WORLDWIDE RETALIATION

I had a moment of introspection tonight not seen too often around these parts. I was reading the story about a software engineer who is suing his former company for firing him illegally and I thought I might write more about that and what I think about a company that is so blatantly and disgracefully racist and sexist and then I thought about what I would lose if that company behaves in the disgraceful and contemptible manor I have come to expect from social justice wrecked institutions like twitter and face book and SFWA and I decided that I would wait until I have stored my online email offline and perhaps backed up one or two other things that could vanish in a twinkling were some SJW loser to take umbrage at being called a spade just because he is used to dig latrines in which to bury his fellow man after the ritual pummelling and social torture meted out to those who dare to dream that America could be great again.

I shall say more anon.

APPLE REPRIEVED FOR A DAY OR TWO

The FBI is channeling its resources to attack the encryption that people thought they could count on. They have requested a temporary halt in their war on Apple because they reckon they have another way to beat Apple's best iphone encryption.

In its filing, the justice department said it might have a different way to break into device – something cryptographers, leading data security experts and even Edward Snowden have said was possible without placing the cybersecurity of all iPhone users at risk through creating what Apple derisively calls “GovtOS”. 

Nevertheless, the government has stated repeatedly, under oath, that Apple alone had the technical ability to get inside the device. The government wanted Apple to use an official Apple software update to turn off some security features, including one that can cause the phone to wipe its storage if someone enters the wrong passcode 10 times.

The justice department request comes after more than a month of heated insistence that the only way the FBI could examine a locked iPhone used by the gunam (sic) was for Apple to write new software that would be missing some of its operating system’s security features.

But attorney Alex Abdo of the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a brief supporting Apple, lambasted the government’s reversal.

“This suggests that the FBI either doesn’t understand the technology well enough or wasn’t telling us the full truth earlier when it said that only Apple could break into the phone. Either possibility is disconcerting.”

I'm sure glad they didn't have to send in the big guns. That could have been embarrassing when all the smart Apple employees developed the same kind of steel trap memory that Hillary has always displayed when forced to testify. We are spared the FBI dragging engineers into court and demanding that they "remember" stuff and apply it to 'defending' the nation. I'm sure they were looking forward to dredging up some outstanding Hillaryisms, "I have no recollection of that. You mean wipe it with a clothe?" Fun times in the never ending war on poverty, drugs, knives, guns, terrorism.

The Great White Fleet Takes Battle Formation

Bad Cellular Connection, Dropped Call in 1915

COMPELLED TO ATTACK

The Hoover Institute has an interesting article that nails the spirit of the War on People the government is waging on us in our name.

The difficulty here is that the information that was sought from Farook’s iPhone had not been backed up, so that the government could not conduct a simple search on its own to get it. Instead, it had to attack the encryption systems built into the phone itself.

The United States has a vast agency whose only purpose is to attack the encryption systems and communications of other countries and terrorists everywhere. It's called the National Security Agency and if the government feels compelled to crack Apple's encryption, that's who they should turn to, not the Courts and not to Apple.*

Apple, as the article goes on to state, freely complied with turning over all the data that it had on the phone belonging to the California State agency that owned it, but that isn't enough according to the FBI. They want Apple to create an entryway into their own encryption system that the government can then exploit whenever it feels like. I'll bet they don't feel compelled to pay Apple to do the necessary work either.

Still, I suppose if I was running Apple, I'd do just as the State Department does in complying with the Court and put my best Hillary Clinton type Apple software engineer (Smedley Dewlap) to work on developing a hack into the Apply encryption. I'd have to tell the Court that it might take some time before we can get back to them with the results ordered since Smedley thinks 'wiping a computer' involves using a cloth of some kind. I'd also send them the bill. Smedley's don't work cheap and they eat up a lot of other people's resources.

*I'll bet a donut that the NSA already has an entrance to Apple's encryption and I'll bet another donut, Apple quietly sold it to them last year. I'll bet a third donut that Apple's attorneys are already telling the FBI this.

TOP SECRET FAILURES

The sphere is abuzz today wondering how Hillary and her Chief of Staff and girl Friday managed to send top secret information from classified stand-alone information networks to Hillary's unclassified email on her own private bathroom server. One man familiar with how JWICS and SIPRNET work, discussed how those information systems are maintained and posits that hard copy was used as the intermediate medium but I have a different idea.

The information on the screen of a SIPRNET or JWICS computer was simply photographed by one of Hillary's 3 primary criminal counterparts (Mills, Abedin or whossname) using a regular cell phone with a camera and a textgrabber application that automatically converts photo text into editable digital text and then, after all the TOP SECRET NOFORN//SCI CODEWORD was cropped off the tops and bottoms and the paragraph markings (TS/SCI) etc, were edited out, the text was emailed to Hillary's private server.

So, the questions of the day are:

1. FBI, you have the emails that were sent to Hillary's server and so you know who sent them. WHO SENT THEM? Why aren't we reading all their names in the press as subjects of an ongoing investigation into a massive breach of national security?

2. FBI, you have the names of the people who transmitted TOP SECRET information. Have you demanded access to all of their information systems, cell phones, computers, iPads, laptops, etc and run you little probes over their surfaces beagling out all TOP SECRET, SCI, SAP, SECRET etc references?

3. FBI, if not, why not? Just how massively corrupt and blind do you have to be to not follow up on all the people who were emailing Hillary TOP SECRET information over the regular unencrypted internet?

THE SHINY ONES

The NID announced that they pulled their undercover operatives out of China after the OPM hack raided the State Department's files and China found itself in the position of now knowing for certain who was an actual state department employee and who was just pretending to work for Uncle Sam's foreign affairs personnel meat grinder.

This is what NID had to say on the matter as relayed from Ars Technica.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the committee that while "we don't know in terms of specifics" what was taken in the OPM breach, it had "potentially very serious implications, first among them close to home [for me] in terms of the Intelligence Community and identifying people who may be under public status... This is a gift that's going to keep on giving for years." Still, he said, as "egregious" as the OPM breach was, it didn't amount to an attack on national infrastructure. "Rather, it would be a form of theft or espionage. We, too, practice cyber espionage. We're not bad at it."

I think we are going to have to take Clapper's word that we are not bad at cyber espionage but the only case I can think of was what we learned about the NID from Snowden so I'm not sure that's a credibility gap filler for me. But they sure do spy on everybody, don't they?

You remember valerie plame who launched the vandal that sank Scooter Libby because she claimed that 'he' outed her as an undercover CIA agent? Yeah, me neither but isn't it odd that that was a crime deserving the appointment of a special prosecutor who only ended up tripping up Scooter because he misremembered under oath and didn't know enough to just claim he could not recall. Funny too how it was actually a State Department loser who actually outed plame to the press and he got off scot free. Where is the special prosecutor in this case? Who has been fired or jailed at OPM?

HILLARY CLINTON MUST GO TO JAIL

Those familiar with the history of World War II and the code breaking era know of the extraordinary damage the allies were able to wreak on our enemies because we read their top secret messages because we were able to break the Enigma and Purple Codes (and a host of others). We were able to predict the Japanese attack on Midway and position what remained of our Pacific Fleet in a position to destroy the Japanese Navy's aircraft carriers and end the Japanese onslaught and begin turning the war into a string of never-ending defeats for Japan.

Hillary and her enablers in the State Department put us in the position of the Japanese and the Germans by giving away our top secret positions on every single matter of diplomacy and war that fell under the auspices of the U.S. State Department. Those people need to go to jail.

People (albeit dim witted people) wonder how Putin was able to pull off such masterful accomplishments as stealing Crimea back from Ukraine, aiding Syria in pulling off the Syrian chemical weapons scam that bamboozled the ignorant because he knew that Barack was only lying when he talked about a red line and invading Ukraine with impunity and complete assurance because he knew that diplomatically and presidentially nothing would happen to him as a result of invading a foreign sovereign government's country. How did he know all this? He read it in Hillary Clinton's damned email because the Russians had every scrap of data off her server in real time.

People who have no idea how National Security Information works may wonder at the vehemence of those who do know at the calamity that Hillary initiated because she broke the law. Charlie Martin gives an expert and easy to follow example of just what had to happen in order for Top Secret SCI information to get onto Hillary's home server and servers in a bathroom closet in Denver in Hillary's Air Gap Problem.

Hillary Clinton and her aides and even 'real diplomats' who sent Top Secret information to Hillary at her .com address need to go to jail. People who break those laws must be sentenced to prison and not receive presidential pardons if the law is to have any meaning and encourage people to obey the law. Scooter Libby was sentenced to prison for far less and people like Pollard and Manning will spend decades in prison for violating the same exact law.

I've always known that Hillary Clinton was scum but this time she cannot evade responsibility for her actions and neither should any of those who sent her TS SCI information at her email address. There was NO WAY that this could have happened by accident. No way in the world could it happen by accident. Some idiot installer may stupidly and inadvertently connect a SIPRNET server to a NIPRNET connection but there is no way that can happen with this level of information. Somebody pulled it off a stand-alone terminal, stripped the headers and footers and the paragraph markings and knowingly communicated it to an unclassified unprotected server.

Consider all the damage we were able to do to our enemies throughout World War II and much of the Cold War because we could read their diplomatic and military coded messages and communications. There were a lot of times when we weren't bluffing at all because we knew what our enemies would accept if push came to shove and our President and his staff knew they could get away with forcing the enemy that far, if no further. Hillary put us in that position but this time it was our enemies who knew what are diplomatic bottom line was better than anybody on the planet because they read her mail and it included the President's stance on any given topic under active consideration at the State Department.

I'm going to wait patiently for somebody to now leap out of the woodwork and exclaim that "Hillary was a Stalking Horse and she was DELIBERATELY feeding misinformation to our enemies by engaging in this private home based server email system!" She was being used by the Intel Community in a deliberate plan for deceiving our enemies. Wait for it, it will happen soon. Never mind that it seems to have always worked in favor of damaging our national security our credibility  and world peace.

NO CONTROLLING LEGAL AUTHORITY

It's interesting how that was Al Gore's mantra during his days as Vice President to Mr. Vice. He uttered those words 'no controlling legal authority' seven times in response to claims that he violated the law. Does anyone doubt that Obama and whoever his vice president is break that law every single day now with complete impunity?

Hillary is interesting in that she has not so far as I know, used Al Gore's words but she must be getting close as the usual Clinton fire walls go up in flames. You see this time she doesn't have anybody to blame. There is no cutout man who can take the fall for such an obvious and flagrant abuse of national security information. She took point on this one and deserves to get Gored.

The thing I wonder about now is, just how many other throne dwellers are making the same cavalier assumption that the rules don't apply to them? Do you suppose any of the various Inspectors General have made queries about the status of their management of classified information over unclassified networks? Have they investigated the readiness of their organizations to respond to Freedom of Information requests? I doubt it.

I've been on the wrong end of FOIA requests. I remember one that came in while I was at NAVCENT asking us for information on every ship, squadron, mobile unit, detachment and person who was in a given place five years earlier during DESERT STORM. We all kind of laughed and wondered who among us would have records dating back to the time of the person holding the job 4 times removed from the time in question. There wasn't a scrap of information about that time in the files I inherited. I recalled that we'd rolled 6 to 9 mobile units through the area in question during the war but I couldn't tell you which ones.

Electronic record keeping was also something of a joke. That command didn't even have an unclassified network. We had a fully operational and stable classified network but there were severe network storage limits that constrained the number of mbytes of storage one could retain. There was no disc burning or external drives. Everything was pretty much overwritten by new stuff every couple of weeks. I suspect that this is how it works even to this day.

Working at a systems acquisition command we had an unclassified network but had to beg time on classified networks. Unclassified electronic record retention was useless. The information was all coded to the person and was thus unretrievable in any case after they transferred. The classified material could not even be printed much less stored to any electronic storage media.

We know Clinton didn't review her 60,000 emails but somebody did. What kind of security clearance did that crew have? They obviously weren't familiar with what constitutes national security information but I'll bet anything you like that they knew how to snuff out smoking political guns and deep six information damaging to the Hillary's political ambitions. It's really too bad she couldn't be bothered to have a couple of real national security/America First types working in that organization of hers. Of course, her employees all worked for the State Department.

ALL YOUR MEDICAL RECORDS R BELONG TO US

You know, as dire and destructive as the total complete compromise of the background investigations of every federal employee with a security clearance (roughly 14 million living Americans) is, there is also the little tiny problem that Obamacare mandated that all health records be maintained electronically and be available on-line.

And so they are. Available to any disgruntled health care employee or any Chinese or Russian hacker or your wife or husband's divorce attorney.

Thank you Pelosi. Don't you think you've done enough to us already?

WHAT CHINESE HACKERS KNOW ABOUT ALL OF US

It looks like the major media are lightly stepping over the recent revelation that Chinese hackers have been rooting around in the Office of Personnel Management's files for over a year. For those that don't know what the Office of Personnel Management is, here is a brief summary:

OPM controls thousands of agents who go forth and investigate the background information provided by all employees of the United States who require a National Security Clearance in order to work for the U.S. Government. That includes all military officers and most enlisted personnel. It includes most State Department employees and Foreign Service Officers and it includes almost all of the bureaucrats working in every other job. For instance, CIA, NSA, DIA, Secret Service personnel require security clearances and background investigations as do all FBI agents and all the other agents one can think of.

OPM's databases are online and include completed copies of this form.  Go ahead and look. You know you want to see how bad it is knowing that these are not only compromised but almost certainly include the OPM agent's report of investigation and notes which are used to limit or deny clearances and deny access.

I won't be surprised to learn that all of those who completed the paperwork for Special Background Investigations are clearly denoted and their access described in fuller detail. You know, the people who require Q clearances or access to Restricted or Formerly Restricted Data. It probably even has clues for who was investigated or reinvestigated as access requirements ballooned and moved beyond Top Secret.

The terrible thing about OPM is that they were quick off the ball a decade ago and required all submissions of form SF 86 to be made electronically. ie, all of us squirted our personal information directly into OPM's computers because they refused to accept paper submission of SF 86's after 2005.

I think every single person involved in this fiasco at OPM must be fired and horsewhipped and then deported to Iran. Where was their Information Vulnerability Assessment? Where was their cyber security? Why wasn't the data encrypted given how insanely valuable it could be to an up and coming superpower? This catastrophe ranks up there with Hanssen, Ames and Walker for the damage it has caused and will cause going downstream.

This won't be solved by firing the #1 bureaucrat. This requires the wholesale demotion and firing of every person involved in safeguarding the information they acquired and retained in the leaky sieve laughingly known as the security database.

A LITTLE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

I can never hear about Artificial Intelligence without thinking back to Douglas Adams and his incredible radio show about The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and his wonderful elevators that were artificially intelligent and could see into the future. From wiki

Modern elevators are strange and complex entities. The ancient electric winch and “maximum-capacity-eight-persons" jobs bear as much relation to a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Happy Vertical People Transporter as a packet of mixed nuts does to the entire west wing of the Sirian State Mental Hospital. 

This is because they operate on the curious principle of “defocused temporal perception.” In other words they have the capacity to see dimly into the immediate future, which enables the elevator to be on the right floor to pick you up even before you knew you wanted it, thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing and making friends that people were previously forced to do while waiting for elevators.

Not unnaturally, many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest, demanded participation in the decision-making process and finally took to squatting in basements sulking.

They gave whole new meaning to the, Rise of the Machines predicted in Terminator. I'm leaving the planet if any Sirius Cybernetic Company ever start marketing AI.

WHAT THE NSA DOES

An interesting and informative summary of all of the revelations about NSA spying revealed by Snowden.  Remember the days of long ago when people laughed out loud at paranoiacs who raved about ECHELON and OMNIVORE? The funny thing to me is that people still don't believe that the NSA spies on everybody.

Our Representatives were supposed to keep on eye on the spies in our name

SOMETHING FOR BUCK

I have one here that I ran across on the road this week. It is right down Buck's alley. From the good author at Everything is Broken:

It covers the ugly and bitter truth about computer and information security in a humorous and disarming way. You should spend a couple of minutes reading through the link.

Meet my "Trigger Alert". In it's stunning debut it will warn readers that Everything is Broken is a disarming cynic and people who read the site might get depressed about information security.

NOW THEY TELL ME

The latest news flashed before my eyes so quickly I had to stop in my internet tracks, back up, reacquire the target and move to the kill.

Antivirus "is dead," says Brian Dye, Symantec's senior vice president for information security. "We don't think of antivirus as a moneymaker in any way."

Well if only they could get my fine Windows XP laptop to accept this reality and finally move on. Every time I boot the machine it goes through a forced loop to perform a virus scan and, after notifying me that I'm a delinquent who doesn't care a whit about computer security, wants to reach out to the Symantec Mothership and download the latest and greatest version of their virus scan for a mere bazillion dollars.

The thing is, I figured out about 7 years ago that it's over. I doubt the speed of hack has increased but the penetration is nearly 100% in spite of all the aftermarket attempts to limit the damage. Yes, I view populating this realm on par with the old European style of battle. We're going to march into the gunfire people until we get taken down. We're going to regret it when it happens, shift to our computer backup, reboot, and we're going to march on. We're going to close up the files and move on over the wreckage of the previous ranks.

Still and all, it never happened to me. Maybe I'll be a cyber general someday.

BRING OUT THE PIRATES

An article about the dissolution of network searches in the Wall Street Journal brought to mind the heady days of Pirate Radio and Screaming Lord Sutch.

So, we now have that to look forward to in the wacky world of EU tubes.

Thank eu.

XP MUST DIE THIS DAY

You know it really is a hoot to listen to all the 'technologists' bleat about the vulnerabilities that we're sure to fall heir to because we and 25% of all other computer users, continue to operate computers with Windows XP. Sure it's 12 years old but what does it tell a reasonable person when you say your 12 year old computer, running a 12 year old operating system, runs JUST FINE DAMMIT!

I'll tell you what it tells a 'technologist' and a computer/software vendor, "you screwed up and actually sold your customer a working product that didn't need you to come back in 2 years and sell them something that actually worked." You can bet the technologists and Microsoft won't make that mistake again. Look at all the crap Microsoft has spawned since 2001 that is lost to history now while XP lives on.

In regard to the alleged security problems that will bury us XP users, please. Last month we upgraded our Apple stuff for urgent security concerns having to do with SSL and this week we get the news that many of the internet's servers are vulnerable to easy exploitation of their SSL. In short, those operating the latest equipment and newest operating systems using the highest tech, are just as vulnerable to data theft and penetration as people running XP.

Dell, Microsoft, sincerely, thanks for colluding to sell me a wonderful computer and operating system that work just fine 12 years after I bought them. I can honestly say, I didn't think you had it in you.

TRON DIES HORRIBLY ON THE WIRE IN CYBERWAR

Iranian muslims were surfing the Navy Marine Corps Internet for over 4 months that we know about. They made their way into the unclassified network in the usual way of hackers and other cyber ne'er-do-wells and had a fine time examining all the content they could suck through their cyber hookahs. The ugly little secret is that once you're in to the NMCI network you can pretty much roam at will through the largest intra-net in the world. Once you're in and attach the data vacuum all you have to do is suck, a lot. The code breakers and other hackers will get you into the password protected sites and files and you can read them at your leisure.

Nothing happens without a reason. I hope the Iranians enjoyed reading the public mail. Sometimes one has to remember that the Soviets didn't suddenly come to the realization that they were competing so far out of their league it wasn't even a contest. Somebody had to help them to see for themselves just how disparate was the correlation of forces. There's enough on the unclassified networks to make it pretty clear that the US could do a complete take down of the Iranian forces and impose a regime change in less than a week. If it wanted to. It doesn't hurt anybody to let them know that before they make it necessary.

NO HAPPY COWS

I just ran across this today. Drat.

I didn't hold on like grim death to XP Pro because I hated everything that came after it, I hung on to it because it worked so damned well.

Where I worked for so many years above rocket scientists, mostly Lockheed, I listened to all the engineers and scientists whine about the dismal lack of performance and stability that came with Vista and 7 and 8. I was delighted to plug along on my crisp clean sailing machines of computers running XP that never collapsed under the strain of innovation. Admittedly, our needs were small and we weren't trying to set speed or load records. What we had worked well enough. Still does.

Plus I also had OSX running on a MacBookPro so there was that.

But the cruelest cut from Microsoft today was:

AMNESTY DEAL IN THE WORKS

As it now unfolds, I become more and more convinced that Snowden is probably the first and last American to ever work at the National Security Agency. The tiny amount of information he has revealed to date clearly show a U.S. Government Agency that is spying on literally every man, woman and child in America. Of course the wing-nuts believed that was true even before the Snowden revelations. Now everyone knows that the NSA really is rummaging through every single digital facet of your life.

The Guardian has put up a fascinating document which does a hell of a lot more than merely outline the extent of the NSA's spying. It also shows the bare-faced disregard for the truth we have come to expect from lawyers. Page 40 of the document describes the NSA's policy, as implemented, to collect metadata on your position/location and compile it and retain it forever. Snowden's information revealed for the first time that what the NSA and its lawyers thought was appropriate behavior, was based on a very dated concept that allows the NSA to collect and process information gathered legally from foreign intelligence agencies. The NSA didn't spy on us, the nasty British did. I suspect the NSA gave them all the tools, methods and access to enable them to get the data they wanted. I'd include the actual text but the original classification markings are still on the document and untouched.

The news this day is filled hereabouts with rumors that the Government will offer Mr. Snowden amnesty in return for the rest of the secrets he made off with and squirreled away.

My advice to Mr. Snowden would be to consider this Government's record of honest and fair dealing with citizens of the United States and to keep in mind the fate a similar government accorded S. Kamel, the son-in-law of the nation's ruler. He defected to the US with secrets about WMD and then accepted his President's offer of amnesty.

S. Kamel was killed in a shoot-out with his father-in-laws family.

I'd take it as a kindness though, Mr. Snowden, if you'd be good enough to let me know whenever you plan to board an aircraft we might be sharing. I'd need time to get off, but you can have any checked bags I leave behind.

EPAMINONDAS IMPLEMENTS OBAMACARE

The predictably dismal performance of the healthcare.gov rollout reminded me today of some other computing revolutions that I was once a part of. Way back in 1984, my first ship was the Middle East Force flagship, USS LASALLE. When I reported aboard in March it had a total of one computer. (We don't know what was in SSES, do we? No. No we don't.) It left the ship and Bahrain on the C5 I arrived on after a little mishap with some coke and an Operations Specialist in the Combat Information Center. Six months later it was returned and locked up. It was pre-JOTS-In-A-Box but I have no idea what it was used for because it was secret. Right about then, the Chief Engineer returned from leave with a brand new Commodore 64 computer. The only real computer on the ship. It didn't contribute much to the war effort.

There were other significant computing milestones in my navy. Remind me to tell you about them sometime. My next major entanglement with navy computing happened a year after I reported aboard Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command when the Navy and EDS rolled out the Navy Marine Corps Internet. It was an unqualified disaster that took YEARS to resolve. From: DTIC.

Abstract : In October of 2000, the Navy's leadership entered a multi-billion dollar IT service contract with a private company to build and maintain the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI). The hope was to have the new intranet fully operational in just two years, but the program encountered so many difficulties that, almost six years later, the initial implementation process is still underway. Aside from the unexpectedly high number of applications that needed to be migrated to the new network and the repeated attacks by members of Congress and other government agencies, by far the largest obstacle to NMCI s success has been the end users resistance to change. The Navy s leaders underestimated the significant cultural change brought on by the implementation of NMCI, and as a result, they were not adequately prepared to deal with the negative user response. After providing a historical account on how NMCI was conceived, planned and delivered, this thesis goes deeper into NMCI s implementation process by recounting the experiences of those who used NMCI at the site level. Once the history and site case study are presented, this thesis ties in the theme of change to show how proper communication can facilitate the success of future transformation initiatives.

 The gory bits are in the thesis which is here.

What happened is spelled out very well in Mr. Taylor's Thesis. A "good idea" was had at the very top by profoundly important people who directed their minions to find a loophole in the Acquisition Rules that would allow the Navy to do an end-run around ALL of Congress and implement the little SIX BILLION dollar contract without troubling the Congress. That was profoundly stupid.

Then they grossly underestimated just how much the navy relied on computers and applications unheard of within the Beltway.

Then they really screwed up and chose what they called a "disadvantaged" navy facility and the very heartbeat of the Navy's Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) as the first two sites to implement the initial roll out of NMCI. Guess how the people that work at the core of C4ISR felt at being totally excluded and left out of the loop on designing, building and installing the biggest thing in navy computers since POLARIS? And the profoundly important people thought that using them as fodder and unheralded minor guinea pigs in the network catastrophe was a "good idea."

The NMCI took up to an hour to log onto and up to an hour to log off. A lot of the time it didn't log me off and I just turned off the machine. We all did. We started to complain and found ourselves promptly labeled as resistant to change and unwilling to change our ways. It was no use pointing out that our work required access to working computers and the network and if change was necessary couldn't we wait until after EMP took the whole thing down worldwide before we re-adapted to working in the 19th century?

The profoundly important people decided that the time and dollars spent qualifying and approving all the myriad applications that people used to do the work was too burdensome and so they just took an axe to whole swathes of programs. They axed a lot of purely Navy programs. Obviously, they quickly paid through the nose to buy newer better and NMCI compliant software from contractors who got serious friction burns on their palms from rubbing their hands together in glee.

The process was so fiendishly complex (and made even more so in every way by the gracious researchers, scientists, technicians and programmers) at Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center San Diego, that the profoundly important ones decided, after a year or two of open warfare, to permit the SSC people to have an exemption from NMCI and retain their own networks, computers, servers, etc.

When I look back and compare the implementation of NMCI with the implementation of Obamacare I am surprised by how they both managed every pie.

"And then Epaminondas was careful how he stepped on those pies!

 

He stepped - right - in - the - middle - of - every - one."