Open Source Spying 101
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."
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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Obstacles to talented people helping.. (Score:1)
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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...
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Saddam had well established ties to a number of different terrorist organizations, including Al Qaeda [nationalreview.com]. An officer in Saddam's secret police was even an Al Qaeda cell leader [nationalreview.com]. You are dispensing disinformation.
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It's nice to dream it's all connected and that taking out one point will make the entire problem go away - but a lot of credible experts have been looking to try
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The big point is nobody found any credible evidence but it was announced anyway - so that is avoiding the issue. Perhaps there is some withly secret conspiricy connecting the two which has never been discovered - but basic inforamtiuon about the middle east showed that if Bin Laden set foot in Iraq he probably would have been executed within hours of being detected. A bunch of extremist wackos off the far end of a religeon who st
Re:Movie OS is a lie? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Movie OS is a lie? (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is exactly the issue that intelligence agencies are dealing with.
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So they attack.
Only intelligent generals and politicians, like the old "Soviet Union", were interested in the kind of stuff Sun Tzu wrote about. "The Art of War" applies to armies and war, and terrorism applies to guerilla terrorists, the exact opposite of armies and war.
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Like it or not, this is an information war just as much as it is a religious one. Terrorists/Guerilla troops never purposely attack strong locations. If we can mislead them into thinking a strong location is weak, they will attack it (and hopefully lose). If we can mislead them into thinking a weak location is strong, they will not attack it. It is that simple.
What you imply is that terrorists drive down the street weilding rocket launchers and at
It makes you wonder (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:It makes you wonder (Score:5, Informative)
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The NSA made security enhanced Linux, other government agencies have worked with FOSS projects. Rather than banning it, they should encourage it. Besides, our enemies don't care about licenses. Which do you prefer, the NSA using Linux and FBI using Wiki software, or seeing our enemies be the only ones to take advantage of it?
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Not all software developers comes from the US. I most certainly do not want the NSA to have any software at all.
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Too bad you are so close-minded (and actually pretty stupid given that absolute statment about an agency which you know little of, other than inaccurate press reports). The NSA does do good work amongst all its tasks, need I remind you of SE-Linux?
And besides, the GPL means to make software Free - and that means *anyone* can use it.
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.
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Trying to go against the government is a lossing battle unless
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BTW, that information sharing?... (Score:1)
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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
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Um, have you actually read the Patriot Act [epic.org]? Of the Act's 10 Titles, only one section of one title (Sec. 504) even remotely relates to improving coordination among government agencies.
Have you actually read it? Or just skimmed the TOC? After having taken the time to read it, I can say you're not quite wrong -- but you're also not correct. In short: it ensures that powers already held by the US government for use in various investigations also apply to counter-terrorism. It expands what information can be shared and with whom (increasing communication) -- but it also limits the use of that information to the matter at hand. That's section 204, which also seems to cover improving in
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It's a tricky question, and I have no idea how to thread my way through that particular landmine. Obviously, with an organization like al-Qaeda, the line between foreign and domestic investigations get
Back then (Score:3, Informative)
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That said there is still a strong xenophobia within the intelligence community. While foreign born citizens are tolerated in positions that require a foreign language they will often face unwritten resitance if they try to move around within the organization. The ammount of resistance will depend on the length of time the person has been a US cit
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The only way to defeat "terrorism" is by getting rid of interventionism and changing the foreign policy. But then again, the goals of the people in power don't necessarily conform with the declared agenda.
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And how would that placate those violent Salafists who wish a world-wide Caliphate, and are prepared to inflict mass casualties to obtain it?
You seem to be woefully ignorant of the "causes of the issue" if you are imply they are economic - and remember that the 9/11 terrorists were middle-class Saudis. No poverty issue there. They were not flying into the buildings screaming "Gimme More Money", nope it
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You're a clueless idiot. There's no other way to put it.
Bin Laden has repeatedly said that he just wants to get the "US imperialists out of the Middle East". He has even explicitly offered a "truce" or "peace" if the US would leave. Of course, the US doesn't want to believe this and our politicians can
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actually, it is you who are ignorant of the causes. the "Allah is great" stuff is secondary (at most). what they are screaming is "Get the fuck out of our land and take your fucking puppets with you". i.e. the causes ARE ec
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Indeed, this is the stated goal of most terrorist groups. When did giving in to an aggressor's demands ever "defeat" anyone? Would not this course of action be called appeasement?
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But.
The fact of the matter is, right now, there are a fairly large number of people (not all of the Arab or Muslim, by any means) who do hate us enough to do things like flying planes i
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You mean their planes?
Seriously though, I agree with you that intelligence would play a role in avoididng more damage. The problem is that, from my standpoint, all the supposed "war against terror" achieved was stripping Americans of their liberties, killed thousands of perfectly innocent Iraqis and triggered a witch-hunt against Muslims that McArthur would be proud of. The last two consequences a
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Do other countries spy agencies do the same thing? (Score:2, Interesting)
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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
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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
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You'd lose quicker. Remember you're supposed to win this one by *not* killing the civilian population.
"That's how our team gets shot up on raids"
So don't go on raids, declare yourself the winner and leave now.
"How many people who've been there, on the ground, hunting these clowns, have ever sat down with and had a beer?" Two.
"Since you're quick to say wh
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You use the word "they" as if "the Iraqi people" are doing the shooting. Most of the people being shot by Iraqi people are other Iraqi people - but that's only a very small part of the carnage. Just like under Saddam - except that then, it was the minority Sunnis as brutally ruled by a family from Tikrit, killing people by the tens of thousands, for decades on end. Now you've got small sectarian cells fueled by cash and weapons from Iran and Syria, with t
Argument 101 (Score:2)
Hmmm...and so how is it you know enough about the many failures to be so cynical? Who revealed the deep dark secrets to you? Or when you say "we" do you really mean you stupid yobos, us, the great ignorant unwashed public, who aren't nearly as clever as youself and can't see the obvious?
Just like every person shot or bombed in Iraq is an 'insurgent' or
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I wouldn't be surprised if there are other, similar scale plots being averted that don't make the news. But if something significantly bigger or catchier was disrupted, I think Der Prez would think it was more important to keep public suppo
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I get a strong impression that you didn't look at the first two links I provided. There are plenty of other incidents and convictions listed that are up and down the scale besides the Padilla case. Anyway, I generally prefer that we find terrorists while they are still "wanna-bes" and not after they have killed a lot of p
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The second link also lists the shoe bomber guy, Johnny Lindh, and Zacarias Moussaoui, none of whom demonstrated
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.
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Turning to Internet (Score:1)
I am very suprised by this too. I would really expect them to go after a cheaper and more efficient communication structure. Take pigeons, for example. They are useful in all sorts of ways [google.com]
....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
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Ah! See, I didn't know that all he was trying to do, while lighting fuses going into the explosives in his shoes, was just to "have a smoke." Yes, your credibility is solid, solid, solid.
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Christ, yes. I say let's dump the entire security/screening circus for passengers, and instead put a big bin of
I can't imagine anyone w
The sad part? (Score:3, Informative)
Oddly, (Score:1)
Classified wikiality (Score:2)
CIA on MySpace? (Score:1)
Rule By Obfuscation (Score:2)
The second method is obfuscation - making "doing what you don't want people to do" or "reading what you don't want people to read" so difficult, obscure (secret), bureaucratic,
Friends-only (Score:2)
Way to Go Open Source Community!!! (Score:1)
They have their own classified wiki? I wonder if it has different levels of classification. Like, you can see this post, but your login doesn't have clearance for this post.
Anyway, I say
Can you imagine it? (Score:2)
*yeah, made up word.
Be careful with meaning of "open source" (Score:2, Informative)
Vague communism hint? (Score:2)
What is this? A vague hint that open source is communism?
other way around (Score:2)
overhyped? (Score:1)
Well, no. Blogs and wikis are just new media outlets of information. The agencies just discovered that they are being used more by those they are spying on (i.e. more accurate and time-sensitive) versus the older channels of communications.
The agencies made the same transistion we're seeing today during the radio -- TV/Video Tapes switch over. It's just they gotten so huge that the organizations are slow to respond compared to the last transition (not to ment
Moronic (Score:1)
Violates old principle of "compartmentalization" (Score:2)
The cost was severe of course. Maybe the risks are worth the benefits. A lot depends on the likelihood of enemy infiltration of the UN intelligence community [wikipedia.org].
local police publishes some files in .nl (Score:1)
see http://www.politieonderzoeken.nl/ [politieonderzoeken.nl] (in Dutch, and uses flash)