The Packet Rat

First, an apology for my absence.  Transitioning from regular print to Web, coinciding with certain other transitions, has made for a bit of rough going, especially since my musings aren’t so much bringing in the cheese like they used to.  But that’s another story.

Also, a thank you for all the kind reader comments.  The posting will resume a more regular rhythm now, and once I clear my in-box of the 50,000 spam messages, I’m sure I’ll have some actual insight to share.

There was also a certain amount of weather-dodging recently, as my travels took me down to the LandWarNet conference in Fort Lauderdale–just in time to encounter Tropical Storm Fay as it Roomba’d across Florida for several days, soaking every inch of real estate and leaving me looking like, well, a wet rat as I dragged my gear to a conference hotel.  Lesson learned: when in Florida in late summer, rent a car.

Rat lesson #2: In next life, go into the convention business.  WiFi was $15 a day at the Broward County Convention Center.  Also, as the Rat’s former colleagues found out: apparently, when you rent a booth at such events, that pricing does not include:

• carpeting.
• a pad for the carpeting (additional cost
• a table for the booth, or chairs, or anything else for that matter.

But such is life.

The Army’s technorati and the rest of the DOD information tech apparatchiks speaking at LandWarNet sounded one thing loud and clear:  play time for those using the NIPrNet to get to the Web will soon be over, because the risks involved in free browsing are apparently at least partially responsible for a chain of data “exfiltrations” from the DOD’s unclassified but sensitive network.  General-rank officers’ personnel records, a number of health records, and other sorts of info covered under a host of regulatory protections have all managed to dance their way off the NIPrNet into unknown hands.

Around the same time, word started to spread that the Air Force was applying air brakes to the launch of its Cyber Command.  That’s likely because (1) Air Force CIO Lt. Gen. Peterson is retiring, (2)It’s rumored that AFCYBER commander Lt. Gen Lord is up for the DISA directorship, and  (3) his deputy just got reassigned.   Oh, plus the Air Force has some other problems.

The Rat (me…I have issues with the third person still, forgive me) dried out just in time to catch the beginning of the Democratic convention in Denver.  There’s something…ironic? about the Democrats having their convention in Denver, in the center of  a deep red state, and the Republicans having their convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, the home of great Republicans like John Anderson. But in any case, the Dem convention, in all its well-staged pageantry, was merely a distant rumbling for the Rat household, where the family was beginning to agitate for the cyberodent to actually do something with his time other than indexing his papers for his unpresidential library–like, actual manual labor.

So, as the din of the convention faded into background, the wirebiter broke out the weed whacker and hedge trimmer.   Apparently, he wasn’t the only one facing some weedy problems, given the troubles the “government”–a broad general term used frequently to conceal the tangle of agencies involved–is having with the so-called “terrorist watch list”.  The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is leading some weeding of what has become a briarpatch of unlinked database tables, making searches a painful process.

“Use the wrong tool for the job, and you end up short a digit,” the Rat always says–especially after having to take eldest ratling to the emergency after nearly dropping a digit of his own to the hedge trimmer.  Another Rat lesson learned: teenagers and power tools in the yard, even when supervised, are trouble.  Much like defense contractors left unattended with tanker contracts.

The Rat has apparently joined a growing movement in government by departing from his years of service: the brain drain. And according to the NY Times, new brains aren’t coming in to replace the old ones because of the draw of places like Google.

A survey quoted in the Times article by Phillip Taubman, on the front page of the dead-tree edition, cited a 2007 M.I.T survey of students that found that very few systems engineering students were headed into defense or government positions– “28.7 percent of undergraduates were headed for work in finance, 13.7 in management consulting and just 7.5 percent in aerospace and defense. The top 10 employers included McKinsey, Google, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, Bain, JPMorgan and Oracle — but not a single military contractor or government office.”

There’s a simple reason for the lack of interest, really: money. The survey showed that the average annual starting salary in finance and high-tech was more than $70,000, compared with $37,000 at the Defense Department,” Taubman wrote.

Combined with the waves of retirement over the past few years, that means that the government–and especially the DOD–has been unable to replace the rapidly evaporating braintrust that handled things like, for example, contract oversight–resulting in things like the Air Force’s tanker contract woes. Folks the Rat has talked with point to the brain drain as being responsible for more and more of the process management on contracts being handed over to the contractors themselves–which is like putting, if you’ll pardon the rodent pejorative, like putting squirrels in charge of counting nuts. (And apparently, according to Defense Systems’ Forward Observer blog, analysts think so too.)

So far, the solutions discussed by government officials aren’t exactly raking in the new braintrust. Becoming an “employer of choice” for Gen Y, as they’re constantly called, is going to take a lot more than making sure current employees are happy ambassadors of workplace joy, or making sure that they can surf Facebook and YouTube from work. The hiring process, which director of the Office of Personnel Management, Kay Coles James admitted in a 2002 interview was actually driving applicants away because of its complexity and length, hasn’t really improved all that much. And to be blunt, the attraction of working on the kinds of interesting problems government folks get to work on is probably not strong enough to draw someone away from an employer offering twice the money AND cool toys.

For those of you who have followed the trevails of the Packet Rat over the past 15 years, thanks for reading.   The Rat’s print ramblings have come to an end; here is the last Packet Rat destined for dead trees:

For nearly 15 years, the Rat has been musing in third-person on these pages. A lot has come to pass in that time—when he began, many of those he served with “information services” didn’t even have e-mail addresses.

But now, it’s time for another change, as the wirebiter prepares to re-invent himself again. “Old techies never die,” he told his wife as he sat down to scrawl one last set of missives for the print medium. “They just go into consulting.”

“And old columnists never die,” Mrs. Rat said with a smirk. “They just go online.”

Read the rest of this entry »

President Bush nominated Army Lt. Gen. Ann E. Dunwoody for promotion to General.  If approved by the Senate, that would make Dunwoody the first woman ever to get a fourth star in the US Military.

Dunwoody became deputy commanding general of the Army Materiel Command on June 17, and was nominated by Defense Secretary Gates to assume command of AMC, putting her in charge of the Army’s  new technology programs, aquisition support and logistics operations. 

When you limit a candidate’s response to 140 words, what happens? Well, they actually have to answer questions.

NPR interviewed Andrew Rasiej, founder of the Personal Democracy Forumabout the Twitter debate between presidential hopefuls John McCain and Barack Obama, and about an upcoming conference the Forum is organizing.

read more | digg story

With the impending change of administration already dampening the air around the halls of power, and political appointees spotted reading worn copies of What Color is Your Parachute, the Rat has decided that maybe–just maybe–it’s time to start thinking outside the command bunker. After all, the wirebiter is close to hitting his FERS number. And with a wave of retirements coming in a year, the Rat started thinking that maybe he should avoid the rush, and make room for one of his worthy underlings.

“Of course, first, that means I have to find worthy underlings,” he sighed.

He’s thought several times of joining in the CIO shuffle, waiting for senior IT feds to be called up to take over other jobs and quietly sliding in to fill their shoes. However, his last gig as “acting” exposed him enough to political appointees that he was all too happy to give up the sunlight for a chance to recover from the radiation burns.

And then there’s the consideration of what exactly he would do with his time if he left his well-appointed cubicle in the Network Operations Center, with coffee available in five steps in any direction and the power to crush network abusers at the tips of his well-worn claws.

 ”I suppose I could always occupy myself with applying the latest Windows patches,” he snickered, seeing the latest seven-pack get shipped out by Redmond in early June. “That would be at least part-time job security somewhere.”

 Of course, considering that, as recently reported, the world spends 200 billion hours a year watching TV–much of it nearly as entertaining as watching patches download and install–the Rat figures there are plenty of free hands available for that semi-automated task.

“I could always turn my powers to evil,” he mused. “With all that free time, I could bring the world to its knees with e-mail scams that are properly spelled…”

“I think you should blog,” his wife said to him. “You spend all your time complaining about things…why not make a business out of it?”

“I think complaining has already been commoditized,” he replied with repressed ire. “What would be my value-add?”

 ”You’re a cranky giant techno-rat, and you want to know what your value-add is?” Mrs. Rat smiled. “I think people would pay to not have to listen to you complain in person.”