The alternative reporting is that a General Staff officer asked a rocket unit commander in a brigade of the 4th Armored Division whether he had launched an attack against specific orders.


The rocket regimental commander supposedly said he fired no rockets and could account for all of them. The General Staff confirmed the report of the rocket unit commander.


There is more to this series of exchanges, but the point is that they raise concerns that US information might have been cherry-picked by some entity in the reporting channel and taken out of context. That is easy to do with information from radio intercepts.


And so the information debate continues and should continue. The US assessment appears to have conflated information and sources; ignored time distortions and dates and misstated relevant points to support its argument.


A heads up is necessary. The poor guidance that prompts intelligence supervisors to require analysts to make judgments about matters that can be scientifically established needs to be recognized by Readers.


The date of an attack is not a matter of judgment. Likewise, the use of sarin is not a matter for "assessment." The presence of sarin and other dangerous materials can and will be established by UN-sponsored laboratory analysis to some degree of probability. The inability of intelligence supervisors and analysts to distinguish matters appropriate for judgment from those that may be established as facts is a significant weakness.


The worst part of the three Western reports is their failure to consider reasonable alternative scenarios consistent with their information. That is a basic step in the scientific method. See R. Heuer, The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis..


Only the Russians have attempted to analyze an alternative scenario and contradictory evidence. Their analysis of the March 2013 incident proved to be the correct analysis, according to the UN. But in the 21 August crisis, senior US officials publicly have disparaged and dismissed UN findings as "irrelevant," even though highly respectable US and European laboratories do the lab work.


So Readers are left with the three questions raised last week:

What was the agent?

How was it delivered?

Who delivered it?

The three Western documents are advocacy arguments, not intelligence appraisals. Every attorney knows that emotive, loud and strident oratory is the tactic to use when there is no clear and convincing evidence.


The Russian document is an intelligence appraisal of a past attack that Western governments wrongly attributed to the Syrian government, according to the UN. It is a lesson in evidence: the evidence on both sides of an argument must be presented and weighed.

End of NightWatch for 4 September.

Jhujar wrote:https://twitter.com/PeterRNeumann/statu ... 28/photo/1
Poaq will still be crawling in Dark Corner of Terrorism ?

The current rapid development in both computing power and the ability to present and mine complex data sets in useful ways provides the backdrop to Intelligence Management: Knowledge Driven Frameworks for Combating Terrorism and Organized Crime.

The chapters address the linkage between: law enforcement; developments in information and communication technologies and key ideas about the management of data, information, knowledge and intelligence. The work is conducted by a number of international academic and industrial research groups, law enforcement agencies, and end users. Section 1 presents four chapters that address the details, outcomes, user needs and background theoretical ideas behind a large-scale research aand development project in this domain (The Odyssey Project).

This project explored the challenges of establishing a Pan-European ballistics and crime information intelligence network. It represents an example of the type of system that is likely to become commonly used by Law Enforcement Agencies in the near future. Many of the challenges are not technical but organisational, legal, economic, social and political. Sections 2 and 3 therefore present wider commentaries. Section 2 explores other research and development projects that attempt to exploit the power of contemporary ICT systems to support Law Enforcement Agencies in many aspects of their work including investigations, data analysis and presentation, identification, training and crime prevention. Section 3 takes a look at the social and organisational issues around aspects of crime prevention, crime detection and policing – with a view to the role of information and communication technologies in these contexts.

ramana wrote:

adzegeek wrote:(quote="Kati")
The idea can easily be extended to India, to predict locations of possible future attacks. Not only for NE insurgents but also for jihadi elements. My idea is to make it a dynamic model, sort of Bayesian, where every moment intel feedbacks are plugged in as they become available. it will have the past data in it, experts can provide subjective
info (which makes it a bayesian model), create a 3D posterior distribution on the entire country's land mass, and from there look at the modes as possible future attack sites. From a mathematical point of view, it would be highly computational intensive, and dynamic too since streaming reliable intel info ought to be fed in continuously.
Coming back to terrorism/insurgency etc. Apparently, these attacks seem like random,
but over a long period of time a pattaern emerges, and one can fit probabilistic models. But to do this we need to get a nice coherent group of people - a few mathematical statisticians, top intel experts, law enforcement experts, and numerical analysts to carry out fast computations. ISSA/IDSA should do this.(/quote)

Hi Kati,
I guess you meant a combination of HMM (Hidden Markov Models) - for partially observed stochastic processes - in combination with Bayesian networks. Check out this link http://www.teamqsi.com/doc/asam_journal_paper.pdf for rather simplified representation of IC-814 hijack model as well which sort of details the concept. Incidentally, the hierarchical model of information integration suggested may work in context of our intel network - you have to excuse me as I am quite new to this world - but just have some predictive analytics experience in civilian applications.

Regarding compute capabilities - in the days of ready access to cloud providers, this shouldn't be that difficult.
Cheers

Looks like it belongs here.

So You Think You're Smarter Than A CIA Agent
by Alix Spiegel, npr.org
April 2nd 2014
Listen to the Story
Morning EditionDownload

The morning I met Elaine Rich, she was sitting at the kitchen table of her small town home in suburban Maryland trying to estimate refugee flows in Syria.

It wasn't the only question she was considering, there were others:

Will North Korea launch a new multi-stage missile before May 1, 2014?

Will Russian armed forces enter Kharkiv, Ukraine, by May 10?Rich's answers to these questions would eventually be evaluated by the intelligence community, but she didn't feel much pressure because this wasn't her full-time gig.

"I'm just a pharmacist," she said. "Nobody cares about me, nobody knows my name, I don't have a professional reputation at stake. And it's this anonymity which actually gives me freedom to make true forecasts."

Rich does make true forecasts; she is curiously good at predicting future world events.

Better Than The Pros

For the last three years, Rich and 3,000 other average people have been quietly making probability estimates about everything from Venezuelan gas subsidies to North Korean politics as part of the Good Judgment Project, an experiment put together by three well-known psychologists and some people inside the intelligence community.

According to one report, the predictions made by the Good Judgment Project are often better even than intelligence analysts with access to classified information, and many of the people involved in the project have been astonished by its success at making accurate predictions.

When Rich, who is in her 60s, first heard about the experiment, she didn't think that she would be especially good at predicting world events. She didn't know a lot about international affairs and she hadn't taken much math in school.

But she signed up, got a little training in how to estimate probabilities from the people running the program, and then was given access to a website that listed dozens of carefully worded questions on events of interest to the intelligence community, along with a place for her to enter her numerical estimate of their likelihood.

"The first two years I did this, all you do is choose numbers," she told me. "You don't have to say anything about what you're thinking, you don't have to justify your numbers. You just choose numbers and then see how your numbers work out."

Rich's numbers worked out incredibly well.

She's in the top 1 percent of the 3,000 forecasters now involved in the experiment, which means that she has been classified as a super forecaster, someone who is extremely accurate when predicting stuff like:

Will there be a significant attack on Israeli territory before May 10, 2014?

The Super Forecasters

In fact, she's so good she's been put on a special team with other super forecasters whose predictions are reportedly 30 percent better than intelligence officers with access to actual classified information.

Rich and her teammates are that good even though all the information they use to make their predictions is available to anyone with access to the Internet.

When I asked if she goes to obscure Internet sources, she shook her head no.

"Usually I just do a Google search," she said.

And that raises this question:

How is it possible that a group of average citizens doing Google searches in their suburban town homes can outpredict members of the United States intelligence community with access to classified information?

How can that be?

Lessons From A Dead Ox

"Everyone has been surprised by these outcomes," said Philip Tetlock, one of the three psychologists who came up with the idea for the Good Judgment Project. The other two are Barbara Mellers and Don Moore.

For most of his professional career, Tetlock studied the problems associated with expert decision making. His book Expert Political Judgment is considered a classic, and almost everyone in the business of thinking about judgment speaks of it with unqualified awe.

All of his study brought Tetlock to at least two important conclusions.

First, if you want people to get better at making predictions you need to keep score of how accurate their predictions turn out to be, so they have concrete feedback.

But also, if you take a large crowd of different people with access to different information and pool their predictions, you will be in much better shape than if you rely on a single very smart person, or even a small group of very smart people.

"The wisdom of crowds is a very important part of this project, and it's an important driver of accuracy," Tetlock said.

The wisdom of crowds is a concept first discovered by the British statistician Francis Galton in 1906.

Galton was at a fair where about 800 people had tried to guess the weight of a dead ox in a competition. After the prize was awarded, Galton collected all the guesses so he could figure out how far off the mark the average guess was.

It turned out that most of the guesses were really bad — way too high or way too low. But when Galton averaged them together, he was shocked:

The dead ox weighed 1,198 pounds. The crowd's average: 1,197.

Finding The True Signal

"There's a lot of noise, a lot of statistical random variation," Tetlock said. "But it's random variation around a signal, a true signal, and when you add all of the random variation on each side of the true signal together, you get closer to the true signal."

In other words, there are errors on every side of the mark, but there is a truth at the center that people are responding to, and if you average a large number of predictions together, the errors will end up canceling each other out, and you are left with a more accurate guess.

That is the wisdom of the crowd.

The point of the Good Judgment Project was to figure out if what was true for the dead ox is true for world events as well.

It is.

In fact, Tetlock and his team have even engineered ways to significantly improve the wisdom of the crowd — all of which greatly surprised Jason Matheny, one of the people in the intelligence community who got the experiment started.

"They've shown that you can significantly improve the accuracy of geopolitical forecasts, compared to methods that had been the state of the art before this project started," he said.

What's so challenging about all of this is the idea that you can get very accurate predictions about geopolitical events without access to secret information. In addition, access to classified information doesn't automatically and necessarily give you an edge over a smart group of average citizens doing Google searches from their kitchen tables.

How Will It Be Used?

Matheny doesn't think there's any risk that it will replace intelligence services as they exist.

"I think it's a complement to methods rather than a substitute," he said.

Matheny said that though Good Judgment predictions have been extremely accurate on the questions they've asked so far, it's not clear that this process will work in every situation.

"There are likely to be other types of question for which open source information isn't likely to be enough," he added.

In a couple of weeks, the Good Judgment Project will start recruiting more forecasters for its experiment, and Elaine Rich, the suburban Maryland pharmacist, thinks that more people like her should give it a shot.

"Health care people are not likely to be involved in international forecasting," she said. "But I have a feeling that many of them would be good at it."

By the end of World War II, strategists in Washington and London looked ahead to a new era in which the United States shouldered global responsibilities and Britain concentrated its regional interests more narrowly. The two powers also viewed the Muslim world through very different lenses. Mapping the End of Empire reveals how Anglo-American perceptions of geography shaped postcolonial futures from the Middle East to South Asia.

Aiyaz Husain shows that American and British postwar strategy drew on popular notions of geography as well as academic and military knowledge. Once codified in maps and memoranda, these perspectives became foundations of foreign policy. In South Asia, American officials envisioned an independent Pakistan blocking Soviet influence, an objective that outweighed other considerations in the contested Kashmir region. Shoring up Pakistan meshed perfectly with British hopes for a quiescent Indian subcontinent once partition became inevitable. But serious differences with Britain arose over America's support for the new state of Israel. Viewing the Mediterranean as a European lake of sorts, U.S. officials--even in parts of the State Department--linked Palestine with Europe, deeming it a perfectly logical destination for Jewish refugees. But British strategists feared that the installation of a Jewish state in Palestine could incite Muslim ire from one corner of the Islamic world to the other.

As Husain makes clear, these perspectives also influenced the Dumbarton Oaks Conference and blueprints for the UN Security Council and shaped French and Dutch colonial fortunes in the Levant and the East Indies.

table 1.1 Types of political risk
Main types of risk events shocks Examples

Geopolitical
International wars
Great power shifts
Economic sanctions and embargoes

Global energy
Politically decided supply and demand issues

Terrorism
Destruction of property
Kindapping/hijackings

Internal political strife
Revolutions
Civil wars
Coup d’etat
Nationalism
Social unrest (strikes, demonstrations)

Expropriations
Confiscations of property
“Creeping” expropriations

Breaches of contract
Government frustration or reneging of contracts
Wrongful calling of letters of credit

Capital market risks, currency, Currency controls
and repatriations of profits
Politically motivated credit defaults and market
shifts
Repatriation of profits
Discriminatory taxation

Subtle discrimination and
favoritism
Corruption

Unknowns/uncertainty
Effects of global warming
Effects of demographic changes
Political events that cannot be foreseen

ramana wrote:Please read and get familiar with this technique:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopography

and portal:

http://prosopography.modhist.ox.ac.uk/c ... abuses.htm