Most Americans will never know about the internal struggle going on in our government over the security of the Internet and the protection of our nations' "critical infrastructure" - in short, protecting us from "cyber attack". That's until we suffer a withering 9/11 style sneak attack on our - pick one - electric power grid, banking and financial sector, a large government entity [e.g., Social Security] and/or the Internet itself. Just imagine a vast regional blackout and our bank accounts zeroed out.

After something like that happens - and the issue is when, not whether - we'll [hopefully] get more serious about protecting ourselves from cyber attacks.

Basically, there are several "camps" of opinion on "how to do it", but precious few of them have our basic national security interests at heart. In fact, most are largely money motivated by special interests that have huge influence with our Congress.

Example: Various bills in Congress give the overall "responsibil...

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It occurred to me that we may well be in for a repeat of the 1992 election when Ross Perot siphoned off just enough Republican votes so that Bill Clinton won, defeating the one term George H.W. Bush (“Bush 41”).

You may remember: The economy was in recession and conservative Republicans were mad at Bush for breaking his “read my lips” promise not to raise taxes. Sound familiar?

I have written here before about the dangers of a third party candidate - for the Republicans: http://www.thecypresstimes.com/article/Columnists/Daniel_Gallington/THIRD_PARTY_A_LOSER_IN_2012/53090.

However, since then it has looked as if Romney would sweep his way to the nomination. After all, the other three main aspirants [Perry, Santorum and Gingrich] fell out, as predicted, and will support Romney, again as predi...

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Those who read my column know that I predicted Mitt Romney would win in November. He will win because Obama will lose. And, Obama will lose because most independents will not vote for him - as they did is 2008. So, Romney wins, the Republicans take over the Executive Branch of government, and bring in their political appointees to “run” the various departments and agencies.

This is the part that worries me.

Why? I spent a 35-year career in government, 20 of it at senior policy levels. As a result, I know - first hand - that too many high-ranking political appointees, Republican and Democrat, are simply not competent to actually do the job that they have been given.

While this is the sad reality for much of the federal government, it makes little real difference except when there is a leadership disaster like hurricane Katrina [remember the FEMA debacle?] or the more recent crisis of moral character at the GSA. This kind of incompetence is what we get ...

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By now everyone has heard the story of the Baltimore woman who apparently has a winning ticket in last week’s Mega Million drawing.

Sure, she was in a pool with her co-workers at McDonalds, where they all worked, but she now alleges that she bought the winning ticket separately, with her own dollar that she “found.”

And that her co-workers – well, they are just out of luck!

If this situation persists, we can expect lots of lawyers working on contingent fees, lawsuits and lots of daytime TV and evening news time covering the story.

However, it reminded me of the story my Grandfather told me when I was a very little kid growing up in Pennsylvania:

It seems that a little boy [obviously me] was given two nickels by his Grandfather – one for the collection at Sunday school and the other for ice cream after church.

He went off to Sunday school with a nickel in each hand.

When he came home from Sunday school, the little...

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This one is short, sad and not so sweet.

We have a professional soldier, a man who enlisted shortly after 9/11 and who was deployed to Iraq several times, and who was deployed again to Afghanistan. He has a family, a wife and children, and he had been wounded in Iraq - two times apparently - one wound being a concussive head injury. He wasn’t a hero, but this is the stuff of today's brave soldier and Marine, a person who goes in harms way time after time and watches his comrades get killed and horribly injured – and they do it for us. How many of us would do it? It takes a special kind of personal courage to do it – time after time after time after time – four times, in fact, for this soldier.

Well, this one just snapped, he just broke, and he killed a bunch of innocent people in a horrible, horrible episode of irrational behavior. Was he insane? Did he just crack under the pressure of another deployment halfway around the world? We don’t know and ma...

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We call this the “silly season” in Washington, a favorite “inside the beltway” expression for the strange things that happen during election time – and when folks of all political persuasions say and do dumb things. This year is no exception; however, there are two recent ideas that transcend the usual electioneering goofiness. They are: Suggestions from the Obama Administration to drastically reduce our strategic nuclear forces; and, the Senate’s unbelievably naïve “Cyber Security Act of 2012.” While neither of these are likely election issues, both go to the very core of how we protect ourselves from the forces and factions in the world that could do us harm. In short, this is the serious stuff!

First. The suggested nuclear reductions – down to just a few hundred weapons – practically assures a new kind of nuclear arms competition with Russia, China and even some newer nuclear powers that often do not have our best interests at heart – e.g., Pakistan. The reason for this is t...

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With both amusement and frustration, I’ve been watching the “Fast and Furious” related Congressional hearings on C-SPAN. The hearings artfully combine a colossal deflection of responsibility by the Congress and a continuation of anachronistic practices by the Justice Department. And, all of this is being hidden skillfully by the parties to the matters under “investigation” - to the detriment of our safety. In short, most of us don’t see the petty politics lurking just behind this latest Washington kabuki dance.

Here are just two of the more basic political and bureaucratic dynamics involved with “Fast and Furious”.

First: How could the “Fast and Furious” investigation in Arizona for following [or “walking”] “straw purchase” guns to Mexico have gone on so long without the knowledge of the seniors at the Justice Department, perhaps including the Attorney General himself?

Shocking as it may ...

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In 2010 I wrote an “Op Ed” that examined the objective reality of having a President who was the product of several generations of affirmative action in education. The bottom line of the Op Ed was that our President was probably not as capable as he [and we] had been led to believe.

Frankly, I was expecting a ration of criticism about the article, especially from liberal commentators, but it never came, and I suspect it was because there was little to disagree with in the thesis: That affirmative action in education was a failed social experiment of the 60’s and 70’s.

But there is another category of preferential admissions to private [and some public] schools and colleges that produces graduates of questionable quality, and who may also think they are more qualified than they really are.

Children of wealthy and influential families get into private schools and colleges just as arbitrarily as do those admitted because of affirma...

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Scene

A super-secret Iranian policy planning meeting, chaired by Iran’s five foot four “little big man” President, Mahmud Ahmedinajad. [By the way, is it just happenstance that the last little guy who stiffed us (at least twice) on his nuke weapon program was the super-short “little Kim”, the last (and late) lifted North Korean “great leader”?].



Script

Ahmedinajad, to assembled Admirals, Generals and Foreign Ministry seniors: “Our policy line just isn’t working. We need at least another year – maybe 18 months - to have a nuclear device that we know will work and that we could test. Then, we will need additional time to perfect some nuclear weapons that are actually deliverable on our planes or our new missiles. We can try and compress this - going directly to weaponization before we test - but we will eventually have to test something that works in order to get the desired political effect. We must do all this, mind you, without precipitating an attack ag...

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As a guy who spent years writing intelligence policy and legislation, limiting the information US intelligence agencies could collect, retain or share about “US Persons” - I’ve always wondered if we couldn’t apply a similar privacy matrix to the Internet.

While the idea of doing this effectively - in a responsible and well thought out way - seems overwhelming at first, it becomes more manageable when broken down into component parts, which I have attempted to do here.

First: Because cyber-based or stored personal information is transferred or transferable across state lines, it’s a “natural” subject of federal privacy law and regulation, because it pertains directly to “interstate commerce”.

Second:Today, the enormous quantities of stored personal cyber information is literally without limitation, and the tendency is to err on the side of collecting and s...

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