: Marines and Sailors, Your Privacy Has Been Trashed
Editor's note: Government Executive debuts the column What's Brewin', written by Editor-at-large Bob Brewin. Every week, What's Brewin' will bring you an insider's look at the hot topics and tidbits of conversation that make up the IT culture inside the Pentagon, at military bases around the world and inside the boardrooms of Defense contractors.
Marines and Sailors: Your Privacy Has Been Trashed
That's the essence of a message sent last week by Gen. James Conway to all commands on the need to destroy all documents containing Personally Identifiable Information (PII) rather than throwing them in the trash.
According to Conway's message, a recent Naval Audit Service investigation of eight Navy and Marine Corps installations revealed that documents containing PII - such as medical records, traffic tickets and other police records, travel documents, personnel rosters, training forms, etc. -- were found at recycling facilities, in office trash cans and dumpsters located on bases and off bases (that means commercial organizations).
Conway's message describes PII as any information about an individual that can be used to uniquely and reliably identify a person, including but not limited to name, address, telephone number, e-mail address, biometrics, date of birth, race, religious affiliation, etc. All documents containing PII, Conway directs, now must be marked "For Official Use Only" and shredded when no longer required.
He recommends the use of cross-cut shredders, and any Marine installation looking for one of these critters can get a deal on one from Advantage Business Equipment, which is running an online special for its Advanta-Shred Model 825 with a one-horsepower motor that knocks down the GSA schedule price from $1,699 to a mere $949.
Even though recycling is politically correct, Conway's message warned against this practice for PII documents since recycling facilities "typically bale the intact paper for transport to commercial paper mills."
Navy CIO: Privacy Is Job One
Rob Carey, the Navy Department's chief information officer, last week told the AFCEA/U.S. Naval Institute Transformation Warfare conference in Virginia Beach that he considers ensuring protection of PII his top priority, saying the Navy and Marines have become "too cavalier" about how they protect the private information of the personnel.
Carey said the Navy and Marine Corps not only need to change their behavior toward PII - which I assume means, among other things, not throwing documents with private information in the trash - but also need to adopt technology to protect PII stored on computers, which in the case of notebook PCs, seem to end up lost, stolen or misplaced.
The Navy needs to protect "data at rest" that's stored on PCs through encryption. The Navy will use blanket purchase agreements awarded last week by the Defense Department's Enterprise Software Office, Carey said.
The 11 BPAs provide software to protect sensitive unclassified data residing on government laptops, other mobile computing devices and removable storage media devices. Categories of software include full disk encryption, file encryption and integrated FDE/FES products.
Army FCS Zigs and Zags with Zigbee
Thanks to my colleague Greg Grant and one of his tipsters, we've learned that the technology at the heart of the unmanned sensor networks for the Army's Future Combat Systems is a short-range wireless data transmission standard and a bunch of gizmos called Zigbee, whose commercial applications include control of home and office heating and cooling systems, appliances, industrial automation systems and home entertainment setups.
Textron Defense Systems, a sub to Boeing, the prime FCS contractor, is developing the FCS Tactical-Unmanned Ground Sensor (T-UGS) and the Urban-Unmanned Ground Sensor (U-UGS), which include optical sensors that remotely monitor the battlespace and then feed that information into the FCS network.
There's one key problem with using Zigbee for these sensor networks: These devices operate in the 2.4 GHz frequency band running under the Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g protocol, which also is used by the FCS Mobile Node network during a test which ran from last fall through early this year at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.
Since it's hard for multiple devices to simultaneously operate in the same frequency band, this resulted in collisions between data packets sent over the Zigbee-powered data network and the FCS Mobile Node at White Sands, which resulted in degrading the data from the sensor networks, the tipster told us.
This should not have come to a surprise to either Textron or Boeing, as a quick Google search for potential conflicts between Zigbee and 802.11 b/g networks pops up a number of papers that lay out the problems quite clearly to anyone who has mastered geek speak.
A paper by Crossbow Technology, which manufactures Zigbee sensors, shows signal degradation of slightly more than 20 percent when the sensors operate at 2.450 GHz in the vicinity of a high-powered Wi-Fi system operating at the same frequency.
I'm still waiting to hear back from the Army, Boeing and Textron on this conflict, but meanwhile, anyone who operates a home Wi-Fi network and uses a 2.4Ghz cordless phone should think twice before adding Zigbee to the mix. A Zigbee network used to control the heat and AC just might end up knocking out the Wi-Fi network and the cordless phone might end up turning up the thermostat.
Marines Way Behind in InfoOps
While the Army, Navy, and Air Force all are pushing their information warfare capabilities, including offensive information operations, the Marine Corps is running dead last in this new and important area of warfare, according to a series of briefing slides that appeared in my mailbox.
The briefing, prepared by the Capabilities Development Directorate of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, shows that the Marines have not even addressed the most basic InfoOps issues: There are no formal Marine InfoOps schools and there is no formal career path for InfoOps officers or enlisted personnel. There also is no formal MOS for the InfoOps field, the briefing detailed.
The Marines, the briefing added, have no InfoOps doctrine -- and doctrine is the baseline for anything in the military. The service also lacks formal information operations planning and coordination, the briefing disclosed.
The service will not have any airborne electronic warfare (EW) capability between the time EA-6B Prowlers (a machine designed to turn jet fuel into an unbelievable amount of noise) are retired in 2015 and new aircraft enter service in 2020.
This is bad news on two fronts. The Marines need InfoOps and EW capability to support operations today, and they also need a formal InfoOps organization to gain funding that the Army and Air Force have positioned themselves to scoop up with visible and well-publicized commands and programs.
The Marines don't even have an InfoOps logo -- no logo, no program, no money.
Big Bucks for Kingdom of Jordan C4ISR
Jordan abuts Iraq, right? The king is our pal, right?
So, according to a CENTCOM internal brief, the Army Foreign Military Sales program plans to spend $228 million to provide Jordan with a spiffy new Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence and Surveillance System.
I somewhat understand the logic behind this, but as a taxpayer, it still boggles the mind.
I wonder which Inside the Beltway contactor will get tapped for this sweet deal.
Zero G Teachers?
Tom Henson, an image therapist at Northrop Grumman, says his company is looking for teachers who want to experience the thrill of zero G flight through trips on aircraft that fly a parabolic arc and induce temporary weightlessness.
The Northrop Grumman Foundation Weightless Flights of Discovery program is designed to "inspire" math and science teachers by simulating how astronauts prepare for space flight, Henson says.
I can't imagine Sister Miriam John -- the dark force of my school years -- ever signing up for such a program. But if she did, she surely would outdo Sally Field in her Flying Nun days.
If you know a teacher ready for zero G, have them check out this Northrop Grumman Web site: http://www.northropgrumman.com/community/weightless.html
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