TransTracker 's Public Library

Some of the steps that are favored by the Obama Administration to open up government to public access and participation may be “useful” but they are nevertheless “prohibited” on U.S. Air Force web sites, according to a new Air Force policy instruction.

In a January 21, 2009 memorandum on transparency and open government, President Obama directed that “Executive departments and agencies should harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public…. Executive departments and agencies should solicit public feedback to assess and improve their level of collaboration and to identify new opportunities for cooperation.”

The U.S. Air Force has a different vision, however.

A new Air Force policy on public communications (pdf) observed that “web-based message boards, threaded chat rooms, and guest books… allow users to post opinions, messages, or information openly on a web site.  They provide a useful means of creating two-way communication but are prohibited as part of public web site services (sec. 10)”

Wang and colleagues at Dalian University of Technology in the Chinese province of Liaoning modelled the US's west-coast grid using publicly available data on how it, and its subnetworks, are connected (Safety Science, DOI: 10.1016/j.ssci.2009.02.002).

Their aim was to examine the potential for cascade failures, where a major power outage in a subnetwork results in power being dumped into an adjacent subnetwork, causing a chain reaction of failures. Where, they wondered, were the weak spots?

The Open Source Center, which replaced the CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service, is doing more analysis and outreach than its predecessor and is also exploring new media, said Mr. Naquin in a recent speech (pdf).

“We’re looking now at YouTube, which carries some unique and honest-to-goodness intelligence,” he said.

“We have groups looking at what they call ‘Citizens Media’: people taking pictures with their cell phones and posting them on the Internet. Then there’s Social Media, phenomena like MySpace and blogs…. A couple years back we identified Iranian blogs as a phenomenon worthy of more attention, about six months ahead of anybody else.”

In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.

Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.

Many power plant networks and other essential pieces of America’s infrastructure are owned, operated and protected by corporations.

Some say security of these vital networks should be the sole domain of the federal government because it is a national security concern. Critics say government monitoring of Internet usage -- even for malicious programming -- is a slippery slope toward Big Brother-style surveillance, and private industry can better secure their own networks.

President Barack Obama declared in May that cyber security would be a national priority, creating a cybersecurity czar in the process. But it’s unclear how far that position’s authority will extend once the slot is filled.

In announcing the czar, Obama pledged the government wouldn’t monitor the Internet or mandate security standards to the private sector.

But the Cyber Security Act of 2009 -- currently being debated in Congress -- would give the president authority to shut down certain private networks in the event of a big attack.

The US is mixing its signals and missing an opportunity to help solve the European Cyber-dilemma, which in turn could help untangle the US policy mess.