FROM THE DESK OF CLEARANCEJOBS.COM
1. Clearances and dual citizenship. Contributor and in-house counsel Sean Bigley advises, “If you are a naturalized U.S. citizen who is concerned about the impact that dual citizenship could have on your security clearance, you can take affirmative steps to help improve your situation. To start, be sure that you are completely divested of all financial and business ties to your home country: close bank accounts there, sell any property you own in your prior country, and don’t otherwise exercise any of the benefits of your home country’s citizenship.”
2. Cleared women Veteran jobs. Contributor Tranette Ledford offers, “In the defense sector, cleared engineering jobs continue to be in high demand in four specialties: electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, nuclear engineering and civil engineering. Breaking down the four areas, here’s a primer . . . .”
THE FORCE AND THE FIGHT
1. Relevance: saving the United Nations. New Republic contributor Jonathan M. Katz reports, “Earlier in the day, an American diplomat dropped a hint to a member of [Ban Ki-moo’s] staff: After more than a month of airstrikes in Iraq against Islamic State militants, the United States was expanding its bombing campaign into Syria. The strikes would begin immediately. The question was, how should the United Nations respond?” See also, “The Backroom: An Inside Account of UN Sec-General’s Statement on US War in Syria.”
2. Carter’s sequestration budget fight. Defense Media Activity’s Claudette Roulo reports, “Sequestration isn’t the law of the land because it makes sense, it’s the law because of political gridlock, Defense Secretary Ash Carter told Congress [Wednesday]. Carter was joined by Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in presenting the president’s proposed defense budget for fiscal year 2016 to the Defense Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee. Carter told the committee that he studied the budget proposal carefully and believes it is the right way forward.”
3. Allies dwindling in Syria. Christian Science Monitor’s Dominique Soguel reports, “Gains by Jabhat al-Nusra, an Al Qaeda affiliate, have forced two major US-backed rebel groups to disband at a time when Washington needs solid partners to counter the influence of jihadists in Syria. Al Nusra, the main jihadist rival to the self-declared Islamic State, delivered a deathblow over the weekend to Harakat Hazzm . . . . Hazzm’s defeat is a setback for Washington, which has struggled to create a coherent strategy that bolsters pro-Western groups among the opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. After careful vetting, the CIA had zeroed in on Hazzm as a movement worth arming and training in a covert program launched in 2014.” See also, “Peshmerga fight off wave of fierce ISIS attacks” and “Iranian-backed Shiite militias lead Iraq’s fight to retake Tikrit.”
4. China’s economy waning. Reuters’ Koh Gui Qing and Kevin Yao report, “China plans to run its biggest budget deficit in 2015 since the global financial crisis, stepping up spending as Premier Li Keqiang signaled that the lowest rate of growth in a quarter of a century is the ‘new normal’ for the world’s No.2 economy. Speaking at the opening of the country’s annual parliamentary meeting on Thursday, Li announced a growth target of around 7 percent for this year, below the 7.5 percent goal that was narrowly missed in 2014.”
5. Putin’s angst over color revolutions. The Moscow Times’ Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber reports, “President Vladimir Putin urged Interior Ministry officials on Wednesday to focus on smothering budding color revolutions, thus bolstering the current political climate by reinforcing a widespread fear of domestic enemies . . . . A color revolution in Russia seems highly unlikely given Putin’s vertiginous 86 percent approval rating and the population’s general reluctance to protest. Yet the notion has permeated Putin’s lexicon, emerging periodically in his speeches.”
CONTRACT WATCH
1. Amazon’s CIA Spy Cloud is up. Forbes contributor Ben Kepe reports, “News for all those tech-loving James Bond fans out there that the private cloud being built for the CIA by public cloud leader Amazon Web Services (AWS) is nearing completion. . . . AWS won the contract to supply the cloud from arch-rival IBM. The contract sparked off a tit-for-tat legal fight which wan ultimately damaging to IBM and which gained a degree of unwanted attention to the lack of maturity of IBM’s cloud.”
2. Navy’s two-pronged approach boosts Boeing. Breaking Defense’s Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. reports, “Pentagon leaders are pushing hard to keep up the momentum of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Many in the Navy, though, still look longingly back at the Boeing-built F-18 Hornet, whose St. Louis production line faces closure in 2017. There are two independent trends that together could save the St. Louis line and the Navy’s favorite plane.”
TECH, PRIVACY, & SECRECY
1. NSA reform countdown. Defense One’s Dustin Volz reports, “Lawmakers have less than 100 days left to decide whether they want to reform the National Security Agency’s controversial bulk collection of U.S. call data—or risk losing the program entirely. Core provisions of the post-9/11 Patriot Act are due to sunset on June 1, including Section 215, which grants intelligence agencies the legal authority they need to carry out mass surveillance of domestic metadata—the numbers and timestamps of phone calls but not their actual content.”
2. Petraeus’ plea in context. Homeland Security News Wire reports, “Abbe Lowell, a lawyer with experience representing government employees caught in leak investigations — including Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a former State Department contractor sentenced to a thirteen-month prison term after pleading guilty to a single felony count of disclosing classified information to Fox News reporter James Rosen—said the case proved high-level officials are treated differently than other government workers.”
3. Network vulnerabilities: Nuclear Regulatory Commission, et. al. FierceGovernmentIT’s Fred Donovan reports, “The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the federal agency tasked with ensuring the safety of the nation’s nuclear power plants, is doing a poor job of securing its own networks and data. That was one of the many findings of the latest Federal Information Security Management Act, or FISMA, report (pdf) to Congress by the Office of Management and Budget. In fact the NRC, along with the Small Business Administration and the departments of Housing and Urban Development, Labor and State, scored a zero on the use of strong authentication to control access to their systems.”
POTOMAC TWO-STEP
1. SecState@Gmail.Com: “The House committee investigating the government’s handling of the 2012 terror attacks in Benghazi, Libya, has subpoenaed the State Department for Hillary Clinton’s emails, which the committee found were sent using her personal account. . . . The subpoenas, the most aggressive action taken by the committee to date to obtain documents, suggests the controversy over Clinton’s email practices will not die down soon. The committee’s chairman, Rep. Trey Gowdy, told reporters Tuesday that the panel planned to exhaust its options in gaining access to the full cache of Clinton’s emails, which were preserved on her personal server, not with the State Department as required by law.” See also, “Hillary Clinton’s penchant for secrecy rattles Democrats.”
2. The Wall: “Republicans on both sides of the Capitol were shaken at the party’s handling of the DHS funding dispute that led to a monthlong standoff, paralyzed the GOP agenda and prompted serious questions internally about whether their newfound majority can deliver anything significant over the next two years. The fear among House Republicans is that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will be too quick to heed Democratic demands and push through watered-down bills on education, trade, health care and the budget. And the worry among Senate Republicans is that their House counterparts will scuttle hard-fought compromises that offer the only way to overcome filibusters and get bills to President Barack Obama’s desk.”
OPINIONS EVERYONE HAS
1. “A Lot Could Go Wrong Here.” US News contributor William D. Hartung argues, “The time for Congress to weigh in on drone policy is now, before the administration’s approach becomes standard practice. Deciding who gets armed drones is one of the most important foreign policy decisions the Obama administration will make, and it should be subjected to appropriate scrutiny.”
2. “All Cold Wars End With a Thaw.” The Moscow Times contributor Pyotr Romanov argues, “Russia has experienced three or four serious crises in its relations with the West over the past 100 years. How did each of those Cold Wars end? With a thaw. How will this one end? The same way. Not one attempt to put pressure on Russia has ever worked.”
3. “The Central Question: Is It 1938?” The Atlantic contributor James Fallows argues, “Unless Iran’s behavior worsens in ways we have not yet seen, to me and others in the not-1938 crowd it will seem more comparable to other difficult states, for instance the old Soviet Union, than to Hitler’s Germany. And unless its behavior improves in ways we have not yet seen, to Netanyahu and many others it will seem like the old threat in a new form, all the worse because of the nuclear element.” See also, “The wound Netanyahu left.”
THE FUNNIES
1. Night games.
3. E-mail hell.
