Contributing to Intelligence Innovation

Below are two ways to contribute to innovation in government, and specifically in intelligence matters. One is for you to consider, the other is a fun new path for me.

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.

A-Space Past and Future

This week marks the second anniversary of the first live internal demo of the intelligence community’s A-Space project, groundbreaking for the IC in its goal of collaborative use of social media across agency lines. Somewhere in Maryland, a remarkable government employee and friend named Mike Wertheimer should pause and quietly celebrate the fruition of his early evangelism for it.

I was still a government employee then, but wrote about the effort at the time here on Shepherd’s Pi (“A-Space: Top-secret social networking“). It makes me chuckle to remember back to those days when it was still mostly unheard-of for IC employees to blog openly on the public web about current technology projects. Now you can’t shut ’em up! 🙂

It made sense, I thought, to set down a few notes at the time for several reasons:

Cyber Deterrence Symposium webcast

As I type this, I’m sitting in a seventh-floor conference area at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, listening to the keynote speaker for the second of five panels today in the “Cyber Deterrence Symposium,” a joint production of INSA (the Intelligence and National Security Alliance), and the Homeland Security Policy Institute.

If you’re reading this on the day of the symposium (Monday November 2, 2009), you can tune in to the live webcast of the speakers and panels. It is a stellar line-up, see the roster below.

Obama Team Infighting on Intelligence

The easiest prediction in Washington is this one: “bureaucratic turf war.” The Obama Administration isn’t immune. Several months ago when the president-elect announced his names for DNI and CIA director, I put forth this idea:  “Swap Blair and Panetta: A Modest Proposal.”  In it I wondered, between the two of them, “Who gets the top bunk?”

Well, they still haven’t figured that out yet. 

DHS Job Opening for Cyber Security CTO

There’s been much press attention to the promised new position of “Federal Chief Technology Officer” in the new Obama Administration, but the government has another vitally important CTO opening, and the job advertisement just got posted.

Agency: Department Of Homeland Security, DHS Headquarters
Sub Agency: National Cyber Security Center
Job Announcement Number: CHCO-08-055DHS
Title: Chief Technology Officer
Salary Range: 117,787.00 – 177,000.00 USD
Series & Grade: [Senior Executive Service] ES-2210-00/00
Duty Location: Washington DC Metro Area, DC

   – USAJOBS.com listing 

 

I received an email last week from a DHS friend quietly asking that I “publicize” the listing once it was posted, which was scheduled to be last week.  I checked for it online Friday – the first day applications were to be accepted – but must have looked too early for I didn’t see it listed.  That’s understandable, given the holidays, so I checked again last night, prompted by a note from Bob Gourley of CrucialPoint, and the listing was live.

The listing has an application deadline of Thursday, January 15, 2009, so if you’re interested in applying you had better get cracking.

Let’s look at a couple of the specific points mentioned in the job announcement.

Some say Obama has already chosen Cyber Czar

I’ll wade into the breach again, of analyzing (and trying to anticipate) some national-security appointments for the new Obama Administration.  Today I must admit that I’m taken with the latest reportage from the U.K. Spectator – a quite conservative publication not usually known for its closeness to the Obama inner circle.

Quick – What’s Your Idea to Improve Homeland Security?

If you have a brilliant idea for protecting Homeland Security – and your idea can stand up to competitive scrutiny – have I got a proposal for you. The well-respected Christopher Columbus Fellowship Foundation has extended its deadline for entries for their $25,000 Homeland Security Award program, presented by AgustaWestland (the helicopter giant). Darlene Cavalier of the Foundation asked me today to remind my readers: “Super simple online nomination process: Here’s the Award entry site, and no fee to enter. However, the deadline is this Friday, May 30 at 5pm EST.”

A Roadmap for Innovation – from Center or the Edge?

Fact:   In marking its five-year anniversary earlier this month, the Department of Homeland Security released a fact sheet touting the department’s accomplishments in that time, including “establish[ing] the Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) to provide a 24-hour watch, warning, and response operations center, which in 2007 issued over 200 actionable alerts on cyber security vulnerabilities or incidents. US-CERT developed the EINSTEIN intrusion detection program, which collects, analyzes, and shares computer security information across the federal civilian government. EINSTEIN is currently deployed at 15 federal agencies, including DHS, and plans are in place to expand the program to all federal departments and agencies.”

Analysis:  I’m not going to write, in this post at least, about US-CERT and EINSTEIN in particular. I will point out that some writers have been skeptical of “Big DHS” progress on cyber security up to now, and the anniversary was an occasion for much cynical commentary. 

Charles Cooper in his popular Coop’s Corner blog on CNet wrote that “when it comes to network security, DHS appears to be more of a wet noodle than even its sharpest critics assumed… Talk with security consultants and former government officials involved with DHS and you come away wondering what these folks do all day.”

Expect Some “New Thinking” on Cyber Security…

FACT: Department of Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff last week: “I am pleased to announce my appointment of Rod Beckstrom as the first Director of the National Cyber Security Center. Rod will serve the department by coordinating cyber security efforts and improving situational awareness and information sharing across the federal government.”

ANALYSIS: There are people who think inside the box, those who think outside the box, and those who ask: What box?

Then there are “the anti-box people.”  They see the box, shove it on its side, stomp on it to squeeze it flat, and consign it to recycling where it belongs.

One of those kind of people is Rod Beckstrom, a well-known Silicon Valley successful entrepreneur and author. I knew him at Stanford, aeons ago, and like others recognized his leadership drive when he ran successfully for student body president, and he left with both a BA and MBA on the way to forming his first successful software startup.

I was surprised when I read last week that Rod is moving to Washington to take a high-level government job.