According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the U.S. Information Technology workforce consists of 3.56 million people as of the end of Q1 2006. That’s the largest IT workforce number since 2001, when the number was 3.574 million, but it’s still a dismal number. Why? BLS counts both the employed and the unemployed as part of the "IT workforce" headline number. After adjusting the headline number to account for the IT unemployment rate there are only 3.471 million IT workers actually employed in the U.S. today, less than employed in 2001

It gets worse; America's population has grown by over 15 million people since 2001 so the number of employed IT professionals has declined while the population has grown by over 15 million. In 2001, 1.25 percent of all Americans were employed in IT. In 2006, 1.19 percent of all Americans are employed in IT.

Digging yet deeper into the BLS numbers shows that many hundreds of thousands of IT workers who lost their jobs since 2002 and were lucky enough to find other IT-related employment have done so at lower salaries and are underemployed. Furthermore, people who don't find other IT-related employment are dropped from BLS statistics altogether - they are considered to have "left the labor force." The real IT unemployment rate is higher than whatever figures BLS posts in any given year or quarter, because it simply makes no allowance for the many hundreds of thousands of IT workers who remain unemployed or have take a job at WalMart. They vanish from statistical tables.

Posted at May 27, 2006 6:48 AM in response to Why Skilled Immigration Endangers the Developing World

The transfer of high wage IT U.S. jobs to lower cost foreign workers via offshoring and H-1B visas is contributing to unprecedented levels of unemployment among American electrical, electronics and computer engineers. Offshoring and H-1B visas also pose a very serious, long-term challenge to the nation's leadership in technology and innovation, its economic prosperity, and its military and homeland security.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the U.S. Information Technology workforce consists of 3.56 million people as of the end of Q1 2006. That’s the largest IT workforce number since 2001, when the number was 3.574 million, but it’s still a dismal number. Why? BLS counts both the employed and the unemployed as part of the "IT workforce" headline number. After adjusting the headline number to account for the IT unemployment rate there are only 3.471 million IT workers actually employed in the U.S. today, less than employed in 2001

It gets worse; America's population has grown by over 15 million people since 2001 so the number of employed IT professionals has declined while the population has grown by over 15 million. In 2001, 1.25 percent of all Americans were employed in IT. In 2006, 1.19 percent of all Americans are employed in IT.

Digging yet deeper into the BLS numbers shows that many hundreds of thousands of IT workers who lost their jobs since 2002 and were lucky enough to find other IT-related employment have done so at lower salaries and are underemployed. Furthermore, people who don't find other IT-related employment are dropped from BLS statistics altogether - they are considered to have "left the labor force." The real IT unemployment rate is higher than whatever figures BLS posts in any given year or quarter, because it simply makes no allowance for the many hundreds of thousands of IT workers who remain unemployed or have take a job at WalMart. They vanish from statistical tables.

Yet, in the face of such unemployment, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and other technology industry executives lament they are perplexed by the declining enrollment in computer science programs at the nation's universities. In March Gates personally added his voice to his company's lobbying effort to expand the number of foreign-born computer scientists allowed to work in this country under H-1B visas.

But many IT professionals question whether the scarcity of qualified employees is as dire as Gates and others claim given the high IT worker unemployment rate. There ARE unemployed U.S.-born computer scientists, many with advanced degrees, available to fill the Microsoft positions; they just cost more to employee than Chinese or Indian computer scientists.

Now the Bush Administration and his GOP controlled US Congress want to further undercut U.S.-born students, their parents and the U.S. workforce in general. President Bush and Congress are about to greatly expand the H1B and L1 “guest worker” visa programs via the giant Immigration Bill, now pending before US Congress.

Read my full OpEd article at opednews.com

Posted at May 25, 2006 7:19 PM in response to Why Skilled Immigration Endangers the Developing World

It appears constitutional and legal consideration hearings will be orchestrated and led by Senate judiciary committee chair Arlen Specter, who immediately expressed deep concern at the revelations about eavesdropping.  Willful disregard of a law is potentially an impeachable offense. Will Bush allow an impeachment case, if it comes to that.

Bush's abuses of presidential power are the most extensive in American history. The alarming argument is that as the Constitutional Commander in Chief he possesses "inherent" authority to suspend laws in wartime. He may try to adjourn congress too. The danger is not abstract, it is in the Constitution. 

The Constitution of the United States of America
Article II [The Presidency]

Section 3. He shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in case of disagreement between them, with respect to the time of adjournment, he may adjourn them to such time as he shall think proper; he shall receive ambassadors and other public ministers; he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed, and shall commission all the officers of the United States.

Posted at December 24, 2005 1:41 PM in response to Checks and Balances

Bush mounted a vigorous defense of his order authorizing warrantless eavesdropping on overseas telephone calls and e-mail of U.S. citizens with suspected ties to terrorists. He contended that his inherent authority under the Constitution, as Commander-in-Chief, and "Constitutional obligation to protect citizens" against attack justified a circumvention of warrants.  

Where?  He is constitutional commander in chief of the Army and Navy, but congress gives him the army to command. Thats it!

U.S. Constitution

Article II The Presidency

Section 1. Presidential Power - The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.....

Before he enter on the execution of his office, he shall take the following oath or affirmation:--"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

Section 2. The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States; he may require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive departments, upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective offices, and he shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.

He shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States, whose appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by law: but the Congress may by law vest the appointment of such inferior officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the courts of law, or in the heads of departments.

The President shall have power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of their next session.

Section 3. He shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in case of disagreement between them, with respect to the time of adjournment, he may adjourn them to such time as he shall think proper; he shall receive ambassadors and other public ministers; he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed, and shall commission all the officers of the United States.

Article I The Legislative Branch

Section 8. The Congress shall have power...

To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water;

To provide and maintain a navy;

To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces;

To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

Posted at December 20, 2005 6:40 PM in response to John McLaughlin Dazed and Confused

Warrantless tapping is a requirement for broadly monitoring all traffic to data mine for information about terrorists.......

Associated Press
February 23, 2004

Pentagon's terrorism research lives on at other agencies
By Michael J. Sniffen

WASHINGTON (AP) Despite an outcry over privacy implications, the government is pressing ahead with research to create ultrapowerful tools to mine millions of public and private records for information about terrorists.

Congress eliminated a Pentagon office that had been developing this terrorist-tracking technology because of fears it might ensnare innocent Americans.

Still, some projects from retired Adm. John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness effort were transferred to U.S. intelligence offices, congressional, federal and research officials told The Associated Press.

In addition, Congress left undisturbed a separate but similar $64 million research program run by a little-known office called the Advanced Research and Development Activity, or ARDA, that has used some of the same researchers as Poindexter's program.

"The whole congressional action looks like a shell game," said Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, which tracks work by U.S. intelligence agencies. "There may be enough of a difference for them to claim TIA was terminated while for all practical purposes the identical work is continuing."

Poindexter aimed to predict terrorist attacks by identifying telltale patterns of activity in arrests, passport applications, visas, work permits, driver's licenses, car rentals and airline ticket buys as well as credit transactions and education, medical and housing records.

The research created a political uproar because such reviews of millions of transactions could put innocent Americans under suspicion. One of Poindexter's own researchers, David D. Jensen at the University of Massachusetts, acknowledged that "high numbers of false positives can result."

Disturbed by the privacy implications, Congress last fall closed Poindexter's office, part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and barred the agency from continuing most of his research. Poindexter quit the government and complained that his work had been misunderstood.

The work, however, did not die.

In killing Poindexter's office, Congress quietly agreed to continue paying to develop highly specialized software to gather foreign intelligence on terrorists.

In a classified section summarized publicly, Congress added money for this software research to the "National Foreign Intelligence Program," without identifying openly which intelligence agency would do the work.

It said, for the time being, products of this research could only be used overseas or against non-U.S. citizens in this country, not against Americans on U.S. soil.

Congressional officials would not say which Poindexter programs were killed and which were transferred. People with direct knowledge of the contracts told the AP that the surviving programs included some of 18 data-mining projects known in Poindexter's research as Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery.

Poindexter's office described that research as "technology not only for `connecting the dots' that enable the U.S. to predict and pre-empt attacks but also for deciding which dots to connect." It was among the most contentious research programs.

Ted Senator, who managed that research for Poindexter, told government contractors that mining data to identify terrorists "is much harder than simply finding needles in a haystack."

"Our task is akin to finding dangerous groups of needles hidden in stacks of needle pieces," he said. "We must track all the needle pieces all of the time."

Among Senator's 18 projects, the work by researcher Jensen shows how flexible such powerful software can be. Jensen used two online databases, the Physics Preprint Archive and the Internet Movie Database, to develop tools that would identify authoritative physics authors and would predict whether a movie would gross more than $2 million its opening weekend.

Jensen said in an interview that Poindexter's staff liked his research because the data involved "people and organizations and events ... like the data in counterterrorism."

At the University of Southern California, professor Craig Knoblauch said he developed software that automatically extracted information from travel Web sites and telephone books and tracked changes over time.

Privacy advocates feared that if such powerful tools were developed without limits from Congress, government agents could use them on any database.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who fought to restrict Poindexter's office, is trying to force the executive branch to tell Congress about all its data-mining projects. He recently pleaded with a Pentagon advisory panel to propose rules on reviewing data that Congress could turn into laws.

ARDA, the research and development office, sponsors corporate and university research on information technology for U.S. intelligence agencies. It is developing computer software that can extract information from databases as well as text, voices, other audio, video, graphs, images, maps, equations and chemical formulas. It calls its effort "Novel Intelligence from Massive Data."

The office said it has given researchers no government or private data and obeys privacy laws.

The project is part of its effort "to help the nation avoid strategic surprise ... events critical to national security ... such as those of Sept. 11, 2001," the office said.

Poindexter had envisioned software that could quickly analyze "multiple petabytes" of data. The Library of Congress has space for 18 million books, and one petabyte of data would fill it more than 50 times. One petabyte could hold 40 pages of text for each of the world's more than 6.2 billion people.

ARDA said its software would have to deal with "typically a petabyte or more" of data. It noted that some intelligence data sources "grow at the rate of four petabytes per month." Experts said those probably are files with satellite surveillance images and electronic eavesdropping results.

The Poindexter and ARDA projects are vastly more powerful than other data-mining projects such as the Homeland Security Department's CAPPS II program to classify air travelers or the six-state, Matrix anti-crime system financed by the Justice Department. They use commercial data-mining technology that Poindexter's office said would "take decades" to build "the new databases we need to combat terrorism."

In September 2002, ARDA awarded $64 million in contracts covering 3½ years. The contracts went to more than a dozen companies and university researchers, including at least six who also had worked on Poindexter's program.

Congress threw these researchers into turmoil. Doug Lenat, the president of Cycorp Corp. in Austin, Texas, will not discuss his work but said he had an "enormous seven-figure deficit in our budget" because Congress shut down Poindexter's office.

Like many critics, James Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology sees a role for properly regulated data-mining in evaluating the vast, underanalyzed data the government already collects.

Expansions of data mining, however, increase "the risk of an innocent person being in the wrong place at the wrong time, of having rented the wrong apartment ... or having a name similar to the name of some bad guy," he said.

==========================

      Associated Press
      February 23, 2004

      ARDA, researcher for the spies: No listings, but a Web site
      By Michael J. Sniffen

      WASHINGTON (AP) _ The Advanced Research and Development Activity is not a secret federal office, but it might as well be.

      It isn't listed in the U.S. Government Manual, the 684-page official compilation of federal departments, agencies and offices. It isn't listed in major commercial directories of government agencies.

      Appropriately for an outfit that sponsors computer research, however, ARDA has a Web site.

      CIA Director George Tenet founded the office in 1998, when some experts were questioning the capabilities of the National Security Agency. They worried the United States' electronic spy service, which breaks and makes codes, might lag behind private companies in the information technology industry.

      The new office researches and develops computer software and equipment to intercept and analyze foreign intelligence that is transmitted electronically _ and to protect the U.S. methods used to obtain and communicate it.

      ARDA's director, Dean Collins, oversees offices inside the National Security Agency's heavily guarded headquarters at Fort Meade, Md. Collins' agency uses the NSA for administrative support.

      It works for all the nation's intelligence services, including the CIA, FBI, Defense Intelligence Agency and parts of dozens of other departments. Its budget is part of the National Foreign Intelligence Program and is secret, although at least some of its research, particularly at universities, is unclassified.

      The office was modeled after the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to subsidize corporate and university research considered too speculative for private financiers to risk their money on. But even more than DARPA, which has 240 employees, ARDA shuns bureaucracy: It employs only eight technologists.

      

Posted at December 19, 2005 7:06 PM in response to NSA Wiretaps

Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

The information was provided to Bush on September 21, 2001 during the "President's Daily Brief," a 30- to 45-minute early-morning national security briefing.

The administration has refused to provide the Sept. 21 President's Daily Brief, even on a classified basis, and won't say anything more about it other than to acknowledge that it exists. This puts the lie to the idea that politicians who voted to allow Bush to use force bear equal responsibility because they had access to the same data as did Pres. Bush and thus "were free to reach their own judgments."

Posted at November 22, 2005 3:54 PM in response to Cheney and the Paradox of Executive Power