public | Social media companies, including TikTok, Snap, and Twitter, caused
people in France to riot and so the government should shut them down,
say French President Emmanuel Macron and the European Union’s top
censor, Thierry Breton.
Said Macron, “When things get out of hand, we may have to regulate them or cut [social networks] off.” The reason, Breton explained today,
is that “Social media didn’t do enough” to remove "content that is
hateful, that calls to revolt and to kill.” Warned Breton, "If they
don’t do it, they will be sanctioned immediately.”
The
comments made by Macron and Breton are shocking, and anybody who cares
about freedom of speech should denounce them as a clear and present
threat to the fundamental human right to freedom of expression as
enshrined in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, the French
Constitution, and the European Constitution.
It’s
true that there are legal protections for removing "content that is
hateful, that calls to revolt and to kill.” Such immediate incitement to
violence is even illegal in the United States, which has much stronger
free speech protections than France and Europe.
But neither
Macron, Breton nor their defenders have presented any evidence showing
that hate speech or incitement to violence rather than outrage over a
police killing, combined with a large and restless immigrant population
that France has failed to integrate and assimilate, caused the riots.
And their calls for greater censorship come at the same moment that the Macron government has passed a new law allowing police to spy on people by secretly taking control of their phones and laptop computers
and activating the microphone, camera, and GPS. The government says a
judge will have to approve all spying, but it is reasonable to worry
about abuses of power. In 2013, military contractor Edward Snowden
revealed mass US government spying without a warrant.
What’s
more, the attack on privacy and the demand for censorship is worldwide.
The British parliament is expected to pass legislation in the next few
weeks that will allow the government to spy on private and encrypted
text messages. The Irish Senate is expected to pass legislation in
October that will allow the police to enter homes without a warrant and
search phones and laptops for evidence of hate speech. And Australia is on the cusp of passing a new law
that would require social media companies to remove any speech that
causes “harm” to “health” or “the environment,” which would allow
government censorship of criticisms of its climate and energy policies.
Why is the attack on free speech and privacy happening in so many nations simultaneously? And what can be done about it?
Social Network Analysis [1] is an approach to studying organisations focusing on analysing the networks of relationships between people and/or groups as the most important aspect. Going back at least to the 1950's, it is characterised by adopting mathematical techniques especially from graph theory [2, 3]. It has applications in organisational psychology, sociology, and anthropology. An excellent overview of the field is given by Wasserman and Faust [1].
Social Network Analysis provides an avenue for analysing and comparing formal and informal information flows in an organisation, as well as comparing information flows with officially defined work processes. We are interested in applying Social Network Analysis to military organisations, and especially to military headquarters ranging from brigade to national strategic levels.
An important aspect of Social Network Analysis is the visualisation of communication and other relationships between people and/or groups, by means of diagrams. Visualisation of Social Networks has a long tradition, and an excellent historical survey is given by Freeman [4]. Visualisation of Social Networks is important because of the complexity of organisational structure, and the need for good visual representations of how an organisation functions.
A second aspect is the study of factors which influence relationships, for example the age, background, and training of the people involved. Studying the correlations between relationships is also important, since it offers insights into the reasons why relationships exists. These studies can be done using traditional statistical techniques such as correlation, analysis of variance, and factor analysis, but also require appropriate visualisation techniques.
The ultimate goal of Social Network Analysis is often to draw out implications of the relational data, in order to make recommendations to improve communication and workflow in an organisation. This is the major motivation for our Social Network Analysis programme. In previous work [5, 6, 7], we have applied Social Network Analysis to military organisations. In the course of this work, we have found conceptual distance to be the most useful construct in explaining relationships. This is partly because the human brain is skilled at thinking about and visually judging distances. In this paper we argue the benefits of using conceptual distance for analysing Social Networks, and demonstrate how to do so using a case study.
Within the next few years, Pentland predicts, reality mining will become more common, thanks in part to the proliferation and increasing sophistication of cell phones. Many handheld devices now have the processing power of low-end desktop computers, and they can also collect more varied data, thanks to devices such as GPS chips that track location. And researchers such as Pentland are getting better at making sense of all that information.
To create an accurate model of a person's social network, for example, Pentland's team combines a phone's call logs with information about its proximity to other people's devices, which is continuously collected by Bluetooth sensors. With the help of factor analysis, a statistical technique commonly used in the social sciences to explain correlations among multiple variables, the team identifies patterns in the data and translates them into maps of social relationships. Such maps could be used, for instance, to accurately categorize the people in your address book as friends, family members, acquaintances, or coworkers. In turn, this information could be used to automatically establish privacy settings--for instance, allowing only your family to view your schedule. With location data added in, the phone could predict when you would be near someone in your network. In a paper published last May, Pentland and his group showed that cell-phone data enabled them to accurately model the social networks of about 100 MIT students and professors. They could also precisely predict where subjects would meet with members of their networks on any given day of the week.
strategic-culture | In her 2012 book Area 51 Uncensored,
journalist Annie Jacobson provided lengthy detail of the Cold War
experiments, aerospace technology and nuclear bomb testing that took
place at Area 51 during this period which largely put the earlier social
engineer experiment of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds emergency broadcast
read aloud in 1938. The mass panic that ensued the broadcast provided
an insight into the levers of mass psychology that certain social
engineers drooled over.
What could account for observed UFO phenomena?
In an interview with NPR Radio, Jacobson stated: “The
UFO craze began in the summer of 1947. Several months later, the G2
intelligence, which was the Army intelligence corps at the time, spent
an enormous amount of time and treasure seeking out two former Third
Reich aerospace designers named Walter and Reimar Horten who had
allegedly created [a] flying disc. … American intelligence agents fanned
out across Europe seeking the Horton brothers to find out if, in fact,
they had made this flying disc.”
During WWII, the Horten brothers were associated with the Austrian scientist Viktor Shauberger whose innovative designs
for implosion (vs explosion) flying technology utilized water currents,
and electromagnetism to generate flying machines that by all surviving
accounts flew faster than the speed of sound. While much of his research
was confiscated and classified by victor nations after WWII,
Schauberger was promised government sponsorship in America which induced
the inventor to move across the ccean where Canada’s Avro Arrow program
sought his designs for supersonic nuclear missile delivery aircraft.
When he discovered that his work would only be used for military
purposes, Schauberger pushed back and over the course of several months,
his patents were essentially stolen, and he returned to Austria to die
broke and depressed in 1958.
The Strategic Importance of Space
It was never a secret that the post-1971 globalized world order
championed by the likes of Sir Henry Kissinger, David and Laurence
Rockefeller and other Malthusians throughout the 20th century
was always designed to collapse. With the mass shock therapy that such a
collapse would impose upon the world, it was believed that a
deconstruction of the Abrahamic traditions that governed western society
for 2000 years could be accomplished and a new society could be
socially engineered in the image of the Brave New (depopulated) World
that would live like happy sheep forever under the grip of a hereditary
alpha class and their technocratic managers. The story of the
Tavistock-led attack on scientific progress is told brilliantly in the
2010 Lpac film The Destruction of NASA.
The only problem these social engineers have encountered in recent
years is the re-emergence of actual statesmen who are unwilling to
sacrifice their people and traditions on the altar of a new global Gaia
cult. Such defenders of humanity’s better traditions have launched the
multipolar alliance and have driven a policy of long-term growth and
advance scientific and technological progress which is embodied
brilliantly by the New Silk Road, and its extensions to the Arctic. The
most exciting aspect of this New Silk Road/Multipolar Paradigm is the
leap into space exploration as the new frontier of human
self-development which has not been seen since the days of President
Kennedy.
With China and Russia signing a pact to jointly develop lunar bases and the NASA Artemis Accords
calling for international cooperation on Lunar and Mars resource
development/industrialization, the age of unlimited growth that was lost
with the LSD-driven mass psychosis of 1968’s “live in the now” paradigm
shift may finally be recaptured. Programs designed to put humanity’s
focus on real objective threats like Asteroid collisions, and solar-induced new ice ages are seriously being discussed by leaders of Russia, China and the USA.
There are billions of suns and potentially billions of galaxies, and
chances are there is indeed life on many of the planets orbiting some of
the stars within our growing, creative universe… and there is also a
fair chance that cognitive life has also emerged on some of those
planets. The best way to find out is not to sit at home while the world
economic system collapses under a controlled disintegration thinking
about Rockefeller-funded conspiracy theories, but rather to fight to
revive humanity’s open system destiny starting with a cooperative space
program to extend human culture and economy to the Moon and Mars, and
then onto other planetary bodies followed by missions to deep space.
If other civilizations exist, maybe it is our duty to take up the torch left to us by JFK and go find them.
NYTimes | The Lazar story
is a useful backdrop to the latest round of claims about secret U.S.
programs involving alien technology, which just appeared in the technology website The Debrief.
Useful, first, because of the familiarity — once again we have a
whistle-blower claiming knowledge of long-hidden work on otherworldly
crafts.
But useful, also, because of
the difference. The would-be whistle-blower in this case, David Grusch,
isn’t touting fraudulent credentials; he’s a former national-security
professional who was assigned to the then-newly-created Unidentified
Aerial Phenomena Task Force (lately rebooted as the All-domain Anomaly
Resolution Office) from 2019-22. That assignment appears to be the basis
for his claims; he’s operating through normal national security
channels in making this report; and he has other figures with some kind
of governmental background speaking in his support.
That doesn’t mean that you should believe him. My general view
is that the U.F.O.-encounter phenomena seems in continuity with
supernatural experiences reported across the long pre-modern past —
abductions into faerie realms, especially. As such, the experiences are
more likely to offer evidence of either some kind of strange Jungian
unconscious or of actual supernatural realms than they are to involve
interplanetary visitors from Zeta Reticuli.
The
possibility of literal spacecraft stashed in U.S. government hangars,
meanwhile, piles up two immense-seeming improbabilities. First, that
inhuman species cross oceans of space or leap interdimensional barriers
using unfathomable technology and yet somehow keep crashing and leaving
souvenirs behind. Second, that human governments have been collecting
evidence for generations without the truth ever being leaked or
uncovered or just blurted out by Donald Trump.
But this
whistle-blower’s mere existence is evidence of a fascinating shift in
public U.F.O. discourse. There may not be alien spacecraft, but there is
clearly now a faction within the national security complex that wants Americans to think there might be alien spacecraft, to give these stories credence rather than dismissal.
The
evidence for this shift includes the military’s newfound willingness to
disclose weird atmospheric encounters. It includes the establishment of
the task force that Grusch was assigned to. It includes the
government’s bizarre behavior, secretive in an attention-grabbing way,
around the military shootdowns of what were presumably balloons earlier
this year.
It also includes other examples of credentialed figures, like the Stanford pathology professor Garry Nolan, who claim they’re being handed evidence of extraterrestrial contact. And it includes the range of strange stories being fed to writers willing to operate in the weird-science zone.
I am not a
personal recipient of hints and tidbits — though my DMs are open if you
have them — and I have no definite theory of why this push is happening.
Maybe it’s because there really is something Out There and we’re being
prepared for the big reveal. Or maybe the dose of Pentagon funding that Harry Reid engineered
for studying the paranormal back in 2007 allowed a cluster of U.F.O.
enthusiasts to infiltrate the defense establishment. Or maybe there’s
always a Deep State network of occult-knowledge believers — think of the
Cold War experiments in psychic research — and they’ve just become more media-savvy lately.
Or
maybe it’s a cynical effort to use unexplained phenomena as an excuse
to goose military funding. Or maybe it’s a psy-op to discredit critics
of the national security state — to make, say, Tucker Carlson look bad
by persuading him to believe in aliens and then doing a debunking.
Actual
aliens would be more interesting than Deep State cranks or psy-ops. But
all these scenarios make for pretty strange stories about how our
government operates.
NYTimes | Ever since Justin, a 15-year-old high school freshman, tried marijuana on his birthday two years ago, he has smoked almost every day, several times a day, he said.
“If I smoke a blunt, after that blunt I’m going to be chill,” he said on a recent morning at a corner deli near his school, the Bronx Design and Construction Academy. “I’m not going to be stressing about nothing at all.”
Another boy came by and flashed two glass tubes of smokable flower. More students were smoking across the street in a doorway and on a stoop. On another corner, a smoke shop frequented by children in backpacks and uniforms opened about half an hour before the first bell.
While it has long been common for some teens to smoke marijuana, teachers and students say that more and younger students are smoking throughout the day and at school.
There is little definitive data on marijuana use among children, and what information is available can sometimes offer a contradictory picture. Disciplinary data from the city education department reflects a 10 percent increase in alcohol- and drug-related offenses this year compared to 2019. But a city survey found teen cannabis use had declined in 2021, the same year that the state legalized marijuana for recreational use, to the lowest level recorded since the question was added to the survey in 1997.
Still, two dozen students and teachers at public, private and charter schools across the city said in interviews that some classrooms were in disarray as more pupils showed up late and high.
They said that with the proliferation of unlicensed smoke shops and the availability of vape pens and edible products, cannabis has never been more accessible and inconspicuous. They relayed accounts of students taking hits of vaping pens when teachers turned their backs, of bathrooms and stairwells becoming smoking lounges and of the smell of weed wafting through school hallways.
“It really feels like this unstoppable tide that we’re futilely trying to suppress,” said America Billy, 44, who has been teaching at a public high school in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn, for over a decade. She said it was hard to know whether a student was out of it because of a lack of sleep, family stress or drugs.
In December, a former principal, April McKoy, described in a letter how students’ cannabis use had spiraled out of control during her last two years in charge of City Polytechnic High School of Engineering, Architecture, and Technology in Brooklyn.
“It felt like more and more were using without knowing the source, impact or consequences of early marijuana use,” Ms. McKoy said in the letter, adding that students had returned after the pandemic “sad, isolated and trying to find ways to cope.”
Freshmen were selling cannabis to each other, and she said she witnessed a smoke shop sell edibles to 14-year-olds with police officers nearby. On another occasion, she sent four students to the hospital because they were sickened from contaminated edibles, she said.
The proliferation of unlicensed smoke shops, which the city says may number as many as 1,500, could be one factor driving marijuana use among children, officials said.
Gale Brewer, a city councilwoman, said that though she had counted fewer than 10 of them in her district on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in September, there were 64 by March. Several school administrators have complained to her about merchants selling joints and infused candies as well as high-potency concentrates and vapes to students.
“We were all saying we need social workers, we need psychologists, we need mental health support in the schools,” she said. But dealing with smoke shops selling to children “was not on the list.”
consentfactory | GloboCap, Inc. and its innumerable subsidiaries, agents, assigns,
political puppets, media goons, and other loyal minions are desperately
endeavoring to enshrine the official Covid-19 narrative in the annals of
“history.” According to new figures from the WHO, “almost 15 million excess deaths” (or “a total of 336.8 million lost life-years”) had been caused by the virus by the end of 2021, none of which had anything to do with ventilators, or the classification of anyone who died of anything (i.e., cancer, heart disease, an auto accident, etc.) who had also tested positive as a “Covid death.”
When the globalist establishment realize they do not control the narrative anymore........ pic.twitter.com/o30WQpRmyt
Previously perfectly healthy young people are dropping dead left and
right from heart attacks and other “natural” (or “undisclosed”) causes
that have nothing to do with the experimental “vaccines” that they did
not need but were coerced into taking, which saved millions or 100 million lives. The masks that didn’t work worked, except that they didn’t, but that was only if you studied how they worked in reality.
Being locked down, forced to wear medical-looking masks, gaslighted and
terrorized by official propaganda, bullied, segregated, censored,
demonized, and otherwise systematically tortured, was actually good for people’s mental health,
except for “people with existing mental health conditions, and
children, and people with disabilities, and adolescents, and people
without financial or social security nets.”
Meanwhile, cognitively dissonant New Normals are taking to the
Internet to claim that no one knew better at the time, and that, OK,
sure, “mistakes were made,” but if we “science-denying conspiracy
theorists,” who they censored, demonized, and systematically persecuted
for over two years, had just spoken up …
I could go on, but you get the picture … or, rather, you either do or
you don’t. Because it’s not just the folks at GloboCap, Inc. that are
fanatically waging this War on Reality. Everybody and their brother is
trying to ram their “reality” down everyone’s throat. You got the
“Viruses Do Not Exist” people. You got the “There Are No Neo-Nazis in
Ukraine” people. The “Putin Is Our Savior” people. The Vote Blue Cult.
The Multipolar people. The Transgendered People’s Army. The Doomsday
Clock Hucksters. The Folks Who Still Listen to NPR. The Insurrection
Truthers. The Insurrection Deniers. The 9/11 Truthers. The Moon-Landing
Truthers. The Cult of Trump. The Church of Russiagate. The Rothschild
Obsessives. The Anti-Racism Racists. The Anti-Anti-Semitism
Anti-Semites. The Mass Formation Movement. The Cult of Marx. The Cult of
Capital. The Climate Change Fanatics. The Musk Cult. The list goes on
and on.
Historically, we humans have not done very well in such psychotic
ontological environments. When “reality” is shattered into a thousand
little shards, and things fall apart, and the center does not hold, we
tend to get rather scared, and confused, and agitated. We start to
panic. We try to put “reality” back together again. This does not work.
This worsens our panic. We start looking around for a new “reality
mcluhangalaxy | “We have never stopped interfering drastically with ourselves by every
technology we could latch onto,” Marshall McLuhan said in 1966. “We have
absolutely disrupted our lives over and over again. Unimpeded, the
logic of this sort of world is stasis.”
McLuhan believed deeply in man’s need to comfort his self from the
onslaught of a world that seemed hostile from birth, and while
masturbation is the act of physically imitating creation, it is in
creating false media environments that man has found the greatest
comfort for his psyche.
Were McLuhan alive today, he would perhaps take great interest in two
particular aspects of modern society. The first of these aspects is the
increasingly violent nature of our world, in both the physical world
and its various media counterparts.
“When you live out on the frontier, you have no identity, you are a
nobody, therefore you get very tough,” he said in 1977. “You have to
prove you are somebody, and so you become very violent…ordinary people
find the need for violence as they lose their identities.”
What does this say about a world where violence, both real and
imagined, increases at a rate matched only by the proliferation of new
media? I believe it says that media is responsible for a world that is
increasingly violent, but not in a manner that censoring sex and
violence is capable of curbing. The nature of media is that which it is
given by man, and we have given it the nature of removing from us our
natural selves. We relinquish aspects of our identity so that we might
take shelter in the constructs that we have created to shield us from
the harsh frontiers we encounter. At each new threshold, collective
identity is lost, and with each new loss comes an increase in our
capacity for violence.
If Marshal McLuhan had lived to see his 100th year in 2011, he might
have marveled less at our technology than at our hunger for nostalgia.
It was an area of particular interest for the author and media scholar,
who said that one result of the electronic age would be a loss of
private identity owing to the discarnate being that one becomes when
broadcast electronically. Lacking a physical body in the electronic
sphere, one’s relationship to the world around them changes.
“One of the big marks of the loss of identity is nostalgia, revivals
of clothing, dances, music and shows,” he said. “We live by the revival,
it tells us who we are, or were.”
ET | Censorship
is the cudgel that is out there. Censorship and cancellation are the
two cudgels that are being used against us. It’s absolutely remarkable
how easily we’ve gone from free speech to asking, “How can I make my way
around the censorship that’s here?” We have skipped over the outrage
phase, which might have led us to a more vigorous protection. Granted, a
lot of boiling frog-type dynamics were built into the censorship
regime.
But
if you’ve been looking for the last 20 years at our press, September
11th brought a quantum leap in this need to marshal people into
categories and to prohibit certain things and certain words and certain
positions from entering into the public sphere. In 2001, Susan Sontag,
one of the great American intellectuals, wrote about having some
questions about the way the new war on terror was being pursued, and she
was hooted down.
We’re
beginning to see that a lot of this hooting down is not as spontaneous
as many of us would like to believe. With the recent Twitter Files, and
the case that the attorney generals of Missouri and Louisiana are trying
now, we’re finding out that this was anything but spontaneous. There
were a number of government actors working in concert with private
actors to achieve a censorship that, frankly, for those of us of a
certain age, is unimaginable.
You
used to be able to say, “I have the First Amendment. Screw you. I’m
going to say what I’m going to say.” We’ve gone from that to, “I have to
be on guard because someone’s always watching me.” We went down this
hole fairly quickly, and it’s very troubling.
Mr. Jekielek:
This is the treason of the experts, I suppose.
Mr. Harrington:
Yes. If you have been lucky enough to have a mentor in your life, what
is a mentor? A mentor is someone who leads you along, who suggests, who
looks at you and says, “What skills does this young person have that
they are not aware of ?” They do an inquiry into that person and suggest
and lead along, and then say implicitly, “How can I help this young
person be the best version of themselves as I see it?” That is what an
expert does. They do not impose a reality on anyone.
They
are very aware of the power they have through their social title, but
more often through their moral force. They realize that it’s a sacred
thing that they have, and that it needs to be treated with the care that
you treat treasures in your life, and that you don’t abuse it. They
need to be very rigorous and be able to look at and check some of their
ego impulses, and then ask, “Am I using this power to satisfy my ego
gratification, more than I am to help the people that I say I am
helping?”
It
seems that that line has been crossed. There’s a lot of ego
gratification that is interfering with what should be a real sober
taking of responsibility for a gift of power. Power is a gift in a
democratic society. It’s not something you own, and it’s not something
there to make people obey you. It’s a gift you have that hopefully you
can use in constructive ways that preserve the dignity of those who
don’t have as much power as you do.
With
the term treason of the experts, I’m playing with history a bit here
with the title. It’s from a famous book that was written by Julien Benda
after the First World War. He was an intellectual. As you know, the
First World War was one of the great cataclysms in the history of the
world, with violence that few people had ever seen.
When
you go back and study it, you can look at what the violence was about,
and the cynicism with which the violence was employed. Leaders marched
their hundreds of thousands of troops so that they could get a tiny
strip of land. It was an open auctioning of soldiers to be fed into the
machine.
Benda
wrote this book in 1927 called, “La Trahison des Clercs,” the Treason
of the Clerisy. What he’s playing with is that in the world after the
late 19th century, the church clerisy began to recede as an important
element in society, to be superseded by the intellectual. The
independent intellectual was made possible through newspapers and the
publishing industry. The new clerisy, as he’s suggesting, are the free
intellectuals.
He
suggests that the role of the free intellectual is to always be
rigorous and to always place themselves above their passions to the best
extent they can and say, “What’s really going on here?” He wrote a
devastating critique in the mid-1920s in which he takes on both the
French intellectuals and the German intellectuals. He said, “They
betrayed our trust. They acted as cheerleaders. They sent young men off
to war to get destroyed, and became cheerleaders of gross propaganda.”
He said, “Come on. We’ve got to reassume the responsibility that goes
with having been granted a credential or a moment in power.” The first
thing I thought about when this began three years ago was World War I.
Mr. Jekielek:
This being Covid?
Mr. Harrington:
Covid. The Covid triennial that we’re in now. In March of 2020, and
you’ll see it in the first essay in the book where I say, “What’s going
on here?” My mind immediately went to World War I. There were big forces
that were pushing us in ways that didn’t add up. There were hidden
hands in places making us do things that simply were not justified at
the level of pure rational analysis. I was very grateful that I had
studied a bit of World War I.
There’s
another wonderful book where you can see some of the madness. It’s by
Stefan Zweig, who was a wonderful intellectual back in that time. He
talks about what happened in 1914 in Vienna. He thought, “We’ve reached
the highest civilization that the world has ever seen.” He was a
Viennese Jew. His friends had been integrated into Viennese life, and
they were leading Viennese life in many ways.
All
of a sudden, they were saying, “Don’t you want to go off to the
trenches? Shouldn’t you be going off to the trenches? Shouldn’t you be
excited? I’m going to go. Isn’t it wonderful?” He began to say, “What’s
going on in this world that I thought was civilized?” I had the very
same reaction in March of 2020.
Mr. Jekielek:
Some people think that this is being done for their own good. It’s not
that there are nefarious forces with their own agendas. A lot of these
folks genuinely believe in this incredibly dystopian vision of the
world, that this is really the right thing to do, and that it will be
good for me and good for you. There is a line that I flagged in the
book, “Ever more open disdain for the intelligence of the citizenry.”
There’s hubris here. That’s particularly infuriating, isn’t it?
Mr. Harrington:
Absolutely. It’s condescension, and I’ve always had a very thin skin for
people being condescending to me. One of the nice things that my
parents did in general was they talked to us as sentient beings almost
from the beginning. It’s one of the things I’ve sought to do with both
my children and with my students.
The
condescending idea is that you need to dole it out and say, “If I told
you, you might not understand. I’m coming from a place of complexity
that you can’t understand. You’ll just have to trust me.” This is very
insulting to people, and it’s antidemocratic. That’s just a fact.
The
premise of democracy, as we understand it, and as it was formed in this
country in the late 18th century, was that the farmer, the worker, and
the lawyer were all citizens in the same measure. Granted, there would
be a natural pecking order in terms of certain skill sets that would
emerge. But in the public space, no one was inherently better or in a
place to tell someone else what they need to know and how they need to
live. It’s one of the great things about this country.
NYTimes | Ali-Rashid
Abdullah, 67 and broad-shouldered with a neatly trimmed gray beard, is
an ex-convict turned outreach worker for Cincinnati’s Human Relations
Commission. He or his co-workers were at the scenes of all five of
Cincinnati’s shootings with four or more casualties last year, working
the crowds outside the yellow police tape, trying to defuse the
potential for further gunfire.
They
see themselves as stop signs for young black men bound for
self-destruction. They also see themselves as truth-tellers about the
intersection of race and gun violence — a topic that neither the city’s
mayor, who is white, nor its police chief, who is black, publicly
addresses.
“White
folks don’t want to say it because it’s politically incorrect, and
black folks don’t know how to deal with it because it is their children
pulling the trigger as well as being shot,” said Mr. Abdullah, who is
black.
No
one worries more about black-on-black violence than African-Americans.
Surveys show that they are more fearful than whites that they will be
crime victims and that they feel less safe in their neighborhoods.
Most
parents Mr. Abdullah meets are desperate to protect their children but
are trapped in unsafe neighborhoods, he said, “just trying to survive.”
And some are in denial, refusing to believe that their sons are carrying
or using pistols, even in the face of clear evidence.
“
‘Not my child,’ ” he said, adopting the resentful tone of a defensive
mother. “ ‘It may be his friends, but not my child, because I know how I
raised my child.’ ”
His
reply, he said, is blunt: “These are our children killing our children,
slaughtering our children, robbing our children. It’s our
responsibility first.”
African-Americans
make up 44 percent of Cincinnati’s nearly 300,000 residents. But last
year they accounted for 91 percent of shooting victims, and very likely
the same share of suspects arrested in shootings, according to the
city’s assistant police chief, Lt. Col. Paul Neudigate.
Nationally,
reliable racial breakdowns exist only for victims and offenders in gun
homicides, not assaults, but those show a huge disparity.
The
gun homicide rate peaked in 1993, in tandem with a nationwide crack
epidemic, and then plummeted over the next seven years. But blacks still
die from gun attacks at six to 10 times the rate of whites, depending
on whether the data is drawn from medical sources or the police. F.B.I.
statistics show that African-Americans, who constitute about 13 percent
of the population, make up about half of both gun homicide victims and
their known or suspected attackers.
“Every
time we look at the numbers, we are pretty discouraged, I have to tell
you,” said Gary LaFree, a professor of criminology at the University of
Maryland.
Some
researchers say the single strongest predictor of gun homicide rates is
the proportion of an area’s population that is black. But race, they
say, is merely a proxy for poverty, joblessness and other socio-economic
disadvantages that help breed violence.
JoSS | This work was supported in part by Department of Defense, the Office of Naval Research(ONR), United States Navy Grant No. 9620.1.1140071, NSF IRI9633 662 and the NSF IGERT 9972762 for research and training in CASOS. Additional support was provided by CASOS - the center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems at Carnegie Mellon University. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the author and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Department of Defense, the Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation, or the U.S. government.
Abstract: Given the increasing threat of terrorism and spread of terrorist organizations, it is of vital importance to understand the properties of such organizations and to devise successful strategies for destabilizing them or decreasing their efficiency. However, intelligence information on these organizations is often incomplete, inaccurate or simply not available. This makes the study of terrorist networks and the evaluation of destabilization strategies difficult. In this paper, we propose a computational methodology for realistically simulating terrorist networks and evaluating alternative destabilization strategies. We proceed to use this methodology to evaluate and conduct a sensitivity analysis of the impact of various destabilization strategies under varying information surveillance regimes. We find that destabilization strategies that focus on the isolation of individuals who are highly central are ineffective in the long run as the network will heal itself as individuals who are nearly structurally equivalent to the isolated individuals "move in" and fill the communication gaps.
Introduction
For reasons of national security it is important to understand the properties of terrorist organizations that make such organizations efficient and flexible, and based on this understanding devise successful strategies to destabilize such organizations or curtail their efficiency, adaptability, and ability to move knowledge and resources. The assessment of destabilization strategies poses a number of key challenges. What does the underlying organization look like? Does it evolve? What strategies inhibit or effect the evolutiuon so that the organization is destabilized? In this paper, we provide an approach to assessing destabilization strategies that draws on work in organization science, knowledge management and computer science.
Terrorist organizations are often characterized as cellular organizations composed of quasi-independent cells and distributed command. In a sense, this is a non-traditional organizational configuration; hence, much of the knowledge in traditional organizational theory, particularly that focused on hierarchies or markets, does not apply. To be sure, lessons can be learned from the work on distributed and decentralized organizations that provides some guidance. This work demonstrates that such structures are often adaptive, useful in a volatile environment, and capable of rapid response [1] [2]. In other words, we should expect terrorist organization to adapt, and adapt rapidly. This suggests, that in general, they should be difficult to destabilize; however, the traditional organizational literature provides little guidance on how to destabilize the organization.
In general, the organization's form or design profoundly influences its performance, adaptability, and ability to move information [3]. It follows that organizations can be destabilized by altering their design. The one caveat here, is that organizations, particularly more distributed and decentralized ones, are continually evolving [4]. Terrorist organizations are often characterized as dynamic networks in which the connections among personnel define the nature of that evolution. This suggests that social network analysis will be useful in characterizing the underlying structure and in locating vulnerabilities in terms of key actors.
In general, organizations evolve as they face unanticipated changes in their environment, rapidly evolving technologies, and intelligent and adaptive opponents. Over the past decade, progress has been made in understanding the set of factors that enable adaptation and partially validated models of adaptive networks now exist [5]. A key result is that, in the short run, there appears to be a tradeoff between adaptivity and extremely high performance in organizations [6]. This suggests that forcing an organization to adapt should reduce its performance. Thus, even if an actor is no longer key, the mere isolation of that actor may be sufficient to be disruptive. However, to assess this a model of organizational change and network healing is needed.
Since the destabilization of terrorist networks could inhibit their ability to effect harm, there is a profound need for an approach that would allow researchers to reason about dynamic cellular networks and evaluate the potential effect of destabilization strategies. To be useful, such an approach must account for the natural evolution of cellular networks. This situation is further complicated by the fact that the information available on the terrorist network is liable to be incomplete and possibly erroneous. Hence, destabilization strategies need to be compared and contrasted in terms of their robustness under varying levels and types of information error. In other words, it would be misleading to judge destabilization strategies in terms of their impact on a static an unchanging network [7].
These problems suggest the need for a new methodological approach. In this paper, we provide an approach based on the use of a multi-agent network model of the co-evolution of the network of "observers" (the blue network) and the "terrorists" (the red network) in which the observers can capture only partial data on the underlying covert network and the covert network evolves both naturally and in response to attacks by the observers. This approach builds off of organization theory and social network theory, as well as machine learning and dynamic network analysis. Specifically, we have developed a computational model of dynamic cellular organizations and used it to evaluate a number of alternative strategies for destabilization of cellular networks.
It is important at the outset to note that this examination of destabilization strategies is highly exploratory. We make no claims that the examination of destabilization strategies is comprehensive, nor that the types of "error" in the data that intelligence agencies can collect is completely described. Further, our estimate of the structure of the covert network is based on publicly available data much of which is qualitative and requires interpretation. Thus, this work should be read as a study in the power of an empirically grounded simulation approach and a call for future research. Further, we restrict our analysis to a structural or network analysis and focus on what does the covert network look like, how does its structure influence its performance and ability to pass information, how does it evolve, how can its evolution be altered (its behavior destabilized) through interventions focused on the nodes, and what interventions should be taken given the level of fidelity in the information that we have. Admittedly, in this complex arena there are many other factors that are critical, but they are beyond the scope of this study. Thus, from a straight social network perspective, this study suggests the types of methodological issues that will emerge when working with dynamic large scale networks under uncertainty.
To ground this paper, a short case description is provided of Al Qaeda with the focus on the network structure. In these two descriptions we draw on both military and organizational theory. This is followed by a discussion of the intelligence agencies engaged in anti-terrorist activity and the possible data and errors in said data. Our intent is to demonstrate, at a fairly high level, the context and the resultant information and modelling problems, not to provide a full analysis for intelligence or military operations. As good science often emerges from attacking hard real world problems, we are trying to provide sufficient detail to understand the basis for the problems that research must address, rather than simply provide a high theoretical description of general data problems. This is followed by a brief discussion of the applicability of traditional social network analysis and the need to take a dynamic network perspective. We then describe a computational model of terrorist organizations as dynamic evolving networks, and anti-terrorist bodies with emphasis on their information collection and destabilization strategies. A virtual experiment is used to examine destabilization strategies and the results are then discussed.
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