"Report from Tehachapi: Why Wind Power Means Jobs, Security" on the Truman National Security Project

Last week I accompanied a group of veterans who are part of Operation Free on a trip to Tehachapi, CA, located just on the edge of the Mohave Desert in southern California, to learn about wind. There’s a lot of it in Tehachapi —a name that many believe comes from the Kawaiisu word tihachipia, which means “hard climb” — a rugged and mountainous country that was the site of some of the first large scale commercial wind production development nearly 30 years ago, and is the site of continued innovation in developing America’s clean and secure energy future. A future that is threatened unless Congress moves to allow industry to continue to develop and grow this proven, dependable, and clean energy technology by renewing the wind Production Tax Credit (PTC)

Read the full post on the Truman National Security Project blog.

"Turn Left Here? Why Problems with GPS Show our Cyber Weaknesses" on the Truman National Security Project

It turns out that the problems with GPS are bigger than any of us knew about — and that has serious implications about not just GPS, but about the larger cybersecurity debate that is playing out in the Senate this week with the final debate over the revised Cybersecurity Act of 2012.

Last month news broke that a team of researchers from the University of Texas had hijacked a drone by spoofing the GPS used in it’s navigation system. “Spoofing” is a hacking technique that involves fooling a computer into believing that the hacker’s computer is a trusted computer. In this case, the U of T team fooled the drone by sending a signal that pretended to be from satellites in the GPS constellation but contained inaccurate location information — information that would have caused the drone to crash if not for pilot intervention.

Which should worry you not just because GPS helps fly drones but also because none of us know how to get anywhere without it any more.

Read the full post on the Truman National Security Project blog.

"The Senate Cybersecurity Bill: A Start, But Not an Answer" on the Truman National Security Project

It has become a depressing but now familiar pattern: in the space of a week, reports surfaced both that LinkedIn’s mobile app scraped information from users’ mobile devices and stored it on LinkedIn’s servers—without informing it’s users of the practice—and that LinkedIn user passwords had been broken and stolen by hackers since LinkedIn had only lightly encrypted and poorly defended the data. To make matters worse, like many of the similar breaches of recent years, these weren’t discovered or disclosed by LInkedIn but by private security researchers.

There are a number of concerns here, but one of the biggest is that for many workers today LinkedIn has become part of their “critical infrastructure”. It’s used for business development and networking to such a level that it’s unthinkable to remove yourself from the system—even if LinkedIn can’t keep your data safe. And without the pressure of losing users, LinkedIn may have little financial incentive to clean up its security practices. Which leaves users in the position of having to trust that LinkedIn will learn from it’s mistakes—a pretty shaky proposition given recent events.

Read the full post on the Truman National Security Project blog.

"GPS, a Weak Link in Cybersecurity?" on the Truman National Security Project

The news last month that LightSquared, a company attempting to deliver broadband internet via satellite, had filed for bankruptcy, settled a long-simmering but little noticed debate with far-reaching impacts on militaries, governments, businesses—and plain old folks like you and me.

Why? Because the global positioning system—better known as GPS—industry feared that LightSquared’s technology would interfere with the GPS signal, a service on which the world has become increasingly dependent but which it also takes almost completely taken for granted. The LIghtSquared decision a pretty big deal in and of itself—but it also opens a window into the larger debate on cyber security which is now being argued both inside the Beltway and around the world.

Read the full post on the Truman National Security Project blog.

"Securing America's Business" on the Truman National Security Project

As the debate on the future of cybersecurity in America continues to heat up, I’d like to take a moment to address one of the critical cybersecurity issues facing our country today:

My mother just bought a smart phone.

Why? Because they are new, and someone else she knows has one, and this person recently asked her if she sends text messages, and apparently this kind of peer pressure works at any age. And also because there was a sale at the Verizon store and like most Americans my mother can’t resist a sale. So despite the fact that my mother had gotten by perfectly well on a 200 minute a month senior plan on a “dumb” phone, she upgraded.

And that’s when the questions started.

Read the full post on the Truman National Security Project blog.