Good article
http://newsmax.com/Headline/obama-weapons-mass-destruction/2010/01/26/id/348085
Obama administration earns an F from WMD panel. Interoperable data would help this once you get over the turf issues. When will we learn to share?
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Interoperable travel (and not)
I’m in the air on the way to Melbourne, Australia to do 3 weeks of work on a variety of things. I thought it would be interesting to note the standards that delighted, or were used or abused along the way:
Good things:
1. English: It’s nice to have a standardized communications interface all along, and comforting for me to know that all the pilots have standardized on English as their standard command language. I enjoy going to other cultures and trying different languages for pleasure, but work is much easier without translation.
2. Internet: a glimpse into the future of global standards – its all the same and familiar no matter where I am for the next 3 weeks. Could run into a modem if I get to the outback, but unlikely.
3. Commerce: Got VISA? No problem. Need cash? ATMs abound. Sure beats letters of credit, money belts and travelers checks of yesteryear. Score one for interoperable, cross organization data and security.
4. Government: Seems like a pretty standardized disregard/disdain of government everyplace I landed, though it’s pretty remarkable how well we seem to have figured out a lot of things in terms of governance, visas, and the like. I’m not going to comment on security.
5. Airline reservation system: Built in the 60’s and improved ever since – pretty amazing when you start to think about all the moving parts that it encompasses.
Frustrating or suboptimal:
1. Left side driving – no renting a car in Australia – I’m not comfortable driving on the other side of the road – what if we all went one way or the other worldwide – what would cumulative impact on manufacturing, travel, etc be?
2. Plugs: My adapter is at the ready for Australia, and can interface me to about 9 other countries as well. Too bad we don’t have a globalized standard – though you can understand that it grew up separately.
3. That pesky metric system: This is “our bad” in the US. I remember in 5th grade we were going to convert, and we bailed apparently – likely that last generation of lobbyists.
4. Cell phone: I’ve gone from unlimited usage to $1.69 a minute while I’m down under. Hello, Skype.
5. Wireless roaming – sheesh, you think there would be transparency and some simple way to do this without yanking out your credit card every time – like telling TMobile to make it happen as long as it doesn’t cost more than $5/hour for short term access.
Good things:
1. English: It’s nice to have a standardized communications interface all along, and comforting for me to know that all the pilots have standardized on English as their standard command language. I enjoy going to other cultures and trying different languages for pleasure, but work is much easier without translation.
2. Internet: a glimpse into the future of global standards – its all the same and familiar no matter where I am for the next 3 weeks. Could run into a modem if I get to the outback, but unlikely.
3. Commerce: Got VISA? No problem. Need cash? ATMs abound. Sure beats letters of credit, money belts and travelers checks of yesteryear. Score one for interoperable, cross organization data and security.
4. Government: Seems like a pretty standardized disregard/disdain of government everyplace I landed, though it’s pretty remarkable how well we seem to have figured out a lot of things in terms of governance, visas, and the like. I’m not going to comment on security.
5. Airline reservation system: Built in the 60’s and improved ever since – pretty amazing when you start to think about all the moving parts that it encompasses.
Frustrating or suboptimal:
1. Left side driving – no renting a car in Australia – I’m not comfortable driving on the other side of the road – what if we all went one way or the other worldwide – what would cumulative impact on manufacturing, travel, etc be?
2. Plugs: My adapter is at the ready for Australia, and can interface me to about 9 other countries as well. Too bad we don’t have a globalized standard – though you can understand that it grew up separately.
3. That pesky metric system: This is “our bad” in the US. I remember in 5th grade we were going to convert, and we bailed apparently – likely that last generation of lobbyists.
4. Cell phone: I’ve gone from unlimited usage to $1.69 a minute while I’m down under. Hello, Skype.
5. Wireless roaming – sheesh, you think there would be transparency and some simple way to do this without yanking out your credit card every time – like telling TMobile to make it happen as long as it doesn’t cost more than $5/hour for short term access.
Friday, January 22, 2010
NGO Interoperability with governments
The feedback I'm getting on Haiti is that everyone is working their heart out trying to make things happen, save lives, treat the wounded, and keep some stability going.
The feedback that I'm also getting is that information sharing between all the various agencies is very difficult, hamstrings the effective deployment of resources and generally diminishes all the heroic efforts.
I recommend that the NGO leadership across a wide range organizations take the reins of this problem, work with or adopt some of the best principles of OASIS and NIEM.gov, and continue to build a set of interoperable, XML based transactions that can be shared in an emergency. CAP (Common Alerting Protocol), HAVE (hospital Availability) and RM (resource messaging) are great starting points and ready to go after a lot of hard work and testing by the groups developing these.
These are free to the world, and their adopted use will encourage/force system vendors to adopt and expand their use dramatically.
If everyone shoots the same interoperable information "bullets" we'll get some great economies of scale, very good sharing, and the ability to build on this layer with predictive analytics, credential management, volunteer and skills manifests that can all be shared across the organizations in a disaster/incident.
There is going to be a major virtual exercise in August that is open for worldwide participation, email me at peterlodell@gmail.com for details.
The feedback that I'm also getting is that information sharing between all the various agencies is very difficult, hamstrings the effective deployment of resources and generally diminishes all the heroic efforts.
I recommend that the NGO leadership across a wide range organizations take the reins of this problem, work with or adopt some of the best principles of OASIS and NIEM.gov, and continue to build a set of interoperable, XML based transactions that can be shared in an emergency. CAP (Common Alerting Protocol), HAVE (hospital Availability) and RM (resource messaging) are great starting points and ready to go after a lot of hard work and testing by the groups developing these.
These are free to the world, and their adopted use will encourage/force system vendors to adopt and expand their use dramatically.
If everyone shoots the same interoperable information "bullets" we'll get some great economies of scale, very good sharing, and the ability to build on this layer with predictive analytics, credential management, volunteer and skills manifests that can all be shared across the organizations in a disaster/incident.
There is going to be a major virtual exercise in August that is open for worldwide participation, email me at peterlodell@gmail.com for details.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
What will we learn in Haiti??? The same thing!
Its early in this tragic disaster, but we've already seen how effective off the shelf social media tools have been in establishing communications and getting the adhoc word out. Regular people were skyping, tweeting, and sending pictures through regular old email.
What we'll also likely see is that the relief organizations can't talk to one another's emergency relief systems, that the military will not communicate will with all the NGOS, and that the internal Hatian based systems will be interoperable with all......
We need a strong implementation effort on intereoperable data like Common Alerting Protocol and other emergency management formats under development. Another example of not being able to connect the dots when lives are at risk.
What we'll also likely see is that the relief organizations can't talk to one another's emergency relief systems, that the military will not communicate will with all the NGOS, and that the internal Hatian based systems will be interoperable with all......
We need a strong implementation effort on intereoperable data like Common Alerting Protocol and other emergency management formats under development. Another example of not being able to connect the dots when lives are at risk.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Fix the plumbing to connect the dots.....
President Obama said about the intelligence failures surrounding the underwear bomber incident, “There are no silver bullets.” And he’s right: there is no single magic step we can take to catch every terrorist. That does not mean, however, that we can’t improve intelligence sharing significantly, and immediately.
A pundit on NPR asked recently why in this age of information a bank can let the credit card company know immediately if he’s missed his monthly payment –yet our counter-terrorism systems still fail to alert airport officials about a potentially dangerous terrorist bomber?
A cynic might answer, because credit card systems were not built on government contracts. But the real problem lies deeper.
Richard Clarke, the security advisor to both the Clinton and Bush administrations who famously predicted an Al Qaeda attack before 9/11, said during a recent TV interview that he was “shocked” the U.S. intelligence community still doesn’t have software that can connect the dots in simple cases like one-way cash ticket/no luggage/worried father/known connections to terrorism. Clarke made the same point at a Portland town hall meeting in 2002, attended by over 600 people. Information sharing is a key line defense against terrorism, he said then, and we’ve got to get it right. Eight years and tens of billions of dollars later, he’s still saying the same thing.
After working on this issue professionally as a software architect in and around government information sharing programs for most of these same eight years, here’s what I’ve learned: Below the interagency cultural and turf issues – and there are many—our intelligence community has a serious plumbing problem. Its information pipes are old, disconnected and full of, well, let’s call it solid waste. And all we seem to be doing is building more of the same old, dysfunctional pipes.
What we need is a whole new model—one which “virtualizes” all the old plumbing, and essentially routes around it. Without getting too technical, the key to doing this is to launch new “green field” systems that are fast, nimble, highly connected and focused on interoperable data models, instead of siloed databases and applications.
Technically speaking, the systemic failure to connect dots into meaningful, actionable threat pictures is a data interoperability problem—a problem that governments have faced, and solved, before. In World War 1, there was no ammunition interoperability among the French, English and US forces –each army had its own unique guns and bullets. In an integrated field of battle, this led to many problems. These same armies eventually standardized on a 7.62mm caliber bullet, which meant that the guns of all the allied armies could start using the same ammo. Huge economies of scale and tactical efficiencies resulted.
Today, each intelligence agency in our government has its own, non-standard “data bullets.” No wonder they are still quite capable of shooting blanks, even in relatively obvious cases. The lack of standardization is keeping intelligence collection dots separated—and all the rest of us are paying with dollars and lives at risk.
A small group inside of the government called the National Information Exchange Model (www.NIEM.gov) is working from the bottom up to develop new kind of data interoperability, and make it viable across not just intelligence agencies, but across all levels and branches of government. But NIEM is small, underfunded effort relative to the size of the problem.
In the past “decade of disasters,” as it’s been dubbed , billions have been spent on government systems that either haven’t worked or have been incompatible with others. We’ve witnessed this problem first hand on 9/11, during the Katrina Hurricane, and recently with both the Fort Hood shooter and underwear bomber. We have also seen over and over that one law enforcement agency doesn’t have information about a killer on parole from another jurisdiction – the recent Seattle shootings were a tragic example. How many more debacles and disasters is it going to take?
In an age when teens from around the world can find each other in real time to play the same obscure video game, the fact we don’t have more interconnected intelligence systems is a national scandal. We need to automate our information collection, analyzing and processing systems with the relentlessness of a WalMart – driving toward a standardized, comprehensible system that can work in both classified arenas, between first resonders and in the public domain.
New systems with standardized, fully interoperable data models are needed instantly—and must become widely available, not just buried in beltway bunkers. Certainly, secret intelligent systems are needed. But these must also interoperate with open systems (with appropriate cyber protections) to deliver critical information to front line personnel who don’t have security clearances, but who are tasked with acting, and interfacing to the public.
There is also every reason to engage the public in this effort using the tools that they are using every day – cell phones, cameras, email, Twitter, Facebook and other real time communication tools. How many passengers on the Christmas Eve flight might have noticed the purported terrorist behaving strangely, and reported their suspicions had there been a way? After the fact reports tell us he was extremely nervous and had a “thousand yard stare.”
Protecting the public is the public’s business, and we should engage everyone who can make a difference. The cost of many new innovative “open source” intelligence services is probably less than a few new body scanners—but the payoffs of any aroused watchful public could be immense.
A pundit on NPR asked recently why in this age of information a bank can let the credit card company know immediately if he’s missed his monthly payment –yet our counter-terrorism systems still fail to alert airport officials about a potentially dangerous terrorist bomber?
A cynic might answer, because credit card systems were not built on government contracts. But the real problem lies deeper.
Richard Clarke, the security advisor to both the Clinton and Bush administrations who famously predicted an Al Qaeda attack before 9/11, said during a recent TV interview that he was “shocked” the U.S. intelligence community still doesn’t have software that can connect the dots in simple cases like one-way cash ticket/no luggage/worried father/known connections to terrorism. Clarke made the same point at a Portland town hall meeting in 2002, attended by over 600 people. Information sharing is a key line defense against terrorism, he said then, and we’ve got to get it right. Eight years and tens of billions of dollars later, he’s still saying the same thing.
After working on this issue professionally as a software architect in and around government information sharing programs for most of these same eight years, here’s what I’ve learned: Below the interagency cultural and turf issues – and there are many—our intelligence community has a serious plumbing problem. Its information pipes are old, disconnected and full of, well, let’s call it solid waste. And all we seem to be doing is building more of the same old, dysfunctional pipes.
What we need is a whole new model—one which “virtualizes” all the old plumbing, and essentially routes around it. Without getting too technical, the key to doing this is to launch new “green field” systems that are fast, nimble, highly connected and focused on interoperable data models, instead of siloed databases and applications.
Technically speaking, the systemic failure to connect dots into meaningful, actionable threat pictures is a data interoperability problem—a problem that governments have faced, and solved, before. In World War 1, there was no ammunition interoperability among the French, English and US forces –each army had its own unique guns and bullets. In an integrated field of battle, this led to many problems. These same armies eventually standardized on a 7.62mm caliber bullet, which meant that the guns of all the allied armies could start using the same ammo. Huge economies of scale and tactical efficiencies resulted.
Today, each intelligence agency in our government has its own, non-standard “data bullets.” No wonder they are still quite capable of shooting blanks, even in relatively obvious cases. The lack of standardization is keeping intelligence collection dots separated—and all the rest of us are paying with dollars and lives at risk.
A small group inside of the government called the National Information Exchange Model (www.NIEM.gov) is working from the bottom up to develop new kind of data interoperability, and make it viable across not just intelligence agencies, but across all levels and branches of government. But NIEM is small, underfunded effort relative to the size of the problem.
In the past “decade of disasters,” as it’s been dubbed , billions have been spent on government systems that either haven’t worked or have been incompatible with others. We’ve witnessed this problem first hand on 9/11, during the Katrina Hurricane, and recently with both the Fort Hood shooter and underwear bomber. We have also seen over and over that one law enforcement agency doesn’t have information about a killer on parole from another jurisdiction – the recent Seattle shootings were a tragic example. How many more debacles and disasters is it going to take?
In an age when teens from around the world can find each other in real time to play the same obscure video game, the fact we don’t have more interconnected intelligence systems is a national scandal. We need to automate our information collection, analyzing and processing systems with the relentlessness of a WalMart – driving toward a standardized, comprehensible system that can work in both classified arenas, between first resonders and in the public domain.
New systems with standardized, fully interoperable data models are needed instantly—and must become widely available, not just buried in beltway bunkers. Certainly, secret intelligent systems are needed. But these must also interoperate with open systems (with appropriate cyber protections) to deliver critical information to front line personnel who don’t have security clearances, but who are tasked with acting, and interfacing to the public.
There is also every reason to engage the public in this effort using the tools that they are using every day – cell phones, cameras, email, Twitter, Facebook and other real time communication tools. How many passengers on the Christmas Eve flight might have noticed the purported terrorist behaving strangely, and reported their suspicions had there been a way? After the fact reports tell us he was extremely nervous and had a “thousand yard stare.”
Protecting the public is the public’s business, and we should engage everyone who can make a difference. The cost of many new innovative “open source” intelligence services is probably less than a few new body scanners—but the payoffs of any aroused watchful public could be immense.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
