Cartwright, Geeks’ Best Pal, Is Out of Race for Top General | Danger Room. As recently as last month, Gen. James “Hoss” Cartwright was known in Washington as “Obama’s favorite general,” a leading candidate to become the country’s top military officer, and one of the biggest tech fiends ever to pin four stars to his shoulders. Now, Cartwright has been definitively ruled out as the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Pentagon sources tell Danger Room — the apparent victim of a nasty Beltway whisper campaign. It means that the military leadership will be losing one of its more original thinkers, just as the Pentagon reconsiders, well, everything: the Afghanistan war, a growing rivalry with China, a budget that could get cut by $400 billion or more.
“General Cartwright is unique. He has a quick, intuitive grasp of technologies and their military applications. Gen. Cartwright, a former F/A-18 pilot and fellow at MIT, emerged on the national scene as the head of U.S. Sometimes, Cartwright seemed to be too technophilic for his own good. Photo: U.S. Ground-Moving-Target-Indicator. Print: The Watchers Draws Glowing Portrait of Überspook | Magazine.
Illustration: Kate Gibb; photo: Getty Shane Harris says that in 2004, when he first shook hands with retired admiral John Poindexter , he thought he was meeting an “evil genius.” Poindexter had become infamous in the ’80s for orchestrating the Iran-Contra scheme with the help of an at-home encrypted data line. After 9/11, he fell into further disrepute as the architect of Total Information Awareness, an antiterrorism program that proposed collecting as much data as possible — emails, credit card statements, even veterinarian bills — about everyone on the planet.
It was too much even for a war-on-terror-era Congress, which shuttered the vast data-mining project in 2003 and ran Poindexter out of office. But as Harris , a correspondent for (and, full disclosure, a friend of mine) got to know Poindexter — hanging out on his boat, sharing lunches of Spam and Tequiza, and trading documents over a private file-sharing network — he was impressed by the admiral’s relentless intellect.
Wired 14.06: The Rise of Crowdsourcing. Remember outsourcing? Sending jobs to India and China is so 2003. The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R & D. By Jeff HowePage 1 of 4 next » 1. The Professional Story Tools Story Images Click thumbnails for full-size image: Claudia Menashe needed pictures of sick people. In October 2004, she ran across a stock photo collection by Mark Harmel, a freelance photographer living in Manhattan Beach, California.
The National Health Museum has grand plans to occupy a spot on the National Mall in Washington by 2012, but for now it’s a fledgling institution with little money. After several weeks of back-and-forth, Menashe emailed Harmel to say that, regretfully, the deal was off. iStockphoto, which grew out of a free image-sharing exchange used by a group of graphic designers, had undercut Harmel by more than 99 percent. He can’t, of course. It took a while for Harmel to recognize what was happening. [1008.3172] Time Critical Social Mobilization: The DARPA Network Challenge Winning Strategy.
Darpa’s Crowdsourcer-in-Chief Bolts for Microsoft | Danger Room. Darpa’s leading advocate for crowdsourcing and other ways of tapping new talent is leaving to join Microsoft — after only a year at the Defense Department’s top R&D division. Peter Lee, the former head of Carnegie Mellon University’s computer science department, joined Darpa to head up its new Transformational Convergence Technology Office. The group quickly became known within the agency for avoiding the traditional cadre of military researchers — and reaching out to the rest of us, instead.
Lee helped organize Darpa’s “Network Challenge,” which sent people scouring the country for a set of 10 big red balloons in an attempt to “explore the roles the internet and social networking play [in] timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization,” according to an agency website. Lee’s office also launched “Transformative Apps,” a project to create a marketplace for soldier software.
“It’s like an iPhone store. Photo courtesy Carnegie Mellon University See Also: Untitled. Speaker: Prof. Alex (Sandy) Pentland (MIT, Human Dynamics) We have developed robust models of how social network dynamics shape human behavior. These models are constructed by use of data collected by my research group's unique `reality mining' sensor platforms, which allow us to track the behavior of hundreds of people in great detail and over long periods of time, and provide accurate predictions of human decision making performance across a wide range of network sizes.
Finally, I will describe how they have be used to effectively shape social behaviors, and were used to guide our win of DARPA's 40th Anniversary of the Internet Grand Challenge. Alex `Sandy’ Pentland directs MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory and the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program, and advises DARPA, the World Economic Forum, Nissan Motor Corporation, and a variety of start-up firms. More information: events.rpi.edu.
Spies Like Us: Top U.S. Intel Officer Says Spooks Could Learn From Journos | Danger Room. American intelligence in Afghanistan is broken, says the top U.S. intelligence officer there. That’s because it focuses too much on whacking Taliban, and not enough on figuring out Afghanistan’s social and cultural landscapes. But the report from Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, the top intelligence aide to International Security Assistance Force Commander Gen. Flynn’s report — which was prepared for public release by the Center for a New American Security – begins with a stunning admission. Part of the problem is cultural: The intelligence community tend to focus on information from classified sources: signals intercepts, information from informants, significant activity reports.
Put succinctly, the coalition has plenty of information about the enemy, but is clueless about the terrain it occupies and the communities it engages. Flynn’s solution? The report proposes creating roving teams of analysts to staff what the report calls “Stability Operations Information Centers.” [PHOTO: U.S. Petraeus Keeps McChrystal’s Top Intel Officer | Danger Room. Just because General Stanley McChrystal lost his job as commander in Afghanistan doesn’t mean a key member of his team is out as well. Major General Michael Flynn, the head of intelligence operations for the NATO war effort, will stay on, Danger Room has learned.
“Major General Flynn is going to stay and be General Petraeus’s top intel officer,” says Colonel Erik Gunhus, Petraeus’ spokesman. Maybe that shouldn’t be surprising. Flynn (pictured, above and right) wasn’t a factor in the Rolling Stone profile that doomed McChrystal’s career. And he’s challenged military intelligence officers to study the Afghan civilian populace as much as the insurgency. Flynn wrote in January that intelligence operations that don’t take into account Afghanistan’s unfamiliar cultural, social, political and economic landscape are only “marginally relevant to the overall strategy” in Afghanistan. Photo: DVIDS / 2nd Lt. See Also: Kilcullen on operational population effects. Back to David Kilcullen's essay on what works in counterinsurgency, what doesn't, and how to tell the difference. But first, a couple of points in response to yesterday's rasher of comments. First, to my knowledge, the paper hasn't been published anywhere -- but I'll skate as close to the copyright laws as I can and give you a good overview.
Second, Kilcullen isn't out to attack all metrics, just bad metrics. Which leads us to the point of today's post. Yesterday, he told you why he dismisses certain metrics as unhelpful. Today, he discusses how to tell what effect your operations are having on the people: "Voluntary reporting. " CHRISTOPHE SIMON/AFP/Getty Images. Afghan-Progress_final-high. Exclusive: Inside Darpa’s Secret Afghan Spy Machine | Danger Room. The Pentagon’s top researchers have rushed a classified and controversial intelligence program into Afghanistan. Known as “Nexus 7,” and previously undisclosed as a war-zone surveillance effort, it ties together everything from spy radars to fruit prices in order to glean clues about Afghan instability.
The program has been pushed hard by the leadership of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. They see Nexus 7 as both a breakthrough data-analysis tool and an opportunity to move beyond its traditional, long-range research role and into a more active wartime mission. But those efforts are drawing fire from some frontline intel operators who see Nexus 7 as little more than a glorified grad-school project, wasting tens of millions on duplicative technology that has nothing to do with stopping the Taliban.
During a decade of war, American forces have gathered exabytes of information on its enemies in Afghanistan. That sometimes means turning traditional intelligence work on its head.