INTREPs

[The Reaper]

Has anyone got a link to a good daily intel report that they would not mind posting in here? The actual "Early Bird" is too long and tedious for posting here.

We could put up the links, if there are several and they are too large.

Great Idea SFG!

[The Reaper]

Originally posted by Doc
Great Idea SFG!

Even a blind hog finds an acorn every now and then.

This is part of my concept that we should make this site of value to SF guys in Team Rooms and while deployed.

What would you like to be able to find, or link to from a single website?

Hey, artist formerly known as 18C3V, what would you, or anyone else recently deployed, like to see or do on a website while out of the net? Except for the porn, of course.

[Jimbo]

Pretty much the most comprehensive, up-to-date news source (that's free) is Yahoo Full Coverage . Broken down by region and then specific country as well as into functional areas.

[NousDefionsDoc]

I get ERRI, Stratfor and OSAC daily news digests by email

[18C4V]

Originally posted by SFG
Even a blind hog finds an acorn every now and then.

This is part of my concept that we should make this site of value to SF guys in Team Rooms and while deployed.

What would you like to be able to find, or link to from a single website?

Hey, artist formerly known as 18C3V, what would you, or anyone else recently deployed, like to see or do on a website while out of the net? Except for the porn, of course.

Sir,
Mostly it has to do with how much bandwith is alllowed at the FOB for ea team. With 9 guys it was hard to surf just alone check emails with one NIPIR. However, the SIPIR (sp?) was very imformative. But then again, we weren't at the FOB all the time either.

When I did surf, I mostly checked emails, AKO and news from major newspapers.

[Psywar1-0]

I have a couple of google searches set up that deliver to my email inbox a search of various keywords. IE FARC, Colombia, The PMC I work for ect. With that Im able to print out that which is intersting and distribute to all the guys. When Im statside I really like the aol daily news that can be set up to be country specific.

Where are the links with the info!

[NousDefionsDoc]

I can provide a weekly LATAM report in word. 3 pages. We do them.

[P36]

TR, I've been subscribed to these folks for the past 6 years. (They recently merged with G2i). I used to push area specific information to 1/1 when I worked in Oki from this list. It is a listserver, not a website though. Here is an article on Access Intel. If anyone is interested, let me know and I'll forward the contact info:

Washington Desk

Councils of War

by James Fallows
There is no mistaking the excitement in Washington when world news originates here. Through the second Clinton Administration it was easy to think that a drive down Highway 101 in the San Francisco Bay area brought one closer to the real centers of power— Oracle, Intel, Cisco—than a drive along Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House to the Capitol. In Silicon Valley and Seattle the technology industry's leaders talked about the "withering away of the state," and in Washington the arrival of technology-driven prosperity was the central fact of political life.

However distant that seems now, the corrective reaction is, perhaps inevitably, going too far. I may be biased from having spent several years in Seattle and San Francisco before returning last summer to Washington. But now that the state is back, I am struck by the assumption here that if there is truly significant technology at the moment, it is the kind the military has used in Afghanistan. During the weeks when Taliban forces were collapsing, I did see three applications of technology with important economic, political, and even terrorism-related implications. Each was plain old civilian technology.

In one case the technology is e-mail, which has made possible the "open-source intelligence" movement. For decades diplomats and soldiers have bitterly joked that most important international secrets are likely to show up in the newspaper before they make their way through classified channels. Obviously, governments can still keep secrets. An illustration: three months after the terrorist attacks the Federal Aviation Administration was still enforcing strict "no-fly zones"—ones forbidden to private noncommercial aircraft—over three cities. Two were the terrorists' targets: Washington, the political capital, and New York, the financial capital. The third was ... Boston. Not San Francisco, capital of the technology industry; not Los Angeles, capital of America's image-making industry; not Chicago, capital of exposed skyscrapers. I asked Steven Brown, the FAA official in charge of airspace, why Boston? Because the planes that hit New York took off there? He said, essentially, If you knew what we know, you'd understand. What he actually said was "The vulnerabilities in Boston, those known to the public and others, are unique." Until we do know what he knows, there's no choice but to take it on faith. Maybe this is where Dick Cheney has been.

But the strictures secrecy requires can make it hard for armies or security units to get full, timely information in emergencies. One solution is to circulate non-secret information. In the mid-1980s the retired Air Force colonel John Boyd attracted adherents, especially in the Marine Corps, with his view that "fast feedback" loops were the key to military success. That is, the army that could observe and react to its opponents' movements the fastest would be the most likely to prevail. A young Marine captain named G. I. Wilson drew from Boyd's work the idea that the military should look for information as widely as possible. "It takes both unclassified open source resources and classified intelligence to win in today's information age," Wilson wrote in the Marine Corps Gazette in 1995, with Major Frank Bunkers.

In practice "open-source resources" means what the best foreign correspondents and embassy political officers have always tried to keep abreast of, but on a bigger scale: reports in local papers, sudden changes in what's available in stores, snippets from the radio. Over the past decade Wilson and his colleagues have set up several electronic networks. The largest, called Access Intelligence (AI), connects hundreds of people in the defense, intelligence, law-enforcement, commercial, and academic worlds. It works like a normal list server or electronic mailing list: one person posts a message and everyone else receives it as e-mail moments later. The AI network often produces a hundred or more messages a day; recipients quickly scan the titles for subjects they are interested in. Although many AI members have security clearance, the material posted is strictly "open source"—publicly available news reports or personal observations. That way the question of violating security rules won't come up.

AI has proved a valuable supplement to the slower, more controlled channels of official communication—much as cell phones did for many civilians on September 11. For instance, Rick Forno, a computer expert who helps to operate the AI list, was in a building overlooking the Pentagon; he posted real-time reports about areas of damage and unfolding events before some of them appeared on CNN. Wilson, who is now a colonel based at Camp Pendleton, has relayed messages to ships' crews during (pre-Afghanistan) combat operations. "I can tell them what's being reported here, and they compare it to what they are seeing," he told me recently.

Open-source intelligence "frequently appears less valuable than classified information because it does not carry the classification mystique," Wilson wrote in 1995. "Because it appears less valuable, it is shared more freely and used more. The irony is by sharing it more the information's value and usefulness increases." Within the Pentagon, Wilson told me, reports that were posted on AI have been stamped with classified markings and used in briefings. An old trick of John Boyd's, Wilson said, was to get data into circulation by leaving it in "the head."

Still, the AI network doesn't get respect. "It's not popular with the intelligence community, because it doesn't cost anything," Wilson told me. (Forno and Bill Feinbloom, a former Green Beret, run it as volunteers, and it is free to all users.) "But you've got about three hundred people acting as individual sensors, from a whole variety of backgrounds. I may say something that seems commonsensical to a Marine, but someone who's a physicist will come back and say no, it can't have worked that way."

[P36]

http://www.intellnet.org/

Try this: http://www.vic-info.org/
It's run out of Pacom.

I'm adding the following to avoid creating a whole new thread for search resources:

Internet-based Phone Lookup Resources & Geography, Routing, and Maps


Extract(s) from Untangling the Web: An Introduction to Internet Research by Robyn Winder, with some links that might prove useful.

Telephone Lookups

Infobel http://www.infobel.com/World/default.asp

Infospace International Directories http://www.infospace.com/intl/int.html

PeopleSearch.net http://peoplesearch.net/

Finding International Telephone & FAX Directories:

AnyWho International http://www.anywho.com/international.html

AOL International Directories http://www.aol.com/netfind/international.html

EscapeArtist Telephone Search Engine http://www.escapeartist.com/global/telephone.htm

Global Yellow Pages http://www.globalyp.com/world.htm

Infobel's International Directories http://www.infobel.com/World/default.asp

Infospace International Directories http://www.infospace.com/intl/int.html

International White & Yellow Pages http://www.wayp.com/

Nedsite http://www.nedsite.nl/search/people.htm#telephone

Peoplesearch.net http://www.peoplesearch.net/

Phonenumbers.net http://www.phonenumbers.net/

SBN International Yellow Pages http://www.sbn.com/international/international.asp WhoWhere http://www.whowhere.lycos.com/wwphone/world.html

Telephone Directories on the Web http://www.infobel.com/teldir/ Specialty Telephone Lookups: ACR's International Calling Codes by country http://www.the-acr.com/codes/cntrycd.htm

ACR's International Calling Codes listed numerically http://www.the-acr.com/codes/cntryno.htm

Americom's International Decoder http://decoder.americom.com/ International Dialing Codes http://kropla.com/dialcode.htm International City Codes http://www.numberingplans.com/kropla/

Internet Geography, Routing, and Maps

About's Maps http://geography.about.com/science/geography/msub1.htm

Mapnet http://www.caida.org/tools/visualization/mapnet/

MapQuest http://www.mapquest.com/

Maporama http://www.maporama.com/share/

Odden's The Fascinating World of Maps and Map-Making http://oddens.geog.uu.nl/index.html

Perry-Castaneda Library Map Collection at the University of Texas Austin http://www.lib.utexas.edu/Libs/PCL/M...map_sites.html

Virtual Reference Sites http://www.dreamscape.com/frankvad/reference.maps.html

[CPTAUSRET]

P36:

Good information:

Terry

[Airbornelawyer]

I used to write a daily open-source INTSUM, modeled after the one I used to prepare for the CG of Fort Benning, but it got too time-consuming.

Just on a cursory glance, that http://www.intellnet.org/ site doesn't seem to be very up-to-date.

Besides OSAC (http://www.ds-osac.org/news.cfm) and ERRI (http://www.emergency.com/ennday.htm) news digests, which NDD cited, other sites with daily international security news digests (many with just the headline and a hyperlink to an article) include:

• GlobalSecurity.org: http://www.globalsecurity.org/index.html
• The Canadian Forces College Spotlight on Military News: http://www.cfc.forces.gc.ca/spotnews_e.html
• Voice of America: http://www.voanews.com/index.cfm
• US Information Agency - Political Security News: http://usinfo.state.gov/topical/pol/#pslatest
• National Security Blog: http://www.nationalsecurityblog.com/import/bundles
• The Command Post: http://www.command-post.org/

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's various regional newslines are good daily summaries of events in those particular regions:

• Russia
• Transcaucasia And Central Asia
• Central And Eastern Europe
• Southeastern Europe
• Southwestern Asia And The Middle East

A couple of region-specific sources:

• The Afghanistan Press Agency gives links to the latest news from that country: http://www.afgha.com/
• The Korean CIA, the National Intelligence Service, has a weekly digest on North Korea: http://www.nis.go.kr/eng/north/index.html
• For news from a Communist slant, there's the PLA Daily: http://english.pladaily.com.cn/

BTW, for those with access to non-open source INTSUMS, as I recall, US Transportation Command always had one of the best on Intellink, since they had to keep an eye on potential developments anywhere they might have to move stuff, and not just in particular AORs like the regional CINCs.

Regards,
Dave

[lrd]

In addition to some of the links AL listed, I like to browse through the links listed at defensetech .

[lrd]

A free news-gathering resource that was recommended to me: www.individual.com

You set your topics and priorities. It will send you email reports once or twice daily, or you can choose to check your page on the website.