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US Government Seeks Open-Source Translation

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the penguins-at-the-keyboards dept.

valdean writes "The Boston Globe is reporting that last week the United States Government began publishing captured Iraqi documents on the web in order to harness the translating talents of the bilingual public. The article calls it 'the same open source principle' that created Linux. Check out the Foreign Military Studies Office's document portal."

3 of 309 comments (clear)

  1. Classification? by Esion+Modnar · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What if it turns out that the document is talking about something that the US finds it needs to classify? Too late then...

    --

    They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
  2. Odd by Saeed+al-Sahaf · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Why don't they put the NSA's crack team on ti, they seem to be good at this sort of thing. Or they couls hire translators? Maybe they are just trying to ferret out people who show too much interest in these documents?

    --
    "Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
  3. Re:are we changing the definition? by FleaPlus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So "open source" is now anything that's a free/community project?

    Coincidentally, the use of the phrase "open source" in the intelligence community actually predates its use regarding software, using it to refer to intelligence gathered from publically-available sources. From wikipedia:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_intellige nce

    Open source intelligence or "OSINT" refers to an intelligence gathering discipline based on analyzing information collected from open sources, i.e. information available to the general public. These sources include newspapers, the internet, books, phone books, scientific journals, radio broadcasts, television, and others. The term OSINT is unrelated to the term open source as that term is used in the computer software community to refer to programs whose source code is publicly available (and modifiable). OSINT should also not be generally confused with OSIF (Open Source Information) on which OSINT is based. OSIF is any information that is publicly available; OSINT is analytically-tailored OSIF designed to answer a specific tasking or to support decision-making.