FCW.com - Stratcom leads DOD cyberdefense efforts
Information sharing and protection is a crucial front in the war on terrorism. Consequently, the Strategic Command (Stratcom) is leading Defense Department efforts to create a virtual environment, including nonstop virtual meetings and blogging so warfighters can disseminate information across locations, commands and rank securely and in real time.Lt. Gen. Robert Kehler, deputy commander of Stratcom, explained these efforts in a keynote speech at AFCEA International's TechNet International 2006 conference today in Washington, D.C.
"Unfortunately for us, cyberterrorism is cheap, and it's fast," Kehler said. "Today's terrorist moves at the speed of information."
In many ways it would be fair to say that terrorists, using consumer tools and public infrastructure, have better information-sharing and collaboration capabilities available to them than the military. As a consequence, they can potentially innovate more quickly (and at a lower cost).
It's an interesting phenomenon. Clearly the military would like the same breakthroughs in collaboration and sharing that the smallest hostile organizations have achieved but that requires a tremendous reengineering within the DoD. Not necessarily reengineering the technology, but a real rethinking of DoD process.
Naturally, there are a lot of open questions, the most important being whether the DoD can simultaneously serve the goals of security, secrecy, and sharing. Collaboration generates information at a dizzying pace, and the lightweight tools that make for effective collaboration, such as blogs or wikis, don't necessarily provide much in the way of security controls. If one were to start to impose control on the systems, however, it would be easy to accidentally destroy the very simplicity that makes them effective conduits for information from individuals.
