Anyone can say anything about anybody

Harsh Words Die Hard on the Web

She graduated Phi Beta Kappa, has published in top legal journals and completed internships at leading institutions in her field. So when the Yale law student interviewed with 16 firms for a job this summer, she was concerned that she had only four call-backs. She was stunned when she had zero offers.

Though it is difficult to prove a direct link, the woman thinks she is a victim of a new form of reputation-maligning: online postings with offensive content and personal attacks that can be stored forever and are easily accessible through a Google search.

I would never knowingly engage the services on a law firm so dumb that they would credit anonymous postings.

New to me local PR blog

Progressive Communicators of Washington, DC

Richard Hohlt

Richard Hohlt is the heavy hitter you've never heard of.

Asked by one of Libby's lawyers if he had talked about Plame with anybody else before outing her in his column, Novak said he'd discussed her with a lobbyist named Richard Hohlt. Who, the lawyer pressed, is Hohlt? "He's a very good source of mine" whom I talk to "every day," Novak replied. Indeed, Hohlt is such a good source that after Novak finished his column naming Plame, he testified, he did something most journalists rarely do: he gave the lobbyist an advance copy of his column. What Novak didn't tell the jury is what the lobbyist then did with it: Hohlt confirmed to NEWSWEEK that he faxed the forthcoming column to their mutual friend Karl Rove (one of Novak's sources for the Plame leak), thereby giving the White House a heads up on the bombshell to come.

So you discover that your reporter buddy is thinking about betraying the identity of a CIA case officer working under non-official cover, and your reaction is to fax the column to your White House buddy? And when the dirty deed is done you just keep your mouth shut?

Hohlt is the sleaziest man in our industry.

Al Gore to Be Keynote Speaker at Marsh Client Breakfast During Annual RIMS Conference

Marsh

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Marsh Inc., the world’s leading risk and insurance services firm, today announced that former Vice President Al Gore will be the keynote speaker at the firm’s client breakfast, May 1, during the annual conference of the Risk & Insurance Management Society (RIMS) in New Orleans.

Sorry I won't be there.

Stopping Spyware at the Source

Cindy Skrzycki, The Washington Post

During the past few months, the Federal Trade Commission has filed deceptive- advertising cases against two distributors of what is called adware or spyware. The insidious form of software subjects consumers and their computers to unwanted advertising and surveillance.

The five-member commission plans to escalate its attack by going after some of the big-name Internet advertisers that hire the online distributors.

"We need to stop the demand side of spyware," said Jon Leibowitz, one of the five commission members and a Democrat. "We will send letters to major corporations and entities that place the majority of these ads. This is a wake-up call to put them on notice.

That should wake them up.

Seriously, if your business model threatens everyone else's security it needs to be changed.

Ivan Safronov

Russian Military Reporter Dies In Fall

(AP) A military correspondent for Russia's top business daily has died after falling out of a window, and some media alleged Monday that he might have been killed for his critical reporting.

Ivan Safronov, the military affairs writer for Kommersant, died Friday after falling from a fifth-story window in the stairwell of his apartment building in Moscow, officials said. His body was found by neighbors shortly after the fall.

He will be missed.

Way to go Walmart

Kyl vote helps sink port scanning bill

Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl joined other Senate Republicans, a few Democrats and the business lobby in defeating a plan that would have required security scans of all imports at U.S. ports.

Business groups opposed a proposal favored by New York Sen. Charles Schumer that would have a required all shipping containers coming into U.S. ports be scanned. ...

... Obama, Clinton and other Democrats wrote to Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT - News), the world's largest retailer and Arizona's largest private employer, asking the chain not to oppose the scanning bill.

Because bad things always happen to someone else and you are never going to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Question for Edleman, if we get hit again from something brought in on a container, how are you going to explain that?

Edit -
Homeland Security Special Report: The cargo challenge

REST vs WS-*

Tim Bray has a post about how the Web Services standards are unworkable and should be abandoned for REST.

This controversy is completely new to me, as in coming out of nowhere. I would be very interested in hearing from my programming readers, what do you think?

See also Bray's SOA and WCF.

Edit -

This seemed relevant -

Raines’ Rule #7 – Lessons & Roads Not Taken
7.Implement in phased, successive chunks
}as narrow in scope and brief in duration as practicable,
}each of which solves a specific part of an overall mission problem and
}delivers a measurable net benefit independent of future chunks.

Patenting the wisdom of mobs

Open Call From the Patent Office

The government is about to start opening up the process of reviewing patents to the modern font of wisdom: the Internet.

The Patent and Trademark Office is starting a pilot project that will not only post patent applications on the Web and invite comments but also use a community rating system designed to push the most respected comments to the top of the file, for serious consideration by the agency's examiners. A first for the federal government, the system resembles the one used by Wikipedia, the popular user-created online encyclopedia. ...

... Last year, the agency's 4,000 examiners, headquartered in Alexandria, completed a record 332,000 applications. The tremendous workload has often left examiners with little time to conduct thorough reviews, according to sympathetic critics.

Under the pilot project, some companies submitting patent applications will agree to have them reviewed via the Internet. The list of volunteers already contains some of the most prominent names in computing, including Microsoft, Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Oracle, as well as IBM, though other applicants are welcome. ...

... "I'm sure there will be a degree of gaming. There always is," Kappos said.

To say the least. Still, this is a very encouraging development.

Edit -
I have a further thought on how to use the wiki on For Immediate Release.

Great moments in project management

Tom Kyte has some hilarious excerpts from 70 things to say when you are losing a technical argument. Check out his commentary.

Congratulations Chris and Mark

Abraham Harrison LLC

Site statistics

As I write this Extreme Tracker shows 67 unique hits for today while SiteMeter shows but 36. I have no explanation for the disparity.

New to me legal tech blog

beSpacific, accurate, focused law and technology news.

New to me public safety blog

Project Disaster, A place for the latest news, information and discussion regarding disasters, terrorism, emerging infectious diseases, disaster response, mitigation and preparedness!

Information sharing is not information monopoly

I think Thomas Beck is unnecessarily concerned.

Information Monopolies – Several states have internal brokering setups in place. These information brokerages are found most frequently in the areas of law and justice, financial transactions, and health information. I believe these areas represent the first of several information monopolies. These monopolies were driven by federal data exchange efforts in homeland security and bioterrorism and, in the case of financial data exchanges, system consolidations on common ERP platforms. Expect to see more of these natural information monopolies in the near future with efforts such as Real ID, the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM), Medicaid spend management, and the National Provider Identifier (NPI) taking hold. As these monopolies take shape, certain organizations within state government will be the logical choice as keepers of this data. These keepers should be building their systems in a service-oriented fashion to facilitate easy exchange of information amongst all systems requiring access to this data.

Let me confine myself to NIEM, which I know something about. NIEM is not a huge honking data base. NIEM is a framework for sharing information. It permits law enforcement from one jurisdiction to access information from another jurisdiction. It is not a done deal, it is still being built. I encourage all interested parties to follow developments and communicate their concerns. The individuals running this project are not empire builders, but dedicated civil servants, and are eager to protect privacy and the fourth amendment.

“Senior Administration Official” Tells All

Reasonable Minds

Why does the government do this? I’m not sure. Maybe in this particular case, the Vice President felt it would not be Vice Presidential to respond to this particular criticism personally. (Though I must say, the “senior administration official” quoted above goes on to make what seem to me to be newsworthy remarks about his recent meetings with Karzai and others in Afghanistan and Pakistan.)

But it is even harder for me to understand why the press willingly goes along with the whole ruse.

Our profession could put an end to this evil practice if we would make the collective decision to do so. I hope we will.

How to hype your security vulnerability

It seems that HID Global, a manufacturer of access-control devices, has a security vulnerability in its RFID proximity cards. Via Adam Shostak, we learn that Chris Paget of IOActive was planning on explaining the vulnerability at the Black Hat DC 2007 conference. Instead of fixing the vulnerability, HID Global threatened Paget with a patent infringement lawsuit. So now, instead of a small group of elite security specialists knowing about this, everyone who reads tech news knows about this.

Furthermore, we also know that HID Global has not announced any plans to fix the vulnerability, just suppress any discussion of it. Yeah, that’ll work. Brian Krebs has responses from both Chris Paget and Kathleen Carroll, director of government relations for HID. I don’t think HID’s response is adequate to the situation.

As of this writing Google News shows 69 items on this story. Slashdot has a spirited debate about the incident.

Incidentally, according to Security Tracker the largest number of reported malware attacks come not after public report of a vulnerability, but after the patch has been announced and offered, which I don’t understand at all.

Sssh!!

Russia's oldest theater hushes cell phones

Randall Samborn

Randall Samborn, spokesman for Patrick Fitzgerald, may have the most unusual challenge in PR. How do you present a client who is prosecuting a publisher and throws a reporter in jail? How do you defend your client to the press when your adversaries can put all nature of spin in the press and the rules of the court prohibit you from responding?

Throughout this controversy, Fitzgerald has been pilloried as a threat to the first amendment for compelling journalists to disclose their sources. Samborn could have responded that these very same journalists were perfectly happy to throw Richard Clark under the bus. Why did he refrain from pointing out their hypocrisy? I can only assume that he decided that it was better to put the focus on the case itself, that the journalists had information vital to an investigation touching on national security. Ultimately their prior hypocrisy did not come into it.

Samborn did an excellent job in placing the very favorable Vanity Fair article that humanized Fitzgerald with its tales of bad housekeeping. It gave the public a brief view of the famous prosecutor, satisfying the public’s curiosity.

I hope Samborn has a chance to speak publicly about this case. How do you make reporters and the public feel that you are being responsive when all you can say is no comment? How do you put a damper on speculation? How did handling the public relations of this case compare to other high profile prosecutions?

I also have questions about the Special Counsel’s website. How is it designed? What was the procedure for putting documents on the site? How did they make sure the copy on the website was the final copy of the document? How did they plan for the great surge in site traffic at the time of the original indictment?

I hope it will be possible to make this information public.

NASA

I am old enough to remember when NASA was the darling of the American news media. Now the coverage is disproportionately from foreign news operations.