New books sent to Secrecy News for review (thanks!) but not yet read include these:
Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digital Weapon by Kim Zetter (reviewed in WaPo, WSJ)
Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution by Richard Whittle (reviewed in WaPo, WSJ)
National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror by Joseph Masco
Russlands “neuer Adel”: Die Macht Des Geheimdienstes Von Gorbatschow Bis Putin von Ulf Walther
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
The federal government can support more proactive, efficient, and cost-effective resiliency planning by certifying predictive models to validate and publicly indicate their quality.
We need a new agency that specializes in uncovering funding opportunities that were overlooked elsewhere. Judging from the history of scientific breakthroughs, the benefits could be quite substantial.
The cost of inaction is not merely economic; it is measured in preventable illness, deaths and diminished livelihoods.