more on Open-Source Spying

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Ross Stapleton-Gray <ross () stapleton-gray com>
Date: December 4, 2006 6:15:50 PM EST
To: dave () farber net
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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