Steven VanRoekel, the former Microsoft executive and newly appointed Federal Chief Information Officer, has presented his first keynote.

He seems to say the choice between innovation and security is a false dichotomy — you can have both.

Now there are some who say we shouldn’t invest in government information technology in this fiscal environment, or use concerns about cyber security as a blanket excuse to preserve the status quo.

But if anyone doubts that now is the time to invest, consider the fact that more than half of the Fortune 500 companies were founded during an economic downturn. When forced to do more with less – when there is no alternative but to create a better way to get things done – that is when the real breakthroughs occur. In tough times, visionaries and risk-takers can tap into underutilized human capital, technology, information and other resources, picking up the pieces to reassemble them into something completely new.

Excellent point. Innovation is a great by-product of security (e.g. can’t innovate where/how you want if you have to spend your time/money fighting attacks) not to mention security innovation itself is a growth area.

His presentation was at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and he made reference to its important role in American history.

When I was growing up in the 80s, I remember hearing people say that America was “destined” to be a service economy. We didn’t make anything anymore – our best days were behind us. But then ideas like those that came out of PARC helped spark a technology revolution that reestablished America’s leadership and launched the innovation economy.

Nicely said, but I call that a false dichotomy. American companies do not have to innovate in order to make things. Just look at Microsoft.

Finland is about to “considerably enhance its cyber defence capabilities” with “counterpunch” and “cyber-weaponry”. Good marketing, but I’m pretty sure their supporting theory is not true

Lt. Gen. Arto Räty, permanent secretary at the Finnish MoD, added that “there can be no defensive capability without the ability to offer a counterpunch. The two things go hand in hand.”

Logically you can have defensive capability without a counterpunch. Regardless of whether I agree with their fighting style, however, I look forward to seeing yet another interpretation of Napoleon’s four innovations in offensive strategy, or Sun Tzu’s six principles.

I mean I wouldn’t be surprised if Finland started their presentation with the announcement that they have developed an enhanced cyber-sword to keep cyber-sheathed unless provoked…

The FOX reporter seems unprepared and hesitant in the following video posted by the New York Observer (a paper founded by a former investment banker).

He does a horrible job asking questions and lobs glacially-slow softballs to a man from the Occupy Wall Street protest. No surprise then who dominates the topic, but how well the protestor dominates it is a surprise. It looks so lopsided it’s like the whole thing was staged; maybe they kidnapped a FOX reporter and forced him into an awkward moment.

FOX starts by asking if protests in America are just a copy-cat movement, part of an international conspiracy

Your colleague, she’d seen the protests in Greece and Europe and elsewhere. Did you guys take your cue from that? Are you hoping to cite certainly what was a lot of the tension, if not police activity. I know over the weekend there were over 100 arrests and you guys got things fired up. Are you taking your cues from the international movement and how do you want to see this? If you could have it in a perfect way, how would it be?

And then the protestor retorts with a cruise missle of logic that obliterates the reporter’s question on every angle

its really difficult to answer questions leading to those conclusions. I’d say that we didn’t take our cue leading off of anybody really. It became a more spontaneous movement. As far as seeing this end, I wouldn’t like to see this end. I would like to see the conversation continue. This is what we should have been talking about in 2008 when the economy collapsed. We basically patched a hole on the tire and said let the car keep rolling. Unfortunately it’s fun to talk to the propaganda machine and the media especially conservative media networks such as yourself, because we find that we cant get conversations for the department of Justice’s ongoing investigation of News Corporation, for which you are an employee. But we can certainly ask questions like you know, why are the poor engaging in class warfare? After 30 years of having our living standards decrease while the wealthiest 1% have had it better than ever, I think it’s time for some maybe, I don’t know, participation in our democracy that isn’t funded by news cameras and gentlemen such as yourself.

It would appear that FOX is no longer in the hen house.

Note: also interesting to see someone protesting Wall Street in a forage cap. Maybe it is a sign of interest returning to the People’s Party and the great bank bail-out of 1893.

Similar to the Panic of 1873, this panic was marked by the collapse of railroad overbuilding and shaky railroad financing which set off a series of bank failures. Compounding market overbuilding and the railroad bubble, was a run on the gold supply (relative to silver), because of the long-established American policy of bimetallism, which used both silver and gold metals at a fixed 16:1 rate for pegging the value of the US Dollar.

Has someone yet adapted the Wizard of Oz secret story to the modern context? What would we have today instead of Dorothy’s silver shoes (silver standard) and the Wizard’s yellow brick (gold standard) road?