My bills are all due and the baby needs shoes and I'm busted
Cotton is down to a quarter a pound, but I'm busted
I got a cow that went dry and a hen that won't lay
A big stack of bills that gets bigger each day
The county's gonna haul my belongings away cause I'm busted.
Ray Charles
Economic optimism is in the air — at least in rarified air of the twin palaces of Versailles On the Potomac and Versailles On the Hudson. And if you believe the newspapers, there are growing signs that the economy is turning around, and America has dodged the depression bullet.
In the attached essay, my friend Jeff Madrick uses the unbridled greed of the finance industry (now trying to rescue itself from its own excesses by sucking at the government teat) to highlight the basic hypocrisy in the so-called free-market economy of go-go capitalism. Jeff summarizes the results of two recent mainstream economic studies which show the egregious bonuses in the finance industry are simply the fruits of unfair economic privilege. To economists, this privilege takes the form of obscene economic “rents” — i.e., the excessive revenues and inefficiencies that competition is supposed to eliminate under the capitalist theory (ideology) of free markets.
Stephen Carmel is a world-class speaker with a truly compelling story to tell, and after learning about him from his appearance at the USNI/AFCEA Joint War Fighting Conference, we were deeply impressed.
Below we summarize the highlights from his speech, which we have put into a proper document with emphasis added throughout. This is one of the most useful intelligent commercial presentations to government we have every seen.
Highlights of his “prime” or most recent speech are below–although delivered in May, it did not hit critical mass in our circles until just now. Whatever “challenging tone” might be detected below is from Phi Beta Ioto–the speaker is a diplomat.
Carmel 14 May 09
1) Complexity is the prime challenge. US Government is not trained, equipped, or organized to deal with complexity.
2) Global trade web has zero slack capacity and both the maritime and air webs depend in internal train and truck webs to keep going. US is $20 billion behind in the latter infrastructure.
3) Global trade web runs on computers and with the dependence on just in time inventory handling, has zero slack in the event of disruption, and the easiest as well as the most damaging disruptioin lies with computers and data that can be contaminated, manipulated, or simply destroyed.
4) USG completely missed China's deal with Russia to lock up the Siberian oil supply that is now bonded at the hip with the Chinese refining capacity that was part of the deal–this is a supply not subject to maritime interdiction.
Imagine simply visiting a Web forum and finding that doing so forced your browser to post an embarrassing Twitter message to all of your contacts, or caused you to admit a stranger to your online social network. Now consider the same dynamic being used to move money out of your online auction account or delete the contents of your e-mail inbox.
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The problem with the token-based security approach, as researchers prior to Hamiel and Moyer have noted, is that it works only if the attacker doesn't have access to that random string of data as well.
To take the Alice and Bob on the forum example a step further, consider what happens when Alice views a forum posting by Bob that includes a link to an off-site image hosted at a site controlled by Bob. That image, when loaded by Alice's browser, will automatically send Bob's site a referrer URL that includes the full token that is unique to Alice's browser session with that forum. Armed with the referring URL's token, Bob can then respond to the image request from Alice's browser with a request to silently take action on that forum in Alice's name.
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Moyer said one way to prevent this attack is commonly used on banking Web sites involves what's known as a nonce, which is essentially a random, one-time-use-only number that is appended to a URL each time a visitor loads a page on that site. He noted that one reason most sites don't adopt this approach is that it requires far more computational and Web server capacity, which can drive up costs — particularly for high-traffic sites.
DefCon White Paper
+++++++Phi Beta Iota Editorial Comment+++++++
In 1990-1991 Winn Schwartau testified to Congress. They ignored him the way they ignored Peak Oil testimony in 1974-1975. In 1995 Robert Steele organized three top experts, Schwartau, Jim A from NSA, and Bill Caelii, and submitted a cross-walk of crystal clear recommendations adding up to $1 billion a year to Marty Harris, responsible for the security of the National Information Infrastructure (NII). Today the US Government is about to waste $12 billion a year helping NSA further its own agenda while ignoring the root needs of the American people for trusted electromagnetic services. The federal government is so busy attacking other people it is neglecting the people that created the federal government as a service of common concern. The gap between those exercising public power and those who elected them and pay them has grown cataclysmic. Public intelligence in the public interest is one way to help the Republic heal.
These two guys are worth over $50billion a year to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), but the U.S. Government does not seem to care about intelligence-driven revenue-collection.
These guys ROCK and represent all that academics should be in the service of their country and theircommunity.
Dr. Simon J. Pak and Dr. John S. Zdanowicz, Penn State University and Florida International UniversityOSS '03: For their extraordinary demonstration, with a tangible value to the public of $50 billion a year in tax fraud savings, of new methods of academic investigation into public trade records, and the consequent discovery of specific instances of import-export money laundering and financial fraud, as well as weight variances associated with the smuggling of contraband and the mis-representation of cargo.
Below are their paper and slides as presented at OSS '03. These guys should have their own investigative cell fully-funded by the IRS and ultimately in ther service of all governments (a multinational global service).
