Essay 3

Cesar Gabriel Cedeño
English for Academic Purposes
21 ENE 2011

CAUSE AND EFFECT
Nowadays, rampant crime and insecurity are the predominant issues in Ecuador. Crime and insecurity has caused many people to focus their attention on the performance of the judiciary and the police. As a result people narrow their view of security only to its legal dimension and forget their operational dimension.
Due to this attention, many people actually believe that Ecuador will improve its security but overhauling this to institutions or by increasing the weight of sentences for certain crimes. Some examples of these beliefs take form in the demands of people in the civil society and the Legislative that claim for radical increases in sentences. Some even request the introduction of death penalty.
However, Ecuador will not improve its security with any of these steps. What Ecuador needs to do is to improve the laws regulating the intelligence, police and military operations in order to give its agencies and advantage over crime. If radical improvements in these laws take place, Security Forces will be able to seek and destroy actors who pose a direct threat to the National Security of Ecuador.
PROBLEM-SOLUTION
As societies evolve, crime and it´s organization also go under drastic changes. Nowadays crime is transnational and highly sophisticated therefore being able to cloak itself into daily and normal activities. What seems to be a healthy and respectable software company might very well be a drug cartel posing a direct threat against the lives of many people.
This is the reason why Ecuador must react now and continue the overhauling, and drastic improvement, of its intelligence system. Intelligence, which is human (espionage and covert activities)-technical (Communications, Signals, Images, Electronic, Measurements) and Financial (Cash Flows-Counter laundering activities and fiscal controls) has the power of destroying the cloak of invisibility that modern organized crime looks for. With these tools, Ecuador can gain the upper hand against crime.
Many people believe that stronger sentences, more policeman and putting boots on the ground are the only solutions to our rampant crime. They are not necessarily right, stronger sentences might be in place but they are useless if you don´t purge the judiciary from judges who are bought by crime, more policemen might help you feel protected but they only see what the moment brings and cannot distinguish crime when it has cloaked and the military might be dissuasive for a time but that effect goes by really fast. This is the reason why intelligence efforts will have a powerful effect to destroy modern organized crime.
DEFINITION
Some people tend to confuse intelligence with espionage when in fact these are different concepts that are involved in the same activity. In modern society, where information is a new and more desirable asset, these to concepts need to be really defined and distinguished.
Intelligence is the cycle of collection, production and secure dissemination of pertinent, exact and revealing information to decision makers. This cycle tends to have prospective, that is a vision of the immediate and longer term evolution, of elements that configure a threat, risk and opportunity to its consumers. Consumers are not exclusively public and, in the contrary, are also private.
Espionage on the other hand is not a cycle, but rather a covert observation and human or technical data collection activity on a specific issue. This activity is secret and covert, secret because it´s not openly known and, on the contrary, tends to be classified to restricted security levels for a long time, covert because it cloaks itself within a fiction to avoid its relevance to other people. Therefore is necessary to know that intelligence and espionage are to quite different things.

COMPARE AND CONTRAST
East and West always are able to shape different cities. This is the case of Miami (East U.S.) and San Diego (West U.S.) cities that I have visited and where I’ve been able to spot peculiar difference that are worth to mention.
San Diego is a vibrant, yet non commercial city. With restaurants, cafés, boardwalks and beaches there is and odd feeling that the entertainment industry is not rampant and evident as in Miami. It will appear as if San Diego was designed for people who were running away from the noise and entertainment of Los Angeles.
Miami on the other hand is both vibrant and commercial. Entertainment is everywhere starting in the simplest Café and reaching the most exclusive clubs in South Beach. Everything in the city seems to be design to make a powerful combination between natural attractions and entertainment. However Miami does not means permanent noise but entertainment seems to have a more powerful presence than in San Diego.