Palantir and the Acquisitions System

Did 3MECH try to sneak their way around the system?

The issue that alarmed Shyu was that the unit said it couldn’t pay for the system, and the company offered its technology on a cost-free basis, as opposed to normal contracting methods. Shyu wrote that “these circumstances warrant immediate corrective action by the Army to ensure that we comply with fundamental rules relating to how the government obtains goods and services from industry.”
The memos, addressed to the Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office and the Technical Support Working Group; and to intelligence contractor Praescient Analytics and Palantir, asked for a “temporary training/reach-back server” from Palantir before the 3rd ID’s deployment to Afghanistan to assume command of Regional Command-South. The unit deployed in August.
The 3rd ID’s memo said that the unit’s budget “will not support the purchase of Palantir. Operational Needs Statement (ONS) was considered, but standard length of timeline for ONS cannot be tolerated. This requirement needs to be filled immediately.” The memos obtained by Defense News show that the 3rd ID considered the 82nd Airborne’s use of Palantir in Afghanistan in 2012 critical in helping to fill “major capability gaps” in the division’s existing intelligence software, and that Palantir is “the only platform capable of filling their advanced analytic requirements.” Because the unit planned on using the software on its upcoming deployment, the memo states that “3rd ID needs a rapid fielding of this system to quickly fill critical capability/training gap prior to our pending deployment.”

One has to wonder whether or not all this bullshit would have happened if CIDNE hadn't fucked CENTCOM, and the Army as a whole, with all their political machinations surrounding the shutdown of FusionNET. There's nothing that we've heard that Palantir can do that FusionNET couldn't do 7 years ago, and it was already in the Army inventory, bought and paid for by the government.
CIDNE ramped up their political whining machine instead of improving their software, and got FusionNET shut down. As far as CIDNE was concerned, their problem was solved.
But the ground forces' problems were not, and thus Palantir was born to try to help unfuck the gaps in capability that CIDNE continued to have. The difference this time is that Palantir has better political cover than FusionNET did.
However, we're now paying for another system to do what CIDNE claimed they could do all along, when we'd already paid for one back in '04-'07. The US taxpayer is sucking up the cost of CIDNE's political dick-dancing by being forced to pay for the same capabilities all over again.

By: Brant

Army Defense of Pricey Acquisitions At the Expense of Performance

Army acquisitions trying to defend their own investments?

The Army ordered the destruction of a report that praised the performance of an off-the-shelf software program that finds buried explosives in Afghanistan and replaced it with a revised, less-favorable assessment, according to internal Pentagon documents.
The unusual action came amid a battle inside the Army. It pits those who want the service to send more of the software platform, called Palantir, to the Afghanistan War against those who favor the Army’s own developed intelligence network, the Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS).
Internal emails reveal an intelligence officer in Afghanistan who was frustrated by Army bureaucrats who blocked his request to buy Palantir in the winter.
“We are trying to solve some very hard problems that pose life or death issues for the soldiers,” the officer emailed to the Pentagon.
The documents obtained by The Washington Times show that Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, Army chief of staff, in February ordered the Army Test and Evaluation Command (ATEC) to judge the performance of Palantir.
ATEC published internally its official report in April, but the report was rescinded and ordered destroyed. The less-favorable assessment of Palantir was issued in its place in May.
The Times first reported last week that commanders in Afghanistan asked higher-ups for permission to buy Palantir, as they raved about its ability to pinpoint a major killer of American troops — buried homemade bombs, or improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
The Times reported how officers had to go over bureaucratic hurdles to acquire Palantir, which is not in the annual Army budget and would have to be purchased with special funds.

The key wrap-up on DCGS is this, from an intel guy in the 82nd:

“Bottom line from our perspective is that [DCGS] has continuously overpromised and failed to deliver on capability that will meet the needs of the warfighter.
“All the bullet points they can list on a slide sitting back in the Pentagon don’t change the reality on the ground that their system doesn’t do what they say it does, and is more of a frustration to deal with than a capability to leverage.
“We aren’t going to sit here and struggle with an ineffective intel system while we’re in the middle of a heavy fight taking casualties. Palantir actually works. When DCGS actually works, we’ll be ready to use it.”
He added: “If the crew of people I work with their combined IQ, ingenuity, and years of experience, can’t figure out how to make DCGS work in this fight, they need to fix their system.”

I've worked with DCGS on the back end - data models, data schemas, system compatibility, etc - and one of the biggest problems with DCGS (just like CIDNE) is the insistence that it become the one-database-to-rule-them-all instead of acknowledging that there are other data sources out there that are relevant and useful and meaningful and they can and should be used without having to be sucked into the MCP.
The Army (in particular) and the DoD (in general) has a hard time with the idea of data sharing. In the wake of Bradley Manning, it's not an unreasonable fear. But it's too often used as a justification to defend rice bowls.

h/t Doctrine Man

By: Brant

Early Computer Wargame Concept?

Found over at DTIC, there's an interesting concept paper that posits computer-aided information systems for gaming way back in 1964

Abstract : Scientific war games have been under development by military operations research groups since about 1960 and business games by industrial operations research groups since 1956. From an information system point of view these games may be divided into three types--computer simulations, digital man- machine games, and continuous variable man-machine games. Computer simulations, or completely automated games, (i.e. Carmonette, AD-257 012) are always rigid, usually stochastic, and generally very detailed. Since they are not limited by the decision-making speed of human beings, they may be executed rapidly, permitting repeated plays with large-scale variations of input conditions and chance factors. Digital man-machine games, or partly mechanized games, (i.e. Theaterspiel) employ digital computers for bookkeeping, computing, and transmission of data but use people for decision making. In digital man-machine games both speed of execution and level of detail are sacrificed in the interests of obtaining the flexibility of human participation. Continuous variable man-machine games employ people for decision making and electronic analog computers for computation. The human decisions are introduced continuously as the game proceeds rather than periodically. (Intended as a chapter in a book to be published by McGraw-Hill, 'Fundamentals of Information System Science and Engineering.')

LATER EDIT: Looks like someone is flapping this around Matrix Games' forums and some other places as "his" find.

By: Brant

DoD is (sing it, Daltrey!) "Going Mo-BILE!"

The DoD has released their new mobile device "strategy".

The Department of Defense announced today the release of a mobile device strategy that identifies information technology goals and objectives to capitalize on the full potential of mobile devices. The strategy focuses on improving three areas critical to mobility: wireless infrastructure, mobile devices, and mobile applications, and works to ensure these areas remain reliable, secure and flexible enough to keep up with fast-changing technology.

“The Department of Defense is taking a leadership role in leveraging mobile device technology to improve information sharing, collaboration and efficiencies,” said Teri Takai, Department of Defense chief information officer. “As today’s DoD personnel become increasingly mobile, a wide variety of devices offers unprecedented opportunities to advance the operational effectiveness of the DoD workforce. This strategy will allow mobile activities across the department to converge towards a common vision and approach.”

The scope of the DoD mobile device user base is significant, with more than 250,000 commercial mobile devices and several thousand Apple and Android operating systems, including pilots. The Mobile Device Strategy is intended to align the progress of these various mobile devices, pilots and initiatives across DoD under common objectives to ensure the warfighter benefits from these activities and aligns with efforts in the Joint Information Environment.

“The DoD Mobile Device Strategy takes advantage of existing technology, the ability to use or build custom apps, and a workforce increasingly comfortable with mobile devices,” said Takai. “This strategy is not simply about embracing the newest technology -- it is about keeping the DoD workforce relevant in an era when information and cyberspace play a critical role in mission success.”

For further information about this strategy, please access http://www.defense.gov/news/dodmobilitystrategy.pdf

By: Brant

COTS Networking Gets Military Workout

The Economist takes a quick trip to Ft Bliss to look into the current NIE.

It has been three weeks since the Ellisian army invaded next-door Attica. The United States, Attica’s ally, quickly deployed troops to help re-establish the international border, and had advanced more than 50 miles by May 16th.

The mission, however, was not an easy one. As well as facing rugged terrain and extreme weather, the American soldiers and Attican security forces had to contend with the radical Islamic Congress of Attica, the transnational Islamic Brotherhood for Jihad, the malicious hackers of the Wolf Brigade and the petty criminals of the area. Thank heaven it was, in fact, a staged exercise, running from Fort Bliss, in west Texas, through to the White Sands missile range, an army base in New Mexico. Some 3,800 soldiers and several thousand military and civilian personnel were taking part in this spring’s Network Integration Evaluation (NIE), the third round of a new twice-yearly series of exercises. Their point is to test how well fancy new mapping and messaging systems would stand up to the stresses of conflict in harsh conditions.

By: Brant

GameTalk - Digital Dominance

How do you model digital systems and the information they can provide on today's battlefield? Do you include intel bonuses for those that have digital dominance? Or do you penalize the speed of their decision-making based on the reality of having waaaaaay too much data to sift through? How do you represent the fielding of new systems during the conflict in the game? For instance, troops were already in Iraq when TIGR started to roll out.

Your thoughts below!

By: Brant

Army App Marketplace is Going Live

The Army's new apps marketplace prototype is going live.

The newly launched Army Software Marketplace prototype now delivers 12 mobile training applications for Soldiers to use on personal phones or tablets.

The publicly-facing apps were developed by Army training schools in the Connecting Soldiers to Digital Apps, or CSDA, initiative. The apps, now approved for Army-wide use, are available online via www.marketplace.army.mil. The CSDA community is continuing to submit apps.

When fully implemented, the Marketplace will deliver web-based and downloadable applications to all devices approved for use within the Army's Common Operating Environment on the Army network.

"The Apps Marketplace is at the center of Army efforts to radically reduce the time to deliver applications across the force," said Lt. Gen. Susan Lawrence, the chief information officer/G-6. "This prototype is a first step in establishing and exercising new submission and approval processes that will eventually enable Army members, organizations and third-party developers to release applications for Army-wide distribution."

By: Brant

Go Mobile in New UAV Side-Scrolling Game

It's more arcade than analytical game, and the text below is corporate PR, but it's still a nifty new mobile Android game that channels Blue Oyster Cult for it's title...

The new Android app, "Fear the Reaper" published by Black Ops Pops uses an old formula (side scrolling shooter, ala Defender) but puts on a modern warfare twist! Fly the famed MQ-9 Reaper drone, used by today's top secret military to attack the bad guys. Since the game uses the accelerometer to fly, one must tilt the screen to and from to navigate the treacherous terrain...Another interesting dimension to this game is the addition of "no-strike targets" represented by mosque symbols -- do not shoot them or the game will detract life from the score.
Luckily for the player, there is an C130 that occasionally flies by and drops a care package. Care packages range from more health (adds more life to bar at the top), stealth mode (Fly right through those pesky enemy radar sites) or diplomatic immunity (shoot through no-strikes).
In keeping with the tradition of fast paced arcade games, these care packages come in very handy as the game progresses. The player is rewarded with more life every 10,000 points.
Black Ops Pops already has one hit game with CamGun -- a novel idea where you use the phone's camera to simulate a first person shooter, like Call of Duty. CamGun allows for the snapping of photos of the kill and upload them to Facebook. Although Fear the Reaper isn't as novel as that app, it has a higher level of arcade amusement.
Download Fear the Reaper in the Play Store here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fearthereaper or in the Amazon App Store here: http://www.amazon.com/Mark-Munsell-Fear-The-Reaper/dp/B007JVZM74/

By: Brant

Why The Army's Games Aren't Your Games

Michael Peck has an article over at Kotaku. It'll be interesting to see how the comments shape up. No doubt some smart-ass is going to accuse him of not knowing what he's talking about.

First, the military doesn't play games. It uses training tools that happen to be games. The fun and competition of games is merely a means to induce students to learn, just like cherry flavor is a means to get kids to swallow disgusting medicine. Indeed, medicine is turning to video games to train surgeons. Do you want your heart surgeon to practice on a game because it's fun, or because it trains him to keep you alive?

People who sell games to the military don't think like gamers. They think like schoolteachers, with learning objectives and performance metrics. This may sound po-faced, but that's how they convince some cold-eyed bureaucrat that their game is better than a Powerpoint lecture at teaching Private Schmuckatelli to spot that IED hidden in the garbage pile by the road. Or, they need to show that the lazy Schmuckatelli will be more motivated to pay attention if his squad is competing against another squad in Virtual Battlespace 2. Making a game that's more interesting than Powerpoint would seem to be child's play, but it's not that simple. Games that will train hundreds of thousands of soldiers require plenty of computers, technical support and a generous donation of your tax dollars. Fun is good. Useful is better.

Second, everything bought by the military boils down to lots and lots of requirements. Someone has to have a need for a game, and the game will need to have very particular features. Sometimes the requirements don't make any sense, but that's how the military thinks. Boasting of your shooter's ultra-realistic physics model is pointless when the Army needs a game to teach soldiers how to butter up the natives not to shoot at them. In a burst of over-optimistic creativity, I once asked the Army why they couldn't use the Wii to practice physical tasks like fixing a tank. They replied that if they needed to teach a soldier to turn a wrench, they would get him a real wrench. Games are a solution, but never assume that they are the only solution.

By: Brant

The Rest of the World Is Paying Attention to (Video) Wargames

Even Tom Ricks is talking about them.

Video games have somewhat of a bad reputation today: individuals have attacked games for their supposed contribution to obscenity and their debilitation of male virtue. Despite these fears, scientists have identified some benefits from gaming, ranging from improved self-worth to augmented surgical skills. In the foreign policy arena, video games can and should serve as a powerful tool for educating civilian and military personnel about war and foreign affairs.

Video games can serve to help bolster America's glaring deficiency in one crucial discipline: history. Video games focused on war and IR provide refreshing bursts of information about often-overlooked leaders and wars. These games can offer descriptive backgrounds of leaders or events (e.g. Age of Empires' description of Genghis Khan or the Crusades). These methods can sometimes provide a deeper and more-engaging understanding of history than just a textbook or lecture.

A subgenre of games, so-called "serious" games, goes further by explicitly trying to educate gamers about historical or political issues. For example, Niall Ferguson in 2007 played the World War II serious game Making History and played out some of his WWII counterfactual scenarios, such as war breaking out over German seizure of Czechoslovakia in 1938. His experience led him to conclude that his counterfactual historical scenarios "weren't as robust as [he] thought." As a result, Ferguson ended up advising this series. This episode, forcing critical re-examinations of events, anecdotally illustrates the range of useful educational experiences gleaned from games like Making History or other, current games such as Global Conflicts: Palestine or the future-themed Fate of the World: Tipping Point that can help civilians better understand history and policymaking, thereby making better choices when voting or arguing politics.

By: Brant

Are We Waving A White Flag In The War Of Ideas?

(and am I using too many capital letters in the headline?)

So the Shababians in Somalia are pretty fond of twitter and that's casuing heartburn in the US.

The United States government is increasingly concerned about the Twitter account of the Shabab militant group of Somalia, with American officials saying Monday that they were “looking closely” at the militants’ use of Twitter and the possible measures to take in response.

Hmmm... this doesn't sound good.

Most of the Shabab’s Twitter messages are in English, not Somali, and are clearly meant for an outside audience. American officials said they were worried that the Shabab might be using Twitter to reach potential recruits in the West.

So we're not even going to try to win the war of ideas, eh?

American officials say they may have the legal authority to demand that Twitter close the Shabab’s account, @HSMPress, which had more than 4,600 followers as of Monday night.

That sure sounds like "no" to me?

The State Department said federal law enforcement agencies had taken action in the past against individuals using “Web hosting and related services.”

So we're no longer allowing people to make public idiots of themselves in pursuit of their misguided goals. We're now afraid of boasting boneheads in Somalia?! Really? We can't out-debate these guys? We can't demonstrate the superiority of our way of life without resorting to techno/legal methods of simply cutting off their voices?

By: Brant

The Internet Equivalent of a Slap-Fight

Kenyan Army and Somali AQ terrorists are duking it out on... TWITTER!

On Monday, the Islamic insurgent group al-Shabab used its Twitter feed to accuse Kenya of having a history of committing "barbarous acts" toward ethnic Somalis, and cited a 1984 massacre where human rights groups say Kenyan troops killed around 3,000 ethnic Somali men in eastern Kenya.

Addressing more recent actions, al-Shabab's tweets that began last week claimed that Kenyan soldiers in Somalia "flee from confrontation & flinch in the face of death." The Twitter feed also described al-Shabab's own press release giving details about Burundian soldiers killed in an October battle between African Union peacekeeping troops and the insurgents. Al-Shabab claimed to have killed more than 150 AU troops at the time.

The AU only reported 10 casualties although Mogadishu-based security sources say the figure was closer to 70.

Al-Shabab's tweets, written in fluent English, mocked an earlier Twitter posting by Kenya's army spokesman, Maj. Emmanuel Chirchir, that threatened to bomb concentrations of donkeys that might be moving weapons for the insurgents.

"Your eccentric battle strategy has got animal rights groups quite concerned, Major," the al-Shabab posting said.

The Associated Press has determined that both Twitter accounts - HSMPress and MajorEChirchir - are legitimate. It's not clear who is writing the al-Shabab tweets. Several Americans, most of Somali descent, have in recent years joined the group that Washington has designated a terrorist organization.

Chirchir has responded with his own barrage of tweets.

"With Al Shabaab joining tweeter, lets take fight to their doorstep," he wrote. Chirchir accused al-Shabab of stoning an innocent girl to death and chopping off hands. He noted that many commanders have banned bras in their territory, and urged readers to retweet the message in support of Somali women.

That's just so macho.

h/t Doctrine Man
By: Brant

Army Driving Ahead on Smartphone Integration

It's nice that the Army is pushing forward with integrating smartphone technology into the force.

Whether you want to learn the different bugle calls or call in an artillery strike, there’s an app for that.
And some of the most promising and powerful apps are proving problematic for an Army trying to provide this information without putting its network at risk.
Indeed, digital applications are off the chain. Most centers of excellence are developing their own apps. The Signal Center of Excellence recently surpassed 1 million downloads over iTunes and the Android market. The service is soon to launch the Army Market Place, which will offer “official” apps that are Army-tested and approved.
The potential is limitless, as apps are already proving their worth.
For example, the Army Blue Book app provides easy access to information on Army culture, history, training and regulations — and it saved $750,000 in printing costs, according to Army data. The Sustainment Soldiers Advanced Individual Training course app showed improvements in proficiency test scores.
The Connecting Soldiers to Digital Applications initiative stands at the heart of this endeavor. Conceptualized in September 2009, the unfunded program is run by the Army’s chief information officer and Army Capabilities Integration Center, with support from Army Training and Doctrine Command. It provides applications for select administrative, training and tactical functions with three stated goals:

• Evaluate new training approaches that allow soldiers to learn anytime or anywhere (providing a “persistent learning environment”).
  
• Explore smartphone potential to enable every soldier to access information and learning in any environment.
  
• Develop means to rapidly update and share information — at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods.

So how long before we start to see persistent multi-player training games on smartphone platforms? By: Brant

The Red Cross Weighs In on Virtual War Crimes

I'm going to admit that at first blush, the article about the ICRC investigating possible war crimes in video games gave me a facepalm. I was going to post a poll with the options being "dumb idea", "stupid idea", and "f'n' waste of time". But on further reflection, I will give the ICRC credit here, even though I don't think they're doing this with the foresight I'm about to ascribe to them.

One of the world's largest and most respected humanitarian groups in the world is investigating whether the Geneva and Hague conventions should be applied to the fictional recreation of war in video games.
If they agree those standards should be applied, the International Committee of the Red Cross says they may ask developers to adhere to the rules themselves or "encourage" governments to adopt laws to regulate the video game industry.
The International Committee of the Red Cross is mandated under the Geneva Conventions to protect the victims of international and internal armed conflicts. That includes war wounded, prisoners, refugees, civilians, and other non-combatants. The question they debated this week is whether their mandate should be extended to the virtual victims of video game wars.

While the "virtual victims" are virtual today, we've seen no shortage of remote-control warfare, from Predator-equipped drones to CROWS turrets. Given the slow, but inexorable, shift in the visualization provided by remote-control weaponry, and the more graphically realistic portrayal of game-based content, are we rapidly closing on the day when the video games and video targeting are visually indistinguishable? And if so, then how far are we, really, from Ender's Game?

If that's really where the Red Cross is going with this, then bravo. They're establishing standards now, before the industry ever catches up to the standard from a technical aspect. Maybe we've learned the lessons of internet 'regulation' after all. But somehow, I'm pretty sure that's not what the ICRC is actually trying to do. So it seems as though they might actually be doing the right thing, even if it's for the wrong reasons.

What do you guys think?

poll by twiigs.com

UPDATE: Here's a thoughtful piece from Rex over at PaxSims about the same topic.


By: Brant

US Army Online Psyops

Yep, getting paid to surf the web and hang out in chat rooms, albeit with pretty high stakes.

The morning sun had barely cast its fresh light over Tampa Bay when Ardashir Safavi — born in Iran, a refugee to Turkey, educated in the mid-Atlantic states — was up and patrolling two dozen Persian-language Web sites, hunting militant adversaries in cyberspace.

His mission was to scan news reports, blogs, social media and online essays to identify those he viewed as “containing lies, misinformation or just misperceptions” about American military operations and Pentagon policy across the Middle East.

In recent months, Mr. Safavi and his teammates spotted posts that included doctored photographs of Osama bin Laden purporting to prove that Al Qaeda’s leader had not died in an American commando raid. They turned up blogs stating that the Pentagon was accelerating war plans for invading many Muslim nations, and others amplifying Taliban accusations that American troops rape with impunity across Afghanistan.

Mr. Safavi works as part of the Digital Engagement Team, established in 2008 by the military’s Central Command to “counter extremist ideology, promote cultural awareness and explain U.S. interests,” said Maj. David E. Nevers, the team’s chief officer, who must approve all responses before they are posted on foreign-language Web sites.

By: Brant

Surowiecki Meets the Intel Community

GMU is looking into crowdsourcing intelligence, following a trend primarily encapsulated in The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki.

Maybe you've got a hunch Kim Jong Il's regime in North Korea has seen its final days, or that the Ebola virus will re-emerge somewhere in the world in the next year.
Your educated guess may be just as good as an expert's opinion. Statistics have long shown that large crowds of average people frequently make better predictions about unknown events, when their disparate guesses are averaged out, than any individual scholar — a phenomenon known as the wisdom of crowds.
Now the nation's intelligence community, with the help of university researchers and regular folks around the country, is studying ways to harness and improve the wisdom of crowds. The research could one day arm policymakers with information gathered by some of the same methods that power Wikipedia and social media.
In a project that is part competition and part research study, George Mason professors Charles Twardy and Kathryn Laskey are assembling a team on the Internet of more than 500 forecasters who make educated guesses about a series of world events, on everything from disease outbreaks to agricultural trends to political patterns.

The thing is, this isn't new. John Poindexter had a very similar initiative back in 2002-2003 that was canceled because of a variety of bad PR and a whole lot of noisemakers looking to yell at the Bush Administration for pretty much everything (up to, and including, sunspots). The Terrorism Futures Market was scary-accurate, but torpedoed Poindexter's career because it looked like someone was making light of potential attacks, and Congress just couldn't lay off.

Dr. John M. Poindexter, director of the Dept. of Defense's Information Awareness Office (IAO), is expected to resign within the next few weeks according to senior Pentagon officials. Since joining the IAO in January of 2002, Poindexter has been an ongoing source of controversy.

The IAO is an agency of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) created in the aftermath of the September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington. The goal of the agency is to gather intelligence on possible terrorist activities through electronic sources such as the Internet, telephone and fax lines.

Under Poindexter's leadership the IAO has created a firestorm of controversy with its Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, which seeks to capture the "information signature" of people in order to track potential terrorists and criminals. Now renamed as the Terrorist Information Awareness program, critics have called it a domestic spy program and the Senate has temporarily blocked funding for the project.

Earlier this week, Poindexter again came under fire for the IAO's latest proposal to predict terrorist events through the online selling of "futures" in terrorist attacks. The Senate again intervened to block the program.

The Policy Analysis Market (PAM), the first phase of the project, was already online with funding from a federal grant and was scheduled to begin a beta testing on today. The Defense Department had also requested $8 million for its "Futures Markets Applied to Prediction" (FutureMAP) initiative, which would expand on the Policy Analysis Market's terror-wagering scheme.

But late on Monday afternoon, Senators Ron Wyden (D.-Ore.) and Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) held a press conference to denounce the program. By Tuesday, Sen. John Warner (R.-Va.), the powerful chairman of the Senate Armed Forces Committee, announced he had contacted the IAO and had been assured the program would be discontinued. By Tuesday afternoon, the site had been pulled off the Internet.

PAM was a joint venture between DARPA; the Economist Intelligence Unit, the business information arm of The Economist Group, publisher of The Economist; and Net Exchange, which was responsible for design, development and operation of the PAM trading system.

PAM was designed to much like other financial markets, with investors buying "futures" in events they think are likely to happen, and selling off futures as they believe events become less likely to happen. Some of the possibilities the PAM website offered for sale were the overthrow of the King of Jordan, the assassination of Yasser Arafat, and a missile attack by North Korea.

Bidders would profit if the events for which they hold futures -- including government coups, assassinations and missile attacks -- occur.

"Spending taxpayer dollars to create terrorism betting parlors is as wasteful as it is repugnant. The American people want the Federal government to use its resources enhancing our security, not gambling on it," Wyden and Dorgan wrote in a letter to Poindexter.

The program was so toxic that even Republicans were running from it.

The program, called the Futures Markets Applied to Prediction (FutureMAP), would have involved investors betting small amounts of money that a particular event -- a terrorist attack or assassination -- would happen.

It has been part of the Total Information Awareness program under retired Adm. John Poindexter, a prominent figure in the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration.

His current boss, DARPA director Anthony Tether, was asked whether Poindexter would keep his job. "I don't see why not," he said as he left meetings on Capitol Hill.

Republicans moved quickly to distance themselves from the program, which was supposed to start Friday.

"We're going to recommend to the secretary of defense not to use such funds as he has available ... to implement the initial stages of this program," said Sen. John Warner, R-Virginia, chairman of the Senate Armed Service Committee.

"I just got off the phone with the head of DARPA, and we mutually agreed that this thing should be stopped," Warner said at a hearing on military promotions.

Tether agreed. When reporters asked him later whether the program was dead, he replied, "Oh yes, absolutely."

Before the Pentagon pulled the plug on the program, it generated fierce criticism, particularly from Democrats.

So it's going to be interesting to see if GMU gets anything worthwhile out of this. On one hand, you've got the internet pajama brigade who could certainly spam-bomb this project and turn it into a hijacked analysis for the Occupy Wall Street And Accomplish Nothing movement. On the other hand, if it becomes an actual useful tool by limiting access to people who actually know something, it has the danger of becoming a second coming of FutureMAP, and you wonder if it'll survive budget scrutiny any better this time than last time.

By: Brant

Sound Off! GPS or Map & Compass

Which one are you?

I want my GPS! I always know exactly where I am and where I'm headed, and there's more than enough batteries to go around

I want my map and compass! I'm old-school and paper is the only way for me. Let me decide where to go and how to get there.

Sound off in the comments below!

By: Brant

Hyperbole Man Strikes Again!

Look, we get it - it's a big deal that a DARPA project is transitioning to a system of record, but TIGR was hardly a "breakthrough multimedia reporting system" when FusionNet did the same thing. Heck, even CIDNE did the same thing if you were willing to be bound by their network/accessibility constraints.

A breakthrough multimedia reporting system for troops patrolling in Afghanistan and Iraq has officially joined the Army's portfolio.

The Tactical Ground Reporting tool, known as TIGR, was created by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in response to Soldiers' needs to digitally capture, report and retrieve patrol data such as common incidents, residents and leaders of a village. TIGR transitioned from DARPA program management to the Army's Project Manager Force XXI Battle Command Brigade-and-Below (PM FBCB2) on Oct. 1.

"TIGR is a remarkable tool that DARPA was able to get out to deployed units quickly, and rapidly develop it in line with what the Soldiers needed on the ground for their counterinsurgency missions," said Col. Thomas Olson, project manager for FBCB2, which is assigned to the Program Executive Office for Command, Control and Communications-Tactical (PEO C3T). "The Army looks forward to building upon this work, by integrating what Soldiers like best about TIGR into our next-generation FBCB2 systems."

The transition comes as the original TIGR application is growing more versatile, with versions for handheld devices, vehicles and command posts heavily involved in the semi-annual Network Integration Evaluation (NIE) events, which have the mission to rapidly advance the Army's tactical network.

It's nice that the troops got a great system to use. But it was hardly the only one of it's kind, and trying to pump it up as such is pretty disingenuous on the part of the article author/PR flacks.

By: Brant

NSA Joins Smartphone Era?

Well, OK... Not exactly. But some people inside the NSA are trying to overcome security hurdles to get more productive.

Troy Lange knows that just mentioning cellphones is enough to give security officers heartburn at the National Security Agency.
Lange, as the NSA's mobility mission manager, is developing a smartphone that he wants to bring inside the super-secret U.S. spy agency to access classified information and apps while on the move. He wants it to work as easily as any of the smartphones those that are so ubiquitous in the outside world.
That is no small vision for an agency where entire buildings are designated as Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities, known as SCIFs in spy speak, with many restrictions to ensure the handling and discussion of secret information stays secure.
Visitors to the Fort Meade, Maryland, NSA complex are not allowed to bring outside cellphones into the building.
Lange argues that using smartphones inside areas that deal with secret material will increase efficiency.
"I want to get this into everybody's hands" -- every employee in the Defense Department, intelligence community and across government, he said, while acknowledging that kind of talk makes "the security people's heads pop off."

By: Brant

The Coming Cyberwar

Foreign Policy magazine is looking ahead at "The Calm Before the Storm".

In one remote attack on the Pentagon's information systems about 10 years ago, the Chinese hauled away up to 20 terabytes of information. If the information had been on paper, they'd have needed a line of moving vans stretching from the Pentagon to freighters docked 50 miles away in Baltimore harbor just to haul it away. Had they done so, the military district of Washington would've become an active theater of operations for the first time since 1865, and the Navy would've blockaded the Chesapeake Bay. But the Chinese did it electronically, so who noticed?

Corporate espionage by both competitors and foreign intelligence services or their surrogates is also increasing. Intelligence officials see this but can't speak openly about the specifics, and I'm seeing it now in my law practice. The victims rarely admit it, for understandable reasons. Oracle, which successfully sued SAP for theft of its software code, was a prominent exception. Google was another.

When the Chinese penetrated Google in late 2009 -- yes, that operation was Chinese, and yes, it was done with the blessing of a member of the Politburo -- they weren't after customer information. They were after the source code that makes Google unique. Nor was Google the only victim: Thousands of U.S. and Western firms were penetrated in that affair. Foreign governments -- and not only the Chinese -- understand that they cannot compete with the United States militarily and politically if they cannot compete with it economically, so their intelligence services want to steal its corporate intellectual property. This is the technology that gives America its competitive edge, and often it has nothing to do with defense. Ordinary companies with valuable technology are now being targeted by nation-states. This is a new era. National security and economic security have converged.

The danger is not limited to the loss of technology and information, however. The owners and operators of the North American electricity grid are hooking up their control systems to the Internet as fast as they can. Exposing the grid to the Internet makes it marginally more efficient, but it also makes it dramatically more vulnerable to disruption. If you can remotely penetrate an electronic system to steal information, you can remotely penetrate it to shut it down or make it go haywire. This is why there is no longer a meaningful difference between information security and operational security. And the biggest operational risk is the grid. In contemporary society, nothing moves without electricity. If the grid goes out, the country stops.

By: Brant