United States Marine Field McConnell
for
Images Leading To A Proof by Contradiction Of Assertions Below
Plum City Online - (AbelDanger.net)
September 23, 2015
1. AD ASSERTS THAT CARLY FIORINA'S HP ASSOCIATES ARE FIRING HP MENTORS TO STOP THEM EXPOSING HP'S USE OF THE NAVY'S ONION ROUTER (TOR) IN PROTÉGÉE KILLING and long-range assassination betting.
2. AD ASSERTS THAT NAVY SECRETARY RAYMOND MABUS HAS PUT 8(A) WOMEN-OWNED COMPANIES IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NAVY / MARINE CORPS INTRANET (NMCI) for ad-hoc high-value-target hits if opportunities occur.
3. AD ASSERTS THAT SERCO HAS USED CARLY'S TOR TO SET UP DEATH POOL SUITES SO [9/11?] HOTEL GUESTS CAN KILL THE POPE if they have enough 8(a) women to read scripts, spin news and remove evidence of a contract hit.
United States Marine Field McConnell (http://www.abeldanger.net/2010/01/field-mcconnell-bio.html) is writing an e-book "Shaking Hands With the Devil's Clocks" and invites readers to e-mail him images (examples below) for a proof by contradiction of the three assertions above.
Serco Ammo Center – Marine Corps Digital Fire – ISIS Ammo Drop
Pope at Ground Zero on Sep. 25!
The 9/11 Hotel - Part 1 of 5
Serco suites at Turnberry Trump Hotel
The Mayfair Set episode 1- Who Pays Wins
"Pope Francis picks Ground Zero for interfaith healing
By Lauren Markoe, Religion News Service
Published: Wednesday, Sept. 23 2015 7:50 p.m. MDT Updated: 3 hours ago Bryan R. Smith, AP Summary Much of Catholic America is excited about Pope Francis' first visit to the United States — and so are many American Muslims.
This story is part of the Deseret News National Edition, which focuses on the issues that resonate with American families.
Much of Catholic America is excited about Pope Francis' first visit to the United States — and so are many American Muslims.
Francis' visit, said Imam Sayyid M. Syeed, "is even more important for Muslims than it is for Catholics."
How so?
A pope 1,000 years ago exhorted Christians to launch the First Crusade against Muslims, explained Syeed, of the Islamic Society of North America. Now, he continued, there is a pope who wants to destroy hatred the world over, a pope who named himself for a 13th-century saint who counseled Christians to cease their violence against Muslims.
"This pope," the imam said, "is our pope."
On Sept. 25, the fourth day of the pope's six-day American tour, an interfaith service at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum will reinforce the idea that Francis is a father to more than just Catholics. In a young papacy defined by his acts of humility, calls for mercy and concern for the poor, Francis has won over many who live firmly in other faiths.
Outside the museum, Francis will meet with relatives of those who died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Inside, with representatives from a spectrum of religions, he will take part in an interfaith service.
The setting of the ceremony, a museum built to bear witness to a deep national wound, invokes multiple tragedies for many Muslim Americans: the horrific act committed against their country, but also the wave of Islamophobia that began to roll across the nation even before the dust from the demolished towers had settled.
"Through the prism of this regretful, treacherous, indefensible and barbaric act," said Imam Abdullah Antepli, "Islam as a religion and Muslims as a people entered many people’s consciousness for the first time."
But Ground Zero is a fitting place for the pope to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Muslims, continued Antepli, because he so obviously loves them.
A striking picture of Francis, taken shortly after his elevation to pope in 2013, showed him washing the feet of an imprisoned Muslim woman — an interfaith twist on a Holy Thursday tradition.
"I am a very faithful Muslim. I love my religion," said Antepli. "But for the first time I see a faith figure from a religion other than my own, and I am filled with holy envy, for how much I admire and respect him."
These sorts of reactions to Francis from non-Catholics do not surprise papal biographer Austen Ivereigh, who explains that the pope has little interest in conventional interfaith dialogue.
"He's convinced that theologically, God is made present by what he calls the 'culture of encounter,'" said Ivereigh. "It's the way you build a relationship of deep trust with another person. You're not trying to convert them. It is genuinely a relationship of trust.
"Then God will use that, it becomes a vehicle," Ivereigh continued. “You create space for the Holy Spirit to act. And in his conviction is that it is the Holy Spirit that unites people, whether they are of the same faith or not."
Many Jews felt that way about Francis long before he became pope.
In his native Argentina, as archbishop of Buenos Aires, Francis stood close by the Jews of that city. He was the first public figure to sign a petition calling for justice in the 1992 and 1994 bombings of the Israeli Embassy and a Jewish community center, which killed 116 and injured hundreds.
He forged a tight friendship with Argentine Rabbi Abraham Skorka — the two co-authored a book and co-hosted a television program — and now the rabbi frequently visits his friend at the Vatican.”
"ISIS assassination plot against Pope Francis – Pontif begs 'please make it painless'
POPE Francis has said he has accepted that he may be assassinated - but has asked God to make sure it doesn’t hurt too much as he is "a real wimp"
By HANNAH ROBERTS, ROME PUBLISHED: 16:40, Tue, Mar 10, 2015 | UPDATED: 04:50, Sun, Mar 15, 2015
Rex Francis said that if fanatics want to kill him, it is "God's will."
He said: "Life is in God's hands. I have said to the Lord, 'You take care of me. But if it is your will that I die or something happens to me, I ask you only one favour: that it doesn't hurt. Because I am a real wimp when it comes to physical pain.'"
The pope, who was a nightclub bouncer before beginning seminary studies, made the comments in an interview with Buenos Aires favela tabloid La Carcova News in which inhabitants of the shantytown Villa La Carcova collectively came up with the questions.
The parish priest of the extremely poor area is Jose Maria Di Paola, or Father Pepe, described as “the spiritual son of Francis."
For months, there have been threats against Pope Francis by the ISIS militants, who call him the "bearer of false truth."
I am a real wimp when it comes to physical pain Former nightclub bouncer Pope Francis In January an assassination plot to kill Francis by detonating a bomb in Manila was reportedly thwarted by the Philippines military, although this was denied by the Vatican.
Former Special Action Force (SAF) commander Getulio Napeñas testified before the Philippine senate that the Philippines National Police had received information that Southeast Asian Jihadist terrorist organisation Jemaah Islamiya, planned to set off a bomb near the papal convoy. Italian prosecutors have also warned that the Mafia have considered a lethal strike on Francis."
"Here's why Everybody hates Raymond (Mabus)
BLAKE STILWELL SEPTEMBER 21, 2015
The Marine Corps recently released the summary of results of its Ground Combat Element Integrated Task Force, a nine-month study to “better understand all aspects of gender integration while setting the conditions for successful policy implementation.” The study was the first step in implementing the order of former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to open combat roles to women across the Department of Defense. The results were not kind to the gender integrated unit in the study. Against the all-male combat units, the gender-integrated were outperformed in 69% of tasks evaluated, which the Marine Corps says were "basic infantry tasks."
Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus, an outspoken proponent of gender integration in combat roles throughout all branches of the military, decried the results of the tests, implying the Marine Corps was biased toward women in the first place and that the results may be skewed because of it. He repeatedly denounced the conduct of the test on multiple occasions.
Mabus told the City Club of Cleveland "one of my concerns about it was, we didn't do a very good job of screening people before the volunteering. One of the things that came out of this was there were no standards, zero, for most of these jobs. You just assumed that if somebody went through boot camp, a man went through boot camp, that they could do it."
In an interview on NPR, Mabus said, "It started out with a fairly large component of the men thinking this is not a good idea and women will never be able to do this. When you start out with that mindset you’re almost presupposing the outcome."
Results found women were more than twice as likely to be injured and ultimately compromise a unit’s combat effectiveness, Mabus said, were an "extrapolation based on injury rates, and I'm not sure that's right."
But Mabus is getting an earful from all sides. Enlisted Marines who took part in the exercise, male and female alike, had strong words for the Navy Secretary.
Sgt. Joe Frommling was a Marine monitor during the experiment. "What Mabus said went completely against what the command was saying the whole time," he told the Washington Post.
"They said, 'Hey, no matter what your opinion is, go out there and give it your best and let the chips fall where they may.'" The same article quoted a female Marine, Sgt. Danielle Beck, who was insulted by Mabus' saying the women probably should have had a "higher bar to cross" to join the task force.
"Every day we were training," said Beck. "We didn’t know what we were going to expect when we got to Twenty-nine Palms, but the training that we did do got us physically ready and mentally in the mind-set for what were going to do."
Marine Sgt. Maj. Justin LeHew, who was one of Marine Corps Training and Education Command top enlisted leaders for the experiment and a key figure in its implementation, wrote on his Facebook page Mabus' comments are "counter to the interests of national security and unfair to the women who participated in this study. No one went in to this with the mentality that we did not want this to succeed no Marine, regardless of gender, would do that."
LeHew's comment carries some weight. He is known as "The Hero of Nasiriyah." He received the Navy Cross for risking his life under heavy enemy fire to evacuate four soldiers and recover nine dead and wounded Marines following a 2003 ambush in Iraq. Since then many Marines “dished” about their experiences in the task force.
There has not yet been a response from the Marine Corps about Mabus' remarks. When asked, the Marine Corps Headquarters Public Affairs Office said "obviously, the Marine Corps is not going to have a public policy dispute with the Secretary of the Navy." But someone in Congress is eager to pick a fight with Mabus, however.
Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), a former Marine officer and Iraq veteran, released a statement last Tuesday saying "Secretary Mabus is quickly proving that he's a political hack … Mabus is not only insulting the Marine Corps as an institution, but he's essentially telling Marines that their experience and judgment doesn’t matter." Hunter then called for Mabus to resign.
The office of the Navy Secretary has not commented on individual statements, but previously said the Secretary's comments 'stand on their own.'"
"Increasing peer privacy
US 7865715 B2
ABSTRACT
In a method for increasing peer privacy, a path for information is formed from a provider to a requestor through a plurality of peers in response to a received request for the information. Each peer of the plurality of peers receives a respective set-up message comprising of a predetermined label and an identity of a next peer for the information. The information is transferred over the path in a message, where the message comprises a message label configured to determine a next peer according to the path in response to the message label matching the previously received predetermined label.
Publication number: US7865715 B2"HP broadened our definition of a minority business in 2009. The main category of businesses our supplier diversity program supports are minority-owned, woman-owned, veteran-owned and small businesses. For the first time, we have included lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgender-owned (LBGT-owned) businesses in the definition. Through our new sponsorship of, and collaboration with, the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce (NGLCC), we will maintain a pipeline of potential LBGT-owned suppliers. In 2009, we also increased our sponsorship of women-owned businesses."
Publication type: Grant
Application number: US 10/084,499
Publication date: Jan 4, 2011
Filing date: Feb 28, 2002
Priority date: Feb 28, 2002
Fee status: Paid
Also published as: US20030163683
Inventors: Zhichen Xu, Li Xiao
Original Assignee: Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P.
Export Citation: BiBTeX, EndNote, RefMan
Patent Citations (6), Non-Patent Citations (6), Referenced by (2),Classifications (6), Legal Events (4
External Links: USPTO, USPTO Assignment, Espacenet"
"Behind Carly Fiorina's 30,000 HP layoffs
By David Goldman @DavidGoldmanCNN
Fiorina says Steve Jobs had sympathy when she was fired It's hard to run for president when your name is synonymous with massive layoffs.
The No. 1 criticism lofted at Carly Fiorina is that she oversaw the disastrous 2002 Compaq merger, leading to some 30,000 layoffs at Hewlett-Packard during her tenure as CEO.
Fiorina has tried to spin the layoffs, saying they were the result of bad timing that coincided with the bursting of the tech bubble in 2000. She has also noted -- correctly — that despite bruising layoffs, she hired more people than she fired. HP and Compaq had a combined 148,100 employees just before she was hired in 1999, and 150,000 by the time she was fired in 2005.
Still, along the way, the cuts were painful.
2000: Voluntary Buyouts Fiorina was named CEO in July 1999 and eight months later, in March 2000, HP offered 2,500 employees a voluntary buyout package. 1,300 employees accepted the offer.
2001: Furloughs and Job Cuts In 2001, Fiorina asked employees to volunteer to take furloughs, hoping that the unpaid time off would stave off further job cuts. HP said the 80,000 who volunteered to take the furloughs saved the company $130 million. But many of those people ended up getting laid off anyway.
Later in 2001, HP laid off 7,500 employees. The tech bubble had burst sending many countries into a recession. People weren't buying as many computers, and HP needed to cut costs to save money.
2002 and 2003: More furloughs and job cuts In 2002, HP asked employees to once again take furloughs over the Christmas break. HP was hardly alone: Dell and Gateway (remember Gateway?) also furloughed their employees. Unlike its competitors, HP allowed its employees to use accrued vacation time.
But HP remained the biggest job-cutter. The company also laid off 8,600 more employees in 2002.
In 2003, HP laid off another 9,000 employees.
In all, the terminations cost HP 26,400 jobs. And that doesn't include that five months after Fiorina left in February 2005, HP announced another 15,200 job cuts.
For sure, HP was not alone in cutting jobs during the dot-com bust. Many tech companies went out of business.
And the job cuts did help HP save money through a particularly difficult time in the tech industry. Of the $3 billion a year HP said the merger helped save in "cost synergies," $2 billion of the annual savings were attributed to layoffs and plant shutdowns.
But Fiorina made a huge gamble in acquiring Compaq — and it didn't work, sending HP into a tailspin it is still trying to climb out of.
HP has announced more than 100,000 job cuts since Fiorina left. And current CEO Meg Whitman is now spinning off the PC unit that Fiorina created with the Compaq merger.
When Fiorina was fired, she took home a $21.4 million severance package, which included $50,000 for career counseling. (Shareholders later sued, saying she got too big of a golden parachute)."
"Tor Isn't A Child Porn Enthusiast's Best Friend, No Matter What The DOJ Claims
from the willful-distortion-of-facts dept Anything that makes law enforcement's job slightly more difficult is swiftly turned into a pariah. And usually the worst kind of pariah: a child molester.
Apple and Google both announced encryption-by-default going forward on their mobile phone operating systems. Law enforcement officials swiftly gathered to talk loudly about all of the dead and molested children that would result from this decision.
The same goes for Tor. The use of Tor can obscure criminal activity -- by hiding the perpetrator and the activity itself. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to use Tor (like many internet services and platforms hoovering up tons of data themselves), but because it makes chasing "bad guys" a little harder, it too must go.
The best way for government agencies to get rid of something they don't like is legislation. When a law enforcement official says something like the following, they're not hoping to sway the intelligent and informed members of the public. They're saying it to sway those who can actually do something about it: tech-clueless legislators and those who vote for them.
At the State of the Net conference in Washington on Tuesday, US assistant attorney general Leslie Caldwell discussed what she described as the dangers of encryption and cryptographic anonymity tools like Tor, and how those tools can hamper law enforcement…
"Tor obviously was created with good intentions, but it's a huge problem for law enforcement," Caldwell said in comments reported by Motherboard and confirmed to me by others who attended the conference. "We understand 80 percent of traffic on the Tor network involves child pornography."
That's a scary number. And it's not even close to accurate.
Wired's Andy Greenberg explains how Caldwell took a statistic from Tor research and twisted it to further the government's agenda.
[A] Department of Justice flack said Caldwell was citing a University of Portsmouth study WIRED covered in December. He included a link to our story. But I made clear at the time that the study claimed 80 percent of traffic to Tor hidden services related to child pornography, not 80 percent of all Tor traffic.
Which is a big difference. "Hidden services" is not just another term for "Tor traffic." Caldwell conflated the two to further the DOJ's push for the end of anything that presents an obstacle to easy access.
The real number is much lower. Greenberg says that most Tor traffic doesn't route to darknet sites. Only about 1.5% of Tor traffic accesses hidden services, and 80% of 1.5% is a number that wouldn't even trouble the most tech-addled Congressperson or the retirement community that repeatedly votes him or her back into office.
At most, a little over 1% of Tor traffic is related to child pornography. That very low number would seem resistant to improvement. How much money and effort should be thrown at 1% of a service in limited use? The answer would appear to be "not very much," but that doesn't tear down Tor's walls or approve budget requests. So, "80% of all Tor traffic" it is, according to the DOJ.
And that 1.2% may even be overstating it. NickM at the Tor Project Blog points out how some hidden service traffic may over-represent the number of people actually searching for certain illicit goods.
A Tor client makes a hidden service directory request the first time it visits a hidden service that it has not been to in a while. (If you spend hours at one hidden service, you make about 1 hidden service directory request. But if you spend 1 second each at 100 hidden services, you make about 100 requests.) Therefore, obsessive users who visit many sites in a session account for many more of the requests that this study measures than users who visit a smaller number of sites with equal frequency...
The greater the number of distinct hidden services a person visits, and the less reliable those sites are, the more hidden service directory requests they will trigger.
He breaks this down later with a hypothetical situation. 1000 people use Tor to access chat rooms while 10 conspiracy theorists use it to dig for information. Chat users may only log in once or twice a day and hang out at the same handful of venues. The ten conspiracy theorists may visit dozens of sites looking for more crazy, while entering and exiting multiple times. To an outside observer, this activity would appear to indicate that 10 conspiracy theorists make up a larger portion of Tor traffic than 1000 chat room users.
Child porn, like regular porn, is generally not one-stop shopping, unlike a favorite chatroom. Multiple site visits and multiple entrances/exits would inflate the percentage of child porn-related traffic relative to the (observable) whole.
Users who use it for obsessive behavior that spans multiple unreliable hidden services will be far overrepresented in the count of hidden service directory requests than users who use it for activities done less frequently and across fewer services. So any comparison of hidden service directory request counts will say more about the behavioral differences of different types of users than about their relative numbers, or the amount of traffic they generated.
In addition, law enforcement and anti-child porn agencies' own investigative efforts could very well be adding to this 1.2% figure.
Also, a very large number of hidden service directory requests are probably not made by humans! See bug 13287: We don't know what's up with that. Could this be caused by some kind of anti-abuse organization running an automated scanning tool?
So, there's a good chance that the non-scary 1.2% number is too high. Sure, the ideal would be 0.0% but law enforcement agencies should actually be pleasantly surprised the number is so low, rather than misquoting stats to make it appear as though anonymization services are child porn enthusiasts' playgrounds.
It isn't just child porn the government is after. There's a whole host of darkweb activities it wants to indict people for. But child porn "sells" better than drugs or prostitution or even the US's latest public enemy no. 1: terrorism. The number the DOJ is using to sell its attack on Tor is blatantly false, as anyone with a minimal amount of Google skills would quickly discover. But the DOJ doesn't care whether you or I believe it. It only needs enough people in Washington DC to believe it. The DOJ doesn't speak to the citizens. It only speaks to those who can assist it in stripping away what minimal personal data-shielding options we have left."
"Super Serco bulldozes ahead
By DAILY MAIL REPORTER UPDATED: 23:00 GMT, 1 September 2004
SERCO has come a long way since the 1960s when it ran the 'four-minute warning' system [a dial-a-yield defence] to alert the nation to a ballistic missile attack.
Today its £10.3bn order book is bigger than many countries' defence budgets. It is bidding for a further £8bn worth of contracts and sees £16bn of 'opportunities'.
Profit growth is less ballistic. The first-half pre-tax surplus rose 4% to £28.1m, net profits just 1% to £18m. Stripping out goodwill, the rise was 17%, with dividends up 12.5% to 0.81p.
Serco runs the Docklands Light Railway, five UK prisons, airport radar and forest bulldozers in Florida.
Chairman Kevin Beeston said: 'We have virtually no debt and more than 600 contracts.'
The shares, 672p four years ago, rose 8 1/4p to 207 1/4p, valuing Serco at £880m or nearly 17 times earnings.
Michael Morris, at broker Arbuthnot, says they are 'a play on UK government spend' which is rising fast."
"White's is the oldest and most exclusive gentleman's club in London.[1] It is based at 37 St. James's Street in London.
Yemen meeting
White's was the venue
for a meeting in around April 1963, which led to an unofficial British covert
operation against the Egyptian-backed government of the Yemen. Those present
included Foreign Secretary Alec Douglas-Home, Aviation Minister Julian
Amery, Neil McLean and Brian Franks.[2]
Current and former
members
Alfred Duff Cooper -
Former chairman.[3]
Ian Cameron - Former chairman.[3]
Edward
Garnier QC MP[10]
Sir Malcolm
Rifkind MP[10]
David Cameron - resigned his membership.[12]"
"A dead pool, also known as a death pool, is a game of prediction which involves guessing when someone will die. Sometimes it is a bet where money is involved.[1] The combination of dead or death, and betting pool, refers to such a gambling arrangement.[clarification needed] …
In the early 20th century, death pools were popular in dangerous sports such as motorsport, for example the first edition of the Indianapolis 500.[2] Variants[edit] A typical modern dead pool might have players pick out celebrities who they think will die within the year. Most games start on January 1, and run for 12 months although there are some variations on game length and timing.[citation needed]
In 2000, website Fucked Company claimed to be a "dot-com dead pool" which invited users to predict the next Internet startups to fail during that era's dot com bust.[3] The site itself folded in 2007 after a long history as a target for strategic lawsuits against public participation by companies.[4]"
"Claim 1 — Trump: Fiorina's management of HP "led to the destruction of the company" There were a lot of sparks between the two CEOs on stage — Carly Fiorina and Donald Trump. Trump went after Fiorina's record as a business executive, especially the five years she spent as head of Hewlett-Packard about a decade ago:
"Today, on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, they fired another 25- or 30,000 people, saying we still haven't recovered from the catastrophe. When Carly says the revenues went up, that's because she bought Compaq, it was a terrible deal, and it really led to the destruction of the company. Now one other company before that was Lucent. Carly was at Lucent before that. And Lucent turned out to be a catastrophe also. So I'll only say this — she can't run any of my companies."
Fiorina's track record at HP was certainly controversial. The company cut about 30,000 jobs during her tenure, and when Fiorina herself was fired in 2005, she got a severance package worth more than $20 million.
The merger with Compaq also put her at odds with some people at HP, including the son of the founder, Walter Hewlett. In her defense, Fiorina notes that her tenure was a wrenching time for the whole industry — the tech bubble had just burst, and while HP continues to struggle, many other iconic companies from that period went out of business altogether.
As Fiorina noted during the debate, she's won the endorsement of a former HP board member, who says they were wrong to get rid of her."
"The Navy/Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) was a United States Department of the Navy program which provides a vast majority of information technology services for the entire Department, including the United States Navy and Marine Corps. …
On October 6, 2000, the NMCI contract was awarded to Electronic Data Systems (EDS), now HP Enterprise Services (HP).[11] Secretary of the Navy Gordon England summed up the Navy’s IT Environment prior to the commencement of NMCI: "We basically had 28 separate commands budgeting, developing, licensing, and operating IT autonomously. It was inefficient and from the larger Department perspective, produced results that were far from optimal."[12]
NMCI consolidated roughly 6,000 networks—some of which could not e-mail, let alone collaborate with each other—into a single integrated and secure IT environment. HP updated more than 100,000 desktop and laptop PCs in 2007.[13] The program also consolidated an ad hoc network of more than 8,000 applications to 500 in four years and 15,003 logistics and readiness systems to 2,759 over a two-year period.[14] Sub-contractors to HP include:
Apple Inc., Cisco, Dell, McAfee, Microsoft, Oracle Corporation, Sun Micro systems, and Symantec[15] Harris Corporation (which acquired Multimax formerly known as Netco Government Services and WAM! NET), which provided enterprise network infrastructure design and support until its contract expired in 2014.[16]
Verizon, which provides wide area network (WAN) connectivity.
HP also provides the security services once provided by Raytheon.
HP also has worked with more than 400 [8(a)] small businesses, with 5 percent for small disadvantaged businesses, 5 percent for women-owned small businesses and 1.5 percent for HUBZone small businesses. Since its inception, NMCI has exceeded the minimum 40% small business objective set for the contract.[17] NMCI quickly suffered some widely publicized setbacks, including rollout delays that caused HP financial losses.[18] Today, NMCI is described in documents from the Navy’s Chief Information Officer as “the core enterprise network for Navy and Marine Corps forces in the United States and Japan, providing secure access to integrated voice, video and data communications."[19]
In 2009 NMCI became the first network to deploy the Global Address List (GAL), a multiservice address list that increases interoperability by enabling Navy and Marine Corps users to access the Defense Information Systems Agency's Joint Enterprise Directory Services (JEDS) contact list.[20] Additional improvements to network performance are also underway with the deployment of the Network Operations Common Operating Picture (NetOps COP). The tool helps provide enhanced situational awareness via increased information sharing and collaboration to commanders by giving them a common picture of network performance. Commanders can see scheduled maintenance tasks and other issues impacting the network, giving them the option to defer work that might affect the flow of critical information from the battlefield.[21]
Work in 2008 has increased NMCI's ability to respond to security issues and the program was the first network to implement fully the Department of Defense information assurance standards in both classified and unclassified environments. Among the enhancements were the deployment of Websense content filtering, an information assurance tool designed to inspect and block inbound Web traffic containing malicious code with little impact to the user. According to NMCI public affairs, "Websense allows the Network Operational Commands to set a tailored blocking policy by content such as gambling, hate speech or adult content, rather than blocking specific sites or URLs only. This allows the network operators to block sites much more efficiently and outsources the fight against the growing amount of inappropriate content."[22]
According to the Navy, Websense enables users to block or unblock sites, based on emerging and/or dynamic threats. The NMCI blocking policy is determined by various operational commands, such as the Naval Network Warfare Command, and enforced by the Global Network Operations Center, based in Norfolk. Blocked sites are redirected to a notification page which then links to a page on NMCI's homeport Web site. On this site, a user can submit a request that a site be unblocked in order to support mission requirements.[22]
In addition, NMCI is upgrading existing servers with Bluecoat proxy servers, which provides better capacity and traffic management functions. According to NMCI's own data, a few users account for the majority of NMCI's bandwidth usage, mostly attributed to streaming internet radio and video. New servers will allow bandwidth usage monitoring, down to a command or user level.[22]
The security upgrades have been well received by the Navy. On March 31, 2009, Rear Admiral (Ret.) John A. Gauss, Acquisition Director for the NGEN System Program Office (SPO) said during a press conference that "NMCI is the most secure network within the Navy."[23]
The Navy and HP measure end user satisfaction through a series of quarterly satisfaction surveys. End user satisfaction has steadily improved, reaching a high of nearly 86% in February 2008, as compared to 80% in December 2006. This is largely due to the upgrade of nearly 112,000 desktop and laptop computers in 2007, and a combination of network enhancements that are improving speed and reliability. HP is on track to upgrade another 120,000 seats in 2008 at Navy and Marine Corps bases in the US and Asia.[3]
Working in tandem with the technology refresh are the virtualization efforts on the network. NMCI is on track to move from 2,700 servers down to roughly 300. The efforts are expected to save more than $1.6 million per year in electricity costs.[24] Additionally, the decrease in the number of servers being refreshed will lower the cost of updating the equipment, leading to a potential savings of at least $1.5 million over four years.[25]
A highlight of the Navy’s virtualization efforts was its win of InfoWorld's 2009 Green 15 Award, which honors 15 companies and/or organizations for their green IT projects.[26] Ted Samson, Senior Analyst for InfoWorld said of the honorees, "This year's Green 15 winners demonstrate, once again, that green IT projects can be a win-win proposition. These organizations have not only helped the planet by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, preserving trees, and keeping e-waste out of landfills. They've also reaped measurable business benefits, such as significantly lower electricity bills, fewer hardware refreshes, and postponed data center-expansion projects -- along with gains in efficiency and productivity."
In 2006, the NMCI program office was criticized for its annual customer-satisfaction surveys. Officials refuse to release the raw data, leading to accusations that their conclusions are overly sunny. One NMCI director, Rear Admiral James B. Godwin III, said releasing the results would challenge the "integrity of our data."
The Department of the Navy has shown no desire to scale back or cancel the program. On 24 March 2006 the Navy exercised its three-year, $3 billion option to extend the contract through September 2010.[1]
In April 2006, users began to log on with Common Access Cards (CACs), a smartcard-based logon system called the Cryptographic Log On (CLO). In October 2008, NMCI's prime contractor HP posted a set of procedures so Apple Mac users can access NMCI's public-facing Web services, such as the e-mail and calendar functions, using their CAC readers with their Macs. The workaround also works with other Defense Department CAC-enabled networks.[27] Alternatively, NMCI and all other CAC-authenicated DoD websites may be accessed using LPS-Public.
After early challenges, the Navy is pleased with the performance and security of the NMCI network. According to Capt. Tim Holland, program manager for the Navy’s Next Generation Enterprise Network (NGEN), "NMCI is very robust today—we have good security with it, very good performance."[19] In an interview the DoN CIO Robert J. Carey stated, "The plan is that NGEN
The Navy's confidence in NMCI today marks a significant turnaround from the challenges cited in the GAO's report of December 2006. The report states that " NMCI has not met its two strategic goals—to provide information superiority and to foster innovation via interoperability and shared services." The document also goes on to evaluate HP’s performance, "GAO's analysis of available performance data, however, showed that the Navy had met only 3 of 20 performance targets (15 percent) associated with the program's goals and nine related performance categories."
In contrast are the more recent comments from Vice Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., deputy chief of naval operations for communication networks (OPNAV N-6) and deputy chief information officer, Department of the Navy. "I believe that NMCI in 2008 is achieving much of what we had hoped NMCI would achieve. It's leveled the playing field for security. It's allowed us to do things like push security patches that go through the whole enterprise that’s on NMCI. If you look at NMCI historically, it was probably the first step for the Navy to move into what was then called Joint Vision 2010 and now is Joint Vision 2020. It's actually done that, and it's moving the Navy toward the U.S. Defense Department's goal of information superiority. So, I see a lot of good things with NMCI."[28]
NMCI works today and it continues to improve as user needs evolve and technology opportunities arise. During the final two years of the contract, technology initiatives included new hardware, applications, and services to support the Navy and Marine Corps’ advanced IT needs. HP will install more than 110,000 new laptops and desktops, and will push more upgrades to improve end-users' IT capabilities through upgraded machine capacity, new operating systems, and new service lines.[3]
"Colonel Sir Archibald David Stirling, DSO, OBE[2] (15 November 1915 – 4 November 1990) was a British mountaineer, World War II British Army officer, and the founder of the Special Air Service.
.. Life before the war[edit]
Stirling was born at his family's ancestral home, Keir Housein the parish of Lecropt, Perthshire. He was the son of Brigadier General Archibald Stirling, of Keir, and Margaret Fraser, daughter of Simon Fraser, the Lord Lovat, (a descendant of Charles II, King of Scots). His cousin was Simon Fraser, 15th Lord Lovat, and his grandparents were Sir William Stirling-Maxwell, 9th Baronet and Lady Anna Maria Leslie-Melville. Raised in the Roman Catholic faith of his mother, he was educated at the Benedictine Ampleforth College and Trinity College, Cambridge. A tall and athletic figure (he was 6 feet 6 inches (1.98 m) tall). He was training to climb Mount Everest when World War II broke out.
….
In North Africa, in the fifteen months before Stirling's capture, the SAS had destroyed over 250 aircraft on the ground, dozens of supply dumps, wrecked railways and telecommunications, and had put hundreds of enemy vehicles out of action. Field Marshal Montgomery described Stirling as "mad, quite mad" but admitted that men like Stirling were needed in time of war. According to John Aspinal, Stirling reputedly personally strangled 41 men.[5] Private military company[edit]
Worried that Britain was losing its power after the war, Stirling organised deals to provide British weapons and military personnel to other countries, like Saudi Arabia, for various privatised foreign policy operations.[5] Along with several associates, Stirling formed Watchguard International Ltd, formerly with offices in Sloane Street (where the Chelsea Hotel later opened) before moving to South Audley Street in Mayfair.
Business was chiefly with the Gulf States. He was linked, along with Denys Rowley, to a failed attempt to the overthrow Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi in 1970 or 1971. Stirling was the founder of private military company KAS International, also known as KAS Enterprises.[6]
Watchguard International Ltd was a private military company, registered in Jersey in 1965 by Stirling and John Woodhouse. Woodhouse's first assignment was to go to Yemen to report on the state of the royalist forces when a cease-fire was declared. At the same time Stirling was cultivating his contacts in the Iranian government and exploring the chances of obtaining work in Africa. The company operated in Zambia and in Sierra Leone, providing training teams and advising on security matters, but its founders' maverick ways of doing business caused its eventual downfall. Woodhouse resigned as Director of Operations after a series of disagreements and Stirling ceased to take an active part in 1972.[7]
Great Britain 75[edit]
In mid-1970s Great Britain, Stirling became increasingly worried that an "undemocratic event" would occur and decided to take action. He created an organisation called Great Britain 75 and recruited members from the aristocratic clubs in Mayfair; mainly ex-military men (often former SAS members). The plan was simple. Should civil unrest result in the breakdown of normal Government operations, they would take over its running. He describes this in detail in an interview from 1974, part of which is present in Adam Curtis's documentary "The Mayfair Set", episode 1: "Who Pays Wins".[5]
In August 1974, before Stirling was ready to go public with GB75, the pacifist magazine Peace News obtained and published his plans, and eventually Stirling – dismayed by the right-wing character of many of those seeking to join GB75 – abandoned the scheme.[citation needed]"
Yours sincerely,
Field McConnell, United States Naval Academy, 1971; Forensic Economist; 30 year airline and 22 year military pilot; 23,000 hours of safety; Tel: 715 307 8222
David Hawkins Tel: 604 542-0891 Forensic Economist; former leader of oil-well blow-out teams; now sponsors Grand Juries in CSI Crime and Safety Investigation
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