Disasters Archives

The Defense Department organization charged with cyber combat is reinforcing military networks by moving much of DoD's computing to a space many civilian agencies view as insecure - the cloud. Cloud computing is the practice of storing and accessing applications in a shared online environment, instead of on in-house servers.

U.S. Cyber Command chief Gen. Keith Alexander told lawmakers on Wednesday the following:

"The idea is to reduce vulnerabilities inherent in the current architecture and to exploit the advantages of cloud computing and thin-client networks, moving the programs and the data that users need away from the thousands of desktops we now use--up to a centralized configuration that will give us wider availability of applications and data combined with tighter control over accesses and vulnerabilities and more timely mitigation of the latter."

The White House has been pressing agencies to outsource information technology services to the Web as a way of phasing out the federal government's more than 2,000 expensive, energy-sucking data centers. But many federal managers are fearful of losing their data in the cloud. What happens in the event of an online outage or if the communal, off-site servers storing their programs are hacked?

Alexander's explanation as to why the cloud will offer Defense good defense:

"This architecture would seem at first glance to be vulnerable to insider threats -- indeed, no system that human beings use can be made immune to abuse -- but we are convinced the controls and tools that will be built into the cloud will ensure that people cannot see any data beyond what they need for their jobs and will be swiftly identified if they make unauthorized attempts to access data."

Insurance companies are preparing for the economic fallout of the tsunami rippling through the Pacific by generating risk models based on ground motion data feeds from the U.S. Geological Survey.

"The second responders are actually the insurance industries" said Simon Thompson, director of commercial solutions at map software firm Esri. He already is fielding phone calls from financial sector clients asking for maps of possible damage to facilities so they can predict the cost of the magnitude 9.0 Japan earthquake that hit early Friday morning.

His team is pulling from government data feeds that track the intensity of the seismic activity to illustrate potentially hit structures along the California coast, hotels in Hawaii and ships in the Pacific. Other data sources Esri is harnessing to help the private sector are USGS shake maps, which are close-to-live maps of ground motion and shaking intensity.

"When you look at the shake maps you look at the type of impact that will have on buildings," Thompson said. For example, one company that insures a Hilton hotel in Hawaii is estimating the cost of possible damage to a private lagoon on the establishment's property.

Another commercial mapmaker, Google, is pinpointing for the general public locations, where the tsunami is headed based on estimates from the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration.

Editor's note: There have been multiple estimates of the earthquake's magnitude. The USGS estimated the earthquake's magnitude at 9.0.

The need for public safety agencies to have interoperable radios is well-documented. But for Customs and Border Protection, their legacy communications infrastructure is so antiquated that in some cases they are buying parts through the online auction site eBay.

That's according to John Santo, executive director of the CBP's wireless systems program office, part of the Homeland Security Department. Santo was discussing interoperability at a forum sponsored by the Federal Communications Commission Friday.

Nonetheless, he said having been in law enforcement for more than 30 years, he is "really encouraged by the momentum that's growing around" have interoperability standards.

Homeland Security Inspector General Richard Skinner, who has probed contractor waste at the department since its inception, announced on Thursday that he will step down March 1.

Prior to his July 2005 Senate confirmation as IG, Skinner -- a four-decade veteran of the federal government -- had held the position of deputy IG at DHS since its March 2003 creation.

"After serving more than 42 years in the federal government, under nine presidents, I believe the time has come for me to give my full time attention to my family and personal endeavors," Skinner wrote to President Obama in a Jan. 13 letter of resignation. "Because of [the IG office staff's] commitment, professionalism and hard work, the OIG has been extremely successful in working with the department to promote the efficacy of its programs and operations, and to combat fraud, waste, and abuse within its ranks. Looking back over the past 9 years since the tragic events on September 11, 2001, we, as a nation, are now beginning to witness the positive effects of the creation of the department of Homeland Security."

It's not surprising that a department quickly cobbled together from 22 existing agencies would endure a fair degree of mismanagement. Most recently, in a report released Jan. 3, Skinner found that DHS had not tried to recover about $643 million in overpayments to 160,000 people who claimed they were victims of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Last summer, he revealed that department officials funding a new financial management system worth potentially $1 billion did not have suitable plans, cost estimates or staffing projection for the undertaking.

Skinner started his career at the Agriculture Department in 1969, and later moved on to managerial positions in the investigative arms of the departments of Justice, Commerce and State, as well as the Arms Controls and Disarmament Agency. He was honored with the President's Meritorious Executive Rank Award for serving FEMA, where he worked as acting IG, deputy IG and assistant IG for audits.

Pentagon officials are starting to repeat one another's cyberwar rhetoric. Hello, is this an echo chamber?

On Wednesday, Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn III discussed the military's cybersecurity strategy after meetings at NATO and the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe. "Like air, sea, land and space, we're going to have to treat cyberspace as an arena where we need to defend our networks and to be able to operate freely," he said.

The rhetoric sounds uncannily familiar to what retired CIA and National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden told infosec professionals at the annual security conference Black Hat in July. "Cyber is a domain like land, sea, air, and space," he said.

While Hayden has been reluctant to use the word "war," underscoring his belief that hackering doesn't equate to Pearl Harbor, he's continued to couch the security question in a language of territoriality and aggression. The result is a set of mixed signals: a denial that data infiltration amounts to war in what is, paradoxically, the language of war. According to AFP, at Black Hat, Hayden "called for the creation of Internet versions of rivers, mountains and other geographic features that soldiers use for defensive positions in real world battles."

In a June NPR Intelligence Squared debate on the question, "Has the cyberwar threat been grossly exaggerated?" tech commenter Bruce Schneier argued there needs to be a better language to frame infosec issues.

If we frame this discussion as a war discussion, then what you do when there's a threat of war is you call in the military and you get military solutions. You get lockdown; you get an enemy that needs to be subdued. If you think about these threats in terms of crime, you get police solutions. And as we have this debate, not just on stage, but in the country, the way we frame it, the way we talk about it; the way the headlines read, determine what sort of solutions we want, make us feel better. And so the threat of cyberwar is being grossly exaggerated and I think it's being done for a reason. This is a power grab by government. What Mike McConnell didn't mention is that grossly exaggerating a threat of cyberwar is incredibly profitable.

In that debate, former Navy Vice Admiral McConnell drew parallels between the concept of cyberwar and the Cold War. "We were in a Cold War and we never exchanged nuclear weapons," he said, implying that even though the Cold War didn't involve outright aggression, the omnipotent nuclear threat during the 1940s -- just like the cyberthreats of today -- did not discount it that era as a time of war.

The Pentagon statement on Lynn's speech picked up that reference. Lynn "likened this pillar [of sharing early detections of threats] to the Cold War strategy of shared early warning," the statement notes. "Just as our missile defenses have been linked, so too, our cyber defenses have to be linked as well," the deputy secretary said." In the words of the early modern poet John Milton, "Copy from one, it's plagiarism; copy from two, it's research."

State Department officials, following the United Nations' lead, now are accepting donations via text message to help support recovery and reconstruction in Pakistan where floods have displaced about 20 million people and spread deadly waterborne diseases.

Punching the word "FLOOD" to 27722 will automatically donate $10 to the U.S. government's new Pakistan relief fund.

Earlier in the month, the UN Refugee Agency partnered with mGive, a mobile donations provider, to allow Americans to make $10 mobile contributions by texting "SWAT" to 50555. State began promoting the effort on Aug. 2 and then created its own mobile-enabled charity late last week.

mGive processed more than $37 million for Haiti during three weeks earlier this year, after the State Department requested help in aiding the earthquake-devastated country.

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has generated lots of computer models, applications and Web sites. Here's another one: Geoplatform.gov, developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric and Administration.

The site, which still is in beta and expected to launch June 8, "will let the public see much of what the Coast Guard sees when tracking the Gulf oil spill: Oil trajectories, loop currents, wind conditions, and the well-being of birds and fish," Seattlepi reports.

In the next version, a focused effort to remove the bureaucratese with plain English and easier navigation may make the site a bit more accessible to the public. But it has "only" been 43 days since the oil spill began.

Texts, tweets and e-mails from those who have felt the effects of the Gulf Coast oil spill will be mapped out with new crowdsourcing technology, giving the federal government another look at the impact of the crisis.

The map was created using the Ushahidi open source software by students at Tulane University in conjunction with the site host Radical Designs and the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, a New Orleans-based justice and environmental nonprofit.

Many of the red dots generated by observers for the map highlighted concerns about oil odors, but an overwhelming majority of the reports filed were pleas from fishermen who have lost their livelihoods.

In Venice, La., a fourth-generation shrimper reported being out of work.

In Jesuit, La., an observer said, "Andrew daigle with miss. kennedi towing. Has a six hundred hsp.tug boat for hire. 504 912 6707."

Nextgov has launched the Nextgov Awards, an inaugural program to recognize federal managers who have shepherded a program, policy or management practice that is not only innovative, but bold and brave.

Yes, we know, there are a lot of awards programs in government. But when we asked federal managers and industry executives what is missing, they told us unanimously: No awards recognize federal employees who took on risks -- personal, political and otherwise -- and boldly acted to see their idea to fruition. Or if their idea died, at least they took on entrenched bureaucratic interests in an attempt to make government better through the use of technology.

We invite you to visit our awards page to learn more and to nominate someone who fits the criteria. The technology isn't the reason for the award, but the bold idea must rely on it in some way. And we encourage you to tell us a story about the individuals you nominate. We want you to wow us because we know there are dozens of stories of federal employees trying to improve government and the lives of citizens, but they are up against big odds. Yet, they have acted bravely and with resolve to bring about change. We want to know about them, the drama they faced and the results they achieved. And, of course, the technology they used.

The winners of the Nextgov Awards will be honored at a luncheon at TechWeb's Gov 2.0 Expo in May. (Nextgov is a TechWeb partner for the event.) We'd love to see you there.

More to come.

Jose Antonio Vargas at the Huffington Post reminded readers about the power of the Web and social networking during times of natural disasters, such as the earthquake in Haiti:

We've said it before and we'll say it again: The Web is flat. And in a world made smaller by the Internet and new technologies, a site like Twitter forces us to become each other's witnesses, one tweet at a time.

At the moment, at around 4:40 p.m. EST, 4 of the 10 trending topics on Twitter -- #YELE; #Help Haiti; #Text; and #Port-au-Prince -- are related to the earthquake in Haiti.

Checking out the Nextgov's The [Twitter] Feed, shows agencies are Tweeting about Haiti, too, much of it coming from the State Department:

DipNote says: Information or inquiries about U.S. citizens in Haiti, please call 888-407-4747. Outside of the U.S. and Canada, call 202-501-4444. #Haiti - 12m ago. [link]

DipNote says: U.S. citizens in #Haiti can call the Embassy's Consular Task Force at 509-2229-8942, 509-2229-8089, 509-2229-8322, or 509-2229-8672. - 14m ago. [link]

DipNote says: U.S. citizens in need of assistance in #Haiti are urged to contact the U.S. Embassy via email at ACSPaP@state.gov - 15m ago. [link]

And there were these as well:

Peace Corps says: Statement from Peace Corps Director Aaron S. Williams on the Earthquake in Haiti: http://bit.ly/8Nr7RL - 19m ago. [link]

U.S. Coast Guard says: District 7 (Miami): ***Media Advisory*** Coast Guard to hold press briefing regarding relief efforts in Haiti: http://bit.ly/6iLk8i - 46m ago. [link]

Travel - State Dept says: For assistance locating non-US citizens contact @redcross http://tinyurl.com/assh2n #Haiti - 53m ago. [link]

And many many more. Keep up on the latest on Nextgov's The Feed.