Slashdot Mirror
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."
Mommy and Daddy are fighting
The US military mounted a cyberattack against the CIA? (disclaimer: did not read TFA)
At least they weren't desperate enough to resort to sending a DMCA take down notice.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
We can have snacks, live TV coverage and perhaps even some interactive challenges, all from the comfort of our homes while the contestants battle it out in a cyberwar tournament! It's gonna be great!
I thought DHS was created for a purpose of streamlining the defense to avoid this kind of crap between different agencies. Don't they have some kind of procedure regulating clashing interdepartmental opinions?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
It's a shame that words like "CyberWar" appear meaningful to the Slashdot community.
The largest prime factor of my UID is 263267.
Well, at least the honeypot becomes more credible to real terrorists now...
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
It was actually created to pay wages and pensions. Like most of the rest of the government you have to hope there is enough side-effect left over from the jobs program aspect to actually accomplish the publicly stated mission of the dept. In the case of the DHS, maybe it is better that they just stay confined to the jobs program aspect.
Would you want terrorists like these roaming free?
I can't exactly recall, but wasn't there an article or two on Slashdot a while back about how perhaps it was better to allow known terrorist network sites to continue to operate, rather than to shut them down and have us not know where the terrorists communicate anymore?
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.
Reading between the lines, someone in the military had a brilliant idea on how to find people liable to be extremists. "Lets make our own extremist site", they said. "Just to make sure we get them all we'll make it really fan the flames of Jihad, and tell Muslims why they should join in". What happens. A few people who would be terrorists come a long ... fine. A large number of moderates come along and leave comments like "you're a disgrace to Islam" and move on.. fine. But a sizeable number of Muslims who are not extremists hit the site and become radicalised by it. Some continue to use the site, but some inevitably find other "real" sites.
Someone does an analysis and says "Look, the number of people being radicalised by us who we lose track of is now larger than the number of people who are already radical who come along and get tracked". The military intelligence guys say "what do you mean doing no good, we have dozens of people here talking about extremist acts, and we only lose track of a quarter of them!", totally missing the point that they now have a dozen untracked extremists, and three dozen who are currently tracked whereas without the site they would have had half a dozen untracked ones!
None of this addresses the need for security of our strategic honey reserves.
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
"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.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
You can't fix stupid. Truer words were never said. Explains quite a bit about our fine Government too.
If you see suspicious activity, please call
1-800-ALQ-AEDA
Your information will be treated confidentially,
Yours In War,
President-VICE Richard B. Cheney
rule #1: don't be a dick. what isn't yours isn't yours. it's none of your business. so shut up. rule #2: use common sense. and if you don't have any, then your best bet is probably just to be completely passive. both rules were egregiously broken here. and by who? military. surprise, surprise.
This is the domestic equivalent of what Pakistan just did recently when they arrested the 2nd highest man in the Taliban, who had not only been talking with the UN, but was scheduled to meet with Karzai in the next few months. Short term thinking and infighting hurting long term strategic goals. So what if some of the extremists left the website that had been set up? If we know all their information, can we just follow them to their new site? I'm sure the CIA had operatives planted in the website who befriended some of the regular visitors. Just like with any other forum/website, when someone leaves, they generally try to get their friends from the site to move with them to the new site, or at the very least let them know where they are going. Taking down this website only made us lose the potential capability to identify and infiltrate other extremist websites that are growing in popularity and membership.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
With all the collective intellect of slashdot users, hasn't it even occurred to a single one of you geniuses that maybe, just maybe, this news is a bit of disinformation that has been spread deliberately to obscure some kind of real reorganization/shakeup that is taking place? Huh? I doubt in the extreme that the DOD has gone to war with the CIA, or that they are this blatantly making like the Keystone Kops.
The DoD and the CIA are both Executive Branch... O.o Why didn't this get handled via the chain of command to the White House?
After 9/11, the clear cause of the breakdown in security was determined to be that government agencies had grown insular. The overwhelming impetus for creating the Department of Homeland Security (a name that still creeps out my NaziDar®) was to integrate these agencies, to make them share information and goals.
You mean GW Bush didn't even get the super-spook agencies to cooperate?
Did that fucktard do ANYTHING right?
... was seducing an enemy agent.
*sigh* This is why we can't have nice things.
Karma: Non-Heinous
I'm going to rehash an argument that I used a few months ago when there was a news story about the FBI running a similar operation to monitor and prosecute criminals involved in credit card fraud. In that case, a few people argued that the FBI was aiding the badguys by giving them a forum to swap their k0d3z in. They completely ignored the fact that the bad guys would do it any way. If they weren't using the FBI forum, they'd be using another, unmonitored forum to trade the exact same information.
The same situation is going on with this CIA jihadist "honey pot". The jihadists are going to use the internet to discuss what they want to discuss. Our government has two choices. They can either facilitate the information exchange and by doing so, tap into it.. or they can attempt to take down the sites where the discussions are taking place. In the former case they gain useful intelligence. In the latter case they end up playing whack-a-mole and are constantly one step behind the bad guys.
The biggest challenge that the government faces in the "War on Terror" (and for the record, I'm against it. However I do realize the inescapability of it at the current time.) is gathering good intelligence. There simply aren't enough American citizens, or people friendly to the American government who have the necessary linguistic skills and social connections to infiltrate "terrorist" networks. Given the lack of human resources necessary to engage "the enemy" with, the government needs to come up with other ways to monitor what is going on. The honey pot that was just taken down was one of those monitoring tools.
Whoever authorized the take down of the site should be stripped of authority and questioned. They obviously aren't playing for the right team.
Wow, article on Slashdot explaining how we're losing all this intel. lol This is just smoke for something else
The summary acts as if the site was run by the CIA and was hacked by the CIA. The article at times talks the same way, although it also sounds like the CIA had access to the site somehow maybe an account and the NSA hacked the site. Either way how could the army not look and see that they had intimate access to a communication channel used to organize activities. Only reason I can think is that they might have to sit on some information to avoid giving away the fact that they have it, but if that is the case why not just milk it for what its worth then hack it.
every anarchist is a baffled dictator. Benito_Mussolini
There is a long history here that needs to be taken into consideration... This undermining of our own efforts is nothing new. This has to do with the disparate directives given to different government agencies.
It used to be that the government intelligence agencies had to protect paper documents, "eyes only", and the biggest threat were photocopiers and miniature cameras... not any more.
I wrote about this transformation many years ago.
From my post:
HumInt/SigInt:
Human Intelligence, CIA
Signal Intelligence, NSA
The English have been masters at the spy trade for centuries. In WWII, the United States felt that it should get into the act and turned to the English for guidance.
With their tutelage, the CIA became a formidable tool against the Soviet threat throughout the cold war. We had clearly defined enemies with clearly defined borders. Gathering intelligence became a methodical science... then, once the Soviet Union collapsed, the clearly defined enemies with clearly defined borders went with it.
The growth of the internet created an atmosphere wherein information and 'intelligence' became a commodity. Then the emergence of an enemy that is not only difficult, if not impossible, to clearly define but who also operates entirely without borders. The polar opposite from what the CIA were trained to do.
Not only has this rule-set reset turned the CIA upside-down, it has rendered it all but useless. The UK isn't doing much better either. The problem is that western society itself is at odds with the rules required to make an effective spy agency. Our open government(s), free access to information, laws against spying on citizens and so forth are what both protect our civil liberties as well as create the environment in which our enemies can plot against us.
The CIA knew about al Qaeda operators operating in the USA prior to 9/11, yet did nothing to notify the FBI. This is because of the opposing nature of each agency. The CIA finds a criminal and wants to string them along to see what intelligence they can uncover by monitoring them. When the FBI finds a criminal, they want to string them up. From the CIA perspective, the FBI sure knows how to screw up an investigation and destroy your intelligence network. (In this case, it was the DoD that took down the honeypot.)
The CIA is now dysfunctional to the point of uselessness. In fact, there isn't a single effective spy agency in the western world. The current battle we're fighting and the enemy we face is one that cannot be defeated by military might, it is a war that MUST be fought using intelligence.
So, the administration turned to the only other agency with experience in gathering and monitoring enemies. It also happens that this agency is experts at SigInt, as opposed to the HumInt. The problem is that the NSA is forbidden by law from spying on American Citizens, UNLESS they are monitoring overseas communications. This exception has always been allowed, no warrant necessary. There is no law that states that I have the constitutional right to conspire with enemies overseas.
No other nation even comes close to the SigInt capabilities of the NSA...
It is imperative that the NSA get on top of this nations information security. A staggering number of government agencies are still not even behind firewalls! There is so much bureaucratic stagnation that nothing meaningful has been done to secure this nations governmental infrastructure.
Finally, they are putting an agency in charge that actually *knows* something about security. I applaud this effort wholeheartedly.
Regards,
Joel Helgeson
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
Did this involve that Huffington Post censorship of Jesse Ventura?
Thought so.....
If you are going to use a quote at least tell us who it's from, also here is the whole quote . . .
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
--James D. Nicoll
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
Oh..., The dark malevolent cracker-humor of it all %~?
Folks, this had me chuckling a few minutes, at work, but paranoia set-in (I stopped laughing).
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Probably saved American lives to shut this down.
That would probably require the DOJ's assistance, and even if it didn't, since they're all members of the same government branch answerable all to the same man, it would probably be handled by firing people and forgetting about it rather than tying up the courts.
"Better" handled by firing people? Maybe or maybe not, but I just can't see the Obama administration (or ANY administration) opening themselves up to a political circus by fighting itself over which agency under its command risked American lives the most in our fight against terrorism.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
C'mon, who here would pass up a chance to Rickroll Al-Qaeda in the middle of a supposed new video by Osama bin Laden?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Enough said.
I seem to recall a certain intelligence agency admitting to the 9/11 commission they had intelligence about the hijackers taking flight training classes prior to the attacks. Hmmmmm, having that intel and keeping that information source operating sure came in handy back then. Might as well go with the same logic this time. Hell yes NSA, you kill those terrorist websites, and the websites that they have spawned!!!!!!!
You have non violent "extremists" and you have terrorists. The difference is the non violent extremists are all talk, no action. The actual terrorists take action or provide financial support to individuals who do. Terrorists are more like paramilitary forces, this is not the same thing as 911 truthers, the Alex Jones crowd, or Glen Beck watchers.
So it makes absolute sense for the CIA to launch and host websites. And the argument that moderates can be radicalized into terrorists by a website is completely ridiculous. Especially if it's a CIA run site, that makes it even more ridiculous.
I'm sure it's possible that people do get radicalized, but I doubt that one website does it. It's probably a combination of things such as loss of family members via the Iraq war, the perception of Islam being under attack due to Bush announcing a crusade, and many other factors such as personality type. I don't think websites make people violent anymore than video games or "guns" kill people.
... to write about ...
It's easy to track the sites people visit. It's next to impossible to track the books people read.
Fortunately the terrorists aren't that smart. Just inject a stealth cookie or even a trojan into their computer and track every site they visit and everything they do online.
Because an IP address usually can be traced to a computer, and a computer can give you the names of the individuals involved, and with those names you can take it offline.
I think that any information transmitted or received to or from their specific IP addresses can be monitored forum or not by the FBI. What the forums probably do is allow the CIA to identify who the terrorists are and who to watch more carefully.
Who knows maybe the terrorists added FBI agents to their facebook.
Looks like the progressive tartism and feckless defense policy born of libtards is creeping into every aspect of govt.
I think you are assuming a situation similar to the US, where people access websites from personally owned computers with static IPs. It is quite possible that the users of these websites were using internet cafes or other throw-away connections.
You can't spell China without "Ha!" This is the Fort Sumter of cyberwar. It's the beginning of the Cyberwar Between The Agencies (or the Civil Cyberwar for you Yanks). :^P
--
Toro
What is diaspora pattern matching?
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Science has two disciplines: (1) Theory and (2) Applied
Theory Major Areas: Mathematics and Physics (Theoretical Unknowns, Curiosities, Anomalies)
Applied Major Areas: Engineering and Fine-Art (Applied Detail, Nuance, and Aesthetics)
All else is just art; as in, exceptional efforts to artfully apply science (Medicine, Design, Analysis...), and feeble/failed attempts to apply science (Economics, Management, War...)
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
NSA is not DoD. Sounds more like a turf battle to me.
to convince all jihadists that the new jihadi website they joined *isn't* a CIA honeypot.