Information
Despite the title, this is not an overview but a few thoughts, in preparation for the APF Twitter chat on the topic today.
Transparency
Increasing transparency may be revealing how power is wielded, but it has a very long way to go. Most people, even in open societies such as the United States, have only a vague sense of which people and organizations hold and use power over them, and what they are doing with it.
Complexity
Complexity obscures power, even to its wielders — witness the 2008+ economic implosion, in which no one, even the powerful, actually knew what their actions meant.
It may also place it in unexpected locales. The maid who has accused the now-former IMF head of sexual attack may -– through no fault of her own –- damage the economy of Europe and even the world.
Machine power
We are passing power to machines. Obscure algorithms were key to the Great Recession, and increasingly determine wide swaths of our lives, such as what we see through search engines and other information portals. These algorithms may or may not reflect the actual intentions of those who created them, and those who use them.
State power
On the whole, states may be increasing their power. Especially in emerging markets, they have more money, technology, and skills in their hands, enabling them to do things that they couldn’t a couple of decades ago.
At the same time, the rawest use of state power, violence, is more constrained that it was. The ordinary repression of the 1980s is now beyond the pale for all but a few states, and can easily get a regime — at least one without power — referred to the International Criminal Court. This is the case nearly across the board: even today’s severe human rights violators tend to be restrained by the standards of the past.
Researchers are creating digitized versions of cities from thousands of photos that people have shared online, Physorg.com reports.
The program used 150,000 photos of Rome to create a 3-D digital rendering of the city, for instance.
This capability is another step toward truly open-source intelligence: publicly available images and other information will be able to generate increasingly detailed snapshots of places, people, and particular moments. And the ability to analyze this information will steadily democratize, and grow more powerful: Google is experimenting with facial recognition software that could reveal the locations and activities of millions of people who aren’t even the primary subject of a given photo, as just one example.
This idea has historic antecedents, by the way. During WW II, the OSS collected American’s tourist photos of Europe, cataloged them and made them partially machine-accessible, and used them to plan bombing raids. (Nicholson Baker, “Deadline,” New Yorker, July 24, 2000, 47.)
(Tip from @Changeist)
(Image: Creative Commons from gruntzooki, Flickr)
The Washington Post reports on the spread of mobile telephony in Africa, taking Congo as its example.
That mobile phones are spreading even in the disaster area that is Congo is telling; if they can be deployed there, they will go everywhere, given that Congo has “almost no roads, mail or telephone system” and is in the midst of a chaotic war.
Mobile phones achieve several immediate goals:
- They allow rapid communication, sometimes replacing extreme difficulty. The article cites a man who previously had to journey eight days by riverboat to see his mother, and now talks to her on the phone every day.
- They enable e-commerce, or more technically m-commerce. African phones are increasingly equippped with the ability to transfer money and pay merchants.
- Mobiles bring efficiencies to commerce, potentially boosting economic activity.
Mobiles also have several larger effects:
- Information speed — They vastly speed up information flows. In a place like Congo, they supplement sparse broadcast media with millions of person-to-person information nodes.
- Information decentralization — As information accelerates, it also decentralizes, with a variety of social and political effects. The classic Third World coup-starter, seizing the radio and TV stations, will have less and less meaning.
- Leapfrogging — Mobiles enable leapfrogging over other technologies, from broadcast TV to fixed-line phones and even the Internet. The Post notes that Congo now has 3.2 million mobile customers, compared to only 20,000 land lines. Mobiles can help begin to close the information devide that grew steadily wider between developed and developing world over the last century.
Mobiles will be particularly transformative in Africa, the least-wired of all regions. They are actually growing fastest here now, and have 152 million users on the continent, the Post says. (This probably includes North Africa, but growth seems to be faster in sub-Saharan.)
A curious intelligence experiment is underway on the Web, the NYT reports.
American intelligence agencies are putting 48,000 boxes of captured Iraqi government documents online, in Arabic.
The idea, pushed by conservatives, is that this will give more attention to neglected details of Iraqis activities and intentions, possibly bolstering the case for war.
This particular scheme may be amateurish in execution, but the underlying idea — truly open-source intelligence — is profound.
Open-source intelligence traditionally refers to publicly available sources analyzed by conventional intelligence agencies.
But the newer meaning of “open source” — opening information, methods, and output in a system to broad participation — could be applied in the intelligence sphere.
Civilian analogues are already in operation:
- Amber Alerts to find missing children are a method of rapidly creating a dispersed intelligence gathering apparatus.
- Fighting child exploitation, investigators have released images with the victim digitally removed, in hopes that the public can identify something from the background or other clues. These methods have sometimes yielded results.
Applied to intelligence, open-source methods could address two problems: inadequate attention resources, and inadequate information gathering. Both are enabled by the networked information revolution that connects ever more people and devices.
Attention: networks of varying openness could be applied to answer three kinds of problems:
- Is there anything to this? Does an image or document warrant further attention?
- Do you recognize this? Where, who, or what is this?
- Is anything happening? Networks could be tasked with real-time monitoring of sensors or imaging systems.
Gathering: The Internet and mobile phone networks are forming an increasingly pervasive information network that far surpasses that of the world’s intelligence agencies. These networks can be used in several ways:
- Passive gathering: The Web and mobile networks are increasingly good for near-real time monitoring of events. After the London bombings of 2005, it was possible to get multiple images of many of the bomb sites from the photo site Flickr.
- Post-facto gathering: The library of images captured by civilians will grow more and more vast, and it is not long before any public event will be recorded by numerous devices. It will be possible to request images of an event or place from the public with near-certainty that the image is out there. (A version of this was done by the US armed forces during World War II, when they asked the public to send in all their pre-war tourist photos of Europe, in order to compile a visual intelligence database. Flickr could achieve the same results in a matter of minutes.)
- Real-time gathering: In certain circumstances and places, it will be possible to put out a request for civilians to gather data in real time.