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Open-Government Technique Used on Iraqi Documents
stalebread writes "MSNBC has an article looking at an internet-based 'many hands make light work' approach to data sifting. From the article: 'The federal government is making public a huge trove of documents seized during the invasion of Iraq, posting them on the Internet in a step that is at once a nod to the Web's power and an admission that U.S. intelligence resources are overloaded. Web surfers have begun posting translations and comments, digging through the documents with gusto.'"
Does anyone *really* think that there would be anything important in those documents? It's not like the location of Osams bin Laden or of Saddam's chemical weapons in Syria will be in these documents.
This particular arm of the government is not dumb enough to publicly release anything that has a remote chance of being important. After all, such documents likely show some of our wrongdoings too.
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Some of that stuff may contain personal information. Such might end up backfiring worse than Abu Ghraib. I hope they black out names and addresses. However, that might make them harder to understand because you don't know if A is doing X to B in paragraph 1 and B is doing Y to A in parag 7, or if A does both X and Y to B. Perhaps they can pick out the names and assign them unique numbers over the blacked out name before making the docs public. However, it still might take a lot of labor just to identify the names.
Table-ized A.I.
For God's sake put the tinfoil hat conspiracies away. they arent needed and really only serve to turn this into a political crap flinging contest between the left and right.
Look at the facts:
The best translators the government has are probably at NSA, CIA and in the military services doing more important and urgent (real time) work, so thats why these "background" documents have been sitting for a few years. The shortage of these folks is well publicized, so they are a scarce resource and will not be allocated to a background task like this.
The simple truth is there are few Arabic translators that the government can hire permanently (and who would do this temporary?), and fewer still that can pass the background checks and get the requisite minimal security clearances needed for general employment in most of the usual places (Departments of Defense, State and the various Agencies). Not that they NEED the clearances and accesses (especially for documents that are now public domain apparently), but that such clearances have become almost ritual in nature and are part of the job requirements, usually at the DoD "Secret" level or above.
Add to that the general disinterest most people have in working for the government, then blend in the public law restrictions on the pay (GS scale precludes spending sprees on hiring), and you have a ready made "shortage", or at lesat an inaiblity fo the government to get the translators it thinks it needs.
And on top of that, add in the screwy contract rules and also consider that no congress-critter has a personal stake in a translation company, and you just about guarantee the inablity for much anything other than the titles to be looked at and a spot check done at random in almost all of these, they get scanned in to a PDF, then off to a box they go.
It doesn't take conspiracy, just the usual incompetence and common inability of big government agencies to get anything done quickly.
No political slant needed to left or right, just business as usual in the belly of the Leviathan.
That's correct. Intel expert Steven Aftergood called this an attempt by the right wing to find "a retrospective justification for the war in Iraq." The bloggers have made some interesting finds, it's true, but so far the ONDI's warning that "amateur translators won't find any major surprises, such as proof Hussein hid stockpiles of chemical weapons" has turned out to be true. They have also given us some bizarre misinterpretation too, such as some bloggers' belief that one document (CMPC-2003-006430.pdf) is a manual for the Mukhabarat even though it is clearly a printout of a webpage by the Federation of American Scientists from 1997 (complete with FAS logo!). Another supposed "smoking gun" was a document that had pictures of Zarqawi, cited as "proof" that Saddam trained him -- when in fact the documents clearly show that the Saddam regime is on the lookout for Zarqawi and his group, and, according to Associated Press, "Attached were three responses in which agents said there was no evidence al-Zarqawi or the other man were in Iraq." There is a lot more misreading and jumping to conclusions from this document dump. It's interesting, and I think it is good to have these documents made public, for historical reasons mostly, but the idea that these documents are where we should look for justification of Bush's war effort just shows how desperate Pete Hoekstra and other Republicans who pushed forcefully for this move really are.
I dont see why it always has to be either an evil political move or an idealistically brilliant move. To me its just as possible that it was some decision made by someone with a mix of good intentions and laziness.
Some choice quotes to give you an idea of what I'm talking about here: