[IP] more on Open-Source Spying
Begin forwarded message:
From: Tom Fairlie <tfairlie@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: December 4, 2006 10:58:09 PM EST
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Cc: monty@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [IP] Open-Source Spying
Perhaps Mr. Burton was unable to get Trillian(tm) to whip
all of those nasty IM tools in shape, but he certainly seems
to be able to deliver disinformation with the best of them.
Can I believe that a bloated government bureaucracy
(or perhaps many/all of them) has outdated information
technology? You betcha!
Do I understand how hard it is for worker bees in the
intelligence community to cross organizational boundaries?
Of course!
Will I believe that our intelligence community is a
technological dinosaur that is but a passive observer
when things like 9/11 or the Orange Revolution occur
at their proverbial doorstep? Hardly.
The U.S. intelligence community has been at the leading
edge of most political, economic, and social revolutions of
the past half century. Does this mean they accomplish
their feats without errors, gross overspending, or collateral
damage? No, but to follow the logic of the article below
continues the dangerously naive belief that American covert
ops cannot possibly have foreseen the actions of a group
like al-Qaeda, which was created, funded, managed, and
steered by the CIA for more than 20 years--from Afghanistan
to Kosovo.
Ask yourself this, if the intelligence community really screwed
up on 9/11, then where is the proof and the accountability?
From what I can tell, several of the key players, both within
and without, have actually been promoted since then. Heckuva job!
Tom Fairlie
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Farber" <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: <ip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, December 04, 2006 4:56 PM
Subject: [IP] Open-Source Spying
Begin forwarded message:
From: Monty Solomon <monty@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: December 4, 2006 12:51:56 AM EST
To: undisclosed-recipient:;
Subject: Open-Source Spying
Open-Source Spying
By CLIVE THOMPSON
The New York Times
December 3, 2006
When Matthew Burton arrived at the Defense Intelligence Agency in
January 2003, he was excited about getting to his computer. Burton,
who was then 22, had long been interested in international relations:
he had studied Russian politics and interned at the U.S. consulate in
Ukraine, helping to speed refugee applications of politically
persecuted Ukrainians. But he was also a big high-tech geek fluent in
Web-page engineering, and he spent hours every day chatting online
with friends and updating his own blog. When he was hired by the
D.I.A., he told me recently, his mind boggled at the futuristic,
secret spy technology he would get to play with: search engines that
can read minds, he figured. Desktop video conferencing with
colleagues around the world. If the everyday Internet was so awesome,
just imagine how much better the spy tools would be.
But when he got to his cubicle, his high-tech dreams collapsed. "The
reality," he later wrote ruefully, "was a colossal letdown."
The spy agencies were saddled with technology that might have seemed
cutting edge in 1995. When he went onto Intelink - the spy agencies'
secure internal computer network - the search engines were a pale
shadow of Google, flooding him with thousands of useless results. If
Burton wanted to find an expert to answer a question, the personnel
directories were of no help. Worse, instant messaging with
colleagues, his favorite way to hack out a problem, was impossible:
every three-letter agency - from the Central Intelligence Agency to
the National Security Agency to army commands - used different
discussion groups and chat applications that couldn't connect to one
another. In a community of secret agents supposedly devoted to
quickly amassing information, nobody had even a simple blog - that
ubiquitous tool for broadly distributing your thoughts.
Something had gone horribly awry, Burton realized. Theoretically, the
intelligence world ought to revolve around information sharing. If
F.B.I. agents discover that Al Qaeda fund-raising is going on in
Brooklyn, C.I.A. agents in Europe ought to be able to know that
instantly. The Internet flourished under the credo that information
wants to be free; the agencies, however, had created their online
networks specifically to keep secrets safe, locked away so only a few
could see them. This control over the flow of information, as the
9/11 Commission noted in its final report, was a crucial reason
American intelligence agencies failed to prevent those attacks. All
the clues were there - Al Qaeda associates studying aviation in
Arizona, the flight student Zacarias Moussaoui arrested in Minnesota,
surveillance of a Qaeda plotting session in Malaysia - but none of
the agents knew about the existence of the other evidence. The report
concluded that the agencies failed to "connect the dots."
By way of contrast, every night when Burton went home, he was
reminded of how good the everyday Internet had become at connecting
dots. "Web 2.0" technologies that encourage people to share
information - blogs, photo-posting sites like Flickr or the
reader-generated encyclopedia Wikipedia - often made it easier to
collaborate with others. When the Orange Revolution erupted in
Ukraine in late 2004, Burton went to Technorati, a search engine that
scours the "blogosphere," to find the most authoritative blog
postings on the subject. Within minutes, he had found sites with
insightful commentary from American expatriates who were talking to
locals in Kiev and on-the-fly debates among political analysts over
what it meant. Because he and his fellow spies were stuck with
outdated technology, they had no comparable way to cooperate - to
find colleagues with common interests and brainstorm online.
Burton, who has since left the D.I.A., is not alone in his concern.
Indeed, throughout the intelligence community, spies are beginning to
wonder why their technology has fallen so far behind - and talk among
themselves about how to catch up. Some of the country's most senior
intelligence thinkers have joined the discussion, and surprisingly,
many of them believe the answer may lie in the interactive tools the
world's teenagers are using to pass around YouTube videos and bicker
online about their favorite bands. Billions of dollars' worth of
ultrasecret data networks couldn't help spies piece together the
clues to the worst terrorist plot ever. So perhaps, they argue, it' s
time to try something radically different. Could blogs and wikis
prevent the next 9/11?
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/magazine/03intelligence.html?
ex=1322802000&en=46027e63d79046ce&ei=5090
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