Dept. Of Homeland Security Chooses Groove, P2P

Ryan Barrett writes "Groove Networks has announced that their P2P infrastructure will power the Homeland Security Information Network, an initiative to increase information sharing between federal, state, and local intelligence agencies. (The initiative doesn't give the govt. more information, it just helps agencies better share the information they already have.) Groove Workspace has also been certified with two govt. security standards, FIPS 140-2 level 1 and NIAP CCITSE. In related news, Groove's developers have been diagnosed with acronym whiplash."

Comments

More information

[eddy]

(The initiative doesn't give the govt. more information, it just helps agencies better share the information they already have.)

Surely a product of this process is more information?

P2P Piracy

[javester]

Its a sad thing, but as the posts here points out, the association has stuck, and legitimate applications of P2P technology has suffered because of it.

Look at how JXTA has been languishing for the past few years.

Cmon folks, P2P is not piracy. It mirrors how distributed complex systems in nature behave and it has the potential to create dynamic, loosely-coupled distributed systems that may just get us out of this IT rut.

Take a look under the hood.

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Isn't Groove a Microsoft project?

From their web site: the company has obtained more than $155 million in financing from Accel Partners, Microsoft(R) Corporation

Yup, this is P2P at it's best! With those kind of finantial backers, wonder what kind of DRM they push with each file served? Is it any wonder GWB and the folks at Homelad Security (and ain't that just a very Nazi sort of a name...) "choose" Groove?

Re:Groove - neat, but practical?

[$ASANY]

No, Groove isn't practical at all. It's a bloated mess of crapola that allows message boarding, email, document collaboration and whiteboarding that sucks up every last bit of bandwidth in a black box system that can't share data with any other system but Groove. Homeland Security and a few intel agencies think this is Really Neat (tm), but it's a solution in search for a problem.

First responders have radios. They work. Replacing those functional radios with laptops and forcing people to type (or draw low-res pictures) to each other is a complete waste. Data collection systems exist or are in development that understand that data requires analysis and evaluation. Groove treats everything as a free-for-all where nothing gets analysed, just thrown all over the place because it's the easiest thing to implement. Analysis requires thought, but throwing everything out there to inundate everyone with random garbage is just So Much Easier.

I can almost guarantee that this is the usual marketing bullshit from BEA Systems (British Aerospace contactor that inexplicably has an in with U.S. Homeland Security) who has been peddling this crap for a few years now. Too stupid to develop custom solutions, they expertly peddle off-the-shelf stuff at a huge markup to glassy-eyed bureaucrats who get wowed because some Tablet PC can share data with some other Tablet PC without using ethernet cables. And it runs XP Tablet Edition version 1.0! Neato! Wanna see it reboot again?

Some god-forsaken police or fire department leader is going to get saddled with yet another fraglie and tempermental piece of battery-dependent equipment that will serve only to force him to talk to higher-echelon bureaucrats instead of doing his job. I pray he'll have the sense to use it to extinguish a precise 12 inch by 18 inch portion of a conflagration where it will be far more functional than it's intended purpose.

Re:Ooohhh...

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed, but this in now a formidable weapon in the courts when the RIAA/MPAA attack p2p saying the only uses for p2p are piracy and all others are negligible at best. If the US Homeland Defense people are into p2p the tech certainly has substantial non-infringing uses such that even a court could appreciate.

So while the general public may not hear about it savvy EFF-type lawyers will invoke this and prevent injunctions,etc... as regards this incipient technology.

Centralized is not automatically bad

[Anonymous Coward]

A system for sharing information between different agencies is not necessarily a reason to dig out the tin foil hats! Honestly!

One of the major hassles as a government worker is that everyone has their own database and their own numbering system, and they don't necessarily share well. That's not referring to turf wars--that's just referring to the different systems. The FBI has their file numbers, the Department of Justice uses a different numbering system. And theoretically, the FBI is under the DOJ! HHS uses their own own numbering system, so does DCIS, etc. This is a major problem, especially when the investigative arms of different agencies are going after the same people.

I spent some time as a paralegal for the DOJ, and one of my jobs was to check the status of older investigations and see what the result was or if they were still open. In many instances, it took weeks to track them down, because all I had was a FBI number and I needed the file from DCIS's investigation. Or I might have a DOJ number and need a file from the FBI... In both instances, they'd have to search by name, and that takes a very long time.

I know very little about Groove Networks or how the technology works, but if it helps share information, it truly is a good thing. This is not a civil liberties issue--its an efficiency issue. The Government already has this data--this just lets them access it better.

Re:Centralized is not automatically bad

[Phat_Tony]

"The initiative doesn't give the govt. more information, it just helps agencies better share the information they already have."

This does not make the new legislation harmless.

Some branch or other of the government already has almost every scrap of information on you that they want. Coordinating it between departments that otherwise wouldn't have access to it can be just as scary as gathering too much information in the first place. This is mostly what Total Information Awareness was all about; sharing information.

A particular danger associated with this is it's potential for facilitating the transition to "rule of men" instead of "rule of law" in this country.

That is, almost everyone has something that's technically illegal in their backgrounds. Unpaid parking tickets, mistakes on taxes, an unpaid bill, or any of hundreds of little things. If you want to get really technical about it, there are kinds of flashlights that are illegal to have in conjunction with a firearm, there are outdated traffic laws that are widely unknown, always ignored, and never enforced, and for a while, Tryptophan, an amino acid essential to life, was illegal to possess in the US. There are elements of the tax code where it's illegal no matter how it's done, and throwing batteries in the trash can tecnically lead to huge fines and years in jail. If they want to put the information together and be picky enough to try to get someone, everyone can be gotten for somehting. Luckily, most of the silly stuff usually goes unenforced. But that doesn't mean it's not scary that, technically, we're all criminals.

Allowing a variety of authorities- from police, sheriffs, & highway patrol, up to FBI and CIA, and down to your neighborhood precinct representative to have easy access to tons of information on you increases the possibility for selective enforcement of laws.

Maybe the officials will use this information wisely to help track down big criminals, murderers, terrorists, etc. more effectively. Or maybe they'll use it to harass good people. Or maybe they'll even use their newfound power over everyone for extortion and blackmail.

Be very wary of governments making sweeping or vague laws, and of classifying lots of things as illegal. Also be worried when they gather or consolidate information. I'll agree the information gathering's/access is potentially useful, and it's the overflow of laws and regulations that scares me much more. But the two in conjunction can be a dangerous combination.

Project IRIS?

[shadowmatter]

This is strange. Through the NSF, the goverment is already pouring money into Project IRIS, a collaboration of some of the best minds in true decentralized peer-to-peer architecture. It includes some of the creators of Chord (MIT), Pastry (Rice), and Kademlia (NYU) -- three of the fastest distributed hash table implementations out there (logarithmic time). So why are they investing in the Groove? Although I realize Microsoft has a well-staffed, well-funded research department (they were partly responsible for Pastry), it seems better to just pour more money into an already-going, well-researched project.

- shadowmatter

Re:First Block

[Motherfucking Shit]

Since someone else has already pointed out what the "crypt" is in technicality (part of a UUEncoded file), I'll tell you what it really is. It's proof that no amount of expanded or enhanced power on the government's part will ever make any of us safer from whatever Bogeyman we're worrying about today.

<hypothetical>Suppose you're a terrorist, and you've just finished the final draft of the Secret Terrorism Plans. Now you need to distribute it to your cohorts. The problem is, "the man" is spying on all internet traffic, and you suspect they might even be able to crack PGP. How, then, can you possibly send a copy of the Secret Terrorism Plans to 18 of your closest friends without being caught?

Easy, you bury it in shit.

You take your Secret Terrorism Plans file and PGP-encrypt it, just for good measure. You then UUEncode the encrypted file, and split it into 10 chunks. Each chunk gets posted as a comment to a different Slashdot story. Somewhere out-of-band - or even in-band, say, as part of the previous message - you tell the recipients to start looking for parts of the file in the first Slashdot story with "Linux" in the story text on March 15th.

Slashdot generates more than a million pageviews a day, with tens of stories and thousands of comments posted. Helpfully, your 10 UUEncoded chunks of the Secret Terrorism Plans are moderated -1, Troll, so that most people never even see them. Of those who do see them, most will ignore them, a few will wonder (as you did) what they are, fewer still will recognize that they're pieces of a UUEncoded file, and probably nobody will bother trying to track down all the parts and assemble them. Except for your intended recipients, that is.</hypothetical>

Am I saying that Slashdot is a medium for terrorist communications? Of course not, though it's certainly possible. What I'm getting at - finally, straying on-topic - is that no amount of Groove, or P2P, or database crosschecking, or FBI wiretapping cable modems and DSL connections, is going to find the Secret Terrorism Plans. People coordinated enough to simultaneously take control of three airliners are not going to be sending around "Secret Terrorism Plans.doc" via email.

IMO, Groove won't do any more to fight $BOGEYMAN than CAPPS or CAPPS II. It's just going to make it easier for "the man" to inconvenience the people who aren't doing anything wrong.