Stop by Tuesday for dinner or a drink with a great guy (and me)

I’m taking up my duties as a public-spirited citizen next week on Tuesday evening, by hosting a fun little fundraiser for my local Congressman – and if you’re going to be in Washington DC the evening of 10/27 I hope you’ll join me (click here for the invitation and details). It’ll be a fun evening; we’ll be at the ultra-cool Johnny’s Half-Shell on Capitol Hill after all.

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.

Spying on the A-12 OXCART

FACT: Today’s Tuscaloosa (Ala.) News has a great elegy for a pilot who died forty years ago: “Jack Weeks, University of Alabama graduate and Birmingham native, died in service to his country [on June 4, 1968]. Reports from his most famous mission wound up on the president’s desk during one of the flashpoints of the Cold War. His widow accepted his medal for valor shortly after his death. But for 40 years, nobody knew what he’d done. Only his wife knew he was a hero…. Weeks was a pilot in the Central Intelligence Agency flying the super-secret A-12 high-level surveillance aircraft from 1963 until his death in 1968. A couple of weeks before his death, he became the pilot who located the USS Pueblo, the American intelligence-gathering ship, after it was captured by North Korean patrol boats…. Next month, Weeks will finally get the public recognition he was denied for so long. Battleship Park, home of the USS Alabama, will commemorate the 40th anniversary of his death on June 4 with a ceremony that will include an Alabama Air National Guard fly-over.”

ANALYSIS: Friday I was over at CIA headquarters at Langley meeting with a friend, and once inside the compound I parked by the Agency’s newest historical exhibit. Situated on a new traffic island between two parking lots behind the original headquarters building, looming over rows of parked cars, is a massive, gorgeous, sleek black aircraft perched on shiny steel struts as if in flight, twenty feet off the ground.