Philip Agee video interview

3 part interview with Philip Agee:

Part 1



Part 2



Part 3

Social Networking Open Source Espionage

This file, marked "confidential", describes development of an EU-funded intelligence gathering system ("INDECT work package 4") designed to comb webblogs, chat sites, newsreports, and social-networking sites to inorder to build up automatic dossiers on individuals, organizations and their relationships.

"The aim of work package 4 (WP4) is the development of key technologies that facilitate the building of an intelligence gathering system by combining and extending the current-state-ofthe- art methods in Natural Language Processing (NLP). One of the goals of WP4 is to propose NLP and machine learning methods that learn relationships between people and organizations through websites and social networks. Key requirements for the development of such methods are: (1) the identification of entities, their relationships and the events in which they participate, and (2) the labelling of the entities, relationships and events in a corpus that will be used as a means both for developing the methods."

FROM WikiLeaks

Publishing industry to implode

"Publishers, stop spending your millions on this tripe," she implored the book trade's movers and shakers at The Specsavers Crime Thriller Awards, at the Grosvenor House Hotel, in Mayfair, where she was inducted into the Hall of Fame.

"The publishing industry is going to implode. They can't pay the millions to these celebrities. If we don't cut through the dross, this trite tripe… these reality TV writers who are here for their 15 minutes of fame."

That's why they're pushing to eliminate advances and cut royalties for writers like you and I.

Never be afraid to attack wrong

"Never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty."

Joseph Pulitzer, 1907

Spies that failed

Here's a list of 15 real-life spies:

"A career in espionage is easily one of the most coveted of all childhood fantasies, due largely to the unending stream of spy movies, comics, books, and real-life stories we’re inundated with growing up. While James Bond is at the top of everyone’s list, in reality things can be a bit different; spies come in all shapes and sizes, and range from honorable to just plain criminal. Some are remembered for their daring and others for their half-witted desperation and lust for money, but one thing rides certain throughout the disparate stories they tell: It takes guts to be a spy. While the greatest spies will, by virtue of their success, never be known to us, these are the 15 most notable spies in our recent history. Regardless of their final motives or original intent, they’ve all earned their own version of immortality by contributing to our unending fascination with the shadowy world they’ve walked."

Read on

"I need your help in the killing of the children"

Mr Wogersien found details of a confession by SS doctor Helmut Kunz at a 1959 trial not covered by the press. After the trial he walked free.

Kunz told the court: "Magda Goebbels said, 'I need your help in the killing of the children.' I refused her. But she insisted and afterwards declared it was no longer a request for help, 'but a direct order from Hitler'."

He said he tried to escape the bunker, "but Magda found me and said if I didn't return, 'you will be a dead man'." He was forced to go with her.

He recalled: "The children were all in one room, but they were not asleep. 'Have no fear,' said Magda. 'The doctor is going to give you an injection all children and soldiers get.'

"She left the room. I injected them with morphine. Magda Goebbels went into the room, the cyanide capsules in her hand. She stepped out, crying, saying; 'Doctor, I can't do it.

READ MORE

Of authors, readers, and publishers

While I respect the need for publishers to vet titles for commercial potential, there’s something inherently broken about a system that rejects titles through this narrow lens.  What about brilliant long tail works with potential audiences of only 100 or 500?  The publishing industry can’t support these.  Publishers also cannot accurately predict which titles will become huge hits, and which will flop, so they routinely overlook great works.

For the last couple centuries, publishers have controlled the means of book production and distribution.  This is too much power concentrated in the hands of too few people whose business interests don’t always align with the interests of authors and readers.

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The awful truth

“Here’s the awful truth: even if every person, every automobile, and every factory suddenly emitted zero emissions, the Earth would still be headed head first and full speed towards total disaster for one major reason.  The military [...] produces enough greenhouse gases, by itself, to place the entire globe, with all of it’s inhabitants large and small, in the most imminent danger of extinction.”

Green Zone, by Barry Sanders