Sunday Morning Document Dump: Emails From Fashion District, Figueroa Corridor, North Hollywood, Downtown Center, Also Fashion District Transactions February Through April

Greetings, friends! If you’ve been wondering what you were going to do this morning after finishing off the Times crossword1 here are a bunch of new public records for your reading pleasure. There’s no single document here that’s mind-blowingly important, but, as I have mentioned many and many a time, we all are strong believers around here in the Mosaic Theory of Intelligence Gathering, and these are just more puzzle pieces, some of them quite important qua puzzle pieces!2

And turn the page for more emails: North Hollywood BID, Figueroa Corridor BID, and our old friends, the Downtown Center BID!

  1. For your choice of Times. Around here we can do the LAT Sunday in about 45 minutes and the NYT Sunday in about…well, TBH, we’ve never actually been able to finish one without cheating.
  2. The linked-to Wikipedia article on the Mosaic Theory of Intelligence Gathering is particularly feckless, even when judged by the relative standards of its fellow Wikipedia articles. If you’re interested in the Mosaic Theory, and especially in its relation to government transparency, you can hardly do better than to read the following essential paper: The Mosaic Theory, National Security, and the Freedom of Information Act. David Pozen, Yale Law Journal, 115:628 (2005). Pozen gives a particularly useful definition: The “mosaic theory” describes a basic precept of intelligence gathering: Disparate items of information, though individually of limited or no utility to their possessor, can take on added significance when combined with other items of information. Combining the items illuminates their interrelationships and breeds analytic synergies, so that the resulting mosaic of information is worth more than the sum of its parts. Even more interesting and relevant is a bit that Pozen quotes from the Department of the Navy’s Freedom of Information Act regulations: The Mosaic Theory is “[t]he concept that apparently harmless pieces of information when assembled together could reveal a damaging picture.” That, friends, right there, is our CPRA methodology in one short sentence, courtesy of the freaking Navy!
  3. This is more than 6.5 times what I recently paid to get some counteradvice on one of B&G or someone’s very poorly thought-out pieces of advice to the FDBID. Stay tuned!
  4. South Park is going to be sorry about this, and so, it now appears, is the Fashion District.
  5. I’m going out to see Mr. Aaron Aulenta in a couple of days to scan all the emails he thought, after wise consideration or whatever, that he was allowed to redact. Perhaps there’ll be some gems in there?
  6. About which I predict you will be hearing a lot more and not so long from now!
Share

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *