The Other Intelligence

Yawn

I don't know what makes this news exciting: 

In a FT.com report, Thomas Fingar, the Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis said that A-Space would be “MySpace for analysts” that will break down firewalls across the “traditionally stove-piped intelligence community.”

A-Space will initially be voluntary “to assuage worries of spies concerned about blowing their cover.” The service will be equipped with web-based email and software that recommends areas of interest to the user “just like Amazon suggests books to its customers.” The site will also allow users to create and modify documents and determine user privileges

The US Director of National Intelligence will open the site to the entire intelligence community in December.

MySpace is old technology in the Web environment.  It just tells me that our IC is still a few years behind the curb, instead of being ahead of it.

Resource: Sex Offenders Database

It's like Google Earth meets a database of evil in our midst, sponsored by a company selling commercial security and monitoring services:

Vision 20/20's POM Offender Locator

Just Out or Just Found

A round-up of recent scholarly articles of interest (cross-posted at Making Sense of Jihad).

Virtual jihadist media: Function, legitimacy and radicalizing efficacy
European Journal of Cultural Studies
Vol. 10, No. 3, 389-408 (2007)

From Secularism to Jihad: Sayyid Qutb and the Foundations of Radical Islamism
Journal of Islamic Studies.2007; 18: 463-466 (a review)

Immigration and Terrorism: A Constructed Connection The Spanish Case
European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research
Volume 13, Numbers 1-2 / April, 2007

Terrorist Attacks: Criminal Prosecution or National Defence?
European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research
Volume 13, Numbers 1-2 / April, 2007

Hudson Institution also has a (kinda new) new issue of Current Trends in Islamist Ideology (vol. 5), including the following articles:

The Development of a Jihadi’s Mind
    by TAWFIQ HAMID
The Struggle for the Soul of Tatar Islam
    by MARLENE LARUELLE
The Jordanian Regime Fights the War of Ideas
    by YAIR MINZILI
Afghanistan’s Islamist Groups
    by HUSAIN HAQQANI

And a book...

Police analysis and planning for homicide bombings : prevention, defense, and response /
by Ellis, John W.
Publisher: Springfield, Ill. : Charles C Thomas, c 2007

Resource: TRANSCRIME

Italy-based research center dedicated to transnational crime, the Joint Research Center on Transnational Crime:

Transcrime is a Joint Research Centre on Transnational Crime between the Università degli Studi di Trento and the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan... Transcrime's funding comes from contracts with local administrations, national bodies, international corporations and the European Union.

Resource: Exploring the Future of Warfare

Out of the Joint Chiefs of Staff office, J7 Joint Experimentation, Transformation, and Concepts Division (JETCD):

Joint Urban Operations: Joint Integrating Concepts

Defense Feeds

A collection of DoD RSS feeds…

Waking Up to Open Source

Office of the Director for National Intelligence recently held a conference on open source.  Proceedings and presentations are here.

Another Panel

Federal Computer Week reports that the Department of Defense has established a new panel

in charge of integrating Defense Department activities that could aid the military in fighting terrorism worldwide...The group, dubbed the Combating Terrorism Coordination Council, is headed by Joint Staff Director Army Lt. Gen. Walter Sharp and Ryan Henry, principal deputy undersecretary of Defense for policy, sources say....

The council’s task is to integrate a number of counterterrorism-related DOD initiatives that so far have operated independently of one another. These initiatives are: improving the military’s ability to conduct stability, reconstruction and counterinsurgency operations;  building up foreign security forces; developing irregular warfare skills and doctrine; and other activities under the Bush administration’s global war on terrorism label, several sources said.

We'll see.