Wampum

The mailings Kintera did for the Kucinich Campaign contained 1x1 gifs, so in the universe of progressive email forwarding, every reading of every Kintera-originated Kucinich mailing, would beacon the home ship.

I don't know if the Kucinich Campaign bought the idea that technical mechanisms offered a better ROI for campaign mailing metrics than human intelligence, but Kintera did, and that is the idea of adaptive, agile, sampling of session state and payload.

What ROI does sampling 1% of all IPv4 (data or voice/data) or SS7 (voice) traffic, and automated "hunting" of some attributes in the sample sets offer? The "I" part of the question quantifies as zero cost for network element capability, the consequence of the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), and a bulk buy from (or hidden subsidy to) the carriers of 1% of the aggregated bandwidth, and the computational and storage capacity to sink a flow sourced by the sampling rulesets, and perform some computationally useful transformations on the sample, yeilding no worse than random modifications of the sampling rulesets, and no worse than random reports and digests for subsequent automated or human processing, or another 1% or more (of the total telecoms DP capitalization) bulk buy from (or hidden subsidy to) high-end storage and processing solution vendors, and of course, the associated capital and non-capital costs to build-out the sample processing facilities and staff them.

It is a non-trivial I.

So what is the R?

If you had 1% of the bandwidth, processing, and storage budget of the aggregated telecommunications industry in the US, and you had to spend it on intelligence, would you spend it replicating the bandwidth, processing, and storage capacity of the aggregated telecommunications industry, or would you spend it something else? Answers should be in keeping with the Department of Defense's mission, which shouldn't need any clarification for either the non-critical or critical readings. Answers should not assume the repurposing of the Department of Defense to domestic policing, or measures to preserve party incumbancy.

What should Kintera do with the savings after zeroing out the budget line for "technically enhanced email penetration provisioning and metrics"? Answers should be in keeping with Kintera's mission of building strong communities for good causes.

I'm looking at the program for an Intel Dog and Pony next February -- one "intended to be the most prestigious world conference on international studies, intelligence policy, terrorism, and homeland security" -- and SP31 caught my eye -- What Can the Public do to get more Involved in the War on Terror? Pick up the phone. Isn't that obvious? Of course, the title to Specialist Session 31 got processed by my lexdysic text processor, if read carefully, the text is SP31: What Can the Media do to get the Public more Involved in the War on Terror? The Specialist is TBA, so they could be waiting on the 2005 Koufax Award in the Wag the Dog category. Fortunately, data processing logic errors exist only in my mind, not in anyone's code or data schema, or the transitive closure of the concatenation of those across all products in the data transmission and processing industries currently and forseeably deployed in the US.

The Intelligence Summit ^SM (originally the "International Holocaust Education Center", now the "Intelligence and Homeland Security Education Center") in Arlington is the place to be next President's Weekend. You know its going to be cool because (from the brochure) This year, at the request of U.S. Intelligence, Iranian dissident organizations will be showcased (wave at the friendly MEK/PMOI cultists, who are status terrorists awaiting laundering) and unlike INTELCON, whos primary purpose was education for American intelligence agencies only, and excluded US counter-terrorism and homeland security. This dog and pony show will include all international and national intelligence, CI and CT entities. It is the first post-disclosure, no badges, no boarders Intel-O-Rama!

The program is fun. There are tracks on Counter Terrorism, Homeland Security, Business Intelligence, Technology, and International Specialists. The Counter Terrorism, Homeland Security tracks are new, reflecting the new reality (no badges, no boarders, no FICA, no ... No).

John Loftus, who in 2002 filed a pro se against Professor Al Arian (for terrorist money laundering), is giving (Counter Terrorism) CT31: Placing Terrorist Group Muslim Brotherhood on the State Department Terrorist List, along with Yossef Bodansky and Dr. Walid Phares. Dr. Phares doen't like Al Jazeera as much as he likes Fox, and as the Other Eric at The Hampster points out, argues that [American] Liberals Caused [the] Beheading [of Nick Berg and everyone else made shorter by a foot]. I'm enamored with Boadansky's 1995 paper containing this gem "Controlling the Strait of Malacca is presently a key strategic objective of the PRC to the point of risking armed conflict with the regional states and even the US."

Apparently we had a naval war with the PRC 10 years ago and I wasn't invited. Darn!

Well, the nice folks at IHEC are looking for volunteers to help them pull this thing off, and one of the inobvious bennies is being in a maze of twisty passages that all look alike, and knowing that John Ashcroft is easily the smartest civil libratarian present, and the same caliber of mind is present in every other intelligence problem domain present, is blogging the heck out of them.

A decent blogger could get pretty damn lonely in such august company.