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."

Comments

An interesting counterpoint...

[Anonymous Coward]

on why ACH (the subject of this story) might not have been readily adopted in some quarters.

Summary:

Ironically, the widespread adoption of ACH as the official method for hypothesis evaluation is the result of a failure to consider alternative hypotheses (ie. alternative possible answers to the question, 'What would be the best way to make hypothesis evaluation more rigorous and reliable?') ACH has been falsely assumed to be (a) valid and (b) the only game in town. That is just the kind of 'jumping to conclusions' that ACH would supposedly help us avoid.

So when we hear about software for ACH failing to be adopted by the US intelligence community, we shouldn't assume that it is another case of tragic bungling by massive bureaucracy. In this case, it might in fact be a lucky escape.

Re:An interesting counterpoint...

[Registered Coward v2]

The answer as in an expert system software is not to entirely rely on it, but use it as a tool in your arsenal to help you do the job. Yes a computer can't figure every conceivable option in most circumstances, but neither can a human, the key is they my both come up with solutions unique to one another.

ACH is not an expert system but rather an analytic approach to conducting analysis of information; in this case intelligence information. Richard Heuer's "Psychology of Intelligence Analysis" is the classic text on ACH.

Are Expert Systems Still Around?

[Gazzonyx]

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.

"Open Source" tells us almost nothing

[njdj]

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:

1. Who can read the source (licensees only?)
2. What you're allowed to do with the source

"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.

Re:Wired... empf

[Anonymous Coward]

There is something about Wired I cannot digest since the whole wikileaks farce.

I have no idea what you're talking about wrt Wired and Wikileaks, but I would like to know. Anyone?

Re:Wired... empf

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

He's talking about Wired's connection to Adrian Lamo who claims to have outed the guy apparently responsible for leaking that video of the civilians being gunned down by a helicopter and perhaps even the latest round of documents. Without getting into the details there is something fishy about the relationship between Lamo and the reporter at wired that wrote (broke?) the story.

Re:Wired... empf

[Raenex]

Well ok, for the sake of others following along I found an article on Salon airing out these suspicions: http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/06/18/wikileaks

Most of this just seems to be anger directed at Lamo and Wired via proxy.

The need for open source sensemaking tools

[Paul Fernhout]

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

Re:Do we want that?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen this. Some scientists at my lab use a particular note-taking application, and I had occasion to read through the license while I was poking around the file format to add some features. The license specifically called out prohibiting the use of the application for anything having to do with nuclear technology. Which put us in a bit of a grey area, as there is some radioisotope use for tagging in our section of the lab, and technically violates the letter of the license.

And, posting AC...