This is a pretty good argument for changing the TSA to a regulatory/testing body and leaving security to the airports and airlines. Then the TSA could send undercover threats to test the security systems put in place at the various airports. Publish the results and fine violators. Simple.
The media tried to play this role with the TSA security apparatus at various times. They had limited success - largely they seem to have been met with resistance or even hostility, despite exposing weaknesses in the security theater.
Yeah, the point of Flight 93 is that terrorists are never going to gain control of the plane again. I was on some of the first post 9/11 flights and at that time the social contract among the guys on the plane was rather explicit. Those first few months everyone made eye contact and there was lots of implied "we've got each other's back" subtext to all of the conversations with strangers on the plane. Anyone trying to hijack a plane with boxcutters post 9/11 would have been torn to pieces before they got the first demand out of their mouth. Heck, even a bunch of AK-47s would have failed, unless they managed to kill every person on the plane.
If there's some doubt as to the intent of an assailant, it is in your interest to mitigate the conflict and get out alive. If you know for sure they intend to kill you and everyone else, your incentive to cooperate drops to zero.
This is a very important service. Aquataine's point about small business is extremely valid. I used to run a small business in a metropolitan area. Like online retailers, I did work on-site. So I had to collect sales tax by the location of the work. What a mess! With dozens of cities and several counties to deal with, as well as school systems and public transportation systems with taxing authority, it was almost impossible to keep track of all of the taxes. And those taxes had to be filed weekly, even if I had no sales in a given period. Wow... I can't believe how much time and effort that took. What a drain on my time and money that was. The government made a lot more off of that business than I did, that's for sure.
Actually, I'm liking this idea. Just one more camel's nose under the tent. Keep shoving noses under there and maybe the great firewall will come crashing down.
Thanks for the reply. That's pretty much exactly where my thoughts were going looking at this data. I'll accept your pedantry over terminology and rephrase as "in order to understand the accuracy of our current climate models, we need to understand the driving forces behind these previous peaks/valleys and why the current trend appeared to follow prior trends until reaching a plateau at about current levels quite some time ago." I haven't heard any discussion of what might be different between this cycle and prior cycles that explains the plateau phase.
I could posit that there is something inherent in the feedback loops of the planet that drives these cycles - and if anthropogenic warming pushes us beyond some tipping point we would trigger an alteration in whatever those forces might be - driving us out of the current equilibrium (plateau). Since the current state (a relatively stable plateau) has been so good for my species, I'd probably like to see the status quo continue. I suppose there are folks somewhere in the halls of academia working on precisely that problem, but a couple of quick google searches and a post or two on an irrelevant forum is about as far as I'm willing to go to connect with them.
I've been looking for an evaluation of this graph in these threads for a while. I have no expertise whatsoever in the field, but looking at the Vostok Petit temperature data over the last 400k years, it appears to me that there is a nice, repeatable pattern of cooling and warming. From that data it looks as if we are currently about 3 degrees below the peak of the current cycle. It also appears that the current cycle of warming was interrupted for some reason and we are long overdue for a warming of 3 degrees followed by a precipitous drop of more than twice that amount, followed by a slow decline to 8 degrees below our current temperatures.
I haven't heard any discussion of this trend data in the global warming debate, but if we don't understand why we are 3 degrees cooler than we should be, how can we understand what drives the peak and nearly immediate rapid decline? Global warming may be scary, even catastrophic - but warming of 4 degrees is nothing compared with cooling of 8 degrees. Covering the majority of Europe and North America in glaciers a mile thick would probably impact humanity more than a couple of meters of rise in sea level and increases in drought. If temperatures increasing to a particular point sets off a sequence of effects that results in the cooling of the earth by this amount, I'd think that would be a handy piece of information.
This is the same analysis I have done. We also have very poor power reliability. So our main data center has a diesel backup the size of a tractor-trailer and a week of fuel available, plus contracts with supply companies for fuel deliveries in the event of an emergency. That ain't cheap. We have redundant data centers and mirrored servers in separate states. Also not cheap.
I've been talking with major colo providers about hosting our ~150 virtual machine servers and our virtual desktops. Unfortunately, they are way more expensive than our expensive in-house setup. We are of a size that we can provide our own redundancy cheaper than hosting providers are willing to do at this time. But I fully anticipate that changing over the next few years. And I'd do it even if the costs were only slightly higher. Having the superior infrastructure and staffing of a Terramark running your server farm definitely provides some peace of mind that is worth a few bucks.
I would expect that very few companies will house their data infrastructure in-house in 10 years time. This includes telephony as well, which is rapidly moving to voip only. The advantage of having all of your infrastructure hosted and connecting via high-speed redundant data connections is immense. If you've ever moved an office, or had a disaster recovery situation that forced you out of a facility for an extended period, then the advantages are obvious. If you can get a data drop in place, you can move in tomorrow.
During the startup phase our company was doubling in size roughly every 6 months. We moved to new facilities 6 times in 8 years. How much easier would my life have been if the data center could have stayed in one place while the company moved around? The infrastructure didn't exist to allow that a decade ago. It does now.
There is another advantage to "off the shelf" software. Customization is difficult and expensive, so the incentive is to mold your business practice to fit the software. This can actually be a good thing. In many situations it can prevent time wasted reinventing the wheel.
If I was starting a mortgage business tomorrow, I'd buy an off-the-shelf mortgage origination package and design my entire business practice around the way the software works. This is because the mortgage industry is very mature, and the packages that exist address most business needs right out of the box.
I happen to work in an industry that has fewer than a dozen companies, worldwide. And really there are only a couple of major players. There is no off-the-shelf solution for our business model, so I've seen the 'build in house' model up close. It is fantastic for providing exactly what the business needs. Everything can be custom tailored to the exact demands of the business at that moment.
This is also a major weakness of this approach. When there are no limits to what you can do, well... there's no limits to what they can ask for. Smart people tend to be creative. So we end up getting a deluge of feature requests, a large majority of which won't actually help the business. If you can't say "no" on technical grounds you are left arguing on business needs - not the IT mission in the minds of most managers. So you end up building a lot of things that won't really help. In most real-world situations, off-the-shelf carries major advantages in terms of focusing the business on things that will grow the business.
I've worked at 3 different companies in my career, and at each of them, IT as an organization held the attitude that the company existed for their benefit, and not the other way around.
IT needs to understand that it is a service organization with the mission of satisfying its customer by providing top notch service and support, and asking "how high?"
I've heard this exact phrase many times over the years, particularly from big-company alumni. This attitude is exactly why companies fail. The only way to be successful is for all members of the team to work together to make the company successful. If your organization fails to foster true collaboration at all levels, your organization blows.
It is human nature that everybody wants to be in control. Sales managers want to have everyone cater to their whims, marketing wants their ideas followed without question, even the guys over in finance want to have their ideas implemented across the board without discussion. Well, following that paradigm will get you nothing but failure.
In a properly functioning company there should be no division between IT and the business unit (and accounting and legal and etc.). Any challenge being faced by the business should be addressed by all members of the organization. If the sales team is having trouble increasing business and feels that a new web application would help, a multidisciplinary team from all aspects of the business should brainstorm the problem and come up with the best solution possible for the company as a whole. There may be accounting reasons for using cloud services that are brought to the table by the Finance guys, and a better technical solution might come from the IT staff.
Your "service organizations ask 'How High?'" idea leads to misguided projects that don't address the underlying problem and fail to grow the business. Any manager worth their salary should know that they are not the expert in everything and welcome input from all quarters.
Of course, at the end of the day someone has to make a final call. But the 'service organization' meme is a stupid relic of the 90's outsourcing craze and has no business in modern corporate life.
We do this test every day. On any aircraft of reasonable size, there are at least a dozen cell phones not in the off position during takeoff and landing. Probably more. Most of these jets carry a hundred or more people. Nearly 100% of people carry some sort of electronic devise. Anyone here work in IT? Care to guess how many of your normal users will follow instructions? Does anyone seriously believe they get much north of 90% compliance with the "all electronics must be in the off position" request under the best circumstances? How many rings, pings, and update sounds do you hear on final approach when you come in low enough for the cell signal to connect? I hear so many I don't even notice anymore.
If this were a truly serious problem, we'd have planes dropping out of the sky like rain. I couldn't say that there isn't a potential for a problem. I can say that the risk must be very, very small.
No it isn't. Here's your thought experiment: What would happen if every animal on the planet ceased breathing, all at the same time? (for "every animal" use "every non-photosynthesizing organism"). What would happen to the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere? To the concentration of O2?
See? Breathing, not carbon neutral. Your fuel source may be renewable, but that's not necessarily the same thing as 'neutral'.
---The Internet: Keeping pedants busy since 1989. Or '62. Or '69. Heck, when was that thing created anyway?
Do you perchance drive on public roads? Take airline flights? Use credit cards? Do any banking at all? All contain varying degrees of public information about you that could be used in a similar manner.
In an exactly parallel move, the DMV could release all motor vehicle registration information revealing your license plate number. Red light cameras, toll roads and perhaps crime-tracking cameras already capture your license plate moving about. FOI requests could compile a similar database on your movements.
Financial transactions of a certain size are already reported to the Feds by law. Want yours revealed in a massive FOI request?
The TSA collects every person who is flying as a part of the "terrorist watch list" clearance process. How about an FOI for that data?
I'm sure that my "top of the head" rumination barely scratches the surface of similar info collected by the state. Still feel like it is all hunky-dory for this kind of invasion of privacy to be allowed?
Fidonet was awesome! I remember getting help with an Amiga problem from someone in Australia back around '89-90. It took a day to get our messages back and forth, sometimes two. At the time it would have taken more than a week to communicate via regular mail, and I never would have met her from my office in the US anyway. Really cool - and free!
Not so amazing compared to today's trans-oceanic iPhone video chats, but pretty transformative at the time.
Nice catch. Cut-and-paste challenged. AC has a great point, never trust your calculator, you should always have a ballpark figure in mind before hitting enter.
Any decent IDE is likely to be better with multiple monitors, not just interface design. Even working in SQL is better when expanding your IDE across multiple monitors. I would argue that spanning an IDE across multiple monitors is a much larger boost to productivity than spanning a spreadsheet across multiple monitors. And I'd also argue that it is pretty damn cheap to buy and run a monitor, so if your employees can use one, give it to them.
I give all of my IT staff multiple monitors, even the help desk. Come on people, you spend the better part of 100k every year even for cheap IT staff. Why would you chintz out on a lousy couple hundred (tops) for a second monitor? That's just crappy management practice.
My "wow, shuttle launches are amazing" moment happened during a night launch. We were listening to the radio broadcast while watching from the causeway. As they ticked off the milestones and speeds, we watched it transform into a brilliant white star slowly descending over the Atlantic Ocean. It was still well above the horizon and bright in the sky when the NASA announcer told us the shuttle was "now passing over the horn of Africa".
Yeah, really bad hyperbole. As spacecraft go, low earth orbit isn't all that fast either. The folks who walked on the moon went a fair bit faster than Mach 25 (17,500 mph). And that's not even a blip on the 17 km/s that Voyager I is coasting along at. That's 163,198.8 mph for those who are metric-challenged.
A really good fastball travels at 100mph. Using that as an analogy for something going 175 times faster is a bit inadequate. And using that as a superlative in a world where "fast" is 10x faster than your fastball....
These guys will be happy to rent you a minivan for the trip. Or any other vehicle for that matter. At 4 weeks per year you could rent for far less than your TCO on keeping the vehicle yourself.
And no, I didn't go that route. I own my cars and only rent when flying. Doesn't mean it isn't financially more sensible if you don't really need a car for daily life.
The Post link doesn't support it's urban myth contentions. In fact, it pretty much says that all the senior officials from that time agree that it is true. It has a lot of fuddled logic about other publications saying he was using a sat phone - but the real connection is "cruise missiles were dispatched to the location revealed by his sat phone". The entire last 20% of the article is various officials saying that their information confirms the connection. (although it may or may not be a single publication) In fact, the biggest thing the article seems to wish to accomplish is to exonerate the Times for running the story. Ok, Times, you are Exonerated. The conduit for the leak is perfectly irrelevant.
Money quote:
"You got me," said Benjamin, who was director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council staff at the time. "That was the understanding in the White House and the intelligence community. The story ran and the lights went out."
More to the point, if your enemy is revealing sensitive information to you, don't tip your hand and let him know. That's true in poker and in war. And it is true whatever the reason for Bin-Laden's eschewing electronic communications. The only source in the story with any sense was "CIA spokesman Tom Crispell" who "declined to comment, saying the question involves intelligence sources and methods. "
I think it is really cool that I know that we followed Bin-Laden's most trusted couriers until they led us to him. It is fun to know about things like that. I also think it probably isn't the best thing for our intelligence agencies that this fact is public knowledge. Unless, of course, that is just a disinformation campaign designed to further disrupt their operations..... in which case: well played!
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This is a pretty good argument for changing the TSA to a regulatory/testing body and leaving security to the airports and airlines. Then the TSA could send undercover threats to test the security systems put in place at the various airports. Publish the results and fine violators. Simple.
The media tried to play this role with the TSA security apparatus at various times. They had limited success - largely they seem to have been met with resistance or even hostility, despite exposing weaknesses in the security theater.
Yeah, the point of Flight 93 is that terrorists are never going to gain control of the plane again. I was on some of the first post 9/11 flights and at that time the social contract among the guys on the plane was rather explicit. Those first few months everyone made eye contact and there was lots of implied "we've got each other's back" subtext to all of the conversations with strangers on the plane. Anyone trying to hijack a plane with boxcutters post 9/11 would have been torn to pieces before they got the first demand out of their mouth. Heck, even a bunch of AK-47s would have failed, unless they managed to kill every person on the plane.
If there's some doubt as to the intent of an assailant, it is in your interest to mitigate the conflict and get out alive. If you know for sure they intend to kill you and everyone else, your incentive to cooperate drops to zero.
This is a very important service. Aquataine's point about small business is extremely valid. I used to run a small business in a metropolitan area. Like online retailers, I did work on-site. So I had to collect sales tax by the location of the work. What a mess! With dozens of cities and several counties to deal with, as well as school systems and public transportation systems with taxing authority, it was almost impossible to keep track of all of the taxes. And those taxes had to be filed weekly, even if I had no sales in a given period. Wow... I can't believe how much time and effort that took. What a drain on my time and money that was. The government made a lot more off of that business than I did, that's for sure.
I think you may have found your clue-stick. On average, people have children.
Actually, I'm liking this idea. Just one more camel's nose under the tent. Keep shoving noses under there and maybe the great firewall will come crashing down.
Not The Stig. The Beer Commercial.
Thanks for the reply. That's pretty much exactly where my thoughts were going looking at this data. I'll accept your pedantry over terminology and rephrase as "in order to understand the accuracy of our current climate models, we need to understand the driving forces behind these previous peaks/valleys and why the current trend appeared to follow prior trends until reaching a plateau at about current levels quite some time ago." I haven't heard any discussion of what might be different between this cycle and prior cycles that explains the plateau phase.
I could posit that there is something inherent in the feedback loops of the planet that drives these cycles - and if anthropogenic warming pushes us beyond some tipping point we would trigger an alteration in whatever those forces might be - driving us out of the current equilibrium (plateau). Since the current state (a relatively stable plateau) has been so good for my species, I'd probably like to see the status quo continue. I suppose there are folks somewhere in the halls of academia working on precisely that problem, but a couple of quick google searches and a post or two on an irrelevant forum is about as far as I'm willing to go to connect with them.
I've been looking for an evaluation of this graph in these threads for a while. I have no expertise whatsoever in the field, but looking at the Vostok Petit temperature data over the last 400k years, it appears to me that there is a nice, repeatable pattern of cooling and warming. From that data it looks as if we are currently about 3 degrees below the peak of the current cycle. It also appears that the current cycle of warming was interrupted for some reason and we are long overdue for a warming of 3 degrees followed by a precipitous drop of more than twice that amount, followed by a slow decline to 8 degrees below our current temperatures.
I haven't heard any discussion of this trend data in the global warming debate, but if we don't understand why we are 3 degrees cooler than we should be, how can we understand what drives the peak and nearly immediate rapid decline? Global warming may be scary, even catastrophic - but warming of 4 degrees is nothing compared with cooling of 8 degrees. Covering the majority of Europe and North America in glaciers a mile thick would probably impact humanity more than a couple of meters of rise in sea level and increases in drought. If temperatures increasing to a particular point sets off a sequence of effects that results in the cooling of the earth by this amount, I'd think that would be a handy piece of information.
This is the same analysis I have done. We also have very poor power reliability. So our main data center has a diesel backup the size of a tractor-trailer and a week of fuel available, plus contracts with supply companies for fuel deliveries in the event of an emergency. That ain't cheap. We have redundant data centers and mirrored servers in separate states. Also not cheap.
I've been talking with major colo providers about hosting our ~150 virtual machine servers and our virtual desktops. Unfortunately, they are way more expensive than our expensive in-house setup. We are of a size that we can provide our own redundancy cheaper than hosting providers are willing to do at this time. But I fully anticipate that changing over the next few years. And I'd do it even if the costs were only slightly higher. Having the superior infrastructure and staffing of a Terramark running your server farm definitely provides some peace of mind that is worth a few bucks.
I would expect that very few companies will house their data infrastructure in-house in 10 years time. This includes telephony as well, which is rapidly moving to voip only. The advantage of having all of your infrastructure hosted and connecting via high-speed redundant data connections is immense. If you've ever moved an office, or had a disaster recovery situation that forced you out of a facility for an extended period, then the advantages are obvious. If you can get a data drop in place, you can move in tomorrow.
During the startup phase our company was doubling in size roughly every 6 months. We moved to new facilities 6 times in 8 years. How much easier would my life have been if the data center could have stayed in one place while the company moved around? The infrastructure didn't exist to allow that a decade ago. It does now.
There is another advantage to "off the shelf" software. Customization is difficult and expensive, so the incentive is to mold your business practice to fit the software. This can actually be a good thing. In many situations it can prevent time wasted reinventing the wheel.
If I was starting a mortgage business tomorrow, I'd buy an off-the-shelf mortgage origination package and design my entire business practice around the way the software works. This is because the mortgage industry is very mature, and the packages that exist address most business needs right out of the box.
I happen to work in an industry that has fewer than a dozen companies, worldwide. And really there are only a couple of major players. There is no off-the-shelf solution for our business model, so I've seen the 'build in house' model up close. It is fantastic for providing exactly what the business needs. Everything can be custom tailored to the exact demands of the business at that moment.
This is also a major weakness of this approach. When there are no limits to what you can do, well... there's no limits to what they can ask for. Smart people tend to be creative. So we end up getting a deluge of feature requests, a large majority of which won't actually help the business. If you can't say "no" on technical grounds you are left arguing on business needs - not the IT mission in the minds of most managers. So you end up building a lot of things that won't really help. In most real-world situations, off-the-shelf carries major advantages in terms of focusing the business on things that will grow the business.
I've worked at 3 different companies in my career, and at each of them, IT as an organization held the attitude that the company existed for their benefit, and not the other way around.
IT needs to understand that it is a service organization with the mission of satisfying its customer by providing top notch service and support, and asking "how high?"
I've heard this exact phrase many times over the years, particularly from big-company alumni. This attitude is exactly why companies fail. The only way to be successful is for all members of the team to work together to make the company successful. If your organization fails to foster true collaboration at all levels, your organization blows.
It is human nature that everybody wants to be in control. Sales managers want to have everyone cater to their whims, marketing wants their ideas followed without question, even the guys over in finance want to have their ideas implemented across the board without discussion. Well, following that paradigm will get you nothing but failure.
In a properly functioning company there should be no division between IT and the business unit (and accounting and legal and etc.). Any challenge being faced by the business should be addressed by all members of the organization. If the sales team is having trouble increasing business and feels that a new web application would help, a multidisciplinary team from all aspects of the business should brainstorm the problem and come up with the best solution possible for the company as a whole. There may be accounting reasons for using cloud services that are brought to the table by the Finance guys, and a better technical solution might come from the IT staff.
Your "service organizations ask 'How High?'" idea leads to misguided projects that don't address the underlying problem and fail to grow the business. Any manager worth their salary should know that they are not the expert in everything and welcome input from all quarters.
Of course, at the end of the day someone has to make a final call. But the 'service organization' meme is a stupid relic of the 90's outsourcing craze and has no business in modern corporate life.
We do this test every day. On any aircraft of reasonable size, there are at least a dozen cell phones not in the off position during takeoff and landing. Probably more. Most of these jets carry a hundred or more people. Nearly 100% of people carry some sort of electronic devise. Anyone here work in IT? Care to guess how many of your normal users will follow instructions? Does anyone seriously believe they get much north of 90% compliance with the "all electronics must be in the off position" request under the best circumstances? How many rings, pings, and update sounds do you hear on final approach when you come in low enough for the cell signal to connect? I hear so many I don't even notice anymore.
If this were a truly serious problem, we'd have planes dropping out of the sky like rain. I couldn't say that there isn't a potential for a problem. I can say that the risk must be very, very small.
Is he eating the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution?
No... The Supreme Court, Congress and President are handling that just fine, thanks.
Breathing is carbon-neutral.
No it isn't. Here's your thought experiment: What would happen if every animal on the planet ceased breathing, all at the same time? (for "every animal" use "every non-photosynthesizing organism"). What would happen to the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere? To the concentration of O2?
See? Breathing, not carbon neutral. Your fuel source may be renewable, but that's not necessarily the same thing as 'neutral'.
---The Internet: Keeping pedants busy since 1989. Or '62. Or '69. Heck, when was that thing created anyway?
Do you perchance drive on public roads? Take airline flights? Use credit cards? Do any banking at all? All contain varying degrees of public information about you that could be used in a similar manner.
In an exactly parallel move, the DMV could release all motor vehicle registration information revealing your license plate number. Red light cameras, toll roads and perhaps crime-tracking cameras already capture your license plate moving about. FOI requests could compile a similar database on your movements.
Financial transactions of a certain size are already reported to the Feds by law. Want yours revealed in a massive FOI request?
The TSA collects every person who is flying as a part of the "terrorist watch list" clearance process. How about an FOI for that data?
I'm sure that my "top of the head" rumination barely scratches the surface of similar info collected by the state. Still feel like it is all hunky-dory for this kind of invasion of privacy to be allowed?
Fidonet was awesome! I remember getting help with an Amiga problem from someone in Australia back around '89-90. It took a day to get our messages back and forth, sometimes two. At the time it would have taken more than a week to communicate via regular mail, and I never would have met her from my office in the US anyway. Really cool - and free!
Not so amazing compared to today's trans-oceanic iPhone video chats, but pretty transformative at the time.
This definitely works. My Director of Technology drinks her coffee like a gerbil at a water bottle, and she's never had prostate cancer!
Nice catch. Cut-and-paste challenged. AC has a great point, never trust your calculator, you should always have a ballpark figure in mind before hitting enter.
Any decent IDE is likely to be better with multiple monitors, not just interface design. Even working in SQL is better when expanding your IDE across multiple monitors. I would argue that spanning an IDE across multiple monitors is a much larger boost to productivity than spanning a spreadsheet across multiple monitors. And I'd also argue that it is pretty damn cheap to buy and run a monitor, so if your employees can use one, give it to them.
I give all of my IT staff multiple monitors, even the help desk. Come on people, you spend the better part of 100k every year even for cheap IT staff. Why would you chintz out on a lousy couple hundred (tops) for a second monitor? That's just crappy management practice.
My "wow, shuttle launches are amazing" moment happened during a night launch. We were listening to the radio broadcast while watching from the causeway. As they ticked off the milestones and speeds, we watched it transform into a brilliant white star slowly descending over the Atlantic Ocean. It was still well above the horizon and bright in the sky when the NASA announcer told us the shuttle was "now passing over the horn of Africa".
That was a "wow" moment.
Yeah, really bad hyperbole. As spacecraft go, low earth orbit isn't all that fast either. The folks who walked on the moon went a fair bit faster than Mach 25 (17,500 mph). And that's not even a blip on the 17 km/s that Voyager I is coasting along at. That's 163,198.8 mph for those who are metric-challenged.
A really good fastball travels at 100mph. Using that as an analogy for something going 175 times faster is a bit inadequate. And using that as a superlative in a world where "fast" is 10x faster than your fastball....
Giant slot car racing! Even better, full scale slots!
These guys will be happy to rent you a minivan for the trip. Or any other vehicle for that matter. At 4 weeks per year you could rent for far less than your TCO on keeping the vehicle yourself.
And no, I didn't go that route. I own my cars and only rent when flying. Doesn't mean it isn't financially more sensible if you don't really need a car for daily life.
Drudge forces a reload of a linked site? Neat feature, how's that work?
The Post link doesn't support it's urban myth contentions. In fact, it pretty much says that all the senior officials from that time agree that it is true. It has a lot of fuddled logic about other publications saying he was using a sat phone - but the real connection is "cruise missiles were dispatched to the location revealed by his sat phone". The entire last 20% of the article is various officials saying that their information confirms the connection. (although it may or may not be a single publication) In fact, the biggest thing the article seems to wish to accomplish is to exonerate the Times for running the story. Ok, Times, you are Exonerated. The conduit for the leak is perfectly irrelevant.
Money quote:
More to the point, if your enemy is revealing sensitive information to you, don't tip your hand and let him know. That's true in poker and in war. And it is true whatever the reason for Bin-Laden's eschewing electronic communications. The only source in the story with any sense was "CIA spokesman Tom Crispell" who "declined to comment, saying the question involves intelligence sources and methods. "
I think it is really cool that I know that we followed Bin-Laden's most trusted couriers until they led us to him. It is fun to know about things like that. I also think it probably isn't the best thing for our intelligence agencies that this fact is public knowledge. Unless, of course, that is just a disinformation campaign designed to further disrupt their operations..... in which case: well played!