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.
As this story rolls out I am increasingly struck by the fact that the American corporate media has turned the Snowden Affair into a rather pedestrian thriller script completely missing the point. I ask myself are the reporters too dumb to see this, or is this a conscious choice. I think it is the later. You can see why American News is so often substance free. We can spend weeks talking about an absur! d, and emotionally damaged little man sending pictures of his penis around the net, but an issue like fundamental freedoms, civil liberties, whoa that would be like real journalism. We don't do that anymore. This is a really chilling trend.
In several of my recent lectures, I pointed out that most end users cannot differentiate among search systems. The comment made about these systems is often, “Why can’t these systems be like Google?” I concluded that the similarity of requests suggests that systems are essentially identical.
One reason is that training in university and the “use what works” approach in the real world produces search, content processing, and analytics systems that are pretty much indistinguishable. There are differences, but these can be appreciated only when a person takes the systems apart. Even then, differences are difficult to explain; for example, why a threshold value in System A is 15 percent lower than in System B. When dealing with sketchy data, the difference is usually irrelevant.
Another reason is that today’s systems are struggling to cope with operations that stretch the capabilities of even the most robust systems. Developers have to balance what the engineering plan wants to do with what can be done in a reasonable amount of time on an existing system.
def all_combinations(the_list): results = [] for item in the_list: for inner_item in the_list: results.append((item, inner_item)) return resultsThis matches every item in the list with every other item in the list. If we gave it an array [1,2,3], we’d get back [(1,1) (1,2), (1,3), (2, 1), (2, 2), (2, 3), (3, 1), (3, 2), (3, 3)]. This is part of the field of combinatorics(warning: scary math terms!), which is the mathematical field which studies combinations of things. This function (or algorithm, if you want to sound fancy) is considered O(n^2). This is because for every item in the list (aka n for the input size), we have to do n more operations. So n * n == n^2.
Below is a comparison of each of these graphs, for reference. You can see that an O(n^2) function will get slow very quickly where as something that operates in constant time will be much better.
One of Three — Click on Image to Enlarge
Net net: Developers have to do what works. Search and related content processes are complex. In order to get the work done, search systems have embraced “what works.” Over time, we get undifferentiable systems.
ROBERT STEELE: Information Technology (IT) has three sucking chest wounds that will persist into the foreseeable future.
1. Free energy and unlimited clean desalinated water have not been a priority for the information era nation-state and corporations. Big mistake. NSA is the poster child for poor leadership in this regard, putting a massive computing center in Utah that has neither renewable energy nor any concept of what it means to need 1.7 million gallons a day from aquifers that are so low the entire state of Utah is on water restriction for front lawns.
Click on Image to Enlarge
2. IT continues to ignore the human factor — as Jim Bamford so famously concludes one of his books on NSA, the human brain is vastly more powerful than any computer NSA might build for 20 years into the future — and as Crisis Mapping and humanitarian technologies are showing, harnessing the distributed intelligence of any given diaspora changes everything about what and when and how one can know — stuff CIA will never master under its current paradigm.
Paul Strassmann
3. IT continues to ignore the demonstrated limitations of proprietary software badly coded and undocumented, generally far from standardization. Proprietary is unaffordable, is not inter-operable, and does not scale. Until we made the turn to Open Source Everything (OSE), IT will continue to return — as Paul Strassmann has documented so ably — a NEGATIVE return on investment. More money for IT in its present configuration “makes bad management worse.”
Just to show us that the national security state doesn't lack for a wicked sense of ironic humor, I see this DARPA topic in the new SBIR solicitation out today:
“Investigate the national security threat posed by public data available either for purchase or through open sources. Based on principles of data science, develop tools to characterize and assess the nature, persistence, and quality of the data. Develop tools for the rapid anonymization and de-anonymization of data sources. Develop framework and tools to measure the national security impact of public data and to defend against the malicious use of public data against national interests.”
(Personally, I'd recommend (1) re-engineering government to see openness as less of a threat, and to focus on making vulnerable systems, where the government has a responsibility, less so, e.g., ratchet back stock trading so it's not the province of millisecond traders and flash crashes, but actually first serves the need for capital investment; and (2) giving *everyone*, and not just the state, more privacy in their transactions on what are essentially common carriers… this “metadata” being snarfed up by the NSA is data about*me*, and I want to pay Verizon to complete my phone calls, not to be in the “information about me” business.)
The world’s GPS system is vulnerable to hackers or terrorists who could use it to hijack ships — even commercial airliners, according to a frightening new study that exposes a huge potential hole in national security.
Using a laptop, a small antenna and an electronic GPS “spoofer” built for $3,000, GPS expert Todd Humphreys and his team at the University of Texas took control of the sophisticated navigation system aboard an $80 million, 210-foot super-yacht in the Mediterranean Sea.
“We injected our spoofing signals into its GPS antennas and we’re basically able to control its navigation system with our spoofing signals,” Humphreys told Fox News.
Our next DC event offers a high-level briefing and discussion of questions of profound significance to both policymakers and corporate America. Join us on Wednesday August 7 at our G Street offices – from 2:15 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Register here. The roundtable will end with a reception.
Key panelists will include:
Daniel Caprio (McKenna Long & Aldridge; formerly Department of Commerce)
Michael Nelson (Bloomberg Government; formerly IBM, FCC)
————-
This from a recent McKinsey report sets out one perspective:
This has happened once before, and appears to be a rather sad attempt to discredit activists not realizing that all this exposure is discreting any future attempt to prosecute real child pornography violators — and the elite pedophiles that appear to be “untouchable” by the FBI. There is no evidence this is being done by the US Government, only by those who believe that activists are fair targets for unethical, invasive, and criminal attack.
BREAKING: Attempted Set-Up of Stewart Rhodes & Dan Johnson With Child Porn
