Neurosphere

Fighting a war on ourselves requires finding the enemy within. The technology and information systems to monitor the behavior of each of us within the collective of a Neurosphere continues to evolve, and billions of dollars have gone to improve the technology. The impact on the non-warfighting side seems to me difficult to understate; tools toward the anthropology of the collective consciousness.

“Congress supposedly killed Total Information Awareness, Darpa’s far-flung effort to comb databases in search of terrorists. But that doesn’t mean the authorities are finished sorting through the records of Americans to expose evildoers. Many analysts think bits of TIA still exist on the covert, “black” side of the Pentagon’s ledger.

NORA (Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness)

Acumen (Adaptive Concept Understanding From Modeled Enterprise Networks)

NIMD (Novel Intelligence From Massive Data)”

http://www.defensetech.org/archives/000752.html

There are questionable uses that go to the definition of who our enemies really are.

“With practice, you can recognize the video spies in the city of Washington, DC. To a casual observer, they resemble lampposts. Some of the cameras have a 360 degree view and magnify by a factor of 10-17. Some are equipped with night vision and can zoom in on a target well enough to read text on a written page or look into a building. Most are placed at locations that would not come to mind as primary terrorist targets: Smithsonian Castle, the U.S. Department of Labor, Dupont Circle, Union Station, Wisconsin Avenue, the Old Post Office, and the Banana Republic in Georgetown. Though the targets they view may not stand out as particularly vulnerable to terrorism, the cameras are placed strategically for the purpose of monitoring demonstrations and protests. One of the first occasions for their use was a demonstration in April 2000 against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF).”

http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Jan2005/kalukin0105.html

There are business drivers for technology development as well; the Mohomine Classifier

“Organising and maintaining vast amounts of content inside corporations is an ever more costly and daunting task as the volumes of unstructured content grow. This data must be classified, whether in support of a custom built application or an enterprise application targeted at CRM, Supply Chain, Marketing, Document Management, or any other specific business problem. Further, as the amount of data those applications handle increases dramatically and alters in nature, the performance and flexibility required to support taxonomy changes becomes key to the overall success of the application.”

Or this.

“Systems Research & Development’s NORA technology can take information from disparate sources about people and their activities and find obscure, nonobvious relationships. For example, it might discover that an applicant for a job at a casino shares a telephone number with a known criminal and issue an alert to the hiring manager.”

http://www.computerworld.com/databasetopics/data/story/0,10801,70041,00.html

As today the Iraq Study Group announces we need a new strategy – news flash! – they might consider how the war on terrorism is more of a war within the skin of a collective humanity, a War on Ourselves. Here’s some dimensions of that war.

According to Human Security Report, the nature of war is changing.

“With the demise of colonialism, one that had caused 81 wars since 1816, simply ceased to exist…Then the cold war came to an end – no more proxy wars…a growing number of preventive diplomacy missions by UN since 1991. So, War is mostly within states…”Between 1991 and 2004, 28 struggles for self determination were started or restarted, while 43 were contained or ended…Just 25 armed secessionist conflicts under way in 2004, the lowest number since 1976.”

http://www.humansecurityreport.info/component/option,com_frontpage/Itemid,1/

Here’s a glimpse of the new nature of war, in Israel/Palestine.

“Although several thousand soldiers and Palestinian guerrillas were manoeuvring simultaneously in the city, they were so ‘saturated’ into the urban fabric that very few would have been visible from the air. Furthermore, they used none of the city’s streets, roads, alleys or courtyards, or any of the external doors, internal stairwells and windows, but moved horizontally through walls and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors. This form of movement, described by the military as ‘infestation’, seeks to redefine inside as outside, and domestic interiors as thoroughfares. The IDF’s strategy of ‘walking through walls’ involves a conception of the city as not just the site but also the very medium of warfare – a flexible, almost liquid medium that is forever contingent and in flux.”

http://www.frieze.com/feature_single.asp?f=1165

Writer Bruce Sterling once wrote that the war on terrorism is the same thing as the Internet bubble. Interesting then that the European Union initiative on the Information Society as within it a new program on Global Cybersecurity.

“The purpose of the Cybersecurity Gateway is to provide an easy-to-use information resource on national and international cybersecurity related initiatives worldwide. In today’s interconnected world of networks, threats can now originate anywhere – our collective cybersecurity depends on the security practices of every connected country, business, and citizen.”

http://www.itu.int/cybersecurity/index.html