The rise in national security secrecy in the first full year of the Obama Administration was matched by a sharp increase in the financial costs of the classification system, according to a new report to the President (pdf).
The estimated costs of the national security classification system grew by 15% last year to reach $10.17 billion, according to the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO). It was the first time that annual secrecy costs in government were reported to exceed $10 billion.
An additional $1.25 billion was incurred within industry to protect classified information, for a grand total of $11.42 in classification-related costs, also a new record high.
We bring Planet, People and Products into harmony through the projects in which we involve ourselves and others. Design Earth, the portal, is allied with other sites that, collectively, are central to a whole systems approach to creating sustainablilty. These include Wiser Earth, Digital Earth, a certification portal, Commonwealth of Learning, oneVillage Foundation, and a portal to open higher education sites such as MIT's Open University. Others include Live Earth and Many One.
Roy Presson, with his daughters Catherine, left, and Amanda, looking out at their flooded 2,400-acre farm on Tuesday in Wyatt, Mo
SIKESTON, MO. — With a rapid series of explosions late Monday that could be felt for miles through the Missouri soil, the Army Corps of Engineers successfully blew out some 11,000 feet of Mississippi River levee, taking dangerous pressure off the river above.
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For the people responsible for trying to manage the unmanageable river, each success is replaced by new worries.
“We’re just at the beginning of the beginning,” said Maj. Gen. Michael J. Walsh of the Army Corps of Engineers and president of the Mississippi River Commission.
Phi Beta Iota: Severe weather is an act of man, not God. Between paving over the wetlands and the many contributing factors to environmental degradation, the Earth's natural systems have been distorted to yield increasingly “unmanageable” conditions.
ScienceDaily (May 3, 2011) — A new study from the Karolinska Institute and Stockholm School of Economics shows that the brain has built-in mechanisms that trigger an automatic reaction to someone who refuses to share.
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“This is an incredibly interesting result that shows that it isn't just processes in the prefrontal cortex and insula that determine this kind of decision about financial equitability, as was previously thought,” says Professor Martin Ingvar. “Our findings, however, can also have ethical implications since the use of certain drugs can clearly affect our everyday decision-making processes.”
This work was funded by the Swedish Research Council, The Barbro and Bernard Osher Foundation, The Swedish Agency for Innovation Systems.
Cooperation to Control Non-State Nuclear Proliferation: Extra-Territorial Jurisdiction and UN Resolutions 1540 and 1373
This workshop will explore theoretical options and practical pathways to extend states' control over non-state actor nuclear proliferation through the use of extra-territorial jurisdiction and international legal cooperation.
UNSC Resolution 1373 and the raft of counter-terrorism treaties related to non-state based nuclear terrorism allow for states to exercise extra-territorial criminal jurisdiction in certain ways. UNSC Resolution 1373 even requires the exercise of such jurisdiction in certain cases. UNSC Resolution 1540, in contrast, focuses on domestic controls.
Phi Beta Iota: Extra-judicial anything is a crime against humanity. While the International Tribunals have done some extraordinary work, the reality is that most non-state proliferation is actively aided and condoned by specific states including the permanent members of the UN Security Council. This is a very troubling line of inquiry.
I just sent the following to an email list I’m on (Google Group Next Net), and thought it would be worth sharing here:
I’ve been involved with R.U. Sirius in instigating an International Open Source Party (version 2.0 – we tried it before but it didn’t quite launch). He wrote about it here. This article includes the principles I came up with for Open Source politics, which I include below. Open Source is not a religion, i.e. not based on faith in something that can’t be observed or experienced. It’s about transparency: when we apply the term Open Source we’re talking about following methods and processes in production and distribution such that whatever we define as “source code” can be observed and experienced, so to me it’s the opposite of religion. Eric Hughes once explained to me, when I was new to Open Source thinking, that a particular encryption tool should be Open Source so that its source could be examined and its effectiveness and integrity verified. Politics should be like this, and if we all insisted on this approach, religion would be transformed into practice (a la Buddhism and 4th Way) rather than dogma (a la much of Christianity).
Principles of Open Source Politics:
Openness
Many of us who are tech-focused have come to understand the power of open approaches and open architectures. Even technologies that aren’t strictly “Open Source” benefit from Open APIs and exposure of operating code (kind of inherent with scripting languages like Perl and PHP). When we know how something works, we know how to work with it. And we know how to transform it to meet our needs.
Government should be as open and transparent as possible. There may be some rationales for closed doors, but few — for the most part, citizens should be able to clearly see how decisions are made. That’s a key component of our political platform: we want to see the actual “source code” for the decisions that affect our lives.
Collaboration
Open Source projects are often highly collaborative and can involve many stakeholders, not just manager and coders. The Open Source Party sees this as a great way to do government. (I’m partial to charrette methodology, personally.)
Emergent Leadership
Effective action and decison-making requires leadership. In an Open Source form of politics, leaders emerge through merit -— by providing real leadership and direction, not by appointment, assignment, or election. Nobody made Linus Torvalds the lead for Linux, or Matt Mullenweg the lead for WordPress. They saw a need, created a project, and found an effective following who acknowledged their vision, expertise, and ability to manage and lead. Emergent leaders aren’t handed authority. They earn it, and if they cease to be engaged or effective, they pass the baton to other leaders who emerge from within the group.
Extensible and Adaptable
Open Source projects and structures are agile and malleable. They can be adapted and extended as requirements changed. Governance should have this kind of flexibility, and our system of governance in the U.S. was actually built that way. We should ensure that bureaucracies and obsolete rule sets don’t undermine that flexibility.
“To understand techno-optimism, it’s useful to look at the free software movement, whose ideology and activism gave rise to the GNU/Linux operating system, the Android mobile operating system, the Firefox and Chrome browsers, the BSD Unix that lives underneath Mac OS X, the Apache web-server and many other web- and e-mail-servers and innumerable other technologies. Free software is technology that is intended to be understood, modified, improved, and distributed by its users. There are many motivations for contributing to free/open software, but the movement’s roots are in this two-sided optimism/pessimism: pessimistic enough to believe that closed, proprietary technology will win the approval of users who don’t appreciate the dangers down the line (such as lock-in, loss of privacy, and losing work when proprietary technologies are orphaned); optimistic enough to believe that a core of programmers and users can both create polished alternatives and win over support for them by demonstrating their superiority and by helping people understand the risks of closed systems.
“While some free software activists might dream of a world without proprietary technology, the pursuit of free software’s ideology is generally more practical in its goal; like good technologists, they view proprietary technology as a bug, and bugs can’t necessarily be eliminated. It’s just not possible to squash every bug, so programmers track, isolate, and minimize bugs instead.”
