Paul's Down-Home Page

I accidentally found Herb Yeates’ site. I have no idea who he is, but his site is beautifully laid out and has a wealth of interesting stuff (including a good layman’s description of how nuclear weapons work). I think my favorite section is the one on the “bizarre glowing minerals of Franklin-Sterling”

What comes around goes around. John Magaw, former head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), just got fired as head of the Transportation Security Agency (TSA). Magaw took over the ATF in 1993, after the Waco debacles. His mission was to turn the agency around; in the six years of his tenure, he didn’t accomplish anything meaningful that I can detect. Naturally, his reward for his lack of competence was a promotion: he ended up as the TSA director in December 2001. Ever since then, passengers, airline employees, airline executives, and lawmakers have been united in their complaints about the TSA: too slow, too secretive, too inefficient, and too expensive. Now, barely six months after his appointment, he’s getting the boot. According to the Wall Street Journal (registration required), Magaw got the boot today. Yahoo’s story says that Magaw was fired for letting the agency spend too much money and for not working with lawmakers; according to the DoT inspector general:

of the 313 employees hired who were not passenger screeners, more than half were paid more than $100,000, including 31 of 39 lawyers and 18 of 30 criminal investigators.

Good riddance, John! Don’t let the door hit you on your way out.

I am not a big fan of John Gilmore. That’s not because of his accomplishments, which are many (including being one of Sun’s early employees, founder of Cygnus, which was open source when open source wasn’t cool, and driving force behind the Free S/WAN security project.) In general, he strikes me as obnoxious and overly opinionated. However, I have to give him his props: he has consistently defended the liberties of American citizens. Now he’s suing the Attorney General. Why? He believes that the current requirement to show photo ID at airports is unconstitutional, since (in his opinion) it violates our constitutionally protected rights to travel within the US and to be secure in our persons and papers. It doesn’t help that the TSA rule that requires this ID check is secret. See his lawsuit here.

Today the Washington Post had a live chat with WorldCom CEO John Sidgmore. Sidgmore was asked “Where were you Mr. Sidgemore when all this was happening?” His weaselly answer:

was Chief Operations Officer during 1997 and 1998. Since that time I have had decreasing involvement in the operations of the company and played primarily a strategy role in mergers and acquisitions since that time. Over the last 2 years my role has been almost exclusively speaking at Internet conferences on behalf of WorldCom.

Wow, I wish I could get a job as COO of a multi-billion-dollar publicly listed corporation so that I can spend my time going to Internet conferences! Where do I get a deal like that?

Frankly, I think the man is lying through his teeth. It is not credible that such a large-scale fraud could be perpetrated by only three employees.

I finished the first chapter of the Exchange security book, and it’s now with the separate tech editor I’ve hired. It wouldn’t be fair to describe him as an anti-Microsoft bigot, but he has substantial security expertise and he has been known to give Microsoft a hard time. If my book can live up to his standards, it should do well.

Over on Dave Farber‘s IP list, Dana Blankenhorn raises an interesting question about the Worldcom mess. John Sidgmore is now the CEO of Worldcom. Before the meltdown, he was the COO and vice chairman; he used to be the CEO of UUnet and took the current position when Worldcom bought UUnet. Why has the media given Sidgmore a free pass? Why isn’t anyone saying “Hey, John, you were the COO. How come you didn’t know this was happening?”

Timothy Smith, another IP contributor, says that Sidgmore was largely out of the loop– after a falling-out with the CEO, “[Sidgmore] pretty much went off and did his own thing” from sometime in 1999 until the present. If I were a stockholder, I’d be outraged. As a consumer of the business press, it certainly makes me wonder why no one asked this reasonable question of Mr. Sidgmore. Maybe someone will.

As I was driving up I-75 on the way to Perrysburg, I began to wonder why the Marine Corps has been so successful, both as a fighting force and as a Washington constituency. Some of it is doubtless attributable to the heroic deeds for which the Corps is famed: Belleau Wood, Tripoli, Guadalcanal, Khe Sanh. Some of it is thanks to the Corps’ legendary esprit de corps. Some is undoubtedly due to Marines’ genius for self-promotion, whether intentional or otherwise. After the battle for Okinawa, James Forrestal (Secretary of the Navy) is reputed to have said “The raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next five
hundred years”. [thanks to Michael Wellman for correcting my quote error!]

I think it’s more than that, though– I think the major portion of the Corps’ success has come from its focus. You don’t see Marines lobbying to be the lead agency for theater missile defense, like the Navy and Army. You don’t see them trying to take over strategic deterrence or control of space, like the Air Force. (Note to my blue-suited friends: the Air Force should own both of these missions, but the sight of zoomies back-stabbing the Navy is, shall we say, unseemly.) You don’t see mixed-gender basic training. The Marines focus on doing what they do: expeditionary combat, mixing infantry units with organic air and logistics. It’s worked well since 1775, although I admit that the Marines could learn some procurement lessons from the other services.