[IP] more on Open-Source Spying
Begin forwarded message:
From: Ross Stapleton-Gray <ross@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: December 4, 2006 6:15:50 PM EST
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [IP] Open-Source Spying
At 02:56 PM 12/4/2006, David Farber wrote:
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.
...
That's an unfortunate title for the article, which is more about how
the IC is adopting Internet-popularized tools for collaboration
within its bubble, than exploitation of open sources (which is the
subject of other reporting, and a whole nother ball of wax).
But a trend worth noting, nonetheless. My last billet in the IC, in
1993-94 on the Intelligence Community Management Staff, was alongside
the crew that launched Intelink as a classified IC clone of the
Internet (or a little "i" internet, obsoleting some of the ancient
interagency networks that provided very limited file transfer, and
none of the utilities that the Internet does).
Two interesting finds, related to the article: blog postings, re a
September session at Booz*Allen with a handful of noted info tech
types, and various Intelligence Community folks, and an August
conference the IC held in Denver, on information sharing.
http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2006/09/decentralized_i.html
http://www.ncsi.com/intelink06/breakout.html
I think it's somewhat telling that the former event was held by/at
Booz*Allen, which, with other so-called "Beltway Bandits" like SAIC
and MITRE, both facilitate and attenuate the intelligence agencies'
contact with the outside world. And given the extent to which the
IC, like the rest of the government, has outsourced expertise
(ability to attract talent on GS-scale salaries being a part of the
problem, but this trend has been a long time on... it was under way
when I was there, in 1994), a lot of the knowledge within the IC
walls is contractor.
If anyone knows of companies in this area with an interest in that
market (e.g., designing tools for exploiting wiki-based knowledge, in
the hypersensitive organization), I'd love to collaborate with them.
I think they're right now struggling just to absorb the "off the
shelf" technologies... what they could use would be things that would
be fun to create, e.g., to analyze the metadata of an odd little
community wrestling with disparate scraps and floods of data
collected at a cost of tens of billions of dollars.
(Semi-related, apparently the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence is finally getting around to creating a directory of all
of the intelligence analysts in the IC. That could be a great thing,
or a disaster... if it's a "Here's your locator, expertise &
interests form, please fill it in and mail it back" sort of exercise,
it'll be vastly less useful than one would want...)
Ross
----
Ross Stapleton-Gray, Ph.D.
Stapleton-Gray & Associates, Inc.
http://www.stapleton-gray.com
http://www.sortingdoor.com
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