US Government Seeks Open-Source Translation

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."

Comments

Can It Be Anything But PR?

[GaryPatterson]

I just don't believe that they'd put documents of unknown content up for all to read. That could easily expose the US government to all sorts of scandals, assuming that paperwork was kept for many of those transactions from the days when the US had a good friend in Saddam (or at least didn't care about his murderous nature).

Imagine a document written by Hussein "Met that fool Rumsfeld today. Thanked him for the poison gas and dirty bombs. I don't know why they're illegal in the US - they're selling them to me! Shook his hand and got my picture taken."

Okay - that's completely made up (except the photo, which is a matter of record), but it's not hard to imagine a similar circumstance. Many western countries had dealings with Hussein, and they weren't just buying oil.

There's massive potential for embarrassment on the scale of Abu Ghraib if something really bad gets out.

That makes me think that these documents are already translated, in order to show the world what an evil bugger Hussein was, but show no taint of the US/EK/French involvement in his rise to power and maintenance of position.

It's great PR when people can read an internal document detailing evil acts. There's no doubt then! Not that anyone doubts now, but still.

There's a term for this...

[clevershark]

...and that term is "astroturfing." Come on, if gay linguists already in the military are judged too unreliable for the task, is anyone going to believe that what they're looking for is helpful strangers from the internet to do translation? Nonsense.

It seems a lot more likely that the documents they ARE seeking "translations" for are pieces cherry-picked because they say what the Pentagon wants to hear, or simply forgeries. The whole goal of this thing is, transparently, to put this so-called "evidence" in the hands of bloggers who will be happy to infect the so-called "blogosphere" with whatever message the Pentagon wants them to spread.

Sure, it sounds far-fetched, but it makes perfect sense; if someone had told you a year ago that the government was eavesdropping on people without any checks or balances -- not even the rubber-stamping body that is FISA -- people would have said *that* was far-fetched.