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Wikileaks and Anonymous Join Forces Against US Intelligence Community
pigrabbitbear writes "The most recent bombshell of confidential documents dropped by infamous watchdog organization Wikileaks is already looking to have an enormous impact on our understanding of government security practices. Specifically, intimate details on the long-suspected fact that the U.S. has been paying a whole lot of money to have private corporations spy on citizens, activists and other groups and individuals on their ever-expanding, McCarthy-style naughty list. But perhaps more importantly, the docs demonstrate something very interesting about the nature of U.S. government intelligence: They haven't really got much of it."
Stratfor is a PRIVATE company. The fact that they "spy" on activists or whatever their corporate clients pay them to do has ZERO to do with US intelligence agencies. To be explicit: the "US" is NOT paying private companies to "spy" on activists. That information does not cross over, and the Intelligence Community is not authorized to collect on US Persons, except where allowed by law or authorized by a properly adjudicated warrant from a court of law. I know people on Slashdot don't like to believe this, and prefer to imagine that the sole purpose of the Intelligence Community is spying on our own citizens instead of, you know, doing the jobs they've been charged to do.
Terrible article and summary. F.
McCarthy never did anything involving citizens, use of his name here is a smear. He sought spies in the State Department.
You all are confusing the HUAC Hhouse Un-American Activities Committee with McCarthy. HUAC kept calling citizens communists. McCarthy was in the Senate, not the house.
It's only surprising if you believe Hollywood hype. The halls of the White House are not bristling with people hell-bent on preventing the next disaster. Life is extraordinarily mundane. The majority of the people in government are moving pages and pages of some of the most sleep-inducing content available. I'm far more apt to believe Tom Clancy's novels depicting CIA, FBI etc getting their intelligence from CNN.
You are going to go after people who LIKE to find people like that and make them give up information?
"good luck with that"...
This also comes to mind...
http://xkcd.com/538/
Instead, it's up to a bunch of unethical misbegotten nerds from 4Chan to save the day.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Poking at the "U.S. Intelligence Community" as smart as pulling on Superman's cape or giving Batman a wedgie.
Anonymous? Guy Fawkes masks. CIA/FBI/No Such Agency -- a near-unending supply of money, guns, badges, warrants, subpoenas, and black bag jobs -- and that's just for the U.S. citizens IN THIS COUNTRY.
You in another country? How about a little extraordinary rendition and an all expense paid trip to a black prison?
Just today, here on /. -- "25 Alleged Anonymous Hackers Arrested By Interpol".
Jabbing a hornet's nest with a short stick is not smart. Not smart at all.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
Vice magazine writing now merits the front page of /.?
If US intelligence has access to the results of their spying, OR pays for it, then it has WAY MORE THAN ZERO to do with it.
Nice try at 2 + 2 = 5, though. It would be commendable if you had the balls to not be anonymous about it.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
...became painfully obvious after the 9/11 attacks and subsequent "WMDs" in Iraq. I could honestly not believe how much our government didn't know about what was going on in our own country, let alone the rest of the world.
giggity
You're a complete and utter dumbass if you believe that US foreign intelligence agencies' primary purpose is going after US citizens.
Hint: the CIA and NSA, and every other component of the Intelligence Community, DO NOT COLLECT ON US PERSONS unless specifically and explicitly allowed by law or executive order. And even then, even with all of the confusion with the Bush wiretapping order under the AUMF — which, by the way, has NOT been declared "illegal" by any court, and even when in full force targeted very few persons within the US, i.e., in the hundreds — targeting of US Persons REQUIRES A WARRANT. Doing ANYTHING with regard to US Persons is also a vanishingly small part of what the IC does. The vast majority of our intelligence apparatus is looking outward — that's the fucking point.
To the extent it looks inward, it does so with very explicit and clear legal controls with respect to US Persons, and armies of lawyers approving and advising on any questionable action. If you actually worked in the Intelligence Community and saw how things worked, especially with respect to US Persons, you'd want to kill yourself for being such a fucking low-rent moron. No, literally: you'd wonder how you could have believed this bullshit for all of those years when the IC in fact isn't the evil beast you believe it to be. Yes, it's a giant bureaucracy and like any other features its own share of maddening inefficiencies, turf wars, and idiots. It got on the post-9/11 gravy train like everything else related to national security. But it's not what you think it is. The funny thing is that if you actually cared, you can easily learn this in an unclassified context.
Of course, this is slashdot, and everyone believes there is a secret cabal trying to "keep down the common man" and that the IC's near-sole purpose is spying on US citizens, so no surprises seeing this kind of mental vomit spewed on my screen.
Okay, so let's raise some ire over this. The government responds. They do so in one of two ways:
1) Fire Stratfor, which closes and reopens under another moniker (I hear "Blackwater" is available these days), then hire "new" company at a lesser amount. (Or, if the right two people are pals, a higher amount.)
2) Fire Stratfor, use the money to hire a competent intelligence firm.
I think in this case we can all bitch and moan about government limpness, but should go no further. Considering the current crop of morons in power in all branches and levels, it's highly unlikely for someone to go "maybe we shouldn't hire external private firms and instead put money into doing real intelligence with our own intelligence agencies". If the article's description of Stratfor holds for other companies they hired, I'd rather let incompetence feed incompetence at this point and focus more on election reform.
but the very page they link to in that quote has the "Yes Men Monitoring" related emails being sent to:
none of which suggest that they are "selling the government" this information.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
I don't understand the complaint. First pigrabbitbear complains that they are spying on private citizens, groups, etc.
But when the article says they are not spying, but only compiling publicly available information, pigrabbitbear complains that they are spying too little.
Which is it? Isn't the latter what privacy advocates would want? The author of the article complains about the cost, but doesn't say how much the government paid.
And why do I trust or care what an "Electronic musician and computer culture journalist." posts to a site called vice.com? This post is a lot of noise and confusion based on nothing; one rant based on another.
Call me cynical, but the US government must not consider them a big threat.
Assange is still alive and wikileaks people aren't found face down in rivers.... yet.
Just saying.
silly nosepickers
Newsflash, dickbags:
US intelligence services have ALWAYS been fucking awful. I don't care how many Jason Bourne movies you have watched, US intel has been shit since the day it started as the OSS. Please take the time to read the book, Legacy Of Ashes and you can begin to see what a clownshow US intelligence services have been for the past 60+ years.
Love,
Crow
but rather lack of integrity. The US intelligence wouldn't give Cheney & friends an excuse to invade Iraq, so they created a new intel unit that somehow found all kinds of WMD-related intel...which, surprise, surprise, turned out to be bogus.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
What I get out of the article is that Anonymous' huge stash of documents amounts to a big nothing. What did they find? It seems the good stuff is beyond the reach of a few script kiddies; imagine that.
...except that this office wasn't needed to make the case on Iraqi WMD. Intelligence analysis doesn't always equal reality. I explain this in great detail here.
Forget about your own political leanings or personal biases. Without intelligence that was questionable or even potentially "manipulated" (a strong charge which requires strong evidence), the case for Iraqi WMD was still strong.
Further, the US and its partners discovered 700,000 tons of non-WMD UN-banned weapons when we invaded. Iraq was in violation of not one, not two, but THREE binding and in-force UN Security council resolutions, any one of which allowed for the use of force with no further justification.
Don't mistake my comment for making the claim that invading Iraq was/wasn't a good idea: just focus on what I'm saying, and don't read into it.
The three companies that made up 'Team Themis', the team planned to help Bank of America respond to a never-completed wikileaks dump of BoA data, by character-assassinating journalists and 'activists', were all govt contractors.
Berico Technologies - owned by ex-military, run by ex-military, major customer = us government.
Palantir Technologies - makes software to help aggregate data about people, us govt contractor
HB Gary - this is the one that Anonymous hacked and dumped the data on. they were a us govt contractor, and they routinely spied on all kinds of groups.
---
does that prove that the govt is paying companies to spy on citizens? no. its just that dozens of companies whose main purpose and expertise is to spy on people, and who are staffed by people who spent their entire military career spying on people, just so happen to be receiving billions and billions of dollars from the government to do various jobs that we are not allowed to know about, because of 'national security'.
now, then, of course, there is the long relationship between the US govt and private companies, and spying, going back to World War I, and then later on the ITT corporation, Western Union, and so forth. Then there was AT&T in more recent years, as well as the major phone network companies, who agreed to cooperate with NSA without caring about the law, except for QWest.
then there are the 'fusion centers'. should i go on?
because you can't have it both ways.
either wikileaks was innocuous and had no impact on anything, because its documents were pointless gibberish.
or bradley manning was a traitor to the country and endangered the lives of the troops because wikileaks had such sensitive important information.
only one of those can be true. not both.
Clearly the author doesn't know or care about the difference between some person with a .gov email being a subscriber to the same stuff Stratfor sells to everybody else on its mailing list, and some agency with Cogressional funds contracting with Stratfor to do something exclusive. If it were the latter, it would be COTS intel. That's what the idiots at Wikileaks and Anonymous wish were the case, because it would elevate the status of their hacks to "trade craft" when in fact they are legal kiddies. The whole of Anonymous and Wikileaks probably cannot spare one fully qualified attorney between them. This isn't diligence, this is spam.
Read the cables, this guys , they use wikipedia as an intel source...... they seem to just have a bunch of theories , not access to the real situation, they are more likely acting as a PR firm.
Vice as a source? Really?
Because this article is silly.
Let's leave aside the fact that the article's thesis is self-contradictory (either government is spying too much, or not enough), the simple fact is that the emails linked to have nothing to do with any government. They're work Stratfor did for Union Carbide and Dow Chemical. We know this because if you go to the link the to: addresses do not end in .gov. They are to unioncarbide.com, dow.com, tomm_sprick@yahoo.com, stratfor.com, and some Canadian website.
Stratfor does intelligence for private companies and the government. This means that, while some of their work may have something to do with public policy, most of it doesn't. In this case it's pretty clear what happened:
The CEO of Dow (which owns Union-Carbide), noticed the Yes-Men and said "somebody should keep an eye on them." His buddy/trusted subordinate said "What's the budget? I think I know a company?" And since then Stratfor has been raking in the dough for sitting on their asses browsing the website.
There's no governmental violation of the Yes Men's privacy rights because the government isn't involved. There's no waste of public funds because no public funds are being spent.
This kind of confusion is probably actually what WikiLeaks was looking for. They are too lazy to find actual government waste (and if it was easy to do so the pols in DC would have done it already, and then had a Press Conference crowing about it), so they find an organization that other lazy people will assume is part of the government, and release documents proving it's kind of silly. *poof* millions of people too lazy to click the link will assume Wikileaks has helped them ferret out government corruption.
Aw, that's lovely. And those WMD - where are they now? Right, they didn't exist...
Cmdr Taco, where are you...?
You may have regarded Slashdot as your personal sandbox from time to time, but at least you had the grace and wisdom not to piss in it everyday.
Wow, great job reading and interpreting my comment!
(Not.)
Since anonymous is, at least according to the common understanding, anonymous, it may have US members. If US citizens collaborate with anyone in targeting US intelligence community, they would be guilty of bona fide treason.
This opens the room for targeting Wikileaks in the way that the Manning leak did not. The Manning leak made Bradley Manning a traitor but allowed Wikileaks to remain journalists. If Wikileaks participates in targeting of the US intelligence, then they won't be receiving information after the fact.
They'll be assisting US citizens in committing treason. This makes them possibly chargeable as collaborators with traitors and possibly simply targetable as enemies of the US. Retaliating against attacks on military installations is generally considered a legitimate use of military forces. At that point Assange can be simply abducted out of any location in the world or even killed on the spot without violation of any US laws.
I do hope Wikileaks doesn't do anything this dumb. It would undermine the status of all journalists as illegitimate targets for the US armed forces. This line between targeted-for-publishing-leaks and targeted-for-attacking-armed-forces would cease to exist in 1 person and it would be of questionable legality after that.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Further, the US and its partners discovered 700,000 tons of non-WMD UN-banned weapons when we invaded. Iraq was in violation of not one, not two, but THREE binding and in-force UN Security council resolutions, any one of which allowed for the use of force with no further justification.
Citation needed.
"One of my trusted former CIA cronies reports Wachovia laundered $70"
"The FBI has a classified investigation on PETA operatives. I'll see what I can uncover"
#antisec Recruits Wikileaks and Anonymous to the Fight Against US Intelligence Community. FTFY.
if they piss off the CIA and NSA... I'm not saying their prized pet poodles will be snatched by black ops and wisked away to secret dungeons to be water boarded... but at a certain point they have so many resources and legal loopholes at their disposal that screwing with them is not a survival trait.
I think a lot of hackers stay out of jail because no cares enough to track them down and not so much because they're eLiTe or whatever. What this sort of provocative actions do is put a taskforce that will be paid 7 days a week to hunt them. And that means any stupid illegal thing they've doubtless done and gotten away with... might come back to bit them in the ass... and then eat them alive.
If they hadn't actually broken any laws it might not be a huge issue for them. But I'm pretty sure they've broken lots including some identity theft and credit card fraud. You can go away for years for that. So if they want you... they can throw you in prison somewhere. All they have to do is find you.
If I were these guys... I'd be doing everything in my power to vanish and disassociate with the larger group.
Something we learned from the war on terror is that the CIA likes to infiltrate groups by posing as one of them. They do that either by taking out someone and then assuming their identity or simply entering the organization at a lower level.
A fair number of the people in anonymous at this point might actually be government operatives posing as allied hackers.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
A lot of the "intelligence" justifying the war came from private sources, most notably a PR firm. Also there has been bullshit of this type dating back to Ford with a private "intelligence" group being used to deliver the "correct" answers when the CIA inconveniently stuck to facts. I'm sure there was plenty previously but some of those in the scam for Ford are still in positions where people mistakenly respect them (eg. Rumsfeld).
The "government is so powerful and omniscient that it only pretends to fail to lull us to sleep" view rises again. Meanwhile back in reality there was almost nobody that could even understand the languages that the intelligence would have been written in because they were laid off and funding moved elsewhere.
Sorry kid, they have been fools for a long time and running the CIA has been little more than a sinecure since Ford. DHS was formed because the CIA could not do it's job but a playboy Prince didn't have the guts to criticise the man running it, so started another CIA instead.
Infamous??? I'd say the US intelligence services were infamous.
paleoflatus
I knew about Stratfor, but hadn't heard much about them recently until the leak. This article in the Atlantic describes the situation pretty well, you are paying for what used to be called newspaper coverage:
The Atlantic: Stratfor is a joke and so it Wikileaks for taking it seriously
Here's another:
ForeignPolicy.com: Wake me when Wikileaks publishes the Illuminati emails
Remember Wikileaks always over promotes everything they release....
Anonymous isn't a unified group. There is no way that Anonymous could as a group be unified enough to declare war on an intelligence community of any nation let alone the most powerful intelligence community on the planet.
It's simple, somebody within Anonymous and within Wikileaks is the target of the US intelligence community and they hold a personal vendetta or grudge. So now they want to try and hide behind Anonymous or whatever. The fact is either you hate all intelligence communities or you work for one. If you just choose to hate the US intelligence community but have nothing to say about any of the others that reveals a lot about you.
Anyone associated with them is going to now be persecuted if the rumors are true.
Let's look at the facts, this Wikileaks and Anonymous targeting the DOJ, FBI, Police and now the intelligence community of the richest and most powerful nation should show any wise person one thing. They are committing seppuku, ritual suicide by cop.
How dumb is it to pick a fight with the most powerful group of people on planet earth? It's just dumb right? So unless they are backed by some foreign intelligence agencies these people might not even survive. What I see happening here is that somebody within these groups is hiding behind the name Anonymous and has a personal grudge against the US government. Bradley Manning isn't the entire intelligence community, it's an issue but it's kind of like declaring war on the US government over what happened in WACO, it's fringe lunatic type thinking.
Haven't you figured it out? It doesn't have to be authorized for it to happen.
If they can get away with it without getting caught that is what authorizes it.
They'll stop at nothing, they'll operate in secret, and shit happens.
Technology trumps the law and the NSA, CIA and FBI have it.
They also have the ability to keep secrets so they don't have to care about the law. They simply do it in secret and then deny that they had anything to do with any of it.
It's been going on since before World War 1. It's been going on since the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_National_Detective_Agency
to attack the U.S. with their new arsenal.. consisting of some Pentium 4's and a Android phone
Since the Justice Department was investigating Wikileaks for gettings their hands on classified government documents, should they then not investigate Stratfor also? And shouldn't they also order Twitter to release all data for all Stratfor employees?
Why was the WMD case made at all, if Iraq was in violation of three UNSC resolutions which would have permitted force? It also seems unlikely to me that there would be a plausible case for Saddam having WMD whilst no intelligence on the other weapons you describe.
My understanding of the situation was that there was a lot of reliance on individual sources, which has to be questionable in a scenario such as this. I think the maxim you quoted 'a strong charge requires strong evidence' should have applied then, not just now.
I am interested in your answer by the way, this isn't just rhetoric.
I think you are right overall. Anyone pretty much has to assume any organization is compromised by informants. A related post by me: :-) as well as so Smari and Bryan and others here can be proud of them too. :-) And, given the CIA is hiring machinists, build a movement where, in a good way, you assume everyone in it is working for the CIA, :-) but where you still get important stuff done in moving the world towards a post-scarcity open future. Just like people should assume Google is a division of the NSA and/or CIA. :-) An impossible task? Well, consider it more like a creative challenge. :-) "
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/ae28e8971f8f9669?hl=en
"My advice to people here is to build movements in such a way that the CIA can be proud of them
Also, one has to accept that there are legitimate needs sometimes for "security" thinking. The big challenge is the irony of the current system, and theft or vandalism does little to really address the root causes of dysfunctions in our security apparatus. To address the root causes, we need a new vision of security. Here are a couple of essays by me towards trying to create a new vision of mutual/intrinsic security.
"On dealing with social hurricanes (like the US CIA) "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
"This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful. Another theme is exploring the meaning, if true, of a allegation by Wayne Madsen about President Obama's deeper connection to the CIA than was otherwise known. "
"Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism" ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (in
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Damn hackers, I hope they give them a death penalty. (With great reason, if they're set free again, I think there's an immense probability of the person getting into hacking again)
One of the US prosecutors at Nuremberg was the father of Chris Dodd - now the front man of an organization that doesn't seem to care much about democracy nor the Rule of Law.
So Dow isn't providing anything upwards to the government? Are you sure about that?
Just because Stratfor wasn't directly hired by Obama himself doesn't mean they aren't working for the government.
there is a distinction between responsible whistle blowing and prankster whistle blowing... wikileaks doesn't seem to grasp the distinction.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
PUL-leeeeze! That is blatant crap.
... is not the content of the emails of Statfor but the mindset of the Intelligence Industry. It shows there is a degree of self supported dependency. This is no different from Addicts, such as Alcoholics and over eaters, drug addicts and .. well http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_twelve-step_groups all of which are there to help in various ways such as a buddy system. Of course we all know that such addictions can lead to criminal activity.
So perhaps we need to add another help group to the list, so to include one for the intelligence industry addicted.
How about we simply name it Anonymous?
Maybe Wikileaks and/or Anonymous should/would establish their own root DNS servers. I and many organizations and communications firms and ISPs alike would start doing zone transfers from them. That would hinder the government/corporate power grab of domain seizures, and would fragment the Internet which overall could be a good thing.
So we're raiding people because they picked the wrong username, and somehow our vast powerful intelligence community can't tell the difference or find the real people. I'm sure anonymous is NOT quaking in their boots right now.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Is there enough room in their parents basement for all of them?
Maybe, if we're lucky, they'll get caught and we can get rid of two annoying groups with one stone.
You are incredibly confused. If anyone at the Nuremberg trials had disobeyed orders, they would have been punished internally. That's what is happening to Manning, because he broke the rules of military command. Either he gets punished for not following orders (his current situation) or punished for following orders (war crimes in your example). Two different things.
No one in any seat of power is going to forgive someone in their command if they just claim "Following orders doesn't make it right, so I'm not doing it." There is a procedure for objecting in the US military, Manning didn't follow it, he will be punished.
Whether he did the right thing, morally, is a completely different question, and he will be judged by history accordingly.
Unfortunately, the intelligence community can't just use the IRS to harass and bully their victims like the Democrats do.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/another-conservative-group-says-its-being-bullied-by-the-irs-clear-obvious-overreach/
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
One thing the intelligence community has that Wikileaks and the Anonymous script-kiddies will never have is the ability to evacuate the craniums of people who become too much of a threat... and get away with it because it's part of their mission. I really think it's going to take a few Anonymous folk being found dead in a ditch to get the message across: this isn't a fucking game. They're playing with people with guns and prosecutorial immunity who won't hesitate to kill whom they see as a genuine threat, but Anonymous and Wikileaks see it all as one great big joke. One thing that Anonymous has in common with other groups attacking the U.S. is that they are composed of a few smart people surrounding themselves with naive, expendable clueless fools (it's not the leaders of jihadist groups who blow themselves up; it's young, stupid, naive idealists with no clue about how the world actually works).. It's the expendable fools who will (at first) be the ones looking down the barrel of a .45, and the line to join the expendable fools goes around the block.
Whether the pending violent reaction to Anonymous etc. is as it should be is another matter, and is subject to debate. The fact that Anonymous/Wikileaks are messing with people who kill is not subject to debate; it's fact. You can either live (and die) in denial, or realize that this is literally deadly serious business.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
Try "famous and welcome"
"There is a procedure for objecting in the US military"
Which rarely, if ever, results in the chain of command doing the right thing AOT CYA.
Being relieved of command used to be commonplace and not held as a mark against one's service. These days, no one is ever relieved unless their incompetence is monumental and pubically exposed.
When loyality trumps ability ring-knockers usually end up sending some poor hump to an early grave, if not a wet-spot in some landfill.
We have a crisis of competence in both government and the military; where silence is currency, failure too often rewarded and doing the right thing mete with severe punishment.
Despite perhaps the best of intention, secrecy and letting the ends justify the means does nothing to mitigate the rot at the top.
The fact that Manning opted to not follow procedure and knowingly suffer the consequences raises his stature in my eyes as much as John Paul Vann, Hugh Thompson Jr, or anyone who breaks rank to expose the lie for what it is and do something about it. Specially when knowing that "following procedure" will result in just another in a long line of cover-ups.
resist propaganda
"delivered nothing but a few PowerPoint slides"
That is not accurate. Sure TrailBlazer had A LOT of contractor issues, such as cost control, overcharging, and typical contractor abuse between BOTH gov't branch heads and execs from private industry. Heck guess where a lot of those TB gov't heads retired to...private industry!
One needs to realize:
a. Thin thread was a excellent proof of concept... you needed to completely change the culture of the community overnight to implement it at scale. It's the typical "new paradigm on a moving train" scenario. Before 9/11, the agency was getting it's budgets slashed and was moving towards COTS. Post 9/11, it panic on solutions and went with COTS... on steroids.
b. Pre-9/11, the agency was panicking as Drake mentioned, BUT there was a lot of competition in-house to develop the right GOTS solution (TT was one of them in some ways). Since it's gov't we're talking about, the politicians thought we were moving to slow and getting expensive since the agency was reducing workforce in the 90's, hence COTS, out-sourcing, and contracting was ideal--heck it worked for DIA, DoD, etc...
c. Since (b) was occurring, the TT team was backstabbed both politically and timely--the contractors took over for instance. I say backstabbed cause basically the contractors took ownership of the problem and wanted their COTS in place... and huge service contracts. That's why we all keep hearing about TT --how about all those other R&D GOTS solutions and other black-projects? Remember the agency had smoke-stack projects, need to know ruled. It wasn't just TT that was successful... at the same mission! Sounds like someone had his lunch stolen.
d. And PPT slides? Sorry but there's a lot of Trailblazer apps being used in the agency, most just got refactored. Trailblazer just didn't promise the holy grail all the leaders were touting, but then again, politics and contractor greed can be blamed for that. Heck even the TT architects wouldn't imagine the amount of data being generated today.
And in the end, we can talk about how TT could have been so great but, we still got him without it.