Meet
Dr. Eric Haseltine Associate Director of National Intelligence for Science and Technology.
Dr. Haseltine works for General Micheal V. Hayden the Principle Deputy Director of National Intelligence who works for Ambassador John D. Negropontethe Director of National Intelligence. (It is nice to see that Negroponte's involvement with the covert funding of the contras, cover-up of human rights abuses by the CIA in the Honduras and, association with Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, former Executive Director of the CIA, under investigation for involvement in the Cunningham Bribery Case, has not prevented him from holding a critical intelligence position in the bush administration.)
Dr. Haseltine was the former Director of Research, at the National Security Agency from 2002 until his new appointment with the Director of National Intelligence in June 2005. Before joining NSA Dr. Haseltine was the Executive Vice President of Research and Development at Walt Disney Imagineering, Disney's R&D division...
Dr. Haseltine is a very smart fellow, as you would guess, and he has a lot of useful experience. His experience as Disney/Pixar would involve managing high end data management and visualization software and its developers. This experience would be directly valuable to the NSA. Dr. Haseltine talks about the problem in
an article in Government Computer News:
That's why NSA needs new informatics software that can gather individual bits of information from many sources and assemble them to produce "actionable knowledge," said Eric Haseltine, NSA research director.
Today's commercial intelligence software just isn't powerful enough to do the job of sorting through the immense amount of data NSA collects...
According to the same article this vast amount of data is increasing:
NSA is experiencing a vast increase in the data it must monitor, Haseltine said. New communications mediums such as instant messaging, cellular telephones and Web pages flood the organization.
Well that makes sense given Al-Queda's heavy use of cell phones and Instant Messaging. As president bush has noted on several occasions it is the democrats aversion to warrantless wiretapping that prevented the administration from intercepting the IM from Osama bin Laden to the hijackers on 9/11. Osama laughs about it on his web page...
Dr. Haseltine experience with Disney/Pixar would also give access to the best and the brightest in the computer industry. In one of his speeches he talks about Alan Kay:
Now, some of you may recall Alan Kay, who was at Xerox PARC and then at Apple, and then at Disney,
where I sat next to him for five years, and by osmoses, some of his brilliance seeped across into my dimwitted
brain that is the way he viewed it, anyhow. And he had a really interesting project that started
off as hypercard and then became Squeak, and now it is something else.
...
But the basic idea, or one of the ideas behind it is that data are going to get very smart. He had a
very interesting demonstration. And you might just guess at what having been Apple, and Xerox
PARC, and so forth, what his attitudes were towards Microsoft.
And so he had a very interesting demonstration with Squeak. He put a demonstration on where
he loaded and executable/data file that had a footprint of a few megabites. That was it. And what that
executable did was that it put Windows to sleep. It completely put Windows to sleep. And on the
modern Vista-type machine, where you have privilege partition and mandatory access control, you
literally could have Windows put itself to sleep and have a series of concatenated micro-kernels pull
themselves together and essentially be the OS of the system.
The context of this discussion centered on information sharing and smart data. Dr. Haseltine is very interested in the problem of information sharing (about you not with you) and the problem of securing the information shared among intelligence agencies.
The other interesting aspect of this little discussion is the self assembling OS. In this example it replaces a Windows system but there should also be no barrier to a self assembling OS creating its own partition on a target system.
What is interesting about all of this is not so much Dr. Haseltine but the interesting confluence of organizations and capabilities, Disney/Pixar and the NSA/ODNI, the ability to search the vast amounts of electronic data generated by terrorists and to restrict access to the results.
Of course there is no need to worry about these cabalities as I am sure that a fine upstanding American like Ambassador John D. Negroponte would never allow any underhanded activities on his watch well, except for the contra thing and the CIA abuses and the bribery scandal. Okay well nevermind, I am sure that president bush would never stoop to spying on americans... Okay, well I guess we are screwed.