Mr. Patrick visited Iraq as a weapons inspector for the United Nations in 1994 on the Iraqi clandestine biological warfare program. He now acts as a consultant to the F.B.I., the Defense Intelligence Agency and the C.I.A.

The Threat of Biological Warfare

This book will be published in June 2002. No more details as yet available.

Many schools of thought assert that Western culture has never been more politically apathetic. Tim Jordan's Activism! refutes this claim. In his powerful polemic, Jordan shows how acts of civil disobedience have come to dominate the political landscape. Because we inhabit such a quickly changing, high-tech and fragmented culture, the single-issue political movements and stable, conservative authorities of the past are continually being questioned. Traditional political battles have been replaced by the popular, collective practices of a new political activism. From Europe to the USA, from Australia to South America, from the Left to the Right, Jordan introduces us to the citizens who make up d-i-y culture: eco-activists, animal liberators, neo-fascists, ravers, anti-abortionists, squatters, hunt saboteurs and hacktivists. In his view, activism comprises a new ethics of living for the 21st century.

Tim Jordan teaches in the Department of Sociology at the Open University, London.

The author's previous book is _Cyberpower_, for which Amazon has 18 sample pages available at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415170788

_Activism! Direct Action, Hacktivism and the Future of Society_

John Rennie Short is Professor of Geography at Syracuse University.

_Global Dimensions: Space, Place and the Contemporary World_

In all likelihood, this symposium, held in Arlington, VA on 6-8 Feb 2002, was a primary source of today's contentious NYT article (which is my previous log entry). There was a panel discussion entitled "Strategic Psychological Operations" in which the following topics were presented:

The Role of PSYOP in Combating Terrorism
PSYOP in Urban Opertions
International Public Information
The DOD Role in Strategic Influence Operations
Joint Strategic PSYOP Capabilities and Requirements
Army Strategic PSYOP Initiatives

The link is to a PDF brochure for the symposium. 12 pages, 1 MB.

NDIA Symposium on Low Intensity Conflict [PDF]

"The Pentagon is developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations as part of a new effort to influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries, military officials said."

Memetics Goes Global In A Big Way

Researchers report on their success in applying two "hyper" topologies to improve the scalability of Gnutella. This brief paper seems to be getting a lot of press.

Doesn't this seem like a "duh" to you? These topologies aren't new. I recall discussing the virtual hypertorus with Tom in ~1996 in regard to the "pipenet" idea. They are quite common in the literature of high-performance cluster computing.

In an ad-hoc P2P network, I suspect it will be problematic to discover the network topology and then force users to interconnect themselves in this way. Even so, this paper is useful in that it demonstrates (theoretically) viable alternatives to the untrustworthy Morpheus/KaZaA-style "supernode"-based architectures.

Hypernets -- Good (G)news for Gnutella

If you want to be in the right place at the right time you need to figure out where things are going...

BT's future timeline

"At The Arlington Institute, we believe that to understand the future, you need to have an open mind and cast a very wide net. To that end, FUTUREdition explores a cross- disciplinary palette of issues, from the frontiers of science and technology to major developments in mass media, geopolitics, the environment, and social perspectives."

A free newsletter, published every two weeks or so. The latest issue is from 31 Jan 2002. Be sure to check out the archives for details on their projects, such as:

The Macro*Memetics Project - The Design, Leadership, and Transformation of Large-Scale, Complex Systems and Resolution of Major Conflict Situations ... A number of forces are now converging to put even a greater emphasis on finding new and fresh ways to deal with large scale problems and challenges. These "macro" groupings range from whole communities to emerging city-states to multi-layered cultures to far-reaching corporate entities and, of course, to the global meshwork itself. Attempts to apply micro-scale (personal) and meso-scale (organizational) solutions to these interconnected and dynamic macro-scale environments have been "weighed in the balance and found to be wanting." ...

FUTUREdition | The Arlington Institute

Jeff Harlow writes about the rapid changes taking place in high-tech industries. It's freely available and is published twice monthly. The latest issue, about intellectual property, is entitled "The Copy Conundrum."

"Insight, analysis, and commentary on the innovations and trends of contemporary computing, and related technologies. An ongoing journey towards understanding, and profiting from, a world of exponential technological growth!"

The Harrow Technology Report explores the innovations and trends of many contemporary and emerging technologies, and then draws some less than obvious connections between them, to help us each survive and prosper in the Knowledge Age.

The Harrow Technology Report

Bamford [is] working on a new book, A Killing Sleep: Anatomy of America's Greatest Intelligence Failure.

From the summary, it appears Bamford gave a history of the NSA. It's a little difficult to distinguish Bamford's remarks from the editorial comments of the summarizer. Among the more insightful comments: "[T]oday's press is actually getting worse. Before Sept. 11, all the coverage was on Gary Condit and on shark attacks, in spite of the fact that there are fewer shark attacks every year. Sells papers."

Report on a James Bamford Talk at Berkeley