In the age of asymmetric warfare, intelligence is tantamount to national defense. Our terrorist adversaries are too dispersed to destroy and too fanatical to deter. Our best hope of security is accurate, timely, accessible information and actionable analysis. We need to organize the Intelligence Community (IC) by mission—not collection mechanism—to take full advantage of our technical proficiency and analytic expertise.

Today, the IC is divided into an alphabet soup of organizations, with key agencies focusing on a single collection discipline, or “-INT.” The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) specializes in human intelligence (HUMINT), the National Security Agency (NSA) specializes in signals intelligence (SIGINT), the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) specializes in imagery intelligence (IMINT), etc. This focus on function has enabled each agency to develop and refine the technologies and best practices associated with its particular collection capability, but the challenge of asymmetric warfare calls for a different organizational design. Structuring the IC by mission instead of collection mechanism would improve the depth and transparency of our intelligence analysis. The reorganization would act as a force multiplier for our existing analytic resources.

Mission over Mechanism: Reorganizing the IC to Meet the Challenge of Asymmetric Warfare

One of the oldest and soundest rules in intellectual life is “never get in a parsing contest with a skunk.”

Log On. Tune Out.

"We have to change the way we think about warriors of the future," says Lord. "So if they can't run three miles with a pack on their backs but they can shut down a SCADA system, we need to have a culture where they fit in."

Inside the Multimillion-Dollar Battle to Host the Air Force's New 'Cyber Command'

The US Air Force is laying both physical and virtual groundwork for its newest warfighting organization, the Air Force Cyberspace Command. This unique group will have a physical headquarters, but it will be virtual in nature, with most of its personnel distributed across several bases.

"What has driven this whole business is speed. We’ve gone from the pony express to train mail, to Federal Express to e-mail."

These rapid changes not only affect how the Air Force fights wars, but also how commands such as AFCYBER conduct their daily business. Because of the rapid nature of threats in cyberspace, the Air Force must respond to worms and other types of cyberattacks almost instantaneously. Gen. Lord notes that the Air Force cannot hope to respond by developing a software patch and distributing it across the entire organization in several days because an enemy can take control of an entire network within two or three minutes. “You need the ability to be very agile,” he emphasizes.

This agility will require establishing rules of engagement for defensive and for counter-cyber operations. "You’ll have to fight in the network while an adversary is potentially in it."

Command Shapes Tomorrow’s Cyberwarriors

Guy: Your most sensitive materials should always be sent in an interoffice envelope marked "Top Secret."

Dilbert: Are you a moron who works in our security department, or an industrial spy who is too lazy to look through lots of envelopes?

[Dilbert, looking dazed]

PHB: Our security guys don't slap that hard or run that fast.

On the Security of Interoffice Mail

You are being watched. From street corners and roadsides, bank machines and satellites, video cameras record our every move. For police forces, photo radar, street surveillance, cruiser cams and tiny cameras have become efficient crime-fighting tools, gathering irrefutable proof of criminal activity and deterring would-be lawbreakers. For others, video surveillance is an uncomfortable erosion of civil liberties, the unblinking eyes of Big Brother.

The Long Lens of the Law

Recently, some mathematical weaknesses of the KeeLoq algorithm have been reported. All of the proposed attacks need at least 2^16 known or chosen plaintexts. In real-world applications of KeeLoq, especially in remote keyless entry systems using a so-called code hopping mechanism, obtaining this amount of plaintext-ciphertext pairs is rather impractical.

We present the first successful DPA attacks on numerous commercially available products employing KeeLoq code hopping. Using our proposed techniques we are able to reveal not only the secret key of remote transmitters in less than one hour, but also the manufacturer key of receivers in less than one day. Knowing the manufacturer key allows for creating an arbitrary number of valid transmitter keys.

Physical Cryptanalysis of KeeLoq Code Hopping Applications

Jason Pontin, of MIT Technology Review, on The Great Hollowing Out.

From the archive:

We are willingly part of a world designed for the convenience of what Shakespeare called “the visible God”: money. When I say we have jobs, I mean that we find in them our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order. It is a spectacularly complex, even breathtaking, order, and it has two enormous and related problems. First, it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the natural world. Second, it has the strong tendency to reduce the human beings inhabiting it to two functions, working and consuming. It tends to hollow us out.

'Google is Like a Gigantic Parasite'

A modest proposal to fix the schools

First, Kill All the School Boards

Occasionally smart people say pretty smart things. The computing world likes to call these pearls of wisdom laws. They also like to name each law after the person who coined it. Take, for instance, the most well-known of all the computing world’s laws, Moore’s Law, which is named after Intel founder Gordan E. Moore.

In the web industry we have no such laws. While computer software and engineering is a science, web work isn’t. I view web work as an amalgamation of a variety of crafts and disciplines, like behavioral psychology, art and design, information sciences - and, since the end medium depends on technology, part computer science.

Given that last bit, it makes sense that some computing laws would apply to the world of the web. Since I have an awful time remembering them, I figured I’d write down the ones that have been helpful to me in my career in the web industry.

The Immutable Laws of Web Design and Development