In its latest Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG), the Pentagon okayed Android 2.2 for use on Defense Department computer networks, but with a number of caveats and limitations.

First, Pentagon approval doesn’t extend to all devices running Android 2.2. In truth, it covers just one: Dell’s Venue smartphone (it would have covered the Streak tablet, as well, had the company not binned it). Second, classified information cannot be transmitted to or from it. Third, any Web browsing done on the device must be conducted via a DOD proxy server. And finally, access to Android Market has been restricted.

So, if you’re a DOD employee hoping to kill some off-hours time with a game or two of Modern Combat on your work-issued Venue, you’re out of luck. And if you happen to own a different-model Android phone, you have no hope of getting it on the DOD’s network — for now, anyway. Devices manufactured by HTC, Motorola, et al, aren’t covered by the STIG.

So, as I said, this isn’t much of a step forward for Android, though it’s a step just the same. One version of the OS is now okay for use by DOD employees, which is more than you can say for Apple’s iOS operating system, which has, so far, been approved only for testing and pilot projects.

It will be like they never left the Googleplex in Silicon Valley if this Washington, D.C., invasion of execs from the search giant keeps up.

The fourth new geek in town is Sumit Agarwal (pictured here), who was head of Google’s mobile product management and has become the deputy assistant secretary of defense for outreach and social media in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense.

Phew! But what’s that? Poking with M-16s? The Berlin Wall? Tweeting troop movements?

In any case, it’s interesting to see so many key appointments in the tech arena going to one company, especially one so immersed now in national and international policy issues.

And especially since Google (GOOG) has begun spending so much money in D.C. on lobbying.

As I reported recently:

According to the most recent public reports filed by Google with the Senate on its lobbying spending there, the search giant has significantly increased its outlay in 2009 from the previous two years.

In 2007, Google spent a total of $1.52 million, which rose to $2.84 million in 2008.

And the 2009 total? Just over $4 million, according to the Lobbying Disclosure Act Database.

That’s probably no surprise given the ever-growing range of issues of concern to U.S. regulators due to Google’s increasing number of deals and because of many new and often controversial initiatives the company is forging forward with.

From pushing for approval of its DoubleClick acquisition in 2007 to its failed attempt to strike a search and online partnership with Yahoo (YHOO) in 2008 to last year’s wrangling with book publishers to 2010’s expected tussle over its $750 million purchase of mobile advertising start-up AdMob, Google’s presence in D.C. is only going to rise as its ambitions expand.

That’s still $2.7 million less than archrival Microsoft (MSFT) spent in 2009, but Google has been gaining on the software giant in a very short time.

In any case, these are former Googlers, who might or might not return to the mother ship at the end of their tenure.

But, for those keeping track, Agarwal will join:

* Former business development and product exec Katie Jacobs Stanton, who was the Obama administration’s director of citizen participation and now works in the State Department.

* Google’s top policy wonk, Andrew McLaughlin, who serves as deputy chief technology officer.

* And Sonal Shah, who worked at Google.org and is now director of the White House’s new Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation.

The Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, launched 10 balloons, each eight feet wide, around the country as part of its “Network Challenge.” The first person or team to locate all of them will win $40,000. Darpa says that the contest is meant to look at how “information spreads and propagates and becomes viral.”

But it’s more than a simple test of crowdsourcing, which has been used to build public databases like Wikipedia or in Wired’s recent hunt for Evan Ratliff.

Peter Lee, director of Darpa’s transformational convergence technology office, which focuses on tech and social trends, said that by giving participants an incentive, like the prize money, the contest tests how people organize themselves and how they validate information.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

But–as many readers have requested–they will all be available in their entirety in this column.

In the less contentious spirit of DEMOfall and TechCrunch50, two demo conferences taking place simultaneously this week, we’re happy to bring you all the demos we had onstage at D6.

Here’s part one of the conference’s most popular demo, with well-known inventor Dean Kamen (pictured here), who showed off his latest creation, the “Luke Arm” prosthesis.

The state-of-the-art bionic arm looks and feels to its user like his or her native limb.

The video of the demo is in three parts, all of which I will post today.

In this video, the DEKA Research founder and Segway creator talks about how he began the project after a visit to his lab by Defense Department officials, who told him that while battleground deaths were down, severe limb injuries were up.

Within a year, the prosthesis was built. In the video, Kamen shows the arm in use, including a man who is able to feed himself after more than a dozen years of being fed by someone else. Kamen also talks about how the arm can be controlled.