This track is focusing on how cyber capabilities are changing business process. The capabilities have certainly changed how we planned and execute this workshop. For example, DoD Policy requires all DoD employee to get an independent review to post work-related or military-related information. What is the impact of these types of policies?
Please add addition ideas on cyber impacts that you have seen.
Here is copy of an article that impacts within the State Department:
New York Times
August 4, 2008
Link by Link
An Internal Wiki That’s Not Classified
By NOAM COHEN <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/noam_cohen/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
IN the past, said Stacie R. Hankins, a special assistant at the United States Embassy in Rome, when the ambassador prepared to meet an Italian political figure, the staff would e-mail a memo about the meeting and attach biographies of those who would be attending to be printed out.
Today, she said, they still produce the memo, but “now they attach a link to the Diplopedia article” — Diplopedia being a wiki, open to the contributions of all who work in the State Department. The ambassador, Ronald P. Spogli, frequently reads the biographies on his BlackBerry on the way to the meeting.
The advantages are obvious, in efficiency and in saving paper, but it has required a leap of faith, too. For, theoretically at least, anyone at the State Department could have edited the biographies Mr. Spogli was reading — unlike traditional resources.
In addition to reference material like the 200 biographies of Italian political and business leaders, the more than 4,400 Diplopedia articles reflect the range of the staff’s concerns — among popular articles are high-minded titles like “Foreign Affairs Professional Reading List” and mundane ones like “Building Pass.”
“It’s grass-roots technology in a top-down organization,” said Eric M. Johnson of the State Department’s Office of eDiplomacy in Washington <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/national/usstatesterritoriesandpossessions/washingtondc/index.html?inline=nyt-geo> , who recently gave a talk about Diplopedia at Wikipedia <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/wikipedia/index.html?inline=nyt-org> ’s annual conference in Alexandria, Egypt.
Since it was introduced in 2006, Mr. Johnson said, Diplopedia has had impressive growth. There are 1,000 registered users, he said, 650,000 total page views and lately 20,000 new page views a week, he said of the site, which contains no classified information but is not available to the general public. “It is one of the most popular sites in the State Department, other than getting your pay information,” Mr. Johnson said.
But he also was quick to put those numbers in perspective: there are 1.8 million cable messages a year within the department, 1.5 billion e-mail messages a year, 1,000 public and internal Web sites.
Even so, success to Mr. Johnson is defined not only by what can be found on Diplopedia but also what cannot. There have been no “flame wars,” he said, that is, mindless arguments over the phrasing in an article, and no pages that have needed to be deleted or locked down.
What if someone creates disinformation or vandalism? Mr. Johnson was asked in Egypt — a not-infrequent question when the topic of wikis comes up. He pointed out that unlike Wikipedia, Diplopedia does not allow anonymous contributors, so bad actors could be tracked down. He then observed, “There are plenty of ways to commit career suicide; wikis are just the newest one.”
There was a larger point to bringing his message to Wikimania 2008, as the annual conference is called: if wikis can work at the State Department, with its fabled bureaucracy and attention to protocol and word choice, they can work anywhere.
There certainly is a culture of collaborative writing at the State Department, Mr. Johnson acknowledged: memos are drafted, massaged, passed up the chain for comments and then approved. But this form of collaboration is based on the notion that the more people who read something, the less chance it will be candid. Wikis, by contrast, are collaborative only in retrospect — someone has to be prepared to be the first to write something, and deal with having those words changed by a complete stranger.
Defense Dept. Gripped By Fear of the Millennials
National Defense, October 2008, published by NDIA
By Sandra I. Erwin
Cybersecurity czars spend billions of dollars building virtual walls to protect the Pentagon’s vast computer networks from relentless attacks by hackers, worms and viruses.
But they are now confronting what could be their most difficult challenge yet — the Web 2.0 revolution.
All the wonderful new ways in which the Internet has taken over the world — social networking, wikis, collaboration, user communities, smartphones — are proving to be huge headaches for the Defense Department. All this emphasis on information sharing, participation and empowerment of users is anathema to the Pentagon’s restrictive “we only do business inside our walls” philosophy. Outside the walls, things are way too scary.
It turns out that the worst offenders of the Pentagon’s cybersecurity code are not the Chinese or the Iranians, but its own young employees — both civilians and military troops in their teens and 20s — commonly known as the “millennials.”
Their bosses can’t fathom why millennials have to stay plugged into their social networks 24/7 at work and why they are so compelled to “share” and “comment” about everything. Why is it so hard for them to stay inside the firewall?
Millennials, incidentally, are also the Pentagon’s target audience. They are being recruited to join the military and to replace an aging civilian workforce. To their surprise, millennials find that the world inside the firewalls is not Web 2.0-friendly. At the Pentagon, generals and colonels go to meetings with pens and notepads. The 20-something troops mostly live by Metcalfe’s Law, spreading information with viral infection.
The Millennial weltanschauung stirs apprehension in senior commanders because they feel they are being second-guessed. The military has been notorious for cracking down on blogging, and it once tried to shut down troops’ access to Facebook.
The fear of intruders overwhelmingly overrides the desire to enjoy the conveniences that Web 2.0 has to offer.
“I absolutely believe in lockdown,” says Roberta Stempfley, deputy CIO at the Defense Information Systems Agency.
The gatekeepers struggle with how to enable troops in the field to do their jobs without compromising security, she tells an industry conference. Although the Army calls itself a “net-centric” force, troops in war zones have limited access to the Internet or to mobile devices.
Defense officials say they want Web 2.0 technology, but how is that going to work out if employees are not allowed to email at Starbucks?
Mobile devices, especially smartphones, are cybercops’ worst nightmare. “What keeps security people up at night is not the Iranians or the Chinese, it’s these things,” says John Hale, information officer for the Director of National Intelligence, while pointing at his Blackberry. The government has learned how to protect data in the traditional desktop PC environment, but mobile computing is a whole different animal. Security worries or not, mobile devices are everywhere in the military and the intelligence agencies, he says. “If you don’t have info at your fingertips it’s useless.”
The Pentagon ideally would like to “bring inside” the virtual communities and other Web 2.0 applications that are now available outside the walls, but that may cost more money than the government is willing to pay, says John Garing, chief information officer at DISA. “We haven’t cracked the nut on how to get it in an affordable way and get the benefits the millennials get in everyday life.”
The good news for contractors is that there could be lucrative opportunities in “secure” Web 2.0 technologies. “We have fixes but they’re not easy fixes,” says Chris Daly, security specialist at IBM Federal Division. He says the company plans to offer “firewalls to enable secure technologies in federated social networks.” Lewis Shepherd, chief technology officer at the Microsoft Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments, says the company is investing billions of dollars in “trustworthy computing” that will be marketed to federal agencies.
For the foreseeable future, it is doubtful that anything will change, considering that the Defense Department is still adjusting to version 1.0 of the Web.
But here’s an even scarier thought. While the Pentagon figures out what to do about irresponsible millennials stepping outside the wall and blogging on non-secure networks, the al-Qaidas out there are jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon without trepidation. The Web is, after all, the terrorists’ premier command-and-control network.
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