Cyberwar Doomsayer Lands $34 Million in Cyberwar Contracts‎ | Hacker News Reader

Cyberwar Doomsayer Lands $34 Million in Cyberwar Contracts‎

wired.com

Could someone change the misleading headline ?

Wired came up with the phrase based upon "foster collaboration among telecommunications researchers, University of Maryland faculty members and other academic institutions to improve secure networking and telecommunications and boost information assurance".

That could describe a wide range of things, saying that they're only developing a mailing list and wiki is highly misleading and probably libellous.

Yes. We all know consultants are expensive, but this isn't reddit, and having exaggerated articles that try to push peoples buttons is simply just trolling.

I might be a little too cynical here but a government agency spending millions on something that is functionally equivalent to a mailing list and a wiki is not an unrealistic scenario.

Maybe, but the article doesn't actually present any evidence that that's what's going on.

I agree completely and it's a poorly written article. However, it's been my experience that far too often in government/big business you wind up with a project that costs millions of dollars that could have been pulled off by two hackers, ~200K and an infinite supply of caffeine.

It could be claimed the vagueness of the contract leads the writer to think the company will do it on the cheap (if they don't allow scope creep). Maybe it will cost the company 1 million somehow, but ultimately it shouldn't cost even that.

Agreed. This is link-bait at its best. I've seen situations where a contractor worked in this capacity. Usually it also included hosting conferences, setting up a resource where a lot of information is organized and available, generating reports, and putting up a mailing list/wiki. How much they're doing for $20 million? I don't know. But it's definitely more than a mailing list and a wiki.

Usually you can find the specifics of these sorts of contracts on FBO.gov, but upon a closer inspection of the article, the $20MM win to Booz was a University of Maryland contract, so I can't dig up any specifics.

In all fairness, even if the work WAS just to stand up a mailing list and a wiki, I would expect it to be no less than 3 million. Many contractors spend up to a million just to WIN THE BID (though unlikely for one so small), but hell, just meeting the requirements of the RFP process requires expert personnel who charge upwards of $300 an hour.

Um, did you all not get that the reference to developing a mailing list and a wiki was tongue-in-cheek? I know coders are often literal, but come on, y'all are supposed to be smart in these parts.

I get so frustrated with how media reports information out of government. It's damned irresponsible. This Wired Piece is a derivative of a Washington Tech article here: http://washingtontechnology.com/articles/2010/04/13/booz-all...

Most unfortunately, the Washington Tech article doesn't actually cite the source of the information either. These contracts, and their awards are on fbo.gov, it doesn't take much to find them and cite the source. But the "mailing list and a wiki" line is, well, unsubstantiated at best, and false at worst.

It may be because I'm unfamiliar with the system, but I can't seem to find the contracts or awards.

What search criteria did you use to find them?

Long ago at Smalltalk vendor ParcPlace, Booz-Allen was a sometimes customer/partner on big accounts. One of our consultants had a little sign in his office, roughly:

Corporate Philosophies

ParcPlace: "Everything is an object"

Booz-Allen: "Money is no object"

This is an awful story -- "fostering collaboration" is definitely vague and fuzzy, and part of the reason people get paid lots of money is translating vague and fuzzy into concrete items. It might be a mailing list and wiki -- or it might not. I don't know. And sure as hell the author doesn't know either.

Even more disturbing is the editorializing in the piece. I'm not going to comment on to what degree we actually face a cyber-threat, but I note that competitors of Booze Hamilton have to be laughing their butts off about now. It's cheap-shot journalism, and when you do that it's easy to start picking your targets for whatever motives you might have -- good or bad. In other words, this guy could have been paid by people who lost the contract to post this, and it would read exactly the same way. That means the tone is has serious flaws.

The story is pretty awful from a journalistic standpoint, however how much money does it really take allow three organizations to communicate with each other. I am willing to be its not even anywhere close to $14 million dollars.

If "fostering collaboration" means a unifying databases, replacing legacy software etc, then yes it can be close to 14 million. At a previous employer, changing the bug-tracking system was yearlong project.

On this topic, there's an interesting debate scheduled June 8 in D.C.

Mike McConnell and John Zittrain versus Marc Rotenberg and Bruce Schneier.

See http://www.thenewnewinternet.com/2010/04/12/upcoming-debate-...

Has anyone studied the relationship between doomsaying and economics? Perhaps there's a book in there somewhere, or at least a TED talk. Certainly for some, making protestations of doom - however implausible - appears to be a viable business model.

A lot of management consulting appears to be based on finding problems that don't really exist and then being paid to fix them. So yes, this is already an extremely well established business model.

Works for politicians too.

Why, yes, of course it is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalypse.

The funds are going to, or related to, the IATAC program, depending on your point of view.

Folks in the DC area might be interested in: http://intelligencesquaredus.org/index.php/debates/cyber-war...

There is a conspicuous lack of Mt. Dew in that photo.

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