Sound familiar?

Track your shared bills and expenses. Effortlessly.

Buxfer: Track Your Money

Smeed and I agreed that Bomber Command could substantially reduce losses by ripping out two gun turrets, with all their associated hardware, from each bomber and reducing each crew from seven to five. The gun turrets were costly in aerodynamic drag as well as in weight. The turretless bombers would have flown 50 miles an hour faster and would have spent much less time over Germany. The evidence that experience did not reduce losses confirmed our opinion that the turrets were useless. The turrets did not save bombers, because the gunners rarely saw the fighters that killed them. But our proposal to rip out the turrets went against the official mythology of the gallant gunners defending their crewmates. Dickins never had the courage to push the issue seriously in his conversations with Harris. If he had, Harris might even have listened, and thousands of crewmen might have been saved.

It's hard to be a contrarian. Especially when you're right.

Be sure to read Part I, as well.

A Failure of Intelligence, Part II

What an amazing idea! Why, if someone had come up with this idea, say, a year ago, why, they could be rich right now!

Splitting dinner checks can cause a splitting headache, even when the diners are a math-oriented data miner, a database security specialist and an expert in networked games.

Fed up with haggling over shared debts, Carnegie Mellon University computer science graduate students Shashank Pandit, Amit Manjhi and Ashwin Bharambe three years ago created Buxfer, short for ''bucks transfer.'' The social-networking site with a personal-finance focus allows users to form groups of friends or housemates and track who owes what for utility bills, dinner tabs, day trips and other shared expenses.

No more haggling: Grad student Web site tracks shared expenses

So you like war stories, but you're getting tired of reading about IEDs in Iraq? Then let Freeman Dyson take you back to the dark days of the 1940s.

My first day of work was the day after one of our most successful operations, a full-force night attack on Hamburg. For the first time, the bombers had used the decoy system, which we called WINDOW and the Americans called CHAFF. WINDOW consisted of packets of paper strips coated with aluminum paint. One crew member in each bomber was responsible for throwing packets of WINDOW down a chute, at a rate of one packet per minute, while flying over Germany. The paper strips floated slowly down through the stream of bombers, each strip a resonant antenna tuned to the frequency of the German radars. The purpose was to confuse the radars so that they could not track individual bombers in the clutter of echoes from the WINDOW.

That day, the people at the ORS were joyful. I never saw them as joyful again until the day that the war in Europe ended. WINDOW had worked. The bomber losses the night before were only 12 out of 791, or 1.5 percent, far fewer than would have been expected for a major operation in July, when the skies in northern Europe are never really dark. Losses were usually about 5 percent and were mostly due to German night fighters, guided to the bombers by radars on the ground. WINDOW had cut the expected losses by two-thirds. Each bomber carried a crew of seven, so WINDOW that night had saved the lives of about 180 of our boys.

... Within a month, loss rates were back at the 5 percent level, and WINDOW was no longer saving lives.

This story continues with Part II.

A Failure of Intelligence, by Freeman Dyson

Hadley, on Iraq:

"The president said we need to make changes. Some of those changes are going to be significant changes."

I observe how this implies that most of the changes will be insignificant. Deck chairs, if you will. Another interpretation is that Bush will simply cast them as OBE:

... provisions that he can argue are already being implemented ...

I collect these kinds of words and phrases:

"a new way forward" [as opposed to merely sideways]
"as the president has said, cut and run is not his cup of tea" [he is rather quite partial to the Kool Aid]
"weeks, not months"

Other top officials, including Cheney and Rumsfeld, said the war would last "weeks, not months."

"laundry list" [translation: Rumsfeld in listmaking mode again, on a dreary Saturday morning]
"the right guy" [translation: search for replacement still in progress]
"ambitious" [translation: broken, hopeless, naïve]

See also: Amid Hints Bush Will Change Policy, Clues That He Won’t

From Bush's weekly radio address on Saturday, I liked this:

"[Maliki] wants to show the people who elected him that he's willing to make the hard decisions necessary ..."

Any chance we could catch Maliki making the same comment of Bush?

Our goal ... is to ... build a country that is united, where the rule of law prevails ...

"Amazon eats their own dog food"
"We're adopting the Microsoft methodology to eat your own dog food"
Black LA firefighter recalls how co-workers served him dog food

Kerry, in 2004: I regret to say that the President, who called himself a uniter, not a divider, is now presiding over the most divided America in the recent memory of our country. I've never seen such ideological squabbles in the Congress of the United States. I've never seen members of a party locked out of meetings the way they're locked out today.

The Bush Administration, believing that the treatment of the detainees was a matter that belonged under the exclusive control of the executive branch, was disdainful of attempts by Congress to address the issue. Lindsay Graham: “I went down to Guantánamo with a group of senators shortly after it opened, and Dave Addington [Cheney's counsel] was also on the trip. I remember Dave had a copy of the Constitution he carried around with him. He took it out, and he said the Administration didn’t need congressional authorization for what it was doing. The President had the inherent authority to handle the prisoners any way he wanted. And I said, ‘That may be a good legal argument, but it’s not a good political argument. The more united the nation, the better it is for everyone.’ But Dave said, ‘ Thanks but no thanks.’ And after that we never had much dialogue.” Or, as Specter put it, “We still had discussions with the Department of Defense -- perhaps in part because the general counsel was interested in a judgeship -- but they didn’t go anywhere.”

Bush Plans to Make 'Significant Changes' on Iraq

When he was hired by the DIA, he told me recently, his mind boggled at the futuristic, secret spy technology he would get to play with ... If the everyday Internet was so awesome, just imagine how much better the spy tools would be.

But when he got to his cubicle, his high-tech dreams collapsed. "The reality," he later wrote ruefully, "was a colossal letdown."

In this essay for the NYT Sunday magazine, Clive Thompson refers to the white paper by Calvin Andrus, The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community, which was recommended here back in July. (Also at CSI. Slides here.)

Following the threads from this article ...

Next up: the ouster of neocon Zalmay Khalilzad, the manipulative pro-consul in Baghdad, and his replacement by Ryan Crocker, a long-time Arabist who recently served as U.S. ambassador to Syria.

Thomas Fingar [2] "manages the production of the President's Daily Brief." He's an SES and an old China hand. He spoke in August, giving a talk entitled Intelink and Beyond: Dare to Share.

"I think in the future you'll press a button and this will be the NIE," said Michael Wertheimer, assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analysis.

In 2004 Wertheimer wrote in the Washington Post:

To succeed we must demand far less near-term intelligence product from the Signals Intelligence community, give it control of its resources and allow it to plan for a disruptive future, a future that is presaged by videos that show an Afghan warlord exhorting his terrorist followers not to use satellite phones for fear of American capture.

He spoke recently at InfoTech 2006; his presentation, Technology Transformation for Analysis: Year One Report, isn't really online, but others at the conference are here.

According to Michael Wertheimer, who held the most senior technical position at th... [ Read More (0.7k in body) ]

Open-Source Spying

This puts a new spin on Rumsfeld's exit.

The situation in Iraq has been evolving, and U.S. forces have adjusted, over time, from major combat operations to counterterrorism, to counterinsurgency, to dealing with death squads and sectarian violence.

In my view it is time for a major adjustment. Clearly, what US forces are currently doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough.

You have to think about who is leaking the memo and what their objectives might be, though it certainly gives the appearance that he was dropped for disloyalty ... and perhaps a perceived unwillingness to "stay the course."

Not that this memo was actually a trigger for Bush; he was already interviewing Gates and had possibly made his decision. But it makes clear that a critical eye on Iraq was quite unwelcome.

The ideas collected here are not especially original; one gets the impression that the memo was drafted after a Pentagon skull session, based on an hour or so of brainstorming and a Lexis-Nexis search.

You'll even find some variations on Gary Brecher's ideas in the list:

Provide money to key political and religious leaders (as Saddam Hussein did), to get them to help us get through this difficult period.

Rumsfeld’s Memo of Options for Iraq War

Do we and Prime Minister Maliki share the same vision for Iraq? If so, is he able to curb those who seek Shia hegemony or the reassertion of Sunni power? The answers to these questions are key in determining whether we have the right strategy in Iraq.

The reality on the streets of Baghdad suggests Maliki is either ignorant of what is going on, misrepresenting his intentions, or that his capabilities are not yet sufficient to turn his good intentions into action.

Text of Hadley's Iraq Memo

A long-overdue wake up call for the information security community.

This popped up on Slashdot recently. I'm curious to get feedback from the security experts here at Memestreams.

Security Absurdity; The Complete, Unquestionable, And Total Failure of Information Security.

General Caldwell summarized the continuing violence in Baghdad this way: Shiite militias conducting murders and assassinations in the city’s Sunni western section, and Sunni insurgents and Al Qaeda staging "high visibility casualty events" in the city’s predominantly Shiite east.

See the video (transcript soon) here.

At the moment, a Google search for this phrase returns zero results. I wonder if it has legs.

File this alongside Japan's constitution-flouting "helicopter destroyers."

Caldwell: Terror Attacks Are Now 'High Visibility Casualty Events'