oSkope Visual Search

In my spare time, I’ve been working with a bunch of very inspiring/inspired individuals from Zurich and Berlin on a visual search tool, which lets you search and manage your favourite items from Amazon, Flickr, Fotolia, Ebay, Yahoo, Image Search, and You Tube (for now). My part in this is actually very small – I only [...]

Joint LFAR: Energy Security in the Former Soviet Union

Read joint LFAR here: energy-security-fsu.pdf
Authors: Aimee Blanchard, Shelly Downes, Yana Feldman, Linda Popova
With an enormous sigh of relief and satisfaction, I’m happy to announce that I’ve just finished my second intel course. The course focused on written communication in intelligence and explored various reporting formats: INTSUMs (intelligence summaries), SFARs (short form analytical reports), writing under [...]

Intelligence and/or Ethics

The Council of Foreign Relations (CFR)’s The World This Week briefings feature several recent publications on the U.S. domestic intelligence and ethics debates.
In Domestic Spy War Intensifies, the author examines proposed amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that have sparked up a heated controversy in the security vs. civil liberty dispute.
NSA Eavesdropping is a backgrounder [...]

LFAR: Energy Security and the “New Great Game” in Central Asia: the Case of Kyrgyzstan

Executive Summary: The interest of the great powers and emerging competitors such as China and India in the resource rich Central Asian states are very likely to continue and increase over the next 12 months. Kyrgyzstan is likely to benefit from increased interest in its hydroelectric sector, attracting foreign direct investment from Russia, China, [...]

Crisis Alerts: Chad, Kenya, Lebanon, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Yemen, Zimbabwe

According to the new Crisis Watch No. 54 report, released 1 February, seven actual or potential situations have deteriorated around the world in January 2008.
Post-election violence in Kenya escalated, increasingly along ethnic lines. Over 900 have reportedly been killed since the 27 December presidential poll. At the same time, mediation efforts led by former UN [...]