29 May 2009
Cyberspace at the Italian Place
(The Italian Place at Seven Corners)
It is going to be news later this morning, but it was old hat yesterday at the Italian Place.
The fight has been going on in the shadows since before 9/11, and it is not going to be resolved any time soon.
I remember when the White House reassigned Dick Clarke from the counter-terror desk to the Cyber desk. At the time, we all thought it was a demotion, considering what happened. But although Mr. Clarke can be an irritating fellow, he is awfully smart and has been right more often than he was wrong.
A long-deferred drink after work was what drew me to the piano bar, not that it really has a piano anymore. It must have back in the days when folks from Spook Central at Arlington Hall Station came up here for lunch.
It is an interesting crowd in an interesting location. The crowd is of a certain age, if you know what I mean. By that, I mean they are older than I am. The women have a hard-edge to the hair that is not the color they were born with, and the men look they once were swaggerers, though now a little out of focus.
My pals the T’s turned me onto the place, which is perched on one of the spokes of the Seven Corners, which is an intersection that only a traffic engineer with delirium tremens could have designed.
He regaled me with stories about what it was like when the place and the people were younger. It was sort of hot, in a geriatric way, listening to the people get up and sing, and watching others drop their walkers and get up and dance.
I met my pal there early- we were not out on the prowl- we were just trying to catch up. He is still in the budget trenches, and I was gnawing a deal like a dog with a fresh bone at the office.
We’d been trying to get together for weeks. It is hard in the testimony season, when the seniors have to get horsed up to defend what is in their budgets to the Authorization and Appropriations Committees.
Normal people don’t like numbers; they are dry and boring and only the initiates to the mysteries know that numbers are alive.
They represent buildings and projects and power, and with those comes everything else that means anything in Washington. If you pretend to be a Senior and don’t understand your budget numbers, Bub, I will guarantee that one of the green eyeshade weenies in the back room is making your policy for you.
Thursday is karaoke night at the Italian Place, and the place filled up as we enjoyed a couple glasses of wine. They have a nice Cab by the glass there- and quite reasonable appetizers including tasty bruchetta and mussels in white sauce.
We talked about who is up and who is down. Verdict is still out on the latest Cyber Czar, but the report that had been promised to be complete in sixty days is finally going to emerge this morning. Melissa seemed to be a shoo-in, since she was a very competent aide to the last DNI, and God knows the cyber thing is a mess.
It is not fair, though, and enough to crush the best of people. She has little kids, and her husband is another bureaucrat who is trying to reform the American Financial System.
This has been a long time coming. Dick Clarke was the first to sound the trumpet back in the early days of W’s Administration. He got squashed by the industry, of course, but it was not the first or last time he was right.
We are vulnerable, and we do not even control our own supply chain anymore. Components of our computers are made in all sorts of places that we do not own, and source code comes from God knows where. if you have an active imagination, you can think what the implications of that might be.
I was working at IBM when Big Blue spun off their laptop line of computers to the Chinese. They were nice machines, but I wouldn’t touch one with a ten-foot pole these days.
Not that anything else is secure either. I suspect one of the reasons that the 60-day cyber report had trouble was that the new guys didn’t want to hear the message that it contained. Hardware to software, we are compromised at every level.
We are in deep kimchi, and have been for a long time. The Internet was intended to be an open architecture, and it was engineered and networked to be exactly that. Then we hung the complete infrastructure of the good ole USA on it, and the rest of the civilized world as well.
Oh well.
At ten this morning the President is going to tell us how he is going to fix everything. Melissa’s report, revised several times, will be the root of it. There will be a new military cyber command and an enhanced role for the National Security Agency in attempting to protect our American Way of Life.
The new Administration has come to the same uncomfortable realization of our vulnerability that the Bush Administration did, and like many other painful and ugly issues, is going to wind up doing about the same thing: throw money and resources at the threat, which is omni directional and implacable.
I wish the new team well. I am counting on them getting it right, or else we can pile another disaster on the economy that is just now show signs of hitting the bottom of the cliff.
Billie the bartender took our wave-off on more wine. The crowd around the dark wood bar was getting jazzed with the prospect of self-generated song. Time to get moving.
The issue of the Cyber Czar will be revealed later today. The new military command will start out being subordinate to the Strategic Command in Omaha, part of that strange post-Cold War arrangement that sought to find a mission for the nuclear warriors.
It will morph into something else over time, but trust me, the battle between DoD and the NSA is just going to get more intense.
I still have the scars from trying to play traffic cop at that intersection between the boys at Langley, the FBI and the Joint Staff. It is worse than Seven Corners at rush hour.
One thing the new Cyber Command will solve, decisively, is the most important single national security issue of the last three decades. Keith Alexander, currently Director of NSA and the Central Security Service, is going to achieve his dream: Second Lieutenant to Four Star General.
Thank God. Now that we have that out of the way, perhaps we can move on and do something to protect the nation.
Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com