Open-Government Technique Used on Iraqi Documents 243
stalebread writes "MSNBC has an article looking at an internet-based 'many hands make light work' approach to data sifting. From the article: 'The federal government is making public a huge trove of documents seized during the invasion of Iraq, posting them on the Internet in a step that is at once a nod to the Web's power and an admission that U.S. intelligence resources are overloaded. Web surfers have begun posting translations and comments, digging through the documents with gusto.'"
Make no mistake... (Score:1, Insightful)
This is right wing blogger chow.
This is a daily drip of anticipation to keep the faithful fed.
This is pablum that lets right wing folks cloud the air with cries of "...but...but...tomorrow document X comes out, and it'll PROVE we're right!"
So, don't be fooled. This is not some wonderful egalitarian thought experiment. It's politics as usual.
Nothing important will be there (Score:5, Insightful)
This particular arm of the government is not dumb enough to publicly release anything that has a remote chance of being important. After all, such documents likely show some of our wrongdoings too.
Melissa
Privacy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop making political hay - here are the facts (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at the facts:
The best translators the government has are probably at NSA, CIA and in the military services doing more important and urgent (real time) work, so thats why these "background" documents have been sitting for a few years. The shortage of these folks is well publicized, so they are a scarce resource and will not be allocated to a background task like this.
The simple truth is there are few Arabic translators that the government can hire permanently (and who would do this temporary?), and fewer still that can pass the background checks and get the requisite minimal security clearances needed for general employment in most of the usual places (Departments of Defense, State and the various Agencies). Not that they NEED the clearances and accesses (especially for documents that are now public domain apparently), but that such clearances have become almost ritual in nature and are part of the job requirements, usually at the DoD "Secret" level or above.
Add to that the general disinterest most people have in working for the government, then blend in the public law restrictions on the pay (GS scale precludes spending sprees on hiring), and you have a ready made "shortage", or at lesat an inaiblity fo the government to get the translators it thinks it needs.
And on top of that, add in the screwy contract rules and also consider that no congress-critter has a personal stake in a translation company, and you just about guarantee the inablity for much anything other than the titles to be looked at and a spot check done at random in almost all of these, they get scanned in to a PDF, then off to a box they go.
It doesn't take conspiracy, just the usual incompetence and common inability of big government agencies to get anything done quickly.
No political slant needed to left or right, just business as usual in the belly of the Leviathan.
Re:Nothing important will be there (Score:3, Insightful)
To attempt to right everyone elses' wrongs without remaining cognizant of our own is a fool's errand. We must remain ever vigilant that we don't unwittingly become that which we purport to despise. There is nothing so hated as a hypocrite.
I don't get it. (Score:2, Insightful)
Why would a person volunteer their time and energies into helping with this? As compared to something you (and possibly other people) would use with open-source software, I don't see anything gained by taking part in this. If a person is (a) fluent enough in both languages and (b) willing to do this sort of translation work, wouldn't they be able to find a job to pay them to do this? Or if they wouldn't want a full time job out of it, find something more people can use and translate that. There are doubtlessly scores of projects that would love someone to do a free translation for them.
Another related thought on this is how the government knows that the translations are accurate? Because of the relative anonymity provided through the internet, the government can't tell whether I really am an Arabic language teacher at a college or a disgruntled monoligual high-school dropout unless if I tell them. Which of these people is more likely to provide an accurate translation? And how can they tell whose translation is correct?
Can't it be gray? (Score:5, Insightful)
Iraqi Government? (Score:3, Insightful)
Err, shouldn't the Iraqi government have all these documents? You know, the democratically elected sovereign body which the US and its allies went to all that trouble of having installed, and who I gather has access to a large number of Arabic speakers.
Re:Make no mistake... (Score:2, Insightful)
The whole charade reminds me of the "You haven't given us time to hide!" skit from Monty Pythons Life of Bryan.
Recall that Clinton bombed Iraq in '98 for not letting the UN inspectors in. Is he part of this grand right-wing conspiracy, do you think?
But we didn't win, and aren't close to winning yet (Score:4, Insightful)
Bamford's book "A Pretense for War" does some really good analysis of the events and decision-making processes that led up to 9/11 and to the Iraqi invasion, and even with the evidence available back when he wrote it, it's obvious that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Bush and Cheney were all bleeding incompetents.
Re:Make no mistake... (Score:3, Insightful)
Open Source Intelligence (Score:5, Insightful)
And INTERESTING stuff has come out. For example, ABC News found documents that seem to show that the Russian ambassador gave the US war plans to Iraq. [go.com]
Individuals are looking too. Here [blogspot.com] is a link from an Iraq blogger who blogs from Baghdad. This document suggests that members of Al Qaeda met with Iraqi intelligence.
I just find it really cool that enterprising people can go in and look at ORIGINAL documents, and that we don't have to purely rely on what the government says they say. Pro-war, anti-war, historians, anyone can go in and look at what was going on inside Iraq.
Re:Something is Fishy about this Whole Story (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure that budget of $2 trillion isn't just lying around, money waiting to be used. It might be paying for things like, oh, highways, medicare, aircraft carriers, bridges to nowhere, etc. Could $2 billion probably be "found"? Sure, but it's not like it's manna from heaven.
Secondly, you can't just haul any dude off the street with a knowledge of Arabic, and have him start translating documents. In just about every case, a document has to be translated from the original by TWO different translators, and then the two translations refined together by a third (government can't afford to trust mistranslations either by accident or on purpose). All of these official translators must have an adequate security clearance, which takes 6 months or more.
And as far as "telegraphing" our next move, most of these docs are government docs (probably worthless) at elast 4 years old. I don't think there's a lot of danger in this.
Somehow, people who personally hate George Bush manage to simultaneously believe his government is capable of staggering stupidity (didn't they see a hurricane coming?) and simultaneously amazing subtlety like this.
If there were statements about WMD in these docs, wouldn't the administration simply, I dunno, PUBLICIZE IT?
Re:Open Source Intelligence (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:But we didn't win, and aren't close to winning (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm sorry, "were"? We still have bases in Japan and Germany, we never left.
Leaving too soon will create a civil war, and it will be 100% our fault.
Crack open a newspaper man, the civil war has already started. Their former prime minister, Iyad Allawi, said it best "We are losing each day as an average 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more - if this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is."
The US needs to stay, and perhaps even increase our presence, not only until the Iraqi government is in place, and not only until Iraqi police forces are trained and capable, but until the Iraqi people gain confidence in democratic processes and their new government.
The Iraqi people will not gain confidence in their government until there is stability. We cannot provide stability (the last 3 years are proof). If anything, our very presence is making the country more unstable (with the exception of Kurdish Iraq and a few southern provinces). Our training of military forces is also not providing stability, we're only training half of Iraq (the Shiites), the Sunnis will not join the armed forces in significant numbers. This will make the situation worse. We are incapable of making Iraq better than it is now. We need to leave before we waste more lives of some of the best America has to offer.
I'm not saying democracy is not desired in Iraq. I'm saying we're incapable of providing it.
Re:But we didn't win, and aren't close to winning (Score:2, Insightful)
Until we leave, every misfortune that Iraq suffers is and always will be our fault. Once again, we have failed to learn the lessons of Vietnam. And we are hearing precisely the same arguments for staying in Iraq.
Creating democracy...
!? You mean like we did in Syria in 1949 and Chile in 1973? Of all our interests in the region, democracy is not one of them. We will stay in Iraq until we can place a new Saddam, just like the old one. And when he turns on us, just repeat. The "democracy" we put into Iraq is pure show. Only American/British approved candidates can run.
There is a viable exit strategy. Just walk away. Don't look back. We can come back when they ask. However, that would put a huge crimp into a certain party's/company's/people's cash flow. And that's what this war(and many others) is about.