Simon Moves On

Jim Simon at the Library of Alexandria, Egypt

One indulgent use of a personal blog is to drop a nod in the direction of a salutary individual, and I’d like to do so for my departing boss, Jim Simon.

Jim has been the founding Director of the Microsoft Institute since 2004, when Bill Gates and Craig Mundie personally decided to establish a small outfit to use the benefits of Microsoft’s advanced research and development activities against intractable problems for the global public sector. They had been talking with Jim for several years, back when he was a senior executive at the Central Intelligence Agency and after, to understand how to improve government’s adoption of modern technologies.

Jim had a long and storied career in the federal government. In the CIA’s senior management ranks under DCI George Tenet he took on broad responsibilities that presaged the creation of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS). From his official bio:

A career CIA officer, Mr. Simon was appointed by President Clinton and confirmed by the Senate in 1999 as the first Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Administration, a position he held until retirement in 2003. As deputy to the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence for Community Management, he was responsible for setting policy for and overseeing the budgets of the 14 agencies that comprise the Intelligence Community. After September 11th, he was designated as the senior intelligence official for homeland security establishing and chairing the Homeland Security Intelligence Council. 

While he was still in government, Jim was a sought-after counselor to those (like Gates) seeking to uderstand why government acts the way it does. For those interested in improving government technologies, his knowledge has been invaluable; after all, his experience included oversight of multi-billion-dollar national strategic projects, and intimate involvement in establishing the CIA’s In-Q-Tel venture capital firm (see pdf report, Accelerating the Acquisition and Implementation of New Technologies for Intelligence). Federal Computer Week once quoted Jim in 2002 with a necessary insight for anyone doing government acquisition:

In fact, the CIA itself is tired of vendors approaching the agency with what the vendors insist is the “total solution,” said Jim Simon, assistant director of central intelligence and the intelligence community coordinator for homeland security. The “total solution” doesn’t exist, he said. (“CIA Venture Firm Devises Tech Review Strategy“)

Jim was no technologist in government, though he managed technical programs, as a renaissance man. My own early background in political science and as a Pentagon Soviet analyst meant that I first learned of Jim’s legend in that light. He grew up in CIA as “an analyst’s analyst,” brilliant and uncompromising. Read the blunt article he co-authored immediately after the 9/11 attacks about the need for intelligence reform in Daunting Challenges, Hard Decisions: The Inteffigence Community 2001-2015.” That article’s conclusions keep being drawn, its recommendations repetitively proposed, again and again after each failure right through today.  

After leaving government and setting up MSI, Jim hired some of the best and brightest from senior government roles for the Institute (and, grading on the curve, hired me as well). We’ve had a lot of fun in the past few years.  The pictures on this page are from trips he and I took together, for example, examining Microsoft Research in various corners. And I’ve enjoyed tweaking him and his Alabama ways once or twice here on ShepherdsPi (see the April Fool’s classic “Microsoft Research Reclaims Value of Pi“).

This column is no obituary. Jim will continue in another role at Microsoft, as Chief Strategist for our Worldwide Public Sector group. He’ll also continue as a valued voice in the ear of government officials, on reform strategies and security priorities. You can connect with him on LinkedIn… though I haven’t been able to persuade him to use Twitter yet

The company has asked me to take Jim’s place as Director of the Microsoft Institute. I know I’ll be relying on his counsel, and his example, for a long time to come. Especially once he starts using Twitter….

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Slate of the Union Day

Today is “Slate of the Union” day, when the two most charismatic individuals in recent American history go on stage and attempt to reclaim mantles as innovators. I’ll leave aside the fellow with lower poll numbers for now (President Obama). More eyes in the tech world will be watching as Steve Jobs makes his newest product announcement, the Apple tablet/Tabloid/iSlate thing iPad (it’s official).

Back in the late 1980s I worked for the legendary “Mayor of Silicon Valley” Tom McEnery (he was actually the mayor of San Jose), and we did many joint projects with Apple, particularly with CEO John Sculley, a great guy.

Follow the USS Carl Vinson to Haiti

As I write on Wednesday afternoon (EST), the scenes of chaos, death, and destruction in Haiti are only now beginning to be visible to the outside world through media. As horrific and heart-rending as those scenes are, they serve a purpose in letting other nations comprehend the magnitude of the crisis and the urgency required in lending direct aid. The U.S. military is uniquely positioned to contribute.

Flight Deck of the USS Carl Vinson

What a difference a day makes: barely 24 hours ago, several hours before the earthquake struck, the Nimitz-class supercarrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70) was cranking up its nuclear engines and setting a peaceful course out of Hampton Roads at the base of the Chesapeake Bay, Virginia. At long last after completing a complex overhaul and new sea trials, she was heading south, to make the South America turn and return to homeport in San Diego as part of the Pacific Fleet.

To fix intelligence analysis you have to decide what’s broken

“More and more, Xmas Day failure looks to be wheat v. chaff issue, not info sharing issue.” – Marc Ambinder, politics editor for The Atlantic, on Twitter last night.

Marc Ambinder, a casual friend and solid reporter, has boiled down two likely avenues of intelligence “failure” relevant to the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and his attempted Christmas Day bombing on Northwest Airlines Flight 253.  In his telling, they’re apparently binary – one is true, not the other, at least for this case.

The two areas were originally signalled by President Obama in his remarks on Tuesday, when he discussed the preliminary findings of “a review of our terrorist watch list system …  so we can find out what went wrong, fix it and prevent future attacks.” 

Let’s examine these two areas of failure briefly – and what can and should be done to address them.

Cruise Missiles and Yemeni Neighborhoods

“The US is planning retaliatory strikes in Yemen against al-Qaida over its attempt to blow up a transatlantic flight on Christmas Day.  American officials [...] warn that finding those responsible is unlikely to be swift and say that identifying other ‘high-value’ al-Qaida targets for retaliatory attack would also be a priority.” – The Guardian (U.K.), 12/30/2009

As U.S. officials are quoted mulling cruise-missile strikes on Yemen, it should be noted that the Yemeni government, such as it is, has already been fighting the hard slog – on the ground, rooting out Al Qaeda in Yemeni neighborhoods and villages.

Below is an interesting 7 minutes of film fresh from Yemen,  just posted to youTube today:  a moment-by-moment video documenting the Arhab raid by the Yemeni Counter-Terrorist Unit (CTU) on an Al-Qaeda-in-the-Arabian-Peninsula (AQAP) safe-house, on 17 December, the same day as a coordinated U.S. cruise missile attack on another site.

Total Recall for Public Servants

MyLifeBits is a Microsoft Research project led by the legendary Gordon Bell, designed to put “all of his atom- and electron-based bits in his local Cyberspace….MyLifeBits includes everything he has accumulated, written, photographed, presented, and owns (e.g. CDs).” 

SenseCam - Click to enlarge

Among other technical means, Bell uses the SenseCam, a remarkable prototype from Microsoft Research.  It’s a nifty little wearable device that combines high-capacity memory, a fisheye lens passively capturing 3,000 images a day, along with an infrared sensor, temperature sensor, light sensor, accelerometer, and USB interface. My group has played with SenseCam a bit, and shared it with quite a few interested government parties and partners. More info on SenseCam here, and more on its parent Sensors and Devices Group in MSR.  

Intel and AMD Think Outside the Box

Everyone in Washington DC is indoors today because of the season’s first snow, or venturing only within an easy snow-shovel’s carry from the front door. DC always comes to a near-halt with even a dusting of snow, so with a foot or more last night and today, folks are immobile.  Here are my photos of our snow fun today, and below to entertain the snowbound I have three separate videos of innovation from Intel, Microsoft, and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

Inside Cyber Warfare

One year ago, the buzz across the government/technology nexus was focused on a pair of political guessing games. Neophytes mostly engaged in debating over whom the newly-elected President would name to be the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer. Grizzled Pentagon veterans and the more sober Silicon Valley types wondered instead who would get the nod as President Obama’s “Cyber Czar.”

Education for Information Security in a Connected World

Much of what I work on involves technologies which address information security and cyber security. So I have to ask, Who is training our next generation of technologists? And are those educators doing enough to focus on the dynamically changing demands of Information Security?

Those fundamental questions took me to Chicago recently, to take part in a roundtable discussion sponsored by DeVry University, “The Demand for Information Security in a Connected World.”

Gunning the Microsoft Semantic Engine

New Bing Maps Beta with embedded data layers from Twitter and other social feeds, click to enlarge screenshot

There’s a lot of information on the Internet already. Every day, more is added – a lot more. And while there are a concomitant number of new analytic or sense-making tools on the web, they butt up against the fact that the data – the all-important data – is held in multiple places, formats, and platforms.

How are we going to deal with all this? One approach is almost mechanical: ensuring that datasets can be accessed commonly, as in our new Microsoft Dallas platform associated with the Windows Azure cloud platform.  In the government realm, the anticipated reliance on “government-as-a-platform” (a meme popularized by Tim O’Reilly) holds promise in allowing somewhat aggregated datasets, openly accessible.