Trend: Government and marketers will know exactly where we are when we have a cell phone with us. The trade-offs are mind boggling.
Here's an excerpt from a San Francisco Chronicle interview with Paul Saffa. He mentions a hidden cost of having a new cell phone. As Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, said "We have no privacy, get over it."
Most people don't realize that our Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Communications Commission have all mandated that cell phones need to have position recording built in. They want to be able to pinpoint your location with a global positioning chip in your phone or some other way of identifying your location. This costs the telephone companies money, so the bargain they made with the Feds is that we'll implement it, but then we get the right to use this for commercial purposes. You will get location-based marketing.
Osama bin Laden offered a truce to America last month. This is a religiously mandated action prior to an attack. We should anticipate that new attacks on US targets will occur soon.
The timing, target, and nature of the next strategic attack on the US is shrouded in uncertainty. Its arrival will be a black swan -- an unexpected event that can't be anticipated with any degree of assurance.
The networks used by the terrorists in any future strategic attacks on the US will be small, decentralized clusters....Since the tools and training necessary for infrastructure attacks are crude, the moral burden of these attacks is meager (these attacks don't result in the deaths and dismemberment of random civilians), and the chance of capture is relatively small, the pool of potential participants is quite large.
Trend: Continuous disruption of energy production is difficult to prevent and effectively creates fear and uncertainty among the consumers of energy.
John Robb at the Global Guerrillas blog writes about how sustainable systems disruption targeting energy production is being used by small groups of global guerrillas to undermine the supremacy of powerful nations in a global economy.
The control over the price of oil is in now in the hands of global guerrillas -- the open source, system disrupting, transnational crime fueled, sons of global fragmentation....These actors can now, at will, curtail the supply of oil through low tech attacks on facilities in Iraq, Nigeria, central Asia, and India. The amount of oil effectively under their control exceeds five million barrels a day, more than Saudi Arabia's two million barrels a day of swing production.
Means and Motives
It's important to note that this capacity to disrupt production is substantially different than any terrorist threat we have faced in the past. With terrorism, the potential of damage has always been from single large attack on a major facility or node (extremely difficult to accomplish and relatively easy to recover from). Today's threat is based on sustainable disruption -- ongoing, easy, low-tech attacks that are nearly impossible to defend against (everything from pipeline destruction to employee kidnapping). The goals of these attackers can be divided into three complimentary categories:
Delegitimization of the target state. Attacks meant to "hollow out" the state, through an inability to deliver critical services or a denial of income/investment, to create zones of local control.
Coercion of the core Western states. Either to damage the US or a target state through economic means.
Criminal profit. By increasing the prices of oil and its refined products, the profits generated by criminal enterprise (bunkering of oil, smuggling, etc.) are radically improved.
Trend: Violent dissidents are empowered by government miscalculations.
The Global Guerrillas blog sees the violence in France as an economic and cultural response of non-mainstream groups who have enough power to disrupt the traditional legal and social systems.
As the violence in France reached its tenth consecutive night, the torched car index reached 1,300, and the geography outside the control of the government radically increased, it has become clear that a classic riot over a lack of economic opportunity and justice has morphed into something else entirely.
Most observers will claim that this situation is due merely to racial/ethnic intolerance and bad economic policy. I think it runs deeper. Here's some brainstorming on why this occurred:
A new report, by Co-op America’s Solar Catalyst Group and Clean Edge, Inc., proposes a three-pronged federal program to regain American leadership in the high-growth global solar photovoltaic (PV) industry. If enacted, the plan would create up to 580,000 new American jobs and generate up to 9 percent of the country’s total electricity needs by 2025, the equivalent of serving over 48 million American homes with secure, safe, clean energy.
In the trade these potent, supersonic missiles are referred to as man-portable air defense systems or, MANPADS. On January 11 the trade journal Defense News reported that Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov announced that "an agreement on the exchange of information on [the missiles] could well be in sight." With growing fear that U.S. military aircraft in the Gulf region, not to mention lumbering passenger jets, could be at risk if these weapons were to fall into the wrong hands, the two nations agreed to more restrictive controls. In all likelihood the deal will be inked when Presidents Bush and Putin meet in Bratislava on February 24.
