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."

Comments

Back then

[El Lobo]

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.

Re:It makes you wonder

[arun_s]

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.