James Bamford, a visiting professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at U.C. Berkeley, will give a public lecture on Monday, Feb. 11, 2002 at 6:30 p.m. at Sibley Auditorium in the Bechtel Center. His topic will be Intelligence Failures that Led to the September 11th Attacks. ... For more information, please call the Goldman School of Public Policy at 642-4670.

Those of you in the SF area may want to check this out ...

James Bamford on 9/11 'Intelligence Failures'

This new publication from Springer, LNCS 2246, offers a number of interesting papers on the many facets of trust in the network society. Here are a few of the paper titles:

Trust Rules for Trust Dilemmas
Trust and Distrust Definitions
The Socio-cognitive Dynamics of Trust: Does Trust Create Trust?
Belief Revision Process Based on Trust: Agents Evaluating Reputation of Information Sources
Adaptive Trust and Co-operation
Experiments in Building Experiential Trust in a Society of Objective-Trust Based Agents
Learning to Trust
Learning Mutual Trust
Distributed Trust in Open Multi-agent Systems

Trust in Cyber-societies: Integrating the Human and Artificial Perspectives | Springer LINK

* What are the most obviously worrisome policy and and legal questions posed by new information technologies and and achitectures?
* Do new technologies promise to solve any current policy or legal problems?
* Who ought to resolve questions of questions of law and policy posed by new technologies?
* What will change institutionally for our legal and policy making institutions as a result of new technologies?
* Can scientists and engineers invent yet other technologies to solve the problems posed thus far by the telecommunications revolution?
* In the current environment, how should lawyers advise companies trying to develop new technologies or governments seeking to cope with such technologies?

Information Technology and Legal Regulation: Promise and Pitfalls

Satellite Start-Up for Apple Co-Founder
By John Markoff

These days, most entrepreneurs may be having some trouble acquiring enough venture capital to start a new business. But if you're Steve Wozniak, they've got lots of money, plenty of excitement, and one John Markoff waiting to tell the world about your great idea.

That said, the company could introduce some cool products. The DFJ web site lists them as a "wireless" start-up with the description "next-generation geolocation platform", but the start-up has no web site yet. WheelsofZeus.com was registered on October 25, 2001 to a law firm in Palo Alto, but nothing is there yet.

A high-flying start-up amidst the downturn?

"What's Really Behind Microsoft's New Commitment to Data Security"

Robert X. Cringely takes a stab at explaining Microsoft's latest media campaign, and he does a passable job of getting it right.

My theory: MS will focus on security because there is nothing else left to do. After two-plus decades of development, virtually every desirable feature has been implemented for both the operating system and the office productivity suite.

Bruce Schneier and other will discredit the new campaign, pointing out that security is a process, not a product, and that no amount of code review can make up for a lack of wisdom on the part of the user. Nearly any useful system can be misused by the foolish and/or determined, despite the protective measures of the designer.

'Trust me, I'm From Microsoft' | Bob Cringely's The Pulpit

For some time, military and political leaders in both Saudi Arabia and the United States have been quietly debating the value of a continuing U.S. military presence in the kingdom. Some on the American side argue that restrictions on U.S. activities and frictions with the Saudi government outweigh the advantages of basing planes, command and control systems and some 5,000 troops on Saudi soil; others say it would be far more difficult for the United States to defend the Persian Gulf, or mount a new campaign against Iraq, without the deployments. ...

Published in the Sunday, January 20, 2002 edition of the Washington Post.

Security and Saudi Arabia | editorial in Washington Post

The United States has an opportunity to set new terms for its alliances in the Middle East. The bargain struck with Egypt and Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War seemed successful for a decade, but now the United States is facing the consequences: Washington backed Cairo's and Riyadh's authoritarian regimes, and they begat al Qaeda. The Bush administration should heed the lesson.

This is one of several good articles in a special section entitled "Long War in the Making" in the Jan/Feb 2002 issue of _Foreign Affairs_ magazine. The author, Martin Indyk, is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former Senior Director on the National Security Council.

Back to the Bazaar | Foreign Affairs, Jan/Feb 2002

"Defense Storm is a service of Storming Media providing unclassified papers from the Pentagon. Most are of a scientific or policy nature."

This web site offers a large database of interesting publications. They are for sale in hardcopy form, but a quick Google search finds that many of the papers are also freely available elsewhere online. Thus, this site serves as a good jumping-off point for further research.

Storming Media: Providing Pentagon information at the speed of lightning.

"The network is the pervasive organizational image of the new millennium. This book examines one particular kind of network - the 'knowledge network' - whose primary mandate is to create and disseminate knowledge based on multidisciplinary research that is informed by problem-solving as well as theoretical agendas. In their examination of five knowledge networks based in Canadian universities, and in most cases working closely with researchers in developing countries, the authors demonstrate the ability of networks to cross disciplinary boundaries, to blend the operational with the theoretical, and to respond to broad social processes. Operating through networks, rather than through formal, hierarchical structures, diverse communities of researchers create different kinds of knowledge and disseminate their results effectively across disciplinary, sectoral, and spatial boundaries. Analysis of networks in health, environment, urban, and educational fields suggests that old categories of 'north' and 'south' are becoming blurred, and that the new structures of knowledge creation and dissemination help to sustain collaborative research."

Networks of Knowledge: Collaborative Innovation in International Learning

Description: "To what degree should we rely on our own resources and methods to form opinions about important matters? To what degree should we depend on various authorities, such as a recognized expert or a social tradition? In this provocative account of intellectual trust and authority, Richard Foley argues that it can be reasonable to have intellectual trust in oneself even though it is not possible to provide a defense of the reliability of one's faculties, methods, and opinions that does not beg the question. Moreover, he shows how this account of intellectual self-trust can be used to understand the degree to which it is reasonable to rely on alternative authorities."

A sample chapter is available. Published in October 2001 by Cambridge University Press.

Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others