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

Bah

[mrsteveman1]

Mommy and Daddy are fighting

Re:Bah

[WrongSizeGlass]

More like the left hand and the right hand can't agree on what they need to do (or should be doing).

I'm sure both sides have legitimate reasons for their positions, but it would seem like this type of thing could (and should) be avoided ... and kept quiet too. I'm going to go check out their Facebook pages and see who's got the most Fans.

Re:Bah

[spun]

Don't let the CIA waterboard you when it's mad at the army.

Re:Bah

[Rich0]

Isn't that the reason we have one person who is the head of the entire executive branch?

If the CIA wants one thing, and the DoD wants something else, why don't they just ask the president to make a call?

Or is the idea of cutting through bureaucracy so repugnant to government workers that the concept of just having somebody make a decision is completely alien?

Did I read this right?

[Mitchell314]

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.

Re:Did I read this right?

[longacre]

How many infidels did you have to kill to become a mod on that board?

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.

I have seen these so called honeypot terrorists

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you want terrorists like these roaming free?

Scorched-earth security defeats itself again.

[jwietelmann]

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?

There's military intelligence for you

[Chrisq]

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!

Re:There's military intelligence for you

[copponex]

Yeah. One would almost assume it would be easier to switch to alternative sources of energy, bring our troops home, spend a fraction of the military budget on protecting our airliners and ports, and stop sponsoring military dictatorships in the middle east with arms and money.

But, they'd still hate us for our freedom! Or something...

Re:There's military intelligence for you

[jwietelmann]

The entire premise for your argument that the honeypot is a stupid idea rests on an assumption that if the CIA didn't operate a jihadi site, all those same site visitors wouldn't be going to any number of other jihadi sites instead.

That seems pretty far-fetched.

Re:Enough already

[spun]

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.

Disturbing

[RealErmine]

None of this addresses the need for security of our strategic honey reserves.

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.

Re:Here's all you need to know

[spun]

"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.

It just, you know, pines for the fjords.

Re:Here's all you need to know

[Rich0]

There's a big difference between soldiers dying because they are accomplishing a dangerous mission, and soldiers dying because they are being ambushed.

There's a difference between merchant ships being sunk because they're accomplishing the dangerous mission of ferrying cargo across the North Atlantic during WWII, and ships being sunk because they are being ambushed by U-Boats.

Under your rationale, the allies should have made use of Enigma/Ultra intelligence to defend any target of any value, without regard to preserving the secrecy of the Ultra project.

In reality, many sailors went to the bottom whose lives could have been saved if the intelligence source were sacrificed. However, I don't know ANYBODY who would argue that the allies would have been better off if they saved a few ships in 1943 at the cost of the Germans switching to an unbreakable encryption system.

Soldiers dying in ambush are no different from soldiers dying taking out a fixed objective where the enemy positions are known. In the end, they are sons and brothers and husbands and fathers, whose loss is a terrible cost which should only be incurred for the greatest need.

However, it is a betrayal to save the lives of a few now at the cost of many more later, or at the cost of the mission. If the lives of a few soldiers is more important than the mission, then we shouldn't be putting them in harm's way in the first place.

This is hardly something new to war. There has been countless debate over things like the decision after the Normandy breakout in WWII France to allow the Germans to retreat instead of cutting them off at a likely cost of many deaths from friendly fire. It is easier to let the war go on an extra six months or whatever and grind through an extra few hundred thousand people than to deal with accusations that your actions killed a few thousand of your own soldiers.

Sometimes in war playing it safe costs more lives than it saves.

You can't.....

[budword]

You can't fix stupid. Truer words were never said. Explains quite a bit about our fine Government too.

Jeeze, use your common sense

[fnj]

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.