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
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.
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?
Given the sudden rise in the number of times I've seen that stupid phrase in the news I'm thinking soon we're going to see a "war online" moddled after the war on drugs and the war on terrorism any time soon with all the associated losses of freedom and shitting on civil rights.
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!
Imagine! The gall of people, smashing two innocent and unrelated words together like that to create a third, wholly unauthorized word. That kind of original thinking and insubordination must be punished. Otherwise, people might catch on that language is created by people, not professors. They might realize that it's all arbitrary, and English is not a science, and barely a legitimate academic discipline at all, but rather the preferred refuge of pompous losers who can't make it in any other field.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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.
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.
OTT with the TLAs ;p
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
Wow, way to look like an idiot. Language isn't studied by English professors, it's studied by linguists. This is a very legitimate profession, and in fact every single real linguist I've ever met has been a staunch advocate of the fact that language is made by people, and not a pompous loser at all. They don't sit in their offices plotting out how English (or any other language) will progress. They instead research how it has come to be in its current state, and why it has come to be in its current state. In fact, information theory, a field with applications in neuroscience, electrical engineering, and computer science, also plays a very large role in linguistics.
The English professors who you seem to be adamant about bashing generally study literature, and spanish professors study spanish literature or culture or something else. Sure, foreign language professors might teach grammar, but that's not what they do research and such on. By bashing English literature as a field, you essentially bash every other field related to the study of art, and then some. So please remove your head from your ass.
I love English just because anyone can shove words together and make a new word.
"English is a language that lurks in dark alleys, beats up other languages and rifles through their pockets for spare vocabulary."
There is a procedure. When something gets in the way of DoD, they destroy it. I believe procedure was followed here.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
The CIA has been doing its own thing for decades and is very much an outsider when it comes to dealing with NSA, FBI, etc.
And with good reason. It's hard to run black ops with a bunch of lawyers(FBI) and UCMJ indoctrinated officers(NSA) looking over your shoulder. You could debate the legitimacy, necessity, and legality of such operations all day, but in the end you always need a group of people willing/capable/enabled to take care of issues "behind the scenes" without political and legal interference.
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
Wow, way to illustrate your lack of reading comprehension. Where did I say that Language is studied by English professors? Many linguists are fine people, like Noam Chomsky. That's why I bashed English as a field, not linguistics. Honestly, though, I'm really bashing prescriptivists, who could come from any field. And foolish post modern deconstructionists who can't tell computer generated nonsense from a real paper.
But none of it is a science. Hell, biology is more of a science. It's philosophy, a bunch of clever ideas and hypotheses unrelated to the real world and lacking any sort of rigorous logical structure.
Now the real question is, do I really believe any of that, or am I just trolling the soft sciences? I'm not even sure myself.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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.
Then you should try German sometime.
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.
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.
Seems perfectly cromulent to me..
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
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").
The gall of people, smashing two innocent and unrelated words together like that to create a third, wholly unauthorized word.
I think the issue is not the process by which the word "cyberwar" was created (even granted that "cyber" is a word...) but the inherent stupidity of using the already dog tired "war" metaphor in this quite inappropriate context.
The "war" in cyber-war is about as meaningful as the "war" in the "War on Drugs" or the "War on Terrorism." Which is to say, not much. It is a cliche' rhetorical device designed to inspire people who aren't particularly able thinkers.
War is of course a fundamentally irrational activity--economically it is the least efficient and effective way of solving human problems. It fails routinely to bring about any sort of viable solution--see the Basque, the Tamil, the Irish, the Palestinians...--and in the rare cases when it does (WWII, Napoleon, and maybe Bismark's little wars) it almost always involves vastly more cost in money and human life than any of the alternative solutions.
Wars are fought to satisfy our inner monkey needs, in defiance of anything that is good and rational in our nature. People who are unable to control their emotions and who engage in emotion-driven thinking and decision-making are in favour of wars. No one else is, because there is no rational motivation to go to war, except in the face of the most utterly intractable enemy. Even then, alternatives to war are generally available. They just take things that advocates of warfare don't have, like courage, self-control and a rudimentary level of rationality.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Fatherland, I mean Homeland Security was sold as a clearinghouse for intelligence and to avoid inter-agency disputes. They've spent a lot of money, a huge new government department. It's important, really important, so important that the Senate put Joe Lieberman in charge of oversight... oh wait.
Fifty years of Yippie! 1968-2018