US Military Shuts Down CIA's Terrorist Honey Pot

Hugh Pickens sends in a Washington Post story about how US military cyber-warriors attacked and shut down a CIA-backed intelligence gathering site. "US military computer specialists, over the objections of the CIA, mounted a cyberattack that dismantled an online 'honey pot' monitored by US and Saudi intelligence agencies to identify extremists before they could strike, after military commanders said that the site was putting Americans at risk. The CIA argued that dismantling the site would lead to a significant loss of intelligence, while the military (in the form of the NSA) countered that taking it down was a legitimate operation in defense of US troops. 'The CIA didn't endorse the idea of crippling Web sites,' said one US counterterrorism official. The agency 'understood that intelligence would be lost, and it was; that relationships with cooperating intelligence services would be damaged, and they were; and that the terrorists would migrate to other sites, and they did.' Four former senior US officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the creation and shutting down of the site illustrates the need for clearer policies governing cyberwar."

Comments

Re:DHS

[bsDaemon]

DHS has nothing to do with DOD and CIA. You may be thinking of Director of National Intelligence, who is meant to head up the cooperative efforts of NSA, CIA, DIA, FBI counter intelligence, etc. However, the current DNI is a former Naval officer and is, of course, going to be more sympathetic to the arguments of the NSA (formerly known as Army Signals Intelligence) and DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) than the CIA.

Here's all you need to know

[TubeSteak]

"Once DoD went to the extent of saying, 'Soldiers are dying,' because that's ultimately what the command in Iraq, what Centcom did, it's hard for anyone to push back," one former official said.

But some experts counter that dismantling Web sites is ineffective -- no sooner does a site come down than a mirror site pops up somewhere else. Because extremist groups store backup copies of forum information in servers around the world, "you can't really shut down this process for more than 24 or 48 hours," said Evan F. Kohlmann, a terrorism researcher and a consultant to the Nine/Eleven Finding Answers Foundation.

Those quotes summarize why they did it and why it was ineffective.
Welcome to the internet, where information never dies.