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Tomorrow the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) will publish its annual report/ threat assessment. It will make for uncomfortable reading at the Home Office and No.10. The Agency is not living up to the great expectations officials placed upon it in 2006. In the febrile political atmosphere of Westminster you can be sure the Conservative [...]

It may be too soon to determine what has trigged the current violence in Beirut. Some analysts have suggested Hezbollah took advantage of a labour strike on Wednesday by using it as a political opportunity and the strike quickly escalated into a flashpoint over Lebanon’s 17-month-old political crisis.
What is more clear is that the Lebanese [...]

One of the trends we’ve seen in investment banking over the last two or three years is what PWC calls the ‘global war for talent’. Local banks in rich emerging market countries have more money to spend than their troubled rivals on Wall Street, so they’re hiring the top talent from western banks to join [...]

For English policy wonks walking along Massachusetts Avenue in Washington DC, the experience is invariably bittersweet.  On one hand, they are (they must admit) slightly awed by the concentration of great engines of think tankery within a stone’s throw of where they stand: Brookings, the Carnegie Endowment, SAIS, CFR and plenty more besides.
But then their [...]

Next week the Hudson Institute is holding a seminar on the future of the US defence industry. Before you stifle a yawn take a look at one of the scenarios they will be considering:
‘…hypothetical Chinese aggression towards Taiwan provokes a Sino-U.S. military confrontation. Initially, the technologically superior and network-centric American military is quickly devastated [...]

Today, I gave the closing address at the RUSI conference, Protecting the Critical Infrastructure, in a session introduced by RUSI’s head of risk and resilience, Anthony McGee. From the introduction to the conference by RUSI’s head, Professor Michael Clarke:
Protecting the Critical National Infrastructure and ensuring the continuation of political, social and economic activity is vital [...]

In our Progressive Governance paper, Alex and I argued that ad hoc ‘shared platforms’ are a vital part of the management of a globalised world, particularly at times of rapid change. In Newsweek, David Rothkopf provides a glimpse of how these platforms have swung into action during the current financial meltdown:
To get a sense of [...]

Over at NetworkWeaving, there’s a bit of compare and contrast going on, between this sort of campaigning:

…and this sort:

Worth a read.

I recently interviewed Sergei Markov, who is a key spin-doctor to the Kremlin. He told me that the West had completely underestimated the extent to which things will change under Russia’s new president, Dmitry Medvedev.
He said: “Most western observers expect no change because Medvedev is the new president. On the contrary, Putin chose Medvedev precisely [...]

Google is working with US intelligence agencies in a bid to connect the dots.
Many of the contracts are for search appliances - servers for storing and searching internal documents. Agencies can use the devices to create their own mini-Googles on intranets made up entirely of government data. Additionally, Google has had success licensing a souped-up [...]

‘Any attempt to map the internet is bound to fall frustratingly short of its true complexity, or to be so complex as to be illegible’. True - but by using the Tokyo subway map as a template the internet can be better understood.

From Edge, via Mapping Strategy:
It is customary to think about fashions in things like clothes or music as spreading in a social network. But it turns out that all kinds of things, many of them quite unexpected, can flow through social networks, and this process obeys certain rules we are seeking to discover. We’ve been [...]

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As Ethan Zuckerman observes, this kind of remix culture approach to campaigning has been called “user-generated swiftboating“…

Back in September 2002, I wrote a cover story for Euromoney called ‘The End of Unfettered Capitalism’. I interviewed various wise sages of finance (Joseph Stiglitz, George Soros, er…Ann Pettifor) who opined to me of the end of neo-liberalism and the need for a new economic model.
Back then, in the aftermath of Enron [...]

The Global Strategy Institute at CSIS has published a map of trends and events up to 2012. For those who travel on the London underground the map may look rather familiar.

If you’ve never been cornered by a 911 truther then you should definitely read Paul Constant’s excellent profile of the movement for the Utne Reader. Key quote:
The very fact that they’ve branded themselves the “Truth” movement shows a canny grasp of public relations on a level with the Bush administration’s lusty embrace of the word [...]

And so to Network Weaving, a blog by and for people who use network mapping tools.  Network mapping folk like nothing better than to, y’know, network, and so it was clearly with a swing in his step that blogger Valdis Krebs went off to the 28th annual conference of the International Network for Social Network [...]

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Here’s an excellent video with which to while away the next nine minutes and thirteen seconds.  The speaker is Clay Shirky, an American writer on the social effects of internet technologies.  He says:
What is happening in our generation is that we have a set [...]

Useful map for presentations.

As the unshakeable solidity of the world’s financial markets turns out to be a castle in the sky, we all wish someone had warned us about collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and the dangers of securitization, before it was too late.
But wait…I did! When I was a young cub reporter covering the securitization market back in [...]

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