Word: thompson
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Another day, another fusillade of TNT falls on Iraq. Is this going anywhere? Only if we're lucky. "Despite claims about a prospective coup against Saddam, this is something Washington can hope for but not plan," says TIME Pentagon correspondent Mark Thompson. "Persistent bombing takes a psychological toll on Saddam's regime, but it's like trying to cut down a tree with sandpaper -- not impossible, but it'll take a long time...
...Representative Curtis Weldon told CNN this week following closed-door hearings he held to study recent waves of cyber-attacks on the Pentagon's computer networks. Well, not quite. The hearings did reveal a new and "more systemic" pattern of assaults, says TIME Pentagon correspondent Mark Thompson, but nothing that should cause the nation to panic. "The Pentagon is simply learning that hacker probes are a cost of doing business over the Internet," he says. "These probes will continue to happen, and the military is just going to have to put up better cyber-guardrails...
There are some real dangers. "Hackers can try to break into research communications between weapons labs and universities," says Thompson, "and they can mess up a lot of traffic pertaining to such support activities as paychecks, logistics, transportation and spare parts." But, he stresses, cyber-spies cannot penetrate the heart of the nation's defenses -- because the Pentagon keeps the good stuff offline. "The Pentagon's key military networks are not on the Internet," says Thompson, "and they are not linked to the Internet." So while the hackers may succeed at making life difficult for the military, they cannot compromise...
...Thompson says that at an institution like Harvard, where change comes slowly, the administration is unlikely to dismantle the committee system anytime soon. Even the handful of committees that Thompson identifies as superfluous are hard to disband, she says...
...hard to get rid of things around here. It's easy to grow things, [but] it's hard to cut them," Thompson says...