In a note to clients, Bernstein's Toni Sacconaghi takes a hard look at the flurry of patent lawsuits Apple has launched against the manufacturers of Google Android phones. All in all, he likes Apple's chances.
[Commentary] The Department of Defense's Strategy for Operating in Cyberspace is predicated upon five strategic initiatives. All five planks are logical and laudable in principle. But none of them are new or novel. To the contrary, many of these elements have been discussed as desiderata for years. That the strategic conversation and planning environment should still be so stunted is disappointing if not also disturbing. The omission of cyber weapons from the strategy, in terms of a treatment of their development and use, is the unacknowledged gorilla in the room.
One powerful dimension of the nation's deterrent may be the ability to quickly reconstitute damaged systems, regardless of the perpetrator. For now, though, strategic ambiguity remains: the United States will respond to grave attack (cyberspace being a "domain" akin to the others), but the instruments it would invoke are unspecified. Ambiguity may in fact be advantageous, permitting consideration of a range of response options and tools -- as long as there are markers in the sand concerning perpetrators, intentions and circumstances. Moving forward, other important open questions include the place and parameters, if any, of information operations in the form of "digital disinformation" that could be invoked to influence outcomes and behavior. While bits and bytes may never completely replace bullets and bombs, cyber tools can serve either as a force multiplier or as a separate channel of attack. Until policy and doctrine here catch up with technology and people, our cyber posture will remain more reactive and ad hoc, and therefore potentially less effective, than it should or could be. Some have even argued that it is too late for redress, and that we should instead start anew by building "a more hardened enterprise structure for some activities." Regardless of one's view on that matter, it highlights the overlap between critical services and national defense. As the strategy makes clear, Defense will help protect privately held critical infrastructure that supports military functions.
[Cilluffo is director of The George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute; Cardash is associate director of HSPI]
The dramatic July 22 attacks in Norway that resulted in the deaths of at least 68 people inspired a vibrant conversation in the blogosphere last week. While sympathy for the victims was significant, more time was devoted to conversations about the killer, Anders Behring Breivik, according to an analysis of social media conducted by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.
In the six days following the attacks (July 22-27), the largest component of the conversation on blogs (38%) involved passing along breaking news and facts. Bloggers passed along tidbits of information in the hours that followed the two attacks and then continued to share information about the death toll, Breivik's history and the developments in his prosecution. But fully 20% of the conversation focused on the motives and ideology of Breivik himself, a 32-year-old Norwegian who admitted he committed the murders in an attempt to "save" Norway and Western Europe from a Muslim takeover. The most common view about him at 15% of the total conversation was that he was a right-wing extremist. As more details about the shooter emerged, including the text of his 1,500 page manifesto, bloggers attached right-wing extremism to his motivations. A number of bloggers also tied his views to those of conservative political parties in Europe and the United States.
The Obama Administration launched the Government Accountability and Transparency Board.
The Board, first announced by the President and Vice President in June as part of the Campaign to Cut Waste, will focus on rooting out misspent tax dollars and making government spending more accessible and transparent for the American people. On July 28, the President named several of the nation’s top watchdogs and leaders on government accountability to the board, which will be led by interim chairman Earl Devaney. The Board is holding their first meeting this morning to begin developing plans to enhance transparency in federal spending and root out and stop waste, fraud, and abuse in federal programs.
Attorney General Eric Holder has agreed to meet Aug. 24 with some of the 9/11 family members regarding the Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiry into the allegations surrounding Rupert Murdoch's media empire.
According to a London tabloid's story based on unnamed sources, a former New York police officer-turned-private investigator said he'd been contacted by journalists from Murdoch's News of the World who offered to pay him to retrieve private phone records of Sept. 11 victims in the United States. The story said the investigator turned down the proposal. The U.S.-based parent company of Murdoch's operations, News Corp., has said that "we have not seen any evidence to suggest there was any hacking of 9/11 victim's phones, nor has anybody corroborated what are clearly very serious allegations.
If you want to know why tax from surging corporate profits isn't making much of a dent in the United States' crippling budget deficit, a glance at Microsoft's recent results provides some clues. Things were rosy in the giant software company's just-ended fiscal fourth quarter, which produced record sales of nearly $17.4 billion, a 30 percent increase in after-tax profit, and a 35 percent gain in earnings per share. But for the Internal Revenue Service and foreign tax authorities, things weren't so rosy. Microsoft reported only $445 million in taxes in the U.S. and other foreign countries, just 7 percent of its $6.32 billion in pre-tax profit. Given the rancor in Congress and in the country about how to tackle the nation's budget deficit and debt, including how companies stash profits overseas and enjoy lucrative tax breaks, it is instructive to see how the top brass at Microsoft's headquarters achieved this eye-popping tax result.
Most news websites look the way they do because most news organizations still approach journalism in a fairly traditional way, and until that changes and media outlets embrace the idea of “news as a process,” the way that their websites look is unlikely to change. In many cases he impression given is that the news displayed is frozen in time, a snapshot of reality taken at a particular moment — in some cases the previous day, and in other cases a time that is difficult to pin down.
The chairman and ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee introduced companion legislation to the Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act.
The measure would require the Government Printing Office to publish agency reports to Congress online within 30 days of their submission. Digital copies of the reports would have to be searchable by report text, key words and by the federal agencies that produced the reports and the Congressional committee that received them. Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL) introduced the House version of the legislation in May. It was reported out of the House Oversight Committee June 22 and is awaiting action by the full House.
If a new survey by Kelton Research is to be believed, 71 percent of 500 U.S. and U.K. employees feel so strongly about using their own mobile device over what IT offers that they're willing to give up at least one thing in the workplace to keep their preferred device.
At 58 percent, free coffee topped the list (perhaps reflecting the quality of typical office coffee), followed by free food (39 percent), and office supplies (30 percent). More than a quarter (26 percent) were even willing to give up paid parking, and 20 percent were willing to give up a vacation day. Half of the respondents said they would rather choose the mobile device they use at work instead of having the company make this decision for them. Although the Kelton survey was conducted for SAP's Sybase business, which has a vested interest in mobile heterogeneity, as it sells mobile device management (MDM) tools, its findings track with the reality revealed by Gartner and Forrester Research that already more than half of businesses let employees choose among mobile devices, even if the business still buys the hardware.
Experts say much more needs to be done by the government and corporations to ensure our national security.
"The problem is we have this thicket of 20th century rules that don't work in the 21st century," said Michael Chertoff, former Secretary of Homeland Security, in a talk last month hosted by analytics company Opera Solutions. "The concept of a 'person' as the only threat has lost is meaning. It may be a server; we can be at war with a network." In other words, protecting land, sea and air borders won't save you if your attackers are seconds away no matter where they are. For all the improvements that the government needs to make, the private sector lags further behind. A recent wave of cyberthreats began to scare corporations into beefing up their security, but companies have still been reluctant to spend. Still, experts say the nightmare scenario -- China disabling our defenses and attacking the country -- remains unlikely.
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