As reported in Greek media, authorities are preparing decides to 'activate' more of the C4i camera network [suspected they were dormant as in Sydney] installed for Olympic Games security. Supposedly - according to the report - a few dozen are regularly used for traffic monitoring and another 150 'only turned on during demonstrations'. But now an additional 900 will be put to use.
The C4I system was installed by SAIC.
'Larry knows how to help SAIC succeed'
Lawrence Prior of SAIC
When Lawrence Prior was tapped as COO of Science Applications International Corporation in the fall of 2007, he faced the very challenges shared by many in the industry: uncertainty about federal spending patterns. At the time, SAIC Chairman and CEO Ken Dahlberg offered this vote of confidence: “Larry knows how to help SAIC succeed.” Since then, Prior has lived up to expectations and then some. A former Marine Corps intelligence officer with a “team first” approach, Prior came to his role as COO with a deep knowledge of both SAIC’s culture and the federal market. (He had previously served as president of SAIC’s intelligence, security and technology group, and before then, senior vice president for federal business). As COO, Prior has helped SAIC accelerate its growth. Revenue for fiscal year 2008 topped $8 billion — up 11 percent from fiscal year 2007. SAIC also secured seventeen $100 million plus contract wins and completed acquisitions to expand opportunities in energy, infrastructure, and the environment. These days, the economy and growing talk of a federal overhaul continue to fuel uncertainty. But, as before, we’re likely to see Larry Prior steer SAIC toward further growth — utilizing tactics and strategies, we might add, for others in the industry to watch and learn from.
SAIC Inc. F4Q09 (Qtr End 01/31/09) Earnings Call Transcript
...By now I presume you would have read our press release and certainly in my view, the fourth quarter was a terrific finish to a great year; reaching the $10 billion revenue milestone as we celebrate our 40th anniversary; well, it’s just icing on the cake. I feel that we really hit our stride as a public company.
In this past fiscal year, we executed on all the commitments that we made as part of our initial public offering. Our major financial results, including revenue, operating margin, earnings per share, and cash flow, were strong for the quarter and the year. We make no mistake; this performance was no accident.
We laid out our approach for transforming the company, creating more focus in the marketplace, collaborating as one SAIC, making bigger bets on emerging strategic trends, and that approach is paying off. Since our performance has been steady and predictable, most of the questions that we’re getting from investors deal with the federal budget and the federal contracting environment. There have been major changes to both, but our overall financial outlook is essentially unchanged.
On the budget front, the President signed the $410 billion omnibus, that provides an average 8% increase for non-defense agencies, and he signed a $787 billion stimulus package. Our largest customers and programs are in national security, but we see potential upside in the stimulus package, especially around our energy efficiency, border and port security, and healthcare IT offerings...
Standards body investigates C4I security tagging
* By Joab Jackson
* Mar 23, 2009
The Object Management Group's (OMG) working group for Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence (C4I) has begun investigating the possibility of either developing or adopting a set of standardized security tags that different service commands could use to share information among themselves, as well as with intelligence agencies and foreign military services.
Meeting this week at an OMG conference held in Washington, the group is investigating whether any existing Extensible Markup Language-based (XML) standards will work for this task, or if it should develop a new set of tags entirely. The tags will be used by the middleware that bridges different C4I systems.
When military data is passed from one system to another, the classification, or sensitivity level, of the data is frequently needed to determine how that data is processed. Without a previously agreed-upon definition of sensitivity level, the data must be channeled through point-to-point exchanges, which can be cumbersome to set up, or even conveyed by hand. A set of tags, if used by all the parties in a transaction, would provide a universal way of understanding the sensitivity of information being transmitted. Ideally, the tags would be used by the combat systems of multiple countries, so that allied forces could share information.
http://www.bigbrotherstate.com
It’s not what you know, it’s who else knows it too
Anne Johnstone April 02 2009
Every breath you take
Every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
I'll be watching you
What was once a wistful lament for lost love now reads like an anthem for the surveillance society. The problem is that not enough of us are singing it. And many of those who do are dismissed as paranoid or geeks.
The privacy issue flared briefly when Google Street View arrived in Britain a fortnight ago. In among the blushes over illicit stolen kisses and the luckless bloke caught urinating, there was a flurry of genuine unease about abusive men snooping on fleeing partners or the government peering through our windows. In reality, because it does not use real-time images, it's only marginally useful as a surveillance tool.
By contrast, the revelation this week that the UK government is party to talks about installing a "communication box" in all new cars, capable of tracking drivers right across Europe, barely made the news. This idea will be sold to us as "a good thing", you can depend on it. It could mean an end to those frustrating waits at traffic lights when there's nothing coming the other way. It could divert you around traffic jams and reserve you a parking space at your destination. The big "but" is that it will enable anyone with access to the data to trace your car within one metre at any time, which, as the EU Data Protection Supervisor conceded recently, will have a "great impact on rights to privacy and data"...
Classical archaeologist to lecture on surveillance in ancient world
By Josh Schonwald
News Office
Hidden cameras, electronic records of consumer purchases, satellite images that can track movement with pinpoint precision. Surveillance is an accepted part of life, but the practice of closely observing and scrutinizing others is not unique to the modern, high-tech era—surveillance is more than 2,000 years old.
Renowned classical archaeologist Susan Alcock will show the pervasiveness of surveillance in the ancient world, and what it implies for the understanding of ancient cultures in early April when she delivers the Department of Art History’s Louise Smith Bross Lectures.
Alcock will give three lectures, drawing on historical and archaeological examples from the Mediterranean and the Near East, in the series titled “Some Archaeologies of Surveillance.”...
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