re: "Glass Houses"

Walter Jon Williams focuses his creative lense on the whole mess.

Money quote(s):

"The cables reflect pretty well on the State Department. These diplomats are doing what they’re trained for. They’re collecting local information, they’re reporting the candid views of foreign sources, and they’re providing information about personalities, sometimes hilariously— you’ve gotta love the detail about the Chechen dictator dancing at a wedding with his gold-plated pistol hanging out of his waistband.

It has to be said, though, that the big news is that this information was so easily obtained. The Pentagon’s Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRNet) is a worldwide US military network to which the State Department and its embassies have access. It runs on Windows XP, not exactly your best model of Internet security. Anyone with a Secret clearance has access not only to the diplomatic cables, but to everything else."

"SIPRNet is a classic example of a good idea gone haywire. The idea was to put every document related to terrorism on a single source, so that it could be accessed by anyone who needed it. But they dumped in loads of unrelated stuff as well, and now their own system has well and truly bitten them on the butt."

Actually, SIPRNet predates the GWOT by quite a few years, although Mr. Williams is correct (I think) if what he's getting at is State's inclusion of classified cable traffic. That came well after SIPRNet's establishment.

"It occurs to me that Russia may only exist because a few important people have decided that it does. And if those props are knocked out, does Russia just become another Iceland?"

It occurs to me that Russia already is another Iceland.

Except, of course, for all the things that make it so much more (and so much less) than Iceland.

No offense meant, Iceland.

"So for my money, the question now, is whether government and finance is only possible if the vast majority of the citizenry is kept in complete ignorance of what they are doing? If Secretary Rice, for fear of exposure, prevents her own analysts from analyzing anything, does that mean that government can no longer conduct the kind of debate and internal dialog that is necessary for a clear-sighted view of its future and its own operation? If the government can’t talk to itself for fear that someone’s listening, do we actually have a government, or just 2.15 million civil servants operating in a complete vacuum, unaware that a bigger picture even exists?"

Mr. Williams is getting to the heart of what I worry will be an over-reaction to the Wikileaks leaks; hamstringing our intelligence analysts and decision-makers through too-zealous or cookie-cutter application of need-to-know policies. After all, how does an intelligence analyst tell you he needs to know something if he doesn't already know about it? Kind of hard to do that if he's kept from knowing about it, isn't it?

This sort of thing spells "intelligence failure." Intelligence analysts know that there are, after all, only two kinds of military outcomes: operational successes and intelligence failures.

(Just to be clear, Mr. Williams knows that Sec. Rice no longer runs the State Dept.; he's mentioning her in the context of a story I didn't snippet from his post.)

USA-T - Stranded travelers turn to social media as ash paralyzes Europe

From my archive of press clippings:

USA Today

Stranded travelers turn to social media as ash paralyzes Europe

As ash from a belching volcano in Iceland continues to ground flights across Europe, benched travelers are turning to social media for rides and rooms - and a virtual shoulder to cry on.
Healdsburg, Calif.-based writer Tod Brilliant launched a Facebook group this weekend, "When Volcanoes Erupt: A Survival Guide for Stranded Travelers," after he and his wife Andrea Barrett - who is 31 weeks pregnant - found themselves unable to fly home to California from London's Heathrow airport after a wedding.

Read the whole article here.


-- By Laura Bly, USA TODAY