Melissa Hathaway Op-Ed on Cyber Security

Below I'm going to post, in its entirety, the text of an e-mail I received from the ODNI notification service.   The subject is an op-ed written by Melissa Hathaway, a senior leader who has been spearheading significant coordination action in the federal government (opinion: Melissa is perhaps the most effective SES-level leader in the US government today, IMHO).

I wanted to post this in totality for a couple reasons.  One is it is something all of us should read.  Although I believe most readers of this blog will find no surprises in this op-ed, Melissa has a real talent for capturing information in easy to understand ways and I think we can all borrow lessons from the way she explains things. 

Collaborate and Deliver With More Cowbell

Participants in this week's Enterprise 2.0 conference, hosted by the ODNI's ICES group and the CIA's WIRe team, were treated to a shared experience that is hard to capture in a blog post.   So I won't try.  But I will say this, we all had some great collaboration and coordination lessons and context, and we were able to participate in creating that ourselves because the conference organizers established a great ambiance and gave us access to wiki's, blogs, twitters and WiFI that knitted that all together.  I really appreciated being there.

One lesson I'd like to note now was underscored by Fred Hassani.  Fred found a great way to make us all think about the variety of collaboration tools at our disposal.  In a musical analogy he underscored how hard it can be to make music with instruments that don't traditionally play well together.  But in a sign that the spirit of the community is strong, we all saw how a cowbell can make really really great music if you put your heart into it.   And we the community of professionals can make use of any tools we are provided to collaborate, even if they are not our favorites.  We will always make due and will always overcome.   One way we will overcome is through mashups.  Just like in music you can mashup piano's and cowbells, in IT you can mashup imagery data and SIGINT data and analytical data etc.

Which brings us to a great video that underscores this point– not from thte WIReICES conference, but from a group of spirited collaborators from SNL who many of us in the community look up to.  

So please check this out and as you do please think of the IT tools in your enterprise.  I guess the point made for CTOs is that we need an enterprise that allows mashups of all tools and all data.  You never know when the maestro will call for more cowbell.

Social Media and Web2.0 for National Security Planners

Over the last couple weeks I sent several friends and associates a draft article I was working up on Web2.0 for National Security Planners.  I enjoyed pulling that together, since it helped me convince myself that the right thing to do is to get more senior US strategists engaged in Social Media.  There are some real security concerns there and we dont' want all our national security efforts exposed to all our adversaries on the Internet.  But use can be made of these tools and the risks there can be mitigated so the overall benefit to the country will far outweigh the risks. 

One of the folks I sent it to was Dion Hinchcliffe, President and CTO of HInchcliffe & Company (see http://hinchcliffeandco.com ).   Dion has long been a very collegial person with an open/collaborative work style.  I met him several years ago when he was giving a presentation to my old community on the then new concept of Web2.0 and have been very glad to be connected with him since.   Dion read the article and published it in his Social Computing Magazine (see http://socialcomputingmagazine.com/viewcolumn.cfm?colid=578 ), and I am very appreciative of him getting the word out on that.

Another online associate is Helen Thompson of AFCEA.  Helen is herself a great contributor to the dialog on national defense.  She just published an article titled "Reconciling Collaboration and Security in the Social Media Space (see http://www.afcea.org/signal/articles/anmviewer.asp?a=1680&print=yes ).   In it she references my article and underscores the point I make about social media tools being a good way to accelerate good idea.

The current draft of the article is at:  http://www.ctovision.com/social-media-national-security.html

Please check it out and let me know your thoughts/input/suggestions.

Day Three of the Synergy Conference

This is the third and final post on some observations from the 2008 Synergy conference (co-hosted by Stratcom).

The day opened up with a great update on operational intelligence in the modern age, with Mr. John J Powers of the Defense Intelligence Operations Coordination Center (DIOCC) providing a first hand look at the DIOCC, its mission, and recent successes.   The question and answer period generated some great dialog and feedback and suggestions from some of the greats in the community, including Mr. Terry Casto and Ms. Lynn Schnur. 

JJ's discussions were followed by a panel of CTO-types introduced by Ms. Nancy Wheeler of the GETA.  Panelists included Mr. Malcolm Hyson (CTO Microlink LLC), Dr. Alex Karp (CEO Palintir Technologies), Dr. John Triechler, CTO Applied Signal technology), Mr. Guljit Khurana (President and CEO, Centrifuge Systems) and me.   

Our panel was followed by the highlight of the day, a presentation by Dr. Prescott Winter, CTO of NSA.  I capture some more detailed notes on his presentation below.

Dr. Winter was followed by CAPT Eva Scofield, the Director of Intelligence (J2) for JTF-GNO.  This is the position I held from Dec 1998 till 2002.  She did a great job of characterizing the threat.  I hope all were listening and I hope the world remains alert and focused on this growing menance.

Closing comments were provided by the Stratcom's Director of Intelligence (J2), Captain Jeffrey L. Canfield, USN.  Unfortunately, I had to miss that presentation to catch a flight. I imagine Jeffrey did his usual great job of both extracting the key points of an entire confernece and drawing conclusions we should all take away.  I'll have to get with him later to see if he can get me up to speed.

Notes from Dr. Winter's presentation:

Dr. Prescott Winter, CTO/CIO of NSA, provided an overview of the NSA IT story and the many changes to the way we do business.   He provided a very good, succinct vision and a compelling argument for continued change towards integration.  He is fully aware of the great progress that has been made to date and does not discount that. But he knows more needs to be done and is helping us all move forward.   We need to move more users into an integrated ops intel space where new information models can be used.  The SIE, Single Integrated Environment, for example, is a new model and new operating environment.

A key vision has been to integrate what users see with what intelligence knows.  This is an integrated ops/intel space that is serving the mission with an integrated picture that wraps the user.  He is moving towards this vision by engaging today's architecture and looking for gaps and addressing those, engaging with industry to know more about the future of technology and how they can address gaps, integrating the NSA investment programs (as you identify stacks of services you must have investment plans that appropriately resource and optimize them).  he is also engaging technologists from throughout the organization by working with PEOs and the AE of NSA.

Pres is working hard to move NSA from a net centric model to an info centric model.  He is also changing the access model from compartment based to attribute based.  On the issue of data  ownership, he is doing everthing he can to change the old model of data ownership to data stewardship.  This is a behavioral issue.  On the issue of SOA and Services, he is moving the entire stack of IT to a services model. 

Pres is a champion of the ODNI's info sharing strategy and vision and is working hard to help execute and implement.  He is working hard to change attitudes and behaviors from need to know to need to provide.   He is working to engineer solutions that will help make data discoverable and available to every member of the selected community that needs that information.

Day One at Synergy Conference

This post provides a summary of day one of the STRATCOM Synergy conference.  The conference is focused on integrating combat ops/intelligence implications for national intelligence processes.   Conference leader Brigadier General Billy Bingham (USAF, ret) opened the conference by reviewing what was discussed last year’s Synergy conference.  He also laid out the goal for this year’s conference, to keep moving things forward and to ensure we are “Integrating operations and intelligence so we can achieve our nation’s objectives in the most efficient means possible. ” 

The morning included a presentation by the STRATCOM J5 (Brigadier General Mark Owen).  He was followed by Major General Michael Ennis, Deputy Director of the National Clandestine Services for community HUMINT at CIA. The afternoon was filled with discussions and briefings that brought home the perspectives of operators from the Ops/Intel world, including a panel filled with ops/intel professionals which discussed lessons learned.  Perspectives on ops/intel synergy on the front lines were provided by a seasoned Marine Corps professional.   Key areas where ISR models clash were highlighted by a seasoned Air force ISR Colonel.   An update was provided on army operational intelligence.

The following provides some takeaway’s from the discussions:

Brigadier General Owens mentioned the many missions of STRATCOM, including nuclear deterrence, and also cyberspace.  In his view, STRATCOM’s mission in cyber is to ensure freedom of action in cyberspace.  He also signaled a strong intention of the Commander, STRATCOM to return the J2 position to the importance it once had.   He also signaled a strong intent to do that while integrating ops and intel into the mission.  He talked about the terms he likes to use, those of intelligence and warfighters, since the operators are warfighters.  

General Ennis gave personal stories underscoring how important it is for ops and intel to work together.  He said great staffs have always worked that way and now at CIA it is all ops and intel together, at JSOC it is all ops and intel together.  He thinks it is wrong to use the old models of ops and warfighters.   That too frequently forces a separate structure.  In the old days there was an ops cell and an intel cell and they were separate.  Today, in efficient operations, the intel and ops cells are together.  General Ennis is a strong believer in new tools and thinks three in particular are dramatically changing the way we are working together.  Blogs, Wikis and the class of tools that lets users go after content in search vice just headlines.   By Blogs and Wikis he meant the many open source/Internet based wikis that can provide context and situational awareness.  For example, the MCIA cultural intelligence initiative makes extensive use of these tools.   He also provide some thoughts on the term “information sharing.”  There are things he doesn’t like about that term because sharing implies the data is yours to own and to decide when to share.   He believes in joint interagency platforms for ensuring responsiveness, relevance and unity of effort.   Regarding Open Source, he would like to see an interagency open source center that is focused on hard problems.   Regarding IT, he believes a common IT backbone is critically important to mission success. 

The afternoon speakers hit on many great topics related to ISR and the different cultures in the Services and how they clash over ISR.  There were many great stories and lessons, and several meaty recommendations.  But the bad news is all the stories sound the same as they have for years and the lessons learned are the same ones we have been relearning for years.  I guess the point of the conference is that we need to embody those lessons somehow.

More later

CIA IT Leaders Are World Class IT Leaders

Federal IT leaders have it tough. In general, they face hard challenges, are constantly getting their budgets cut, they must comply with tough security guidelines, and must support a workforce who think everything should work like it does in rich corporate environments or in computer security lax homes. And they must support and serve some of the hardest missions on earth.

I appreciate most all the IT leaders I have met in the federal IT space. But a select few rise above all others. Folks like Bobby Laurine, Prescott Winter, Bob Flores, and Al Tarasiuk.

One of those, Al Tarasiuk, was the subject of an article in CIO magazine today. See it at http://www.cio.com/article/print/441116

Here is a little bit of what that article says:

Tarasiuk has, so far, opened up the 61-year-old insular spy agency to
the concept of more efficient and effective information sharing by
using Web 2.0 technologies, such as the CIA's Wikipedia-like Intellipedia
that's used across the U.S. intelligence community. Another sign of
change is a grassroots, Web-based collaboration among Russian
intelligence experts at several U.S. agencies, which enables analysts
to securely share their insights, analysis and information on breaking
news on Russia.

Tarasiuk has instituted a new IT governance team that has—for the first
time—the highest level of management support at the agency. His team
has also moved completely to agile project management methodologies,
virtualized 1,000 servers that are projected to save $18 million in
2008, and empowered frontline CIA employees to ask for, decide on and
employ new IT tools.

In 2007, Tarasiuk's team was finally able to the replace the CIA's main
information-handling system, which was severely outdated and lacked the
basic functionalities found in 1990s-era e-mail systems, with a more
modern and user-friendly system called Trident.

In the process, Tarasiuk has tried to revitalize IT's image within CIA
to match what's necessary today, "to be seen an as enabler of mission
and not just a technology shop that's delivering a desktop," he says.

One thing I know from first-hand experience is that Al is a model of a CIO all enterprise technologists could/should learn from.

CIA IT Leaders Are World Class IT Leaders (continued)

CIO magazine continues its reporting on the IT enterprise at CIA and the CIA's CIO (Al Tarasiuk).  I have little more to add:  My comments from before still stand:  Al is a world class leader and this follow on report just underscores that.  I imagine Al is similar to other great CIOs from industry (folks like HP CIO Randy Mott, for example) and my old boss Mike Pflueger of DIA.   These leaders must wrestle with far more than technology (they can hand of the easy technology stuff to CTOs, right?).  In story after story of the great CIOs I note that they spend a great deal of time on culture, policy, process and human factors. 

For continuity I wanted to provide the link to the rest of the story.   It is here:  http://www.cio.com/article/print/441688

Bob