Internet Archives

In the almost forgotten era before the Internet, if you were sick enough to go to a hospital, all you had do was lie in bed, have doctors and nurses care for you, and you eventually got better.

Now, thanks to technology, the Veterans Affairs Department wants to develop an Interactive Patient Bedside Care Tool, or an e-patient terminal. The idea is to encourage patients to "be more actively involved in the care process."

VA wants a contractor to turn the bedside TV into an interactive terminal so patients can access the MyHealheVet website, stream educational videos, view a list of scheduled appointments for the day and, who knows, maybe a surgery webcam.

As anyone who has served in combat knows, if a buddy is wounded, the first two things you need to do are make sure he can breathe and his bleeding is stopped.

For the past several years, troops serving in Afghanistan and Iraq have used an advanced Combat-Application-Tourniquet (C-A-T) developed by Composite Resources in Rock Hill, S.C. The tourniquet features a nylon strap and a plastic rod to tighten the strap to stop bleeding.

The regulation C-A-T costs about $28. But about two years ago the Army detected cheap knock offs made by a Hong Kong company that had entered the military's supply chain in Afghanistan and Iraq. The imitation sold for about $8.50.

They're accurate looking fakes, right down to the label and national stock number.

But as Col. John Kragh, a doctor at the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research at Fort Sam Houston, pointed out in June, the rod on the fake tourniquet "is bendable to a point where it cannot work right. It's like bending Gumby's arm."

He said the fake tourniquet could be fatal because it cannot stop bleeding. Kragh added a decentralized ordering system probably accounts for the presence of the fake tourniquets in the field, with low-level supply personnel ordering the knock offs over the Internet based on price.

The Defense Department issued a warning about the knock-offs in April, Kragh said, and the Food and Drug Administration this month put out a safety alert about the tourniquets, which are also used by civilian first responders.

The lesson here is a good deal isn't always that; it can even be deadly.

Congress -- an outfit which consists of 535 folks in search of a sound bite and 24,000 staffers who support that goal -- wants access to the Defense Department's classified network, or also known as the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet).

Giving thousands access to the network could result in leaks that make the Gulf oil spill look like a drip. But it could happen due to language buried on page 372 of the 637-page report on the fiscal 2011 Defense authorization bill approved by the House Armed Services Committee.

The language would require the Defense Secretary to provide SIPERNet access to each congressional committee through a secure link on CAPNet, the fiber-optic network that serves the House and Senate.

The link, the bill says, would support "appropriate" classified communications between the Hill and the Pentagon. But I'm more than a bit concerned it will lead to decidedly inappropriate leaks of classified and sensitive information.

I can understand a need (maybe) for SIPRNet access by the Defense or Intelligence committees, but why (oh why) would the Standards of Official Conduct or Small Business committees need a connection to Defense's secret network, used to run wars, among other things.

About 7 million airline passengers had been going nowhere slowly due to the volcanic ash plume from a volcano in Iceland that has all but closed air traffic in Europe since April 14.

But if those travelers have a Wi-Fi laptop computer and are stuck in an airport that offers wireless service, they are probably better informed than folks stuck on the Washington Beltway - all of whom, we know, keep their eyes on the road.

You can get The Big Picture from Radar Virtuel, which offers a nifty map of Europe that shows flights in real time -- with an ash cloud overlay.

The site graphically depicts what everyone who reads, watches or listens to the news knows: Northern Europe has less air traffic since the 1880s when Santos Dumont flew his airship around the Eiffel Tower.

You can get The Bigger Picture from NASA, which offers a variety of satellite shots of the plume and the Eyjafjallajökull cauldron from April 17 through Monday.

At no extra charge, NASA also throws in how to pronounce the name of the volcano: EYE-a-fyat-la-yu-goot. The Associated Press tells us it's "ay-yah-FYAH'-plah-yer-kuh-duhl." (Listen to this pronunciation and you decide.)

In any case, don't practice it while driving on the Beltway.

You can get Just The Facts from Eurocontrol, which coordinates air traffic control across the continent and offers four daily updates on how much European airspace is closed due to the volcanic ash cloud.

One of the latest updates shows air traffic control services are not being provided to civilian aircraft in the major part of European airspace. This includes Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, northern Italy, Romania, Slovenia, Switzerland, parts of Ukraine and the United Kingdom.

Eurocontrol also provides a map of the ash cloud that shows it's not moving very far or very fast.

You can get your Bad Mozzarella Report from Bradley Klapper of the Associated Press, who did a great roundup of the economic impacts resulting from the near shutdown of European air traffic. He hit the high points such as the fact that air carriers are losing $200 million a day, but also took a look at other fallouts from the cloud. This includes hotels gouging stranded travelers $800 a night and Italian farmers facing losses of $14 million a day as mozzarella and fresh fruits risk going bad as they sit on tarmacs.

The U.S. Postal Service, which expects to lose $7 billion this year, could pick up more than a bit of spare change by helping the Federal Communications Commission and the National Telecommunications Administration conduct a national analysis of spectrum usage, according to the FCC's National Broadband Plan, which it recently sent Congress.

FCC said the national inventory of spectrum usage would require sniffing the airwaves with spectrum analyzers mounted on postal vehicles, and it put the cost at $15 million.

That won't come close to erasing the Postal Service's deficit, estimated to hit $238 billion by 2020, but, hey, every million bucks here and there counts when you are struggling to get by.

It's amazing what I can find trolling through thousands of pages of budget documents. Like this one: the location of a highly sensitive system.

Be warned that in the era of plain old Google and Google Earth any small hint of a system's location will lead any reasonably good searchmeister right to it.

I did that on Wednesday when an agency I will leave unnamed put the building number in its fiscal 2011 budget documents where it planned to install an unbelievably sensitive system. It did not include the city or street name.

I fired up Google, typed in the name of the agency and the building number, and in less than a minute had the name of the installation where the building was located, the city, the street number and the zip code. I then cranked all that information into Google Earth, fiddled around for a couple of minutes, and was then looking into that building's front door.

This is open source intelligence, and if I could find the building, so, I imagine, can any number of bad guys. I'm not disclosing the name of the agency, building or system, but I did send them a note about what I considered a rather serious OPSEC flub.

I'm really sensitive to this kind of stuff. In 1998, while on assignment for Federal Computer Week in Bosnia, I was captured by a U.S. Army rifle platoon after a seemingly innocent trip to a remote hilltop to do a telemedicine story.

Army Lt. Col. Jim Cronin, the public affairs officer in Tuzla, Bosnia, at the time, told me I could take all the photos I wanted, and so I snapped merrily away, including many shots of some really weird radio antennas.

Turns out that the weird antennas belonged to, shh, an outfit headquartered at Fort Meade, Md. As a result, the Army dispatched four Humvees to capture me.

Oh yeah, they wanted the film, which I did not give them. (Nowadays, I don't need my own film, just Google Earth.)

Cronin tried to explain it all away by telling me "we had a slow peacekeeping day."

I live in New Mexico, one of the 36 states whose drivers licenses will no longer qualify as identification for domestic air travel as of the New Year. That caused me to worry that I might never return from my holiday trip to Hawaii.

This meant I needed to renew my passport, a process I started the day after Thanksgiving, with a fear that the passport would not arrive before I left on vacation this month. The State Department Web site says it takes two to three weeks to process a passport application even with its expedited service, which I opted for.

Those concerns were alleviated when my wife and I received our passports on Dec. 7 via express mail. That's six business days (almost to the hour) from when we put them in the mail.

I considered this a miracle akin to the Internet, a testament to the Postal Service and the State Department.

Megan Mattson, a spokeswoman at State, told me that even though the department cautions the public that it can take two to three weeks to get a new passport with the expedited delivery option, it's not uncommon for it to take only a week.

Despite the Real ID Act's Jan. 1, 2010, deadline, which will make many drivers licenses in 36 states Unreal ID (unless the Department of Homeland Security extends the deadline), Mattson told me that the volume of passport applications this year is running about 2.7 million behind 2008's volume. State has issued 13.5 million passports in 2009 so far, compared with 16.2 million in 2008.

I'm thrilled to have my new passport but still miffed that I need to use one for domestic travel. That's a policy that was a hallmark of the old Soviet Union, and by today's standard, the Peoples Republic of China.

Such a policy has no place in a democracy.

During the Big One -- that would be World War II -- my father, like many soldiers, communicated from the Pacific with my mother by V-Mail (Victory Mail). It was advanced technology for the time and was developed to reduce the mail sent to forward locations.

My father would write a letter on a special V-Mail form, take it to his unit post office where it was microfilmed. About 150,000 microfilmed letters fit into one mail sack, according to the all-knowing Wiki folks. When the sack reached the states, the microfilmed letters were enlarged, printed and sent on their way.

The Army has updated this approach with HooahMail to speed the delivery of mail to soldiers in Afghanistan. It went into operation on Tuesday. Friends or family of troops in Afghanistan can log on the site, type in a soldier's address, type in a message, attach a digital photo if they want to and then press send.

The letter is routed via the Internet to one of 10 locations in Afghanistan where special equipment will automatically print, fold, address, stuff the message into an envelope and then seal it. The envelopes are then placed into the regular intra-theater mail delivery system.

Bill Hilsher, Army postal program manager, said HooahMail cuts down delivery of mail to troops in Afghanistan from 14 days to next-day or even same day delivery.

What's next? Spam, which my father wouldn't touch after the Big One, that tastes good?

Want a positive sign that security in Iraq is improving?

Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt finished up a three-day business trip to Iraq on Tuesday, where, among other things, he kicked off a Google project to digitize and electronically catalog 14,000 artifacts in the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad.

Agence France Presse, the French newswire service, reported that the undisclosed cost of the digitization project will be split between Google and the State Department. Asked of Google planned more projects in Iraq, Schmidt said, "I'm sure we'll add more."

Schmidt had high praise for the troops in Iraq. He told the Pentagon Channel that "the overwhelming impression that I have of Iraq is the courage of the soldiers and the people who assist the soldiers. . . . These are people to be celebrated."

As I reported last week, the Veterans Affairs Department asked the Industry Advisory Council for its help in modernizing its venerable, but more than two-decade-old, Veterans Health Information System and Technology Architecture, or VistA.

The first meeting of the IAC VistA Industry Advisory Council was held on Oct. 14 and in a press release issued today, Ed Meagher, chairman of the group and a former VA deputy chief information officer, said, "We are tasked with producing substantive recommendations on ways to modernize a system that works very well but is written in software code that is outdated and difficult to maintain."

Meagher, currently the director of strategic health initiatives at SRA International, added, "A new and more open approach would enable various sectors of the health care industry to leverage the significant investment the government has already made in VistA."

IAC plans to fulfill its charter in keeping the light on in the Obama administration transparency thing and launched a blog on Tuesday to report on its work.

In the blog, Meagher said more than 40 IAC members have joined the working group to help modernize VistA "not as representatives of their respective companies but as representatives of our industry and more importantly as concerned citizens of our country."

WorldVistA, a nonprofit that backs the use of open source VistA outside VA, also has signed on to the IAC effort. Joseph Dal Molin, who is working on a pilot test of VistA in the Kingdom of Jordan, said he viewed the IAC effort as "a landmark opportunity to gather together the wisdom and experience of the VistA community and communicate it's insights to VA leadership."

Writing on the VistA Hard Hats blog, which serves the VistA open source community, Dal Molin said the Vista Community, scheduled for early January in Tempe, Ariz., will focus on the work under way by the IAC VistA Working Group.

Dal Molin urged the open VistA community to help develop new graphical user interfaces for VistA, new functionality and new software platforms.

What do these IAC and WorldVistA efforts mean? It's simple, one knowledgeable source told me: development and deployment of an almost free electronic health record system clinicians and hospitals can download from the Internet.

And, since free VistA software could threaten the mega-billion dollar health care information technology industry, you can bet that there are a lot of folks who will do their darndest to ensure that the VistA modernization efforts go nowhere.