Slashdot Mirror
Open Source Spying
eldavojohn writes "The New York Times is running a very lengthy but amazingly interesting article on the short history of open source software and information on the inside of the intelligence community. The article discusses the transformation of the intelligence community from fighting the Cold War with traditional information exchange to fighting terrorism today utilizing things like wikis & blogs. From the end of the article, 'Today's spies exist in an age of constant information exchange, in which everyday citizens swap news, dial up satellite pictures of their houses and collaborate on distant Web sites with strangers. As John Arquilla told me, if the spies do not join the rest of the world, they risk growing to resemble the rigid, unchanging bureaucracy that they once confronted during the cold war. "Fifteen years ago we were fighting the Soviet Union," he said. "Who knew it would be replicated today in the intelligence community?"' You may recall that the CIA now has their own classified Wiki. I think it's interesting that the 9/11 Report recommended that United States agencies such as the DoD, CIA & FBI learn to share information more freely to overcome terrorism and now they're turning to internet community applications to accomplish that."
Back in the cold war times, secret services agencies had hundred of peoples reading ad analyzing every number of the must important publications in the world, searching for clues and disguised information. I guess the same can be applied now for the web, with the advantage that it's a lot easier to search the web and classify information using database filters than it was back then.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
I think it's interesting that the 9/11 Report recommended that United States agencies such as the DoD, CIA & FBI learn to share information more freely to overcome terrorism and now they're turning to internet community applications to accomplish that."
They will be sharing more internally, cutting across organizational boundaries and through previous barriers, and not necessarily with the outside world.
We will often never hear of their successes, even when some of them are readily available. I'm astonished how often you read comments denying that there have been any terrorism arrests or convictions, and acting as if it was all made up*.
* And this doesn't even get into the fringe ideas worthy of debunking.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Just because they said Open Source on one of ten pages doesn't meant they're talking about open source software. Blogs and Wikis are concepts, and it wasn't mentioned what software they run on. The whole thing was just about (surprise surprise) how much technology sucks in the government, and how two people (out of all of inteligence community) are trying to change it. The reported just used the term 'Open Source' to mean shareing.
RTFA.
RTFA please! The title is a bit misleading, the article is not one bit about open source software. Its about having a more 'open' online presence within its branches, such as through the use of blogs and wikis. The blogs example particularly has a good case for it: the example of google using links to rank the importances of pages is given, compared to the mess of unsortable data the government previously seemed to be having.
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
Pathetic that an open-source wiki *needs* to be established, but it's accomplished more than, say, SAIC's failed $200M boondoggle that was supposed to modernize the FBI's computer systems. See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/08/17/AR2006081701485_pf.html for an enlightening read.
Um, have you actually read the Patriot Act? Of the Act's 10 Titles, only one section of one title (Sec. 504) even remotely relates to improving coordination among government agencies. Most of the rest of the act is designed to increase government powers relating to anti-terrorism enforcement, anti-money-laundering enforcement, anti-counterfeiting enforcement, and increasing the powers and authority of the Director of Central Intelligence and the President.
The Patriot Act does not setup DHS, nor does it put any other federal agencies under the discretion of DHS.
My blog
First of all, Slashdotters need to understand that the term "open source" can be used differently in other contexts. In the intelligence community it has a specific meaning that has nothing to do with software - it refers to intelligence information available through publicly available sources (e.g., the news media, jihadist web sites, web blogs). Don't read too much into the title of the article - I doubt even the author knows for sure which meaning of "open source" was intended.
Do you wonder why they are shooting at you in Iraq
You use the word "they" as if "the Iraqi people" are doing the shooting. Most of the people being shot by Iraqi people are other Iraqi people - but that's only a very small part of the carnage. Just like under Saddam - except that then, it was the minority Sunnis as brutally ruled by a family from Tikrit, killing people by the tens of thousands, for decades on end. Now you've got small sectarian cells fueled by cash and weapons from Iran and Syria, with the local Al Queda operator pouring gasoline on the fire. The average Iraqi is hardly rising up against the troops that are there training local forces, building infrastructure, and protecting the elected government as best they can from assasination attempts by foreign insurgents or would-be theocratic idiots that proclaim democracy to be un-Islamic.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.