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Mon, 03 Sep 2007 22:30:05
Almost nine years after their arrest on charges of spying on the U.S., five Cubans are awaiting an appeals court ruling that could put them closer to freedom. Kelly Cobiella reports.Mon, 03 Sep 2007 23:30:07
During her series of reports from Iraq and Syria, CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric interviewed President Bush in Iraq on Sept. 3, 2007.Wed, 29 Aug 2007 11:39:28
SECRECY NEWS Secrecy News Blog: http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/ Support Secrecy News CRS ON "THE PROTECT AMERICA ACT" The controversial amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that were enacted under intense Administration pressure earlier this month are reviewed section-by-section in a new report from the Congressional Research Service. The legislation, dubbed the "Protect America Act of 2007," removed legal impediments to the interception of foreign communications that pass through the United States. But it also redefined the terms of the FISA so as to permit increased surveillance of communications involving persons in the United States while curtailing judicial supervision. The new CRS report offers a careful reading of each provision of the Act. But instead of fully clarifying its impact, the report serves to highlight just how unclear and indeterminate the new law actually is. Thus, one provision "could conceivably be interpreted" to apply to parties within the United States. Another provision "might be seen to be susceptible of two possible interpretations." Still others "appear to" or "would seem to" or "may also" have one uncertain consequence or another. In other words, the new law bears the hallmarks of its hasty, poorly considered origins. The new CRS report may help to identify some of the questions that Congress will examine when it revisits the legislation next month. A copy of the report was obtained by Secrecy News. See "P.L. 110-55, the Protect America Act of 2007: Modifications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act," August 23, 2007:
Recent reports from the Congressional Research Service on transportation security and related issues include the following. "Highway Bridges: Conditions and the Federal/State Role," August 10, 2007:
"Federal Railroad Safety Programs: Selected Issues in Proposed Reauthorization Legislation," August 10, 2007:
"Transportation Security: Issues for the 110th Congress," updated August 3, 2007:
Noteworthy new reports from the Congressional Research Service that have not been made readily available to the public include these. "Diplomacy for the 21st Century: Transformational Diplomacy," August 23, 2007:
"U.S. Foreign Aid to East and South Asia: Selected Recipients," updated August 22, 2007:
"The Role of National Oil Companies in the International Oil Market," August 21, 2007:
"The War Crimes Act: Current Issues," updated July 23, 2007:
"Manipulating Molecules: Federal Support for Nanotechnology Research," updated August 2, 2007:
****************************** Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation of American Scientists. The Secrecy News blog is at: To SUBSCRIBE to Secrecy News, go to: To UNSUBSCRIBE, go to: OR email your request to saftergood@fas.org Secrecy News is archived at: SUPPORT Secrecy News with a donation here: Wed, 15 Aug 2007 13:56:02
SECRECY NEWS Secrecy News Blog: http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/ Support Secrecy News INCREASED DOMESTIC ROLE FOR INTELLIGENCE FORESEEN Spy satellites and other classified intelligence technologies are poised to play a greater role in domestic homeland security and law enforcement missions, challenging long-standing legal and policy barriers against their domestic use. The Wall Street Journal reported today that the Director of National Intelligence recently authorized access to intelligence satellite products by officials of the Department of Homeland Security to help support border security. See "U.S. to Expand Domestic Use of Spy Satellites" by Robert Block, Wall Street Journal, August 15, p.1:
A comprehensive 2005 government study of the use of intelligence capabilities for domestic applications concluded that "significant change is needed in policy regimes regulating domestic use of IC [intelligence community] capabilities" in order to permit their full exploitation. "The use of IC capabilities for domestic purposes should be based on the premise that most uses of IC capabilities are lawful rather than treating any use as an exception to the rule requiring a case-by-case adjudication," the study said. "There is an urgent need for a top-down, Executive Branch review of all laws and policies affecting use of intelligence capabilities purposes," the report said. In particular, the 1981 Executive Order 12333 which governs intelligence activities "should be amended to permit as unfettered an operational environment for the collection, exploitation and dissemination [of domestic intelligence data] as is reasonably possible," the report recommended. The authors acknowledged that such "unfettered" operation would require increased oversight, but they suggested that it could be satisfactorily accomplished by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. The Board has been a minor, not notably influential player in recent intelligence policy disputes. The report acknowledged in passing a problematic 2001 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case Kyllo v. United States, which concluded that the use of infrared sensors to scan a private residence for heat lamps used in marijuana cultivation constituted an unlawful warrantless search. The ruling appears to be significantly at odds with the new domestic intelligence thrust. "This decision has placed in question the continued viability of past settled practice of the IC within the domestic domain," the study delicately observed. Nevertheless, "to date we are not aware of any clear authoritative guidance issued on the impact, if any, of this decision." The 2005 study was first reported by the Wall Street Journal today. A copy of the unclassified study, which was "produced solely for the use of the United States Government," was obtained by Secrecy News. See "Civil Applications Committee (CAC) Blue Ribbon Study," Independent Study Group Final Report, September 2005:
Intelligence support to domestic environmental monitoring and emergency response has been conducted since the 1970s under the supervision of the little-known interagency Civil Appplications Committee. A 2001 fact sheet describing the history and mission of the Committee is available here:
BALLISTIC MISSILE DEFENSE IN EUROPE The U.S. Missile Defense Agency has published a glossy brochure setting forth its vision of a missile defense system based in Europe. See "Proposed U.S. Missile Defense Assets in Europe," Missile Defense Agency, June 15, 2007:
Various perspectives on the missile defense program were presented in a recently updated report of the Congressional Research Service, "Long-Range Ballistic Missile Defense in Europe," July 25, 2007:
****************************** Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation of American Scientists. The Secrecy News blog is at: To SUBSCRIBE to Secrecy News, go to: To UNSUBSCRIBE, go to: OR email your request to saftergood@fas.org Secrecy News is archived at: SUPPORT Secrecy News with a donation here: Tue, 19 Jun 2007 15:33:00
It's the second day of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference here at the Boston waterfront. Yesterday was the workshop day for the event as well as the much-ballyhooed showdown between Andrew McAfee and Tom Davenport, the original point of disagreement around the real impact of Enterprise 2.0 which I've covered before . Today the main conference sessions begin and a quick look at the show program tells you that an all-star cast of Enterprise 2.0 folks has been assembled here. I was fortunate enough to be able to provide one of the morning workshops yesterday, an Intro to Social Computing, which I billed as a panoramic tour of the concepts and platforms of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 as well as a look at the organizing principles around how to create a strategy around them for your organization. If you weren't able to make it, Doug Cornelius has done a great job blogging a rather detailed summary of the session, which seemed to be quite popular with the audience overall. The big debate between McAfee and Davenport yesterday can now be viewed on video on Veodia. I missed it personally since it ran during my workshop session, but by all accounts it was an informative debate, even if some felt that violent agreement frequently took place. You can read good coverage of debate here from Andrew McAfee, ZDNet's Dan Farber (who moderated the debate), and John Eckman, the latter which has a detailed transcript. For those of you who don't know it, Andrew McAfee is the Harvard Business School professor that defined the concept of Enterprise 2.0 last year. If you're trying to get a handle on all this, I definitely recommend that you watch the video of the debate or the first episode of our Enterprise 2.0 TV Show. Is Web 2.0 Really Moving to the Workplace? I'm a big believer in using measurable numbers to define the scope and importance of trends online. One thing I often do in my of my talks on Web 2.0 is to ask the audience to raise their hand if they have an easy to way to create a blog or wiki on their local Intranet. Last year at the Collaboration Technologies Conference (the event that was renamed this year to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference), I asked the question and just a handful of people raised their hand. Yesterday, in a crowd of around a hundred, about 10-15% raised their hand. Compared to the same question I ask audiences about LinkedIn usage (which have gone from that same handful last year to nearly 70%), and it's a telling indicator of how enterprises are lagging behind in adoption of these tools. Andrew McAfee has described the SLATES mnemonic (details on it here) to capture the essential elements of an Enterprise 2.0 platform. The "A" in SLATES stands for Authorship, in that if workers don't have the ability to publicly author material that the rest of the organization can find, use, and otherwise leverage, then these tools simply won't be effective. Authorship is Step One in capturing the otherwise hidden and lost knowledge that is the submerged "iceberg" of information that is still not kept in the IT systems of a typical organization (i.e. "tacit instituational knowledge). And my informal surveys over the last year have shown little practical growth here. The bottom line is that the Enterprise 2.0 story has a long way to go and we aren't going to see the results until the tools get into most worker's hands and organizations understand the key elements of success with Enterprise 2.0. Fortunately, the grassroots side of the Enterprise 2.0 story is quite good and informal data there suggests that workers are bringing these tools in to their organizations on their own when they're not being provided for them. This has positive and negative ramifications both but it does indicate that E2.0 has serious momentum on the ground on its own.
In my diagram above, I depict the growth of the Internet and various new stages of it, including Web 2.0, which I often say that Tim Berners-Lee gave us, but we didn't get at first. I put it together to show how each new development grew exponentially, unlike many of the other aspects added to it (things like Gopher for example). Network effects for these extensions of the Internet (the Web and Web 2.0) have indeed been exponential in terms of growth and adoption, but Enterprise 2.0 does not fit nicely onto this Internet extension model. This is because in practice Enterprise 2.0 presence will be highly fragmented since its implementations will exist just as much on private IP networks inside firewalls as well as on the open Internet, and often bridge them as well. So how do we measure the growth of Enterprise 2.0? That will be one of the toughest questions as we try to figure out what's really happening with Web 2.0 platforms in the enterprise. There's little question however that it's become a major trend on its own, whether we give it a name or not. For example, Wiki platforms have already begun proliferating inside most organizations, and so too with blogs, and other Enterprise 2.0 platforms. How do you think we should measure Enterprise 2.0's growth? Editorial Note: This is my inaugural blog post as the new Editor-In-Chief of Social Computing Magazine. I've retired as EiC of the Web 2.0 Journal and AjaxWorld Magazine and have accepted Jeremy Geelan's gracious invitation to help head up this highly informative online exploration on the application of Web 2.0 and social software to business, society, and culture. Stay tuned here at the Web 2.0 Blog for lots more and please do drop me a line and let me know what you're doing in the Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 communities. Fri, 08 Jun 2007 20:30:06
Summertime means camp time for many kids. One couple"s dream camp " started for their daughter with Down syndrome " offers a different experience. Steve Hartman visits the Down Home Ranch for Assignment America.Sun, 10 Jun 2007 12:00:01
A new private university in Damascus, founded and staffed by Iraqis, is a haven for students and professors driven out of Baghdad by insurgent attacks. Elizabeth Palmer reports.Sat, 09 Jun 2007 20:00:13
In a California high school with 420 students for each guidance counselor, students have stepped in to help each other succeed. Bill Whitaker reports. |
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