Wireless Archives

The answer: No one. That's because the Defense Department has neither a CIO nor an assistant secretary of Defense for networks and information integration (that job is slated for the junk heap as part of a grand money-saving reorganization scheme).

But that plan is going nowhere due to congressional opposition. One result is that there's no one around at a high level to fight for the 100 MHz of Defense spectrum that Lawrence Strickling, head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration said yesterday he wants to transfer to commercial cellular companies in connection with the national broadband plan.

Strickling said he will work with Defense and other agencies to ensure they have the spectrum needed to perform critical missions, but somehow those missions seem far less important than the ability of every 12-year-old in America to stream Hannah Montana videos to their mobile phones.

Will Defense mount a defense of its spectrum? I can't even get an answer to that question -- a reflection of the CIO leadership vacuum.

The Program for Culture and Conflict Studies at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., has developed a database on Afghanistan to help in managing aid and development projects.

The provincial reconstruction teams that are staffed by Defense Department personnel, diplomats and even farm experts from the Agriculture Department use the database, which includes detailed information on the country's provinces such as lists of key leaders.

But the database is hard to access from remote and unwired areas of Afghanistan. But two students at the postgraduate school solved the problem. They created a smart phone application called Mobile Afghanistan, which includes detailed province-by-province information, including:

--maps
--leaders and presidential candidate profiles
--tribal and clan genealogies, divisions and histories
--economic, cultural and political development analyses
--security incidents and more

Robert Davis and Christopher Joers, both Air Force captains, developed the app as part of a class assignment from their professor, Thomas Johnson, director of the Program for Culture and Conflict Studies. Johnson dubbed the Davis' and Joers' app, Afghanistan in Your Hand, but Davis calls it, Cliff Notes for Afghanistan.

Mobile Afghanistan is available free on the Culture and Conflict Studies website and includes installation instructions easily understood by someone who does not have an advanced degree.

Today the Veterans Affairs Department started posting online its monthly data breach reports as part of its ongoing transparency thing, VA Chief Information Officer Roger Baker told a press briefing this morning. He said the latest report (for July) might not make it to the Web until Thursday.

The reports include not only lost, misplaced or stolen computers and BlackBerries, but also misaddressed prescriptions sent out by the VA mail-order pharmacy operation, Baker said. Those packages contain sensitive veterans health information coupled with personal identifiers.

VA mailed out 5.6 million prescriptions last month, and a statically infinitesimal amount -- just 10 -- ended up in the wrong hands. If someone calls VA about receiving a misaddressed Rx, Baker said he or she is instructed to throw it away.

Nelson Grubbs in Pickering, Ohio, received an erroneously mailed Rx from VA earlier this month and following policy was told by VA to throw it away. Grubs told the Columbus, Ohio, NBC TV affiliate he had a hard time understanding the instruction because a local pharmacist valued the 90-day supply of a dementia drug he erroneously received at $700.

The TV station wanted to show the pill bottle on air, which resulted in the VA hospital in Columbus working with the station to blur out the label to keep from identifying a dementia patient, Baker said.

While it may seem wasteful to throw away $700 worth of drugs, the policy is enforce to ensure patient safety, because the "chain of custody" had been broken between VA and the intended recipient, he said.

Baker also said employees continue to lose BlackBerry gizmos -- 13 in July, 24 in June and 13 in May. That's something I have a hard time comprehending. He promised to supply me next month with a cumulative total for the number lost in 2010.

I asked if folks who lose their BlackBerrys are subject to a timeout before they are issued a new one. No, Baker said, because the low cost of the gadgets (a couple of hundred bucks) does not equal the loss in productivity that would result from a BlackBerry-less employee.

I live and work in a BlackBerry-free zone, and I believe my productivity is enhanced by not having one.

That's a question that 13 employees of the Veterans Affairs Department would have a hard time answering, said VA Chief Information Officer Roger Baker said in a call with reporters on Wednesday. The unlucky 13 reported they lost their portable gizmos in the month of May.

How do you lose a BlackBerry, I asked Baker. "Someone gets into a New York cab, puts it down, it slides into a crack in the seat, and stays there for years," he replied.

Baker added that this scenario was, of course, hypothetical and had nothing to do with personal experience.

Baker related the BlackBerry loss in his monthly call with the media to go over any potential data and information breaches at VA in the previous month. He said he was not concerned about any data loss from the misplaced BlackBerrys because the devices electronically die within five minutes of separation from their owner.

Last month, VA also had five encrypted laptops stolen, and Baker again said he was not concerned by the loss because the data was secured. An unsecured laptop also took a hike, but he said since the box was used for patient entertainment, it did not result in a data breach.

VA ships 7.5 million prescriptions a month by mail or United Parcel Service. UPS informed VA that its investigators had discovered an employee helped himself to a prescription package rather than delivering it. Susan Rosenberg, a UPS spokeswoman, said the employee has been arrested.

Baker prefaced this month's data breach call by saying it would be boring, but at the end said, in the name of transparency, he intended to continue the practice.

I'll continue to call in - even at the risk of boredom.

Amtrak has offered WiFi service to high rollers zooming along the Northeast corridor on the high-speed Acela Express trains, but the national passenger rail carrier said it has released a proposal to now provide WiFi on all its trains.

Amtrak said it plans to install WiFi next on its California trains followed by the Northeast regional service, which still offers an affordable ($49) ride between Washington and New York. It then plans to add the service to long distance trains.

I can hardly wait to test out WiFi service from my home in The Original Las Vegas, N.M., to Trinidad, Colo., over Raton Pass. If it works on that stretch, it will be a miracle.

By now, practically everyone on the planet knows that Steve Jobs and Apple introduced on Wednesday the iPad tablet, the machine That Will Change The World As We Know It Forever.

But, based on my experience, the Apple Newton, the iPads's predecessor in many ways, nudged military medicine towards development of the kind of electronic health record system that President Obama wants every clinician in the country to embrace.

I covered the event to introduce the Newton on Aug. 13, 1993, at Symphony Hall in Boston for Federal Computer Week.

Apple set up display areas to show applications for the Newton from various developers, including something called ProMed, which KPMG had developed for Walter Reed Army Medical Center. It blew my mind.

The app, according to a report, "replaced cumbersome, paper-based processes and allowed practitioners to practice medicine in a more naturalistic way."

The Newton and ProMed, and its primitive (by today's standards) wireless communications systems, untethered military docs from paper charts at a nurse's station and allowed them to interact with electronic records while standing at a patient's bed.

Apple later killed the Newton because of its primitive handwriting recognition software did not exactly thrill users, but at Walter Reed, the Newton definitely kick started a revolution in military medicine that reverberates today.

I spent a couple of days last week at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico metaphorically kicking the tires on the new high-tech gadgets and gizmos the Army plans to field to seven infantry brigades starting in 2011. I came away from the trip -- as I always do when I'm out in the field -- more impressed by the soldiers I met than the gear. (You can see the soldiers and some of the gear in this slide show.)

The Army Evaluation Task Force at White Sands has been testing high-tech systems at White Sands for more than a year and has assembled a force composed of some truly savvy combat veterans and newer troops who look like they should be in band practice, not hanging out in the Tactical Operations Center.

But 20-year-old Spec. Justin Anthony, a military intelligence systems integrator and maintainer, told me he was "way beyond" your ordinary geek and despite his youth already had a degree in electrical engineering capped off by more than a year of military schooling.

Anthony works for Maj. Blanca Reyes, an Iraq combat veteran and intelligence officer for the 5th Brigade Combat Team, which is participating in the tests at White Sands. She told me that the intelligence field attracts soldiers with the kinds of tech skills that Anthony has mastered to manipulate imagery and maps. "All intelligence soldiers are a little geekish," Reyes said.

Sgt. Maj. Chance Brooks, a two-tour Iraq veteran who helps manage planning for the brigade, said he may lag behind in geekiness to some of the younger soldiers but added his combat experience can help those soldiers as they work to refine the systems intended for use in the Army of the near future.

In the midst of the Brigade Tactical Operations Center, filled with video screens almost large enough for a baseball stadium, Sgt. Heather Hubbard, a chemical warfare specialist, engaged in a low-tech task that seems to reach back to World War II: writing operational information with a greased pencil on a large plastic board. "This is dinosaur work," Hubbard readily admitted. But then she pointed out that "systems sometimes fail and it's necessary to have a backup."

Down the road, at the Tactical Operations Center of the 2nd Combined Army Battalion, Maj. Jeffery Gottlieb, the battalion executive officer, coordinates the unit's operations in a nearby combat training village. Gottlieb, a lanky tanker and Iraq veteran, said he signed on with the Army Evaluation Task Force because he wanted to play a role in development of the future Army.

But on the day I visited, he experienced frustration with systems of the today's Army. The test force uses a mix of new communications systems based on developmental radios from the Joint Tactical Radio System for data communications and the Army's standard Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System (SINCGARS) for voice communications. Gottlieb could not connect with the unit operating in the village using the voice radios.

To fix the problem Spec. Lori Richards, a 20-year-old signal systems specialist, draped a coil of antenna wire around her neck and climbed a nearby tower to connect a new and higher antenna into the radios inside the Tactical Operations Center, illustrating that no matter how high tech an Army may become, it still needs folks to climb towers and string wire.

Sgt. First Class Blake Summerlin, a tank master gunner who has done combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, served as one of my escorts at White Sands. I learned, once again, that it is always a good idea never to judge a book by its cover or a person by their camouflage uniform. I asked Summerlin what he planned to do after the Army. He hesitated, almost blushed, and then murmured "horticulture." He then said, "But you can't write about that."

But after warming to the subject -- and his plans to finish a horticulture degree when he gets out of the Army -- Summerlin agreed I could write about his passion for plants.

Yeah, real tankers can become horticulturists, just as real geeks can join the Army, and that's just part of what I discover every time I am privileged to hang out with real soliders in the field.

The House Appropriations Committee approved a budget for the high-powered Wideband Global Satcom System in fiscal 2010 of $626.7 million in its version of next year's appropriations bill, an increase of $425 million from the president's requested budget.

There are two wideband global satcom satellites in orbit today, each capable of providing more throughput than all the older military satellites now in orbit. Defense plans to launch six of these birds, which can transmit data at a rate of 6.2 gigabits per second compared with a wired home Internet connection, which pokes along at 7 mbps.

The House also approved the requested development budget of $880.9 million for the Joint Tactical Radio System, which based on my experience last week at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico has finally started to deliver radios that can operate on the battlefield at a data rate of 1.8 mpbs.

It's only taken the JTRS program a decade to field a broadband radio, but I guess radios, like wine, take time to mature.

Of course, these funding lines are not final until the Senate passes its bill and the two bills then go through a conference to arrive at the final budget, which maybe this year may happen before the end of the fiscal year, something that will be close to a miracle.

News reports pin the recent spate of cyberattacks against government Web sites in South Korea and the United States on North Korea.

And an internal paper published in May by an intelligence analyst at U.S. Forces Korea said North Korean hackers penetrated U.S. military networks and Web sites with greater frequency than any other country in the world, including China.

The paper, written by Army Maj. Steve Sin, a senior analyst at the Open Source Intelligence Branch of the Directorate of Intelligence at U.S. Forces Korea, said North Korea operates two cyber warfare units: the State Security Agency's electronic communications monitoring and computer hacking outfit, and Unit 121, which is part of the Reconnaissance Bureau. The bureau's staff works directly for the General Staff Department of the Ministry of People's Armed Forces.

Unit 121's staff of about 100, Sin said, has the capability to launch "moderately advanced" Distributed Denial of Service attacks, the kind that took down South Korean and U.S. government Web sites this week. The attacks this week, though, sure give a new meaning to the word moderate. Unit 121 also has moderate ability to infect target computers with viruses and malicious code, Sin added.

North Korea has cyber warfare capabilities that could damage the military networks of the U.S. Pacific Command and those located in the continental United States and networks operated by South Korean and U.S forces in South Korea, Sin reported.

Sin traced North Korean activities back to at least 2004, when he said the country "tapped into 33 out of 80 military wireless communications networks used by 14 different ROK [Republic of Korea] units during the Corps level field exercises and the ROK-US combined Ulchi-Focus Lens exercise."

While the cyber warriors at the North Korean State Security agency labor away in the Korean Computer Center in the rather grim capitol of Pyongyang, Sin said at least some of the Unit 121 personnel work in a luxury hotel owned, he said, by the North Korean government in Shenyang, China, about a three-hour drive north from its border with North Korea.

I'm not going to name the hotel here (you can find it in Sin's report), but Web sites for the 160-room, four-star establishment portray it as quite a spiffy place, decorated in a "traditional Chinese theme that is stimulating, while comforting at the same time. The pastel hues and new furnishings are ideal for travelers that want calm surroundings."

Based on what I have read, this does not sound like standard North Korean housing. The Shenyang hotel, which houses the North Korean hackers, also features wireless Internet access, a must for anyone in their line of work, as well as a restaurant that serves Chinese food, the favored grub of hackers worldwide.

Before employees who labor away in the Darth Vader building at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington get too excited, the Defense Intelligence Agency is looking to use Radio Frequency Identification chips to track its personnel -- in emergency situations ONLY, not every minute of their lives.

DIA wants a system that can automatically track all the people who enter its buildings - such as the Darth Vader HQ -- and if those buildings are evacuated in an emergency, it wants to track those who have left.

One good approach could be to combine the people-tracking function with the chip-based key fobs used to provide employee access to many buildings in the Washington area -- combing two functions in one gizmo -- and a related database.

Or, DIA could (though I doubt it would) emulate Dr. John Halamka, chief information officer at Harvard Medical School, who had an RFID chip embedded in his arm in 2005.

DIA would like to hear from small businesses who believe they can do the work by June 5.