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

Despite news yesterday that the Justice Department has closed its investigation of the graduate student behind the controversial fake boarding pass generator, Christopher Soghoian may not be out of legal jeopardy yet.

It appears I was too quick to declare a happy ending to the Christopher Soghoian story.

The TSA should be spending more time addressing the issues Soghoian called attention to, then investigating Soghoian. If they officially press charges against him, we should not have any problem making them look like incompetent fools in the media.

27B Stroke 6 - Its not over for Soghoian.

Americans would have to sign up for a new military draft after turning 18 if the incoming chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee has his way.

Remember when Democrats were fearmongering that Bush would enstate a draft if reelected... Um...

Someone please smack Rangel...

Top Democrat: Bring back the draft - CNN.com

You could provide universal health care but you'd have to radically re-align the system so that stakeholders compete based upon outcomes (ie results) instead of treating based upon episode and billing fee for service. This would not provide a system where every citizen would get the same "level" of health care service, but it would provide that every citizen would get quality affordable service based upon a tiering of cost per outcome. So the poor would get results, but the rich would get them faster, with more bells and whistles, and more conveniently at a higher price. Much like any other product or service you procure today.

Flynn23 provides some interesting insight into tackling the problems with our health care system.

Universal Health Care: Realign the shareholder interests

The MemeStreams user interface has gotten a much needed makeover. The navigation of the site has been greatly simplified. The posting process has been made more intuitive. The site logo has been updated. A box on pages showing site activity has been enabled.

More changes are on the way...

Big New Feature

You'll notice a new box on the topic pages that shows you "popular topics." These topics are shown in order on a weekly basis. This is a minor thing but I think it will make the site a lot more usable for people who don't have accounts and may have trouble finding the content by drilling around in the topic higharchy...

More to come...

Small New Feature

"Its definition of freedom -- one utterly divorced from civic responsibility -- is superficial and is itself a grave threat to the liberty and security of the American people."

Apparently asking the executive to comply with acts of Congress is "utterly divorced from civic responsibility."

Gonzales attacks ruling against domestic spying - CNN.com

UK security experts have cracked the sooper sekure new UK biometric passports. It took 48 hours. With 174 worth of sniffer hardware, attackers can read all the personal information off of any of the three million new UK passports in circulation

Boing Boing: UK RFID passports cracked

The Ukrainian government offered to lau­nch DSCOVR free of charge, France made a similar offer. But NASA's response so far has been "no thanks."

LAUNCH IT!

WHAT THE HELL IS NASA THINKING?!?!

Seed: Free DSCOVR!

NASA has spent almost $100 million in taxpayer money to build a satellite that is headed for a storage bin in Maryland.

Triana was scheduled for a November flight into space, where it would measure ozone in the Earth's atmosphere while also beaming round-the-clock photos of Earth to the Internet.

But now, some fear it may never fly.

The cause of the costly hibernation: presidential politics and conflicting views -- many of them partisan...

LAUNCH IT!

If for no other reason then tax payers should see some ROI out of the project. This sounds like partisan politics leading to a pair of blinders willfully being put on the public.

POLITICS PUTS $100 MILLION SATELLITE ON ICE