This new uncertainty around international travel would mean we would be unlikely to have any international guests present at the conference thereby detracting from the original intent of the event. Additionally, there is a significant risk of not being able to meet the requirements for the number of “in person” delegates which has the potential to pose a significant financial risk to the AIPIO.
Whilst this is very disappointing, given the level of interest from partners and sponsors and potential speakers, it is a sensible decision.
What it does enable the AIPIO to do is bring forward the Adelaide conference to 2021 and allow us to fully celebrate our 30th anniversary!
- AIPIO Intelligence 2021 will be held as a hybrid event from the Hilton Hotel, Adelaide, from Wednesday 13 October – Friday 15 October, 2021
- Intelligence International 2022 will be held as a hybrid event from the Sofitel, Melbourne, from Sunday 23-Wednesday 26 October, 2022
These changes have also meant that a revised theme for 2021 is necessary, given the Boards desire to preserve “Collaborating in a Complex and Uncertain World” for II2022.
The 2021 Theme will be: The Evolving Intelligence Landscape
Streams: Business/Competitive Intelligence | Criminal Intelligence | Regulation Intelligence | Security Intelligence
Implications across all themes include, but are not limited to: Finance | Risk | Ethics | Capability
We will also be Exploring, in the context of Intelligence: Where have we come from | Where are we now | Where do we need to go
The Theme and underpinning streams for 2021 will be more fully described and we will update the descriptors as soon as possible through the AIPIO Website and other means.
By Sharyl Attkisson
New York Times bestselling author Sharyl Attkisson takes on the media’s misreporting on Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, Joe Biden, Silicon Valley censorship, and more.
When the facts don’t fit their Narrative, the media abandons the facts, not the Narrative.
Virtually every piece of information you get through the media has been massaged, shaped, curated, and manipulated before it reaches you. Some of it is censored entirely.
The news can no longer be counted on to reflect all the facts. Instead of telling us what happened yesterday, they tell us what’s new in the prepackaged soap opera they’ve been calling the news.
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by Nicholas A. Christakis
Apollo’s Arrow offers a riveting account of the impact of the coronavirus pandemic as it swept through American society in 2020, and of how the recovery will unfold in the coming years.
Drawing on momentous (yet dimly remembered) historical epidemics, contemporary analyses, and cutting-edge research from a range of scientific disciplines, bestselling author, physician, sociologist, and public health expert Nicholas A. Christakis explores what it means to live in a time of plague — an experience that is paradoxically uncommon to the vast majority of humans who are alive, yet deeply fundamental to our species.
Learn moreUniversities are bristling against the prospect of more regulation to combat foreign interference, as Australia’s domestic spy agency warns the threat cannot be left unchecked.
ASIO has told the parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security’s inquiry on foreign interference in the university sector it has learnt of researchers and their families who have been threatened or coerced by actors seeking to provide their sensitive research to a foreign state.
The agency said it was also aware that some universities have been threatened with funding cuts should critical research continue, and of academics self-censoring to avoid being punished.
Read moreAn unexpected catch has revealed Beijing’s sneaky underwater spying activities right on Australia’s doorstep – a scary new escalation in tensions.
The Christmas catch has revealed Beijing is actively surveying critical shipping choke-points to Australia’s north. And that could have dire implications if our trade-spat worsens.
Three undersea spy drones have been caught in Indonesian waters. They appear to be a Chinese design, and they were in shipping lanes crucial for Australia’s security.
They look like simple tubes with wings. But they’re packed full of sensors and a long-range transmitter to send their discoveries back to headquarters.
Read moreFake news about the U.S. coronavirus vaccine—promoted by Russian-linked trolls—is spreading quickly across Africa and making people wary of the lifesaving shot.
On Dec. 5, Joël Bokadi received a WhatsApp message from a Nigerian phone number. It insisted that coronavirus vaccines produced by American companies can hurt people’s immune systems and are less effective than vaccines produced in Russia.
As soon as he saw the message, Bokadi began to forward it to dozens of his contacts on the messaging app.
Within two days, Bokadi, who lives near Lwemba town in Democratic Republic of Congo’s northeastern Ituri province, had forwarded the message to about 40 people across the restive district, where ethnic militia attacks have killed hundreds of civilians since March and displaced more than 200,000 people since the beginning of the year.
The suspicious message came with a link to a website purporting to provide “facts” on how Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the United States National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a leading voice on the coronavirus, “buried research by a popular American female scientist that showed how vaccines can damage people’s immune systems,” Bokadi told The Daily Beast.
“I believe the vaccines produced in America are dangerous and are aimed at reducing the world’s population.”
Read moreThe government of Estonia requested support from the European Commission under Regulation (EU) 2017/825 to analyse new and emerging technological developments and identify their potential application in cybercrime.
In May 2019, RAND Europe was commissioned by the European Commission Structural Reform Support Service to conduct a study (ref: SRSS/C2018/092) aimed at:
- Conducting an analysis of future technologies and how these could be used to commit or prevent cybercrimes.
- Proposing possible ways to prevent future technologies from being exploited for criminal purposes.
Key Findings
- The next decade will likely see an increase in the speed and coverage of connectivity which will contribute to an overall increase in the volume and speed at which different types of cybercrime are conducted.
- The proliferation of Information Technology-enabled devices, systems, and services will result in an increase in the attack surface and vulnerabilities that could be leveraged by malicious actors.
- Developments in the fields of computing and data storage technologies, paired with a proliferation of devices, are expected to result in an increased ability to record, generate, store, access and manipulate data.
- Advances in computing power, accompanied by developments in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning, are expected to contribute to a growing ability to process and analyse data, allowing to infer from these new insights and results which are beyond the reach of current analytical capabilities.
- Technological advances are expected to result in increasing complexity as regards the tracking and attribution of criminal and malicious activities.
- The consolidation of the internet economy around a limited number of key players, and an increasing societal reliance on their products and services, may raise challenges such as contributing to the widespread embedding of vulnerabilities with the potential to yield large-scale systemic effects when leveraged.
- While this study focuses on the impact that technology may have on cybercrime, a wide variety of other non-technical drivers and factors are also expected to influence this phenomenon over the coming decade.
Evidence that climate change poses critical security risks to the U.S. homeland, national security, and global stability has been mounting in recent years.
To take early action to manage or reduce extreme weather and climate-related disruptions, high-level and timely quantitative and qualitative assessments and predictive information are needed.
Working with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Wilson Center developed a framework to improve predictive capabilities for security risks posed by a changing climate.
To operationalize the framework, this brief provides recommendations on how to align and sustain engagement across the U.S. government and its partners for increased and better coordination among decision-makers, and practitioners.
Read the reportThere is a magic in information graphics. Maps float you above the land for a bird’s eye view. Timelines arrange memories on the page for all to see. Diagrams reveal the parts inside without requiring disassembly, or incision.
Data visualization leapt from its Enlightenment origins and into the minds of the general public in the 1760s. It cast more powerful spells throughout the following century. By 1900, modern science, technology, and social movements had all benefited from this new quantitative art.
Its inventions include the timeline, bar chart, and thematic map. Together, these innovations changed how we understand the world and our place within it. Data visualization helped a new imagination emerge, wired to navigate a reality much bigger than any single person’s lived experience.
The sections in this exhibition examine information graphics that show space, time, nature, and society. Many are beautiful. Each is a unique way of seeing still worth our attention. —RJ Andrews, guest curator
See more2021 is only a few weeks old but you’ve probably spent a little time pondering your goals and resolutions for the year ahead. In this spirit, we outline below three plans that we believe every analyst should prepare at the start of every year to support their professional development.
- The Reading Plan
- The Learning Plan
- The Influence Plan
Read more about the plans
In the context of the digitization of delinquent activities, perpetrated via the internet, the question of the most appropriate means of crime prevention and crime repression is once again being raised.
Studies performed on police investigations have highlighted the over-determining nature of circumstantial factors in crime as a condition for their elucidation for more than fifty years.
The emergence of mass delinquency, such as cybercrime, has thus strongly altered the role of investigation as a useful mode of knowledge production.
This obsolescence has appeared gradually and can be summarized in four stages, which generates a suspicion about the social relevance of the investigation.
It seems that the holistic approach of criminal intelligence is more adapted to the fight against new forms of crime. The investigation becomes a precision instrument assigned to functions that become more specific.
This article considers this paradigm shift by the approaches to knowledge management of crime control. Cybercrime is then emblematic of this shift. This study is based on the criminological review and the delinquency analysis led by the central criminal intelligence service of the national gendarmerie.
Read the full articleI believe that we, as intelligence analysts, are all familiar with the experience that we “feel” something is wrong. That our inner radar turns to a specific subject, piece of information, or behaviour.
This phenomenon is also sometimes called the “asshole alarm.” In general, we are not fully aware of this.
Let’s illustrate with a real-life example:
One day a colleague of mine asked me to shine my light on a domain name, he said: “What’s your idea? The first hunch is often the right one”.
I took a look at the domain name and immediately I got an uncanny feeling, a nagging pain in my gut at the level of my solar plexus. Almost a kind of agitated, ‘fight or flight’ mode.
I felt my muscles tightening and my nerves and senses were on edge. Alarm bells went off.
I remember finding this remarkable, why did my system react so quickly and yet so intense?
Continue readingA model that is based on the knowledge of experienced investigators in the analysis of serial crime is suggested to bridge a gap between technology and methodology.
Its purpose is to provide a solid methodology for the analysis of serial crimes that supports decision making in the deployment of resources, either by guiding proactive policing operations or helping the investigative process.
Formalisation has helped to derive a computerised system that efficiently supports the reasoning processes in the analysis of serial crime. This novel approach fully integrates forensic science data.
Read the full articleNothing makes me happier than a conversation with whip smart people on the past, present or future of intelligence: enter Heather Williams, a senior policy researcher at RAND, and Zachery Tyson Brown, a strategic futurist and founder of Consilient Strategies.
With decades of experience at multiple agencies, multiple deployments overseas, advanced degrees from the National Intelligence University and a network of contacts that would do any Rolodex proud, they have oodles to offer.
We talk the information revolution, generational change, institutional reform, a variety of -ologies and of course the pandemic and the incoming presidential administration. Basically, just the entire future of intelligence.
Listen nowThe British novelist didn’t just write about the world of intelligence. He changed it forever.
David Cornwell, who wrote for six decades under his famous penname, John le Carré, and who died Dec. 12 at the age of 89, came from a long tradition of British writers who were also spies. Unlike others in that tradition, however, his books transcend their spy-novel genre.
Like espionage itself, they are about human frailty—moral ambiguity, intrigue, nuance, doubt, and cowardice. And for the same reason, le Carré’s fiction had the rare distinction of tangibly influencing his subject—the intelligence world.
Although he worked for British intelligence for only a few years, in low-level positions—le Carré was the only novelist to have served in both MI5 (Britain’s domestic-focused Security Service) and MI6 (foreign intelligence)—his experiences shaped his entire subsequent writing career.
He wrote his first novel, Call for the Dead (1961), a minor masterpiece, while commuting by train to MI5’s London headquarters—making it surely the best novel ever written on a train—though he had moved to MI6 by the time it was published.
At the time, both services were heavily shrouded in secrecy, far more so than today. Britain’s government then did not even publicly avow the existence of its intelligence services. Forbidden from even mentioning either service, le Carré instead amalgamated them into a single fictional institution: the Circus.
Read onGeorge Blake, born George Behar, escaped Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1966 and fled to the Soviet Union where he lived until his death.
Blake was sentenced to a record 42-year jail sentence in London in 1961 for spilling MI6 secrets to the Soviet Union, sending dozens of Western agents to their deaths.
“The bitter news has come – the legendary George Blake is gone,” said Sergey Ivanov, spokesman for the SVR foreign intelligence agency, formerly the KGB. “He died of old age, his heart stopped.”
Blake, born in Rotterdam, was a British spy who worked as a double agent for the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
He became a Communist and decided to work for the KGB while a prisoner during the Korean War.
Blake’s betrayal was discovered in 1961 and he was arrested when he arrived in London after being summoned from Lebanon.
He gave his MI6 interrogators a full confession and was sentenced to 42 years imprisonment.
Five years into his sentence, in 1966, Blake escaped with the help of three men he had met behind bars.
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