'War on Terror' Allies Form Information Consortium 139
Wowsers writes us with a story from The Guardian about FBI interest in connectivity between its own database resources and those abroad. It's spearheading a program labeled 'Server in the Sky', meant to coordinate the police forces of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to better fight international crime/terrorist groups. The group is calling itself the International Information Consortium. "Britain's National Policing Improvement Agency has been the lead body for the FBI project because it is responsible for IDENT1, the UK database holding 7m sets of fingerprints and other biometric details used by police forces to search for matches from scenes of crimes. Many of the prints are either from a person with no criminal record, or have yet to be matched to a named individual. IDENT1 was built by the computer technology arm of the US defence company Northrop Grumman. In future it is expected to hold palm prints, facial images and video sequences."
Re:Server in the Sky? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:UKUSA Community (Score:4, Informative)
- LAMP (Linux, apache, PHP, MySQL) stacks to support a wide variety of applications, such as some below
- MediaWiki powers Intellipedia [wikipedia.org], the highly successful wikis that run on the three iterations of Intelink
- phpBB powers Intelink Forums [ncsi.com]
- WordPress MU enables the current generation of Intelink Blogs [ncsi.com]
- Jabber provides the IC-wide Intelink Instant Messaging
- tag|Connect is a social bookmarking tool [gd-ais.com] based on del.icio.us
- Zimbra powers the uGov Collaboration Suite
- RSS, XML, and other open standards are used extensively
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These services are run in robust, highly available environments, and have gotten great support within various IC components. In fact, much of the social software movement within the IC is reliant on open source software and open standards, and they have been embraced. For a great overview of what the IC is doing with social software, see:
- 'The Intellipedians' The social software movement within the U.S. Intelligence Community [fcw.com], Federal Computer Week, 16 August 2007
And if you don't want to sit through the presentation (it is a bit long, though quite good), see:
- Open-Source Spying [nytimes.com], New York Times Magazine, 3 December 2006
- A Wikipedia of Secrets [washingtonpost.com], Washington Post, 5 November 2006
And on the newest initiative, A-Space:
- Logged In and Sharing Gossip, er, Intelligence [nytimes.com], New York Times, 2 September 2007
- Classified social-networking system promises to help U.S. spies talk, collaborate [iht.com], Associated Press, 5 September 2007
Some of the articles are a little over-simplified, but the reality is that social software running on open source platforms and environments is taking off in the Intelligence Community.
Re:UKUSA Community (Score:3, Informative)
There is no "Anglo Saxon alliance". The Anglosphere [wikipedia.org] is made up of English speaking countries that share a common culture and history. South Africa is definately considered to be part of the Anglosphere.
There are many overlapping alliances and agreements between members of the Anglosphere (the "special relationship" [wikipedia.org] between the US/UK, the Anzus treaty [wikipedia.org], the US/Canadian Joint Board of Defense [wikipedia.org], NORAD [wikipedia.org], etc, etc) but there is no one "Anglo-Saxon alliance" as far as I'm aware and the members of the Anglosphere have their share of disputes (trade disputes between the US and Canada, New Zealand banning nuclear vessels from their ports, US treaty obligations to Latin-America that conflict with the goals of other Anglosphere nations, etc, etc).