IT at the CIA

neocon writes "The current issue of the CIA's Studies in Intelligence (unclassified edition, natch) has an article on the state of IT within the CIA, titled 'Failing to Keep Up With the Information Revolution', which looks at how the agency has fared in staying up to date both with information security needs and with promising new technologies."

Comments

First Post

[iONiUM]

Move out of your parent's basement and take your fucking penguin t-shirt off, nobody cares that you like linux, especially your non-existant girlfriend.
Maybe you should format your computer, which is no doubt running some Microsoft varient, because as well as being fat you dont want to be called a hypocrit now do you?

What the CIA needs:

[Anonymous Coward]

less technical assets, more people in the field.

Re:What the CIA needs:

[Skyshadow]

I agree that there has been way too much dependance on electronic survailance in the past couple of decades. This has left us in a uniquely bad position to deal with threats from decentralized terrorist-type outfits. That's hard to argue.

On the other hand, there's a lot more to technical assets than just spy satellites and evesdropping on phone calls. Specifically, the intelligence community needs to concentrate on technologies that will let them "know what they know", especially in the face of an exponential amount of available data.

Example: Knowing that a terrorist is about to strike and knowing who and where they are is useless if one person knows about the threat, one person knows who the terrorist is and the location is in some obscure database (which is pretty much what happened on 9-11). It's only when that information is brought together that it becomes useful.

Again, however, the CIA has dropped the ball on human assets in recent years, mostly because they (and the people who fund them) lacked the imagination to envision the new threats in the post-Soviet era. Hopefully, this is something that's being corrected as we speak.

Re:What the CIA needs:

[emo boy]

They need to do more research. Look at this photo from the archives. It shows that Segways were used long before now. Conspiracy is key.

Re:What the CIA needs:

[tha_mink]

less technical assets, more people in the field.

And you're qualified to make that assessment how exactly?

Re:What the CIA needs:

[RobertNotBob]

One of the things I remember most clearly from the morning of 9-11 is the face of a former head of the CIA. He was going from one media outlet to another preaching from the mountaintop that this attack came because of a policy change preventing the CIA from paying known criminals. I don't remember his name off the top of my head, however I do remember he was on every channel saying the exact same thing over and over.

So there were at least SOME people who recognized the need for Human Intelligence, but it unfortunately seems that they were run out of the organization rather than listened to.

Re:What the CIA needs:

[Thud457]

Because he's freakin' Anonymous Coward ! Jeebus H Christ, that's like questioning Dr. No's credentials! Do you have any idea how many posts he makes to slashdot a day? He's a veritable criminal mastermind, and a genius to boot!

Re:What the CIA needs:

[Anonymous Coward]

Dont think for a second that theyre werent people in the CIA and other agencies that didnt know what was going to happen on 9/11. First of all, all the shorts on airline stocks was a dead give away that SOMEONE knew. How about Bush's brother dropping his insurance coverage on the towers right before the disaster? 9/11 was what we needed to get the public into "ani-terror" mode. Same thing with this SARS garbage. Tell everyone there's a deadly effect to something, then let the media and the gov create the cause. This has been going on for years. The CIA has its own counter spies inside, making SURE they don't have too much info. Add to that the fact that other agencies pretty much despise(sp?) each other and you have more scandals, terrorism, and doubletalk then we'll ever need from other countries. nomorefakenews.com

Re:What the CIA needs:

[Anonymous Coward]

penis.

Re:What the CIA needs:

[dolbywan_kenobi]

Qualifications: How about the raid on Son_Tay in Vietnam? Perfectly executed in everyway except there were no prisoners there. Or to use a more modern example - Iraq. How many WMD have been found there? None. So either someone's lying to the American people or the CIA's intello is faulty.

Here's an anecdote I read a long while back, near the end of the Cold-War:

NATO wanted to know the bore of the gun of a Soviet tank. There was one in East Germany. The US used satellites at a cost of millions of dollars. The British used someone to break into the facility to measure the bore. The cost was to replace the lock but the person who did it risked his life. The French took a Russian officer out to dinner, after having plied him with good food and lots of alcohol and just asked the him what the bore was.

Re:What the CIA needs:

[kin_korn_karn]

Mr. Clancy, there's no need to post as an Anonymous Coward here.

Re:What the CIA needs:

[plugger]

This series of programmes draws much the same conclusion. The link leads totranscripts of three BBC radio programmes about the CIA's history, from its birth to the present day. There is an interesting analysis of CIA intelligence failures due to lack of people 'on the ground', that is to say integrated into the society of countries they wish to watch and understand. Contributors include past senior CIA officers and one or two people who are still well connected in us.gov .

Re:What the CIA needs:

[Dr. Scott]

NATO wanted to know the bore of the gun of a Soviet tank. There was one in East Germany. The US used satellites at a cost of millions of dollars. The British used someone to break into the facility to measure the bore. The cost was to replace the lock but the person who did it risked his life. The French took a Russian officer out to dinner, after having plied him with good food and lots of alcohol and just asked the him what the bore was.

Not an anecdote, but an old joke, I think. And there's some truth to it. But that truth cuts both ways. Americans and Brits expend great effort to find out what the bore dimension is. The French are satisfied to learn what a drunken Russian officer says it is. That's not the same thing at all.

Re:What the CIA needs:

[jc42]

One of the more interesting comments after the WTC attack was admissions that several US government agencies actually had some information about it, but the info hadn't been processed due to a lack of people who are fluent in Arabic.

And one of the more interesting comments on this is the people who tie it to the strong "English only" pressure in the US, especially in our school systems. The clear intent in this ongoing debate is that people don't want immigrant children to grow up fluent in their parents' languages. They should be Americanized as soon as possible, and this means learning only English, dammit.

So we now have a couple million Arab-Americans who learn Arabic only as a religious language, and are about as fluent in it as your average Catholic is fluent in Latin or your average Jew is fluent in Hebrew.

If we had a grain of sense, we'd be pushing immigrants to preserve their native languages and passing them on to their children, and we'd demand that our school systems encourage and support bilingualism in such families. We'd have millions of Arab-Americans who are fluent in Arabic, and a lot of them would be happy to work as translators for the CIA or other government agencies.

In a world that is becoming more and more internationalized, we have a serious need for people who are fluent in both English and another language. And it doesn't matter how important the other language is.

We paid severely for our English-only attitude on a certain Sept 11, and we will continue to pay for such willful ignorance and isolationism in the future.

Re:What the CIA needs:

[Anonymous Coward]

Iraq. How many WMD have been found there? None. So either someone's lying to the American people or the CIA's intello is faulty.

My bet's on the former. I trust the CIA's intelligence analysts more than the U.S.'s political administration.

Re:What the CIA needs:

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot your tinfoil hat.

Re:What the CIA needs:

[UnknowingFool]

less technical assets, more people in the field.

I don't think quantity necessarily will solve the issues the CIA faces today. It used to be that the CIA's main focus was on the former Soviet Union and their allies. This single focus made their jobs easier because it was easy to allocate resources and assess success.

Today they face a multitude of enemies: Religious terrorists, drug cartels, and some Communist countries (North Korea, China, etc). Now they face a shortage of both personnel to track all these potentials threats, but what is more important is that they face a lack of expertise. After 9-11, it was revealed the CIA recorded telephone conversations between suspected terrorists in the Middle East but they couldn't translate some of them due to a lack of translators.

In the murky world of intelligence and counter-intelligence, allies and enemies are not so black and white nor as permanent. In the 80s when Communism was the enemy, the CIA backed some Central and South American factions against the Communists. Some of these factions were involved with drug trafficking. In Afghanistan, they trained the Taliban. The CIA needed these allies to achieve their objectives. These allies are now considered enemies, and countries like Russia are now consider more of an ally.

A clearer focus is what the CIA needs. Unfortunately, nobody seems to know what the new focus should be.

Re:What the CIA needs:

[Anonymous Coward]

reading only the first few pages, it sounds like it's written by someone who doesn't understand multi-level secure operating systems. They're inherenly difficult to use/administer. I've seen out-of-the-box installations stonewall would-be intruders...then you configure them...

Re:What the CIA needs:

[dogfart]

I've actually heard the State of Utah referred to as a great recruiting ground for the NSA just for this reason - the Mormon missionary requirement means many of these folks are required to be fluent in a non-English language. Of course, having a verifiable "clean" background helps with security clearances too.

Re:What the CIA needs:

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the article seems to indicate that they're not really doing multi-level secure OSes, it seems that it's really all-or-nothing.

Re:What the CIA needs:

[Anonymous Coward]

That's if you consider Mormon's trustworthy. They're taught to be loyal to the church above pretty much everything else.

Re:What the CIA needs:

[garyrich]

"Or to use a more modern example - Iraq. How many WMD have been found there? None. So either someone's lying to the American people or the CIA's intello is faulty."

Actually the CIA had been telling the executive branch for a long time that Iraq didn't have any WMD, or at least not any significant weapons stockpile. They got so sick of hearing such "unpatriotic" talk in the white house that they stopped listening to the CIA a couple of years ago. Rumsfeld and Cheney run their own little "mini CIA" out of the DOD that tells them what they want to hear. CIA intel is largely ignored.

Re:What the CIA needs:

[pokeyburro]

The French took a Russian officer out to dinner, after having plied him with good food and lots of alcohol and just asked the him what the bore was.

In Soviet Russia, the bore is YOU.

(Last time I make that joke, I promise.)

Re:What the CIA needs:

[cshark]

There was a great article on this a few months ago in the federal times. Wish I would have saved the link. I'm amazed we haven't heard more about in-q-tel

http://www.in-q-tel.com/

the cia's venture capital arm in all this.

I think the core problem is this:
Information moves fast. Governments move slow. Always have. And the bigger they get, the slower they get.

It would appear as though they understand this and are trying to change, but not changing for so long makes this whole proccess a lot harder than it would be for a civilian agencey or group.

Re:What the CIA needs:

[the gnat]

There was another great story sometime last year about how the army had recently expelled no fewer than eight advanced Arabic speakers because they were homosexual, despite a severe shortage of qualified translators. Way to fight terrorism, guys! It's nice to know that with our nation under attack by religious extremists, the Pentagon hasn't forgotten what really matters: keeping the queers in order.

Re:What the CIA needs:

[sheldon]

The Torricelli amendment. It was passed as part of the outrage following an incident in Guatemala where the husband of a United States citizen was murdered by a CIA paid informant.

More about that here.

It wasn't so much that the he was murdered, but that the US Govt knew what had happened to him and tried to cover it up. She tried for years to get information, information that the authorities had but kept denying.

Finally in 1995 Representative Torricelli of New Jersey revealed the information publicly.

Most people recognize the need for human intelligence, but it is very difficult to justify the US working with individuals who are murdering US citizens. How would you feel if you found out that the CIA was still in contact with, and was still paying Osama bin Laden?

Some intelligence and balance needs to be there. In the case of the Guatemala incident, the CIA had apparently severed ties with the colonel responsible for the murder, which was the correct thing for them to do. But they should not have tried to cover up the murder. Heads don't need to roll, we just need to be willing to admit when we made a bad choice.

Re:What the CIA needs:

[xmedar]

Well they have a huge problem there, would you like to be a CIA "asset" like Noreiga, Bin Laden, Hussein etc. think about it, today they are all nice and chummy, letting you go around doing what ever you like to people, then one day you out live your usefulness, or you become more useful as a "target", the CIA has no choice but to use technology because no one with an IQ in double digits would ever have anything to do with them. Oh and just so you know now that the analyst side of things is so political they have lost that credibility and don't even get me started on all the dirty tricks, murder and general evilness and stupidity they show with every step, whether it be in South America, the Mid East or elsewhere, kids, just say NO! to the CIA... END TRANS

Re:What the CIA needs:

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the analyst side of the CIA takes a lot of pride in being carefully apolitical, and attempting to report all sides of an issue regardless of whether it will please the administration-du-jour. It's the operations side that goes around mucking about in other countries at the whim of politicians.

Re:What the CIA needs:

[Anonymous Coward]

...as we speak

You mean right now, at 0535Z, 5/28/03??? Why the fuck can't you speak without being ineffably trite?

Re:What the CIA needs:

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

According to the back-and-forth on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the policy change was simply that management had to sign off on hiring criminals. In theory, that might even make things easier, by giving field people cover for their decisions.

Oh, apparently management never said "no".

One other thing -- on the morning of 9/11, nobody - not Osama, not the CIA, *nobody* -- knew why US intelligence had missed the attacks. Anybody who went around that morning saying "it happened because we didn't have X" was someone who wanted X all along, had no respect for facts, and had no respect for the dead people he was exploiting to push his agenda.

Re:What the CIA needs:

[RobertNotBob]

We are obviously in agreement here, so I don't want to come off as picking a fight, but to defend myself...

You tacked on the last part after saying "One more thing--" as if you were trying to convince me of something that I had been resisting. Just as an FYI; in the original post I didn't use the phrase "preaching from the mountaintop" as a form of flattery.

Now I don't want the CIA (or anybody else for that matter) to come to MY office and tell me how to do MY job, so I'll try not to do the same to them. My point was, that there was a chance for cooler heads to prevail, but that chance was missed. It's just a shame that it may have contributed to such a large loss of life.

Re:What the CIA needs:

[glwtta]

So either someone's lying to the American people or the CIA's intello is faulty.

I don't see why this is necessarily an either/or proposition.

Re:What the CIA needs:

[glwtta]

CIA intel is largely ignored.

Good, I bet CIA AMD will be more cost effective anyway...

Re:What the CIA needs:

[tha_mink]

Dude. It's a big country and the US armies have only been there for a month or two. Give them some time to find something. Plus, who says they will report what they find right away to the general public.

Re:What the CIA needs:

[sql*kitten]

less technical assets, more people in the field.

There is a very good book about this, "See No Evil" by Robert Baer. A former CIA agent handler, he reports how time and time again, the CIA backed away from good old-fashioned HUMINT (agents on the grounds doing stuff) in favour of SIGINT (intercepting communications). He points out that if you are fighting an enemy who do not use sophisticated technology on a day-to-day basis, who prefer to comunicate face to face, who are patient enough to use bike messengers carrying handwritten notes rather than fax machines and email, then SIGINT is useless.

Re:What the CIA needs:

[ces]

Ignoring the rest of this conspiracy theory tripe I have to respond to this: Same thing with this SARS garbage. Tell everyone there's a deadly effect to something, then let the media and the gov create the cause.

SARS is the real deal. People are getting sick from it and dying. I seriously doubt you'd get every country that has been effected to "go along" with creating a public scare. It is also not a bioweapon "field test". While our genetic technology has come a long way in 40 years we really don't understand viruses all that well yet, certainly not well enough to make one to order. The famly of viruses that SARS is thought to belong to is well known for periodicly mutating on its own, this is why there isn't a vaccine for the common cold among other things.

Sounds like your typical govt agency

[esconsult1]

In my experience, it seems that politics and top down systems design without allowing for filtering up of ideas -- as it typical in most large orgs -- is responsible for this state of affairs.

What makes an org nimble is when they listen to the people who actually dig the trenches. There is no difference in this case, between the CIA, and say, GM.

Re:Sounds like your typical govt agency

[ianscot]

What makes an org nimble is when they listen to the people who actually dig the trenches. There is no difference in this case, between the CIA, and say, GM.

Working in a big corporate organization, I couldn't agree more wholeheartedly. You can see a million little bureaucratic failings in something like the CIA or the FBI, and they'll remind you of stuff the senior director at your company once did. Colleen Rowley's memo read like my dang diary -- the way they wouldn't even try for a warrant except under the circumstances they were accustomed to was sooo very typical, and the subsequent promotion of the higher-up who wouldn't pursue Moussaui was dead-on corporate America.

(Makes me wonder why we talk so much about electing people who have business experience leading these enormous companies to public office... The CEO of United Airlines is as out-of-touch with the world of cause and effect as anyone out there.)

Re:Sounds like your typical govt agency

[ornil]

Yes, but in the article the author claims that he looked at other government agencies and big companies, and CIA is behind all those. They are more afraid of IT than you would expect based on the stuff you mention, it seems.

Re:Sounds like your typical govt agency

[Anonymous Coward]

Makes me wonder why we talk so much about electing people who have business experience leading these enormous companies to public office.

But you get what you pay for.

The CEO usually has a compensation package which gives him just about as much $$$ to fail and run the
company into the ground as it does to run the company well.

I really don't understand why, but it's true.

Re:Sounds like your typical govt agency

[xteddy]

In fact it is much worse. The current US-Administration is practicing "Selective Intelligence - Donald Rumsfeld Has His Own Special Sources. Are They Reliable?".

It follows logically from Leo Strauss' Philosophy of Deception which is based on three rules: Deception, Power of Religion and Aggressive Nationalism:

"The people are told what they need to know and no more." While the elite few are capable of absorbing the absence of any moral truth, Strauss thought, the masses could not cope. If exposed to the absence of absolute truth, they would quickly fall into nihilism or anarchy...

Karl Popper has written "The Open Society And Its Enemies" about ideologies of this type in the 1940-ies. He had national socialism and communism in mind, but he seems to be pretty modern again.

Re:Sounds like your typical govt agency

[Malcontent]

Typically we don't elect business types to the presidency though. That's interesting.

IT at the CIA?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean a government agency has actually started to use Segways?

Oh, I guess that's the wrong IT.

Dean Kamen flashback

[sacrilicious]

IT within the CIA

I imagined for a moment that the CIA had finally gotten around to equipping all their agents with stealth Segways.

Who gets cooler uniforms?

[emo boy]

IT Swat teams or DI Mod Squad?

Hey...

[J-Piddy]

I saw Spy Games, so I already know how out of date the CIA is!

As well as how vulnerable they are to social engineering...

Re:Hey...

[Anonymous Coward]

what about the movie Sneakers? It's just that easy, people!

Re:Hey...

[chadm1967]

Spy Games? Is this a movie? I hope not because how could anyone possibly compare the actual CIA to a movie?

Re:Hey...

[aridhol]

Every organization is vulnerable to social engineering. As long as at least one login requires a username and password, or you can sneak in and "convince" someone to open the door or log in for you, you can get it. Or take the time, become a mole, and get access "legitimately". It may take some time, and put you in danger, but it will work.

Re:Hey...

[Torinaga-Sama]

TPSFAGA: That's Pretty Standard For A Government Agency

Re:Hey...

[HowlinMad]

To bad that was based in the early 90's. Watch the movie again.

biggest problem in the CIA

[Anonymous Coward]

TUTMA - They Use Too Many Acronyms

firewall? we don't need no stinkin' firewall!

[Black Copter Control]

A friend of mine was talking to an IT type at CSIS (Canadian Security and Intelligence Service -- equivalent to CIA). He asked them what kind of firewall they used for their secure systems.

"We don't use a firewall. We use an air gap."

Re:firewall? we don't need no stinkin' firewall!

[fussman]

What? Firewall? Wouldn't that burn the whole place down? Dang kids playing with fire! They don't know what they're messing with.

Re:firewall? we don't need no stinkin' firewall!

[SirWhoopass]

The US uses the same thing with SIPRNET. It is physically separate from the internet. Script kiddies like to gloat about how insecure military networks are and how they hacked into classified information. Not true. They may certainly have seen some "private" web sites with telephone or social security numbers, but not actual classified information. They'd need to dig a hole and splice fiber first.

Re:firewall? we don't need no stinkin' firewall!

[JohnnyCannuk]

Otherwise known as "sneaker net"...

Seems better than a firewall to me. They can't hack you if you're not on the network. Isolated networks are always more secure than public ones, as long as the location they are at is physically secure and trust me, places like CSIS, CSE (our NSA) and the Mounties are VERY secure.

Besides, your "friend" could lose his job if he told you what firewall they use on their public facing networks....

Re:firewall? we don't need no stinkin' firewall!

[DogIsMyCoprocessor]

I hope their network isn't wireless, then.

Re:firewall? we don't need no stinkin' firewall!

[Anonymous Coward]

A friend of mine was in a Cisco class with a Dept of Defense WAN engineer. They have a wall in the IT department of people's personal equipment (hard drives from laptops and PDAs) that they plugged in to the secure network. Their network detects the unauthorized equipment, and they IT guys get to hang it on the wall using a 12" spike.

Re:firewall? we don't need no stinkin' firewall!

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't say the mounties are very secure...I live in a rural town, our local detachment is 10 officers...And guess what they have for the Staff Seargent to access the network via notebook well anywhere in the office, that's right a completely insecure linksys default WAP...Give me your name, and I'll put out a warrant for your arrest...

Re:firewall? we don't need no stinkin' firewall!

[kruczkowski]

Funny thing is that ILUVYOU was released on SIPERNET. Becouse the militray has the secure mentality most (of those that do have) anti virus software were out of date.

Did I mention that the systems run Windows?

Re:firewall? we don't need no stinkin' firewall!

[golgotha007]

top secret computers connected in a network configuration aren't connected to the outside. the networks i've seen aren't even connected to anything outside the very room these computers are kept.

in fact, each computer's network cable (bright blue) goes up the wall, to about 2 feet from the ceiling, then wraps around to a switch, also located near the ceiling.

the purpose of this is so one can immediately observe every network connected device by looking along the wall. this would prevent anyone from connecting an unauthorized system into the network.

Re:firewall? we don't need no stinkin' firewall!

[Black Copter Control]

Did I mention that the systems run Windows?

Sounds like another case of "military intelligence".

One of the rules of security is to presume that any one layer is going to fail. Even the physical controls can fail. network attachment points halfway up the wall, and watching the MAC addresses of connected nodes still won't protect you from someone connecting a (supposedly) secure laptop with a spare wireless card in it and configured as a gateway.

People will circumvent security -- and they'll (almost) always think that they have a good reason for it.

IDSs and firewalls are still a good idea within a (supposedly) disconnected and private system, because if a cracker ever manages to connect, then you probably REALLY want to know about it.

Re:firewall? we don't need no stinkin' firewall!

[SirWhoopass]

The systems don't "run Windows" any more than computers on the internet "run Windows". The OS is entirely up to the person using it. A lot of the classified systems run unix.

Re:firewall? we don't need no stinkin' firewall!

[Ayanami Rei]

still won't protect you from someone connecting a (supposedly) secure laptop with a spare wireless card in it...

SIPRNET facilities are closed areas wherein RF-transmit capable devices are not allowed. This means no cell phones, wireless cards, etc. Most procedure documents specifically disallow mobile equipment in the lab; only fixed and inspected equipment is allowed to make SIPRNET connections. Just getting a machine hooked up with an active connection is a huge affair involving letters and inspections and signatures and shit.

If you hook up something to SIPRNET without getting approval, you could get your ass dragged through the paper trenches. ^_^ Those "accidents" are generally avoided in this draconian manner.

Re:firewall? we don't need no stinkin' firewall!

[Black Copter Control]

It may be difficult and annoying, but it's still possible. If you don't have internal IDS and protection systems in place on top of the physical containment, then you're hooped when (not if) someone figures out a way around the physical protections.

I'd rather presume that these groups do have protection beyond what's obvious. But if they don't then they might get hacked up the ying-yang before they realize that someone has made it through.

Re:firewall? we don't need no stinkin' firewall!

[Ayanami Rei]

Okay, so right, bring in your laptop and box for NAT with a programmable MAC on a USBethernet adapter (so you don't have to break the seal), have a WAP outside, and you have the potential for a situation. System won't notice the laptop behind the NAT, which in turn is acting as a gateway for the Internet. IPSec (if req.) can be handled by creating a bridge interface on the trusted box. (I assume you somehow have mitigated the fact that SIPRNET and the Internet have conflicting address spaces)

But to go through all that trouble of bringing in that shit (which you aren't allowed to do anyway, and are constantly reminded as such) signifies malicious intent, in which you have a range of possible modes of clandestine access.

You could also print stuff out and don't tell anyone, then sell it in the abandoned warehouse district. Seems easier to me. ;P

Re:firewall? we don't need no stinkin' firewall!

[tupps]

In the article they state that it is possible to move unclassified data onto the classified network, but not the other way round.

Re:firewall? we don't need no stinkin' firewall!

[Art Tatum]

have a WAP outside

As I understand things, they have heavily shielded construction anywhere important for just this reason. And I would be surprised if they didn't also monitor RF in the vacinity as well.

Re:firewall? we don't need no stinkin' firewall!

[zebs]

"We don't use a firewall. We use an air gap."
Wireless network then? They can't be that far behind then?

Re:firewall? we don't need no stinkin' firewall!

[SirWhoopass]

If you have access to the facility, and really want to steal classified information, you can. You'll probably even get away with it for a while. There's no way to give someone access to information and, at the same time, prevent them from having that information.

That's where the security clearances come in. To gain access to such a facility you need a clearance, which is granted after a background investigation, interviews with your ex-girlfriends, etc.

Typing through choked laughter

[emo boy]

Just in case you are retarded and haven't watched the laugh out loud videos at http://www.segway.com, here's a linky.

Re:So..

[fussman]

Yes, and orange with SARS.

I had a chance to look at the classified edition

[IWantMoreSpamPlease]

Editing out the more sensitive bits (I'll put periods in for the text), here's what it says:

"...all.....your......base......are.....not....b el ong....to....us...."

Re:So..

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should Slashdot quit posting NYTimes articles? The registration?

They are lying

[bstadil]

They are lying.

This is just a plug for more resources. Do you really believe they would publish this if it was true.

Today Sig at /.

What upsets me is not that you lied to me, but that from now on I can no longer believe you. -- Nietzsche

is uncanny prescient.

Re:They are lying

[Anonymous Coward]

is uncanny prescient.

What on earth does 'prescient' mean?

Re:They are lying

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you really believe they would publish this if it was true.

Yes. The DI actually publishes a number of internal assessments. You can, for instance, go and read studies on how they recommend their analysts evaluate data, postmortems of past intelligence successes and failures, etc.

Bah, just a front!

[BitwizeGHC]

Everybody knows the "declassified" version is just a diversionary tactic to make us THINK the agency is behind the times, IT-wise. In reality, they've slipped nanites into everyone's drinking water to track the populace's movements and habits, beaming the data through the ether to the giant mainframe computers under Mt. Weather (where the CIA also happens to keep its massive drug stash).

Remember, just because you're paranoid...

Re:Bah, just a front!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't mean they're not after you?

Re:Bah, just a front!

[haystor]

How did you submit this? The nanites should have prevented such a submission. Peculiar.

--- BEGIN NANITE ORDER ---
MEMWIPE 24 HOURS
REBOOT
---- END NANITE ORDER ----

Move along.

Re:Bah, just a front!

[swimmar132]

It amused me that this post was immediately preceded by this one:

They are lying. This is just a plug for more resources. Do you really believe they would publish this if it was true. Today Sig at /. What upsets me is not that you lied to me, but that from now on I can no longer believe you. -- Nietzsche is uncanny prescient.

Re:Bah, just a front!

[Anonymous Coward]

hah - if you've ever been to MWEAC, you know how funny this is. More likely to find moonshine stills hidden there.

Re:Bah, just a front!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this is more accurate than you might believe. Several years ago, I met the son of my dads best friend. This son also happens to work for the NSA and used to work for the CIA in their technology areas.

He never ever ever said anything about the tech they use except "You aren't cabable of imagining what we have"

Re:Bah, just a front!

[Anonymous Coward]

He playing you right into the mystique surrounding classified stuff.
The fact you seem to buy into it only reinforces that this kind of tactic works on impressionable morons.

I seriously doubt they are sooooo far advanced that no mere mortal could imagine it.

Give me a break.

Interesting recommendations

[TopShelf]

Looking at the recommendations, what seems to pop out is that there is more a need for information organization than new-fangled gee-whiz technotoys. Analyst websites available via intranet, and the ability to search and join together information from various analyst accounts seem to be the major needs.

Re:Interesting recommendations

[Degrees]

The other need mentioned was being able to track the workloads of the various DI analysts. This requires being able to assign workloads to various DI analysts.

For many organizations, this is a huge can of worms, and for which they don't have a solid IT answer. Sad to say, in my workplace, we (somewhat) use MS Project. Even sadder, if we were a MS Project + MS Exchange shop, we would at least have a chance of solving this problem. That Gantt chart becomes a whole lot more intelligent when it is backed up by every persons' calendars.

So a decent question is: is there a project management package that runs on Linux, and uses Ximian (or something like it) to tie everybody together?

/. in trouble?

[Vengeance]

In the news: Hackers at a web site called 'slash-dot' (we believe it to be a hate-site against Indian developers) have instituted a denial-of-service attack against CIA web servers. Teams are currently raiding several OSDN locations in order to preserve freedom.

-- John Ashcroft, here to help you

Re:/. in trouble?

[fussman]

Good point.
Now why would we want to piss off the American Government with a slashdotting? Please, all of you, pay attention to what you are doing!

Made for OSS..

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

One reason is that DI offices cannot easily get funding for new software packages. The funding required for the development and testing of such tools--typically, tens of thousands of dollars per year--is small in comparison to the CIA's total budget. But it is enormous in the context of the discretionary funds that an individual office has--let alone an individual analyst.

Another reason for open source. I'm the lone OSS outpost in my military operation and when the budget cuts came, the OSS got rolled out!

Previously it was tough as hell but I am bringing in more and more OSS packages all the time that give some great functionality like Post-Nuke, phpESP, etc.

Now I can damn near get away with murder because I am still bringing some great functionality in with no additional cost.

This mantra has sold Linux more than anything else: "Services, not platforms".

Repeat

Re:Made for OSS..

[StandardDeviant]

Yeah, as I was reading that article, I was struck by how handy something like a secure version of LiveJournal would be to an intelligence organization. Each analyst could post things up, works in progress, tidbits of interest, or formal product, which could then be syndicated by other analysts and consumers of analytic content in a fluid manner (NB: obviously would need some additional access, authentication, and authorization infrastructure to regulate who can syndicate what). Further, the LJ codebase would allow feedback on each entry in the analyst's "text stream", or I should say "media stream". And as a bonus, clients exist to talk to LJ servers from pretty much any platform, and most don't require any knowledge of HTML or similar technologies by the end user. The source code for the LJ server system as well as most of the clients is available here but as usual for any outside product, it'd probably be wise to commission a source review of it before putting it into production in a secure environment. (This may be one way to help fund the projects, if possible, by commissioning project developers to contribute to the security process, and allowing the non-agency-specific security changes to be rolled back into the public sphere, analogous to the NSA's SELinux.)

Re:Made for OSS..

[Degrees]

And here I thought what they needed for their Analyst Websites was just to throw up some slashcode. ;-)

Re:Made for OSS..

[ashpool7]

Maybe rolling OSS out cheaply works in a sandbox where you can trust everything. Somehow I doubt that's good enough for the CIA.

While development costs could be curtailed with OSS, it is unlikely that they will be eliminated. Who writes software with the CIA in mind? Modifications to make OSS software work within the CIA model will be required, not to mention the granular security features that would have to be added. IIRC, it's either A or B grade trusted systems where they have to prevent communication via morse code using on/off file locking. Those are the kind of things I don't think anyone except the CIA/NSA/whoever thinks about when designing software.

This doesn't eliminate the testing cost either. While thorough testing doesn't seem like a big deal with many OSS projects, many corporations and (obviously) the CIA require that an application be tested in a standard fashion before being deployed. Find a bug? That's more man-hours to fix it right there.

Anyway, my point is that even if the software is free and open source, it's still probably going to cost a significant amount of money for the CIA to use it. Perhaps more, since sometimes it's harder to beat an application into doing what you want it to than to simply start it from scratch. Many OSS projects have realized this.

Re:Made for OSS..

[jwbozzy]

Ok, and how many times has Nuke been r00table?? God, I hope you are lying through your teeth...

Re:Made for OSS..

[commanderfoxtrot]

How about a CIA wiki?!?

Re:Made for OSS..

[StandardDeviant]

Wiki sites are very cool (I used one as the basis of my employer's internal knowledge base), but they operate on a somewhat different conceptual model than LJ, much more N-people-onto-1-seamless-page instead of 1-page-of-N-people-discreetly. Wikis might be good for internal documentation and final product, but perhaps not so good for really fluid material (you can update LJ from a cell phone, heh). Further, the Wiki mindset is by design focused on the traditional page/document/site model, whereas LJ is much more a system for syndicating content than anything else. That way user/consumer A can choose to read thoughts about Italy, Lichtenstein, and Albania, whereas user/consumer B can choose to read thoughts about the Basque rebels, Moscow Drug Rings, and Australia. Try fitting all those combinations into a single set of pages....

Re:Made for OSS..

[StandardDeviant]

Unfortunately Slash is very resource intensive to run (I should know, as I help run a site that uses Slash, see my .sig below). So unless you plan on buying a server for each analyst... ;-) [I've heard v2+ of slash is easier to vhost, but still... it'd be easier to get 10,000 analysts on an LJ derivative than to maintain 10,000 slash sites.] It's not tooo hard to syndicate slash feeds, but it looses out to LJ in the ease of update and administration. Updating LJ is such a breeze even idiot high school kids can handle it, whereas admining/updating slash can be a bit of a black art. There are clients to update LJ for even things like cell phones, no such luck for Slash, you need a full web browser.

Re:Made for OSS..

[Saltine Cracker]

I don't know if this would be widely accepted in the CIA. As a contractor at NASA who maintains collaborative web tools, like knowledge and document management systems, we have a very hard time getting the user populace to change from the print and file culture, to the save and upload culture.

Way off base

[mental_telepathy]

As far as I can tell, the author's main concern is that the CIA is not keeping up with the private sector due to security constraints. All I can say is, thank God. Any recent security poll will tell you that corporations have multiple security incidents per year, even if they take an active interest in security. Do we really want the CIA to publish a statement saying some script kiddie is publishing the names of suspected terrorists?

Re:Way off base

[PD]

Yes, that would be good. Just look how long it took to get the spooks to admit that MLK and Einstein were on lists of suspected communists.

more info on In-Q-Tel

[ih8apple]

Are you guys familiar with In-Q-Tel? (It's mentioned in the article)

Here's an article.
and another...
and another...
and another...

IN SOVIET RUSSIA

[Anonymous Coward]

The KGB keeps up with IT...so they can keep up with you.

for Troll Tuesday I proclaim that michael should suck it HARD!

Re:IN SOVIET RUSSIA

[davesag]

I meet a lot of strange people in my travels but one of the strangest was a guy who had just graduated with the Russian FSB and who specialised in code breaking. The department he worked for was making clusters specifically dedicated to real time cracking of the 56 bit keys used by the voice channel of GSM phones - note the data channels are not encrypted. His department got privatised in 1999 with venture capital from the US, and now they crack GSM phones for the higest bidder. Also interestingly enough they run SSH (and thus TCP/IP) over the the power grid to link their clusters together cheaply while keeping the data off the public internet. Or so he said over a few sturdy vodkas.

a different kind of moderation...

[fussman]

'Failing to Keep Up With the Information Revolution'

Didn't someone earlier today say something about giving mod points to articles?
I would mod this article "-1 Flaimbait."

Re:PlayStation to supercomputer in $50,000

[stratjakt]

By contrast, it is almost impossible for researchers to install the Linux system on Microsoft's Xbox game console.

This is because they dont know how to solder, or dont know where to get a Torx 10 screwdriver to open it?

Insider info

[Chagatai]

I could tell you what that state of IT really is inside the CIA. Of course, then I'd have to kill you.

Re:Insider info

[chainsaw1]

I'd be more willing to believe you if you posted as AC :)

Re:Insider info

[dogfart]

Didn't you know that the CIA provides a complete fake identity to all its agents? Passports, birth certificates, work history, even a slashdot user name?

Not Exactly...

[DesScorp]

"Again, however, the CIA has dropped the ball on human assets in recent years, mostly because they (and the people who fund them) lacked the imagination to envision the new threats in the post-Soviet era".

While the intelligence community did indeed have a lack of vision with post-Soviet threats, the biggest reason for the dropoff in human assets was a combonation of over-reliance on gee-whiz technologies, like satellite surveilance, and just plain El-Cheapo budgeting on the part of Congress. Basically, after 1991, the attitude was "what do we need spies for? We've got satellites now". After September 11th, when the media was ravaging the CIA for not preventing the attacks, Tom Clancy was interviewed, and his comments were right on the ball. He basically said "Look, we castrated the CIA, and now you're surprised that the agency is ineffective?". That barb was aimed especially at media members and Congressmen that were in such a hurry to save money by cutting personnel.

Re:Not Exactly...

[Anonymous Coward]

another under-reported fact - the FBI gutted the CIA in the 90s. After several CIA spy scandals, the FBI was given authority to find a mole suspected in the US intel community. Several hundred CIA officers were identified and put under suspicion for years; most of their careers were effectively ended. Meanwhile FBI agents received little scrutiny. That went on throughout the 90's as Clinton's politicized FBI took charge - they were busy shooting survivalists and burning out cults. Then only a few years ago, we find out it was FBI agent Robert Hansen.

Re:Not Exactly...

[Anonymous Coward]

To add insult to injury, the castration went even deeper. After 1996, even satellite feeds were being cut in an effort to save money. Remember when cutting the budget, the first place you start cutting is where no one will see the effects right away. I'm sure anyone in the IT industry will understand the ignorant, "I don't know what it is all about so we must not need it, and no one will ever miss it.", syndrome.

Cooks don't need IT!

[cpopin]

Why would the CIA have a need for technology advancements? Cooking's old school.

It reads like a help desk...

[gamgee5273]

This is a similar tact, though not exact, to the help desk structures that are successful. The DI analyst's job sounds quite a bit like the job my staff has to handle, and many of the suggestions like the ones I am regularly making.

I would suggest they actually look at those models. ITIL (the IT Infrastructure Library, brought to you by the British government) is an excellent set of guidelines to start off with...

Then they can hire me. :)

Presentation by CSIS dude

[Anonymous Coward]

As a matter of fack this is a rather interesting subject . I recently heard a presentation from the organaztion conserned for the whole IT security of canada (including CSIS) . They only recently implemented an IDS system on one DOD network , which logged an amazing 56,000 "attack attempts" (people port scanning) . 1,000 were serious (is there any windows shares?) and 56 had obtained access to the DoD network . Now this network was not a honeypot (actual production network) , so its kinda of scary . They do actually have some firewalls implace but they arent very effective (more than 1/2 of those 56 access obtained occured on "protected" networks) . Now it is highly probably that all these numbers were exegerated (or not) as they want more money .

I worked for the navy at the pentagon.

[Anonymous Coward]

THe two networks are completely separate. Most people had a classified, and unclassified machine at their desk, completely separate. Once a disk had gone into a classified machine, it could never be used in an unclassified machineagain(In theory) same for hard drives and memory, including printer memory.

TEh only time i have ever heard of the two networks being connected was a seinor chief plugged two lan cards into one computer, just messing around. Caught unholy hell for it, luckily he was the sharpest guy with the most experience in the office(Never fuck with a chief, they run EVERYTHING) and just got a verbal ass kicking, off the record. At least thats how i heard the story.

Re:I worked for the navy at the pentagon.

[brer_rabbit]

TEh only time i have ever heard of the two networks being connected was a seinor chief plugged two lan cards into one computer, just messing around. Caught unholy hell for it, luckily he was the sharpest guy with the most experience in the office

Sounds like another case of "military intelligence".

Re:I worked for the navy at the pentagon.

[out180]

I didn't work at the Pentagon but I was the lead IT on a ship and also an engineer (post-eaos) for the the NIPR/SIPR shipboard ISNS provider.

The CIA isn't the only government agency that is behind the times. Lets talk about intelligence handling with the Navy. It wasn't until 4 years ago that an official standard, project if you will, was implemented on a broad scale to handle the class/unclass infosys traffic. Now I'm not saying that it didn't exist, because it did exist, but what I am hitting on here is that the Navy, in this example, didn't provide a clear cut method for shipboard units to maintain data via a computer network. Now, the standards existed, but on a broad scale it was left up to specific commands to implement a computer system within the regulations for INFOSEC without outside assistance. So lets get into how it was done, pre-ISNS days.

Seaman Smuckitelle is tasked with providing a half-ass computer network on the ship. Since during that time the DS's were still in existance it wasn't a hard task but the real fun came when everyone started messing around with it. The only "allowed" system shipboard was unclass due to the obvious INFOSEC requirements of a class network and the serious lack of personal that could accomplish such a task unassisted. Now, DS2 Smuck creates this network and connects all the major spaces together, this is UNCLASS mind you. Now, as you can probably tell what ended up on that unclass network, yep... classified material. In a matter of a week you have chief's writing CASREPS on it (a classified message). Then, someone has a bright idea. From a distant corner of the Wardroom comes a voice that says, lets put all of our message traffic on it through the exchange server. There was much celebrating from the wardroom that night and thus the unclass, insecure, half-ass, non-INFOSEC compliant network now magically becomes a secret network.

This isn't to scare anyone, its just to further extend the point of being "behind the times". In the case of the CIA we should hope that the outdated IT problem is due to hardware and lack of funding. In the case of the Navy it was due to a lack of training and organized leadership. The foresight of a tight, well designed INFOSYS infrastructure wasn't clear until well past its need. Once it was clear, they tried to do something about it. Now as of 2 years ago, when I last touched it, the times were changing... but there was still alot to be learned. Example being when the Navy decided to formalize their shipboard INFOSYS structure they downsized the DS rating (the only rating in the Navy that specialized in Data Systems specifically) and crossed all of the new IT responsibility to the RM's, or Radiomen. Now, who do you think could handle this task better, a Data Systems specialist trained in the use, support, and troubleshooting of computer systems (despite the obvious age of these system), or a RM who's only purpose in life was to push paper and transmit radio traffic? Well, I'll tell you this... any advance the Navy made by bringing a standard cross-ship platform for INFOSYS into the works was further slowed by allowing inexperienced people take charge of it. My exact point is made very clear in the above post where a Chief, a leader mind you, hooked an unclass and a class network together on the same system. Why might you ask? Well the real fact is clear, people as a whole are very concerned about Information Security, the single induhvidual (yes Dilbert) doesn't think before they act. Could it be innocent, yes but the information that is classified is made such for a reason and the gross mishandling of that information leads to serious problems. Do I believe that SIPR is secure, sure in theory, but the people behind it are not.

Its the government, they never choose wisely until its too late and then they always find a way to muck it up in the long run. You know how many times I went onboard a ship to fix a downed Exchange server and they hadn't backed up in 2 months....

Re:I worked for the navy at the pentagon.

[SirWhoopass]

Every SIPRNET facility I've ever worked at used contractors for the technical issues. The ITs only did basic sysadmin work (new accounts, forgotten passwords, etc). Software installation and configuration was all cleared through a central authority (off site). I've served on a DD and a DDG. While SIPRNET is by no means fool-proof, it's not nearly as half-assed as some of the stuff you see aboard ship.

- IS1

Re:I worked for the navy at the pentagon.

[out180]

Agreed, the new way of doing things take far more out of the sailors hands. Pre-ISNS left something to be desired. Now, you can just call someone. Being an IT1 I'm sure you know who I used to work for. The biggest problems were a serious lack of training, which I hope has gotten better since my time, and deviating from the guidelines. As you well know, the ISNS package is designed to run one specific way... when it gets messed with who knows what can happen. Everybody crashes their Exchange box and they never have a backup. Breathing life back into an Exchange box over INMARSAT 5000 miles away at 4am local just got old for me.

I saw things taking a positive turn when I last plugged in and for that I'm thankful. I just hope they continue to offer the training for the IT's. A lot of then can do it, and a lot of them don't want to. You just have to count of the younger crowd to join and take charge. I've seen IT's, FC's, GSE's, and even PN's take charge and run a shipboard system, that's what makes the Navy great.

I agree, SIRNET isn't half-ass, its a decent system with a good foundation. The problem, as always, is the user. The half-ass systems I would find weren't piped into the SIPR system... they were usually NIPR class systems w/ class info on them. Most of the time they were smart enough to unplug them from the outside world, but not always. The big drive that pushed the "smaller" ships to create their own networks was the larger platform standards that were being created without concern for the other parties in the battle groups being able to keep up. The Navy saw the need to bring organized systems into the fleet but didn't think ahead to the interoperability issues that arose from multi-platform connectivity. We went from grease pencils and plot boards to posting datam on shared web pages via SIPR for instant data sharing. Now that's the way it should be done. IRC chat was another wonderful tool that arose from it that allowed the sharing of information via non-radio means. I'm sure it has only gotten better.

Pennywise

[AtariAmarok]

I don't recall seeing the CIA anywhere in Stephen King's "IT". However, it would not surprise me if they now employed Pennywise the Clown in their espionage efforts.

Actually, I'm kind of cheered up by this.

[kahei]

It's nice to know the CIA has lots of people who just sit at desks and do boring stuff and spend their time trying to find pesky documents. I was afraid they *all* spent their time ferrying cocaine around southeast asia and creating military dictatorships.

Sounds like they need to buy some nice commodity content-management and data mining software and a timesheet system. It's so cosy!

Re:Actually, I'm kind of cheered up by this.

[Art Tatum]

You'd be surprised. A lot of what the CIA does is conglomerate and summarize information, encyclopedia style.

first hand experience

[Anonymous Coward]

I havent read the article yet, but I can tell you a first hand experience. On a business trip I was in Washington DC. I had my laptop on in my car, and as I drove past the CIA it happened to find an access point labeled CIA. WEP was enabled but still, I think that the CIA should not use such an insecure method of communication. Honeypot maybe?

Disclaimer: I did not intentionally stumble upon this access point, nor did I attempt to access or decrypt its transmissions. I just drove past and it happened to pop up.

Tax dollars at work...

[Anonymous Coward]

so far 25 minutes and still accessable (not slashdotted). At least the CIA IT people know how to keep a system up under load.

"Military Intelligence" is an oxymoron

[djeaux]

I know it's a cliché, but it's true.

I agree with the poster down the page who opined that what the CIA needs is more people in the field. Look around the typical IT department & ask yourself, "Are these geeks the kind of folks I want providing vital information to the guys who have their fingers on the nuclear button?"

It's pretty obvious -- regardless of your position on operation Iraqi "Freedom" -- that electronic surveillance is not very reliable without plenty of dirty on-the-ground spying. Another way to put it is "Where are all those WMDs?" We saw the "pictures"...

Re:"Military Intelligence" is an oxymoron

[phorm]

Are you sure you'd prefer the alternative, and what are the alternatives? Personally, I don't even trust those that have their fingers on the button now.
Personally, I think that the military must have an intranet page something akin to
<IMG SRC='mushroomcloud.gif'>
<form method=POST>
Who do we want to nuke today: <input name='todaysenemy'>?
<input type='submit' value='nuke em'>
</form>

Re:"Military Intelligence" is an oxymoron

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with the poster down the page who opined that what the CIA needs is more people in the field. Look around the typical IT department & ask yourself, "Are these geeks the kind of folks I want providing vital information to the guys who have their fingers on the nuclear button?"

I suspect the CIA's hiring standards are a little above that of "the typical IT department". (Not to mention that it's not the IT people providing the data; they just process it. Put more people in the field, and all that data will still go through the IT people.)

electronic surveillance is not very reliable without plenty of dirty on-the-ground spying. Another way to put it is "Where are all those WMDs?" We saw the "pictures"...

I suspect it was the Bush administration, not the CIA, that claiming Iraq was overflowing with WMDs. After all, our own allies didn't buy off on the evidence we presented to them. The DI is actually fairly conservative in its own intelligence assessments. Methinks the politicians hyped up the message.

CIA Humint - Sigint - Remote Sensing

[Wyatt Earp]

The CIA's problem isn't a lack of funding, a lack of agents in the field or a lack of IT.

The problem is that since 1980 it hasn't figured out anything in advance.

1983 Hezbollah attacks on France/US missed
1983 Marxist revolt in Granada missed
1989 Czech border reforms missed
1989 E. Germany fall missed
1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait missed
1991 Coup attempt in USSR missed
1992-94 Islamists in Somalia missed
1993 Bombing of WTC missed
1998 African Embassy bombings missed
1999 Attempt on DDG Sullivans missed
2000 Bombing of Cole missed
2001 WTC/Pentagon missed

Clancy has been a CIA supporter for a long-time even though they don't accomplish anything anymore.

I read the Hunt for Bin Laden which is about the Green Berets in Afghanistan which doesn't have anything nice to say about CIA either.

I just don't see how they are relavent anymore.

Re:CIA Humint - Sigint - Remote Sensing

[fussman]

1983 Hezbollah attacks on France/US missed
1983 Marxist revolt in Granada missed
1989 Czech border reforms missed
1989 E. Germany fall missed
1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait missed
1991 Coup attempt in USSR missed
1992-94 Islamists in Somalia missed
1993 Bombing of WTC missed
1998 African Embassy bombings missed
1999 Attempt on DDG Sullivans missed
2000 Bombing of Cole missed
2001 WTC/Pentagon missed

Of course, it it always easier to look at the flaws of something rather that the strengths in the same area. How many things did they not 'miss' and actually have an unskilled civilian populace know about it?

Re:CIA Humint - Sigint - Remote Sensing

[stratjakt]

And what happened this memorial day weekend?

What happened at the millenium celebrations?

You can only compile a list of the misses, not hits. You have absolutely no idea what they've prevented.

Re:CIA Humint - Sigint - Remote Sensing

[banzai51]

1989 Czech border reforms missed

1989 E. Germany fall missed

1991 Coup attempt in USSR missed

I don't know about the rest of the list, but those listed above were not 'missed'. The CIA was dead on in thier prediction of these events. Wether or not the leaders in charge heeded these assessments is another story.

Plus, you'll never hear of the successes. CIA foils a bomb plot, bombing never happens, thus news never covers the event. So how sure are you that the CIA is ineffective?

Re:CIA Humint - Sigint - Remote Sensing

[Jonny Ringo]

Of course its also easy to not think about how many of these things they miss on purpose. Its the easiest way for the CIA to get more funding.

Re:CIA Humint - Sigint - Remote Sensing

[dolbywan_kenobi]

We just don't know about the ones they got right and prevented because those are classified.

Re:CIA Humint - Sigint - Remote Sensing

[f97tosc]

I read the Hunt for Bin Laden which is about the Green Berets in Afghanistan which doesn't have anything nice to say about CIA either.

The conflict in Afghanistan was revolutionary because of CIA. They were there before any of the armed forces and they basically won the war by bribing/ persuading different fraction to join up against the Taliban.

Also, has it occured to you that in the set of failed and successful CIA activities there is an extreme bias in which ones you ever hear about?

Tor

Re:CIA Humint - Sigint - Remote Sensing

[Wyatt Earp]

And what happened between 8 am PDT and 9am PDT?

Nothing.

Just because nothing happened doesn't mean the Spooks from CIA busted through a window somewhere and stopped Dr. Evil.

I'm not anti-intellegence, it's just from what one reads about the CIA's failures/successes seems to make it look like they ain't doing a very good job.

When it comes to counter-intel they like to play who-can-be-the-biggest-idiots with FBI.

Re:CIA Humint - Sigint - Remote Sensing

[leviramsey]

There's also some conjecture that the CIA intentionally leaks information about when they fuck up, to project an image of being ineffectual (which may lead potential adversaries to underestimate them and do stuff which makes it easier for the CIA).

Re:CIA Humint - Sigint - Remote Sensing

[rwiedower]

Actually, they did prevent some millenial madness from occurring. They got a tiny amount of good press about it, too.

Re:CIA Humint - Sigint - Remote Sensing

[the_rev_matt]

I understand that they can't broadcast their successes, but seriously, missing pretty fundamental things NOT perpetrated by a shady loose network of terrorists (like the fall of E Germany, Czech border reforms, Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (esp. considering he ASKED PERMISSION), Coup attempt in USSR, hell they missed the fall of the Soviet Union even though Gorbachev had been broadcasting it for YEARS).

Re:CIA Humint - Sigint - Remote Sensing

[Anonymous Coward]

Without knowing about all the successes that you will, by definition, never know about, you have no way of evaluating whether they outweigh the failures. The only people qualified to judge the effectiveness of the CIA are those with way more security clearance than you.

Re:CIA Humint - Sigint - Remote Sensing

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, they did miss those. that is true. but how many did they stop? you have no idea. i have no idea. you might want to try and find some stats on hits/misses before saying the cia isnt relevent anymore.

Re:CIA Humint - Sigint - Remote Sensing

[EverDense]

The conflict in Afghanistan was revolutionary because of CIA. They were there before any of
the armed forces and they basically won the war by bribing/ persuading different fraction to
join up against the Taliban.

At the end of the day, they were just cleaning up the mess they created in the first place.

Re:CIA Humint - Sigint - Remote Sensing

[hobbesmaster]

Or perhaps they didn't miss all those things and just didn't feel the need to tell/have the time to make the decision to tell the general population about the events.

Now obviously they must have missed 9-11...

Re:CIA Humint - Sigint - Remote Sensing

[Anonymous Coward]

They ignored Gorbachev. On purpose. The NWO is what's missing in your equation.

Re:CIA Humint - Sigint - Remote Sensing

[Art Tatum]

They didn't really "miss" 9-11. They just didn't know the details in advance.

Re:CIA Humint - Sigint - Remote Sensing

[Art Tatum]

Well, what I heard was that they only want you to think that they're intentionally leaking information about their mistakes to project an image of being ineffectual... :-)

Re:CIA Humint - Sigint - Remote Sensing

[Anonymous Coward]

Your forgot India and Pakistan joining the Nuclear Club. That was totally missed by the CIA, too.

Re:CIA Humint - Sigint - Remote Sensing

[Johnny Pissoff]

1998 India detonates five nuclear weapons 1998 Pakistan detonates a nuclear weapon

Re:CIA Humint - Sigint - Remote Sensing

[AlCoHoLiC]

What "Czech border reform" are you talking about? There was no "Czech republic" in 1989. Country you're talking about was Czechoslovakia. In case you don't see the diference the word contains names of two major nations who formed new state shortly after WWI in 1918. Peaceful separation happend on January 1, 1993. There were no border related disputes.

I should know it since I'm half Slovak/half Czech and enjoy the luxury of having double citizenship. :-)

Re:CIA Humint - Sigint - Remote Sensing

[Anonymous Coward]

The CIA doesn't do intelligence work, they do money laundering. The 13 other agencies do the bulk of the intelligence work.

Want to start a war? Short on cash? Need a land rover and some AK-47s? Call the CIA.

Want to launder 2 billion to pay for a coup attempt? Call the CIA.

Need to bribe on official in a foreign government, but need it to be untraceable? Call the CIA.

Want to get your drug money out of .... to continue financing you war? Call Poindexter. Chirp!

Want to get a group of media companies to initiate a smear campaign against a president who is tramping on corporate interest in Latin America...Or North America? ...Call the CIA.

Want intelligence, want information sharing ... Call ONI, DIA, NSA*, the NRO, NIMA, even the FBI.. I would even be willing to wager that DoE and the Treasury Dept have more intelligence resources available to them than the CIA. The CIA is also notorious for not sharing information. They collect it from everyone else, but you can't pry it out of them. Personally, I find this a good thing. Do I want the new Gestapo at Homeland Security to have timely access to everything? Not really. If they get it, in 10 years they are a million times worse than Hoover was with the FBI.

Am I willing to say.. Let it remain a little screwed up...even if it cost a few lives ...To slow down the police state? Yes, I am.

*The NSA is also a member of the we do not share club.

Re:CIA Humint - Sigint - Remote Sensing

[glwtta]

The CIA's problem isn't a lack of funding, a lack of agents in the field or a lack of IT.
The problem is that since 1980 it hasn't figured out anything in advance.

I'll leave the obvious problems with your argument to others, and just stick to logical pedantry - not being able to "figure anything out" is not a problem, it's a symptom, which may very well be caused by the problems you listed.

Re:CIA Humint - Sigint - Remote Sensing

[bshanks]

True, but this causes problems in a democracy. History has shown that it is dangerous for the public to just trust a small cadre of (mostly unelected) government officials with the clearance to know what is going on.

This may not be avoidable in this case. Still, it would be irrational for citizens not to be skeptical of information that they cannot verify. The public should presume that additional government control and bureaucracy is unjustified until proven otherwise.

The burden must remain on the intelligence organizations to demonstrate their usefulness to the public in verifiable ways. I recognize that this is difficult.

Re:CIA Humint - Sigint - Remote Sensing

[lommer]

Actually, one of the parents was completely wrong on that one. A teacher of mine was in NATO hq in brussels almost 3 months before the attempted coup in the USSR against Gorbachev, and they already knew about the coup and had even declassified it to the point where they could tell my teacher. When the coup happened, the media reported that it was a huge surprise to everyone, but many people, and at least NATO were well aware of it months ahead of time. So they didn't miss that, and the parent poster's mistake there really should call into question the reliability ofthe rest of his list. The media does NOT constitute a reliable source for this kind of info AFAIAC, let someone who is actually in a position to know these things testify and then we can talk.

CIA overthrows dictatorships

[Anonymous Coward]

"time ferrying cocaine around southeast asia and creating military dictatorships"

The CIA is actually known for overthrowing military dictatorships, and helping countries fend off invaders.

Re:CIA overthrows dictatorships

[Anonymous Coward]

The CIA is actually known for overthrowing military dictatorships, and helping countries fend off invaders.

Keep drinking that electric kool-aid, dupe.

Re:CIA overthrows dictatorships

[Anonymous Coward]

> The CIA is actually known for overthrowing military dictatorships, and helping countries fend off invaders.

Well, they're also well known for stupid shit like back in 1973 when then they overthrew the democratic government of Chile. It was replaced it with a dictatorship. You've heard of Gen. Pinochet, right..?

Mass arrests, summary executions, torture, "disappearances"..

Re:CIA overthrows dictatorships

[neocon]

You know, I hate to disappoint you, but under the Clinton administration, all of the CIA's records of the coup in Chile were declassified and analyzed. The truth, unfortunately, is rather less sinister, though perhaps more disappointing, than your little black-helicopter theory.

See, although the CIA were spending lots of budget dollars to monitor the situation in Chile after Allende nullified the Constitution there and cancelled elections, when Pinochet siezed power, they were as surprised as anyone else.

Pinochet, by the way, stepped down a little more than a decade later, under pressure from the US to hold free elections. When he lost the ensuing election, he retired to private life. Do you think that Allende, who had brought in over three hundred guerillas from Cuba to act as a personal bodyguard after he nullified the Chilean constitution, would have done the same?

Re:CIA overthrows dictatorships

[Anonymous Coward]

That he "retired to private life" offers no consolation to those whose friends and family were killed for political reasons. We're talking more than 4,000 people killed or missing. (figure quoted from London Sunday Times)

This was encouraged by the CIA and the whitehouse, there's no "theory" about it.

September 11th, 1973. Nice day for a coup, I guess..

Re:CIA overthrows dictatorships

[neocon]

I don't think I said it was any consolation for his victims, any more than Allende's being deposed was any consolation for his, or any more than Castro's eventual death will be any consolation for the families of the tens of thousands he has murdered.

What I did say, and am now repeating, is that as opposed to the random unbacked accusations which you are making, the actual evidence is now on the table, and it shows that we were not involved in the Pinochet coup.

To quote the report:

Although some of these residual propaganda operations may have benefited Pinochet and the putchists indirectly, officers of the CIA and the Intelligence Community were not involved in facilitating Pinochet.s accession to President nor the consolidation of his power as Supreme Leader. For most of the period, CIA had no covert action authority for Chile. While the CIA had liaison relationships with various security services over the years, there is no indication that any service asked for, or that the CIA offered, any assistance to promote Pinochet to the Presidency.

and the documents are there to back this conclusion.

Re:CIA overthrows dictatorships

[Malcontent]

Why would you take the word of the CIA on this? Why would you take the word of the US govt on this?

Both entitites have shown repeatedly that they lie, lie, lie, lie, lie and lie some more whenever it suits them.

Re:CIA overthrows dictatorships

[Malcontent]

That and the shah.

Re:CIA overthrows dictatorships

[neocon]

Do you have some evidence? Or are you suggesting that random FUD spewed by AC's on slashdot is a more reliable source?

C'mon, that doesn't even pass the laugh test...

I mean it's all very well to allege government lying. But unless you are alleging that the government saying something makes that thing false, you need to provide some evidence. The CIA denies that they are storing UFOs at Roswell, too, after all, but that doesn't mean they are, now does it?

Re:CIA overthrows dictatorships

[Malcontent]

Apparently you don't think the us govt ever lies. Apparently you also think that the CIA never lies.

Really I have nothing to say to you. They are both habitual liars and I don't as a matter of habit ever believe anything that a habitual liar might tell me especially when it concerns them telling me that they didn't do anything wrong.

Re:CIA overthrows dictatorships

[neocon]

Ah yes, the old /. standby, proof by assertion.

While I certainly never asserted that the CIA has never lied (though you have yet to provide us with a single documented example), if you have any evidence that they are lying in this case you really should present it.

Otherwise, you're just blowing FUD and hot air.

Infighting

[Anonymous Coward]

A little mouse once told me a story about two different IT groups in the CIA focusing a lot of effort on making the other group look bad. This infighting has led to a lot of missed opportunities.

not clear on the concept

[gclef]

The first part of his analysis reads very clearly like someone who didn't bother to understand the business he was advising before spouting off. (This is a common problem with consultants.)

He dismisses the security concerns that prevent a lot of technology deployment as risk elimination rather than risk management, and says that this attitude hurts IT deployment within the CIA. The thing is, he says this without understanding that the CIA's risk profile is *totally* different from a business risk profile. The CIA can not take risks that a business can, as lives, not dollars, are at stake in the work they do. Any actual security consultant who made that mistake would (should) be fired on the spot.

Granted, it sounds like his other recommendations (streamlining procurement, merging different IT groups within the CIA) are reasonable, but as a security person, that first paragraph just set me off.

Re:not clear on the concept

[Anonymous Coward]

He dismisses the security concerns that prevent a lot of technology deployment as risk elimination rather than risk management, and says that this attitude hurts IT deployment within the CIA. The thing is, he says this without understanding that the CIA's risk profile is *totally* different from a business risk profile.

Actually, he seemed to very clearly understand the differences between the two. He correctly argued that while they are different, there is such a thing as excessive paranoia. There are always tradeoffs, CIA or corporation, so it is always necessary to think in terms of risk management: what are the tradeoffs of increased security?

As you noted yourself, look at his actual recommendations at the end. They aren't obviously insecure "business-risk" solutions.

Re:not clear on the concept

[gclef]

I disagree. Look at one of his recommendations:

The most critical upgrade for the DI is deploying a fully integrated workstation that allows DI analysts to move easily among programs, databases, and security levels. In addition, the DI should put a high priority on introducing SIPRNET-- DoD's SECRET-level network--into each workstation. SIPRNET may become the nucleus of a secure communications system for homeland security (that will include law enforcement and emergency response personnel, in addition to a broad set of military users). Use of SIPRNET would also give DI analysts an IT platform that is less restricted than their current, highly classified network. This would allow them to communicate and publish products in a large, but reasonably secure environment.

There's a good idea buried in there: get SIPRNET onto analyst's desktops. Unfortunately, it's buried in bad ideas....and don't even start me on the phrase "reasonably secure environment."

Re:not clear on the concept

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't actually give examples of disagreement with what I said; other than "it's buried in bad ideas".

Re:not clear on the concept

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

The CIA can not take risks that a business can, as lives, not dollars, are at stake in the work they do. Any actual security consultant who made that mistake would (should) be fired on the spot.

Actually, they not only can they should just because lives are at stake. You completely fail to see the benefit side of the cost-benefit analysis. C.f. if the CIA had taken greater security risks prior to 9/11 and as a result had lost ten people but that that would have thwarted the attack then 2990 (or so) more people would be alive today than is currently the fact. Clearly a positive outcome. Even in terms of PR since you would never have heard about those ten...

The author (who is an ex CIA officer and hence not naive in these matters) is spot on. What he points out is that today the CIA doesn't even perform a cost benefit analysis when dealing with IT-security risks, instead going for risk elimination. That way they wouldn't even know of the potential benefits.

This is of course not new. General Groves was dismayed at the lax security at Los Alamos, chastising Oppenheimer that the researchers were discussing secrets with each other left and right. Groves wanted to put everybody in uniform and get them disciplined. Oppenheimer responded that he was all for it, but that Groves could then forget about the bomb; science doesn't work that way. Formalise everything, and the free flow of ideas and information will stop, leading to no science getting done.

At a lower level Feinmann observed the same thing, he leaked to his team what it was that they were actually doing (test yield calculations, instead of just crunching incomprehensible numbers). His group increased performance ten times as a result.

These two things undoubtedly increased the risk of serious leaks in the organisation, but the benefits far outweighed the exposure (depending on what world view you subscribe to), and hence the right thing to do.

By your reasoning, the army could never advance since defensive battle is safer than offensive, and life is after all at stake...

Mr Hat!

[Anonymous Coward]

(insert Southpark reference here, episode 511) Mr. Garrison is putting the final touches on his top secret device, which he simply calls "IT". Take it like a man!

CIA says their IT sucks. I wonder why?

[Le Marteau]

(CIA Guy discussing his article from CIA publication) "Yeah, our IT sucks, that's the ticket. Why, it sucks so bad, nobody has to even use encryption to prevent us from listening. It sucks so bad, we can't ever even BEGIN to spy on our own citizens, even if we want to. Terrorists don't have to do ANYTHING to remain anonymous, yeah, that's the ticket. It sucks so bad, I think the Congress should cut us a nice fat check, yeah, that'll help us protect the children."

recruiters told me this three years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

I went to a job fair and talked with the CIA recruiters. They told me that if I was interested in cutting edge I should stay away. They had hardware and software that was older than dirt and had no budget for anything new and no forceable change in budget status.

I had them send me the employment forms anyway...

I then went to a dot.bomb - iCAST.com -
I should have gone with the CIA::

questions on the form ( in addition to listing all relatives, frinnds, neighbors, aquaintences, relatives neighbors aquaintences etc.)

Do you have any issue with being relocated during your tenure with the CIA

Do you understand that once hired you will remain an employee for a minimum of three years

Do you understand that at any time you may be relocated to wherever we need your services

AllYourFreedomsAreBelongToUs: +1, Patriotic

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks To George W. Bush

Welcome to the United States of Amnesia

Cheers,
W00t

Get Your War On

e-mail vs. formal message traffic

[KD7JZ]

I worked for a large 3 Letter Agency during the late 80's through the mid-90s and one large issue we had was the transition from formal message traffic to e-mail. The military/intel community for years had a network for sending formal message traffic. These were written messages with formal accountability. They could be used to order actions, dispatch personnel, transfer money. When e-mail came along it was a big challenge to figure out if that same accountability could be built into e-mail or not.

Re:e-mail vs. formal message traffic

[kin_korn_karn]

if the comms weren't time-sensitive, why replace the written messages at all?

Re:e-mail vs. formal message traffic

[Anonymous Coward]

cost. In a distributed setup you have to move the documents. If everyone is in one big building then that's one of cost. If folks were in Key West, FL and needed to get traffic to Seattle, WA (diametric locations in the country for an illustrative example) then "instantness" isn't the only feature.

But yes... conventional email by definition makes copies and infinitely distributable.

SAIC

[lpret]

I was just reading an article in Business 2.0 (yes, I try to help out where I can) about a group called SAIC that does a lot of data mining and management for the CIA as well as many other aspects of the government. Apparently they do quite a bit of the security aspect of the CIA as well. Now if only they'd go public, their stock would be incredible...

Re:SAIC

[Anonymous Coward]

Their stock is incredible. I was an employee for 3 of their biggest growth years and made a ton of money when I left the company. They should remain private.

Re:SAIC

[Anonymous Coward]

ROTFL! That's some funny shit!

Civilian not Military

[Anonymous Coward]

"Military Intelligence"

It is a cicilian organisation.

Re:Civilian not Military

[djeaux]

It is a cicilian organisation.

The Mafia is a Sicilian organization.

The CIA is no more "civilian" than I believe everything the US government tells me. If it walks like a duck & quacks like a duck, it doesn't matter if it tells you it's a dog.

your sig

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't the ! a little redundant, since it wouldn't prompt for confirmation after you had written the file?

Re:your sig

[Torinaga-Sama]

It depends on how exicted you are about the whole thing.

Actually I had to use when on an HP system with multiple root accounts and it just stuck with me.

Not a fair accounting....

[DesScorp]

Like any govermnet agency, CIA is going to screw up from time to time. But even if they had everything they wanted, they STILL couldn't be omniscient.

Part of the problem is that CIA can't publicly talk about their successes much, for fear of jeapordizing personnel or methods. And even when they DO publicly make accurate predictions, often they're ignored.

The perfect example of this happened in 1983. The CIA released a report called "Terminal Giants". It was either ignored or written off as "Reagan-esque right wing propoganda" by the media and leftist politicians. The prediction of the report? That the USSR's economy was dying because of excessive military spending, and that the Soviet Union could collapse within ten years.

Nobody believed them. And to this day, CIA still doesn't get credit for that prediction.

Re:Not a fair accounting....

[Wyatt Earp]

Which is funny because all through the 80s the DoD published Soviet Military Power that wildly overstated WP military strength and systems deployment.

I have the 83,85,86,87,88,89 SMPs and they were claiming the Mi-28 would be in service by 1988 and it's still only in limited Russian deployment and very limited foreign military sales.

Re:Not a fair accounting....

[neocon]

This is undoubtedly true, but pointing at systems whose deployment was originally expected in the period '87-'91 when the Soviets were backing away from the Brezhnev doctrine, and scaling back defense spending accordingly is not necessarily good evidence of incorrect predictions.

After all, the US military has had more than its share of platform rollouts pushed back as much as decades by development problems or budget cuts, or even cancelled. MV-22 Osprey, anyone? Crusader artillery piece?

Re:Not a fair accounting....

[Anonymous Coward]

Des, you're a fucking tard.

Look at the CIA website

[ThomasFlip]

If you goto the CIA website and look under the careers section, they want people with WINDOWS experience. I think that sums up there lack of adaptivity.

Re:Look at the CIA website

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine that, they want people that know how to use the dominant OS on the market.

Re:Mt. Weather

[Anonymous Coward]

You're lame. I know a lot of people who work up at MT. Weather and it's not all that hi-tech. I've also driven by there personally (it's pretty cool at night) but never inside. Also, I've yet to hear about drugs being stashed in the mountain. I've heard them seeing various "high level" politicians but no drugs.

If any of you believe that the CIA isn't on top of their game you are blind. Their "public" budget has been increasted 50% from last year (who knows what their classified budget is now).

Remember that companies like SAIC play a major role in the US' spying programs and activities. They say they are a "private employee owned" company...check out who's on the board of directors.

-PR

Technology?

[bobm17ch]

It`s the topology of the CIA that is causing the problem.

Any organisation with so many unique elements will struggle to create a single IT framework to complement and aid information availability.

The best solution is to implement several, smaller-scale solutions, defined by the goals and interests of individual areas, and work towards integration at a time when these technologies are mature.

Economical and soundly-engineered methods are the only way to ensure long term functionality in the longer term.

This guy missed something

[PolyDwarf]

Clearly, we need more information about the people in the CIA, and what their relative abilities are, not whining about the IT abilities or lack thereof.. I mean, where's the mention of John Clark?

The $ETHNIC military uses an air gap too.

[vaxer]

In fact, their entire network is airgapped -- it's all Wi-Fi. No cables, no hackers, no problem.

Re:The $ETHNIC military uses an air gap too.

[TopShelf]

hehehe... mod parent up FUNNY! Whooo... those $EXPLETIVE $PERJORATIVE $ETHNIC's...

oh not THAT "It"

[zzyzx]

Anyone else think at first that this was going to be about the CIA buying some segways?

This is not limited to the CIA

[nemaispuke]

Before I retired from the Navy, I worked in an Intelligence facility at the Top Secret level. The equipment that was available to me was several Macs (to produce PowerPoint slides), a Sun Sparc 10 used as a file and print server, a terminal to connect to PROFS (IBM OfficeVision) to read Top Secret e-mail, another Mac to access the Secret LAN and read Secret e-mail. There were no unclassified PC's, Macs, or Unix workstations to "surf the net" despite reading an article in the same command about "open source intelligence". Part of the problem is compartmenting the information which makes it difficult to search for information since not everyone can access all the information based on the compartments an individual is cleared for. This will not go away soon. And let's not get into the politics of it.

HAHAH!

[Anonymous Coward]

Post-Nuke!!! That was excellent! Funny, but way to obvious.

Economical? Soundly engineered?

[BitwizeGHC]

This looks like a job for...

OPEN SOURCE!!! ...man!

:wq! has its uses

[ShortSpecialBus]

Actually, if you are trying to write to a read only file, you need the !

I keep my counterstrike config.cfg file in mode 444, so that the game never overwrites it, but if want to make changes, i simply :wq! and it will override the read-only.

It's useful from tiem to time.

A bad case of falling behindism?

[swb]

"Falling Behindism" is a term that I and my old boss created for the creeping paranoia that says, no matter how hard you're working at it, you're falling behind technologically and are not keeping up. The corallary is that you can't ever catch up and are doomed to obsolensence.

I think everyone largely suffered from this during the late 90s, when, if you weren't paying attention for a week, you got two full revs behind on your applications and missed an OS rev entirely.

The reality is usually more nuanced and perceptions of technological sophistication are very skewed by trends. Having an advanced widget doesn't prevent falling behindism if the buzz is about using anti-widgets instead.

I think it's also a problem to look at the state of technology across broad fields (OS, systems, networks, applications) and see yourself behind on all of them. It's a false standard, since it's nearly impossible to get any decent sized organization current on everything (or anything) -- and even if you could, you'd garner some risk due to new problems not yet discovered.

ok, mr smart guy, I'm calling you on that!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Give me your name, and I'll put out a warrant for your arrest..."

Rob Malda, wanted for child molestation.

Classifed networks difficult for a reason

[Anonymous Coward]

they call it Sensitive Compartmentalized Information (SCI) for a reason...

its the easiest and most effective way to ensure that people like our friends at the (Karl Gruber from Die Hard)Efff....Beee.... Eyeeeee...(/Karl Gruber) who do end up selling out and spy against the US are prevented from getting all the secrets.

I've got a TS/SCI, worked on a few Special Access Requires (SAP) programs, and realize that not only for the programs' sake, but for mine as well, if i was ever caught or captured while on travel in a foreign country, SCI is there to ensure that not all the marbles get let out.

The deliniation between SCI programs, the "need to know", and the restricted access is not there because its assumed that _everyone_ is not trustworthy... on the contrary.

Its there to keep you safe, limit your danger, ensure that you can't be squeezed for any more information than is necessary, AND to limit the damages inflicted by spys/sellouts/rat bastards.

I ensure you all - as part of "The Conspiracy" - we're just normal folks.. you probably even live or play or church with many that have these accesses... but this guy is a twit if he thinks that there is a SIMPLE approach to problems... there is not.

MLS networks are hard to do. They are very difficult to work with. They are not elegant and simple. Can this info go from this net to this one? What about someone with tickets x, y, and not z? Can he still get this info, but not that info? What is the classification of this jpg? Of this .zip file? Of this .sit file? (yeah, everyone's on a Winblowz box, right.)

The permutations are mindnumbing... and there is simply no really great way to do it other than physical network separation.... for now. Now, i challenge folks all the time to use VPNs, because there often is no need to use separate copper/fibre... but we simply need a content separation... that is not being adopted as fast as it should, i agree.

SIPRNET is a quagmire because of the low level of security is it/has/protects.. and the number of people jacked into it. Its a bitch for everyone, and usually, its not worth the trouble. Its a bitch because its at such a low level - SECRET - and often, people try to integrate UNCLASS onto it. DISA keeps it held so close because too many people get their SIPRNET account, and then want to jack in all kinds of things that may or may not munge the security of the network.

I don't have the solution to the SIPRNET problem. I'm not going to say i do... but running the Homeland Defense agency (or whatever the hell it is) isn't going to make matters better, i guarantee you that... how many freaking govt. wakners are going to want/need/get SECRET clearances just to email each other the latest "10 things To Make Someone Smile" spam via SPIRNET simply because their boss said they need SIPRNET.... unnecessary.

There is no easy fix to it other than simply building your own network, and going around the whole problem.

Yes, OSS is a great thing for the classifed world.. and it pisses me off that we don't use it more.. because we'd have the smegging code if we did... you morons.

(obvously, i'm not in charge around here).

sorry for this being all over the map.. i'm working. ;-)

Please

[4of12]

Failing to Keep Up With the Information Revolution

So, tell me, truthfully, just how many organizations as large as the CIA can make the claim that they have, indeed, "kept up with the Information Revolution", eh?

These are just conventional and expected codewords that are to be interpreted as "we need our IT budget intact, preferably more, and certainly not less".

Whoever is the CIO of the CIA (what a catchy sounding title that is) should get an F on their report card if they didn't get some similarly-titled report published.

I still don't get it

[supernova87a]

who needs Information Technology at the Culinary Institute of America?

toricelli

[b17bmbr]

you are referring to the toricelli ammendment which stipulated we couldn't work with criminals, etc. had horible consequences. and of sen. torch, as he was known, was run out of town on corruption charges.

James Woolsey

[glrotate]

James Woolsey is who you are thinking of. Clinton ran him off for being too pushy.

While he was right on the Torricelli ammendment, be careful listening to him too closely. He was being paid by rich Iraqi exiles to whoop up war fervor and has made quite a few blunders on his own.

Re:James Woolsey

[neocon]

Where `too pushy' means `he objected to the fact that over two years passed after his appointment before Clinton would meet with him', eh? But given the rest of the parent post, I'm sure you're about to tell us that Clinton actually did care about intelligence issues...

Inside the CIA, a common joke around the time a lone crackpot landed a small plane on the whitehouse lawn was to claim that it had been Woolsey, desperately trying to get in to see his boss.

No, really -- if you're going to make such serious claims about Woolsey, you should provide hard evidence. Otherwise, you're just blowing hot air.

Re:James Woolsey

[glrotate]

No, really -- if you're going to make such serious claims about Woolsey, you should provide hard evidence. Otherwise, you're just blowing hot air.

The best ime was one of his many appearances on Hardball when he told Chris Matthews that Iraq had ICBMs. I fell out of my chair laughing for a good 20 minutes.

Re:James Woolsey

[neocon]

Source? Transcript?

Or are you, in fact, moving on to a new accusation, just as unbacked as the last one, now that you were asked for evidence of that one?

Re:James Woolsey

[glrotate]

Anybody watching the episode saw it. If you missd it, your loss.

Don't forget Woolsey was also one of the loudest voices insisting Iraq had a massive WMD program, when in fact they didn't have a single lousy SCUD.

Of course he gets paid by the INC.

Don't believe if it makes you feel better.

Re:James Woolsey

[neocon]

Ah yes, the old /. standby, demonstration by repetition.

Keep telling us `Iraq didn't even have a single SCUD' if you want, but given that they fired several at Kuwait during the recent battle, you're not exactly helping your credibility by doing so.

Likewise, if after months of telling us that if Hans Blix and his merry band hadn't found WMD in six months this meant that they needed more time, you're not helping your credibility much by claiming that if US troops haven't found more than traces of such weapons in three weeks since the fighting ended, this means they weren't there.

So I think we understand enough about your credibility for me to repeat that you should provide evidence of your wild claims about Woolsey or stop making them.

Re:James Woolsey

[glrotate]

Iraq didn't have any SCUDs. Iraq fired HY2 (a modified HY1) Silkworm (US designation Seersucker) missiles at Kuwait. A much different beast. They have an effective range of 80 miles tops. A modified SS-1C Scud-B or Al-Hussein has a range of about 500 miles. A big difference.

Here's an AP story of the missile that hit the shopping mall in Kuwait.

Missile fired at Kuwait City

U.S. officials speaking on the condition of anonymity said the attack on the mall appeared to have involved a Chinese-made Silkworm cruise missile launched from southern Iraq.

Note Iraq was never barred from possesing the Silkworms because of their limited range.

I challange you to find a story about a Scud being found in Iraq, it didn't happen. It's pretty obvious you really don't know what you're talking about. Try informinging yourself and come on back to /.

Re:James Woolsey

[neocon]

Umm, hello? No one's discussing the navally-launched seersucker which impacted outside a shopping mall in Kuwait city. We are discussing the fourteen or so SCUDs which were fired on ballistic trajectories from southern Iraq into Kuwait in the first week and a half of the war.

In case you weren't paying attention, here are some stories on those attacks.

• The Guardian: Iraq launches Scud missiles
• Canadian Broadcasting Corp.: Iraq lobs missiles at Kuwait
• Houston Chronicle: Patriot system proves its worth

I mean really, faced with fourteen SCUDs fired at Kuwait, your answer is `look, this one attack was with another type of missile, so there are no SCUDs'? Iraqi information minister Mohammad Sayeed Sahaf would be so proud...

Re:James Woolsey

[jdfox]

In case you weren't paying attention, here are some stories on those attacks.

* The Guardian: Iraq launches Scud missiles
* Canadian Broadcasting Corp.: Iraq lobs missiles at Kuwait
* Houston Chronicle: Patriot system proves its worth

And here are the follow-up stories, written once the over-excited journos had a chance to calm down a little and look at the evidence:

• The Guardian: "Taking sides" (BBC reported false Scud stories put out by US & UK military)
  
• Canadian Broadcasting Corp: " Iraqi TV reports fighting 150 km from Baghdad" (but no Scuds or WMD found in Iraq)
  
• Seattle Times: "Accidents cast doubts on Patriot missiles" (they didn't knock down many Scuds, but they were highly effective against British fighter jets)
  
• San Jose Mercury: "U.S. confident trailers were used to produce bioweapons" (no Scuds or anything else found yet really, but we definitely expect to find something really important Real Soon Now)
  
  

Re:James Woolsey

[neocon]

Um, yes. Did you read those articles? Did they allege that illegal SCUD and al-Samoud missiles were not fired? No. They state that the Patriot missile system was also involved in two friendly fire incidents.

And? Why just today, CNN is reporting in more detail on an Iraqi use of illegal al Samoud missiles during the war. The missile described in the story was fired from `North of Basra' and landed outside Camp Doha in Kuwait.

It only takes about five minutes and a map of Iraq to confirm that a missile firing on a camp outside Kuwait City from Basra has a range greater than the 150 km permitted. As noted here, the al-Samoud also violates the restrictions on maximum engine size for rockets and missiles.

Thirteen other illegal ballistic missiles were fired during the war as well, as both the articles I linked and the articles you linked confirm. Eight of these others were intercepted, and five were off course enough to be deemed unthreatening to troops or populated areas.

Are you denying these facts, even though the articles both of us have posted agree on them? Are you agreeing with glrotate that no such missiles were fired, and the cruise missile attack on Kuwait City was the only attack? Really?

IT

[Anonymous Coward]

look into my dead lights

CIA Successes Stay Classified & Out of the Me

[reallocate]

Almost by definition, you'll only read abut the Agency's mistakes or alleged failure's to "prevent" something.

The CIA works in a classified world. If something works, news about it stays classified. If something breaks badly enough that someone else starts talking to the media, you may hear their side of the story. Odds are you won't hear the real CIA side of the story, because that remains classified.

Read carefully press reports about CIA activities, especially any that allege to have "inside" sources. Those "inside" sources usually turn out to be "retired" or "former" employees. I.e., people who no longer have access to the Agency. Real CIA insiders remain bound by their security agreements.

By the way, the CIA's job is to collect and report intelligence. It's the job of the person they report to -- that guy in the White House -- to prevent bad things happening.

Somebody mod this guy up!

[djeaux]

ROTFL!

Unfortunately /. isn't giving me any karma to dole out today, or you'd get a few points!

So let me change my original assertion to: Government intelligence is an oxymoron!

You know you're a geek (wasRe:The $ETHNIC militar)

[gauche]

When you want to know why an ETHernet Network Interface Card would even have a military...

The CIA just wants you to think they are behind...

[Anonymous Coward]

While they secretly have super duper high tech gee whiz type stuff locked away since the Alien Saucer crash in Roswell.

It's all a front.

This is actually the best kind of security

[Sycraft-fu]

If you have a system or network of system that are totally seperate from the Internet in every way, there is no chance they can be hacked from it. The idea is you have a secure network, like the Internet but for you only, that is physically seperate. Any computer connected to it can not be connected to any other network. Then, provided that the computers in question are physically secure, you have eliminated the problem of hacking. Only uathorized personel can get near a computer on the network so only they can access any of its resources.

It is like at work, we have a public network, that most things run over. We also have some private networks that are either no different switches or use non-routable address space. Those then get connected to the public network with a firewall. Well while those are more secure than system on a public network, there is still a weakpoint. If someone can hack the firewall, or computer assoicated with it (for SSH access) then they can get in the private network. If we want to be REALLY careful, we setup a dummy network in the test lab. It never connects to the public network at all so no security is necessary. You have to physically be in that room to access it.

Re:This is actually the best kind of security

[raju1kabir]

It is like at work, we have a public network, that most things run over. We also have some private networks that are either no different switches or use non-routable address space. Those then get connected to the public network with a firewall. Well while those are more secure than system on a public network, there is still a weakpoint. If someone can hack the firewall, or computer assoicated with it (for SSH access) then they can get in the private network.

If the private network machines can surf the web, then no firewall hacking is necessary. They just need to put sufficiently good porn online to tempt a private network user to visit a web site which exploits the MS bug-of-the-week (or the "dumb user clicks OK" wetware bug). This can install a remotely-controllable trojan that speaks application-proxy-valid HTTP.

Re:This is actually the best kind of security

[Sycraft-fu]

Well in this case the private network talks to things like Cisco routers, IDS sensors, async consoles and the like.

Re:I had a chance to look at the classified editio

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh Huh... "DI analysts know far less about new information technology and services than do their counterparts in the private sector and other government organizations. On average, they seem about five years or more behind. Many analysts seem unaware of data that are available on the Internet and from other non-CIA sources." ... Sure.... Right... Just keep on using that there internet thingy.. we ain't got noooo idea how ta tap into that...dang kids...!!

The best info technology

[Anonymous Coward]

Get information that Joe Terrorist is a bad guy...

Go kill him...

or

Get info that Governments are supporting terrorists.

Launch nukes from MT missle silo...

These two approaches will solve the problem -- no hi tech computers needed.

new hire at CIA!

[nxs212]

and it ain't Jennifer Garner :)
Jayson Blair is CIA's newest hire. He comes from liberal, yet shrewd and intelligent NY Times where he was a "hands-on" reporter("All the News That's Fit to Print")
George Tenet personally welcomed Jayson and introduced him as ~The man who will cut CIA's travel budget in half and will bring honesty, diversity and precision to our organization~
George also mentioned that he came across Jayson's resume on dice.com; (leading online provider of online recruiting services for technology professionals) Blair's resume was simply stellar~ said Tenet, ~With his experience and skills he should be twice as old!~

p.s.
troll alert!

Re:I had a chance to look at the classified editio

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the NSA and the FBI are the ones who do most of the Internet-tapping. Furthermore, the DI analysts aren't the guys who go about actually doing that sort of thing -- they're the guys who analze the data that other people collect.

Re:Bah, just a front! -- I doubt it

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to remember that the CIA has three divisions, DI, DO, and DS&T. The Operations and Sci/Tech boys get all the toys -- which I'm sure are amazingly advanced -- used for collecting data in the field. The poor Intelligence analysts that muck through documents and databases are the ones stuck behind.

It's common to think of the government as one big unified organization, but even one agency can be highly compartmentalized, with quite different resources and procedures.

Sounds Like IBM

[bobaferret]

The current State of the DI sounds like the early 90's IBM. Organized in a very heirarchical fasion, that prevents it from adapting to new dynamics in the market. Perhaps they should look to the private sector companies that managed to adapt well to the current times.

-jj-

CIA DOES blow up US commercial planes though!

[Anonymous Coward]

This was an eye opener!

http://www.dcia.com/gander1.html

Re:CIA DOES blow up US commercial planes though!

[neocon]

Heh. Anyone tempted to take this claim seriously should check out the front page of the linked site. Real nutjob stuff -- it's hard to see how they get any sleep, what with all those black helicopters circling overhead...

Re:I had a chance to look at the classified editio

[FroMan]

Now, if we could just figure out what "bel" and "ong" mean. We'd know all the CIA secrets.

(Yes, I know a slashdot induced space)

Don't believe everything you hear

[Muttonhead]

Black Ops:

1. Downplay your capabilities.
2. Carry out a sophistacated op, like bombing yourself.
3. Blame somebody else.
4. Proclaim, "Oops, we goofed. Give us more money to fix the problem."
5. Get more money for computers, etc.

Example: Michael Hayden a year or two before 9/11/2001.

True? Who knows, but the moral of the story is don't believe everything you hear. It stands to reason that anything the CIA wants the public to know is made available for a reason. And likewise everything it doeosn't want people to know is not made available.

You sir, are absolutely correct.

[DrMorpheus]

I had the exact same reaction when reading it as well. The author simply doesn't understand the "nature of business" that the CIA is in.

Can their operations be improved? Almost certainly, it's the nature of every organization that inefficiencies arise. But as you stated, the CIA has to actively eliminate risk rather than just "manage" it.

Re:You sir, are absolutely correct.

[Anonymous Coward]

why in the world do you say he doesn't understand it? he just spent a year in residence, observed & interviewed hundreds of people, all in addition to formerly BEING IN the cia. just because you draw different conclusions doesn't mean that his views aren't "informed".

the only thing the cia "has" to do is to further our national interest & security. and you, being as enlightened as you claim to be, certainly know there's no such thing as total risk avoidance? you're *always* managing your risk.

Re:You sir, are absolutely correct.

[sjanich]

He was also a Former CIA Analyst.

Try it if you dare.

[ratfynk]

Just try cracking certain domains and watch how fast you get whacked. The community wants hackers to try, it is their bread and butter. The recruiting methods for the community are a little more sophisticated than Microsoft. Dot Net hackers need not apply.

Their ability to code requirements go far
beyond Redmond. Do you guys think that a system like Carnivor could have come from Redmond? Who built the net in the first place? Brilliant minds are more common at the CIA than anywhere else in Government. It is just that they are smart enough not to need to advertise, the myths about the CIA being composed of stupid individuals are very carefully cultivated and a necessary diversion.

It's for visitors.

[Ayanami Rei]

...So they can get to the Internet. The WEP is to prevent freeloaders.

Air gap, buddy.

misinformation

[isaaccasaubon]

This is standard intelligence procedure. Let the enemy underestimate you. George Bush senior was head of CIA. Apparently he has George II using the same strategy. He's not as dumb as he's pretending to be. Neither is the CIA.

Re:misinformation

[Anonymous Coward]

It's "misunderestimate" according to Bush Jr.

Re:misinformation

[neocon]

The CIA isn't as dumb as Bush is pretending to be?

Or your understanding of grammar isn't as bad as you are pretending it to be?

Who needs to read the article?

[[cx]]

'Failing to Keep Up With the Information Revolution', which looks at how the agency has fared in staying up to date both with information security needs and with promising new technologies."

If the title is "FAILING TO KEEP UP...."

Obviously they havent fared very well keeping up with the technologies.. haha...

[cx]

Re:Try it if you dare.

[Anonymous Coward]

Who built the net in the first place?

It wasn't the CIA. It wasn't even, for the most part, the government, though it was originally funded by the government.

Re:Try it if you dare.

[Anonymous Coward]

... or it's the contractors that are really the intelligent ones. While credit should go to the CIA for recognizing the need for something like In-Q-Tel, this just demonstrates the fact that the government realizes it isn't the best-equipped organization at modernizing.

Could not disagree more strongly

[slashdotcassius]

For DI, to be breeched is to fail. As a phrase in the article adeptly hints, managing risk indicates, at best, incompetence, and at worst, treason. A policy of excluding risk, however, is acceptable. Where Bruce Berkowitz suggests, " . . . a 35-year-old DI analyst with ten years of experience ought to be able--routinely-- to take calls directly... noting where there is important uncertainty or disagreement", I could not disagree more strongly. Never should the opportunity for treasons of subterfuge of misdirection lie within a single human being. The current bureaucracy of peer review represents an excellent example of risk exclusion policy.

oh, wrong IT

[extropy]

Ok, that makes much more sense, I was imagining agents trying to be sneaky while wheeling around on Segways.

What do you think the CIA does?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's with you people? You think the CIA is about protecting America? Foiling bomb plots or stopping terrorists? Bzzzz! Wrong!
The CIA protects american *interests*, not americans. The american interests it protects are those of the rich minority. The CIA doesn't stop terrorists, it makes them. Making psychos like bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and Manuel Noriega, THATS what the CIA does. Also selling drugs and arming violent terror groups (Iran-Contra), supporting the worst human rights violaters (Columbian government), destabilizing and overthrowing governments (Iraq next Iran or Syria), all fall into the CIA jurisdiction.

My Bear Repellant Stick(tm)

[Opiuman]

Do you see any bears around me? No? Then my Bear Repellant Stick(tm) must be working -- As Seen on TV. Come on! The CIA hasn't been effective for ages. If anyone has prevented any attacks, it has been the work of the NSA and the FBI. The CIA has been moderately effective in processing Alerts from foreign intelligence bodies such as the Mossad, which they have grown rapidly dependant on.

natch?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you forgot the preceeding 's'!

Risk management still applies

[Goonie]

If the CIA makes a bad call because their IT systems made it impossible or too hard to retrieve important information people can die just as easily as a security breach.

Risk management is still the right way to do this - it's just that the risks on both sides of the ledger can sometimes be much higher.

disagree

[zogger]

I would have to disagree, pretty strongly. their track record is dismal. they barely escaped a complete breakup from the tip of the ice berg abuses that came out in the Church hearings. They have a bad habit of supporting, funding, training, and trading with bad guys like saddam, osama, noriega, and way back, castro. They've been caught in massive drug dealings. Not penny ante, massive, serious bales of cash big. Plane loads. Even the DEA has been warned off of approved cia shipments. Afghanistan is now running the largest amount of opium production in their history, with their support, I mean, we got spooks and military all over that place, we own it, so???? They also actually STOPPED the afghan war, called a time out, flew out some thousands-up to 8 thousand by some numbers- of top Taliban and al queda members to bases inside pakistan, and got away with it, then the war re started. That story poofed fast, but it really happened. They trained with, supported, sheltered, transported, armed and funded elements of the KLA albanian narco terrorist gangs. They are involved in money laundering, the rigged bankruptcy courts, take overs of various other legitimate businesses, and the worst, various crimes against humanity in the second and third world,including murder and torture, and most likely certain elements, with help from the mafia and inside the DIA were also involved with JFK's whack and some others.

The entire organization top to bottom, every member, isn't corrupt, I am not saying that, but it's so infested with long term chronic serial corruption,at managerial and leadership positions, and is so unavailable for any open investigations, that they need to be just stopped, and a new intel agency created in their place, with better oversight, better vetting, cross vetting, and severe penalities for going rogue, right up to treason charges. They need not one more penny, no more human assets, or electronic assets. It's not one rotten apple in the barrel now, it got WAY beyond that by 30 years ago, or longer. And it's so compartmentalised that it's just too hard now to even have an entity as powerful as the US legislature to even investigate, because, quite frankly, they can just lie about anything they want to, and it's almost impossible for the investigators to find out anything, from them being able to serious alter and forge documents and data, and from the huge sums of black market cash they operate with, ie, "no records".

The nation needs GOOD intelligence services,this is a gimmee, but services that are ALSO honest and not run as overlapping rogue profit mercenary outfits. Throwing good money after bad is never a wise decision. Spook work is always dirty, and sometimes they need to deal with dirty characters, that doesn't give them carte blanche to become dirty themselves.

Soft hyphens

[NickFitz]

Failing to Keep Up With the Information Revolution

Most obviously, they can't even use soft hyphens:

Center ... community ... shortcomings

happen to be the first three unnecessarily hyphenated words I found.

YMMV :-)

Dangers of private sector intelligence gathering.

[qtp]

Since the 1960's, the intelligence community> has used private corporate contractors, such as Wackenhut, The Curry Company, Scientologythe Music Corporation of America (The Curry Company's parent corporation), and the Mafia to gather information and diseminate disinformation. The changing nature of the information economy, due to the internet and Free Software, threatens the quite lucrative monopoly on information and populace control (hence the recent activities of the RIAA and the MPAA).

It seems to me that the Intelligence Community and the private contractors, who have seen thier profits dwindle since the end of the cold war, seek more to control IT in order to both increase thier ability to monitor the daily lives of private citizens, and to limit the access to information that may inform us about thier covert activities.

The concern of the CIA over technology is not one of information gathering, but one of information, and populace, control.

CIA has a great IT program

[bagsc]

Here is a link. Cleveland Institute of Art is one of the best for graphic design.

Re:I had a chance to look at the classified editio

[Art Tatum]

You should work for the New York Times or the Washington Post. You appear to have mastered the judicial use of quotes. I hear there's a post open at the Times. Some guy named Blair just left...

Levels of Trust

[herwin]

The underlying problem became clear to me when I went to the UK and learned how analysts there look at security engineering differently from analysts in the US Government. In the UK, they emphasize two areas more strongly:

• Levels of trust that reflect a sensitivity to how information is used. In the US, it's all or nothing.
  
• Explicit rules and policies for granting access that match the various levels of trust. This tends to be more informal in the US.
  

Consequently, US Government systems tend to be harder to use.

MOD PARENT UP!!!

[john.r.strohm]

This is PRECISELY correct.

By definition, you WILL NOT learn about the CIA's successes, because they are CLASSIFIED and they will STAY that way until everyone involved, and everyone whose involvement derives from it, is long since dead.

Here's some evidence

[jdfox]

Do you have some evidence? Or are you suggesting that random FUD spewed by AC's on slashdot is a more reliable source?

There's plenty of evidence online, if you're willing to read it. Here, this should get you started.

Re:Here's some evidence

[neocon]

Actually, I've read that site, as well as the much more thorough archive at Georgetown University (who have put the entirety of the declassified documents online). What you'll notice is that although there are a lot of repetitions of the same claims at that site, there are no pointers to actual evidence. The `proof' they cite falls into a couple of categories:

• evidence that the CIA was monitoring Chile closely after Allende suspended the rule of law and cancelled elections, something no one denies (and it would be absurd for them not to do so).
• evidence that some contacts which the CIA had worked with were involved (apparently without the CIA's knowledge -- at least no one has ever provided evidence of such knowledge) in the assassination of a one General Schneider two years before Pinochet's coup
• evidence that the US state department considered Allende's nationalization of industry and suspension of free elections a negative development (again, hardly surprising).

These are all accepted fact. Compared to copious evidence of these facts, however, there is no evidence of US involvement in Pinochet's rise to power.

In contrast, by the way, it is well known and uncontested fact that it was sustained pressure by the Reagan administration which forced Pinochet to step down after a little more than a decade in power, and to re-establish free elections. Do you think Allende would have done the same? Did Allende's buddy Fidel Castro do the same?

Re:Here's some evidence

[jdfox]

When did Allende suspend elections, as claimed in your first and third points?

You also claim the CIA had no knowledge of their contacts' illegal actions, ostensibly including that of Manuel Contreras and the DINA assassins of Letelier and Moffitt, and demand evidence of this knowledge. May I ask what sort of evidence would satisfy you that they knew?

Finally, you claim that pressure from the Reagan adminstration forced Pinochet to step down, and that this is an "uncontested fact". Yet the Reagan administration were selling helicopters to Pinochet's regime, all the while they were supposedly "pressuring" for elections.
http://www.hrw.org/reports/1989/WR89/C hile.htm

It's more logical to conclude that Pinochet was planning to step down, and the US was simply applying the same sort of "pressure" that Israel currently enjoys from the US, meaning mild, periodic press releases requesting the client state to do the decent thing. The Republicans put Pinochet there, should we congratulate them for asking him to step down years later, all the while suppressing documents on US involvement, all the while turning a blind eye to the torture and murder of tens of thousands, including that of US citizens?

What evidence can you cite that Allende would not have stepped down? So far, you have offered only Castro as some sort of proxy evidence.

In fact, Castro was never Allende's "buddy", and Castro was not encouraging revolution in Chile in Allende's time, rather the reverse is true. Castro and his Stalinists played a significant role in stopping revolution in Chile. When Castro visited Chile in 1971, and conflict was at its peak between the most militant sections of workers and the Allende government, Castro was advising against any independent revolutionary activity. Chile, he told the workers, was different to Cuba, and because of its long history of constitutional government, there was a distinct "Chilean road to socialism" which could take a parliamentary path. Cuba, on the other hand, was a dictatorship under the US' pal Batista, and Castro rightly saw there was no way a parliamentary struggle against Batista could succeed. He never did implement democracy in Cuba, and its correct to criticise him for that. But Allende did, and had Chile been left alone, it could have served as a stick to beat Castro with.
Nope, not good enough for the White House and the CIA, they wanted both govts out at any price. So to this day they defend their indefensible actions in Chile by saying "it all would have turned out like Cuba, we just KNOW it."

Re:Here's some evidence

[neocon]

When did Allende suspend elections, as claimed in your first and third points?

A list of Allende's constitutional violations was prepared by the Chilean Chamber of Deputies in August of 1973, and can be read here. Here is a report on Allende's abuses from the September 15, 1973 issue of The Economist, while a more modern take can be found here.

You'll find a good paper on the history of constitutional law in Chile here (.doc format, sorry), which details in passing some of how the Constitutional review process broke down early in Allende's rule, as Allende overruled and/or repeatedly refused to enforce laws passed by the legislature.

Incidentally, one of the best primary documents on Allende's abandonment of the Chilean constitution is the open letter which the Supreme Court of Chile wrote to the New York Times after they were forcibly dissolved by Allende. I haven't yet found this on the web, but I'll keep looking. Any good history of the era reproduces it, as well.

You also claim the CIA had no knowledge of their contacts' illegal actions, ostensibly including that of Manuel Contreras and the DINA assassins of Letelier and Moffitt, and demand evidence of this knowledge. May I ask what sort of evidence would satisfy you that they knew?

Kind of an odd question, really, since so far you've provided no evidence at all. In either case, I've already mentioned or linked to the known archives of Chile-related material, none of which (as far as I can tell) provide such evidence.

Even such knowledge, however, would be a far cry from evidence of US involvement in Pinochet's rise to power, however, no?

Finally, you claim that pressure from the Reagan adminstration forced Pinochet to step down, and that this is an "uncontested fact". Yet the Reagan administration were selling helicopters to Pinochet's regime, all the while they were supposedly "pressuring" for elections. http://www.hrw.org/reports/1989/WR89/Chile.htm

What confuses you about the idea of providing aid coupled to demands for reform? The fact is that Reagan aided Chile and demanded elections, and the result was elections, while Carter had cut ties to Chile and demanded elections, which resulted in nothing at all.

In other words, the result of Reagan's pressure was the stable democracy that Chile is today. And you propose that what, exactly, would have been a better course of action? Invasion?

It's more logical to conclude that Pinochet was planning to step down, and the US was simply applying the same sort of "pressure" that Israel currently enjoys from the US, meaning mild, periodic press releases requesting the client state to do the decent thing. The Republicans put Pinochet there, should we congratulate them for asking him to step down years later, all the while suppressing documents on US involvement, all the while turning a blind eye to the torture and murder of tens of thousands, including that of US citizens?

As you have yet to provide any evidence that the US `put Pinochet there', you have no grounds to base further claims on this allegation. When you have demonstrated that this wild conspiracy theory is true, then you may rationally theorize about `what it tells us', and not before...

And while we're at it, perhaps you can provide a source for your claims of `tens of thousands' killed under Pinochet's rule? Most credible reports which I've seen put the number of deaths at around 1,000 or 2,000, and even the site remember-chile.org which you link to

Re:Here's some evidence

[jdfox]

Thanks for the links. I can find many criticisms of Allende in there, but nowhere can I find evidence that he cancelled or suspended elections.

No, I would not have proposed invading Chile to affect political change: I am not a neocon. I propose that Carter and his successors ought to have not only ceased all weapons sales, but also stopped the CIA from providing covert aid, publicly cut ties with Chile, introduce resolutions aginst the Pinochet regime in the UN and other international bodies where the US holds sway, and introduced economic and other sanctions.

As for my evidence that the US helped to put Pinochet there, well, I'm sorry you're not convinced by it. I think it's far more damning than any evidence that US administrations have put forward against Iraq, Iran, Syria, Panama, Vietnam, etc. You seem happy for our military to take up cudgels against these on receipt of the slimmest of evidence, but then turn around and insist on the most rigorous standards of evidence for other countries.

And while we're at it, perhaps you can provide a source for your claims of `tens of thousands' killed under Pinochet's rule? Most credible reports which I've seen put the number of deaths at around 1,000 or 2,000, and even the site remember-chile.org which you link to puts the number of deaths at 3,197 (957 of those being `disappearances'). This is still too many, of course, but it raises questions about the credibility of your claims that you report numbers five to ten times higher thananyone else does...

Since he was very good at disposing of the bodies, it is indeed very difficult to prove an exact number of deaths. But I actually said "the torture and murder of tens of thousands". I am only sure of 3,197 dead so far, but many thousands more were tortured, and many still live with the physical and mental agony. On a personal note, I would prefer death to having my eyes slowly gouged out in front of my children.

Of course, your comparison of Israel, a free and open democracy with equal rights for all of its citizens, to either Allende's or Pinochet's dictatorships suggests that you're not really interested in reasoned debate anyway. Please take such nonsense to another thread...

I believe it to be a directly relevant analogy. Israel is not "a free and open democracy with equal rights for all its citizens": Israeli Arabs do not have the democratic freedoms that the majority of its citizens do. Similarly, those Arabs who would not or could not agree to forced citizenship, and their descendants, regularly have their human rights trampled in the worst ways. People were tortured and killed by the US client state Chile while the White House under GOP and Dems did almost nothing, and sometimes actually assisted this vile regime. The same is true for Israel, presently ruled by a war criminal no better than Pinochet, whom Bush describes as "a man of peace".

Well, let's see. Allende

* cancelled elections
* disbanded the Supreme Court of Chile
* actively encouraged mutinies within the Chilean navy, out of fear that officers might obey their oath to uphold the Chilean constitution
* ordered tear gas and even live ammunition fired into crowds of unarmed protestors, including a delegation of wives of military officers
* called for and received three hundred Cuban guerillas to act as a personal bodyguard


You repeat these allegations, yet have still offered no evidence to support them, only essays alleging them with no evidence in support. In particular, the link you provide right after the above quote does not support them anywhere as far as I can see. I would be interested to see some evidence please.

Even if you could prove all of the above, it would in no way prove that he would not have stepped down had the US failed to support the Pinochet coup. The future is unproveable, and I wouldn't dream of asking you to prov

Re:Here's some evidence

[neocon]

Let's go through what you're saying here:

Thanks for the links. I can find many criticisms of Allende in there, but nowhere can I find evidence that he cancelled or suspended elections.

Look again at what Chile's duly constituted chamber of deputies found in their declaration:

• ``the current government of the Republic, from the beginning, has sought to conquer absolute power with the obvious purpose of subjecting all citizens to the strictest political and economic control by the state''
• ``the administration has committed not isolated violations of the Constitution and the laws of the land, rather it has made such violations a permanent system of conduct, to such an extreme that it systematically ignores and breaches the proper role of the other branches of government''
• ``[The administration] has usurped Congress's principle role of legislation through the adoption of various measures of great importance to the country's social and economic life that are unquestionably matters of legislation through special decrees enacted in an abuse of power
• ``It has consistently mocked the National Congress's oversight role by effectively removing its power to formally accuse Ministers of State who violate the Constitution or laws of the land''
• ``Lastly, what is most extraordinarily grave, it has utterly swept aside the exalted role of Congress as a duly constituted power by refusing to enact the Constitutional reform of three areas of the economy that were approved in strict compliance with the norms established by the Constitution.''
• ``It has made a mockery of justice in cases of delinquents belonging to political parties or groups affiliated with or close to the administration, either through the abusive use of pardons or deliberate noncompliance with detention orders;''
• ``It has violated express laws and utterly disregarded the principle of separation of powers by not carrying out sentences and judicial resolutions that contravene its objectives''
• ``It has grievously attacked freedom of speech, applying all manner of economic pressure against those media organizations that are not unconditional supporters of the government, illegally closing newspapers and radio networks; imposing illegal shackles on the latter; unconstitutionally jailing opposition journalists; resorting to cunning maneuvers to acquire a monopoly on newsprint; and openly violating the legal mandates to which the National Television Network is subject by handing over the post of executive director to a public official not named by the Senate, as is required by law''
• `` It has obstructed, impeded, and sometimes violently suppressed citizens who do not favor the regime in the exercise of their right to freedom of association.''
• `` It has made frequent politically motivated and illegal arrests, in addition to those already mentioned of journalists, and it has tolerated the whipping and torture of the victims;''

In light of these abuses of power, many of them (such as the arrest and torture of journalists and political opponents) used to corrupt the results of various local elections, and all of them siezures of power in contravention of the Chilean constitution, are you really claiming that Allende meant to hand back all this power and hold elections in 1974? Really?

No, I would not have proposed invading Chile to affect political change: I am not a neocon. I propose that Carter and his successors ought to have not only ceased all weapons sales, but also stopped the CIA from providing covert aid, publicly cut ties with Chile, introduce resolutions aginst the Pinochet regime in the UN and other international bodies where the US holds sway, and introduced economic and other sanctions.

Re:Here's some evidence

[jdfox]

You have presented several articles, which do not mention him suspending or cancelling elections.

You have also provided a list of accusations by some elected politicians. The latter is not evidence, it's allegation. Where is your evidence?

Re:Here's some evidence

[neocon]

While I don't blame you for trying to change the subject away from your original allegations, now that you've failed to turn up any evidence for them, you really should go back and look at what I posted.

In particular, refering to the findings of the duly appointed sub-body of the Chilean legislature charged with investigating Allende's conduct as `` accusations by some elected politicians'' is rather silly. Do you refer to a finding of fact by a judge as ``a list of accusations from an appointed official''?

Re:Here's some evidence

[jdfox]

I've read every pearl you've written, and can find only allegations of other sorts of wrongdoing, and nothing about cancelling elections.

I'm still waiting for some evidence of your original, repeated assertion that Allende cancelled the elections.

Do you intend to supply any?

Re:Here's some evidence

[neocon]

With due respect, jdfox, I have already posted several links discussing the March 1973 Constitutional Elections in Chile.

As even this anti-Pinochet site acknowledges, Allende consistently ignored the results of the March,1973 Constitutional elections, spinning the results which had been 58-44 against his rule as a `victory'. Other documents I have linked point out that Mr. Allende used of violence, imprisonment, and torture against journalists and political opponents to achieve even this 44 percent showing.

Likewise, I have already demonstrated that by the summer of 1973, the entirety of the Chilean constitution was in suspension, that the courts and the legislature had been effectively shut down, with all of their power now in the hands of Allende and Allende alone, and with even direct votes of the legislature and direct rulings of the courts being ignored by Allende's administration.

Now I understand, given how far-fetched your original claims have turned out to be, and given how much difficulty you are having finding evidence to back your wild assertions, that you would like to change the subject. And I understand that getting hung up on a legal technicality (If an election was held, but its results ignored, was that election `cancelled'?), but unless you can provide evidence that Allende intended to behave differently in the elections of 1976 than he had in the ignored elections of 1973, you won't get anywhere this way.

Which brings us back to your original black-helicopter theories: since you have yet to present any evidence of US involvement in Pinochet's rise to power, and since you have now changed the subject, lashing out desperately in hopes of finding some other point to cling to, can we assume that you now accept that your original premise (that the US aided Pinochet's coup) was simply false?

Re:Here's some evidence

[jdfox]

I'm still making the same point as I have throughout this thread. I provided evidence, and you don't believe it. That's OK, it's just evidence, not proof. But your rebuttal from the beginning centred on Allende "cancelling elections". You have since then come up with all sorts of interesting evidence that Allende may have done this or that wrongdoing during, before and after elections, but you have not yet cited your evidence that Allende cancelled or suspended any election. I do want to see this evidence, as it could certainly change my mind once I've finally seen it.

Re:Here's some evidence

[neocon]

On the contrary, the `evidence' you posted was a link to a list of articles which claim the same thing you claim, also without providing evidence. In contrast, I have posted a number of links to primary documents from the era in question, and to analyses of those primary documents.

So again, what makes you believe that the US had a role in Pinochet's rise to power? That you `heard it somewhere, once'? Or have you seen evidence which would back up this wild claim? You do understand why it behooves you to provide a link to such evidence, don't you? You do understand why no one reading this thread is likely to be convinced by such claims if the only backing you can bring for them is that some other guy once said the same thing, also without evidence, in an article published thirty years after the fact, right?

As for elections, I have already shown that Allende threw out the results of the Constitutional Elections of 1973, much as he ignored the results of any number of votes of the Chilean legislature. I have already provided primary documents showing how Allende had effectively dissolved the legislature and judiciary within Chile, thus destroying the Chilean constitution. If you want to hang your hat on a narrow legalistic claim that it is not `cancelling' an election for the branch of government whose job it is to carry out that election's results to throw those results out, go ahead -- but don't expect anyone to be convinced by such a claim. If you want to claim that counter to every action he took during his three years in power, Allende planned to obey the results of the elections of 1976 (as he ignored the results of the elections of 1973), go ahead, but again, don't expect the readers of this thread to take you seriously when you do so.

As it happens, he had no chance to prevent those elections from being held. He had no chance to throw out their results as he had the results of 1973's elections. That this happened only at the expense of a decade or more of Pinochet is a shame -- but we can still take heart that Chile is today a stable and free democracy as a result.

Re:Here's some evidence

[jdfox]

On the contrary, you'll find that outside of the United States, it's almost universally accepted that the US was behind the Pinochet coup, just as it was behind the recent attempted coup in Venezuela, and the coup against Mossadegh in Iran, and against Kassem in Iraq, and against Arbenz in Guatemala, etc, etc, etc.

Why do you think Kissinger doesn't travel abroad much?

Because the evidence is piling up:
1 2 3,
...and next time he's taken in for questioning, he might not strike it lucky again.

It's completely fair and logical for you to declare that you're not convinced by all the evidence you've seen to date for US involvement in the Pinochet coup, but it's quite illogical of you to then go on to assert that "no-one else is convinced of this".

And as I've said several times, I'd be delighted to cite you even more evidence, just as soon as you tell me what evidence would convince you.

Re:Here's some evidence

[neocon]

Did you actually read those links, or just post them without reading them? I suspect the latter, because here's what you just posted:

• A link to the dustjacket of Christopher Hitchens' The Trial of Henry Kissinger. As it happens, I've actually read Mr. Hitchens' book in full, not just the dust jacket -- in fact, I have it in front of me as I write. Only two of the work's eleven chapters discuss Chile, and even there Hitchens does not allege that any evidence shows that the US aided Pinochet's rise to power, he rather suggests that such evidence might emerge, and accuses the US of aiding Pinochet's government years later In fact, such evidence hasn't emerged, in all the thirty years since the coup.
• A link to a copy of a `secret' memo stating that Kissinger met with Pinochet... in 1976. 1976, of course was three years after the coup which brought Pinochet to power, and the fact that we opened contact with him around then is hardly a `secret' in either case. This is, after all, exactly the contact which Reagan used to convince Pinochet to step down.
• A link to an article expressing hope that when the CIA's papers on Chile are declassified `later this year' (the page you link was written in 1999), they will include evidence of US involvement. The papers were indeed declassified, early the next year. They contained no such evidence.

Really, are you reading these things before you post them? Because if you are, it doesn't speak well for your conspiracy theories that such thin backing is all you find to post.

I'd also like to comment on your positing that it is `evidence' of America's guilt that many in Europe believe we were involved. I'm not sure how many, in fact, do, but if this is in fact widely accepted, then what?

It's widely accepted in the Arab world that Jews drink the blood of Children, after all, just as it was very recently widely accepted in Europe that that Mr. Hitler was a nice gentleman who we could all do business with as long as you don't get him talking about the Jews.

As I said above, saying that `this other guy holds the same irrational belief that I do' is not evidence. If it were, the earth would be flat (because the flat-earthers have dozens of members), and there would be hangars full of UFOs out at Roswell.

As you continue to provide no evidence at all to actually back your wild black-helicopter theories, and as the only primary evidence presented in this discussion has all contradicted your claims, you're just not going to get anywhere by the argument `these other people believe this thing without evidence, so I do to'.

Re:Here's some evidence

[jdfox]

First you claimed that no-one could be expected to believe that the US is behind the Pinochet coup on the basis of the existing evidence, then when I point out that most of the world believes it, you accuse me of basing my argument solely on widespread belief. Backflips like that must be rather painful!

Watching you twist my arguments back and forth is good fun, but you can forget about wearing me down with that old tactic. I am still waiting for you to tell me what evidence would convince you. You seem strangely unwilling to answer.

Re:Here's some evidence

[neocon]

On the contrary, I pointed out that none of the three pages you linked to contained or even claimed to contain evidence of US involvement in Pinochet's rise to power. It's all very well for you to allege that I `wouldn't accept' your evidence, but claiming so is hardly a substitute for providing evidence at all, now is it?

So we're back where we started: as at the point where you joined this thread, I have presented primary documents refuting your claim of US involvement, while you, on the other hand, have presented nothing but a few articles which either make no attempt to present evidence, or openly admit not having evidence of US involvement.

If there is, in fact, no evidence backing your claim (and again, you have yet to present anything which even claims to be such evidence), you can hardly expect me buy into your weird black-helicopter theories merely because you allege (without evidence) that other people have bought into it...

Re:Here's some evidence

[jdfox]

You have submitted no "primary documents" yet, let alone a refutation of a single word I've written, only the official parliamentary record of politicians accusing other politicians of wrongdoing, couched in long paragraphs of ad-hominem. That's hardly the mark of someone who's confident about his arguments. Do you think those actually report verbatim what's said in any country's parliament or congress? Do you really consider that to be a primary source? Do you really? Really?

I am still as keen as ever to furnish you with further evidence. Will you be telling me anytime soon what evidence would convince you? Why do you keep refusing to answer this single, simple question? Could it be that all you're interested in is getting me to dig out yet more evidence, so you can dismiss it, and demand more and more and more until I eventually give up in disgust, like most people do on /. after trying to have an honest debate with you? No thanks! Tell me your required evidence, and then I'll supply some. Otherwise you're just blowing hot air.

Re:Here's some evidence

[neocon]

Heh, nice try. While I suppose you could continue to assert that there is lots of evidence out there, you just won't link to any of it because you're afraid that I `won't accept it', I suspect that by now anyone reading this thread has realized that your evidence is like the mysterious girlfriend that a kid in middle school claims he has, and yet never actually produces -- something which doesn't actually exist, and yet which you talk about endlessly.

After all, let's look at the thread to date. For nine messages now, you have been assuring us that you can provide links to evidence of US involvement in Pinochet's rise to power, and yet what have you produced? Here's what:

• In this post you linked to a list of articles about Chile. Some of these articles make the same assertions you make (though most explicitly do not), but either explicitly state that there is not yet evidence to back their claim, or simply do not discuss evidence at all.
• In this post, you link to a report pointing out that Pinochet committed murders, something no one in this thread has denied. Even so, you appear not to have read the report, since you misstate it's findings about the number killed by a factor of five to ten.
• In this post, you mysteriously link to a site which praises palestinian murder-suicide bombings, calls Louis Farrakhan `wise' and `balanced', and repeats centuries-old anti-Jewish blood-libels, but contains no content about Chile at all.
• In this post you link to:
  • A picture of the dustjacket of Christopher Hitchens' The Trial of Henry Kissinger, which you have not read. Had you read it (as I have), you would know that Hitchens admits openly that he has no evidence of US involvement in Pinochet's coup, but believes that such evidence may someday be found. In either case, only two of the book's eleven chapters discuss Chile at all.
  • A copy of a `secret' memo mentioning that Henry Kissinger met with Pinochet in 1976. 1976, of course, was three years after Pinochet's rise to power, and the meetings in question are a matter of public record in any case -- in fact, they established the connections which Reagan was later to use to pressure Pinochet into stepping down.
  • An article written in 1999 which states that no evidence of a US link to Pinochet's rise to power has been found, but that such evidence might turn up when all of the CIA's records regarding Chile are declassified. It has now been three years since those records were declassified, and dozens of groups going over those records for evidence of such a link have found that, in fact, the CIA was as surprised by Pinochet's rise to power as anyone else was.

and nothing more.

In contrast, I have linked to:

• a review of the full declassified records of CIA activities in Chile, showing no inolvement in Pinochet's rise to power.
• the findings of the Chilean chamber of deputies regarding Allende's abuses. You, of course keep refering to these as `ad hominem accusations by politicians', a claim which shows a tremendous disregard for democracy or the rule of law on your part. The legal rulings of the duly appointed body of a democratically ele

Re:Here's some evidence

[jdfox]

Yes, I've got all of the above evidence, and more. Thank you for summarising several all on one page: I will bookmark that for convenient reference.

We cluster-bombed Baghdad on far less evidence than that. And as soon as you tell me what evidence you will accept, there will be even more.

I will not continue to dig out and submit yet more evidence to you, for instant dismissal on the grounds that it's somehow not good enough for Sir, like a waiter bringing out everything in the kitchen until Mr. Creosote sees something he likes. As soon as you're ready for real debate, I'm all ears. We can start now if you like.

Re:Here's some evidence

[neocon]

Hehehehehehehe. In between making other wild claims (no one `cluster-bombed' Baghdad, needless to say), you finally admit that you're not actually going to post any evidence, and are instead taking your ball and going home?

Well, it's been fun. I think it's quite clear to anyone still reading this thread that your belief in US misdeeds in Chile has long since become an essentially religious conviction, based on no evidence at all...

Re:Here's some evidence

[jdfox]

:-) Proof at last that you won't accept any evidence at all, and your opinion was permanently set in stone on the subject years ago. I suspected as much.

Neoconservatism isn't an ideology, it's a religion, and a man might as well be arguing about economics with Castro as argue about history with a neocon. Good thing I didn't burn up even more time digging out all the rest of the evidence out for you then.

This thread will stay alive for some days more: think it over. If you do eventually decide there's any evidence at all that would convince you, then y'all come back, I'll be here waiting.

Re:Here's some evidence

[neocon]

Hehehehe. Digging out `the rest' of the evidence? I've just cataloged the pages you've linked to -- none of which even claim to have evidence of US involvement in Pinochet's coup. When asked about this, you reply that you `have lots of evidence' but aren't willing to link it, and then suggest that I'm not providing evidence, even though I've linked to multiple primary documents, none of whose findings you've contested.

So you can go ahead and call me irrational if you want -- but I'm the one backing up my claims with primary evidence, while you're the one insisting that something is true and that there is evidence proving it, but that you are unwilling to link that evidence.

Forgive me if I'm not impressed. I doubt the readers of this thread are either...

Re:Here's some evidence

[neocon]

Your .sig is also quite amusing. For those not in on the joke, iraqbodycount.net is a site maintained by a Women's Studies professor at the University of New Hampshire, which has the unusual distinction of claiming more civilian casualties in Iraq than even the Iraqi Information Minister, Mohammed Sayeed Sahaf claimed.

Re:Here's some evidence

[jdfox]

I note that once again you cannot dispute the statistics, hence you must fall back on your faithful safety net of ad-hominem argument:

a) He's a professor of Professor of Economics, International Relations, and Women's Studies at the University of New Hampshire, therefore his statistics are somehow valid.

b) Sahaf claimed high civilian casualties, therefore all other high counts of casualties are somehow supporting Sahaf, and are likewise somehow invalid.

Is that the best you can do?

Re:Here's some evidence

[jdfox]

Nearly all of them cite evidence, none of which you like. For example, you don't like Hitchens' damning indictment of Kissinger for assisting the Pinochet coup and other crimes, but since the whole book isn't about his involvement in Chile, it's somehow not good enough. And so on.

You, meanwhile, produce secondary and tertiary evidence, call it primary, and rather amusingly try to imply that I'm at fault for not accepting it as primary. This is your "evidence" in support of your bizarre thesis that the US was really not involved in the Pinochet coup. Dogma makes men twist themselves into the oddest positions.

I am still waiting, by the way, for you to tell me what evidence would convince you, since all the evidence I have produced is somehow not good enough. You still refuse. I wonder why?

Re:Here's some evidence

[neocon]

There we have it ladies and gentlemen -- while many of you thought that Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Sayeed ``No American Tanks within 100 Miles! What's that noise?'' Sahaf was inflating civilian casualty statistics, jdfox has uncovered the real truth: he was actually underreporting them! What a brilliant thesis...

Of course, there are plenty of concrete reasons to doubt the statistics provided by Womens' Studies (should that be `Wimmin's studies'?) professor Marc Herold:

• the fact that Mr. Herrod was so spectacularly (and famously) wrong in Afghanistan, reporting more than three times as many civilian casualties as the sources he claimed to have gotten his statistics from, and more than twice as many civilian casualties as the Taliban themselves did (see the section on civilian casualties at the end of that article)
• The fact that Herold's statistical methods have been thoroughly debunked, which is no surprise, as he has no training or background in statistics at all.
• The fact that he steadfastly refuses to explain where he gets his numbers, despite repeated demonstrations that he is double- and even triple- counting actual incidents, and accepting other incidents as genuine based only on the allegations of Taliban and Iraqi Information Ministry sources.
• The fact that the non-partisan Statistical Assssment Service, a group of professional and academic statisticians formed to combat the incorrect use of statistics in the media has examined Mr. Herold's methods and found them fatally flawed.

So what was that you were saying?

Re:Here's some evidence

[neocon]

Nice try, but it's increasingly clear that you haven't actually read Hitchens' book at all. I have read it, and noted repeatedly that Hitchens states explicitly that he has no evidence of US involvement in Pinochet's coup. Which part of this didn't you understand? Likewise, if you claim the articles you posted (which I list exhaustively above) provide evidence (something they themselves do not claim), what evidence do you allege they provide?

Likewise, while it's nice that you think using (to you) big words such as `tertiary' improves your argument, these words in fact do not change the fact that I have linked media, government, and intelligence documents from the actual year in question, all of which are primary documents, while you have linked what? A couple of articles written decades later, all of which explicitly admit they don't have evidence of US involvement.

So while you can go on hiding behind claims that I `wouldn't accept' your evidence if you want, the fact that you have yet to produce anything which even claims to be evidence in eleven posts to date suggests that such whining is actually a cover for the fact that you don't have any.

If you do, post it -- because you have long since convinced anyone reading this thread that you have nothing...

Re:Here's some evidence

[ceejayoz]

FYI, links 2 and 4 appear to be the same thing (#2 just has an extra concluding paragraph)... good links, though.

Re:Here's some evidence

[jdfox]

Several points:

a) journalists got nowhere near the same access to the Afghan bombings as they did in Iraq.

b) your journalists compare back-of-the-envelope estimates by some human rights groups and journalists, who clearly stated at the time that they were estimates, with Herold's attempt at a count. When Herold started out, he was the only one attempting a count. The PDA later also attempted an Afghan count too, which came out lower. Neither claims to count all the deaths, as some could not possibly have been reported, such as isolated families being wiped out in the sticks. The PDA one was even more catuious than Herold, but neither counts subsequent deaths from disease and starvation that were a direct result of the bombings. Both are then almost certainly too low, but it would take years of hard work to count those additional numbers. Little chance of that happening, now that the US has allowed the warlords to take the country over again, as they did after the Soviet invasion.

Your first link: "Professor Herold's general methodology seems to be that..." It goes on to note that Herold, whose count is one of two attempts at a methodical count available in the public domain, has revised his figures down to a paltry 3000-3600. Only 3000 dead. Is this OK by you then, so long as they weren't American dead?

This Spectator writer isn't even confident enough in his accusations aginst Herold to state what he alleges was done wrong, he just say "seems". Just because several journalists say something is true doesn't make it true, as you pointed out recently, and this fellow is too cowardly even to declare any precise wrongdoing, for fear of a libel lawsuit. The Spectator has certainly had its share: they were recently in trouble with the police over an extremely racist article they printed, and as the mouthpiece of the moribund Conservative party, they cannot afford any more trouble in court.

The article does not even offer its own alternative methodical count, it merely quotes the PDA one, and several back-of-the-envelope estimates. How spectacularly useless.

Your second link:
Says he quotes journalists who rely on the AIP, but does not say which, or even how many. Two? Three? A hundred? He goes on to cite three examples of double counts, which you and I have no means of checking, and then claims that these are followed by "numerous" other examples. How numerous? Two? Three? A hundred? If he actually found a lot, why doesn't he even say "I found fifty more before I gave up"? Because the count is actually very low, of course. Herold himself says he knows that some of his sources will be wrong, and that he's making a best-attempt at a count. Yet this articles implies that three innaccuracies out of thousands renders the data somehow invalid. He then says " A STATS review of the data suggests that, on a careful reading, only 650 of the deaths he claims are in any way reliably reported." Do we get to see their "careful reading"? Nope. Do we evn get to hear secondhand what methodology their "careful reading" employed? Nope. But we're assured by the journalist that it's reliable, so maybe we should just trust him. How about applying your fastidiously rigid criteria on evidence about the Pinochet coup here?

He then quotes the lower PDA count, as well as the beginnings of an AP attempt, and even he notes that the AP attempt is unfinished and will be higher, and concludes by saying that the civilian death toll was indeed disproportionate, and that the Defense Dept needs to start addressing this issue, so he is actually agreeing with Herold's conclusion, though he disagrees about how many thousands of civilians were killed. "Thoroughly debunked"? Hardly.

In your third link, you cite an article where a writer from an ultra-right-wing commentary sheet could not find corroborating sources on his own, and claims that Herold refused to help him out. From this you conclude that he "he steadfastly refuses to explain where he gets his numbers

Re:Here's some evidence

[neocon]

A long post, yet you manage to address none of the agreed upon facts. As far as I can tell, everyone agrees on the following:

• Mr. Herold has no background or formal training in statistics
• In preparing his reports, Mr. Herold includes numbers provided by the Iraqi information minister as directly factual, something no one else agrees is reasonable to do.
• Even a cursory examination of Mr. Herold's claims turns up several instances of double- and even triple- counting of numbers from other sources.

These are the facts on which everyone agrees (even Mr. Herold). These are facts which you do not attempt to address in your post, so I'm assuming you agree with them as well, whether you consider them important or not.

Given this, I'd say the readers of this thread have more than enough information to decide whether Mr. Herold's claims make sense, but I'd like to speak to a few of the points you raise anyhow:

a) journalists got nowhere near the same access to the Afghan bombings as they did in Iraq.

While it is far from clear that this is correct (in actual fact a number of international reporters were reporting from all over Afghanistan during the war, while the Baghdad regime only allowed reporters in a limited area of Baghdad), if this were the reason for the discrepancy, wouldn't Marc Herold's numbers agree more closely with the estimates of other journalists in Iraq than in Afghanistan? As it happens, they don't.

However, this is a moot point, since as we discuss below, Mr. Herold is relying on bogus (according to every actual statistician who has looked at them) statistical interpretations of the same data as everyone else, not on independent data.

b) your journalists compare back-of-the-envelope estimates by some human rights groups and journalists, who clearly stated at the time that they were estimates, with Herold's attempt at a count. When Herold started out, he was the only one attempting a count. The PDA later also attempted

Except that Herold's `attempt at a count' was (according to him) based on the exact same reports which yielded the other estimates -- in other words, given the exact same reports, he came up with different numbers. As a number of independent analysts have shown, he yielded these higher numbers not by `counting better', but by double- and triple- counting a number of actual incidents, and by including in the count every random claim of the Afghan or Iraqi regimes, without any independent verifications.

You've already shown us (in this thread) that if the Iraqi information minister said `no ballistic missiles fired into Kuwait', that's what you believe to this day, even though every other media source (even sources such as al-Jazeera) counted fourteen such missiles. For those of us who do not take the words of Iraqi Information Minister Mohammad Sayeed Sahaf as gospel truth, however, Mr. Herold's numbers, which rely heavily on those pronouncements, carry far less weight than you seem to give them.

an Afghan count too, which came out lower. Neither claims to count all the deaths, as some could not possibly have been reported, such as isolated families being wiped out in the sticks. The PDA one was even more catuious than Herold, but neither counts subsequent deaths from disease and starvation that were a direct result of the bombings. Both are then almost certainly too low, but it would take years of hard work to count those additional numbers. Little chance of that happening, now that the US has allowed the warlords to take the country over again, as they did after the Soviet invasion.

Ah yes, the left's old lie: ``the afghan bombing led to startvation and disease and chaos''. This allegation has already been

Re:Here's some evidence

[jdfox]

I'm sorry you don't like it when I use the word "tertiary". It's pretty big, I'll grant you, but I note you've just used several bigger words in your last post, like "intelligence" and "exhaustively". Getting comfortable with the word "tertiary" should be just a matter of you hearing it and using it a few times, so don't worry.

Like I've said several times now, you are still complaining that none of the evidence I've submitted is good enough for you, so what we'll need now is for you to state which evidence would convince you of US involvement in the coup, so I can dig some out for you. Please don't wait too much longer, as /. are going to archive this story pretty soon.
Thanks!

Re:Here's some evidence

[neocon]

Heh -- as I said, my objection was not to the word `tertiary', but to your apparent belief that if you used enough big words, no one would notice that you had still failed to provide anything which even claimed to be evidence of your original claim in what? Twelve posts now?

Nor, if I were you, would I count on your constant questioning of what evidence I `would accept' being seen as anything but the dodge that it is. It's not like you need my permission to post to slashdot -- and if you actually did have convincing evidence, nothing I could say would make it unconvincing to the people reading this thread.

So let's have it -- or do you (as I suspect) have no evidence at all, in which case you are merely clinging desperately to an unbacked assertion for ideological reasons.

Re:Here's some evidence

[jdfox]

A long post, yet you manage to address none of the agreed upon facts. As far as I can tell, everyone agrees on the following:

Everyone? Really? You've read the opinions of everyone? Cool! Where can I find the writings of everyone who's reviewed Herold's research?
Or did you mean "everyone" you happen to agree with?

* Mr. Herold has no background or formal training in statistics

That's an interesting assertion. May I see some evidence please?

* In preparing his reports, Mr. Herold includes numbers provided by the Iraqi information minister as directly factual,

Which numbers please? How many? Two? Three? A hundred? What percent of 3000 are they?

something no one else agrees is reasonable to do.

No-one? There it is again! I've just got to see this database of the opinions of tens of thousands of professional statisticians you've found. Please post the URL: I will happily pay a subscription charge to see research that thorough.

* Even a cursory examination of Mr. Herold's claims turns up several instances of double- and even triple- counting of numbers from other sources.

Hm, so now it's gone from "numerous" to "several". How many is "several" please? Two? Three? A hundred?

wouldn't Marc Herold's numbers agree more closely with the estimates of other journalists in Iraq than in Afghanistan? As it happens, they don't.

Which "other journalists" please? Are you claiming that all journalists disagree with Iraq BodyCount's numbers? You've read every journalist in the world that's written on the civilian casualties in Iraq?
Or do you mean the "other journalists" that you know of, and happen to agree with?

And they are not "Herold's numbers", as I've already explained to you: he's one of a staff of 21 researchers. It's worth noting that one of those researchers is Dr. Glen Rangwala of the Univ. of Cambridge. Tony Blair's infamous "intelligence dossier" on Iraq was based in large part on plagiarism from Rangwala's doctoral thesis on Iraq done 12 years ago, and spiffed up by British civil servants to look like recent research. Rangwala noticed, and complained in public, so the Blair government is still feeling the fallout from that particular pack of lies about the war. That poor schmuck Colin Powell singled out Blair's "valuable dossier" for particular praise while he was fighting hard to persuade people that some sort of threat existed from Iraq. Bet he now wishes he hadn't.
But it's telling that you only attempt to discredit the Iraq numbers by attacking a single past piece of work by a single member of a team of 21. It makes me wonder why you can't find anything else to criticise about the Iraq Body Count numbers.

However, this is a moot point, since as we discuss below, Mr. Herold is relying on bogus (according to every actual statistician who has looked at them) statistical interpretations of the same data as everyone else, not on independent data.

You mean "every actual statistician" you've read and agree with. Why would a statistician go to the press to say he agrees with someone's statistics? You will only ever read about a disagreement in the press, as agreement is not news. And since you can't possibly have read the opinion of every "every actual statistician" who has looked at them, I suggest you stop claiming that you have.

Except that Herold's `attempt at a count' was (according to him) based on the exact same reports which yielded the other estimates -- in other words, given the exact same reports, he came up with different numbers.

Researchers can use different criteria when evaluating the same raw data. Some researchers were even more cautious than he was, and applied different criteria. If you were a scientist, you'd know that this is a source of debate in every field: that's why not all scientists agree on climate change, the health effects of tobacco, risks of

Re:Here's some evidence

[jdfox]

Giving you the benefit of the doubt, I'll assume you really don't understand what I've clearly stated several times. I am not interested in playing the game of being sent repeatedly for evidence, and having it dismissed for no reason, until I wear out. If you want more evidence from me, you're going to need to tell me what evidence will convince you.

It's quite mystifing that you are so unwilling to answer this simple question.

Re:Here's some evidence

[neocon]

Right here is a list of all links you have posted in this thread. Every single one -- and none of them are to sites which even claim to have evidence of US involvement in Pinochet's rise to power.

Given this, is it not extremely dishonest for you to speak of the possibility of you providing `more' evidence?

As for what's `mystifying', some might find it extremely mystifying that you would spend over a dozen posts making excuses for not posting the evidence you allege you have, but in fact there's a perfectly obvious explanation -- you don't have any.

And in fact I'd say that by now the readers of this thread have more than enough reason to reach just that conclusion...

Re:Here's some evidence

[neocon]

Now, now -- temper, temper, temper, Mr. Fox. Assuming your intention is actually to convince anyone of anything (if not me, then at least the readers of this thread), bouts of impotent rage and puerile name-calling like that last post aren't going to get you anywhere.

In a second post, I'll speak to what you did respond to in your post, but before I do, I'd like to point out what you didn't respond to, something I find quite interesting.

In my previous post, I had written:

Here are some basic halmarks of sound research, which any academic could tell you:

• Seek independent verification of claims by unreliable sources such as the information ministries of totalitarian states
• Provide information on your data and your methods for peer review
• Do not invent new methods of extrapolation and regression without subjecting the methods to peer review, especially if you have no background or formal training in statistics.

These are basic, simple concepts of intellectual honesty and academic integrity, yet they are foreign to Mr. Herold and his work. Why?

In responding to my post, you chose to clip this part, leaving these points unanswered. Now it seems to me that there are three possibilities:

• You do not in fact feel that these criteria are important
• You believe that Mr. Herold has, in fact, met these criteria (even though he admits having done none of these things)
• You realize that Mr. Herold has not, in fact, met these criteria, and thus cannot be considered to meet even the most basic standards of intellectual honesty and academic integrity

The fact that you chose not to respond to this part of the post suggests the third of these possibilities holds. Is this the case?

Re:Here's some evidence

[neocon]

Now, let's go through what you did say in your post, as silly as it may be:

A long post, yet you manage to address none of the agreed upon facts. As far as I can tell, everyone agrees on the following:

Everyone? Really? You've read the opinions of everyone? Cool! Where can I find the writings of everyone who's reviewed Herold's research? Or did you mean "everyone" you happen to agree with?

A puerile dodge -- I note that you do not yourself claim to disagree with any of these statements, so you resort to a semantic point, instead.

* Mr. Herold has no background or formal training in statistics

That's an interesting assertion. May I see some evidence please?

Mr. Herold's resume is currently off-line (whether through server trouble or as a response to the number of people who have recently pointed out how thin it is), but a quick look at google's cached copy confirms that it lists not a single published work of a statistical nature, whether peer-reviewed or otherwise.

More generally, his resume is remarkably short on peer-reviewed works in any field for an academic of his age, which may explain why he has resorted to teaching Women's (Wimmin's?) Studies at a small state school in New Hampshire...

* In preparing his reports, Mr. Herold includes numbers provided by the Iraqi information minister as directly factual,

Which numbers please? How many? Two? Three? A hundred? What percent of 3000 are they?

How many would you consider `acceptable'? Since we both agree that some number of reports from Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Sayeed Sahhaf were taken as directly true without verification by Mr. Herold, why don't you tell us why we should take seriously any study which considers such sources `reliable'?

something no one else agrees is reasonable to do.

No-one? There it is again! I've just got to see this database of the opinions of tens of thousands of professional statisticians you've found. Please post the URL: I will happily pay a subscription charge to see research that thorough.

While I must admit that the possiblity that anyone would consider it a reasonable research practice to take the pronouncements of Mohammed Sayeed `There are no American tanks within 300 miles of here! What's that noise?' Sahhaf as a reliable source of casualty information had escaped me, I'd be more than willing to hear arguments why you think we should -- or is this another case where you have no actual point to make, so you're looking for some semantic detail on which to hang your hat?

* Even a cursory examination of Mr. Herold's claims turns up several instances of double- and even triple- counting of numbers from other sources.

Hm, so now it's gone from "numerous" to "several". How many is "several" please? Two? Three? A hundred?

Again, how many would you consider `acceptable'? And why has Mr. Herold done nothing to address the cases of double- and triple- counting already pointed out, even in his report on Afghanistan?

wouldn't Marc Herold's numbers agree more closely with the estimates of other journalists in Iraq than in Afghanistan? As it happens, they don't.

Which "other journalists" please? Are you claiming that all journalists disagree with Iraq BodyCount's numbers? You've read every journalist

Re:Here's some evidence

[neocon]

And on to the rest of your post:

And they are not "Herold's numbers", as I've already explained to you: he's one of a staff of 21 researchers.

How many people Mr. Herold has running around copying down the pronouncements of the Iraqi Information Minister, al Jazeera, and other sources he lists is not really the question here. Mr. Herold has taken full credit for the `methodology' his researchers are using, and for the data sources they are tracking, and now that both of those choices have been discredited, it is he who should be answering the criticisms which have been raised. That he has not done so (or even provided enough information to allow normal peer review of his choices) is telling.

It's worth noting that one of those researchers is Dr. Glen Rangwala of the Univ. of Cambridge. Tony Blair's infamous "intelligence dossier" on Iraq was based in large part on plagiarism from Rangwala's doctoral thesis on Iraq done 12 years ago, and spiffed up by British civil servants to look like recent research. Rangwala noticed, and complained in public, so the Blair government is still feeling the fallout from that particular pack of lies about the war. That poor schmuck Colin Powell singled out Blair's "valuable dossier" for particular praise while he was fighting hard to persuade people that some sort of threat existed from Iraq. Bet he now wishes he hadn't.

While I wouldn't want to speak for Mr. Blair or his sources, your resort to insults (`poor schmuck' and the like) here certainly seems to suggest that you aren't very confident that your argument stands on it's own merits. In any case, looking over Colin Powell's presentation to the UN, I note that he did not source Mr. Blair or his dossier for any of the evidence he presented, so your case looks a bit forced, no?

Likewise, attempting to dismiss a brutal totalitarian regime with an active WMD program and demonstrated ties to al Qaeda as a non-threat is, at best, wishful thinking on your part.

But it's telling that you only attempt to discredit the Iraq numbers by attacking a single past piece of work by a single member of a team of 21. It makes me wonder why you can't find anything else to criticise about the Iraq Body Count numbers.

An interesting claim on your part, since I've shown a number of problems with the methodology and data sources Mr. Herold is using on both this project and the last one, and since he explicitly states that he is using the same long-since discredited methods as used in that `past piece of work' to analyze the conflict in Iraq...

However, this is a moot point, since as we discuss below, Mr. Herold is relying on bogus (according to every actual statistician who has looked at them) statistical interpretations of the same data as everyone else, not on independent data.

You mean "every actual statistician" you've read and agree with. Why would a statistician go to the press to say he agrees with someone's statistics? You will only ever read about a disagreement in the press, as agreement is not news. And since you can't possibly have read the opinion of every "every actual statistician" who has looked at them, I suggest you stop claiming that you have.

Are you really that unfamiliar with the concept of `peer review'?

No work in any serious field is taken very seriously until it has been corroborated by peer review, so the fact that Mr. Herold is so unwilling to subject his work to such review is far more telling than you seem to think.

Except that Herold's `attempt at a count' was (according to him) based on the exact s

Re:Here's some evidence

[jdfox]

The links I have given are all evidence. They're not proof, but evidence, because that's what you asked for. By way of analogy, a witness' claim of someone matching a suspect's description placing him at the scene of the crime is not proof, it's evidence.

You don't like the evidence I've provided. Well, then please tell me what kind of evidence you are looking for, and I will give it.

Re:Here's some evidence

[jdfox]

Well, I hit 'em like they're pitched, Mr. Con. As soon as you stop hurling personal abuse and insults at me, I'll stop batting them right back at you. If you're ready to be polite while discussing this, I will respond in kind and be glad to do so.

You have submitted opinions that you think Dr. Herold's Afghan count is faulty, and attempted to use this to impugn the work of a team of 21 on another project. You have quoted (double-quoted actually) the work of one statistical group to support this, and then gone on to claim that all statisticians must therefore agree.

I do not agree that you have proven that Dr. Herold has breached any of the standards you cite on the Afghan project, and I await your assesment of the Iraq Body Count data or methodology, since that was what you were criticising in the first place.

Re:Here's some evidence

[jdfox]

Mr. Herold's resume is currently off-line (whether through server trouble or as a response to the number of people who have recently pointed out how thin it is), but a quick look at google's cached copy confirms that it lists not a single published work of a statistical nature, whether peer-reviewed or otherwise.

You link to a career precis listing work on:

• social and economic changes in the Second and Third Worlds
  
• Chile under Allende
  
• Grenada under the New Jewel movement
  
• industrialization in Albania and the German Democratic Republic
  
• foreign capital in El Salvador and in Mexico
  
• the peripheral socialist planning model in Nicaragua
  
• the new international division of labor
  
• survival strategies of poor urban women in Brazil
  
• the construction of modern business since 1840
  
• steamship rivalry to secure trade routes to Brazil
  
• a case study of economic change of the state of Bahia
  

How do you think one publishes peer-reviewed works in these areas without statistics? Are only statisticians skilled analysts of statistics? Statistics is the backbone of the study of economics, and he has a PhD in Economics from Berkeley. Your assertion that "Mr. Herold has no background or formal training in statistics" is therefore demonstrably false.

Again, how many would you consider `acceptable'? And why has Mr. Herold done nothing to address the cases of double- and triple- counting already pointed out, even in his report on Afghanistan?

You have submitted three examples of double-counts. They may be true, though I have no means of checking them. 3/3000 = one-tenth of one percent of entries possibly wrong. 3/3400 = .08 of one percent. Both can reasonably considered negligible. I would personally consider that if 30-40% of the low side of his estimate were proven wrong, that would be grounds on which to consider the rest of his work suspect. Since STATS judges that only 690 of his entries are what they would consider reliable, that would mean 77%.

But because we have no idea on what basis this one statistical group has judged entries invalid, you have only an opinion, not an academic basis from which to attack this single example of Professor Herold's previous work. If you can show me their methodology, I will gladly admit here that I was wrong: I take great pride in my unblemished record on this. If you can prove to me a similar level of error in the Iraq Body Count numbers, I will admit that I'm wrong on that too, and remove it from my sig. In fact I am even open to persuasion on Chile, and anything else you care to argue about. I would start voting neocon myself, today, if you could prove to me a basis on which to believe that it is a correct ideology. In fact I was a conservative myself for many years, until I was shown that the data on which I'd based my ideological alignment were demonstrably incorrect.

There: I have just answered "how many would you consider acceptable", the very first time you asked. Will you now at long last answer my similar question "what evidence would you consider acceptable on US involvement on the Pinochet coup", now that I have asked you repeatedly?

Re:Here's some evidence

[jdfox]

While I wouldn't want to speak for Mr. Blair or his sources, your resort to insults (`poor schmuck' and the like) here certainly seems to suggest that you aren't very confident that your argument stands on it's own merits. In any case, looking over Colin Powell's presentation to the UN, I note that he did not source Mr. Blair or his dossier for any of the evidence he presented, so your case looks a bit forced, no?

He did indeed source it: though he did not mention Blair in the UN speech itself, he did brief the British press about it afterwards. And he is rather embarrassed about it now.

How many would you consider `acceptable', especially in the absence of any studies substantiating Mr. Herold's claims?

I have just answered this in detail on the other sub-thread where you asked it, though you probably haven't read this yet.

In this post you directly alleged that the only missile Iraq fired on Kuwait was the single Seersucker which impacted outside a shopping mall in Kuwait City. The Iraqi Information Minister claimed the same thing, but every single news outlet referenced in that thread including the ones you posted links to claimed otherwise.

That post was by glrotate. There are many links in that thread to news reports of Scuds landing in Kuwait: all have the US Defense Dept as their source, none are verified. The military would not let anyone see all these alleged Scuds. I certainly can't blame a reporter for quoting US Defense Dept briefings: that's news. But I won't believe the reports until I read that the press went and actually saw 14 impact sites with fragments of Scuds.

I've yet to see a single actual statistician consider Mr. Herold's work as valid, but perhaps you could give us a counterexample? Even one?

A man is innocent until proven guilty. You have attacked Professor Herold's work, not me: prove his guilt, and I will accept it.

I've just shown you several statisticians and even a trade group of statisticians which consider Mr. Herold's work to be nonsense. Can you show me any that have confirmed his work? Any?

I can only recall one, that of STATS: please remind me of which other statisticians you quoted? Remember that the Iain Murray article is in fact a reprint of his original piece on the STATS site.

Poor Mr. Fox. I'd wager you don't even see the irony of your juvenile name-calling coming but one paragraph after your appeal for politeness and reasoned debate.

Yes, that was indeed the joke, Mr. Con. Glad to see you enjoyed it.

Re:Here's some evidence

[neocon]

Okay, let's go through the links you've posted. All of them:

• In this post you linked to a list of articles about Chile. Some of these articles make the same assertions you make (though most explicitly do not), but either explicitly state that there is not yet evidence to back their claim, or simply do not discuss evidence at all.

Do you claim that this link, which does not claim to provide such evidence, was `evidence' of US involvement in Pinochet's rise to power?

• In this post, you link to a report pointing out that Pinochet committed murders, something no one in this thread has denied. Even so, you appear not to have read the report, since you misstate it's findings about the number killed by a factor of five to ten.

Do you claim that this link, which is entirely concerned with the activities of Pinochet's government after he came to power, was `evidence' of US involvement in Pinochet's rise to power?

• In this post, you mysteriously link to a site which praises palestinian murder-suicide bombings, calls Louis Farrakhan `wise' and `balanced', and repeats centuries-old anti-Jewish blood-libels, but contains no content about Chile at all.

Do you claim that this link is `evidence' of US involvement in Pinochet's rise to power?

And finally, in this post you link to:

• A picture of the dustjacket of Christopher Hitchens' The Trial of Henry Kissinger, which you have not read. Had you read it (as I have), you would know that Hitchens admits openly that he has no evidence of US involvement in Pinochet's coup, but believes that such evidence may someday be found. In either case, only two of the book's eleven chapters discuss Chile at all.

Do you claim that this link, to the cover of a book which explicitly admits not having such evidence, is `evidence' of US involvement in Pinochet's rise to power?

• A copy of a `secret' memo mentioning that Henry Kissinger met with Pinochet in 1976. 1976, of course, was three years after Pinochet's rise to power, and the meetings in question are a matter of public record in any case -- in fact, they established the connections which Reagan was later to use to pressure Pinochet into stepping down.

Do you claim that this link, which is entirely concerned with events of three years after the coup, is `evidence' of US involvement in Pinochet's rise to power?

• An article written in 1999 which states that no evidence of a US link to Pinochet's rise to power has been found, but that such evidence might turn up when all of the CIA's records regarding Chile are declassified. It has now been three years since those records were declassified, and dozens of groups going over those records for evidence of such a link have found that, in fact, the CIA was as surprised by Pinochet's rise to power as anyone else was.

Do you claim that this link, which explicitly admits having no evidence at the time of writing, is `evidence' of US involvement in Pinochet's rise to power?

And if you do not, in fact, claim that any of these things are evidence (and remember, none of them claim to have such evidence), what on earth do you mean when you write ``The links I have given are all evidence.''?

Re:Here's some evidence

[neocon]

As I said before, it does you no good to count the number of other researchers working on the Iraq Body (mis)Count project, when the project states explicitly that it is using data sources and methodologies chosen by one man -- a Women's (Wimmin's?) Studies Professor from a small state school with no background or formal training in statistical matters.

Likewise, no number of researchers signing on will grant academic integrity to a project which refuses to produce its data and methods for peer review, which is the barest minimum as far as standards of intellectual honesty go.

That those statisticians who have written about Mr. Herold's work have called it handwaving and bunkum doesn't help, of course -- as does your complete failure to provide a single statistician who has written approvingly of Mr. Herold's work.

Re:Here's some evidence

[neocon]

How do you think one publishes peer-reviewed works in these areas without statistics? Are only statisticians skilled analysts of statistics? Statistics is the backbone of the study of economics, and he has a PhD in Economics from Berkeley. Your assertion that "Mr. Herold has no background or formal training in statistics" is therefore demonstrably false.

Except that none of the publications which Mr. Herold sees fit to mention in his resume are peer-reviewed works at all. It is, I suppose, possible that he has mysteriously chosen to include only his less serious and less academic work on his resume, but I'm sure you'll agree that this is unlikely.

Likewise, you will note that the bulk of Mr. Herold's work in `economics' is of the `social history' sort, being concerned with interviews, oral history, and other `soft' subjects. I have no reason to believe that this does not include his work at Berkeley.

All of this is rather moot, however -- having refused to submit his work to peer review (or even to share his data and methodology for independent verification), Mr. Herold has shown himself to be a stranger to even the most basic concepts of academic integrity and intellectual honesty, no matter what his training may be.

You have submitted three examples of double-counts. They may be true, though I have no means of checking them. 3/3000 = one-tenth of one percent of entries possibly wrong. 3/3400 = .08 of one percent. Both can reasonably considered negligible. I would personally consider that if 30-40% of the low side of his estimate were proven wrong, that would be grounds on which to consider the rest of his work suspect. Since STATS judges that only 690 of his entries are what they would consider reliable, that would mean 77%.

Except that that's not three double-counted deaths out of three thousand deaths, that's three reports which were double counted out of one or two hundred reports which were tallied (we have no way of knowing for sure how many reports, since Mr. Herold refuses to release his data). Thus, we are in fact talking about a one-point-five to three percent rate of double- or triple- counting reports, even if the instances of such double-counting which are evident from the small percentage of his data which Mr. Herold has released are the only such instances in the total body of data.

Worse, since some of the reports which Mr. Herold tallies are claims from Taliban government spokesmen of hundreds of deaths (completely unverified by non-taliban sources), the percentage of deaths double-counted may, in fact, be much higher.

And again, that's just the little bit which can be determined from the information Mr. Herold has released about his data on Afghanistan. He has released even less information regarding his data on Iraq...

And yes, the shoddy reasoning you demonstrate here is indeed the same standard you are applying in our discussion of Chile. Readers of this thread can see what you're trying to pass for evidence in that thread here.

Re:Here's some evidence

[neocon]

He did indeed source it: though he did not mention Blair in the UN speech itself, he did brief the British press about it afterwards. And he is rather embarrassed about it now.

I can't speak for what link the British press may have made between Powell's and Blair's (separate) sets of presented evidence, but in either case, surely you would agree that an `unnamed source' which appear only in the Guardian (a paper with a well-defined ideological position, to put it mildly) is not necessarily the best source of information on what Powell is thinking, no?

How many would you consider `acceptable', especially in the absence of any studies substantiating Mr. Herold's claims? I have just answered this in detail on the other sub-thread where you asked it, though you probably haven't read this yet.

Or failed to answer it, as the case may be. In either case, my response to that answer is here.

In this post you directly alleged that the only missile Iraq fired on Kuwait was the single Seersucker which impacted outside a shopping mall in Kuwait City. The Iraqi Information Minister claimed the same thing, but every single news outlet referenced in that thread including the ones you posted links to claimed otherwise.

That post was by glrotate. There are many links in that thread to news reports of Scuds landing in Kuwait: all have the US Defense Dept as their source, none are verified. The military would not let anyone see all these alleged Scuds. I certainly can't blame a reporter for quoting US Defense Dept briefings: that's news. But I won't believe the reports until I read that the press went and actually saw 14 impact sites with fragments of Scuds.

That post was indeed by glrotate. My apologies -- from the haste with which you posted to defend it, I took his position to be yours as well, and mistook who had posted first. Is his position yours as well?

In either case, in that thread I posted links to a number of reports on those firings, not all taken from DoD sources, including an eyewitness account from a CNN news crew. Interestingly enough, you did too .

Video of several of those intercepts was also taken by several news agencies, including al Jazeera.

I've yet to see a single actual statistician consider Mr. Herold's work as valid, but perhaps you could give us a counterexample? Even one?

A man is innocent until proven guilty. You have attacked Professor Herold's work, not me: prove his guilt, and I will accept it.

A man may be presumed innocent until proven guilty, but academic work is presumed faulty until adequately peer-reviewed. Mr. Herold's refusal to submit his work to peer review is thus the academic equivalent of a guilty plea, or at least a pleas of nolo contendere to charges of intellectual dishonesty.

I've just shown you several statisticians and even a trade group of statisticians which consider Mr. Herold's work to be nonsense. Can you show me any that have confirmed his work? Any?

I can only recall one, that of STATS: please remind me of which other statisticians you quoted? Remember that the Iain Murray article is in fact a reprint of his original piece on the STATS site.

In any case, the twelve distinguished statisticians on STATS' advisory board indepently review and sign off on every piece of research which STATS publishes.

Can you show me a single statistician who has defended Mr. Herold's work? One?

Re:Here's some evidence

[neocon]

And while we're on the subject of dodged questions, I have twice now presented the following criteria as a baseline for academic research which wishes to be taken seriously:

• Seek independent verification of claims by unreliable sources such as the information ministries of totalitarian states
• Provide information on your data and your methods for peer review
• Do not invent new methods of extrapolation and regression without subjecting the methods to peer review, especially if you have no background or formal training in statistics.

along with two basic questions:

• Do you agree with these criteria?
• Do you claim that Mr. Herold has met these criteria?

Each time, you have stonewalled these questions, cutting them from your reply and leaving them unanswered. Should the readers of this thread take this as evidence that you are not comfortable with your answers? I sure do...

Re:Here's some evidence

[jdfox]

I can't speak for what link the British press may have made between Powell's and Blair's (separate) sets of presented evidence, but in either case, surely you would agree that an `unnamed source' which appear only in the Guardian (a paper with a well-defined ideological position, to put it mildly) is not necessarily the best source of information on what Powell is thinking, no?

The British press and politicians all appear to know exactly who the unnamed source was: British law is very strict about revealing state secrets, hence the secrecy. But all hell is breaking loose in Downing Street at the moment.
Here is The Times' take on it, top-selling right-wing paper in Britain.

Here is another from a middle-of-the-road paper, The Independent.
This story is relevant too.

And here it is again from Channel 4 News in London.

That post was indeed by glrotate. My apologies -- from the haste with which you posted to defend it, I took his position to be yours as well, and mistook who had posted first.

That's perfectly alright. Thank you for your polite and timely reply.

Is his position yours as well?

Not quite. glrotate says "There were no Scuds." I'm saying that there is no evidence of any Scuds yet, so we should proceed on the basis that there were none until the claims are independently verified.

As for your questions on Professor Herold, no, I can find no statisticians leaping to his defense on the Afghan numbers. But likewise, I can find only STATS criticising them, and lots of people quoting STATS. STATS claim to be a "non-partisan" stats group: well, how many stats groups or statisticians claim to be "partisan"? Every one of them is "non-partisan", just like every man in jail is innocent. The Iraq Body Count team may have only used a very small percentage of incidents from what you and I would consider unreliable sources (Saddam loyalists et al.), with a resulting insignificant impact on interpreted results.

My long background in medical stats has given me a healthy dread of the nasty little games statisticians play. If you'd like to see a good example of how distinguished "non-partisan" statisticians are happy to send innocent people to their graves for a buck, try googling for "thimerosal".

So please forgive me if I cannot accept a summary from some group I've never heard of, criticising the past work of one academic, as a basis for rejecting the work of all future work of any team he ever works in again. I'm aware that you would need to buy the report in order to prove their methodology to me, and even I'm not so presumptuous as to insist on that.

We therefore seem to be at something of a standstill.

Still, if you ever do come across a copy of what critieria they used to judge "reliable" and "unreliable" incidents on the Iraq numbers, and it shows I was wrong, I promise to admit it here, and remove the sig immediately.

Until then...