Army Times, By Andrew Tilghman – Staff writer
Posted : Thursday Sep 9, 2010 8:29:12 EDT
Army Reserve Col. Lawrence Sellin has no regrets about publishing a rant about the military’s overreliance on PowerPoint presentations — despite the fact it got him fired from his job at joint command headquarters in Afghanistan.
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Sellin said his controversial article was the last of several efforts to find something meaningful to do at ISAF headquarters.
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Sellin’s screed highlights a long-simmering controversy inside the military bureaucracy.
Marine Gen. James Mattis, currently chief of U.S. Central Command, told a military conference earlier this year that “PowerPoint makes us stupid.”
And Army Brig. Gen. H.R. McMaster banned PowerPoint presentations as a brigade commander during his successful efforts to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005.
Sellin said his complaint is not solely about PowerPoint, the presentation software created in 1987.
“I don’t hate PowerPoint. It’s a useful tool,” he said. “But it can be a crutch as a substitute for thinking. It’s too easy to produce a lot of slides and create volume, not quality. You really think that with a lot of detailed slides that you’re making progress, when you are actually not.”
Army Times article, second below, reports what the beginning of what I expect will be a major decline in functionality of Army computer systems. While some sort of institutional response to the alleged Wikileaks traitor, Specialist Bradley Manning, is appropriate, I don't think this is it. This is a simplistic approach, the sort of thing the KGB did and presumably the sort of the SVR continues to do.
By the way, IMHO, 91K classified documents on the Internet is not some sort of an inadvertent security violation. It's almost certainly one of the national security crimes; I think it's treason. Better to concentrate on the perpetrator — try him, convict him, and then, maybe, violate in some significant ways his Constitutional protection against “cruel and unusual punishment” as a highly visible deterrent against espionage.
NOTE: Image links to source generally as persistent link not available.
Below the line: PBI comment and cyber-security recap (34).
CIA rendition: US court throws out torture case, citing state secrets
Appeals court judges sound apologetic tone in ruling; plaintiffs say they were tortured overseas in ‘extraordinary rendition' program.
Under the state secrets doctrine, courts have generally granted deference to executive branch claims that certain litigation may involve highly sensitive US government information which, if disclosed, would cause significant damage to national security.
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In a dissent joined by four other judges, Judge Michael Hawkins said the court was wrong to dismiss the entire lawsuit at such an early stage. He said the case should be remanded to a federal judge to determine to what extent actual evidence in the case might raise a threat of disclosing state secrets.
Hawkins acknowledged that the state secrets doctrine is an established precedent. But he said the privilege need not be so broadly enforced.
“The doctrine is so dangerous as a means of hiding governmental misbehavior under the guise of national security, and so violative of common rights of due process, that courts should confine its application to the narrowest circumstances that still protect the government’s essential secrets,” he wrote.
The majority concluded its opinion with a quasi apology to the plaintiffs. “Our holding today is not intended to foreclose – or to prejudge – possible nonjudicial relief, should it be warranted for any of the plaintiffs,” Judge Fisher said.
Five years ago at IC2 Institute in Austin, we were talking about digital convergence, and those talks spun off an organization called the Digital Convergence Initiative, the idea being to build a local business cluster of convergent companies. We were ahead of our time, and it was hard for many to get their heads around how such a “horizontal” cluster would work. We were onto an effect of convergence that could be pretty interesting: the edges of verticals will blur, and companies that before convergence had nothing in common will find affinities and synergies that create new forms of business.
Phi Beta Iota: We have been beneficiaries of Jon Lebkowsky's good-hearted genius and will start following his blog, which is being added to Righteous Sites today. The ten areas covered by the cited article include Shopping, Relationships, Business Deliveries, Maps, Education, Politics, Society, War, Advertising. The bottom line for the public is that accountability and transparency is virtually inevitable, and we will eventually eradicate corruption including fraud, waste, and abuse. The only question is how soon and will it be soon enough. We think it will. Like Jon, we are optimists.
Here are the last two paragraphs with the links recommended:
Linked data and the future
The examples of data mentioned in this article are innovative, exciting and life changing, but the best is yet to come. The majority of the information that we use in our daily lives is “dumb”, or unconnected. The next step is “linked data”, or data that talks to each other. In the UK, Tim Berners-Lee and the team behind Data.gov.uk are aiming to create a linked database of Government information. By providing all data the Government produces in a linked format, individuals will be able to pull in different sets of data to produce new and innovative ways of understanding how our Government and the world works.
FluidDB, a start-up company run by Terry Jones, and with backing from Tim O'Reilly and Esther Dyson and others, is tackling this field from a different angle. FluidDB wants to create a “writeable world”, where physical objects have virtual identities, which can be updated and called upon by any individual with access to the internet. That could mean tweets and status updates about everything from a brand of toothpaste to the Eiffel Tower could contribute to a collective database. The possibilities for collaboration are endless.
Spelling matters, but in this case, the human in the loop is glad to have a chance to highlight the below reference, which is available for all countries in the world on a case by case basis.
East View Cartographic; East View Arabia, China, Russia Access All is the only stop we make when we need cartographic or terrain products. They are the ones who noticed and then pointed out to the USG that the Russians had mapped all the tunnels but put the text on the reverse side of their combat charts–no one spoke Russian at NGA. We once got an entire border region from them, both sides, 1:50,000, not available from the NGA within a couple of days. They are also the organization that made it possible for the UN Eastern Force Commander to finally get the Dutch to create $3 million in 1:50,000 charts as shown in the below link.
The terms of the rapidly developing agreement appear to be based on the long-established parameters predicated on the 1967 borders and the right of return for a still undisclosed number of Palestinian families displaced by the Arab-Israeli wars. An international force consisting of both Jewish and Non-Jewish as well as Muslim and Non-Muslim troops will be deployed on the West Bank to provide security for both nations: Israel and Palestine.
Contributing Editor Chuck Spinney: Looks like a cape job to me. No mention of settlements and w/o rollback of settlements, a contiguous Palestinian state is inconceivable. And what about the Israeli defensive barrier along lower Jordan River, an issue also related to water rights. Still have the issue of water and Israeli preemption of West Bank Aquifer. There is no way Israelis can back away from preemption, because 30% of their water budget comes from WB, and it is the highest quality water. Netanyahu as long history of scuppering the peace process toward a two state solution One possibility would be proposal for a single binational state of Israel and WB, but with Gaza handed off to Egyptians or UN. Of course the devil is in the details, and given the Israelis history it is hard to imagine a binational state with equal rights for all, which would include the Palestinian right of return (since Jews already have it). Best to wait and see.
China-Iran: China's Railways Minister Liu Zhijun will visit Tehran on 12 September to sign a contract between Iran and a Chinese company to build a $2 billion rail link to Iran, according to Iranian Transport Minister Hamid Behbahani. Transport ministers from Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Iran are expected to gather in Dushanbe in October to firm up the deal for a 2,000-kilometer (1,200-mile) route that links China and Iran.
NIGHTWATCH Comment: For more than a decade Chinese leaders have talked about linking Chinese rails with systems in Central Asia at meetings of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Within the past five years, the Chinese have backed their talk with investment.
China has railroad projects in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Burma and now Iran. It has road and pipeline projects in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan.
Many of the projects are scheduled to be completed by 2012. Their cumulative effect would be to shift the economic focus of Central Asian states from Moscow to Beijing. The advantage China brings is that the Chinese rails would use standard gauge, making it possible to ship from the Pacific Coast of China to Turkey without changing bogeys or moving containers in order to accommodate different rail gauges.
Until the Chinese projects become operational, all rail traffic from Asia to Europe will continue to rely on Russian gauge railroads and multiple gauge changes in Asia and at the border of European states.
Phi Beta Iota: Never mind the Caliphate, it's dead because India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Turkey want it dead. Instead, think about the Chinese waging peace with construction, and exporting their excess males to take over Argentina and portions of Africa with war by womb. We continue to be stunned by what war college scholars call “strategic decrepitude,” i.e. the confusion of powerpoint slides and operational motion with strategic thinking. Below we list all primary references to China on this website; indirect references are too many to list.
