Regarding the need for radical transparency:

Instead of providing more information, State sticks to its 19th Century role of speaking privately and taking the corporate defense that less information is better (which is extendable to destroying data as soon the retention schedule permits it, or rather, when legally permissible to do so, which I’m sure will surface soon). State minimizes information so it can’t be held accountable — which is a false hope. Even if it shuts its eyes really, really hard, others saw the event and a vastly greater audience heard unchallenged reports of the event. Closing its eyes and pretending the world of information isn’t an adequate defense. For the criticisms of Blackwater, they knew the value of video recording.

Ubiquitous computing and widely available broadband access changed the game. Minimizing information to avoid accountability ceased to be a effective strategy when large organizations lost their ability to control the story.

If you can’t control the story (the old way of managing information and image), then maybe you ought to think about pre-empting the story in the first place. Radically opening the flow of information offers one way to do this.

Caught Mary Habeck’s talk on “Understanding Global Jihadism” last night at JHU/APL’s Rethinking seminar series.

Her broad conclusions fit with those that have been summarized by George Packer [1] [2] [3]. These include the tiny size of the militant jihadist community within the larger Muslim community (0.04% was the estimate Dr. Habeck quoted).

Most of Dr. Habeck’s talk focused on discussing four Islamic concepts and explaining how the mainstream Islam interprets them and how militant global jihadists interpret them. These four terms were: tawhid, jihad, Caliphate or the more general concept of an Islamic state, and da’wa. These differences lead to the conclusion that this is primarily a struggle over authenticity within Islam. It has both ideological components (as members attempt to convert others to their vision), political components (as militant global jihadists attempt to create their version of an Islamic state) and military components (as they kill those they judge to be false Muslims).

Dr. Habeck concluded by exploring how this struggle within Islam turns into war on the West in general and the United States in particular. In this exploration, she focused on the role of three of the major thinkers who have significantly influenced the modern global jihadi movement: Muhommad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb.

A great nugget I collected was to read The Management of Savagery, which is a militant jihadist strategy for realizing their goals.