At a meeting in Washington, the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities heard testimony from experts that, essentially summarized, goes like this: The attackers already have access to the systems, so rather than try to lock them out, it’s now a matter of managing them, now that they’re in. Just as in the real world, spies are going to get into the country whether you want them to or not. So, knowing that they’re there, it makes more sense to make their day-to-day spying activities as difficult and costly as you can. DOD security practices currently focus on trying to keep intruders out.

“I think we have to go to a model where we assume that the adversary is in our networks,” James Peery, director of the Information Systems Analysis Center at the Sandia National Lab, told legislators, as reported by Threatpost, a blog produced by security firm Kaspersky Labs. “They’re on our machines, and we’ve got to operate anyway. We have to protect the data anyway.”

The hearing echoed some things we’ve been hearing on the security front from the likes of Art Coviello, the EMC vice president and former CEO of RSA Security, who spoke to AllThingsD recently.

Current practice calls for perimeter-based defenses that aim to put a defensive ring around a network to keep intruders out. That thinking is out of date and in need of a significant rethink, the panelists said. It should be noted that most of the agencies represented at the hearing were doing what government executives usually do when they go before the U.S. Senate: Jockeying for more funding.

That is, except for one agency: Michael Wertheimer, director of research and development at the super-secret National Security Agency (NSA), an agency whose budget is classified to begin with, said that current levels are sufficient, but that money needs to be spent more wisely. Then again, the NSA just built a massive data center in the Utah desert, which didn’t exactly come cheap.

You can watch a video of the 81-minute hearing here.

“I can’t control what people think this was. I can only tell you my intentions. This was not a rally to ridicule people of faith or people of activism or to look down our noses at the heartland or passionate argument or to suggest that times are not difficult and that we have nothing to fear. They are and we do. But we live now in hard times, not end times. And we can have animus and not be enemies.

But unfortunately one of our main tools in delineating the two broke. The country’s 24 hour political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator did not cause our problems but its existence makes solving them that much harder. The press can hold its magnifying glass up to our problems bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire and then perhaps host a week of shows on the sudden, unexpected dangerous flaming ant epidemic.

If we amplify everything we hear nothing. There are terrorists and racists and Stalinists and theocrats but those are titles that must be earned. You must have the resume. Not being able to distinguish between real racists and Tea Partiers or real bigots and Juan Williams or Rick Sanchez is an insult, not only to those people but to the racists themselves who have put in the exhausting effort it takes to hate–just as the inability to distinguish terrorists from Muslims makes us less safe, not more. The press is our immune system. If it overreacts to everything we actually get sicker–and perhaps eczema.

And yet, with that being said, I feel good–strangely, calmly good. Because the image of Americans that is reflected back to us by our political and media process is false. It is us through a fun house mirror, and not the good kind that makes you look slim in the waist and maybe taller, but the kind where you have a giant forehead and an ass shaped like a month-old pumpkin and one eyeball.

So, why would we work together? Why would you reach across the aisle to a pumpkin assed forehead eyeball monster? If the picture of us were true, of course, our inability to solve problems would actually be quite sane and reasonable. Why would you work with Marxists actively subverting our Constitution or racists and homophobes who see no one’s humanity but their own? We hear every damn day about how fragile our country is–on the brink of catastrophe–torn by polarizing hate and how it’s a shame that we can’t work together to get things done, but the truth is we do. We work together to get things done every damn day!

The only place we don’t is here or on cable TV. But Americans don’t live here or on cable TV. Where we live our values and principles form the foundation that sustains us while we get things done, not the barriers that prevent us from getting things done. Most Americans don’t live their lives solely as Democrats, Republicans, liberals or conservatives. Americans live their lives more as people that are just a little bit late for something they have to do–often something they do not want to do–but they do it–impossible things every day that are only made possible through the little reasonable compromises we all make.

Look on the screen. This is where we are. This is who we are. [points to the Jumbotron screen which shows traffic merging into a tunnel]. These cars–that’s a schoolteacher who probably thinks his taxes are too high. He’s going to work. There’s another car-a woman with two small kids who can’t really think about anything else right now. There’s another car, swinging, I don’t even know if you can see it–the lady’s in the NRA and she loves Oprah. There’s another car–an investment banker, gay, also likes Oprah. Another car’s a Latino carpenter. Another car a fundamentalist vacuum salesman. Atheist obstetrician. Mormon Jay-Z fan. But this is us. Every one of the cars that you see is filled with individuals of strong belief and principles they hold dear–often principles and beliefs in direct opposition to their fellow travelers.

And yet these millions of cars must somehow find a way to squeeze one by one into a mile long 30 foot wide tunnel carved underneath a mighty river. Carved, by the way, by people who I’m sure had their differences. And they do it. Concession by concession. You go. Then I’ll go. You go. Then I’ll go. You go then I’ll go. Oh my God, is that an NRA sticker on your car? Is that an Obama sticker on your car? Well, that’s okay–you go and then I’ll go.

And sure, at some point there will be a selfish jerk who zips up the shoulder and cuts in at the last minute, but that individual is rare and he is scorned and not hired as an analyst.

Because we know instinctively as a people that if we are to get through the darkness and back into the light we have to work together. And the truth is, there will always be darkness. And sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t the promised land. Sometimes it’s just New Jersey. But we do it anyway, together.

If you want to know why I’m here and want I want from you, I can only assure you this: you have already given it to me. Your presence was what I wanted.

Sanity will always be and has always been in the eye of the beholder. To see you here today and the kind of people that you are has restored mine. Thank you.”

*Note that this isn’t coming from the most obvious sources: Viacom’s own Daily Show site, which carried a live stream of the event but doesn’t have any record of it anymore, or C-SPAN, which is running a loop of the rally, but doesn’t have a handy way to excerpt the three-hour event. Too bad Hulu can’t help here….

[Image credit: Cliff1066]

Indian officials and RIM (RIMM) executives are in talks after the government set an Aug. 31 deadline for the Canadian smartphone maker to come up with a solution to allow monitoring of its BlackBerry corporate email and messaging services. India–along with other countries including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates–fears terrorists may use BlackBerry’s heavily encrypted network.

“The discussions are ongoing, we are not in the business of shutting down services,” Sachin Pilot, also the country’s junior information technology minister, told reporters on the sidelines of an industry conference.

Home Secretary G.K. Pillai will get a report Saturday following another round of meetings between RIM and the federal home ministry later Friday. Pillai will hold an internal home ministry meeting Monday to take a final decision based on the report.

On the Indian side, the ongoing meetings are being attended by officials from the Intelligence Bureau and the National Technical Research Organisation, a government body that deals with technology-related security concerns.

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The new videogame Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, set to hit stores Tuesday, is a sequel spawned by sequels. But rather than following the frequent pattern of franchises fading as they age, Modern Warfare 2 is the most highly anticipated game of the season.

“It’s the biggest launch in our history, bigger than Halo 3,” said Tony Bartel, merchandising and marketing chief for videogame retailer GameStop, which has been taking pre-orders since April.

The manufacturer, Activision Blizzard Inc. (ATVI), has been advertising the first-person shooter game since March.

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In a 352-page report published last week, the National Research Council said data mining and behavior detection aren’t nearly as useful as their proponents claim. In fact, they’re of dubious scientific merit and have “enormous potential” for infringing on law-abiding Americans’ privacy. “Automated identification of terrorists through data mining (or any other  known methodology) is neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal of technology development efforts,” the Council found. “Even in well-managed programs, such tools are likely to return significant rates of false positives, especially if the tools are highly automated.”

While not an explicit condemnation of the techniques at issue here, the report does recommend that the government evaluate the effectiveness and lawfulness of these data mining and behavior-detection programs it’s so keen on before implementing them, and periodically thereafter. Said the Council, “History demonstrates that measures taken in the name of improving national security, especially in response to new threats or crises, have often proven to be both ineffective and offensive to the nation’s values and traditions of liberty and justice.”