Stewart Baker in CFP
Assistant secretary Stewart Bake from the DHSr spoke at the CFP-dinner. He started out by asking how many were libertarians, and then he asked how many had 72 hours of food and water of those. And if they did not have that - who did they count on to come save them?
Baker spoke about Katrina and said that they now realized that they needed two things: an ebay for givers and recipients of gifts as well as a 911-service for SMS, since this requires less functionality than real-time telephony. The DHS is working with this.
He then spoke about biological warfare. He said that one theory about the Anthrax-episode ws that an insider did it, to warn us. But that it went out of hand. (Much like the first Morris-worm of the net). The sophistication of bio-warfare is increasing quickly, doubling every year. With routinely available equipment you can generate moderate but scary viruses. The reason that this is not happening yet may well be that this is so scary. The spirit of this field is a lot like the spirit of the Internet - but people are working with very dangerous projects (the mouse-pox-example).