Information technology's next grand challenge will be to secure the cloud–and prove we can trust it.
By David Talbot
Phi Beta Iota: The story is so good we will not extract from it. It must be read in its entirety. Government is failing to do its job, leaving a “wild west” environment alive and corruptible in the cloud. Standards are beginning to emerge but security is not a priority and the end-user as the ultimate source of the security is not even being considered (over ten years ago Eric Hughes conceptualized anonymous banking and end-user controlled encryption of all data). Eventually, after great expesne and great loss of data, government and industry may realize that the ultimate security is that which originates with the individual end-user, not a central service that can be hacked by disgruntled insiders or that can make a mistake that instantly explodes tens of millions of clients. Below is the original Mich Kabay slide, still relevant.
Mich Kabay's Threat Slide Link Leads to NSA Las Vegas Briefing
Retired Maj. Gen. Tim Haake is a Washington lawyer who served on active and reserve duty in special operations for 36 years. Now he is a lobbyist.
Phi Beta Iota: The article has to be read in the original. Well-intentioned and totally divorced from reality, it is what the Military-Industrial-Intelligence-Congressional Complex (MIICC) wants the taxpayer to believe. Missing from this fairy tale depiction are the realities: we cannot afford, nor is there sufficient time, nor can the Air Force carry, nor can the intelligence community inform, such a force, spending $5 million for every $1 spent by asymmetric opponents holding the moral high ground. Furthermore, and Jim Bamford and Will Durant agree on this point, the only infintely expandable resource we have is the human brain–neglecting our investments in global education and national population health as we have been and will continue to do, is the certain death of the Republic.
During an appearance on MSNBC's Morning Joe today journalist and author Carl Bernstein lamented that the debate over and the writing of health care reform legislation has shown us “Congress at its worst.”
Bernstein harshly critiques the nation's legislative branch as a body that is “responsive only to money and special interests” while ignoring the public and national interest:
The bad news is the really great problem in this country is the systemic breakdown of one of the three branches of government: the Congress of the United States. And until it's repaired, [Obama] and this country are going to be undermined. We could have had health care legislation in a meaningful way that would have gone twice as far at solving our budget and our health care problems, but because of the irresponsibility and the systemic corruption of the United States Congress, we don't.
Phi Beta Iota: Actually, all of our major institutioins have failed–the Executive, the media, the church, the schools. We live in a “cheating culture” in which INTEGRITY is no longer the foundation value. The good news is that there is nothing wrong with America the Beautiful that cannot be fixed by an Electoral Reform Act followed by reform of national intelligence, governance, and then national security.
The below article written by my two good friends Winslow Wheeler and Pierre Sprey is one of the very best case studies describing how the incredible corruption of critical thinking that prevails in the day to day life of the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex (MICC) produces techno trash.
With programs like the F-35 populating the Pentagon's modernization plan, there can be no question of why the defense budget is now at a post World War II high, yet is powering the Defense Department into a Death Spiral, where forces continue to shrink (the AF is now contemplating yet another reduction of its fighter structure by 2 more tactical fighter wings), weapons continue to get older, and there is continual pressure to cut readiness, even though we are fighting two wars. Add in the fact that the Pentagon's planning and budgeting system can not pass a simple audit that identifies and verifies the links between money appropriated by Congress to the money expended by the Pentagon, which is required by the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990, not to mention the Accountability and Appropriations Clauses of the same Constitution every member of the federal government has sworn to protect and uphold … and you have a prescription for ever increasing disasters at ever higher costs.
Setting aside the not-so-proud history of the P-38, the Lightning II moniker is a poor fit for the F-35. Despite the F-35's whopping (and still growing) $122 million per copy price tag, the Air Force and other advocates pretend it is the low-priced, affordable spread in fighter-bombers. Though horrendously overburdened with every high tech weight and drag inducing goodie the aviation bureaucracy in the Pentagon can cram in, the Lightning II is hardly a pioneer, being little more than a pastiche of pre-existing air-to-air and air-to-ground technology – albeit with vastly more complexified computer programs. The P-38 Lightning of the twenty-first century it is surely not, especially for those who hold the P-38 in undeserved high regard.
In the interests of giving credit where credit is due, a more historically fitting moniker for the F-35 would be “Aardvark II.” Aardvark — literally ground pig in Afrikaans — was the nickname pilots (and ultimately the Air Force) gave to the F-111–and for good reasons. The F-111 was the tri-Service, tri-mission fighter-bomber of the 60s, and also a legendary disaster. The F-35 is rapidly earning its place as the Aardvark's true heir.
There are astonishing parallels between the two programs.
Click A Tale of Two Pigs to read entire story. other references below the fold.
Scott Atran, an anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, John Jay College and the University of Michigan, is the author of the forthcoming ‘Listen to the Devil.'
Confidence is important, but we also have to recognize that the decision to commit 30,000 more troops to a counterinsurgency effort against a good segment of the Afghan population, with the focus on converting a deeply unpopular and corrupt regime into a unified, centralized state for the first time in that country's history, is far from a slam dunk. In the worst case, the surge may push General McChrystal's ”core goal of defeating Al Qaeda” further away.
What binds these groups together? First is friendship forged through fighting: the Indonesian volunteers who fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan styled themselves the Afghan Alumni, and many kept in contact when they returned home after the war. The second is school ties and discipleship: many leading operatives in Southeast Asia come from a handful of religious schools affiliated with Jemaah Islamiyah. Out of some 30,000 religious schools in Indonesia, only about 50 have a deadly legacy of producing violent extremists. Third is family ties; as anyone who has watched the opening scene from ”The Godfather” knows, weddings can be terrific opportunities for networking and plotting.
Understanding these three aspects of terrorist networking has given law enforcement a leg up on the jihadists.
I got this from a friend who works on budget issues in Congress, and he/she assured me the reasons are accurate — that is all I know, but if true, this list would explain why insurance stock just rose to all time highs.
Top 10 Reasons to Kill Senate Health Care Bill
1. Forces you to pay up to 8% of your income to private insurance corporations — whether you want to or not.
If you refuse to buy the insurance, you'll have to pay penalties of up to 2% of your annual income to the IRS.
Many will be forced to buy poor-quality insurance they can't afford to use, with $11,900 in annual out-of-pocket expenses over and above their annual premiums.
Massive restriction on a woman's right to choose, designed to trigger a challenge to Roe v. Wade in the Supreme Court.
Paid for by taxes on the middle class insurance plan you have right now through your employer, causing them to cut back benefits and increase co-pays.
Many of the taxes to pay for the bill start now, but most Americans won't see any benefits — like an end to discrimination against those with preexisting conditions — until 2014 when the program begins.
Allows insurance companies to charge people who are older 300% more than others.
Grants monopolies to drug companies that will keep generic versions of expensive biotech drugs from ever coming to market.
No re-importation of prescription drugs, which would save consumers $100 billion over 10 years.
The cost of medical care will continue to rise, and insurance premiums for a family of four will rise an average of $1,000 a year — meaning in 10 years, your family's insurance premium will be $10,000 more annually than it is right now.
In the latest of many shameful lapses, the federal agency in charge of securing the nation’s transportation system approved background checks for a dozen illegal immigrants working in sensitive areas of a busy U.S. airport.
The illegal aliens, from Central America and Mexico, worked in operational areas of Stewart International Airport, a 2,400-acre facility located about 60 miles north of New York City. Stewart is a major passenger airport for the state’s mid-Hudson region that also handles large quantities of cargo and serves as a military field.
The illegal aliens all had security badges approved by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the agency created after the 2001 terrorist attacks mainly to protect airlines. The TSA’s national background check failed to detect the fake Social Security numbers and other bogus documents provided by the illegal immigrants to obtain clearance.
So the embattled 43,000-member Homeland Security agency, which has received hundreds of millions of dollars from Congress to fulfill its mission, granted the undocumented aliens “trusted agent” security badges.
