Rick Cattell, Distinguished Engineer at Sun quotes Bob Taylor, manager of Xerox PARC CS Lab:

Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If they’re really good ideas, you usually have to cram them down their throats.

I’m reading this report because someone I know, and I have great respect for, Tara Lemmey, was involved in its creation. One thing that’s great and unique about the United States is that groups like this spring up basically on their own, and they produce high-quality work. Whether it will be applied by the powers-to-be is a different subject, but no one can say we didn’t know how to do it.

From the report:

The problem is broader than just collecting and sharing information. It is the challenge of using information effectively, linking collection with sound and imaginative analysis derived from multiple perspectives and employing cutting-edge technology to support end-users, from emergency responders to Presidents. In other words, we need to mobilize information for the new era of national security we have entered.

This last sentence is one great view of looking at the problem. "Mobilizing information": getting away from passive data to proactive, one could say "action-inducing" information. I wish I had come up with that phrase.

This is an excellent report, I just hope the DHS and others take it to heart.

In the second report, they write:

First, our government should give greater priority to sharing and analyzing information. In the Cold War intelligence architecture, the government placed a premium on the security of information. It developed a system that tightly controlled access to information by requiring that every individual have a demonstrable “need to know”… This system assumed that it was possible to determine a priori who needed to know particular information. And it reflected the judgment that the risk of inadvertent or malicious disclosure was greated than the benefit of wider information-sharing.

I very much like their focus on building a decentralized system, both technically and organizationally. It’s the right thing to do — and probably dead on arrival because it will upset every vested interest there is. We can just hope that insight beats inertia, that the real danger of losing real lives beats the bureaucracy.

Bob Lechner, one of the old CDIF people (my Intro to CDIF, although mostly only of historical interest now, is still on-line), gave me this picture taken at a CDIF meeting which took place — if I recall this correctly — in January 1996.

It was taken on the deck of the Del Coronado Hotel, a very nice, historical hotel in San Diego. While the Object Management Group, with whom we were meeting, were done with their program, we hard-core CDIF people moved to the deck and did some serious meta-modeling! (To the utter bewilderment of the tourists on deck).

From the left: Conrad Bock (now with NIST), Rob Hill (entrepreneur, then "just retired" from Sybase), Woody Pidcock (of the Boeing Company), and myself (then with Integrated Systems, which was later acquired by Wind River Systems).

Axelrod’s famous book "The Evolution of Cooperation" has been one of my all-time favorites for a long time.

SmartMobs now reports via Wired that a new successful strategy has been found for the iterated prisoners’ dilemma that is different from Tit-for-Tat.

This strategy basically steps out of the original system by having prior knowledge of the strategies of other entrants, by attempting to recognize other entrants during the game, and then behaving differently. Clever! and obviously much closer to reality than the original setup.