Personal and academic blog. Explores the borderlands between rhetoric, politics and intelligence.

25.2.05

Grey and snow-white litterature

With London being drizzled by occasional showers of cold snow and me sitting inside with a lot of work that hasn't been done, what better pass time than to drink strong coffee and read a lot of books.

And a litterature extravaganza it is:

Open source intelligence:

First of all I have discovered GreyNet. "Grey" litterature is open source information OSINF, but of the kind you will have to know where to look for - the kind that is hidden away in dusty libraries and won't be found by Google. I had instant luck, finding a thesis from Fort Leavenworth on "The Danish Perspective on Baltic Security". It will be useful for my current work and the next two essays that I'll start out on next week.

Another online resource for grey litterature is Highbeam Research. Here I found an otherwise unaccessible article on Scandinavian Intelligence after the Cold War. It is a pay-site, but you get a free trial which was enough for me.

My friends om Amazon in the US just sent me a bucketfull of books that arrived today:

The principal thinker on OSINT Robert Steel's books "On Intelligence. Spies and Secrecy in an Open World" (Aristotelian inspiration - look below) and "The New Craft of Intelligence. Personal, Public, & Political".

Furthermore I got the RAND study "Reshaping National Intelligence for an Age of Information" by Gregory F. Treverton and "Intelligence Analysis - A Target-Centric Approach" by Robert M. Clark.

Keep on truckin'.

Rhetoric:

My british affiliates in Amazon send me another parcel, as they would say:

Kenneth Burke's "A Grammar of Motives": I have long wanted to struggle with Burke's congenial writing. Now I got 530 paperbacked pages to have fun with.

Aristotle's "On Rhetoric" (Just for the record: He was here first and came up with that way of making good book-titles Mr. Steele and Clausewitz) in George A. Kennedy's lauded translation. It actually looks better on a first glimpse than my old worn copy of Thure Hastrup's Danish translation.

So another monthly salary poorer I can now stuff my bookshelf. Hopefully I will also get to read some of them soon...

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