Vital Systems Security

The special issue of Interfaces journal from 2006 was entitled: Homeland Security: Operations Research Initiatives and Applications. You might find some of the papers interesting, since they touch on broad range of topics discussed on this blog. Some of the topics are bio-security/terrorism, emergency response and critical infrastructures. The article number 6 is especially interesting, since the author starts by drawing a direct link between homeland security and the genealogy of operations research expertise that we have been tracing in OEP research.

Trust for America’s Health has released its 2007 edition of “Ready Or Not?”, a yearly treasure trove of information on the state of public health preparedness in the US. The report provides a thorough assessment of the wide array of activities, issues and trends that intersect to help form this constantly changing field. It is a gem and should be required reading for anyone with a professional interest in the field.

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Despite recent spikes in H5N1 avian influenza activity in humans and birds, there have been fewer bird outbreaks in fewer countries this year [2007] than in 2006, according to a preliminary report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
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I shouldn’t be so snarky because the story is actually really interesting. Check out this link from yesterday’s LA Times, which details the behind-the-scenes politicking which proved the coup de grace for one of the nation’s first next-generation vaccines against a category A agent: VaxGen’s rPA102 anthrax vaccine. Deft lobbying and savvy rhetoric by Emergent BioSolutions, Inc., proved insurmountable for the South San Francisco company, which not only failed to produce the nation’s first BioShield-related vaccine, but was kicked in the teeth for trying. Amongst all the great reasons for not wanting to see anthrax ever appear amongst human populations in epidemic proportions is the discomfiting imagery of the six shot series of vaccinations that will still be needed in the event of such a threat. Emergent BioSolutions, manufacturer of said scary but mostly-kind-of effective vaccine, effectively argued that VaxGen’s (substantially less onerous) product was of questionable worth, developed by novices. Ouch. I thought BioShield’s point was to get novices in the game, because BigPharma was avoiding orphan vaccines like the plague. Ha! The plague!

Oh yeah, and look at this cool picture.

I am happy to introduce Amelia Moore to this blog. Amelia is a doctoral student at UC Berkeley. Currently, she is conducting fieldwork in the Bahamas (and the U.S.). Her terrific research project focuses on biocomplexity and resonates with many other projects conducted by our little group over here at the vss blog. Amelia recently sent me a short description of her research project. To learn more, read on! Read the rest of this entry »

The engineering society IEEE’s general magazine Spectrum has a featurette on “Open Source Warfare” in the November online version. It’s written by Robert Charette, who normally tracks software failures at his blog Risk Factor. The article is a good one, as these things go, spurred on by John Robb’s recent book Brave New War. Robb is a RAND researcher who has been writing about so-called open source warfare for a few years now. I thought I’d post this here because it’s obviously of concern to me that the term open source is being applied in this way. What it means to the RAND researchers and people who think the concept makes sense, is captured by my title here though: jihadists and insurgents are said to be more efficient at innovating their techniques because they are “free from the administrative burdens of maintaining their own infrastructure…” and can rely on Wal Mart and Fedex to supply and ship the things they need to make household bombs.

So, my analysis of open source is useful here, in that I think they are absolutely right about this, but that it is only one piece of what makes open source distinctive… but lacks many others. There is no mention of the intellectual property related aspects, or the specific mode of openness that characterizes software projects, much less the specifc IT tools people use. But it is correct about one thing, which is the reliance on existing standardized infrastructures and hardware, such as the widely shared PC architecture, file formats (for insurgents’ videos), the Internet, secure international credit transactions for online purchasing and so on.

The phrase “administrative burdens” is a peculiar one though. Much or the article focuses on the weapons acquisition process of the US Military, arguing that the process simply takes a long time. The implicit argument seems to be that this process and the time it takes to acquire weapons should be changed and shortened. I wonder though, whether this is just another way of arguing that the military should have less oversight, more secrecy, and less accountability… which would be pretty much the opposite of what open source can and has achieved in other areas.