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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."
less technical assets, more people in the field.
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.
Newsfollow.com
TUTMA - They Use Too Many Acronyms
"We don't use a firewall. We use an air gap."
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
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...
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
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
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
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
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?
Are you guys familiar with In-Q-Tel? (It's mentioned in the article)
Here's an article.
and another...
and another...
and another...
Why do I h8 apple?
"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.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
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.
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!
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Anyone else think at first that this was going to be about the CIA buying some segways?
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.
who needs Information Technology at the Culinary Institute of America?
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?
"dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope"