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Open Source Spying
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Tue Dec 05, 2006 07:25 AM
from the cloak-and-dagger-plus-5 dept.
from the cloak-and-dagger-plus-5 dept.
eldavojohn writes "The New York Times is running a very lengthy but amazingly interesting article on the short history of open source software and information on the inside of the intelligence community. The article discusses the transformation of the intelligence community from fighting the Cold War with traditional information exchange to fighting terrorism today utilizing things like wikis & blogs. From the end of the article, 'Today's spies exist in an age of constant information exchange, in which everyday citizens swap news, dial up satellite pictures of their houses and collaborate on distant Web sites with strangers. As John Arquilla told me, if the spies do not join the rest of the world, they risk growing to resemble the rigid, unchanging bureaucracy that they once confronted during the cold war. "Fifteen years ago we were fighting the Soviet Union," he said. "Who knew it would be replicated today in the intelligence community?"' You may recall that the CIA now has their own classified Wiki. I think it's interesting that the 9/11 Report recommended that United States agencies such as the DoD, CIA & FBI learn to share information more freely to overcome terrorism and now they're turning to internet community applications to accomplish that."
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Classified Wiki For U.S. Intelligence Community 184 comments
CortoMaltese noted that the U.S. intelligence community has unveiled their own classified wiki, the Intellipedia. Reuters says "The office of U.S. intelligence czar John Negroponte announced Intellipedia, which allows intelligence analysts and other officials to collaboratively add and edit content on the government's classified Intelink Web much like its more famous namesake on the World Wide Web.
A 'top secret' Intellipedia system, currently available to the 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, has grown to more than 28,000 pages and 3,600 registered users since its introduction on April 17. Less restrictive versions exist for 'secret' and 'sensitive but unclassified' material."
For kicks, you can also read about Intellipedia on Wikipedia."
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Movie OS is a lie? (Score:3, Funny)
THAT'S WHAT THEY WANT YOU TO THINK.
"Yeah, our systems are like old and stuff. Boy we sure aren't very technically adept at all. We couldn't monitor all phone calls in the world and automatically flag some for futher investigation. Nosiree. We're just some bumpkins who fell off the turnip truck near the guardpost at Langley. What's a cumpooter?"
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Having been a full-time employee at the NSA, I can say that these agencies are nowhere near as competent as Hollywood often thinks, much less what the conspiracy theorists think.
Posting anonymously for obvious reasons...
Re:Movie OS is a lie? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Movie OS is a lie? (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is exactly the issue that intelligence agencies are dealing with.
Parent
It makes you wonder (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:It makes you wonder (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
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Re:It makes you wonder (Score:4, Insightful)
Then realistically, you're going to have to stop developing not only open source software, but any software at all.
This is the flip side of "information wants to be free" -- once it is free, it's really free. Proprietary, open source, whatever; once the bits are out there, they're not going back. Microsoft cannot stop people from using Word to write documents critical of Microsoft, or Visual Studio to develop software that competes with Microsoft's offerings. The NSA cannot stop people from using SE Linux to securely store, process, and transmit information that might be detrimental to the US. China cannot stop its citizens from reading web sites which contain content the government doesn't like; neither can Iran. And you, once you write a piece of software that might somehow be useful to some spook in some three-letter agency, and release that software into the wild, have absolutely no control over what happens afterwards.
Parent
Back then (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Do other countries spy agencies do the same thing? (Score:2, Interesting)
They will be sharing internally (Score:2, Informative)
They will be sharing more internally, cutting across organizational boundaries and through previous barriers, and not necessarily with the outside world.
We will often never hear of their successes [whitehouse.gov], even when some of them [usdoj.gov] are readily available. I'm astonis
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Do you have any idea how different that conflict would look if we did act like the insurgents and exhibit no concern over who got killed on the sidelines? If we know there's an Acme IED Factory franchise operating out of the basement of a Baghdad apartment building, we can either risk the lives of our own people, and try to surgically deal with it, or we can just drop some
Open Source? (Score:2, Informative)
RTFA.
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DoD Using OSS (Score:3, Insightful)
Very interesting, but certainly not surprising. Tools such as Wikis and blogs have exploded in popularity with the private sector because they are easy to use and more efficient than available alternatives (if any exist). It makes perfect sense that government agencies would be looking to harness those same advantages that have worked to the benefit of the public at large.
I think one of the most interesting things to me in my limited dealings with unclassified DoD communications contracting is that these government entities do not have an aversion to or ignorance of the available OSS technologies. On the contrary, they frequently have a strong desire to use these tools, but they're waiting for budget money to contract someone to tell them how to use it properly and securely. Unfortunately they often end up waiting far longer than they should.
....not Open Source... (Score:2)
This is a good article (Score:2)
Anything would be better than the annoyance of having to be at an airport for two hours, ditch most carry-on items, and submit to ridiculous searc
The sad part? (Score:3, Informative)
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All that other stuff was just a bonus!
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The Patriot Act does not setup DHS, nor does it pu