Following is stunning, coming as it does from the left-wing newspaper we called “Pravda on the Potomac” during the Cold War.)
Two op-eds from mainstream media follow; both discuss need for Legislative and Executive Branches of the USG to get their [sierra] together and serve the national interest.
Washington Post, August 4, 2013, Pg. 18
Defense In Decline
Sequestration cuts at the Pentagon put the nation's safety at risk.
As big data analytics begins picking up steam, we are seeing more and more interesting outlets to learn about different platforms to choose from. Not just catalogs and boastful corporation sites, but insightful criticism. One such recent stop was when we came about the “About” story of Bamboo DIRT.
According to the site:
Bamboo DiRT is a tool, service, and collection registry of digital research tools for scholarly use. Developed by Project Bamboo, Bamboo DiRT is an evolution of Lisa Spiro’s DiRT wiki and makes it easy for digital humanists and others conducting digital research to find and compare resources ranging from content management systems to music OCR, statistical analysis packages to mindmapping software.
One look at its tips for analyzing data and we were sold. Here we were turned on to such intriguing companies as 140kit and Dataverse. The user-supported recommendations were the best. About Dataverse, it said: “Researchers and data authors get credit, publishers and distributors get credit, affiliated institutions get credit.” Concise and giving all the needed vitals, this type of crowdsourcing recommendation site could really catch on as the world of big data analytics keeps growing beyond most users’ capacity to keep up.
“The message that you sent to an @us.army.mil user with subject “Key references for you into the future” was not accepted for delivery since it contained URLs that Army Cyber Command has disallowed.”
Phi Beta Iota: The message was to a serving flag officer, a long-standing fan of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). When the link was deleted, a second rejection was received because the two memoranda, one for NATO and one for SOCOM, contained Phi Beta Iota links and/or tinyurl links.
Assuming the best, that it is the tiny urls rather than Phi Beta Iota that are confounding Army cyber, we have to wonder why they still have a job if they cannot handle validation of tiny urls on the fly….lazy trumps smart once again.
Here is the link and the two attachments that the US Army Cyber Command, in the infinite wisdom of its weakest officer, has decided not to allow anyone to access using official capabilities.
(1) Saw this on CNN this afternoon; (2) through my own personal set of lenses, I see this as more likely than not to be true in virtually every detail.)
CNN has uncovered exclusive new information about what is allegedly happening at the CIA, in the wake of the deadly Benghazi terror attack.
Four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were killed in the assault by armed militants last September 11 in eastern Libya.
Sources now tell CNN dozens of people working for the CIA were on the ground that night, and that the agency is going to great lengths to make sure whatever it was doing, remains a secret.
CNN has learned the CIA is involved in what one source calls an unprecedented attempt to keep the spy agency's Benghazi secrets from ever leaking out.
Since January, some CIA operatives involved in the agency's missions in Libya, have been subjected to frequent, even monthly polygraph examinations, according to a source with deep inside knowledge of the agency's workings.
The plight of McDonald’s minimum-wage workersmade headlines earlier this month when the burger chain published a much-maligned sample monthly budget, purportedly aimed at helping its staffers save money.
In recent days, armchair prognosticators have taken their concerns to the internet, wondering on Twitter and in comments sections whether they’d be able to afford McDonald'sMCD+0.96% food if the company doubled its workers’ wages.
Arnobio Morelix, a student at the University of Kansas School of Business, found himself asking the same question, so he did some financial modeling based on McDonald’s annual reports and data sets submitted to investors.
Morelix’s take: If McDonald’s workers were paid the $15 they’re demanding, the cost of a Big Mac would go up 68 cents, from its current price of $3.99 to $4.67.
A Big Mac meal would cost $6.66 rather than $5.69, and the chain’s famous Dollar Menu would go for $1.17.
“Some folks online are complaining they will not pay $2 for their Dollar Menu, but the truth is that even if McDonald’s doubled salaries the price hike would not be 100%,” Morelix said. “I will be happy to pay 17 cents more for my Dollar Menu so that fast food workers can have a living wage, and I believe people deserve to know that price hikes would not be as high as it is often portrayed.”
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon might have to cancel many modernization programs over a decade-long period should mandatory federal spending caps remain in place over the next decade, US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Wednesday.
Hagel for the first time discussed end strength, hardware and missions that could be targeted as defense officials look for ways to reduce planned spending by $500 billion over that time frame.
While decisions on these and many other options laid out by Hagel during a Wednesday afternoon press conference at the Pentagon have not been finalized, the Strategic Choices and Management Review (SCMR)identified fundamental changes that DoD officials believe are necessary as the Pentagon prepares for a future with fewer funds.
Hagel launched the review in March. The Defense Department announced an overhauled military strategy in January 2012, but since that time, sequestration cuts have been put in place as Congress and the Obama administration have not been able to agree on a comprehensive plan to cut the US deficit.
The Pentagon has already been hit with a $37 billion budget cut in 2013, and faces a $52 billion cut to its 2014 budget proposal. The cuts have led to the curtailment of military training and the furloughing of hundreds of thousands of civilian employees.
The SCMR has looked at ways to modify DoD’s military strategy, which places an increased emphasis on the Asia-Pacific region, if sequestration remains in place over the decade.
Continued defense spending cuts would at best “bend” the strategy, Hagel said. Parts of the strategy would “break” under sequestration.
With all the attention pointed towards PRISM, another interesting publication was virtually overlooked. Earlier last month, a taskforce belonging to the US DoD’s Defense Science Board (DSB) released a final report titled “Resilient Military Systems and the Advanced Cyber Threat” [PDF], that reports on the findings of an 18-month research project. The DSB is a committee of civilian experts that is to advise the US DoD on scientific and technical matters. I just threw that line in here to point out that this committee is staffed by individual civilians and not representatives of the industrial military complex. This is worth mentioning, because a good portion of the report is absolutely riveting in its description of how bad they think the situation is, and this is automatically bound to become a target for those people who still don’t believe in Cyber Warfare. The report starts off with a sentiment many of us will find reasonable, and applying to cyber security as a whole (as opposed to cyber warfare specifically):
“Cyber is a complicated domain. There is no silver bullet that will eliminate the threats inherent to leveraging cyber as a force multiplier, and it is impossible to completely defend against the most sophisticated cyber attacks. However, solving this problem is analogous to complex national security and military strategy challenges of the past, such as the counter U-boat strategy in WWII and nuclear deterrence in the Cold War. The risks involved with these challenges were never driven to zero, but through broad systems engineering of a spectrum of techniques, the challenges were successfully contained and managed.” – Mr. James R. Gosler & Mr. Lewis Von Thaer – Resilient Military Systems and the Advanced Cyber Threat.
In this same opening letter, some fairly damning statements are made.
