More than passively eavesdropping, we’re penetrating and damaging foreign networks for both espionage and to ready them for attack. We’re creating custom-designed Internet weapons, pre-targeted and ready to be “fired” against some piece of another country’s electronic infrastructure on a moment’s notice.
This is much worse than what we’re accusing China of doing to us. We’re pursuing policies that are both expensive and destabilizing and aren’t making the Internet any safer. We’re reacting from fear, and causing other countries to counter-react from fear. We’re ignoring resilience in favor of offense.
As the cancer on this presidency continues to metastasize, with trust in the president continuing to deteriorate, and a growing realization that the federal government is growing, or perhaps has grown beyond the limits and control intended by the Founders, it’s worthwhile to start to consider the possible political implications down the road. The conventional wisdom remains that, at worst, Barack Obama will lose the Senate next year, fail to regain the House, and be the lamest of ducks until the natural end of his term in 2017. But if things get bad enough, there is a much more radical, but completely constitutional scenario, in which the Republicans could get somewhat of a do over of last fall’s election. This will particularly be the case if enough people come to view its results as illegitimate, having been influenced by the tyrannical actions of the IRS and other federal agencies.
“We don’t know how to prepare teachers,” said Arthur Levine, former president of Teachers College at Columbia University and author of a scathing critique of teacher preparation. “We can’t decide whether it’s a craft or a profession. Do you need a lot of education as you would in a profession, or do you need a little bit and then learn on the job, like a craft? I don’t know of any other profession that’s so uncertain about how to educate their professionals.”
Bob Zimmerman reports that AIAA seems to have been won over:
Historically, AIAA has not been considered a New Space organization. Its members mostly come from the older aerospace companies like Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Since these companies have generally been hostile to the new commercial space companies like SpaceX and Virgin Galactic — seeing them as a dangerous and competitive threat — I would have expected an effort by AIAA to influence Congress would mean they are trying to encourage funding for Big Space projects like the Space Launch System (SLS). In the past it has been these Big Space projects that has filled the coffers of Boeing and Lockheed Martin. The contracts for these project have been cost-plus, meaning that they have been able to rake in a lot of cash, whether or not they even build anything.
To my joy Mr. Shweyk’s presentation described something completely different. Instead, the AIAA is gung-ho for commercial space, and is doing everything it can to encourage Congress to come up with the money to fund the efforts of new companies like SpaceX, Sierra Nevada, Orbital Sciences, and Boeing to build new cheap cargo and manned ferrying spacecraft to low Earth orbit. The Space Launch System was not on their agenda. They had no interest in promoting it. Instead, they wanted money to go to the new efforts, so that more rockets and spaceships could be built by more companies, for less money.
For this organization, dominated as it is by the big and older aerospace companies, to push this agenda suggests to me that the culture truly has shifted, and that private space is definitely winning the political and cultural battle.
You can only defend the indefensible for so long. Remaining with the old approaches will result in a moribund industry, and people are starting to realize it.