Well, no, security dweebs, we’re on a public policy kick, probably will be until the end of the year (more on that to follow, stay tuned), so you wouldn’t be so lucky.

The Plum Book’s official title is Government Policy and Supporting Positions and basically it’s a huge staffing chart for the Senior Executive Service–the political appointees.  Congress publishes the Plum Book after each presidential election, so for those of us who remember our civics lessons in high school, that would be every 4 years, and the last one was published in 2004.

In fact, you can see the last edition here.  Caveat:  it’s dry, like the uber-trocken Franken white wine that grows in the fields around where I used to live in Germany–so dry that it sucks the moisture right out of you.

Plum Pickin photo by Secret Tenerife

Now why do we care about the Plum Book?  Well, that’s a good question.  Have a look at some of the staffing plans in the plum book, and you’ll see something missing:  Agency CISOs.

Now, I’m not a rocket scientist on org charts, but it seems to me that unless you put CISOs up to where they’re answerable to the agency head, they’re just a cost center inside the IT department with no visibility to the decision-makers.  Once again, we’ve crippled our security staffs like the old-school way of doing things.

On another note, taking a quick straw poll of the agency CISOs that I know, I think about half of them are political appointees, and half of them are GS-15s.  So what’s the difference?

Well, political appointees (SES) are appointed by the President.  They make a better target because they have much more visibility from the higher-ups they are more political in nature.

GS-scale employees are civil service careerists.  Usually these are the guys who have moved up the ranks in the various agencies and know quite a bit of things.

Which is better?  Well, if you want survivability, then GS-scale is the way to go.  If you want to make the most difference, SES is the ticket.

Most of us will never get the choice. =)

Bookmark to:

This question of state government's recent origins, and, conversely, of its long failure to originate throughout most of human history, is a fundamental concern for social scientists. Until fifty-five hundred years ago, there were no state governments anywhere in the world. Even as late as 1492, all of North America, sub-Saharan Africa, Australia, New Guinea, and the Pacific islands, and most of Central and South America didn't have states and instead operated under simpler forms of societal organization (chiefdoms, tribes, and bands). Today, though, the whole world map is divided into states. Of course, most of that extension of state government has involved existing states from elsewhere imposing their government on stateless societies, as happened in New Guinea. But the first state in world history, at least, must have arisen de novo, and we now know that states arose independently in many parts of the world. How did it happen?

[...]

...anthropologists, historians, and archeologists tell us that state governments have arisen independently under one of two sets of circumstances. Sometimes external pressure from an encroaching state has placed a people under such duress that it ceded individual rights to a government of its own that would be capable of offering effective resistance. For instance, about two centuries ago, the formerly separate Cherokee chiefdoms gradually formed a unified Cherokee government in a desperate attempt to resist pressure from whites. More frequently, chronic competition among warring non-state entities has ended when one gained a military advantage over the others by developing proto-state institutions: one example is the formation of the Zulu state by a particularly talented chief named Dingiswayo, in the early nineteenth century, out of an assortment of chiefdoms fighting each other.

[...]

We regularly ignore the fact that the thirst for vengeance is among the strongest of human emotions. It ranks with love, anger, grief, and fear, about which we talk incessantly. Modern state societies permit and encourage us to express our love, anger, grief, and fear, but not our thirst for vengeance. We grow up being taught that such feelings are primitive, something to be ashamed of and to transcend.

There is no doubt that state acceptance of every individual's right to exact personal vengeance would make it impossible for us to coexist peacefully as fellow-citizens of the same state. Otherwise, we, too, would be living under the conditions of constant warfare prevailing in non-state societies like those of the New Guinea Highlands.

The mismatch between the resources devoted to fighting organised crime compared with those directed towards counter-terrorism is unnerving. Government says that there are millions of pounds in police budgets that should be devoted to dealing with organised crime. In truth, only a handful of British police forces know how to tackle it. The ridiculous Victorian patchwork of shire constabularies means that most are too small to tackle serious criminality that doesn't recognise country, never mind county, borders.

The Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) was launched two years ago as Britain's equivalent of the FBI, with the remit of taking on the Mr Bigs of international crime. But ministers have trimmed Soca's budget this year. Far from expanding to counter the ever-growing threat, the agency is shrinking and there is smouldering unhappiness in the ranks. Soca's budget for taking the fight to the cartels and syndicates is £400 million -- exactly the same amount that the Government intends to spend overseas in countries such as Pakistan on workshops and seminars to counter al-Qaeda's ideology.