[net-gold] Secrecy News -- 08/02/10
- From: "David P. Dillard" <jwne@xxxxxxxxxx>
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- Date: Mon, 2 Aug 2010 19:03:41 -0400 (EDT)
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Date: Mon, 2 Aug 2010 10:31:10 -0400
From: Steven Aftergood <saftergood@xxxxxxx>
To: Steven Aftergood <saftergood@xxxxxxx>
Subject: Secrecy News -- 08/02/10
SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2010, Issue No. 62
August 2, 2010
Secrecy News Blog:
http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/
** AFGHANISTAN CASUALTIES, AND MORE FROM CRS
** WEAKNESSES IN INDUSTRIAL CYBER SECURITY DESCRIBED
** TOO MANY SECRETS, THE GREATEST MATH DISCOVERY, AND MORE
AFGHANISTAN CASUALTIES, AND MORE FROM CRS
Sixty-six American troops died in Afghanistan in July, making it the
deadliest month for U.S. forces in the Afghanistan War thus far, the
Washington Post and others reported.
Casualties of the Afghanistan War have recently been tabulated by the
Congressional Research Service, including statistics on American forces, of
whom around 1100 have been killed, as well as allied forces, and Afghan
civilians. Although the three week old CRS report does not include the very
latest figures, it provides links to official and unofficial sources of
casualty information that are regularly updated. See "Afghanistan
Casualties: Military Forces and Civilians," July 12, 2010:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R41084.pdf
A number of other noteworthy new CRS reports that have not been made readily
available to the public were obtained by Secrecy News, including these:
"Terrorist Material Support: An Overview of 18 U.S.C. 2339A and 2339B," July
19, 2010:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R41333.pdf
"Terrorist Material Support: A Sketch of 18 U.S.C. 2339A and 2339B," July
19, 2010:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R41334.pdf
"Veterans Medical Care: FY2011 Appropriations," July 27, 2010:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41343.pdf
"U.S. Sanctions on Burma," July 16, 2010:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R41336.pdf
"U.S.-Australia Civilian Nuclear Cooperation: Issues for Congress," July 7,
2010:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/R41312.pdf
Sen. John McCain inserted a nice tribute in the Congressional Record on
April 28 to CRS analyst Christopher Bolkcom, our friend and former FAS
colleague, who died last year. See "Remembering Christopher C. Bolkcom":
http://www.fas.org/sgp/congress/2010/bolkcom.html
WEAKNESSES IN INDUSTRIAL CYBER SECURITY DESCRIBED
The vulnerabilities of critical energy infrastructure installations to
potential cyber attack are normally treated as restricted information and
are exempt from public disclosure. But a recent Department of Energy report
was able to openly catalog and describe the typical vulnerabilities of
energy infrastructure facilities because it did not reveal the particular
locations where they were discovered.
"Although information found in individual... vulnerability assessment
reports is protected from disclosure, the security of the nation's energy
infrastructure as a whole can be improved by sharing information on common
security problems," the DOE report said. "For this reason, vulnerability
information was collected, analyzed, and organized to allow the most
prevalent issues to be identified and mitigated by those responsible for
individual systems without disclosing the identity of the associated...
product."
The specific vulnerabilities that were found are no big surprise -- open
ports, unsecure coding practices, and poor patch management. But by
describing the issues in some detail, the new report may help to demystify
the cyber security problem and to provide a common vocabulary for publicly
addressing it. See "NSTB Assessments Summary Report: Common Industrial
Control System Cyber Security Weaknesses," Idaho National Laboratory, May
2010:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/eprint/nstb.pdf
TOO MANY SECRETS, THE GREATEST MATH DISCOVERY, AND MORE
The Wikileaks publication of tens of thousands of classified U.S. military
records last week is inevitably prompting a review of information security
practices to identify remedial steps. I have been arguing that one of those
steps ought to be a rethinking of classification policy. "The reform that
may be needed more urgently than any other is a careful reduction in the
size of the secrecy system." See "Afghan Leaks: Is the U.S. Keeping Too
Many Secrets?" by Alex Altman, Time, July 30:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2007224,00.html
The Department of Defense has updated its doctrine on "foreign internal
defense," which refers to actions taken to support a foreign government's
efforts to combat domestic subversion, insurgency or terrorism. See Joint
Publication 3-22, "Foreign Internal Defense," July 12, 2010:
http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/jp3_22.pdf
"The Army in Multinational Operations" is the subject of a newly updated
U.S. Army Field Manual, FM 3-16, May 2010:
http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-16.pdf
Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), whose essays transformed Western
consciousness and literature, was not capable of solving basic arithmetic
problems. And most other people would not be able to do so either, if not
for the invention of decimal notation by an unknown mathematician in India
1500 years ago. That is the contention of a neat little essay recently
published by the Department of Energy (based in part on a book by Georges
Ifrah). See "The Greatest Mathematical Discovery?" by David H. Bailey and
Jonathan M. Borwein, May 12, 2010:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/eprint/discovery.pdf
_______________________________________________
Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation
of American Scientists.
The Secrecy News Blog is at:
http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/
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Support the FAS Project on Government Secrecy with a donation:
http://www.fas.org/member/donate_today.html
_______________________
Steven Aftergood
Project on Government Secrecy
Federation of American Scientists
web: www.fas.org/sgp/index.html
email: saftergood@xxxxxxx
voice: (202) 454-4691
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