Thread by @conways_law

Question: Why does the United States need a Public Intelligence Service?

Answer: To un-short-circuit our political OODA loop.

This is a call to action.

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Background:

English common law and the US Constitution contemplate a feedback loop, shown here in Fig. 1, that governs political action.

The actual loop has a *characteristic time* that is approximated by the intervals between elections, measured in small numbers of years

2/20

The inherent characteristic time of the actual loop is a property of the system of actors in the loop. The election interval is chosen as a compromise between stability and responsiveness.

3/20

If the election interval is too long the government will not respond adequately to changes in the external world or in society. If it’s too short the government can become unstable or unresponsive.

4/20

The law’s framers assumed that the external world consists of actors similar to this government, and that had similar characteristic times, even if they were hostile.

New uses of the Internet by hostile players have invalidated that assumption.

5/20

References:
These changes have been documented in, e.g.:
@thegreathackdoc: “The Great Hack”
@chrisinsilico: “Mindf*ck”
@jimsciutto: “The Shadow War”
@anelsona: “Shadow Network”
@MalcolmNance: “The Plot to Destroy Democracy” etc.
@TimothyDSnyder: “The Road to Unfreedom”

6/20

United States of America vs. Internet Research Agency: justice.gov/file/1035477/d…

The Washington Post: washingtonpost.com/world/national…

The New York Times: nytimes.com/2019/07/25/us/…

The Guardian/Observer: theguardian.com/news/series/ca…

7/20

The general impression one gets from reading these reports is that of being drugged and raped, and of being paralyzed to fight back against the work of hostile actors such as Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and the Russian Internet Research Agency.

8/20

In several of the books the competition between Russia (and other non-Western players) and the West using social media has been characterized as a new kind of combat.

9/20

There is help:

The military OODA loop concept, widely used to describe combat operations.

In combat the characteristic loop times might be seconds to minutes for air combat, and minutes to hours for ground combat.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop

10/20

From Wikipedia: “The approach explains how agility can overcome raw power in dealing with human opponents. It is especially applicable to cyber security and cyberwarfare.”

The objective is often stated to “get inside the opponent’s OODA loop”.

11/20

Fig. 2 here shows that the democratic feedback loop of Fig. 1 is actually an OODA loop.

In military terms, what the literature cited above tells us is that, in political combat:

Our opponents are consistently getting inside our loop.

12/20

.@chrisinsilico’s book in particular shows the details of how this is done, by hostile actors short-circuiting the OBSERVE and ORIENT stages and directly intervening in individual citizen psychology. This is shown in Fig. 3.

13/20

This direct intervention in citizen behavior via the aggressive use of social psychology and statistical methods in social media explains the intractable irrationality of our body politic, because our traditional social reasoning processes have been bypassed.

14/20

Response:

Here is my proposal. It is not a silver bullet, but over time I believe it could greatly strengthen our society.

>> Incorporate a Public Intelligence Service into our society.

15/20

A Public Intelligence Service has the multi- and cross-disciplinary, and system-aware capabilities of our classified intelligence services, but it is dedicated to building the

*Political Self-Awareness*

of our society.

16/20

We build it by augmenting the ORIENT activity to have all the intercommunicating disciplines a non-hostile intelligence service would have, including education, the arts, the social and physical sciences, and mathematics and system science. This is shown in Fig. 4.

17/20

It is a public institution, trusted by the public, that educates itself about how the public functions politically

*and that makes public what it learns*.

This public educational mandate, and possibly others, assure us that it does not become another Cambridge Analytica.

18/20

By this means it *inoculates* the public against the direct interventions that are targeted to some (via social media), or to all (via propaganda), citizens.

Here is some work that preceded this proposal.
melconway.com/Home/pdf/vacci…

19/20

Call to action:

America needs a trusted nonpartisan institution to step up and support the planning, and then the creation, of this new Public Intelligence Service.

20/20

@threadreaderapp unroll

Wrt to the "what's the difference?" question:
It's the difference between individual health and public health. Public health looks at the whole system: both the elements of the system and their interactions.

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If there's going to be a magic bullet it's going to involve breaking down the stovepipes and forming cross-discipline system-aware teams.

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