During the holidays, people around the world are going to receive computers, upgraded Internet access, video game consoles, MP3 players and many other gadgets and gizmos that will connect them to the wonders of the Internet. Many of these gifts will be ordered and paid for over the Internet. In addition to gift giving, there will be an upswing in charitable donations, and many will seek to spread holiday cheer via electronic means. At the same time, an international array of talented, unscrupulous and sometimes downright evil cyber criminals are gearing up to feast on this annual frenzy of online goodwill. The results won’t be pretty.

My apologies to those few of you who expected to see a MAZ-INT blog entry for November, however, the AFCEA Webpage does not seemed to be overwhelmed with inquiries about the missing blog, the IC seems to be functioning despite missing a month of my advice, and unemployment has started to drop since my last blog. Perhaps I should take more months off!

If you're like me, after the activity from this fall, you need a few days away from the usually grind to refocus your planning. I did this in August and it was amazingly refreshing. (Actually, I need a six month sabbatical but that will have to wait!) Over the holidays (or in January) is a great time to relax and consider your business development activities since Labor Day.

Members of the U.S. Joint Forces Command’s Joint Enabling Capabilities (JEC) Command arrived home from Afghanistan and the first major operational use of the Ready JEC Package (RJP) just in time to join their families for the Thanksgiving holiday.

The news earlier this year that the U.S. Marine Corps was banning social media sent some people into a near tizzy. How could it do such a thing? Aside from the fact that it was not what Marine Corps officials actually said—for security reasons they prohibited Marines from using applications such as Facebook and Twitter on Marine Corps computer networks—the move by the Marine Corps, and the uproar surrounding it, spurred the Pentagon to examine its policies surrounding these collaborative tools and to assess how they are treated.

Periodically, we ask the senior leadership of the global security community to give us feedback on their top priorities in the command, control, communications, computers, intelligence and information technology domains. In the past couple of years, they have been fairly consistent in saying that their top priority is interagency and coalition information sharing.