Some providers at Kaiser Permanente, a health network with 30 medical centers and 431 medical offices, now ask to see a driver’s license in addition to the program’s health card. The University of Connecticut Health Center, concerned after a case of medical identity theft occurred there, began checking patient driver’s licenses.
We're actually closer to 1984 than most people realize. Antidemocratic forces have the ability to turn on cameras in our homes and offices -- to monitor our every action and every keystroke. That's the lesson of the ghostnet report. http://www.scribd.com/doc/13731776/Tracking-GhostNet-Investigating-a-Cyber-Espionage-Network
The Pentagon's development of a "cyber-command" is prompting questions
about its role in the larger national strategy to protect government
and private-sector computer networks and whether privacy can be
protected. And the command is fueling debate over the proper rules to
govern a new kind of warfare in which unannounced adversaries using
bits of computer code can launch transnational attacks.
Well, on second hand, that may not quite work. Cyber security is a matter of national security, and the departments need to weigh in on cyber issues through existing channels. 
Wait! We reckoned without Larry Summers and the National Economic Council. We don't want national security types running amok and wrecking the most innovative sector of the economy with incautious regulation in the name of security.
Hold the presses! NEC isn't the only White House office that wants to assert its prerogatives. What about OMB, which traditionally sets budget standards and measures departmental compliance with White House priorities? What about the CIO and CTO positions that the President just filled with such fanfare? They aren't chopped liver. Cyber security is all about information and technology. Oh, and the Office of Science and Technology Policy -- what is cyber security policy if it isn't science and technology policy?
President Obama has made document and information security a priority,Ouch.
and we’re nearing the end of a 60-day review period. That’s just a
fancy way for the government to say they’ve studied a problem to the
point where they can announce more work needs to be done.
There was NO "contract", neither to the University of Maryland, to the institute at which I sit, the Center for International and Security Studies , nor to me. Nor, as is implied by the word "contract", was there any payment for the work, which took about six months to complete. Instead, the editor of the publication series produced by the Strategic Studies Institute at the US AWC solicited the study from me after seeing an earlier conference paper that was published in another book.... In fact the University does not provide me with a salary either. I have been working that way for some years now. (I am 75.5 years in age ....) But I have been working on CBW issues since the mid-1960's. Some of my recent and current work is funded by Foundation grants ( a book about the history of the Soviet BW program) , but some is not , and this was not. In this case, it didn't even occur to me to ask the AWC/SSI if they could provide any funds because I simply assumed that they didn't do that."2. Leitenberg says it's not unusual for an AWC study to include a disclaimer that it doesn't reflect the views of the Army:
"[T]hat statement and the rest of that page appears in precisely the same format in every AWC publication, even ones written by members of the Army War College faculty, which is the great majority of the cases, and even if those AWC faculty have been there 10 and 20 years. The statement therefore denoted no specific disengagement by the AWC/SSI from my text in any way different from that of any other author whose work they publish . "3. Leitenberg also feels that I did not do justice to the length and heft of his work:
"Finally, other reviewers have referred to that study as a "book" , but in any case, 115 pages is most certainly not an "op-ed"."My responses:
Wired Magazine has smeared the new DHS nominee for Science and Technology, Tara O'Toole, as a “bioterror disaster.” I may have met O'Toole, and I certainly know her work, which left me impressed, so the attack on her seemed unfair. Even the first piece recognized that O'Toole is “a doctor, the CEO of the University of Pittburgh’s Center for Biosecurity, the former chairwoman of the Federation of American Scientists, and the brains behind a series of influential disaster response exercises that woke Washington up to the threat of terrorists with weapons of massive destruction.” In a remarkable display of support, the comment section of the article was immediately flooded by signed statements from prestigious scientists rebutting the claim, forcing the publication of a second, slightly more balanced article. (I apologize the lack of hyperlinks to this and other web accessible documents, but Scribefire, which is very convenient for some things, such as linking to a single article, is pretty much unbearably clunky for others, such as inserting new links or removing doublespacing from quotes.)
Even taken together, though, the Wired articles add up to a hit job designed to slow her confirmation. They are not even-handed journalism.
Why do I think that? Well, to take one example, Wired claims in both articles that O'Toole's war game scenarios in 2002 and 2005 were criticized in “an Army War College report” for “grossly misleading assumptions.”
The problem with that claim is that the reporter doesn't seem to have actually read the front pages of the report. The report was, it's true, paid for by the U.S. Army. But it says at the start that “The views expressed in this report are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.”
In this case, that's not boilerplate. The contract was apparently given to a Maryland research institute, which in turn subcontracted it to Milton Leitenberg, who is listed as the sole author. That's as it should be, because the report is clearly a personal op-ed in support of the proposition that, as he says, “Bioterrorism may or may not develop into a serious concern in the future, but it is not 'one of the most pressing problems that we have on the planet today.'” (Emphasis in original.) Leitenberg's candidate for the planet's “most pressing problem” seems to be getting ready for pandemic flu, which he (a bit anomalously) seems to think is not related to preparing for biological terrorism.
So the whole point of the Leitenberg study is to debunk bioterrorism as a risk. In that cause, he attacks the 2002 and 2005 bioterrorism exercises for what he thinks are unrealistic assumptions. That criticism boils down to the assertion that al-Qaeda is not (quite) ready to launch (exactly) the attack set forth in the exercises. Below, I quote a sample of the criticism; see how persuasive you find it.
First, Leitenberg explains the scenario's backstory:
The scenario posits that the al-Qaida group’s scientists received microbiological training at Indian and U.S. universities. These scientists received additional training when the group hired a scientist who was part of the former Soviet Union’s offensive biological weapons program. ... Then, with their own microbiology training, the terrorist group was able to acquire all the required laboratory equipment to grow and process the Variola major seed stock they had acquired into a relatively high-quality dry powder that was then used in the attacks.
Then he explains why this backstory is unrealistic:
In the real world, Al-Qaida had one single individual who had received a BS degree in Biology “with a clinical concentration” at a U.S. college. He could in no way be described as a “scientist.” Furthermore, he was arrested in December 2001. The individual with more advanced training who supplied al-Qaida with its microbiological literature was unwilling to himself do any laboratory work for them. The few pieces of standard equipment obtained by the group in Afghanistan were rudimentary in the extreme.
I find this utterly unpersuasive. Does Leitenberg really believe that we should only prepare for attacks that al Qaeda could carry out with exactly the personnel they had in 2001? Since the only real proof of al Qaeda's capability is likely to be an attack, that's not a recipe for being prepared. That's also not a lesson you'd expect government to learn from 9/11, which featured tactics and capabilities al Qaeda hadn't used before. And finally, that's not the usual basis for exercises, which ought to stretch the participants to respond to a range of possible disasters.
Leitenberg's criticisms of the exercise scenarios are such a stretch that they suggest he has a pretty big policy axe to grind. And Wired's credulous citation of his personal views as an “Army War College report” suggests that Wired is holding the grindstone.
That's not the only time Wired slants its coverage. Wired gives loving attention to this quote from Rutgers researcher Richard Ebright:
“O’Toole is as out of touch with reality, and as paranoiac, as former Vice President Cheney. It would be hard to think of a person less well suited for the position. ... She was the single most extreme person, either in or out of government, advocating for a massive biodefense expansion and relaxation of provisions for safety and security. She makes Dr. Strangelove look sane.”
OK, we're all aware of the Hitler rule -- the first debater to compare his opponent to Hitler has already admitted he's losing on the merits. I think we can update it a bit; in academic debate, it should be prima facie evidence that you've lost your sense of balance if you invoke both Richard Cheney and Dr. Strangelove in talking about a colleague.
Does Wired ask whether Ebright might also have his own axe to grind, something that would account for this peculiar passion? Nope.
But you don't have to dig far into Google before you discover that Dr. Ebright is a biological researcher who has received NIH funding – and who has argued passionately that research projects like O'Toole's have improperly shifted NIH funding away from traditional biological projects and toward the kind of research Ebright doesn't do.
Here's an excerpt from an undated Ebright slide show criticizing NIH for foolishly funding bioterror research in heavily secured labs. It's a heartfelt point of view; Ebright even puts it in red font so no one will miss it:
“[S]ub-par research has been funded. As a further result, an incentive structure has been created that has diverted scientists out of highly promising, biodefense-relevant, model-microorganisms and non-bioweapons-agents-pathogens research (where funding is tight and competitive) into less promising bioweapons-agents research (where funding is loose and easy).”
Now I'm not competent to judge whether Ebright himself has asked for funding to do “highly promising, biodefense-relevant, model-microorganisms and non-bioweapons-agents-pathogens research (where funding is tight and competitive).” But I think any reader of the Wired article would want to know just how personally Ebright thinks he's been affected by O'Toole's success in attracting funds.
At a minimum, even without a personal interest on Ebright's part, it seems clear that Wired has wandered into a medical researchers' food fight of epic proportions, with billions in funding at stake. Ebright is probably right to worry that O'Toole's appointment makes it less likely we'll see a return to the good old days of lavish funding for the “highly promising, biodefense-relevant, model-microorganisms and non-bioweapons-agents-pathogens research” that Ebright likes.
But descending to personal smears to shift NIH funding priorities is unworthy of him and of Wired.
Without intending it, I’ve become something of an expert in the process of creating new government organizations, having worked to establish two of the three most recent Cabinet departments. I helped Shirley Hustedler start the Education Department in the late 1970s, and at DHS, I started the DHS Office of Policy. That was a startup within a startup. The more I’ve seen of government reorganizations, the more skeptical I’ve become about their value, and I’m especially skeptical about the recommendation to create a NOC.
Let me explain why. There is a kind of lifecycle to proposals for new governmental organizations. In the first stage, proposals for organizational change begin to gain momentum -- almost always because the existing organization of government is flawed. After all, no one suggests changes when things are going well. Sometimes there’s been a shocking failure, such as the 9/11 attacks that led to the creation of DHS. Sometimes the flaw is a lack of governmental focus on a mission that seems more important than before, as with the Education Department. But we always begin with an existing organization whose flaws have suddenly become especially prominent.
The second stage, when proposals for organizational change become concrete, requires an exercise of imagination. The new organization has to be envisioned. Since the whole point of the new organization is to cure the failings of the old organization, I think it’s fair to say that the proponents of change never imagine an understaffed, overworked agency that drops balls. No. More or less by definition, an organization that does not exist does not have any flaws. So there’s a great temptation to give this new organization great responsibility. After all, the old agencies have sometimes failed, and the new agency has not.
Unfortunately, that’s only the second stage. In the third stage, the new organization actually begins work. In the glare of publicity it takes up its new responsibilities. But as a brand-new agency, it has to hire staff, find space, let contracts, arrange for IT support, and lease copiers, all before it can begin to carry out the missions that it has been assigned. Meanwhile, the agencies that lost ground in the reorganization snipe from the sidelines or make a bid to recapture their old turf. Six months after it’s been created, the new agency is still struggling to put in place the basic capabilities that any agency needs to function. Instead of the ideal organization imagined by lawmakers and commission members, the new agency is all too flawed. Only after years of effort does the reorganization begin to produce improvements that the outside world can see.
I’ve lived that cycle. I’ve helped write reports that called for the creation of new organizations to respond to existing agencies’ flaws. I’ve joined new organizations full of enthusiasm for the newly imagined perfection that they will embody. And I’ve labored to deliver perfection in offices that had no light bulbs, no staff, and no way to move paper around the office. It’s that experience that makes me dubious about creating a National Office for Cyberspace.
"DHS's execution of its responsibilities has certainly not been perfect, but it has spent much of the last year improving on its record. It has able new leadership and a head start on creating the capabilities it needs. I would be inclined to build on that foundation rather than starting over," he said.
A diplomatic skirmish has broken out over suggestions by the U.S. homeland security chief that terrorists routinely enter the country through Canada - including the perpetrators of 9-11.
Janet Napolitano's remarks in a recent Canadian television interview have angered MPs who are in Washington to participate in a border conference.
The comments have also frustrated Ambassador Michael Wilson, who is once again trying to dispel the 9-11 border myth nearly eight years after the 2001 attacks.
"[A] lot of people in Canada, and I suspect a lot of people in the northern part of the United States, are wondering why, why tamper with something that has clearly worked so well for so many years?
NM: Are you talking about the 9/11 perpetrators?
JN: Not just those but others as well. So again, every country is entitled to have a border. It's part of sovereignty. It's part of knowing who's in the country.
Having set her up, the journalist pounces:
NM: You know you mention terrorism, and there have been a lot of prominent American officials, including Secretary of State [Hillary] Clinton when she was a senator and a number of other congressmen and senators, that have said that there has to be tighter security because a lot of the 9/11 perpetrators came in through Canada.
The fact, of course, is that they didn't. They all came directly into the States, sometimes with U.S. visas. Senator [Charles] Schumer cited terrorists crossing at Buffalo, and then had to concede that that hadn't happened. I think there's kind of a popular misconception in this country that Canadians have been battling for a long time that we're somehow a nest of terrorism. But in reality it's not the case. And why is that view so common here?
Arguably, the Secretary should have known where all of the 19 came from, but that is history, and she's got a lot to worry about in the present. I don't see any sign that she actually believed the hijackers came from Canada or that this impression was driving policy. What's driving policy is the other terrorist threats that she cites. It looks to me as though she was simply going along with what seemed to be the journalist's statement of fact.
But if the journalist wanted to know why Americans worry about Canadians' commitment to the fight against terrorism, he provides it himself by grousing that the US hasn't taken Maher Arar off our no-fly list, making the dubious claim that Arar was found "not guilty" by a Canadian judge. When the Secretary says that Arar's case was reviewed and we concluded that his status shouldn't change, he insists on treating this as hostility to Canada: "So Canada was wrong."
That's it. On terrorism policy, the Canadian media's two main concerns are getting the US to defer border security measures and getting us to take Arar off our no-fly list.
Richard Thompson, President and Chief Counsel of the Law Center stated, "Janet Napolitano is lying to the American people when she says the Report is not based on ideology or political beliefs. In fact, her report would have the admiration of the Gestapo and any current or past dictator in the way it targets political opponents. This incompetently written intelligence assessment, which directs law enforcement officials across the country to target and report on American citizens who have the political beliefs mentioned in the report, will be used as a tool to stifle political opposition and opinions.
CBP officers have also indicated
that they consider travel to high-risk
destinations as a factor warranting greater
scrutiny.40 In theory, this basis for scrutiny
looks to behavior – where people go rather
than who they are ....
Depending on how this factor is applied,
however, use of travel histories could serve as
a proxy for more invidious profiling, since
most travelers to particular countries are
people who have ethnic ties to those
countries.
The Border Measures proposals are also still subject to considerable disagreement. Some countries are seeking de minimum rules, the removal of certain clauses, and a specific provision to put to rest fears of iPod searching customs officials by excluding personal baggage that contains goods of a non-commercial nature.
It’s June 14, 2003 at Chicago’s O’Hare international airport. The U.S.-led war to topple Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime in Iraq was launched a little less than three months ago. Resurgent fears of terrorism have kept some would-be passengers from the skies, but O’Hare is still operating at a fairly brisk pace.
A Jordanian man named Ra’ed al-Banna is among the throng of passengers who have just arrived on KLM flight 611 from Amsterdam. After waiting in line, al-Banna presents his passport to U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers.
The CBP officers consult the computerized targeting system used to screen passengers who seek to enter the U.S. The information about al-Banna – drawn from his airline reservations and past travel – triggers a closer look. The officers examine al-Banna’s documents, and they begin asking him questions.
Something doesn’t add up. Al-Banna has a legitimate Jordanian passport; he holds a valid visa that allows him to work in the United States; and he had visited the U.S. before for a lengthy stay. But the officers aren’t satisfied that he’s being completely truthful with his answers, so they decide to refuse him admission. Al-Banna’s fingerprints are taken, and he is put on a plane back to Jordan.
So far it sounds like a fairly routine day at the border. And it was, until events in Iraq nearly two years later gave it a new, and sinister, significance.
On February 28, 2005, at about 8:30 in the morning, several hundred police recruits were lined up outside a clinic in Hilla, a city in the south of Iraq. With no warning, a car drove into the crowd and detonated a massive bomb. 132 people were killed, and about as many were wounded. At the time, it was the deadliest suicide bombing Iraq had seen.
The driver was Ra’ed al-Banna. We know that because when authorities found the steering wheel of his car, his forearm was still chained to it.
No one knows why al-Banna wanted to be in the U.S. in 2003, or what he would have done if he had gotten in. But we do know what kept him out – the government’s ability to quickly marshal the data that first triggered a closer look, and that the CBP officer later used to question al-Banna closely and to conclude that his answers weren’t satisfactory.
At the center of that system was airline reservation data, known as Passenger Name Records or “PNR.”
A much faster way to provide relief would be for Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to exercise her power under the law and approve such status by executive order. But she has no such intention, said her spokesman, Sean Smith.
"There is no change in our policy on temporary protected status, and deportations to Haiti are continuing," he said Tuesday. "And let me be clear: No one living in Haiti right now should be attempting to come to the United States in hopes that they will be granted TPS."
Washington Times - Protected status sought for Haitians
The officials declined to enumerate the questions but said they went to the case against each detainee that Europe might be asked to accept. They also sought assurances that the policies underlying the system of detention in Guantanamo are a thing of the past.
"We have a list of questions, not conditions," said Ivan Langer, the Czech interior minister whose country currently holds the presidency of the European Union. He added at a news conference Monday in Washington, "There is one condition: maximum information."
Accompanying Langer was Jacques Barrot, a vice president of the European Commission. The visit was the first formal senior contact between the European Union and the Obama administration.
Langer said the decision of whether to accept detainees is one for individual states within the union, but because of open borders in continental Europe, officials there would like an agreed framework among the member states in advance of any transfers from Guantanamo.
As an example, Van Loan said Canada is interested on reopening talks with the Obama administration about opening U.S. customs pre-clearance facilities at Canadian land border crossings. The aim would be to allow trucks carrying goods to the U.S. to clear American customs before they arrive at the border, "the same way we pre-clear passengers at airports" in several Canadian cities. The idea went nowhere under the Bush administration.
Several witnesses at Tuesday's hearing echoed James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who argued that the "greatest failing" of the CNCI was that the initiative "despite its name, was not comprehensive." In part because it was launched under a veil of secrecy and without statutory support, the CNCI focused primarily on securing the dot-gov domain. But as a report sent to Congress last month by the Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection stressed, 85 percent of the nation's critical infrastructure is privately owned and operated.
Posts
All Comments
