After surviving numerous devastating wars throughout history, humanity is well acquainted with war in the physical realm.

But we’re still unfamiliar with the concept of cyberwar. In 1998, John Arquilla, professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, tried to envision it in a piece for Wired Magazine, The Great Cyberwar of 2002, in which a loose coalition of rogue states, terrorist groups and drug cartels team up to prod the United States into a war with China and Russia by knocking out power grids, blowing up chemical plants and causing airliners to collide in midair.

It was fiction, but the scariest fiction is always based in part on plausible fact.

So what exactly would cyberwar look like in the real world?

It’s an important question to answer now, after the U.S. Department of Defense announced last week that it now considers “cyberspace” — an obviously dated word referring to the Internet and networking computer environments, but which has recently regained currency in government circles — a theater of warfare similar to land, sea, air and space.

In a speech this week at the National Defense University in Norfolk, Va., Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn announced that the United States now considers attacks on certain computer networks and systems by foreign powers and terrorists as the equivalent of a traditional attack with guns and bombs. It thus reserves the right to retaliate, both in the cyber-realm or with traditional force.

(You can see Lynn’s speech, which runs about 45 minutes, in the video below, courtesy The Pentagon Channel. And below that I’ve embedded the 19-page policy document.)

The striking declaration raises some fundamental questions about warfare, including: What would war in cyberspace look like? How would it be fought? Would those not directly involved in the fighting even know it’s going on or which side is winning? Would we even know who the enemy is?

We have some hints. At its basest level, we know that unknown parties are probing U.S. government and private networks, stealing what they can and leaving the doors unlocked for future visits.

U.S. officials have complained in private and in public about alleged attacks against government networks and those belonging to defense contractors.

Privately and in diplomatic cables, they most frequently blame China, which has always denied any involvement. An April 21 Reuters story citing U.S. State Department diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks showed officials estimating that hackers working for China’s People’s Liberation Army had stolen terabytes worth of information, and that efforts to put down the attacks, dubbed “Operation Byzantine Hades,” were ongoing.

Overall, the Government Accountability Office says that intrusions on government computer networks have climbed from 5,503 incidents in 2006 to 41,776 in 2010.

The examples are numerous.

In March, the SecurID system made by RSA, a unit of storage giant EMC, came under attack. A subsequent attack was launched against defense contractor Lockheed Martin. The same RSA tokens are widely used at government agencies and at innumerable corporations.

In June, Google disclosed that its Gmail email service had come under attack from someone in China, a claim which that country’s government denied.

And just this month several U.S. Department of Energy facilities — including the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash. — severed their connections to the Internet following a series of attacks using “Zero Day” vulnerabilities, which exploit previously unknown weaknesses.

All of these incidents seem to scream out the need for a more active defense, which the new policy is intended to create. To date there’s never been a penalty for attacking U.S. government and private networks, in part because it’s hard to hit back when you don’t know precisely who’s hitting you in the first place.

This is known as the attribution problem.

If you’re able to solve that issue, there are some hints about what a retaliation might look like. Consider Stuxnet: A powerful piece of carefully-targeted malware, supposedly designed by Israel, it burrowed deep via Microsoft Windows into the industrial control computers running Iran’s nuclear centrifuges.

With its target located — it was designed to seek out a specific installation — Stuxnet made those centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium, spin faster than they were supposed to. The resulting damage set the Iranian nuclear program back by two years or more.

That’s not a bad outcome, perhaps, but Stuxnet opened a Pandora’s box. And while experts who have analyzed it closely have said it would have taken a team of highly skilled programmers several million dollars and several months to design it, you can bet that cyberwarriors in every nation on Earth are combing through the Stuxnet code hoping to build their own version of it. All these could conceivably be used against our own power grids and factories and more.

And in an odd way that’s an encouraging thought. Where we might end up is with the digital equivalent of mutually assured destruction.

If we reach a point where we can destroy and disrupt the networks and infrastructure upon which our potential enemies rely and they can do the same thing to us with relative parity, the fear of a devastating reprisal becomes a deterrent to the temptation to launch an attack.

Similar assumptions about nuclear war prevented the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union from turning hot, and made nuclear war ultimately unthinkable for both sides.

Without electrical power and thus the ability to communicate or conduct commerce, any society breaks down quickly. Consider the thought of six weeks without a working cellphone network, without the ability to access funds in your bank account or without power.

If that scares you — and it should — it should scare our potential enemies just as much, and thus give them pause. That’s the hope, anyway.

d20110714cyber

The T-Hawk, as it’s called, belongs to a class of unmanned planes called “micro air vehicles” that have been used for a few years by U.S. military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan for surveillance. Honeywell International Inc., the maker of the T-Hawk, has supplied four of the funnel-shaped drones to help Tokyo Electric Power Co., the plant’s operator. The T-Hawk earlier this month gathered video and radiation data at the Fukushima plant, which was damaged by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Called “the Blood-Stained Housing Map,” the project uses Google Maps to plot violent housing evictions and land grabs across the country. The result bears an eerie, and sobering, resemblance to the Guardian’s own Google Maps chart showing deaths recorded in the Wikileaks Iraq war logs.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Then there is John Young, who publishes documents about WikiLeaks.

From his apartment on New York City’s Upper West Side, the 70-something architect, computer buff and self-described “cypherpunk” runs a website, http://cryptome.org, that seeks to hold accountable the site that boasts of holding others to account.

Mr. Young said his scrutiny is meant not to undermine WikiLeaks, but to harden it for battle. “Doing what they’re doing,” he said in a telephone interview, “they have to be just as tough as nails. And they can’t get tough by having people praise them. They can only get tough by having people attack them.”

WikiLeaks has posted hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. military documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the most recent trove released last weekend. Among the posts on Mr. Young’s site—which covers a broad range of subjects—are internal WikiLeaks emails showing the group debating strategy for attracting funds and supporters. The Cryptome posts have provocative labels such as “wikileaks-fear,” “wikileaks-snitch” and “WL Hate.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Jared Cohen (pictured here), who has gained fame as the State Department’s social networking phenom and the youngest member of its policy planning staff, is considering taking a job at Google in a strategic policy role, said sources close to the situation.

Cohen has been in discussions with Google very recently about going there, those sources said, although it is not a done deal.

In other words, the revolving door between Washington, D.C., and Silicon Valley keeps on turning, especially Googlers.

Katie Jacobs Stanton, who worked for both Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO), recently left a job at the State Department to return to California to head international efforts for Twitter.

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

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

And Sumit Agarwal, who was head of Google’s mobile product management, became the deputy assistant secretary of defense for outreach and social media in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense.

Coincidentally, for their Twitter-as-statecraft fame, the 28-year-old Cohen, along with Alec Ross, a senior adviser for innovation at the State Department, got the full New York Times magazine profile treatment earlier this month in a piece titled “Digital Diplomacy.”

Wrote Jesse Lichtenstein:

“Their Twitter posts have become an integral part of a new State Department effort to bring diplomacy into the digital age, by using widely available technologies to reach out to citizens, companies and other nonstate actors. Ross and Cohen’s style of engagement–perhaps best described as a cross between social-networking culture and foreign-policy arcana–reflects the hybrid nature of this approach…They are the public face of a cause with an important-sounding name: 21st-century statecraft.”

If it sounds a lot twee in a policy wonk way, it definitely is, which should fit in well at Google, which could use a few friendlier faces to show off in Washington, where some regulators are eyeballing the search giant’s growing power closely.

In the piece, Cohen is seen as playing the organizer of a private dinner Secretary Hillary Clinton had with some Silicon Valley power players, including Google CEO Eric Schmidt, earlier this year.

He and Ross have also been leading technology delegations abroad to places like Iraq, Haiti, Russia and the Congo, chock full of Internet leaders.

Cohen, who attended Stanford University and was also a Rhodes scholar, was actually appointed by the Bush administration’s secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice.

He is also the author of a book, “Children of Jihad: A Young American’s Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East.”

Google and Cohen both declined to comment.

But to give you an idea of their close relationship, here is a video of Cohen and Ross in a conversation with Schmidt at the the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif., in March:

Google CEO Eric Schmidt did one of his patented throat-clearers in an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal today and it pretty much begs for translation.

Well, BoomTown shall not tarry from the task of decoding the extra-long rumination from the head of Google (GOOG), who was responding to the recent spate of aggressive attacks by traditional media publishers.

They have blamed the search giant for everything from their current business woes to the destruction of journalism to Tiger Woods’s dicey marital troubles.

Okay, not that! But the rest for sure.

First and foremost among the attackers has been Rupert Murdoch, CEO and ruler-of-all-he-surveys at News Corp. (NWS), which owns The Wall Street Journal and this Web site.

How ironic, yet still typically cozy from a corporate bigwig point of view! I call you a cur in public, but please use my newspaper so that I can get some decent traffic from this wrestling match.

But all is not what it seems in the Schmidt piece, of course, so here’s the translation:

What Schmidt wrote: How Google Can Help Newspapers

By ERIC SCHMIDT

Translation: We come in peace, always. You know, like the freakily calm lady from “V,” who is really a lizard under all that pretty and is actually secretly trying to decide between grilling and broiling all you whiny news people.

Also, you can address me in the future as Emperor Palpatine.

What Schmidt wrote: It’s the year 2015. The compact device in my hand delivers me the world, one news story at a time. I flip through my favorite papers and magazines, the images as crisp as in print, without a maddening wait for each page to load.

Some of these stories are part of a monthly subscription package. Some, where the free preview sucks me in, cost a few pennies billed to my account. Others are available at no charge, paid for by advertising. But these ads are not static pitches for products I’d never use. Like the news I am reading, the ads are tailored just for me. Advertisers are willing to shell out a lot of money for this targeting.

Translation: It’s the year 2015 in the United States of Google, where the new country colors are a festive green, blue, red and yellow.

As per the new Declaration of Googlependence, besides the tracking chip in your thighs, every citizen will be outfitted with a tablet running Chrome and looking suspiciously like a large iPhone, except that Apple (AAPL) was outlawed in the Fanboy Purge of 2010.

Every day, citizens will receive news specially aimed at them, such as “The Health Benefits of Sergey Worship.” Ads will also be tailored to citizens’ likes and dislikes, such as a pitch for Googley deodorant with the motto: “Search me, because I smell nice!”

Costs will be billed to your accounts at the National Bank of Google.

What Schmidt wrote: This is a long way from where we are today. The current technology–in this case the distinguished newspaper you are now reading–may be relatively old, but it is a model of simplicity and speed compared with the online news experience today. I can flip through pages much faster in the physical edition of the Journal than I can on the Web. And every time I return to a site, I am treated as a stranger.

So when I think about the current crisis in the print industry, this is where I begin–a traditional technology struggling to adapt to a new, disruptive world. It is a familiar story: It was the arrival of radio and television that started the decline of newspaper circulation. Afternoon newspapers were the first casualties. Then the advent of 24-hour news transformed what was in the morning papers literally into old news.

Translation: [Rachel: Please insert usual pap boilerplate here damning the newspaper business with faint praise. History of how change hurts, but is inevitable...blah, blah, blah. Please make sure to deliver a few digs too, like how--unlike Google--newspapers have no idea what their readers did last summer. Like we do. Cue evil Mwahahahaha laugh here.]

What Schmidt wrote: Now the Internet has broken down the entire news package with articles read individually, reached from a blog or search engine, and abandoned if there is no good reason to hang around once the story is finished. It’s what we have come to call internally the atomic unit of consumption.

Translation: “Atomic unit of consumption” is one of those terms we don’t expect you small-brained people to even begin to understand. Although you use only eight percent of your mental capacity, we here at Google use an average of 71 percent, tracking on our search share.

What Schmidt wrote: Painful as this is to newspapers and magazines, the pressures on their ad revenue from the Internet is causing even greater damage. The choice facing advertisers targeting consumers in San Francisco was once between an ad in the Chronicle or Examiner. Then came Craigslist, making it possible to get local classifieds for free, followed by Ebay and specialist Web sites. Now search engines like Google connect advertisers directly with consumers looking for what they sell.

Translation: I also don’t expect you Luddites will get this, but all your base are belong to us.

For those who need an older cultural reference, it is like the end of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” Um, as much as you Hollywood types like a happy ending, Butch and the Kid did not make it.

What Schmidt wrote: With dwindling revenue and diminished resources, frustrated newspaper executives are looking for someone to blame. Much of their anger is currently directed at Google, whom many executives view as getting all the benefit from the business relationship without giving much in return. The facts, I believe, suggest otherwise.

Google is a great source of promotion. We send online news publishers a billion clicks a month from Google News and more than three billion extra visits from our other services, such as Web Search and iGoogle. That is 100,000 opportunities a minute to win loyal readers and generate revenue–for free. In terms of copyright, another bone of contention, we only show a headline and a couple of lines from each story. If readers want to read on they have to click through to the newspaper’s Web site. (The exception are stories we host through a licensing agreement with news services.) And if they wish, publishers can remove their content from our search index, or from Google News.

Translation: Shut your overstuffed pie holes, you grumbling antiques. You were dying by the cell long before our superior technology arrived to save the day and help you out of your sorry mess.

Plus, we toss you all that traffic and you still manage to fumble our perfect pass like the pikers you are. (In truth, you are Charlie Brown and we are Lucy.)

Also, have you ever heard of “fair use”? It’s the law now and we can hire more lobbyists in Washington, D.C., than you with the bazillions and gamillions of dollars we make from all those tiny little blue links.

You do realize I have a key to the the White House and visit more times than Joe Biden?

What Eric wrote: The claim that we’re making big profits on the back of newspapers also misrepresents the reality. In search, we make our money primarily from advertisements for products. Someone types in digital camera and gets ads for digital cameras. A typical news search–for Afghanistan, say–may generate few if any ads. The revenue generated from the ads shown alongside news search queries is a tiny fraction of our search revenue.

Translation: Here’s an easy formula for you to grok: Michael Jackson+the pretty boy from “Twilight”+digital cameras=Big bucks for Google! Some thumbsucker you did on Afghanistan, however worthy and important for our nation’s future=14 cent CPM, but only if a drunken Lindsay Lohan story is in close proximity.

What Schmidt wrote: It’s understandable to look to find someone else to blame. But as Rupert Murdoch has said, it is complacency caused by past monopolies, not technology, that has been the real threat to the news industry.

Translation: [Rachel: Please insert Rupe quote that actually hangs him here.]

What Schmidt wrote: We recognize, however, that a crisis for news-gathering is not just a crisis for the newspaper industry. The flow of accurate information, diverse views and proper analysis is critical for a functioning democracy. We also acknowledge that it has been difficult for newspapers to make money from their online content. But just as there is no single cause of the industry’s current problems, there is no single solution. We want to work with publishers to help them build bigger audiences, better engage readers, and make more money.

Meeting that challenge will mean using technology to develop new ways to reach readers and keep them engaged for longer, as well as new ways to raise revenue combining free and paid access. I believe it also requires a change of tone in the debate, a recognition that we all have to work together to fulfill the promise of journalism in the digital age.

Translation: Really–we’re from Google and we’re here to help! Mwahahahahaha.

Seriously, you guys, please go back to demonizing Microsoft (MSFT) or those banker salaries or the health care bill.

While my gabillions of dollars are more than protecting me from the blows you are trying to land, I am not liking the hairy eyeballs I got at the Allen & Co. conference at Sun Valley last summer. I think Washington Post head Don Graham even short-sheeted my 600-thread count Frette bedding there.

What Schmidt wrote: Google is serious about playing its part. We are already testing, with more than three dozen major partners from the news industry, a service called Google Fast Flip. The theory–which seems to work in practice–is that if we make it easier to read articles, people will read more of them. Our news partners will receive the majority of the revenue generated by the display ads shown beside stories.

Translation: [Rachel: Please insert some kooky-named Google 20 percent project we have no intention of really going large on here, so they think we really are working on something to save them. Those media folks like Hail Mary tech solutions, even if they don't even know how to turn them on.]

What Schmidt wrote: Nor is there a choice, as some newspapers seem to think, between charging for access to their online content or keeping links to their articles in Google News and Google Search. They can do both.

Translation: You de-indexin’ me? You de-indexin’ me? You de-indexin’ me? Then who the hell else are you de-indexin’? You de-indexin’ me? Well I’m the only one here. Who the %*#! do you think you’re de-indexin’?”

What Schmidt wrote: This is a start. But together we can go much further toward that fantasy news gadget I outlined at the start. The acceleration in mobile phone sophistication and ownership offers tremendous potential. As more of these phones become connected to the Internet, they are becoming reading devices, delivering stories, business reviews and ads. These phones know where you are and can provide geographically relevant information. There will be more news, more comment, more opportunities for debate in the future, not less.

The best newspapers have always held up a mirror to their communities. Now they can offer a digital place for their readers to congregate and talk. And just as we have seen different models of payment for TV as choice has increased and new providers have become involved, I believe we will see the same with news. We could easily see free access for mass-market content funded from advertising alongside the equivalent of subscription and pay-for-view for material with a niche readership.

Translation: Smartphones are the answer! Sure! Your aging demo loves reading teeny-weeny writing on a device they want to throw against a wall.

Or maybe you can be like HBO! Except you’ll need more borderline porn and Mafia guys.

What Schmidt wrote: I certainly don’t believe that the Internet will mean the death of news. Through innovation and technology, it can endure with newfound profitability and vitality. Video didn’t kill the radio star. It created a whole new additional industry.

Translation: A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.

Mr. Schmidt was part of a delegation, led by Peter Pace, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to encourage business development in Iraq.

“After this tremendous investment in Iraq, we see business recovery finally happening,” he said in a video interview provided by the U.S. Army. “The creation of a new Iraqi state ultimately means business opportunities for global firms.”

“Google’s interested in making sure that Iraq ends up being an open and transparent democracy–after all, information makes a big difference in everybody’s lives,” Mr. Schmidt added.

The delegation met with both military and civilian leaders in Baghdad, he said. “It’s clear that the government is reaching out now to business, to try to get us to begin our part in the reconstruction of Iraq.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

“After this tremendous investment in Iraq, we see business recovery finally happening. The creation of a new Iraqi state ultimately means business opportunities for global firms. Google’s interested in making sure that Iraq ends up being an open and transparent democracy–after all, information makes a big difference in everybody’s lives.”

– Google CEO Eric Schmidt

I’ve heard that Arango is leaving for six months and that the Times doesn’t have plans to replace him while he’s out. But media editor Bruce Headlam, via email, says the paper is still figuring all of that out:

A lot is still up in the air–When Tim might go and for how long. We do know that he will be coming back, however, and he’s a huge asset to our group so we’re looking for creative solutions in the meantime.

Arango came to the Times after stints at Time Warner’s (TWX) Fortune and News Corp.’s (NWS) New York Post. I’ve asked him for comment–for instance, I’d love to know why he wants to trade midtown office suites for the desert–and will report back if I hear from him.

And to cap off the meta navel-gazing, I should report here that I like my gig very much and have no intention of leaving.

On the spur of the moment yesterday–as Los Angeles was gridlocked by the memorial service for pop legend Michael Jackson–BoomTown decided to pay a quick visit to Harvey Levin, who runs TMZ.

Located on Sunset Boulevard–natch!–TMZ is the celebrity news Web site that actually broke the news of Jackson’s death, before any other media outlet.

And it has pretty much led the coverage as the sad story has unfolded–and continues to.

In fact, TMZ–which stands for the “30-mile zone” of Hollywood and also has a television show–is one of the great content sites on the Internet.

It uses a nice blend of text, video, audio and a laser focus on intense reporting on its topic to yield a whole new kind of media that is Web-born and -bred.

As I always note: Levin covers the tribulations of celebrities, like Britney Spears, as if they were the Iraq war.

TMZ, which will soon undergo a refresh of its design, is owned by Time Warner (TWX). It was launched in 2005 jointly by its Telepictures and AOL units.

Here’s a video interview I did with Levin about hubbub around Jackson yesterday and other topics, such as paying for tips and the convergence of online and offline (and, below it, is also a video tour of TMZ I did in late 2007, just after it launched its television show):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090708/tmzs-harvey-levin-speaks-about-michael-jackson-and-more/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081215/viral-video-if-the-shoe-fits-mash-it-up/ http://allthingsd.com/20081215/viral-video-if-the-shoe-fits-mash-it-up/#comments Mon, 15 Dec 2008 23:58:16 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=7687

Of course, the recent shoe attack on President George W. Bush in Iraq created the perfect storm for online video.

As you might know (although Bush clearly did not from this video), the showing of the sole of a shoe is the ultimate insult in Arab countries. And throwing a shoe? Well, worse.

In this country, making a video about shoe-throwing is.

Here are some results, plus one of my favorite hit online videos about shoes, called, of course, “Shoes”:

RE-MIX

SLO-MO

BOOGIE SHOES

CRISPIN GLOVER IS ODD

THESE SHOES RULE, THESE SHOES SUCK

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081215/viral-video-if-the-shoe-fits-mash-it-up/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20081120/charlene-li-and-boomtown-talk-yahoo-on-kqeds-forum-radio-show/ http://allthingsd.com/20081120/charlene-li-and-boomtown-talk-yahoo-on-kqeds-forum-radio-show/#comments Thu, 20 Nov 2008 08:00:09 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=6775

If you want to listen to an interesting discussion on what happened with Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang’s leaving his job and what’s next for the troubled Internet giant, well-known Internet analyst and now consultant Charlene Li (pictured) and I talked yesterday with Forum host Michael Krasny for the “Forum” radio show on San Francisco’s KQED public radio.

The first part of the show is about Iraq (also a great talk), but if you are interested in just Yahoo, click through to the 24-minute mark.

Here’s the show:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081120/charlene-li-and-boomtown-talk-yahoo-on-kqeds-forum-radio-show/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20081103/john-mccain-and-barack-obama-talk-tech/ http://allthingsd.com/20081103/john-mccain-and-barack-obama-talk-tech/#comments Mon, 03 Nov 2008 08:00:33 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=5965

In advance of tomorrow’s elections, here’s a pair of videos of the two presidential candidates, Republican Sen. John McCain and Democratic Sen. Barack Obama, talking about tech.

While Obama has many more supporters in the tech and Internet sectors in terms of numbers, including Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt, McCain’s include Cisco (CSCO) CEO John Chambers, former eBay (EBAY) CEO Meg Whitman and former Hewlett-Packard (HP) head Carly Fiorina.

And while tech is not exactly issue No. 1 with either of them, here is McCain talking about it in the entire interview he did at the fifth D: All Things Digital conference in 2007 (he also discusses Iraq and other topics in the interview) and a new, much shorter three-minute video just posted by Obama on tech policy:

[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081103/john-mccain-and-barack-obama-talk-tech/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080905/replay-the-d5-interview-with-sen-john-mccain/ http://allthingsd.com/20080905/replay-the-d5-interview-with-sen-john-mccain/#comments Fri, 05 Sep 2008 08:00:16 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=3364 Last night, Arizona Sen. John McCain officially accepted the GOP candidacy for President in a speech in which he pushed himself as a change agent, even though the Republicans have been in power for eight years.

Ah, politics!

Actually, the maverick image was one of the reasons we invited Sen. McCain to our fifth D: All Things Digital conference in 2007.

In the video, Sen. McCain talks about substandard broadband in the U.S., tech policy and also Iraq (keep in mind, this interview took place during a time when most had written him off in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination).

Since the speech last night had more generalities than specifics, as convention speeches often do, here’s an hour-plus interview with Sen. McCain by Walt Mossberg and me:

[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080905/replay-the-d5-interview-with-sen-john-mccain/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20070910/sen-john-mccain-the-entire-d5-interview-with-walt-mossberg-and-kara-swisher/ http://allthingsd.com/20070910/sen-john-mccain-the-entire-d5-interview-with-walt-mossberg-and-kara-swisher/#comments Mon, 10 Sep 2007 07:01:31 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20070910/sen-john-mccain-the-entire-d5-interview-with-walt-mossberg-and-kara-swisher/ Whatever his current chances to nab the Republican presidential nomination, you’ll want to see this video of our interview with Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

He talked a bit about tech, but the really riveting stuff is about Iraq and his controversial backing of keeping the U.S. presence there.

By way of background, D: All Things Digital, the annual tech and media conference Walt Mossberg and I host, has been sold out with a long wait list every year we have put it on.

That has meant only a few hundred people can see the interviews and also demos we do live onstage with some of the tech and media industry’s most interesting and important players and products.

The lineups have included Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs, as well as Eric Schmidt of Google, IAC’s Barry Diller, Meg Whitman of eBay, Cisco’s John Chambers and many others.

And we’ve demoed stuff like the Treo when it first came out, as well as digital toilets, Wi-Fi phones and much more.

We usually post the photos and videos of the interviews and demos six or more months after they take place on a separate conference site. This year, our Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski live-blogged D5, and we also posted video highlights from all of the sessions immediately on our newly launched site here.

Now, we are posting videos of every session of the 2007 conference here, in full, and we have made all our photo galleries, hosted by SmugMug and mostly shot by our fabulous Asa Mathat, public too. You can also access our videos via the site’s master player here.

Every day, I am going to highlight a different interview or demo from the conference.

Here’s Sen. McCain:

[ See post to watch video ]

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