Slashdot Mirror
Spy Agencies Turn To Online Sources For Info
palegray.net sends us to US News and World Report for an article about increased spy agency use of online sources. Turning to well-known destinations such as NPR and Wikipedia, folks in the intelligence world are increasingly filling their reports with information gleaned from the public domain. "A few days ago, a senior officer at the Pentagon called his intelligence officer into his office. The boss had heard a news report about China while driving to his office and wanted some answers. It wasn't a tough assignment, given the news coverage, but there was a hitch. 'There was plenty of information in the public domain about the topic,' recalls the intelligence officer, a 10-year veteran. 'And yet, if there wasn't some classified information cited in my report, the boss would never believe it was accurate.'"
Seriously. Most spying is not covert at all. Most of our spies work openly, either here or in embassies in other nations, simply reading the local press and other local public information. This is called "official cover", but the spies aren't in any way covert (it now US law that if a memebr of, say, the CIA has ever been posted overseas with official cover, they can never do covert work - because CIA managers tried to get cute and lots of people died).
The one thing a CIA employee will never do is directly collect secret information from a forieng government - they're not sneaking into government buildings at night photographing secret documents with tiny cameras, or planting bugs, or etc. Overt agents just read the press (and get the mood on the street). Covert agents recuit trusted locals to do any sneaky stuff (often posing as a memebr of some other nation's covert intelligence arm - whatever nation the source is sympathetic to).
There was a time when the overt data colection would get you executed as a spy, so there's a historical reson for our overt agents to pose as State Department officials, but it's not exactly a secret these days (anyone in an American embassy is just automatically assumed to be a spy), and most useful and trustworthy information comes this way.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Errr... no, it's not. OSINT is just plain "open source", no 's'. Check Wikipedia for more information.
Now we know why the CIA etc has been so often completely off base -- they've been getting their information from Slashdot!
Not sure what you're trying to imply. Open Source intelligence predates open source software by probably 30 years.
No. I don't. We might have hundreds of thousands (actually millions) people working in those groups, but the vast majority of them are not analysts. The vast majority are the paid thinkers but the do'ers and the ones who maintain the infrastructure to support the do'ers. I'd be surpirsed if 10% of them were analysts in the sense we are speaking of regarding this article.
And while some Captain in the Air Force might have to write reports for his bosses on the performance of his squad and suggest plans of attack on the upcoming mission, those aren't the same level of intelligence gestalting reports that we are talking about here.
No news here, move along.
It's called ECHELON and its more than US-UK: It's the Anglic-5 (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand).
With Canada and Australia in the mix, a significant part of the globe is covered. And with all five countries in the mix, it's easy to imagine that perhaps one government would pass on information about persons of interest to any of the other four.
Oh, I suppose I need a mandatory /.ism:
...a scheme that the US / UK axis perpetrate...
There, fixed that for ya!
I'm here EdgeKeep Inc.
As of yesterday, the official count of Americans dead in Iraq is 4,158. As to the number of dead Iraqis, that number depends on how you count the dead.
If you mean strictly civilians killed by American and other forces, that number will never be revealed. Obviously we don't want the civilians of Iraq to know how many of their neighbors were killed by the liberators. In fact, when the Iraqis tried to keep a running total based on the number of bodies brought to morgues, the Iraqi government was forced to stop counting the figures.
If you mean the number of civilians killed by American and other forces along with the number killed by their neighbors due to religious, cultural or other reasons, again, that number will never be revealed. Wouldn't want to reinflame sectarian violence, would we? However, based on interviews and other sources, as of November 2006, we have the following estimates:
Iraqi civilians deaths: 49,000 > 655,000
Those figures were derived from Iraq Body Count and a study published in Lancet in 2006.
If you mean the number of Iraqi civilians who took up arms against the occupying forces but who are considered insurgents/terrorists/member of Al Qaeda/etc, then the military will gladly give you that number. In fact, as of August 2007, the military reported 18,832 suspected insurgents killed.
For a report on why getting numbers is so difficult, see this story in The Guardian from March of this year.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower