G-Cubed: Gadget Guru Gourley

Posted on January 11, 2008 by lewisshepherd

Fact: According to a press release announcing his joining the corporate Advisory Board for startup Triumfant, longtime intelligence-community technologist Bob Gourley “is a strong advocate for user-focused software and his contributions to the Google Gadget community have placed him on Google’s list of the top 200 gadget programmers in the world.”

 Analysis: Bob Gourley and I served roughly coterminous periods at the Defense Intelligence Agency (I got there a year before him and left only a month after), and it’s fair to say we became partners in crime (bucking rules and The Man), partners in innovation (helping DIA’s CIO to overturn and modernize some seriously deficient infrastructure and apps), and partners in some boozy misadventures entirely unrelated to our work.

Bob is a brilliant technologist – I recommend his blog over on the blogroll – and as the Triumfant press release correctly states, he was a winner of InfoWorld’s Top 25 CTO award this past year – a mark of great pride for DIA, which had never won that award, so much so that DIA Director Gen. Maples re-recognized him for the honor in a special ceremony at the Agency.

 But I have to address this “Google fetish” he has (and he’s not the only one). Let’s tell some truth here….

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IARPA’s First Director: Dr. Lisa Porter

Posted on January 9, 2008 by lewisshepherd

Fact: IARPA has a new Director.

Analysis: The well-known DARPA (part of DoD) will now at last have a full-fledged intelligence-community counterpart. The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity – prosaically called “IARPA” – was created last year, but has been stepping out slowly because [/opinion on] of lack of leadership [/opinion off], with only “interim” place-holder leaders.  Many of my friends who were recruited or absorbed into IARPA at the beginning, as it swallowed the old Disruptive Technologies Office for example, felt that the new org was spinning its wheels without traction, for lack of a strong and stable hand at the helm.  [Note also this recent post on IARPA.]

Today the Director of National Intelligence named Dr. Lisa Porter as IARPA’s first Director. She’s been at NASA, and before that DARPA itself.  She and I were at Stanford at around the same time, although hanging in different crowds – she working on her doctorate in Applied Physics while I was over doing the real heavy lifting in the hardest of all sciences, Political Science 🙂  

I’ve never met her, unless I don’t recall from old DARPA visits, so I did a tiny bit of surfing to clip a few salient tidbits from her DARPA work.

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A-Space: Top-secret social networking

Posted on November 16, 2007 by lewisshepherd

Fact: As reported in InformationWeek recently, “In December, the DNI will launch A-Space, a portal that will eventually include everything from wikis, blogs, and social networking; built using SOA.”

Analysis: Our team at DIA got assigned by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to design and build A-Space, a brand new social-networking environment for the full intelligence community – “the MySpace for spies.” We’re talking a very high-walled Walled Garden.

I had to devote (not to say divert) some of our most talented people leading the all-important Alien program to this new effort, which really only began in September. Phase I of A-Space must go live by the end of the year; Phase II (with more advanced Web 2.0 capabilities) just a few months later.

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Alien bites man biting dog

Posted on November 8, 2007 by lewisshepherd

Fact: On Nov. 6, 2007, the Washington Post covered the intelligence community’s new “All-Source Intelligence Environment, known also as Alien.” According to the column, the Defense Intelligence Agency team behind the project is running a “government collaboration with private vendors to develop new ways of using personal information and intelligence.”

Analysis: Columnist Robert O’Harrow and the Post posit a looming Orwellian context for DIA’s efforts to live up to the reform challenge imposed by the 9/11 Commission and WMD Commission. Those highly-regarded reform efforts encouraged the Intelligence Community to increase its use of so-called “open-source” information, and to promote information sharing and wider access across agencies to important data. Mr O’Harrow’s article by contrast worries that “the potential outcome is meaningful — if you’re interested in security, privacy and the war on terror, that is.”

O’Harrow also warns of something he calls “the security-industrial complex,” a theme he has sketched in even more purple prose in his recent book “No Place to Hide.” That book’s hyperventilating account of the modern surveillance state received less-than-stellar reviews even from some on the left; Matthew Brzezinski writing in no less than Mother Jones (the proud flagship of liberal journals) pointed out that “the brains behind the security-industrial complex are not setting out to create an Orwellian state, but rather to use cutting-edge technology to track down murderous extremists.”

AlienAnd that, accurately enough, leads to Alien. The truth about Alien, fortunately, is benign, at least for Americans concerned about privacy issues. The Post’s misguided premise, that Alien is “about new ways of using personal information,” strays from the fact that DIA information is solely on valid intelligence targets and non-US persons only. “Both the law and strict oversight enforce this,” reads one poster’s critical reply to the column, calling it “off-base.”

Those readers interested in a sounder, less shrill discussion of Alien and its technology, intent, and safeguards, can find several articles in more sober publications like Signal magazine, Government Computer News, Military Information Technology, and InformationWeek.

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