The situation apparently is not as bad as I had thought, if the data and conclusions in the Wall Street Journal article I have linked to below are correct. The U.S. competitive position is not as at-risk as I had concluded from so many articles in the popular and industry press, as well as from anecdotal encounters. I had thought that, especially since 9/11, the United States had made it much harder for foreign students with degrees in science and engineering to stay here, with very detrimental consequences for U.S. industry, competitiveness, and the future.
This is also good news even for those of you who require your hires to obtain security clearances in order to work in the government or for government contractors. If the total pool of science and engineering PhDs is larger it means that the competition for finding and hiring qualified graduates for all positions is not as intense, relatively speaking. At least some of the positions that don’t require clearances will be filled by people who can’t or won’t get clearances, instead of by people who are eligible to obtain clearances. That isn't to say that they would be interested in jobs that do require clearances, but that's a different issue.
Nevertheless, the United States doesn't graduate enough students in the sciences and engineering. (Full disclosure and mea culpa: I started out back in my undergraduate days as an engineering major — but didn't finish. Frankly, I would not have made a good engineer. But, as many of you know, I have still retained a deep passion for science and engineering.) Yes, it's hard — or harder. But the way science is taught in K-12 leaves a lot to be desired. And when they graduate, science and engineering majors aren't paid enough. All in all, not the best incentives.
U.S. Keeps Foreign Ph.D.s
Despite Fears of a Post-9/11 Drop, Most Science, Engineering Post-Grads Have Stayed.
By David Wessel
The Wall Street Journal
January 26, 2010
Most foreigners who came to the U.S. to earn doctorate degrees in science and engineering stayed on after graduation—at least until the recession began—refuting predictions that post-9/11 restrictions on immigrants or expanding opportunities in China and India would send more of them home.
Newly released data revealed that 62% of foreigners holding temporary visas who earned Ph.D.s in science and engineering at U.S. universities in 2002 were still in the U.S. in 2007, the latest year for which figures are available. Of those who graduated in 1997, 60% were still in the U.S. in 2007, according to the data compiled by the U.S. Energy Department's Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education for the National Science Foundation.
Foreigners account for about 40% of all science and engineering Ph.D. holders working in the U.S., and ...
Friday, January 29, 2010
Thursday, January 28, 2010
A modest proposal (and my comments)
I want to emphasize that the following article is supposed to be satirical (the author emphasizes that point several times during the article), though many of the points he makes are not satirical.
I also want to emphasize that almost all his criticism is directed at the CIA, although he takes a swing or two at the intelligence community as a whole. Note also that he is suggesting that the U.S. government should outsource the CIA, not the entire intelligence community.
Actually, he's a bit late in suggesting outsourcing of the CIA or any other intelligence agencies. Approximately three-quarters of the 100,000-plus people who work in the intelligence community are contractors. In my humble opinion, we've gone too far in terms of outsourcing intelligence responsibilities, functions, and activities that are and should be considered inherently governmental. But that's another story.
On the other hand, the idea that investigative reporters could do a better job than many CIA analysts and agents does have more than a little merit. On the other other hand, those former reporters will probably find that they haven't escaped dysfunctional management and bureaucratic politics just because they've left the newsroom. They may have just leaped from the frying pan into the fire.
But remember — the following article is a satire...
Outsource the CIA to Downsized Reporters
By Ron Rosenbaum
Slate.com
January 22, 2010
It's rare that one is able to solve two profoundly troubling societal problems with one quick fix, but I feel I've done it! Well, in a metaphorical, Swiftian, satirical "Modest Proposal" way. I suspect that most Slate readers will be aware that Jonathan Swift's 18th-century "Modest Proposal" to solve the Irish famine by encouraging starving parents to eat their children was meant as satire, right? Because when I ran my own modest proposal by a journalist friend, she took it a little too seriously, and heatedly informed me, "That's the worst idea I ever heard!" That's sort of the point! When things are bad, the only way to make the situation crystal-clear is to show how difficult it would be to come up with an idea that is ludicrously worse.
On the other hand, as they say in cheesy movies, "Sounds crazy, but it just might work!"
So: My modest proposal to solve America's "intelligence" failures is to fire the entire CIA and our other many tragically inept intelligence agencies and outsource all intelligence operations to investigative reporters downsized by the collapse of the newspaper business. Thereby improving our "intelligence capability" (it can't possibly get worse!) and giving a paycheck to some worthy and skilled investigative types — yes, some sketchy, crazed, paranoid (but in a colorful, obsessive, yet often highly effective way) reporters who once made the journalism profession proud, exciting, and useful, not boring stenography for the power elites.
How bad are things in U.S. intelligence? I refer you to a Jan. 20 Reuters report on the Congressional investigation into the failure to "connect the dots" on the Christmas bomber: the guy who — as just about everybody in the world except U.S. intelligence knew — was trying to blow up a plane. Why?
A senior counterterrorism official said on Wednesday his agency lacks "Google-like" search capability that could have identified the suspect in the attempted Christmas Day airline bombing.
The National Counterterrorism Center, the agency charged with reviewing disparate data to protect against attacks, does not have a computer search engine that could have checked for various spellings of the alleged bomber's name and his birthplace in Nigeria, the center's chief told a Senate hearing on security reform. "We do not have that exact capacity," said Michael Leiter, adding that the agency is working on solutions that could be in place within weeks.
Don't you love "that exact capacity"? Sort of trying to say they almost have the capacity but not ... exactly. Remember the Hertz commercial in which a junior exec gets some loser car and has to say that it's "not exactly" what he could have gotten from Hertz? I see Michael Leiter pulling up in a DayGlo-painted clown car, his crack team of Google-like computer experts in full clown makeup emerging with their Commodore 64s at the ready saying, "We almost identified the would-be terror bomber, but ... not exactly."
That's the Michael Leiter, by the way, who is our Supreme Chief of Connecting the Dots in our gazillionith reorganization of U.S. intelligence. Yes, that would be the same Michael Leiter who decided after the Christmas bombing attempt to proceed with his previously booked ski vacation. Hey, the "Google-like" capacity wouldn't be available for weeks, so why not spend some cozy time at a ski resort with all the fixings, maybe even some after-dinner Pong or Donkey Kong.
Why this guy hasn't been summarily fired, not just for the vacation (hope the trails were fluffy!) but for the lack of a "Google-like" search capacity for U.S. intelligence is baffling to anyone with any intelligence. And I think it's sufficient evidence that my modest proposal should be taken more seriously. After thinking about my proposal for a few days during my ski vacation, I've come up with some bells and whistles for it.
I wouldn't stop with firing our entire intelligence team (leave behind the slide rules, though, will you guys, before you turn out the lights — or blow out the candles?) and outsourcing their jobs to downsized print journalists. I'd include the unfairly down-played and down-market wings of media that get no respect, like The Enquirer. (Who knew Hugo Chavez had a love child?) I'd enlist the legion of bloggers and even celebrity-gossip Web sites to join in my new U.S. intelligence team. Do you have any doubt that it would take TMZ less than 48 hours to come up with an (alleged) Mullah Omar sex tape? Or for Gawker Stalker to spot OBL at a Kandahar bazaar. Or for Page Six to get the details on the "gymnastic" skills of Vladimir Putin's 20-somethng hottie and link her somehow to Tila Tequila?
I know: J-school ethicists wouldn't approve of this, and I agree with Glenn Greenwald's argument that journalists shouldn't get mixed up in government business, and I've practiced what I preached. (I once turned down a CIA offer to deliver a lecture about Hitler and the nature of evil at their Langley headquarters.) But, hey, do I need to reiterate that this is a "modest proposal" satire remember.
And I wouldn't limit my recruitment to the new CIA (renamed the Creative Intelligence Agency) to just the downsized. Why not unleash some of the still-employed fearsome legends of investigative reporting, like Sy Hersh or Jane Mayer, on our nation's foes? They invariably have ways of outsmarting the CIA's rudimentary secrecy protections, publishing leaks from inside sources. The warrantless wiretaps, the "black flight" illegal renditions of suspects to torture-friendly countries, the "enhanced interrogation" torture program itself, you name it — if the CIA's got a secret, the New York Times and the Washington Post have it a day later.
These reporters have managed to infiltrate the CIA far better than the CIA has infiltrated any terrorist organization. The CIA has compiled a history of failure so replete with lethal blunders that even when a self-proclaimed mole within al-Qaida told them he could get al-Qaida's No. 2 man, al-Zawahiri, they credulously and, alas, tragically got the go-ahead to trust him and ended up losing seven lives because they were so eager to end their relentless run of defeats.
Newsmen have taken such a beating lately from the likes of corporate consultant-racket profiteers such as Jeff Jarvis, who get paid handsomely to tell the executive drones who hire them as consultants that the collapse of the newspaper industry wasn't their fault. No, it was somehow the fault of the reporters they had to fire to maintain their perks, so that these execs don't have to carry anything on their conscience about it. Just keep paying Jeff to tell them fairy tales about the future, and someday they'll find an online business model that really, really works (for Jeff, anyway).
Indeed, my modest proposal might be a morale booster to show the world just how resourceful and skillful and "creative" U.S. reporters can be. I'm not suggesting a Pulitzer Prize for spying. Maybe a Congressional Medal of Honor though. (Kidding!)
Let's face it: The only good secrets our intelligence agencies have are quickly scooped up and published by ace investigative reporters. In fact, any group of people randomly selected from the phone book (or Facebook) could have compiled a better record than our intelligence agencies over the past half-century. They've made us a laughingstock.
Do I need to recount the dismal, abysmal, horrible, very bad record of U.S. intelligence agencies over the past half-century? They may as well have been run by our worst enemies. (Indeed, some paranoia-inclined analysts believe they were run by double agents and moles, but my inclination is to follow the maxim: "Never believe in conspiracies when sheer incompetence provides an explanation.")
You want to see incompetence? Look at the record (or read Tim Weiner's encyclopedic compilation of CIA failures, Legacy of Ashes, for a start). After their hall-of-fame-worthy bungling of the Bay of Pigs, CIA incompetents almost got us into a global nuclear holocaust over the Cuban Missile Crisis, when they assured the Pentagon in October 1962 that the Russians had not yet armed their nukes in Cuba. This turned out to be totally false: The nukes were assembled, armed, and aimed, and Khrushchev had given operational control to Castro already, so that the invasion the Joint Chiefs almost talked JFK into would have almost certainly been an instant Armageddon. Heckuva job, Langley!
Then there's the endemic problem with "connecting the dots" — which dates back to the veritable dot matrix that Lee Harvey Oswald presented, one that the CIA ignored (or siloed as the fashionable new management jargon has it). After all, consider Oswald: a guy who defects to the Soviet Union proclaiming his belief in communism and hatred of America, then redefects to the United States, where he gets deeply involved in violent post-Bay of Pigs CIA-financed intrigue, proceeds to threatens an FBI man who tries to question him, buys a rifle, and happens to work within gun scope range of the presidential motorcade. Nothing much here for the CIA to be concerned about or communicate to the Secret Service watch list, right?
Did all of this have something to do with the CIA being run by elite, WASP, Skull and Bones types who were pitifully easy marks for the darker-skinned people they were trying to control? Yes. But there was also a kind of Higher Stupidity at the CIA that masked itself as "complexity."
You can see this in the whole "molehunt" madness initiated by legendary (for paranoid delusion) James Jesus Angleton, the chief of the CIA's counter intelligence division for two misbegotten decades, who was made a fool of by Kim Philby, the British KGB operative who was perhaps the most obvious mole in history but who appealed to Angleton's Anglophilia, a pathology of most of the upper-class twits who ran the CIA from the beginning. After Philby made a fool of him, Angleton went mad, turned the CIA into a place where the paranoid inmates ran the asylum in their insane hunt for a nonexistent mole, a foolish crusade that utterly paralyzed the agency's chief mission: spying on the Soviets. And so at the height of the Cold War, the CIA had no intelligence it trusted about the Soviets.
Then, when it turned out there were no CIA moles during Angleton's watch, his hypervigilance discredited ordinary, rational vigilance and allowed a blundering creep like Aldrich Ames, a real mole, to steal every secret the CIA had for Soviet cash and cause the death of an untold number of our operatives in Moscow.
And then there was the Team A/Team B fiasco, another profoundly dangerous screw-up. It wasn't a bad idea in theory. George H.W. Bush, head of the CIA under President Ford, was persuaded that there was doubt about CIA estimates of Soviet missile progress, doubt raised by perennial "missile gap" alarmists. He appointed a team of outside "experts" to investigate and offer an alternative analysis, beyond the agency's.
They became known as "Team B" to the CIA's in-house "Team A," and they produced what turned out to be a totally inaccurate overestimate of Soviet capabilities and intentions. (See Cold War historian Pavel Podvig's demolition of Team B's conclusions in the light of history.) Nonetheless, in a kind of forerunner to the WMD fiasco, Team B's paranoid analysis became the basis for the $1 trillion arms buildup during the Reagan administration to match the Soviet's illusory gains. Paradoxically, Team B's overestimation and the insane overspending that resulted may have made them a key factor in causing the collapse of the Soviet Union. The CIA's stunning record of ineptness led to Team B's epoch-making mistake. As Dylan wrote, "There's no success like failure." Though, he added, "Failure's no success at all."
The CIA's post Cold War failures are all too well-known from the WMD fiasco. (CIA head George Tenet famously told the president it was "a slam dunk" they were there. Maybe by "slam dunk" he was thinking of water-boarding and other supereffective "enhanced interrogation" methods that were shamefully adopted by the intelligence community.) And, of course, the entire intelligence community had a hand in producing the now-discredited 2007 National Intelligence estimate on the Iranian nuclear weapons program, which left the credulous media with the impression: nuthin' goin' on.
A record like that, an unprecedented, massive, relentless record of failure deserves only one response: accountability. We've got to fire them all. At the very least, this action would say that failure won't be the new normal forever. But who to replace them with? And who to handle the transition?
My modest proposal may have been engendered by rereading something I wrote a while ago in Harper's ("The Shadow of the Mole," October 1983, subscription only) about the whole Angleton mole madness which mentioned a little noticed Washington conference on "intelligence," sponsored by a shadowy group called "The Consortium for the Study of Intelligence." The conference produced a volume, Intelligence Requirements for the 1980s. In it was a paper by veteran espionage journalist (and Slate contributor) Edward Jay Epstein, who I think should play a key role in managing the transition after we fire the CIA en masse.
Epstein's essay had the forbidding academic-sounding title "Incorporating Analysis of Foreign Governments' Deception Into the U.S. Analytical System." But buried within it was an important distinction between "Type A Deception," which involved manipulation of foreign governments' perception of our overt behavior, and "Type B Deception," which "purports to emanate from the highest levels of decision making" — and might involve journalists staging deception — giving the foe a false impression of our secret, esoteric strategy. I'm not doing its complexity justice.
But there was a key passage in the essay that startled me because it broke out of the gray, bureaucratic prose of most of the volume to raise an imaginative, even cinematic idea: a "Type B Deception" team. "It might conceivably employ functional paranoids, confidence men, magicians, film scenarists or whomever seemed appropriate to simulate whatever deception plots seemed plausible."
"Functional paranoids?" "Confidence men." He might as well be describing the mind and character of our better investigative reporters! I'm not strictly an investigative reporter myself, though I've done a lot of it, and I know a lot of them and I think I know the mind-set. They'd be a perfect fit for replacing our discredited intelligence community.
My first step would be to contact the IRE (the Investigative Reporters and Editors organization) and see whether we can scare up some volunteers. Then I'd ask Ed to be my (wartime) consigliore. We will save America from its external enemies! We will end abusive practices and endless bungles! We will put the dangerous, worse-than-useless CIA out to pasture.
That's my modest proposal.
Ron Rosenbaum is the author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler.
I also want to emphasize that almost all his criticism is directed at the CIA, although he takes a swing or two at the intelligence community as a whole. Note also that he is suggesting that the U.S. government should outsource the CIA, not the entire intelligence community.
Actually, he's a bit late in suggesting outsourcing of the CIA or any other intelligence agencies. Approximately three-quarters of the 100,000-plus people who work in the intelligence community are contractors. In my humble opinion, we've gone too far in terms of outsourcing intelligence responsibilities, functions, and activities that are and should be considered inherently governmental. But that's another story.
On the other hand, the idea that investigative reporters could do a better job than many CIA analysts and agents does have more than a little merit. On the other other hand, those former reporters will probably find that they haven't escaped dysfunctional management and bureaucratic politics just because they've left the newsroom. They may have just leaped from the frying pan into the fire.
But remember — the following article is a satire...
Outsource the CIA to Downsized Reporters
By Ron Rosenbaum
Slate.com
January 22, 2010
It's rare that one is able to solve two profoundly troubling societal problems with one quick fix, but I feel I've done it! Well, in a metaphorical, Swiftian, satirical "Modest Proposal" way. I suspect that most Slate readers will be aware that Jonathan Swift's 18th-century "Modest Proposal" to solve the Irish famine by encouraging starving parents to eat their children was meant as satire, right? Because when I ran my own modest proposal by a journalist friend, she took it a little too seriously, and heatedly informed me, "That's the worst idea I ever heard!" That's sort of the point! When things are bad, the only way to make the situation crystal-clear is to show how difficult it would be to come up with an idea that is ludicrously worse.
On the other hand, as they say in cheesy movies, "Sounds crazy, but it just might work!"
So: My modest proposal to solve America's "intelligence" failures is to fire the entire CIA and our other many tragically inept intelligence agencies and outsource all intelligence operations to investigative reporters downsized by the collapse of the newspaper business. Thereby improving our "intelligence capability" (it can't possibly get worse!) and giving a paycheck to some worthy and skilled investigative types — yes, some sketchy, crazed, paranoid (but in a colorful, obsessive, yet often highly effective way) reporters who once made the journalism profession proud, exciting, and useful, not boring stenography for the power elites.
How bad are things in U.S. intelligence? I refer you to a Jan. 20 Reuters report on the Congressional investigation into the failure to "connect the dots" on the Christmas bomber: the guy who — as just about everybody in the world except U.S. intelligence knew — was trying to blow up a plane. Why?
A senior counterterrorism official said on Wednesday his agency lacks "Google-like" search capability that could have identified the suspect in the attempted Christmas Day airline bombing.
The National Counterterrorism Center, the agency charged with reviewing disparate data to protect against attacks, does not have a computer search engine that could have checked for various spellings of the alleged bomber's name and his birthplace in Nigeria, the center's chief told a Senate hearing on security reform. "We do not have that exact capacity," said Michael Leiter, adding that the agency is working on solutions that could be in place within weeks.
Don't you love "that exact capacity"? Sort of trying to say they almost have the capacity but not ... exactly. Remember the Hertz commercial in which a junior exec gets some loser car and has to say that it's "not exactly" what he could have gotten from Hertz? I see Michael Leiter pulling up in a DayGlo-painted clown car, his crack team of Google-like computer experts in full clown makeup emerging with their Commodore 64s at the ready saying, "We almost identified the would-be terror bomber, but ... not exactly."
That's the Michael Leiter, by the way, who is our Supreme Chief of Connecting the Dots in our gazillionith reorganization of U.S. intelligence. Yes, that would be the same Michael Leiter who decided after the Christmas bombing attempt to proceed with his previously booked ski vacation. Hey, the "Google-like" capacity wouldn't be available for weeks, so why not spend some cozy time at a ski resort with all the fixings, maybe even some after-dinner Pong or Donkey Kong.
Why this guy hasn't been summarily fired, not just for the vacation (hope the trails were fluffy!) but for the lack of a "Google-like" search capacity for U.S. intelligence is baffling to anyone with any intelligence. And I think it's sufficient evidence that my modest proposal should be taken more seriously. After thinking about my proposal for a few days during my ski vacation, I've come up with some bells and whistles for it.
I wouldn't stop with firing our entire intelligence team (leave behind the slide rules, though, will you guys, before you turn out the lights — or blow out the candles?) and outsourcing their jobs to downsized print journalists. I'd include the unfairly down-played and down-market wings of media that get no respect, like The Enquirer. (Who knew Hugo Chavez had a love child?) I'd enlist the legion of bloggers and even celebrity-gossip Web sites to join in my new U.S. intelligence team. Do you have any doubt that it would take TMZ less than 48 hours to come up with an (alleged) Mullah Omar sex tape? Or for Gawker Stalker to spot OBL at a Kandahar bazaar. Or for Page Six to get the details on the "gymnastic" skills of Vladimir Putin's 20-somethng hottie and link her somehow to Tila Tequila?
I know: J-school ethicists wouldn't approve of this, and I agree with Glenn Greenwald's argument that journalists shouldn't get mixed up in government business, and I've practiced what I preached. (I once turned down a CIA offer to deliver a lecture about Hitler and the nature of evil at their Langley headquarters.) But, hey, do I need to reiterate that this is a "modest proposal" satire remember.
And I wouldn't limit my recruitment to the new CIA (renamed the Creative Intelligence Agency) to just the downsized. Why not unleash some of the still-employed fearsome legends of investigative reporting, like Sy Hersh or Jane Mayer, on our nation's foes? They invariably have ways of outsmarting the CIA's rudimentary secrecy protections, publishing leaks from inside sources. The warrantless wiretaps, the "black flight" illegal renditions of suspects to torture-friendly countries, the "enhanced interrogation" torture program itself, you name it — if the CIA's got a secret, the New York Times and the Washington Post have it a day later.
These reporters have managed to infiltrate the CIA far better than the CIA has infiltrated any terrorist organization. The CIA has compiled a history of failure so replete with lethal blunders that even when a self-proclaimed mole within al-Qaida told them he could get al-Qaida's No. 2 man, al-Zawahiri, they credulously and, alas, tragically got the go-ahead to trust him and ended up losing seven lives because they were so eager to end their relentless run of defeats.
Newsmen have taken such a beating lately from the likes of corporate consultant-racket profiteers such as Jeff Jarvis, who get paid handsomely to tell the executive drones who hire them as consultants that the collapse of the newspaper industry wasn't their fault. No, it was somehow the fault of the reporters they had to fire to maintain their perks, so that these execs don't have to carry anything on their conscience about it. Just keep paying Jeff to tell them fairy tales about the future, and someday they'll find an online business model that really, really works (for Jeff, anyway).
Indeed, my modest proposal might be a morale booster to show the world just how resourceful and skillful and "creative" U.S. reporters can be. I'm not suggesting a Pulitzer Prize for spying. Maybe a Congressional Medal of Honor though. (Kidding!)
Let's face it: The only good secrets our intelligence agencies have are quickly scooped up and published by ace investigative reporters. In fact, any group of people randomly selected from the phone book (or Facebook) could have compiled a better record than our intelligence agencies over the past half-century. They've made us a laughingstock.
Do I need to recount the dismal, abysmal, horrible, very bad record of U.S. intelligence agencies over the past half-century? They may as well have been run by our worst enemies. (Indeed, some paranoia-inclined analysts believe they were run by double agents and moles, but my inclination is to follow the maxim: "Never believe in conspiracies when sheer incompetence provides an explanation.")
You want to see incompetence? Look at the record (or read Tim Weiner's encyclopedic compilation of CIA failures, Legacy of Ashes, for a start). After their hall-of-fame-worthy bungling of the Bay of Pigs, CIA incompetents almost got us into a global nuclear holocaust over the Cuban Missile Crisis, when they assured the Pentagon in October 1962 that the Russians had not yet armed their nukes in Cuba. This turned out to be totally false: The nukes were assembled, armed, and aimed, and Khrushchev had given operational control to Castro already, so that the invasion the Joint Chiefs almost talked JFK into would have almost certainly been an instant Armageddon. Heckuva job, Langley!
Then there's the endemic problem with "connecting the dots" — which dates back to the veritable dot matrix that Lee Harvey Oswald presented, one that the CIA ignored (or siloed as the fashionable new management jargon has it). After all, consider Oswald: a guy who defects to the Soviet Union proclaiming his belief in communism and hatred of America, then redefects to the United States, where he gets deeply involved in violent post-Bay of Pigs CIA-financed intrigue, proceeds to threatens an FBI man who tries to question him, buys a rifle, and happens to work within gun scope range of the presidential motorcade. Nothing much here for the CIA to be concerned about or communicate to the Secret Service watch list, right?
Did all of this have something to do with the CIA being run by elite, WASP, Skull and Bones types who were pitifully easy marks for the darker-skinned people they were trying to control? Yes. But there was also a kind of Higher Stupidity at the CIA that masked itself as "complexity."
You can see this in the whole "molehunt" madness initiated by legendary (for paranoid delusion) James Jesus Angleton, the chief of the CIA's counter intelligence division for two misbegotten decades, who was made a fool of by Kim Philby, the British KGB operative who was perhaps the most obvious mole in history but who appealed to Angleton's Anglophilia, a pathology of most of the upper-class twits who ran the CIA from the beginning. After Philby made a fool of him, Angleton went mad, turned the CIA into a place where the paranoid inmates ran the asylum in their insane hunt for a nonexistent mole, a foolish crusade that utterly paralyzed the agency's chief mission: spying on the Soviets. And so at the height of the Cold War, the CIA had no intelligence it trusted about the Soviets.
Then, when it turned out there were no CIA moles during Angleton's watch, his hypervigilance discredited ordinary, rational vigilance and allowed a blundering creep like Aldrich Ames, a real mole, to steal every secret the CIA had for Soviet cash and cause the death of an untold number of our operatives in Moscow.
And then there was the Team A/Team B fiasco, another profoundly dangerous screw-up. It wasn't a bad idea in theory. George H.W. Bush, head of the CIA under President Ford, was persuaded that there was doubt about CIA estimates of Soviet missile progress, doubt raised by perennial "missile gap" alarmists. He appointed a team of outside "experts" to investigate and offer an alternative analysis, beyond the agency's.
They became known as "Team B" to the CIA's in-house "Team A," and they produced what turned out to be a totally inaccurate overestimate of Soviet capabilities and intentions. (See Cold War historian Pavel Podvig's demolition of Team B's conclusions in the light of history.) Nonetheless, in a kind of forerunner to the WMD fiasco, Team B's paranoid analysis became the basis for the $1 trillion arms buildup during the Reagan administration to match the Soviet's illusory gains. Paradoxically, Team B's overestimation and the insane overspending that resulted may have made them a key factor in causing the collapse of the Soviet Union. The CIA's stunning record of ineptness led to Team B's epoch-making mistake. As Dylan wrote, "There's no success like failure." Though, he added, "Failure's no success at all."
The CIA's post Cold War failures are all too well-known from the WMD fiasco. (CIA head George Tenet famously told the president it was "a slam dunk" they were there. Maybe by "slam dunk" he was thinking of water-boarding and other supereffective "enhanced interrogation" methods that were shamefully adopted by the intelligence community.) And, of course, the entire intelligence community had a hand in producing the now-discredited 2007 National Intelligence estimate on the Iranian nuclear weapons program, which left the credulous media with the impression: nuthin' goin' on.
A record like that, an unprecedented, massive, relentless record of failure deserves only one response: accountability. We've got to fire them all. At the very least, this action would say that failure won't be the new normal forever. But who to replace them with? And who to handle the transition?
My modest proposal may have been engendered by rereading something I wrote a while ago in Harper's ("The Shadow of the Mole," October 1983, subscription only) about the whole Angleton mole madness which mentioned a little noticed Washington conference on "intelligence," sponsored by a shadowy group called "The Consortium for the Study of Intelligence." The conference produced a volume, Intelligence Requirements for the 1980s. In it was a paper by veteran espionage journalist (and Slate contributor) Edward Jay Epstein, who I think should play a key role in managing the transition after we fire the CIA en masse.
Epstein's essay had the forbidding academic-sounding title "Incorporating Analysis of Foreign Governments' Deception Into the U.S. Analytical System." But buried within it was an important distinction between "Type A Deception," which involved manipulation of foreign governments' perception of our overt behavior, and "Type B Deception," which "purports to emanate from the highest levels of decision making" — and might involve journalists staging deception — giving the foe a false impression of our secret, esoteric strategy. I'm not doing its complexity justice.
But there was a key passage in the essay that startled me because it broke out of the gray, bureaucratic prose of most of the volume to raise an imaginative, even cinematic idea: a "Type B Deception" team. "It might conceivably employ functional paranoids, confidence men, magicians, film scenarists or whomever seemed appropriate to simulate whatever deception plots seemed plausible."
"Functional paranoids?" "Confidence men." He might as well be describing the mind and character of our better investigative reporters! I'm not strictly an investigative reporter myself, though I've done a lot of it, and I know a lot of them and I think I know the mind-set. They'd be a perfect fit for replacing our discredited intelligence community.
My first step would be to contact the IRE (the Investigative Reporters and Editors organization) and see whether we can scare up some volunteers. Then I'd ask Ed to be my (wartime) consigliore. We will save America from its external enemies! We will end abusive practices and endless bungles! We will put the dangerous, worse-than-useless CIA out to pasture.
That's my modest proposal.
Ron Rosenbaum is the author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Cyberdefenders Protect Navy Networks
Navy Cyber Defense Operations Command Gets On the Offensive to Guard Information Operations
By Mark Kagan
Military Information Technology
December 2009
The July 2009 announcement by the Chief of Naval Operations that a new Fleet Cyber Command/ Tenth Fleet (FLTCYBERCOM) would be stood up by the end of the year signaled the profound importance and priority that the Navy is giving to the cyberwarfare domain. FLTCYBERCOM, which will also become the Navy component of the new U.S. Cyber Command, will bring together under one command the Navy’s information technology, intelligence and communications operations and will eventually comprise 45,000 personnel.
A key component of FLTCYBERCOM will be the Navy Cyber Defense Operations Command (NCDOC), which is responsible for coordinating, monitoring and overseeing the defense of the Navy’s computer networks and systems and their 700,000 users worldwide. NCDOC’s areas of responsibility encompass the Navy’s centrally managed NIPRNet and SIPRNet enclaves, which consist of the Navy Marine Corps Intranet, Integrated Shipboard Network System and OCONUS Navy Enterprise Network. These networks total approximately 350,000 seats.
NCDOC’s areas of responsibility also include legacy and “excepted” networks. Legacy networks are those networks that have not migrated into a centrally managed enclave or have not been designated as an excepted network. Excepted networks are networks that have been authorized by the Cyber Asset Reduction and Security Task Force to operate independently of a centrally managed network. Legacy and excepted networks comprise approximately 190,000 seats.
NCDOC executes computer network defense (CND) across the Navy through a group of operations centers that are aligned to the centrally managed enclaves. Command, control and coordination of the defense of legacy and excepted networks vary because of the unique nature of these networks. NCDOC also maintains close liaison with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which is the Navy’s cybercrime prosecution authority.
Based in Norfolk, Va., NCDOC reports to the Naval Network Warfare Command and is operationally aligned to the Joint Task Force-Global Network Operations, the lead Department of Defense organization designated to identify and mitigate threats to DoD information networks and to direct the defense of the Global Information Grid (GIG).
COMPUTER NETWORK DEFENSE
As the Navy’s designated computer network defense service provider, NCDOC provides CND services to Navy networks worldwide and executes all computer incident response team responsibilities. CND services include actions taken to protect, monitor, analyze, detect and defensively respond to unauthorized activities within DoD information systems and computer networks. Unauthorized activities may include disruption, denial, degradation, destruction, exploitation or access to computer networks, information systems or their contents, or theft of information.
“We detect and act upon all security incidents, and anyone else in the Navy doing any kind of security functions is required to report any incidents to us,” said Jim Granger, director of capabilities and readiness at NCDOC. “Whether we’re detecting them or they’re detecting them, it all comes to us.”
By comparison to computer network defense, information assurance covers measures that protect and defend information and information systems by ensuring their availability, integrity, authentication, confidentiality and nonrepudiation. This includes providing for restoration of information systems by incorporating protection, detection and reaction capabilities.
The Navy’s global CND strategy is fully integrated with DoD’s overarching defense-in-depth strategy, which is designed to ensure continued operation of the GIG, even in a degraded state. It covers people, technology and operations and is based on both a strong IA posture and CND unity of command.
The core of the Navy’s global CND strategy is its centrally managed sensors, which are operationally controlled by NCDOC and which aggregate the incoming data for attack sensing and warning.
“Our systems provide a tremendous capacity to process and export disparate data formats and present a global view of network activity to enable holistic fusion analysis, trending and normalization of network activity,” said Granger. “We fight in a terrain with no boundaries and with highly adaptive adversaries. That requires a global perspective and deliberate processes.”
Deliberate processes are important because they allow for consistent training and repeatable, standardized operations across multiple watch sections operating on a round-the-clock basis.
NCDOC was established in 2006, after performing similar functions as the Navy Computer Incident Response Team (NAVCIRT) since 1996, making it one of the oldest cybersecurity organizations in the federal government. It currently has about 200 personnel and is expected to grow significantly within the next four to five years if funding is approved, reflecting both the projected growth in cyberthreats and attacks and the importance that the Navy places upon cyberdefense.
“I think that the level of attention that the networks — we don’t have a single network, we have multiple networks — [is] garnering is what’s going to help us attain the realization across the Navy and joint organizations that cyber is another warfare area that has to be considered and treated like the other warfare areas,” said Captain Stephanie Keck, NCDOC’s commanding officer.
Keck assumed command of NCDOC this past summer after serving as the Multi- National Force-Iraq Information Operations Chief in Baghdad. She has spent much of her Navy career in information operations doing offensive cyberwarfare and exploitations. Like many users, she admits that she didn’t pay much attention to what was going on in the cyberdefense arena.
“Since taking command of NCDOC, I’ve learned quite a bit about how difficult it is to defend a multiplicity of networks when users typically aren’t paying attention to the things that they ought to be doing or not doing,” Keck said. “I’ve also learned it takes a holistic approach to defend the network and not just technical solutions.”
Regarding awareness across the Navy about cybersecurity and the threats and vulnerabilities it faces, Keck observed, “It depends on which part of the Navy you’re talking about. At most senior levels, I would say that awareness is very high. The lower you move down the chain, the lower the level of awareness.”
NETWORK AWARENESS
The heart of NCDOC is Prometheus, a system-of-systems that receives, aggregates, processes, correlates and fuses realtime and near-real-time information from multiple network sources to provide network domain awareness. “Network domain awareness” — a term that NCDOC coined and uses instead of situational awareness — provides commanders with the intelligence to make better-informed decisions about the directions in which they need to go, resource allocations and operations.
“We say ‘network domain awareness’ instead of ‘situational awareness’ because we’re not trying to tell where the ships are or what the weather is or anything of that nature,” Granger explained. “Network domain awareness is about what’s happening on the network and about the health of the network.”
A retired Navy commander, Granger joined NAVCIRT, which became NCDOC in 2006, as the first civilian in 1997.
The huge and growing number of security events was the stimulus for the creation of Prometheus in 2006, which was built upon an earlier system called Mobius. The problem at the time was two-fold, according to Granger.
“First, there was the data crush, which was only growing,” he explained. “We couldn’t handle all the alarms and we couldn’t aggregate and correlate them. At the same time, we needed analytical tools that could handle the massive amounts of data.”
Prometheus collects three primary data classes:
• Referential data: What does the network look like?
• Activity data: What’s happening on the network?
• Command and control information: Who owns that portion of the network on which activity is occurring?
The data is collected from hundreds of sensors on the Navy’s networks, as well as intrusion protection systems, compliance reporting databases, and every type of log, and combined by Prometheus to provide the network domain awareness.
“This capability provides the Navy with an exceptional ability to develop a deep understanding of the environment and to characterize network activity and continuously move toward earlier recognition of anomalous behavior requiring in-depth analysis,” Granger said.
Using customized filters for tracking information, Prometheus can automatically detect trends within its database and initiate further analysis when suspicious activity occurs. “The filters give our watch standers the flexibility to see the incidents and other data that they need and ideally see only information that is actionable,” Granger said. “I want my guys to see only something that they’re going to do something about.”
EVENT MANAGEMENT
Prometheus has two primary components: a Novell Sentinel front-end for security event management, and a data warehouse back-end based on SAS Institute’s Intelligence Platform components, including SAS Enterprise BI Server, SAS Data Integration Server and SAS Intelligence Storage. Sentinel alerts and prioritizes all security events in a centralized dashboard that is easily accessed by security operators in NCDOC’s operations center at any time. The SAS data warehouse integrates and stores the large volumes of computer network defense data for longterm storage and trend analysis.
“Prometheus gives us tremendous flexibility,” Granger said. “It enables us to visualize data and it also enables us to export data in a common standards-based format. Even when we change a data source, our operators on the watch floor don’t have to change operating procedures or have to be re-trained on a new piece of equipment. They keep looking at the same interface, but they can view more information in perhaps a different manner.”
The Sentinel component of Prometheus has been heavily customized by NCDOC to meet the organization’s requirements. For example, “We’ve driven a lot of developmental work to build what we call ‘rightclick functionality,’ which allows our watch operators on the floor to right-click to do a ‘who-is lookup’ or automatically generate a trouble ticket or input tasks into the workflow,” Granger said.
The Naval Research Lab, a key contributor to the evolution of Prometheus, has developed most of the agents that create the bridge between individual data sources and Sentinel.
“As far as the SAS backend goes, it’s met the requirements,” Granger noted. “We had to build the tables to meet the unique requirements of the individual data sources, but I would call that using the product, not specifically tailoring or modifying. I like being in a business where I can say that we haven’t come close to touching all the capabilities of the product. That’s where we are now.”
For the future, NCDOC is focused on what Keck contends is the biggest risk for the Navy’s networks. “I think it’s where the threats, vulnerabilities and impacts come together,” she said. “I want to be more proactive about the actions we can take to reduce that risk, because you’re never going to be able to take care of all the threats, and you’ll never be able to patch all the vulnerabilities.”
Mark Kagan is a Washington, D.C.- based consultant and writer on defense, intelligence and security.
By Mark Kagan
Military Information Technology
December 2009
The July 2009 announcement by the Chief of Naval Operations that a new Fleet Cyber Command/ Tenth Fleet (FLTCYBERCOM) would be stood up by the end of the year signaled the profound importance and priority that the Navy is giving to the cyberwarfare domain. FLTCYBERCOM, which will also become the Navy component of the new U.S. Cyber Command, will bring together under one command the Navy’s information technology, intelligence and communications operations and will eventually comprise 45,000 personnel.
A key component of FLTCYBERCOM will be the Navy Cyber Defense Operations Command (NCDOC), which is responsible for coordinating, monitoring and overseeing the defense of the Navy’s computer networks and systems and their 700,000 users worldwide. NCDOC’s areas of responsibility encompass the Navy’s centrally managed NIPRNet and SIPRNet enclaves, which consist of the Navy Marine Corps Intranet, Integrated Shipboard Network System and OCONUS Navy Enterprise Network. These networks total approximately 350,000 seats.
NCDOC’s areas of responsibility also include legacy and “excepted” networks. Legacy networks are those networks that have not migrated into a centrally managed enclave or have not been designated as an excepted network. Excepted networks are networks that have been authorized by the Cyber Asset Reduction and Security Task Force to operate independently of a centrally managed network. Legacy and excepted networks comprise approximately 190,000 seats.
NCDOC executes computer network defense (CND) across the Navy through a group of operations centers that are aligned to the centrally managed enclaves. Command, control and coordination of the defense of legacy and excepted networks vary because of the unique nature of these networks. NCDOC also maintains close liaison with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which is the Navy’s cybercrime prosecution authority.
Based in Norfolk, Va., NCDOC reports to the Naval Network Warfare Command and is operationally aligned to the Joint Task Force-Global Network Operations, the lead Department of Defense organization designated to identify and mitigate threats to DoD information networks and to direct the defense of the Global Information Grid (GIG).
COMPUTER NETWORK DEFENSE
As the Navy’s designated computer network defense service provider, NCDOC provides CND services to Navy networks worldwide and executes all computer incident response team responsibilities. CND services include actions taken to protect, monitor, analyze, detect and defensively respond to unauthorized activities within DoD information systems and computer networks. Unauthorized activities may include disruption, denial, degradation, destruction, exploitation or access to computer networks, information systems or their contents, or theft of information.
“We detect and act upon all security incidents, and anyone else in the Navy doing any kind of security functions is required to report any incidents to us,” said Jim Granger, director of capabilities and readiness at NCDOC. “Whether we’re detecting them or they’re detecting them, it all comes to us.”
By comparison to computer network defense, information assurance covers measures that protect and defend information and information systems by ensuring their availability, integrity, authentication, confidentiality and nonrepudiation. This includes providing for restoration of information systems by incorporating protection, detection and reaction capabilities.
The Navy’s global CND strategy is fully integrated with DoD’s overarching defense-in-depth strategy, which is designed to ensure continued operation of the GIG, even in a degraded state. It covers people, technology and operations and is based on both a strong IA posture and CND unity of command.
The core of the Navy’s global CND strategy is its centrally managed sensors, which are operationally controlled by NCDOC and which aggregate the incoming data for attack sensing and warning.
“Our systems provide a tremendous capacity to process and export disparate data formats and present a global view of network activity to enable holistic fusion analysis, trending and normalization of network activity,” said Granger. “We fight in a terrain with no boundaries and with highly adaptive adversaries. That requires a global perspective and deliberate processes.”
Deliberate processes are important because they allow for consistent training and repeatable, standardized operations across multiple watch sections operating on a round-the-clock basis.
NCDOC was established in 2006, after performing similar functions as the Navy Computer Incident Response Team (NAVCIRT) since 1996, making it one of the oldest cybersecurity organizations in the federal government. It currently has about 200 personnel and is expected to grow significantly within the next four to five years if funding is approved, reflecting both the projected growth in cyberthreats and attacks and the importance that the Navy places upon cyberdefense.
“I think that the level of attention that the networks — we don’t have a single network, we have multiple networks — [is] garnering is what’s going to help us attain the realization across the Navy and joint organizations that cyber is another warfare area that has to be considered and treated like the other warfare areas,” said Captain Stephanie Keck, NCDOC’s commanding officer.
Keck assumed command of NCDOC this past summer after serving as the Multi- National Force-Iraq Information Operations Chief in Baghdad. She has spent much of her Navy career in information operations doing offensive cyberwarfare and exploitations. Like many users, she admits that she didn’t pay much attention to what was going on in the cyberdefense arena.
“Since taking command of NCDOC, I’ve learned quite a bit about how difficult it is to defend a multiplicity of networks when users typically aren’t paying attention to the things that they ought to be doing or not doing,” Keck said. “I’ve also learned it takes a holistic approach to defend the network and not just technical solutions.”
Regarding awareness across the Navy about cybersecurity and the threats and vulnerabilities it faces, Keck observed, “It depends on which part of the Navy you’re talking about. At most senior levels, I would say that awareness is very high. The lower you move down the chain, the lower the level of awareness.”
NETWORK AWARENESS
The heart of NCDOC is Prometheus, a system-of-systems that receives, aggregates, processes, correlates and fuses realtime and near-real-time information from multiple network sources to provide network domain awareness. “Network domain awareness” — a term that NCDOC coined and uses instead of situational awareness — provides commanders with the intelligence to make better-informed decisions about the directions in which they need to go, resource allocations and operations.
“We say ‘network domain awareness’ instead of ‘situational awareness’ because we’re not trying to tell where the ships are or what the weather is or anything of that nature,” Granger explained. “Network domain awareness is about what’s happening on the network and about the health of the network.”
A retired Navy commander, Granger joined NAVCIRT, which became NCDOC in 2006, as the first civilian in 1997.
The huge and growing number of security events was the stimulus for the creation of Prometheus in 2006, which was built upon an earlier system called Mobius. The problem at the time was two-fold, according to Granger.
“First, there was the data crush, which was only growing,” he explained. “We couldn’t handle all the alarms and we couldn’t aggregate and correlate them. At the same time, we needed analytical tools that could handle the massive amounts of data.”
Prometheus collects three primary data classes:
• Referential data: What does the network look like?
• Activity data: What’s happening on the network?
• Command and control information: Who owns that portion of the network on which activity is occurring?
The data is collected from hundreds of sensors on the Navy’s networks, as well as intrusion protection systems, compliance reporting databases, and every type of log, and combined by Prometheus to provide the network domain awareness.
“This capability provides the Navy with an exceptional ability to develop a deep understanding of the environment and to characterize network activity and continuously move toward earlier recognition of anomalous behavior requiring in-depth analysis,” Granger said.
Using customized filters for tracking information, Prometheus can automatically detect trends within its database and initiate further analysis when suspicious activity occurs. “The filters give our watch standers the flexibility to see the incidents and other data that they need and ideally see only information that is actionable,” Granger said. “I want my guys to see only something that they’re going to do something about.”
EVENT MANAGEMENT
Prometheus has two primary components: a Novell Sentinel front-end for security event management, and a data warehouse back-end based on SAS Institute’s Intelligence Platform components, including SAS Enterprise BI Server, SAS Data Integration Server and SAS Intelligence Storage. Sentinel alerts and prioritizes all security events in a centralized dashboard that is easily accessed by security operators in NCDOC’s operations center at any time. The SAS data warehouse integrates and stores the large volumes of computer network defense data for longterm storage and trend analysis.
“Prometheus gives us tremendous flexibility,” Granger said. “It enables us to visualize data and it also enables us to export data in a common standards-based format. Even when we change a data source, our operators on the watch floor don’t have to change operating procedures or have to be re-trained on a new piece of equipment. They keep looking at the same interface, but they can view more information in perhaps a different manner.”
The Sentinel component of Prometheus has been heavily customized by NCDOC to meet the organization’s requirements. For example, “We’ve driven a lot of developmental work to build what we call ‘rightclick functionality,’ which allows our watch operators on the floor to right-click to do a ‘who-is lookup’ or automatically generate a trouble ticket or input tasks into the workflow,” Granger said.
The Naval Research Lab, a key contributor to the evolution of Prometheus, has developed most of the agents that create the bridge between individual data sources and Sentinel.
“As far as the SAS backend goes, it’s met the requirements,” Granger noted. “We had to build the tables to meet the unique requirements of the individual data sources, but I would call that using the product, not specifically tailoring or modifying. I like being in a business where I can say that we haven’t come close to touching all the capabilities of the product. That’s where we are now.”
For the future, NCDOC is focused on what Keck contends is the biggest risk for the Navy’s networks. “I think it’s where the threats, vulnerabilities and impacts come together,” she said. “I want to be more proactive about the actions we can take to reduce that risk, because you’re never going to be able to take care of all the threats, and you’ll never be able to patch all the vulnerabilities.”
Mark Kagan is a Washington, D.C.- based consultant and writer on defense, intelligence and security.
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