IARPA and the Virtual Long Tail

FACT: This week, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, an arm of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), launched its new unclassified website.  What’s there is initially fairly minimal, but they’ll be adding to the public information posted there regularly.

ANALYSIS:  I spent the week in Orlando, as a Keynote speaker at the IARPA “Incisive Analysis Conference.”  I’ll be writing a little more about the conference in the near future, as I saw some great demo’s and spoke to the principal investigators on many excellent and far-sighted advanced research projects sponsored by IARPA.  It was great to be there and to see so many old friends from the intelligence community, the national labs (PNNL, Sandia, Oak Ridge, Livermore), DoD, and innovative commercial R&D outfits.  Also, as the first IARPA conference since the organization’s launch, it was an opportunity to hear new director Lisa Porter communicate her vision and principles, which she did well and I’ll discuss those soon as well.  (She also kidded me about my efforts to make her a cultural phenomenon, but I blamed it on WIRED magazine.)

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Google Accelerates Hiring of Nobel Laureates

FACT:  Answering a question in this week’s Business Week about several recent high-profile departures of Google executives and engineers, CEO Eric Schmidt said: “What bothers me is that some people write: ‘So-and-so left the company.’ Well, they don’t also write that we hired 120 people that week, five of whom have Nobel prizes, three of whom have PhDs, and so on, who are beginning their career here now.”

ANALYSIS: There have only been some 700 Nobel Laureates awarded in the history of the program since 1901, according to the official Nobel site, and at least as of a 2001survey there were approximately 210 living Nobel prize-winners.

So, with some trepidation, I calculate that by Schmidt’s aggressive hiring of five Nobel laureates in a typical week, the entire roster of living prize-winners will be working for Google within a year.

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“Legally Blonde 2.0” – SoCal Spook at Harvard

Shout out to Chris Rasmussen, a former colleague in the intell biz who emails that he’ll be speaking on uses of Web 2.0 approaches in the Intelligence Community at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in June…. as he put it in his email, “I’m pretty sure Danish dudes from southern California have been legallyblonde2.jpgblacklisted from Harvard for hundreds of years. Well the times are changing.”

Chris has been involved in social-networking and other 2.0 efforts in the IC, both at the enterprise level and in grass-roots form — accomplishing the latter and encouraging the former (strongly).  The Kennedy School program, “Web 2.0: Taking Action in Government”  is advertised as “examining the lessons learned from first movers in both business and government and distilling what actions government leaders must now take to harness the power of these new tools and business models.”  (more info here

I especially like that the conference is being organized with the help of Don Tapscott, co-author of  an excellent book: Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything.

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Microsoft May Have a Killer Cloud App – Live Mesh

Microsoft Mesh LogoGot a technical briefing on Live Mesh today in Redmond, and I’m impressed – particularly by the demonstrated commitment to interoperability through adhering to web standards – and the very cool Live Desktop giving you remote access to all your files and folders from any device (work computer, home laptop, mobile phone) with  the new Microsoft Device Connectivity Service.

This is what will bring Cloud Computing down to earth.

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SecDef Blasts Air Force on ISR

FACT: U.S. military use of airborne drones (UAVs) dawned at the turn of the millenium, with nearly 100 vehicles in use before the Sept. 11 2001 attacks. By the end of that year the number had doubled, with the majority in use in Afghanistan. Today, according to a speech today by Sec. of Defense Bob Gates, “We now have more than 5,000 UAVs, a 25-fold increase since 2001.”

ANALYSIS: The Gates speech today, to an Air Force audience, is being covered mostly with a focus on his “harsh criticism” of that service. For example, CNN’s headline was “Defense Secretary Scolds Air Force for War Effort,” or Fox News “Gates Says Air Force Must Step Up Efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan.”  And there was plenty of raw material for the tough stories, including CNN’s inclusion of the Gates soundbite that getting the Air Force to send more surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft to Iraq and Afghanistan has been “like pulling teeth.”

Others (like a Reuters story) struck a less frenzied tone, including more depth about his proposals going forward, and the Defense Department’s actual plans for improved acquisition and use of Intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, or ISR. I’d encourage you to read the full transcript (get it here).  (By the way, here’s some background on ISR and its variants.)

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What If Microsoft Bought a Slice of Apple?

FACT: The amount commonly cited as Microsoft’s offer to buy Yahoo is $44 billion, though that fluctuates with Microsoft’s stock price, as one component of the offer is in stock. 

windows_vista_logo.jpgANALYSIS: How much is $44 billion?  It was Warren Buffett’s net worth two years ago when he decided to give most of it (85 percent) away; it was reportedly the annual budget of the U.S. intelligence community in 2005; it would pay for a full five years Universal Social Security coverage for all uncovered state and local government employees; it’s the total amount spent on illegal immigration enforcement by the federal government over the past two years

Microsoft has decided to offer that much for Yahoo, but I like really out-of-the-box thinking 🙂  And today I read a better idea for that money.

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Tempted to “Skimp” on IT Security?

FACT: According to a study presented at last week’s annual RSA Conference on cyber security, by Palo Alto Networks CTO Nir Zuk, “Users are routinely, and fairly easily, circumventing corporate security controls. And that is because traditional firewall technology was not meant to grapple with the diversity of Internet applications of recent years.”

ANALYSIS: Security has been an even hotter topic than usual for the past month, what with new national-level attention to cyber security and, for Microsoft, a culmination of sorts of various strands of effort into our new “End to End Trust” initiative.  My boss, Jim Simon, attended the RSA Conference in San Francisco, with his boss, Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s Chief Research and Strategy Officer.  Craig laid out Microsoft’s “End-to-End Trust” vision, designed to provide users more control over online and enterprise systems.  His keynote was widely covered (even by offbeat security blogs, like RiskBloggers.com) so I don’t need to rehash it.

Nir Zuk’s presentation was interesting – and not just because he’s one of the true pioneers of firewall technology.  He really understands secure enterprise environments, something I’m talking about increasingly with government organizations, who are learning the hard way the need to protect their data, apps, and computing platforms.  

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Google App Engine and the Gathering of Clouds

How many Cloud Computing platforms would you say there are today? 

Some abhor the notion of there being multiple clouds – by this thinking there is only one “cloud” in an almost Zen manner, meaning “the grid” and the ability to reach in, somewhere somehow, and use someone else’s compute capacity, web apps, services, storage, etc.  Some others, however, as Amazon and others roll out their branded ability to do that reach, are beginning to call these “clouds” — I prefer to think about them as distinct platforms enabling cloud computing, but that’s starting to become a hazy definition. 

Next week the world will hear more about Microsoft’s Mesh strategy.

I feel like an observer out on a prairie on a hot summer afternoon, watching the sky as cumulo-nimbus shapes emerge and burgeon across the horizon.  The multiplicity is going to inevitably lead to feature differentiation, competitive marketing, a full hype cycle with naysayers and boosters (see Fortune magazine), down-market competition, shoddy wannabe clouds, boom and bust, market shake-out, etc. etc. – good times! 

How many such platforms (how many clouds) will there be in future?  How many should there be?  And if multiplication really occurs, is this any different from “utility computing” and aren’t we heading back to the days of the mainframe-model of time-sharing?

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Air Wars: the Air Force Takes Heat for its PR

FACT: A heated online debate is erupting about a particular photo posted online, and the brouhaha around it focuses on whether or not classified details are contained therein, thus revealing them. 

ANALYSIS: Given that others are even now writing extensively about this photo and its controversy I thought I would add a couple of thoughts.  Don’t bother blaming me for linking to the photo, by the way; given the attention and reposting/rehosting it has already received, the glare of publicity can only serve to prod better security practices. 

I expect to see parody versions on Flickr soon, with “Area 51” touches.

And so to my related thoughts: recently, an active-duty USAF officer and regular reader emailed me about one of my posts concerning Rod Beckstrom and the new National Cyber Security Center, which he had not previously heard of.  He wrote that in discussing it with a colleague, the response was “I thought the Air Force Cyber Command already had the mission to coordinate all cyber security efforts.”

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Friendships and Professional Relationships

FACT: The General Accounting Office has lifted a week-old ban imposed on IBM’s ability to win any new federal contracts (or work on new task orders for existing contracts).  But, according to ComputerWorld, “IBM still faces an investigation by the EPA as well as a federal grand jury probe over a bid for a contract at the agency in 2006.” The ban had been imposed because of significant problems in the process surrounding the $84 million Environmental Protection Agency contract, which the company lost last year. 

ANALYSIS: Now that the ban has been lifted, I am glad to relay the news — not only because I blogged about it when imposed but also because I admire IBM and its work for government. But the circumstances made me think about my own current set of relationships with former colleagues in the federal government.

According to the AP’s account of the agreement struck with IBM leading to the ban’s lifting, which I read in Enterprise Security Today, “Several IBM employees allegedly obtained protected information from an EPA employee, ‘which IBM officials knew was improperly acquired, and used the information during its negotiations to improve its chance of winning a contract,’ according to the agreement. Such an act violated federal procedures… IBM has placed five individuals on administrative leave pending its own internal investigation and any federal probe.”

I don’t have more to say about the issue per se, other than riffing on that human aspect of the affair to make a personal comment about my own experience since leaving the federal government’s payroll last December….

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