How Did I Miss This? YouTube Now Has A 360 Degree Video(!) From North Korea(!)

You read that title right, sports fans!  360 degree videos.  As in you can now decide where you want to look, left, right, up or down in a video.  Take a look at this recent video shot by a couple of guys visiting North Korea...

How does it work?  Incredibly simply!  Just click the arrows in the circle in the upper right hand corner of the video image.  Take a look at the annotated screenshot to the right if I am not being clear enough.

Right now it appears to only work on Chrome or Android devices and I found that other videos (and there are a growing number of them) often had to pause to buffer.

The North Korean video was shot with an Etaniya camera and some specialized software.  Apparently YouTube (via Google) is working with the software and the hardware manufacturers to make it easier.

In the interim, there are some guides starting to be produced to help you get going making your own 360 degree video.

(H/T to WK!)

New Digital Attack Map From Google, Arbor Networks (Extreme COOLINT)

Google Ideas and Arbor Networks have recently made available a very interesting "digital attack map" that provides a live data visualization of Distributed Denial of service attacks around the world.  It is pretty cool stuff and well worth the look! (H/T to Rebeka for the link!  Thanks!)

Strategic Minerals, Collaboration, Intelligence And...Oh, Yeah...Twitter!

http://strategicminerals.blogspot.com/

I am currently team teaching a class called Collaborative Intelligence with one of our adjuncts, Cathy Pedler.  I like to say that the purpose of the class is to explore "how to work in groups and how groups work."

Specifically, we are tapping into our own research and experience working with small groups of analysts (as well as the research of others) to teach students how to optimize group work processes with particular emphasis on group work in virtual or distributed environments.  In addition, we are also teaching them how to collect useful information and produce analysis using a variety of online and social media tools.  For this part of the class, we are emphasizing social network analysis as a core methodology.

In order to give the class some focus, Cathy and I decided to have the students take a hard look at strategic minerals (such as the "rare earth elements").  In order to share the results of our efforts, we also created a class blog, Strategic Minerals, where students could post both some of their collected information and some of their analysis for others to examine and comment upon.

On the blog you will find a couple of different kinds of exercises.  First, there are INTSUM-like entries that summarize recent news articles but add snippets of commentary or analysis (Note:  For those who have not tried it, blogging software is a nearly perfect way to replace traditional INTSUMs.  You get all of the benefit and none of the costs of creating them the old-fashioned way).

Second, there are classroom exercises, like our recent effort to build a down-and-dirty model of the non-chemical relationships between the various strategic minerals using social network analysis.  Third, and most recently, we have been posting some of our (very preliminary) analysis of the impact of trends in these minerals on national security, law enforcement and business interests in the US.

While none of our current analytic efforts are very sophisticated (Don't worry:  We will get better), how we are producing these results is likely to be as (or more) interesting to many of you as our analysis.  For example, the most recent assignments required the students to produce their analysis without any face-to-face interaction.  Instead, they had to use nothing but the suite of collaborative tools we had been discussing (and using) in class.  If you take a look at the "Methods and processes" section of these most recent reports, you can see how well this worked, what problems they had to overcome, and how they went about making the reports happen.

In the coming weeks we will be diving much deeper into social network analysis, talking a lot more about group dynamics, learning how to use Twitter, Pintrest, Facebook and other social media as collection tools, and producing increasingly complex reports involving larger and larger groups of analysts.

It promises to be an interesting term.  We hope to learn something about strategic minerals but more importantly, we hope to learn how to work in groups and how groups work. 

Follow along at Strategic Minerals!

Top 5 Things Only Spies Used To Do (But Everyone Does Now)

There has been a good bit of recent evidence that the gap between what spies do and what we all do is narrowing -- and the spies are clearly worried about it.

GEN David Petraeus, Director of the CIA, started the most recent round of hand-wringing back in March when he gave a speech at the In-Q-Tel CEO Summit:

"First, given the digital transparency I just mentioned, we have to rethink our notions of identity and secrecy...We must, for example, figure out how to protect the identity of our officers who increasingly have a digital footprint from birth, given that proud parents document the arrival and growth of their future CIA officer in all forms of social media that the world can access for decades to come."

Richard Fadden, the Director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), added his own thoughts in a speech only recently made public:

"In today's information universe of WikiLeaks, the Internet and social media, there are fewer and fewer meaningful secrets for the James Bonds of the world to steal," Fadden told a conference of the Canadian Association of Professional Intelligence Analysts in November 2011. "Suddenly the ability to make sense of information is as valued a skill as collecting it."

Next I ran across a speech given by Robert Grenier, a former case officer, chief of station and 27 year veteran of the clandestine service, given at a conference at the University of Delaware.  In it, he describes the moment he realized that the paradigm was shifting (and not in his favor):

"Grenier said he came to realize the practice of espionage would have to change when he received a standard form letter at a hotel overseas, while undercover, thanking him for visiting again.  When he realized electronic records now tracked where he had been for certain date ranges, he said he knew the practice of espionage was going to have to change.  “It was like the future in a flash that opened up before my eyes,” Grenier said."

(Note:  While I could not embed the video here, the entire one hour speech is well worth watching.  The part of particular relevance to this post begins around minute 8 in the video.   This is, by the way, fantastic stuff for use in an intelligence studies class).

Finally  (and what really got me thinking), one of my students made an off-handed comment regarding his own security practices.  I needed to send him a large attachment and I asked for his Gmail account. In response, he gave me his "good" address, explaining that he only used his other Gmail address as a "spam account", i.e. when he had to give a valid email address to a website he suspected was going to fill his in-box with spam.

That's when it hit me.  Not only is it getting harder to be a traditional spy, it is getting easier (far easier) to do the kinds of things that only spies used to do.  The gap is clearly closing from both ends.

With all this exposition in mind, here is my list of the Top 5 Things Only Spies Used To Do (But Everyone Does Now) -- Don't hesitate to leave your own additions in the comments:

#5 -- Have a cover story.  That is precisely what my student was doing with his spam account.  In fact, most people I know have multiple email accounts for various aspects of their lives.  This is just the beginning, though.  How many of us use different social media platforms for different purposes?  Take a look at someone you are friends with on Facebook and are connected to on LinkedIn and I'll bet you can spot all the essential elements of a cover story.  Need more proof?  Watch the video below:


The only reason we think this ad is funny is because we intuitively understand the idea of "cover" and we understand the consequences of having that cover blown.

#4 -- Shake a tail.   It used to be that spies had to be in their Aston Martins running from burly East Germans to qualify as someone in the process of "shaking a tail."  Today we are mostly busy running from government and corporate algorithms that are trying to understand our every action and divine our every need, but the concept is the same.  Whether you are doing simple stuff like using a search engine like DuckDuckGo that doesn't track you or engaging "porn mode" on your Firefox or Chrome browser, or more sophisticated stuff like enabling the popular cookie manager, NoScript, or even more sophisticated stuff like using Tor or some other proxy server service to mask your internet habits, we are using increasingly sophisticated tools to help us navigate the internet without being followed.

#3 -- Use passwords and encrypt data.  Did you buy anything over the internet in the last week or so?  Chances are good you used a password and encrypted your data (or, if you didn't, don't be surprised when you wind up buying a dining room set for someone in Minsk).  Passwords used to be reserved for sturdy doors in dingy alleyways, for safe houses or for entering friendly lines.  Now they are so common that we need password management software to keep up with them all.  Need more examples? Ever use an HTTPS site?  Your business make you use a Virtual Private Network?  The list is endless.

#2 -- Have an agent network.  Sure, that's not what we call them, but that is what they are:  LinkedIn, Yelp, Foursquare and the best agent network of all -- Twitter.  An agent network is a group of humans who we have vetted and recruited to help us get the information we want.   How is that truly different from making a connection on LinkedIn or following someone on Twitter?  We "target" (identify people who might be useful to us in some way), "vet" their credentials (look at their profiles, websites, Google them), "recruit" them (Easy-peasy!  Just hit "follow"...), and then, once the trust relationship has been established, "task" them as assets ("Please RT!" or "Can you introduce me?" or "Contact me via DM").  Feel like a spy now (or just a little bit dirtier)?

#1 -- Use satellites.  Back in 2000, I went to work at the US Embassy in The Hague.  I worked on a daily basis with the prosecutors at the International Criminal Tribunal For the Former Yugoslavia.  That collaboration, while not always easy, bore results like the ones that led US Judge Patricia Wald to say, "I found most astounding in the Srebrenica case the satellite aerial image photography furnished by the U.S. military intelligence  (Ed. Note:  See example) which pinpointed to the minute movements on the ground of men and transports in remote Eastern Bosnian locations. These photographs not only assisted the prosecution in locating the mass grave sites over hundreds of miles of terrain, they were also introduced to validate its witnesses’ accounts of where thousands of civilians were detained and eventually killed."  It is hard to believe that only 12 years ago this was state of the art stuff.

Today, from Google Earth to the Satellite Sentinel Project, overhead imagery combined with hyper-detailed maps are everywhere.  And that is just the start.  We use satellites to make our phone calls, to get our television, and to guide our cars, boats and trucks.  We use satellites to track our progress when we work out and to track our packages in transit.  Most of us carry capabilities in our cell phones, enabled by satellites, that were not even dreamed of by the most sophisticated of international spies a mere decade ago.

-----------------------

If this is today, what will the future bring?  Will we all be writing our own versions of Stuxnet and Flame?  Or, more likely, will we be using drones to scout the perfect campsite?  Feel free to speculate in the comments!

Attitudes Towards Social Media Non-Users And Some Interesting Privacy Watchdog Sites

I have a team of students (very bright students, of course) who have been taking a hard look at social media and the risks of both being involved and the risks of not being involved.

They have come across lots of data (Key Finding:  It is highly likely that social media people LOVE to talk about social media (High confidence)), but we have not been able to find out one thing:  Do people who use social media sites (like Facebook and Twitter) think that people who don't use them are weird? I don't necessarily mean weird in a pejorative way (though I am certainly interested in that interpretation).  It could be just sort of a reaction, like when someone says, "Oh, I don't have a Facebook account" and someone else would automatically think, "That's weird."

So, before I talk more about it more, answer the Swayable below:


Here's what I think we'll see:  A small but significant percentage of those that answer the question will say, "Yeah, it's weird."  If I could gather details, I would guess that there would be a fairly strong correlation between those that think it is weird and age (with younger people thinking it is weirder, obviously).

What is really weird, though is that we can't seem to find anyone who has asked this question before.

Changing the subject a little (but not much), I also wanted to highlight two sites, one old and one new, that provide an interesting insight into the subject of privacy in the age of social media.

http://blogs.wsj.com/wtk-mobile/

The first is the wonderful What They Know courtesy of the Wall Street Journal.  This site lets you explore the privacy settings of some of the most popular apps for IOS and Android phones.  You can see a screen shot of part of the site at the right but you owe it to yourself to visit the interactive and a bit disquieting site.

The other site, Privacyscore (See screenshot below), is new but seems like it would be particularly valuable to anyone who searches the web (i.e. everyone).  The site can tell you, based on its own rating system, on a scale 1-100 (where 1 is very bad and 100 is very good), how private your activities on that site really are.  So, for example, Google.com scores an 85 whereas Bing scores only a 74.   Of particular interest to heavy web users or researchers are the Firefox and Chrome add-ons that will display a site's privacy score in real time as you search.

http://www.privacyscore.com/

How To Improve Your Open Source Search Skills -- One Day At A Time!

If you scratch the surface of the web you will find a ton of articles, websites and videos about how to search for information more efficiently.

Not that this makes any difference.

Students, according to the Project For Information Literacy, "while curious in the beginning stages of research, employed a consistent and predictable research strategy for finding information, whether they were conducting course-related or everyday life research." The report goes on to say, "Almost all students used course readings and Google first for course-related research and Google and Wikipedia for everyday life research."

There are a number of reasons to be worried about this. Many people tend to focus on the over-reliance on Google as the search engine of first resort. While some of that logic is true (for an interesting and illuminating experiment that makes the point, I recommend this site...), I find the inability to use even Google very well to be one of my largest concerns. I mean, if you are going to rely only on Google, you ought to be incredibly good at finding stuff with it.

The best way, in my mind, to get good at finding stuff with Google is to practice doing it and Google apparently feels the same way. The Wizards of Mountain View are now offering a game that is designed to use "your creativity and clever search skills". The premise is simple. They ask a question and then you use Google to find the answer. The game is called "Google a Day". You can try today's challenge below:

I can easily imagine this as an icebreaker in a computer equipped classroom or as a homework or extra credit assignment. Leave your own ideas in the comments!

Mercyhurst Offers Online Cyberthreat Analysis Course!

Billy Rios

The Mercyhurst College Institute Of Intelligence Studies is now accepting applications and inquiries for a 3 credit online graduate course in Cyberthreat Analysis.  It is scheduled to begin on 29 NOV 2010 and will end on or about 23 FEB 2011.

The course is open to anyone with a bachelor's degree from an accredited college or university and an interest in the topic.  The course is designed as an online, standalone, introductory graduate-level course -- there are are no prerequisites.

 The instructor for the course is Billy Rios (see picture).  Billy is currently a Senior Security Researcher with Google and has taught the course for us in the past.  Before Google, he was the Security Program Manager for Internet Explorer and one of authors of the book, Hacking:  The Next Generation.  Billy has also served as a Marine Corps officer in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. 

According to the course description:  "This course explores the relatively new discipline of cyberthreat analysis at a basic level, introducing students to the methodology of investigation, the threat environment (cyberspace), some of the online tools used by analysts, and their application in real world examples. Students will be introduced to the key concepts, tools, and terminologies used by professionals in the field and apply what they learn in lab exercises that model real-world events."

Our recent informal survey of hiring managers indicated that cyberthreat analysis is still one of the hottest areas of hiring in intel.  This course is a great way to get your feet wet if you are looking to expand, improve or add depth to your professional portfolio as an intelligence analyst.

If you or anyone you know is interested, please have them contact Linda Bremmer at lbremmer at mercyhurst dot edu or call 814 824 2170.

Google Proves Massively Useful Once Again; Continues To Try To Dominate World (Google Docs)

One of my former students (Thanks, Meg!) sent me the big news: Google has added real-time, collaborative editing to Google Docs. This means that you and up to 9 collaborators can jump on a single Google Doc and simultaneously type and edit.

While this may not appear to support Google's attempt at world domination to quite the extent the headline to this post makes it seem (whew!), it does.

Previously, a wonderful little online product called Etherpad was the only such real-time collaborative tool available. Lots of people loved it but, when Google (the plot thickens...) bought it out a few months ago, the people who wept loudest were -- wait for it -- teachers.

I myself had used it in the classroom. It was easy and efficient and got students working together quickly without a whole lot of admin fuss and bother. The final collaborative product wasn't very pretty (no real formatting options) but, once the content was agreed upon by the students working on the project, it was easy to move that content into Word or PowerPoint or, for that matter, Google Docs, to pretty it up.

For those of you who did not have a chance to experience the magic of Etherpad, you can still see what all the fuss was about. Google (kindly) made the code for Etherpad open-source and several people developed almost identical clones of the product (my favorite is Typewith.me). I strongly encourage you to find a buddy or two and use this product. Everyone who has played with it, loves it.

Particularly teachers.

Where teachers go, students are sure to follow. Once you have had a taste of the speed, the increased level of intellectual engagement and, frankly, the fun of real-time collaboration, it will be very difficult to go back to the old emailing-the-doc-around-sort-of-thing. Google is more than happy to share its apps with schools and over 7 million students currently use them. Students (at least here at Mercyhurst) are already using Google products extensively and Google has just given the millennials one more reason to go Google and stay Google.

I have a couple of gripes, though. First it seems you have to have a Google account to set up a Google Doc. It is unclear whether or not you have to have a Google account to access the doc (We tried this in my Advanced Analytic Techniques class today and people with Mercyhurst addresses could not access the site while people with Gmail addresses could). This was not the case with Etherpad.

Likewise, you can only have 10 active collaborators at a time (though more can view the doc). While I recognize that teachers and classes aren't the only audience for this product, maybe in Mountain View they only have 10 students to a class but I would suggest that this is not the norm.

More importantly, some of the features demoed in the video below were not obviously available to us when we did get access. If the version we used this afternoon is supposed to look like the version in the video, it didn't -- and there was no obvious way to change it. We also experienced some lag in seeing each others' edits, something I had not experienced before with Etherpad.

Finally, the URL for sharing a doc looks like this: http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AbJaj3wMNjkSZGhrcWs0ZGhfMjNodGRoam1jaA&hl=en

Not the easiest thing to share...

One thing you can count on with Google, though, is that it will continue to improve its flagship products. I may not like what they are currently offering ( I am sticking with Typewith.me for the time being) but I am virtually certain it will get better over time (and, in this case, fairly quickly, I expect).

Whether you like Google or you hate it, don't blink -- it is definitely coming to a document near you soon.



One last thought: My personal hope is that someone will take the open source Etherpad code and make an extension for MediaWiki. Can you imagine the increase in productivity (not to mention usage...) of Intellipedia with an extension that allowed easy real-time collaboration? Yoikes!

PowerPoint Templates? PowerPoint Alternatives? (Link List)

One of my students (Thanks, Jeff!) asked me this morning if I knew of any place to find high quality, free PowerPoint templates.

He had already looked at the MS Office template repository and had done the standard Google search and found the MS templates to be good but over-used by his classmates, the truly free offerings to be of fairly poor quality and the good quality templates to be out of his "poor college student's" price range.

I suggested that he use either Google's advanced search feature to look for .PPT files that were "free to use or share" or use one of the several PowerPoint specific search engines to help him find additional templates or backgrounds he could use.

Another alternative , of course, is simply not to use PowerPoint. There are a number of alternatives including, for example, Impress, which comes bundled with the OpenOffice Suite of software. OpenOffice is free and open source software which mimics (and in some cases improves) on MS Office's functionality. It works with most operating systems (including Windows and Mac).

Ever since I started using Ubuntu (a Linux distribution) on my laptop, I have been impressed with OpenOffice (which comes bundled automatically with Ubuntu). I have not had a chance to use Impress other than as a tool to view .PPT presentations but it has worked flawlessly. I also noticed that there were a number of free (and fairly attractive) template sites dedicated to Impress (an example of one is here).

If you look to online presentation applications, the alternatives seem even more robust. Rotorblog lists a number of options worth exploring. Two of these I have seen in action, Sliderocket and Prezi, and I think they could both be used to make a very interesting presentation.

Of course, the final option is to dramatically change your presentation style. We tend to focus on a "standard professional" style here at Mercyhurst that minimizes the flash and focuses more on substance.

There are a wide variety of other styles out there, however. Presentation Zen has captured some of them including the "Lessig Method", the "Godin Method", The "Kawasaki Method" and the "Takahashi Method". Not all of these methods are appropriate for intelligence briefings but there may well be some elements which can transfer effectively.

Have your own favorite tool, template source or presentation style? Leave a comment!

Following The Month-long Elections In India (Link List)

Beginning tomorrow, India is going to take a month(!) to decide the new composition of its Parliament, the Lok Sabha. 700 million voters will decide on about 500 seats in a series of elections that begin on April 16 and end on May 16, 2009.

We spend an awful lot of time in this country talking/worrying about China but for my money, the real player over the next 20 years is going to be India. Whether you agree with that assessment or not, India is definitely going to be important and watching the Indian political process unfold and estimating the future trajectory of India's policies based on the results makes a good bit of sense.

It is going to be a complex operation, though, and, in the past, these votes were marred with all sorts of bribery and other shenanigans. Fortunately, there are a number of online tools that will allow Indians to more actively take part in (and the rest of the world to watch) these elections.

I would start with the Wikipedia article on the elections. It provides a nice overview with a massive number of links and other data. Particularly interesting is the discussion tab on the Wikipedia page. It gives some insight into a number of the behind-the-scenes issues and arguments with respect to this election. Another good general overview comes from the BBC in their special report on the 2009 elections.

The University of Maryland's (Baltimore County) Ebiquity Research Group has also put together a very nice website that will track news and other data emerging from the elections as they take place. Likewise, the blog Google Maps Mania points to a joint Hindustan Times/Google effort to track the elections as well.

Google Maps Mania also points to my personal favorite: Vote Report India. Using the innovative Ushahidi platform, Vote Report India will allow people all over India to email, text, tweet or otherwise report violations of India's electoral code. The site is already active and already getting hits (See image below for recent reports of violence).

This tool has the potential to provide an unparalled transparency to the electoral process. While it will inevitably have many of the flaws of any "tip" line, it also holds out the promise of some really interesting HUMINT on the elections.

TimeSpace News Exploration Tool (Washington Post via Information Aesthetics)

Information Aesthetics points to a useful tool for tracking and accessing the news available through the Washington Post. Called TimeSpace, it is an interactive Google map with a variety of tools that allow the reader to explore the news at different times of day, from a geographic perspective, with respect to certain keywords or all of the above.

Pump Up Your Google Search Skills (YouTube via Digital Inspiration)

Digital Inspiration featured this excellent short video on getting the most out of your Google searches featuring Matt Cutts, a senior engineer at Google. The video starts out with a number of well-known tips but quickly gets to some stuff that I did not know Google could do. Even if you are an expert, this is a good 5 minute refresher course on getting the most out of Google.