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CIA Software Developer Goes Open Source, Instead
jamie found this piece, at Wired's Danger Room from a couple of days back, about an encouraging sign for the growth of open source in the military / intelligence sphere. "For three years, Matthew Burton has been trying to get a simple, useful software tool into the hands of analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency. For three years, haggling over the code’s intellectual property rights has kept the software from going anywhere near Langley. So now, Burton’s releasing it — free to the public, and under an open source license."
Good thing it's both free to the public and open source. I hate it when things are either free or open, but not both.
Doesn't he understand how the revolving door system work? Why is he fucking with our common well? Damn. Like we don't all have boat payments and stuff.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
on why ACH (the subject of this story) might not have been readily adopted in some quarters.
Summary:
There is something about Wired I cannot digest since the whole wikileaks farce.
they really love following rules
When they are done creating the ultimate spy software will it be free to download?
You know, I remember reading about expert systems when I was a kid... are they any better or more intelligent than they were 15 years ago? Expert systems seems to be like artificial intelligence; mostly unheard of outside of academia with very few breakthroughs technologically.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Neither the post, nor the article linked, tell us much. "Open Source" just says that some people can read the source code. It doesn't tell us:
"Open source" doesn't mean "public domain". Somebody still owns the copyright, and can make permission to copy the source conditional on acceptance of a license. Then the terms of that license are all-important.
Do we really want growing open source use in the military / intelligence sphere?
Where is the border between helpful and harmful, and where is the moral event horizon for the contributors?
"Software for Analysts" sounds harmless, but could very well be their best shot at re-creating 1984. Is it really encouraging to have Echelon being empored by open source to eavesdrop on even more emails and phone calls?
Or how about drones, avionics, etc? Would you feel empowered by having a killbot using your code?
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
As I read the article, the guy extended to some software the CIA already had on speculation, but they don't want to buy his extension. So he has a hissy fit and decides to abandon the project and release the source. Nothing to see here...
Show us the code or it's not free
So far, and for a while now, all this has been but site that collects peoples emails. There is NO SOFTWARE, just a promise that it's "Coming Soon"... Pardon the skepticism, but this could just be a misguided stunt by a butthurt developer to try and leverage public interest or a more nefarious scam, or just attention whoring.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
He would probably make more money writing a book about who killed JonBenet than he would have by selling his software. I wonder if that's what he's planning to do, because he boldly said that he was wrong in thinking that the mother killer her, but he did not say who the evidence led him to believe actually did it.
They also allowed the release of "Vortex", http://sourceforge.net/projects/vortex-ids/, created by Charles Smutz of Lockheed Martin. Its a Near-Real Time IDS system that captures streams and allows multiple threads to evaluate the captured data. Very nice. (Not LM, just a fan).
Instead of selling our spooks the software, he instead essentially chose to give it away to all the spooks in all the countries who want it?
Let's see where that gets him... I'm guessing it'll be a back room with no windows the next time he's at the airport.
You can only make something open source if you own the rights to it or manage to get the appropriate rights to someone else. You can't make something open source if the intellectual property rights are owned by someone else.
So if, as claimed in the article, "haggling over the code's intellectual property rights has kept the software from going anywhere near Langley", then he shouldn't be able to take it open source at all. (Unless it just means that he had the rights and was haggling over giving them up.)
Expert systems have been used in the Mortgage underwriting business for years to help gain an advantage over competitors who use a manual underwriting process. You take a zillion underwriting cases and store them and the end results. Then when a new customer wants underwriting, you find a close match and return a verdict plus any needed requirements..
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
If I write military software and use a variety of open source projects in my software, what it does is allow me to build with tools that have been vetted by analyst as being clean. E.g. I need a crypto software for my submarine communications systems, I can re-use open source knowing that the code has been researched and found to be clean of "other influences". If I use a black blox software, you don't know what is inside (at least not as easily). An open source box can be analyzed and signed, joining a list of "approved" tools. I don't write military software, so I'm just opining generically here..
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
Site summary: "We don't have anything really to download, but hey, give us your email address and we'll let you know when we do. No really, it's completely legit. Just type in your email address below. We promise not to use it for anything nefarious. Really, we do."
Advice: on VPS providers
You can watch for the code the repository in github. It's empty at the moment. http://github.com/Burton/Analysis-of-Competing-Hypotheses
Until the skies turn blue...
Until the air of freedom strikes us...
There is a statement at the bottom of this /. page, I guess we could call it the random thought of the moment. For this page it is:
Men seldom show dimples to girls who have pimples.
For equal opportunity purposes, this should be accompanied by:
Girls seldom show nipples to men who have pimples.
I'm wondering when slashdot started indoctrinating the faithful in close encounters with the female kind.
I posted two comments related to this issue of open source sensemaking tools to understand how socio-politico-techno-economic stuff works at the following URL in response to a larger issue raised by Marshall Brain on the USA's ongoing economic decline:
http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/2010/08/06/makes-you-think-in-america-we-realize-that-our-children-will-do-worse-than-their-parents/
In short, I feel open source tools for collaborative structured arguments, multiple perspective analysis, agent-based simulation, and so on, used together for making sense of what is going on in the world, are important to our democracy, security, and prosperity. Imagine if, instead of blog posts and comments on topics, we had searchable structured arguments about simulations and their results all with assumptions defined from different perspectives, where one could see at a glance how different subsets of the community felt about the progess or completeness of different arguments or action plans (somewhat like a debate flow diagram), where even a year of two later one could go back to an existing debate and expand on it with new ideas. As good as slashdot is, such a comprehensive open source sensemaking system would be to slashdot as slashdot is to a static webpage. It might help prevent so much rehashing the same old arguments because one could easily find and build on previous ones. Hopefully in a better way than this classic: :-)
"Argument Clinic Sketch by Monty Python"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQFKtI6gn9Y
As I mention in my comments to Marshall Brains' blog entry, Elizabeth Warren did a terrific job of socio-economic sensemaking, in terms of "The Two Income Trap" and her presentation on the struggles of US middle-class families in the video Marshall Brain linked to. But why should even Harvard Law professors essentially wing it as far as sensemaking with only email, spreadsheets, and word processors, probably working mostly alone, and in a way that she can not easily share all the details of her explorations? Especially when the USA has invested, probably, literally billions of dollars to create software to help groups of people collectively understand complex social and economic issues? And given the US is likely to spend billions more in this area? And given that, if we have any faith in "truth", one would hope that helping everyone in the world come to a better understanding of various truths and a better understanding of each other would, in general, lead to less conflict rather than more?
I also commented on that idea about a year ago:
"[p2p-research] FOSS modeling tools (was Re: Earth's carrying capacity and Catton)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/004130.html
I tried a little to put together a non-profit foundation to do that, so far to not much success.
And here is why I feel the (non-secret) results of any public funding should be open source rather than proprietary:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html
I feel there is room here for an entirely new approach towards structured collaboration across the internet. It has its roots in Doug Englebart's Augment ideas from the 1960s, and in scale may well be the next Red Hat, Wikipedia, or even Google (whether for-profit or non-profit). Or, it is possible it may be some bunch of related companies and non-profits, all using a common infrastructure
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
They are too worked up about what is their territory to work with anyone else, or use anyone else's info / software. They are too busy marking their territory, like the dumb dogs they are.
I can just hear them now:
Hey, git away from there. That's my tree.
It's not your tree. I just marked it.
Hey guys, did you just hear an explosion?
I don't care if you did just mark it. It's in my yard.
Does anyone smell smoke?
I don't care if it is in your yard. Just sniff it. You'll know I have been marking it. It's my tree.
Do you hear sirens?
It's in my yard, it's my tree. Now get out of my yard.
Is that gunfire?
wake up and hold your nose
Govt contracts I have SEEN have stipulations in them that all IP belongs to the Govt. to include source code when code is specifically developed under contract. If a contractor wishes to create a program for another Govt. agency and reuse some of that code all they need to do is ask their previous customer for permission. If they are doing a contract for the same customer then again all they need to do is ASK. GFE code and hardware are moved from project to project ALL THE FUCKING TIME! Contractors CAN develop things on their own and attempt to sell it to multiple agencies. However unless the license specifically states that it cannot be shared the Govt. is free to share it with other agencies - and they DO.
I have no idea why this guy had such an issue getting his code adopted but it had ZERO to do with code reuse, sharing, or any of the other bullshit insinuations made about how the Govt. pays for the same thing over and over. News flash - if a contractor builds a piece of software under contract for one Govt. agency and then tries to sell that same software to another Govt. agency it is ILLEGAL. Agencies DO actually talk to one another and in fact they will collaborate together concerning contractors to figure out which ones are trying to screw them. Contractors that do this get called on the carpet and suddenly find themselves no longer receiving notices about new contract work. This goes both ways BTW, some Govt. groups screw contractors and you had better believe word gets out pretty quickly. What's that - you took my innovative white paper and asked another contractor to build it for you instead of me? Oh you reverse engineered my shiny piece of software that I allowed you to test and built your own? Yeah, THAT agency now finds that rates are higher and bidders fewer...
BTW - this guy wasn't a "CIA Developer". He developed this software on his own or at his companies request and attempted to get it purchased by the Govt. If he had developed this under the direction of the CIA or anyone else as claimed, which would make him a "CIA Developer" and then released it in the way he did then he would have done something ILLEGAL because he would NOT have owned the code. All of this noise about people haggling over it makes it sound like his company directed him to build this with development dollars and is now crying because whatever huge sum of cash they then wanted for it wasn't accepted. THAT is what really happens.
This story is horseshit from the word go and stinks to high heaven of ignorance. Sorry that for some reason someone didn't jump on your shiny piece of software but that doesn't mean it was because they wanted to support some contractor somewhere.
I am too damn lazy to retype something most people could dig up on their own with the judicious use of a search engine
You can help us be judicious by providing good keywords with which to start searching.
I was under the impression that works created by the government are not entitled to (domestic) copyright protection.
WWWWolf, I agree with the moderation that your comment is insightful. And we do have to make moral choices about how we use our tools, as well as moral choices for how we distribute the fruits of our labors with tools (why I support a "basic income" for all, for example).
But there are at least two other aspects to this, and they relate to the point you made in your last sentence: "Perhaps it'd be best to see exactly how those best ideas that were leeched off of good honest scientists are put to action - maybe that'll help us build nicer things for nicer purposes."
One is Langdon Winner's point (such as in his book "Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a Theme in Political Thought") about moving beyond a tool/use distinction (e.g. "knives can be used for good or bad") and looking at how we create complex socio-technical systems that embed assumptions about social organization, intent, acceptabilty, and other things into them. In that sense, the choices we make about what to research, how to build things, and what priorities to set are very much political choices about how we want our social world to be, even if they may not seem so at the time. So, for example, if we research and work towards centralized nuclear power plants, we've made a different statement about how we want society to operate, how accessible technology should be, and what are acceptable risks and to whom, then if we research and work towards, say, solar panels on every roof, or for that matter, long-lasting non-maintenance nuclear batteries. (Although distributed solar and even small-scale home or neighborhood nuclear batteries still may have very different implications on recycling, proliferation, weaponization, privacy, and monitoring).
For example, it is well known that a previous CIA director, R. James Woolsey, supports the development of an electric car infrastructure. See, for example:
http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052702303411604575168130469848598.html
Whatever else one might say about the CIA policies under his tenure, electric cars are a fundamentally more democratic technology than gasoline-powered cars because they would would eliminate the USA's dependence on foreign oil (also reducing the need for a big US military to defend long oil supply lines), and electric cars would be easier for the average person to service given less parts or to recharge at home using local renewable energy production.
Diesel engines, which can be powered by local biofuels, have some of these aspects, too -- which was part of why Rudolf Diesel intentionally invented them. From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_engine
"Though best known for his invention of the pressure-ignited heat engine that bears his name, Rudolf Diesel was also a well-respected thermal engineer and a social theorist. Diesel's inventions have three points in common: they relate to heat transfer by natural physical processes or laws; they involve markedly creative mechanical design; and they were initially motivated by the inventor's concept of sociological needs. Rudolf Diesel originally conceived the diesel engine to enable independent craftsmen and artisans to compete with industry.[8]"
Stirling engines also have some of these attributes. So the choice to research and develop electric cars, diesel cars, or stirling engines is, in that sense, fundamentally different in social implications than a choice to improve gasoline-fueled cars (given gasoline takes oil to make, and big refineries). On the other hand, research on, say, producing gasoline safely at home from vats of sunlit algae would have more democratic implications.
It would be nice to have open source (in the OSI and FSF sense) collaborative software tools for public intelligence that help scientists, engineers, and the general public discuss and thin
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
AC wrote: "Instead of selling our spooks the software, he instead essentially chose to give it away to all the spooks in all the countries who want it? Let's see where that gets him... I'm guessing it'll be a back room with no windows the next time he's at the airport."
That's certainly a possible sentiment that may well reflect how some in the intelligence community will feel about this general topic of free and open source intelligence tools. Still, as I posted in another thread here:
"Moving beyond tool/use distinction and irony"
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1746980&cid=33189078
"""
As with that notion of "mutual security", the US intelligence community needs to look beyond seeing an intelligence tool as just something proprietary that gives a "friendly" analyst some advantage over an "unfriendly" analyst. Instead, the intelligence community could begin to see the potential for a free and open source intelligence tool as a way to promote "friendship" across the planet by dispelling some of the gloom of "want and ignorance" (see the scene in "A Christmas Carol" with Scrooge and a Christmas Spirit) that we still have all too much of around the planet. So, beyond supporting legitimate US intelligence needs (useful with their own closed sources of data), supporting a free and open source intelligence tool (and related open datasets) could become a strategic part of US (or other nation's) "diplomacy" and constructive outreach.
"""
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Here is more on this issue of the global distribution of free and open source software to all the countries of the world, even ones now deemed "competitors" or "unfriendly".
When I was an undegraduate psychology major at Princeton University, my advisor was George A. Miller. This was in the early-to-mid 1980s just before he started working on WordNet -- which was funded in large part by three letter agencies after George "retired". WordNet is also an "open source" project to which, in my less humble moments, I like to think I played a little role in sparking with my own crude explorations on semantic networks as a student of his, as discussed here:
http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/msg/231e63e966e932df?hl=en
WordNet, being open source, is no doubt used by governments around the world, including in China or maybe even North Korea. WordNet is also at the core of much of Google's AdSense profit making (not that I ever saw a dime from that. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Armitage_Miller
But, what I have seen from that is being able to use Google -- a great service run on essentially a global supercomputer that has let me create all sorts of essays about ways forward for our society, such as:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
So, I and many others have greatly benefited from the open source nature of WordNet and what that made possible, far more than if I or George or someone else had a bunch of money in the bank from some proprietary semantic network system that otherwise had sat on the shelf.
George never talked politics with me -- maybe as a consequence of always being pestered by other people to tell of his days working alongside Noam Chomsky (like working on joint papers, etc.). :-) The only time he said anything remotely political in my presence that I can recall was, in the days after "The Day After" movie (a PU prof had helped with the special effects) in the corridor near his office outside the men's bathroom in Green Hall. He seemed a bit upset or angry, IIRC another faculty member was there that he might have been talking to about this, and he said how stupid it was that the first thing the US or USSR military planned to do in a military confrontation was blind the other's satellites, which essentially would ensure the conflict would escalate, because there would be no way the other side could tell what was going on, and they would probably just assume the worst and shoot off all their missiles. I think he may have just read a newspaper article about that.
I feel George has made the world a much better place by creating WordNet -- and a world less likely to shoot off all its nuclear missiles. Whatever the sparks behind WordNet which he started at around age 65 (and I'm sure there were many sparks, as he hung out with lots of people doing semantic network stuff, like Alan Newell and Herbert Simon), he put in year after year of hard work, and structured it based on years of his research into how humans understand language and also how dictionaries work (or should work). He made something open source back when hardly anyone was doing that (and I myself was more interested in proprietary things and being the next, well, Bill Gates was not that big then, but whoever was ultrarich with a big company etc.). As a measure of my own personal growth from those times, in part from George's example, here is a recent video I ma
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
After about a year or two they started going all corporate and away from hackerdom. I cancelled my subscription right away.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/