The GEO Blog

On the 17th of November, the Global Challenges Forum (GCF) was officially established in Geneva Switzerland. Hosted by the Naval Postgraduate School, the Talal Abu-Ghazaleh Graduate School of Business, and the University of Geneva, the forum comprises think tanks, research centers, and academic institutions. Its goal is to address the complex problems of the 21st century through partnership oriented solutions. The 2010 GCF gathered over 80 attendees from government, military academic, and private institutions at the U.S. Mission in Geneava, Switzerland for 2 days of spirited discussion focused on shaping the future of the forum. Highlights of the conference included an opening address from U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Betty King, keynote speeches from Dr. Bates Gill (Director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) and Ambassador HE Yafei (Permanent Mission of the People's Republic of China to the UN Office at Geneva and other International Organizations in Switzerland), as well as numerous presentations and discussion sessions. While attending the conference in support of the Naval Postgraduate School, I was able to spend a considerable amount of time in each of the sessions and I think the biggest take-away for all in attendance was a more defined picture of the sorts of challenges the GCF will address. While the intent of the agenda was to have a series of targeted discussions, laying out first the problem space and then the structure of the forum, the direction of dialogue ended up being considerably more free-form.

Building on the Civil Society 2.0 Initiative first introduced by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the recent Tech@State Civil Society 2.0

In a recent EUCOM blog post, Admiral James Stavridis discusses the challenges presented by what he calls The Cyber Sea - the technological and social space that comprises the web.  On the whole, the observations made in the posting, and expounded on in the linked address to The Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association, are on point.  Stavridis offers an assessment of the cultural changes enabled by technological advancement, the security challenges that have arisen as a result, and the sorts of responses these challenges necessitate.  That said, there are some points that bear additional discussion, most notably his tendency to focus on technology itself as the solution to such problems.

 

The inaugural U.S. European Command (USEUCOM) Intelligence Summit and Technology Expo, from 15 to 17 February, gathered over 430 attendees and 82 vendors for two days of discussions.  While the stated focus of the summit was to bring together both U.S. and European government, law enforcement, academic, and industry representatives; the majority of attendees represented U.S. agencies and companies.  Despite this majority, several interesting presentations from NATO and Interpol punctuated the program.

Much of the language of the Web has found its way into the intelligence community.  Were I to pick a few key terms that defined the talks given; metadata, collaboration, and cross-domain would be my first choices.  These terms, along with others, were used in almost every presentation and panel given.  That frequency, however, did not seem to correlate to a nuanced understanding - suggesting that while the language of the Web has become ingrained, the underlying concepts require considerably more attention.