Obama’s Credibility Gap (New York Times)
Americans are still looking for the answer, and if they don’t get it soon — or if they don’t like the answer — the president’s current political problems will look like a walk in the park.
Public Rifts On Afghanistan: Leaks suggest that the administration is divided, endangering Obama's strategy (Philadelphia Enquirer)
A divided administration will produce an incoherent policy.
U.S. school bans the dictionary (Many Sources)
A California school district has added a new book to the controversial list of literature that is considered unfit for young eyes. . . . It's the dictionary.
Pentagon Report Calls for Office of ‘Strategic Deception’ (WIRED)
The Defense Department needs to get better at lying and fooling people about its intentions. That’s the conclusion from an influential Pentagon panel, the Defense Science Board (DSB), which recommends that the military and intelligence communities join in a new agency devoted to “strategic surprise/deception.”
Intelligence From Tehran Elevates Concern In The West (Spiegel Online)
SPIEGEL has obtained new documents on secret tests and leadership structures that call into question Tehran's claims to be exclusively interested in the peaceful use of the technology.
Critical Calls (Government Executive)
When Paul Llobell, fire commissioner of Long Island, N.Y., responds to an emergency call, he often straps on as many as five different radios to ensure he can communicate with local, state and federal responders. Depending on the situation, he might have to call in search-and-rescue, evacuation or public safety teams from other jurisdictions.
U.S. Is Unprepared To Handle Major Bioterrorism Attack, Commission Finds (Washington Post)
More than eight years after the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks, the United States is still unprepared to respond to the threat of large-scale bioterrorism, a congressionally appointed commission said Tuesday in a report that gave the government mixed grades overall for how it has protected Americans from weapons of mass destruction.
Google Toolbar Tracks Browsing Even After Users Choose “Disable” (PC Security Watch)
Edelman also shows how it's too easy to enable the “Enhanced Features” which cause the transmission of full browsing details to Google, and it's not all that easy to disable them. Google forcefully urges you to activate them and tells you how important they are. At the same time they present the privacy policy in a way that's difficult to read.
Pentagon Searches for ‘Digital DNA’ to Identify Hackers (WIRED)
“In other words,” The Register’s Lew Page notes, “any code you write, perhaps even any document you create, might one day be traceable back to you – just as your DNA could be if found at a crime scene, and just as it used to be possible to identify radio operators even on encrypted channels by the distinctive ‘fist’ with which they operated their Morse keys. Or something like that, anyway.”
Navy Next-Gen Network Looks Highly Vulnerable To Cyber Attack (Info-Warrior Online)
Having done security reviews on NMCI years ago, I don't see the NextGen navy network faring any better than NMCI on the infosec front.
UNMANNED AERIAL SYSTEMS IN JOINT AIR OPERATIONS (Secrecy News)
Control issues, no processing, more glitch prone than real air, can be hacked.
Phi Beta Iota: We just shake our head each morning. The Administration has no strategy and no intelligence (decision-support) or anything else that might lend coherence to their wasteful and mis-directed spend-thrift ways; the Pentagon and the intelligence communities of the world are both in the business of lying to publics (no doubt with the best of intentions but toxic results); we cannot trust Google; and we still have not figured out at the highest levels that CISCO makes an Internet-aided mixer to connect all analog radio systems and that we need to deconflict all of our electromagnetic devices. Talk about being our own worst enemy!
