Bazaars in the Government Cathedral 102
guanxi writes: "This article by James Fallows in The Atlantic is one of the most interesting I've read all year. It describes how innovators in government are applying the concept of the Bazaar: The many eyes of 'Open-Source Intelligence' movement that provides better intelligence than classified sources, and a b2b-like marketplace created by World Bank employees that distributes aid more efficiently than the bureaucratic process."
Re:Source? (Score:5, Informative)
From what little I've read about the area, for some sorts of intelligence-gathering this gets as much info as cloak-and-dagger stuff.
However, presumably what they're talking about here is using bazaar techniques (mailing lists, whatever) to help share and evaluate intelligence information. That's probably not a bad idea either, if you can manage the security risk.
Re:Source? (Score:3, Informative)
Not too long after that quit his government intelligence gathering job to create Open Source Solution [oss.net] which provides most of the same data to the same agencies at a much lower price point, saving taxpayers millions of dollars a year.
I don't like most of those three-letter-acronym agencies, but I think this is a Good Thing.
Re:Source? (Score:2, Interesting)
Open source in the intelligence community means getting intelligence from sources that everyone knows about instead of from someone that had just gone through some ``tactical interrogation.'' I can give examples to make this open source intelligence clear.
During the second world war, allied planes would bomb railways in France in order to interdict German supply lines. Now this was before the era of Key Hole Satellites --- the only way to know if the bombing did distroy the railway is to send somebody to look it over.
It is reported that scores of lives were sacrificed to obtain and send information about the state of the targeted rail line to headquarters. Most of the intelligence is gathered by French patriots. But when the information gets to headquarters it is thrown away because HQ already knows what the reports are saying. It turns out that the effectiveness of the bombing is easily gauged the next morning from the prices of basic goods on the Paris market.
Allied intelligence never told French Resistance about the redundancy of the intelligence-gathering the patriots are engaging in because HQ doesn't want to make it obvious that their efforts were unneeded.
Also during the second world war, intelligence about the affectiveness of bombing raids on Hitlers factories can be determined from the length of the German womens skirts.
I declare this article... (Score:2, Funny)
Sounds interesting (Score:2)
Prehaps we could farm out the intellegence space to interested parties.
Doesn't look /.ed to me. (Score:1, Informative)
----
here is no mistaking the excitement in Washington when world news originates here. Through the second Clinton Administration it was easy to think that a drive down Highway 101 in the San Francisco Bay area brought one closer to the real centers of power-- Oracle, Intel, Cisco--than a drive along Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House to the Capitol. In Silicon Valley and Seattle the technology industry's leaders talked about the "withering away of the state," and in Washington the arrival of technology-driven prosperity was the central fact of political life.
However distant that seems now, the corrective reaction is, perhaps inevitably, going too far. I may be biased from having spent several years in Seattle and San Francisco before returning last summer to Washington. But now that the state is back, I am struck by the assumption here that if there is truly significant technology at the moment, it is the kind the military has used in Afghanistan. During the weeks when Taliban forces were collapsing, I did see three applications of technology with important economic, political, and even terrorism-related implications. Each was plain old civilian technology.
In one case the technology is e-mail, which has made possible the "open-source intelligence" movement. For decades diplomats and soldiers have bitterly joked that most important international secrets are likely to show up in the newspaper before they make their way through classified channels. Obviously, governments can still keep secrets. An illustration: three months after the terrorist attacks the Federal Aviation Administration was still enforcing strict "no-fly zones"--ones forbidden to private noncommercial aircraft--over three cities. Two were the terrorists' targets: Washington, the political capital, and New York, the financial capital. The third was
But the strictures secrecy requires can make it hard for armies or security units to get full, timely information in emergencies. One solution is to circulate non-secret information. In the mid-1980s the retired Air Force colonel John Boyd attracted adherents, especially in the Marine Corps, with his view that "fast feedback" loops were the key to military success. That is, the army that could observe and react to its opponents' movements the fastest would be the most likely to prevail. A young Marine captain named G. I. Wilson drew from Boyd's work the idea that the military should look for information as widely as possible. "It takes both unclassified open source resources and classified intelligence to win in today's information age," Wilson wrote in the Marine Corps Gazette in 1995, with Major Frank Bunkers.
In practice "open-source resources" means what the best foreign correspondents and embassy political officers have always tried to keep abreast of, but on a bigger scale: reports in local papers, sudden changes in what's available in stores, snippets from the radio. Over the past decade Wilson and his colleagues have set up several electronic networks. The largest, called Access Intelligence (AI), connects hundreds of people in the defense, intelligence, law-enforcement, commercial, and academic worlds. It works like a normal list server or electronic mailing list: one person posts a message and everyone else receives it as e-mail moments later. The AI network often produces a hundred or more messages a day; recipients quickly scan the titles for subjects they are interested in. Although many AI members have security clearance, the material posted is strictly "open source"--publicly available news reports or personal observations. That way the question of violating security rules won't come up.
AI has proved a valuable supplement to the slower, more controlled channels of official communication--much as cell phones did for many civilians on September 11. For instance, Rick Forno, a computer expert who helps to operate the AI list, was in a building overlooking the Pentagon; he posted real-time reports about areas of damage and unfolding events before some of them appeared on CNN. Wilson, who is now a colonel based at Camp Pendleton, has relayed messages to ships' crews during (pre-Afghanistan) combat operations. "I can tell them what's being reported here, and they compare it to what they are seeing," he told me recently.
Open-source intelligence "frequently appears less valuable than classified information because it does not carry the classification mystique," Wilson wrote in 1995. "Because it appears less valuable, it is shared more freely and used more. The irony is by sharing it more the information's value and usefulness increases." Within the Pentagon, Wilson told me, reports that were posted on AI have been stamped with classified markings and used in briefings. An old trick of John Boyd's, Wilson said, was to get data into circulation by leaving it in "the head."
Still, the AI network doesn't get respect. "It's not popular with the intelligence community, because it doesn't cost anything," Wilson told me. (Forno and Bill Feinbloom, a former Green Beret, run it as volunteers, and it is free to all users.) "But you've got about three hundred people acting as individual sensors, from a whole variety of backgrounds. I may say something that seems commonsensical to a Marine, but someone who's a physicist will come back and say no, it can't have worked that way."
f the AI network is the application of e-mail to the military-intelligence business, a new company called Development Space represents the application of eBay to international aid. In the quarter century plus of the personal-computer age a few seminal applications have suddenly made computers necessities for new groups of people. The first was VisiCalc, the original spreadsheet program, whose introduction in 1979 gave small businesses a reason to own computers. The next was the coming of e-mail. And the most recent is eBay, the online auction site. Whereas Amazon.com, for instance, offers a faster, more convenient version of a familiar shopping experience, eBay creates something that didn't exist before: a self-policing worldwide market matching buyers and sellers of even the most obscure goods. I am generally skeptical of "perfect markets" as laid out in economics textbooks, but an eBay auction for a used car, a signed baseball glove, or a new digital camera comes close. Those who want to sell have the largest audience of buyers; those who want to buy have the largest selection to choose from; and each party can judge whether to trust the other by means of a rating system based on past transactions (and a cautionary label on those with no record yet).
From the archives:
"Changing the World on a Shoestring" (January 1998)
An ambitious foundation promotes social change by finding "social entrepeneurs"--people who have new ideas and the knack for implementing them. By David Bornstein Dennis Whittle and Mari Kuraishi, two employees of the World Bank who had served around the globe, decided in 1998 to try to match resources and need just as directly in the public sector. Their first approach was bricks-and-mortar: a one-day Innovation Marketplace inside the atrium of the Bank's headquarters, in Washington. Normally proposals for Bank projects wend their way through a tedious multi-stage vetting process. On this one day anyone who worked for the Bank could set up a little booth, science-fair style, and make a pitch for a project; at the end of the day a jury would award grants to the best ones. More than a hundred teams made presentations, and eleven got awards, totaling $3 million.
Whittle and Kuraishi next persuaded the Bank to hold a two-day fair, with applications accepted from anyone who wanted to come and present an idea. More than 1,100 groups, from eighty countries, sent proposals. The heart of the program was letting people who knew firsthand about a local need or dream--a well, a road, a small business--explain what the money could do. A group of war widows in Bosnia, for example, offered a plan for a small, high-end knitting operation. The World Bank brought more than 300 finalists to Washington; and the forty-four winners got grants averaging just over $100,000 and totaling about $5 million. (The war widows won, and now they are prosperous, selling their output mainly to fashion houses in Europe and the United States.)
Electronic publicity explains the tenfold increase in applications. "Once this idea gets into e-mail circulation, it is amazing how fast it gets around the world," Whittle told me. "People who didn't have Internet access were contacted by those who did and encouraged to try. One Turkish guy was strutting around like a proud father at a Phi Beta Kappa ceremony--five of the finalists had found out about the program from him."
Whittle and Kuraishi thought that if the concept worked despite the real-world impediments of getting applicants to one place at one time, it would work all the better if it were also implemented electronically. In 2000 they resigned from the Bank, and just as the Internet economy was beginning to falter, they created an online company, Development Space, which began operation last month. Like eBay, it is meant to let the "market"--in this case for development aid--clear at minimum cost and with little or no bureaucratic interference. People who want money--for vaccines, for an orphanage, for a small factory--can prepare online descriptions of their projects, with help from advisers, if necessary, in drawing up business plans. Foundations and government aid agencies that intend to give money--but also individuals who will give, say, $250 if they think it will help--survey the projects and decide which to support. Various inspection and feedback systems will establish a track record, as on eBay, and follow up to see how the money was used.
A number of environmental foundations have approached Development Space to explore using this platform to find projects to support. If America's past wars are any guide, huge amounts of recovery assistance will soon be headed to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and who knows where else. This model could be a lower-cost, better-targeted way of getting it there.
pen-source intelligence and an eBay for foreign aid are extensions of the Internet's model of information flow. The third innovation comes from a company called Athena Technologies, and it's an extension of the ongoing hardware revolution.
In 1992 a young South African named David Vos was preparing for his Ph.D. in aeronautical engineering at MIT. His dissertation project was to build a guidance system that would let a unicycle propel itself, with no rider. I have seen a videotape of his presentation. On an arctic day in Boston a shaggy, tired-looking graduate student in a ski jacket (Vos) hovers inches away from a unicycle, ready like a parent to reach out and support it. But the unicycle keeps itself erect and propels itself around a basketball court, responding to commands from something on top that looks like a cake box.
The mechanism inside the box was Vos's achievement: a system of inertial sensors and quick-response motors that could detect changes in the unicycle's balance eighteen times a second and issue the right corrective command. A tricycle is of course inherently stable, and a bicycle has a kind of stability when moving. But because a unicycle is always trying to fall over, most people cannot react quickly enough to control it, and no mechanical device had previously been able to.
Ten years later Athena, Vos's company, has produced a device that drives not unicycles--or people, like the inventor Dean Kamen's highly publicized "IT" vehicle--but airplanes, and with significant implications for defense. The device is known as GuideStar, and it is about the size of a car radio. Packed with inertial sensors and logic circuits, it is capable of detecting and reacting to changes fifty times a second and of flying aircraft that are too tricky or unstable for human pilots to control. Vos made another video to underscore the point. In it an odd-looking airplane--one big wing and no tail--sits on a runway. Without a tail an aircraft would be even more unstable than a unicycle and, according to simulation models, would require such constant and immediate adjustments that even a skilled pilot would quickly lose control of it. But in the video this jet-powered tailless plane zooms off the runway and then circles several times before it lands, to the joyous whoops of Vos's team in the background.
GuideStar has civilian potential--for instance, as part of the autopilot in small planes or airliners, permitting them to land in circumstances that overwhelm the pilot. Another device shown in Vos's videos suggests military and civilian uses alike. This is a vehicle, built by the Micro Craft company and guided by Vos's systems, that looks like a large smudgepot, with a cylindrical base and a vertical shaft, powered by a compact engine. It can take off straight up, maneuver itself around corners, travel at altitudes from treetop level to a few hundred feet, and land straight down. In the civilian world this could be a jazzy counterpart to Kamen's "IT" vehicle, delivering parcels rather than people. For the military it could also be a remote sensing device, far cheaper than current pilotless drone aircraft.
But what Athena has been touting since September 11 is that its GuideStar controls could be programmed to prevent any airplane from ever going someplace it should not. No airliner, we can assume, will ever be flown into a skyscraper again: the passengers will not let it happen. But in theory it could still happen with a FedEx or a UPS cargo plane. The coordinates of restricted areas and important buildings could be entered into the new guidance system, which could thwart a pilot's attempts to divert the plane. In principle the system could land the airplane at a military airfield if it sensed abnormal commands.
hat do these innovations have in common, apart from reminding us of the fecundity of the high-tech world despite the Nasdaq's slide? They show two crucial traits of the civilian tech world in general, and these traits distinguish them from most military technology.
First, they are cheap. The open-source network is literally free to its users. Development Space plans to support the eBay model of foreign aid by taking a seven percent cut of all transactions, to pay for expert teams and authenticators--much less than the overhead of most charities. The Athena controls are both cheaper and more powerful than current autopilots. "We come from the computer-industry mindset that the price has to keep going down," says Jeffrey Leonard, who is on Athena's board of directors.
It is easy to forget how important the race to cheapness was in creating the technology boom. Indeed, the Internet's main business problem is that users think content should be free. The contrast with military technology is sharp.
A B-52 bomber, for example, costs about $23,000 per flight hour just to operate; the B-2, which makes long treks to Afghanistan from its home base in Missouri, costs at least twice as much. During the Kosovo bombing campaign the United States reduced Serb defenses by firing HARM missiles, which lock onto the beam from a radar station and then destroy the station. The Serb army reportedly discovered that it could place microwave ovens in open fields and the HARMs would think the ovens were radar stations. Each oven cost less than $100; each missile it attracted cost $750,000. We pay any price for freedom, and the costs mount up. The idea of a race for cheapness has not spread from the civilian to the military world.
Second, these innovations don't try to replace what is best about human judgment and intelligence. The most popular breakthroughs in the commercial-tech market have let people do more of what they have always wanted to do: buy, sell, interact, explore. Open-source intelligence and Development Space follow this model as well. GuideStar does replace a human function, but a calculator-like one, at which machines should ultimately exceed human abilities--as spreadsheets do, and language-translation programs do not. In principle the military would always prefer to use machines instead of men. Machines don't have grieving families; they don't need to be recruited and trained. Some of the most expensive boondoggles in military technology have involved attempts to mechanize the most sophisticated human abilities--which include, surprisingly, the ability to detect patterns. Any human being can tell a camel from a car. Designing sensors that can reliably do so is very hard. That is why even in the phenomenal rout of the Taliban army, the bombing became effective only after special-operations troops, on foot and on horses, were there to identify the right targets.
This war began with a devastatingly brilliant bit of jujitsu, in which the very openness of our society and elegance of our technology were turned against us. The stages ahead will certainly call not for brute-force technical power alone but for a shrewd combination of human and technological abilities--a lesson the military can take from the civilian world.
Re:Doesn't look /.ed to me. (Score:1)
Re:Doesn't look /.ed to me. (Score:1)
world bank (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:world bank (Score:1)
in most cases, this is true, not through deliberate acts of the IMF and World bank, but due to the effects of their actions...
Examples are where making agriculture more "efficient" means converting to cash crops like coffee (which are useless to the natives without further processing), where the real money is made back in the developed world.
Re:world bank (Score:1)
However traditional WB loans are given to countries to purchase products or services from WB lendor countries. Often projects do not promote independance and can leave the beneficiary too dependent on expensive overseas supplies.
I don't work for the WB, but I have worked on a WB financed contract and I have seen enough to disillusion me.
Re:world bank (Score:2)
2) WB makes loans that poor countries probably aren't going to be able to pay back, then harshly regulates their economies in an effort to wring out the money. Loan sharks generally won't loan to you if they expect to have to pay a legbreaker to collect, and certainly won't knowingly loan you more than you can possibly pay back, but the WB can't quite figure out whether they're a lending or a welfare instititution, so they make obviously bad loans and then go nuts trying to collect...
3) Tiny loans to start small local businesses have been proven to fuel economic development much better than the WB's mega-loans to governments. However, even if the WB wants to make the tiny loans, I don't see how they can -- micro-loans have to be made by local people in the villages.
Risks of Centralised Control (Score:4, Insightful)
[the] GuideStar controls could be programmed to prevent any airplane from ever going someplace it should not
I've read about this panacea repeatedly since 9/11. The existence of an irrevocable fly-by-wire lockout mode such as this gives hijackers a new physical location (the control room) or software/protocol system to target. I believe the Risks [ncl.ac.uk] inherent here are great.
Having trained, experienced humans local and ready to override compromised Guidestar-like devices is crucial. The 9/11 hijackers gained easy access to a plane's most valuable assets -- pilots in the cockpit -- due to a lack of Sky Marshals, security doors, and cameras. That was a tragic case of cost cutting by the airlines.
I'd hate to think that similar cost cutting measures could lead to adoption of this automatic flying device with an intention to deskill or replace pilots. The implementation of such a device requires careful human factor analysis. Perhaps a periodic, probabilistically triggered interrogation of pilot credentials (created for one-time-use during a single flight) according to flying patterns and location?
Re:Risks of Centralised Control (Score:2)
Having trained, experienced humans local and ready to override compromised Guidestar-like devices is crucial.
Just in case it's not clear to everyone, "local" here means "on the airplane". Remote control piloting of aircraft is even more dangerous than the Guidestar idea.
Re:Risks of Centralised Control (Score:2)
Re:Risks of Centralised Control (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Risks of Centralised Control (Score:2)
Re:Risks of Centralised Control (Score:1)
What good will 'Sky Marshalls' be? Everyone seems to forget that using a gun in a plane is a very bad idea. I now know that if I was on a plane that was hijacked I *would* fight and I would act as a 'Sky Marshall. I think there are many more like me now as well. I have complete respect for the people on the 4th plane and I pray that I would be as brave. As for 'Security doors', the ones that I have seen fitted are not much better than before. Cameras are only for use in court and have no effect at the time.
The only good thing is that people prepared to die for a cause are a dying breed.
Re:Risks of Centralised Control (Score:1)
Tasers. Mace. Glubombs.
Re:Risks of Centralised Control (Score:1)
:)
Re:Risks of Centralised Control (Score:2, Interesting)
Tasers. Mace. Glubombs.
Useless. Useless. Useless.
Remember Rodney King? Specifically, do you remember the couple of minutes of video that the TV news 'forgot' to air? It features King being shot several times with a taser, and getting up to attack the officers after each one.
And I've had plenty of failures with defense sprays like Mace and pepper. If the subject has any meaningful amount of alcohol in his system, the sprays are about fifty-fifty.
And batons have their failings. I'm about 6'2", 220 pounds, mostly muscle. There was one fine night where I got called to deal with a scrawny 15-year-old girl who had been mixing meth, PCP, and alcohol at once. As the contact evolved, I ended up hitting her on a nerve cluster on her leg, hoping to shut down that nerve temporarily so I could settle her down without having to shoot her. Nope. One strike will work, in theory. In practice, the fourth one broke a metal expandible baton. How we got control of her, I'll never quite understand.
In other words, I would never trust my own life to OC or taser. And I'm not comfortable trusting it to a baton either, not on an airplane. I do, however, have a great deal of faith in overpriced German handguns. And where the mission is to keep an airliner from becoming a missle, I'm not exactly willing to take unnecessary chances.
Sometimes I've been thinking, it's actually a pity that I'm too old to apply for the air marshal's program.
Re:Risks of Centralised Control (Score:1)
Maybe you're right. Maybe the best approach is for all "road warriors" to club hijackers repeatedly with their overweight Armada laptops...
Re:Risks of Centralised Control (Score:1)
Heh. I've got a Dell Inspiron I'm willing to sacrifice for a good cause.
Or break out the airplane food. Just be sure that the hijackers don't get any eggs in their mouths if you want to take them alive.
Re:Risks of Centralised Control (Score:2, Interesting)
I've noticed the reverse, everyone keeps repeating that it's a bad idea without making it clear why. I mean, what happens, the gun (maybe) puts a hole in the plane, which will (eventually) depressurize the plane, forcing the pilots to bring the plane down to a reasonable altitude (15,000 ft?) and make an emergency landing... Which is, I imagine, exactly what they were going to do anyway if there's trouble on the plane.
Or maybe there's something I'm missing, and firing a gun on a plane would cause a certain crash, which, of course, is not exactly the worst-case scenario.
--
Benjamin Coates
Re:Risks of Centralised Control (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Risks of Centralised Control (Score:1)
Re:Risks of Centralised Control (Score:1)
The Telephone Game? (Score:5, Funny)
> They will strike the White House on the 27th of September.
> Ils heurteront Maison Blanche sur le 27ème septembre.
> Sie werden sich weißes Haus auf 27. September stoßen.
> ih biti njoj samoj bjeloa dom da 27. rujan aktivnost.
> áü á áëçí îí÷ííé îí âî ä äëü 27. íáü äí ü.
> ay 27. .
> Their close amplitude modulation her six flower bone territory ay reservation 27. September attack.
Bah, I'll probably get modded down for this.
Re:Automatic webpage scrambler (Score:2)
The grammer & spelling improved!
Google has performed the impossible!
Re:The Telephone Game? (Score:1)
Open Society (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, it is amazing what some freedom of speech can do for a country, imagine what would happen if there was more. Because, most of the sources listed in there are all centered around either war or business. Both things our country seems to be good at. It makes no mention of any protesters or activists showing up at the world bank's Bazaar. Did they? Did they get money, or were they just ignored.
It touches on the fact that in an open society, it is really hard to keep secrets (the fact that Boston was/is a no fly zone, hmmmm, maybe because of the big dig, any terrorist setting off a biochemical weapon would be extremely successful because of the cities horribly transportation system. And the boston T could be a wicked way to spread it).
If having an open society is so key to our ability as a nation to defend itself, wouldn't that mean that anything that inhibits the free flow of information (the basis of an open society in the article, the idea of the AI email list) should be considered a threat to open society? Of course, that shouldn't be a problem as long as the media conglomerates and mega corporations are on our side. But wait! Didn't the author mention that news one person wouldn't think as important, another person would be able to get some vital information from? So they are still a problem, even if they are on our side, they could be ignoring information that is vital to our survival!
Something to chew on.
Sidebar re James Fallows and the Atlantic (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Open Society (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Boston (Score:1)
Really, ALL year? (Score:1)
Yep, it's SO interesting, it surpasses all of the previous month's content...
Re:Really, ALL year? (Score:4, Funny)
AI List Dead? (Score:2)
Thanks in advance.
Re:AI List Dead? (Score:2)
-Crus
Open vs. Classified info (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Open vs. Classified info (Score:3, Funny)
1-2-3-4-5
Re:Open vs. Classified info (Score:1)
(No points for spotting the movie reference)
Open source information can be dangerous (Score:4, Insightful)
Being that open source information is relatively easier to acquire, more of it can be gathered and pieced together to make a more complete picture than scattered pieces of classified information.
In the Bazaar, as I read it, alot of open source information is being shared. I'm a little apprehensive, especially after that seminar, that if the wrong people are allowed to acquire alot of this information, they can eventually piece together and learn an awful lot about the future systems, processes, etc. of our government.
In light of the current conflict abroad and at home, I don't think making all this information available is necessarily a Good Thing (tm).
Re:Open source information can be dangerous (Score:3, Interesting)
the following thoughts came to mind (in the following order)....
1. Who decides which of the little pieces is the key piece that the wrong people are not allowed to see ?
2. Who decides who the wrong people are ?
3. Who audits the people who make decisions one and two ?
Re:Open source information can be dangerous (Score:1)
Seriously, 19 centuries after Juvenal -- the Roman satiric poet who remarked, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?, or "Who watches the watchmen?" -- it is no longer the height of originality to point out that any scheme for exercise of regulatory authority will require some control on the regulator's power. If you have some interesting comment to make about the form that control should take, great. Otherwise, it would save time if people would just say "Juvenal's Remark" instead of spelling out at length what is obvious.
Are you certain we're talking about "open source"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, yes, but I think any presentation from the NSA will get these terms mixed up, due to no fault of their own.
From http://www.opensource.org/advocacy/faq.html [opensource.org]:
By default, an NSA person would hear their own definition, not the programming community's definition. Related, but not the same thing.Re:Are you certain we're talking about "open sourc (Score:1)
Re:Open source information can be dangerous (Score:1)
"...they can eventually piece together and learn an awful lot about the future systems, processes, etc. of our government."
Well, yes. *Our* goverment. Wouldn't it be nice to know how it actually works? Shouldn't we *know* about the systems and processes of our goverment?
Re:Open source information can be dangerous (Score:2, Interesting)
To an extent, but not when the information presented can be used by an adversary's (generic term). I can't tell you specifics (the whole "I'd have to kill you" thing) but you would be amazed what people have been able to piece together from open source information, and more amazing still is how it was exploited.
Re:Open source information can be dangerous (Score:1)
This is a lot harder for a government to emulate. The danger here is that there are fewer sources and it becomes easier for a single viewpoint to override others. The Bazaar becomes necessary if only to give a sanity check on your own sources of information.
Yes, the US govt. needs its own sources of information, but if they don't look at CNN or even better read The Economist as well, then they are in deep trouble.
As for the accessibility of info for a potential enemy, doesn't it help things if that enemy knows that you have both the intention and the capability to respond to threats?
Open Intelligence Sources (Score:2, Funny)
The spooks don't trust this source because... (Score:4, Insightful)
Even assuming that all of the reports were factual (ie. actually came from a newspaper or witnessed first hand) it would take a great deal of analyst time to separate the signal from the noise (s/n in the media being quite low), which is why "open source" intelligence is generally viewed with skepticism even after analysis. Trusted networks are already in place for watching CNN and the various newspapers, and there are teams dedicated to their analysis, so an untrusted network doing the same thing isn't likely to get a lot of respect.
I'm very skeptical of the professionalism of anyone who would brief one of the posts on the AI list to a general. Generals usually want summaries and analysis of collected data, not the raw data itself - especially if it's of potentially dubious origin. It would be appropriate to attach the post to an information report, describe its source, and forward it to analysts; but to present it as final, analyzed intelligence is misleading and dangerous.
Further, in the big scheme of things, open source intelligence counts as one "discipline" in the minds of the analysts, just as all data derived from imagery collection platforms are lumped into the "image intelligence" discipline. Giving it undue credit (especially to the detriment of other intelligence disciplines) would be bad policy, even in a perfect world.
Open source intelligence doesn't "[appear] less valuable than classified information because it does not carry the classification mystique", it is generally less valuable because of its unpredictability, poor information quality, and high susceptibility to subversion.
Re:The spooks don't trust this source because... (Score:2, Interesting)
In fact, there have been times where this information has been MORE useful for us (I work in a military intel shop) because it's 80% reliable and I have it NOW - and don't need to lug it around in a safe with armed guards - than the stuff I get from 'sources and methods' that are classified and not as portable. Do I brief from AI material only? No way - but it sure helps support what I get from other sources, and helps monitor trends in areas where MY approved 'sources and methods' don't, or I can't get the appropriate system where it's needed.
I've rarely seen anything that was 'dubious' of 'subversive' on the list - what we do see that is such types of material (eg, some of the Middle East radical stuff in the weekly newsletters of various organizations) is clearly marked by the AI subscriber posting it, and such information is taken in that context, not as 'news' or 'gospel.' In this case, it's good to at least be aware of what the other person (eg, the 'bad guys') are thinking, doing, and saying to their peoples.
Re:The spooks don't trust this source because... (Score:1)
BZZZT. The reason it works is that its private. The people who read it know the other people who read it. And just like slashdot, you ignore the guys who talk crap.
In fact, it is a samller, more targeted Slashdot... As you pointed out, you wouldn't use the one list or source as your only source. I bet you use other sites, even for linux "propaganda". I know I don't rely on slashdot for all my tech news, and to just cut-and-paste an internet article before passing it up the chain of command is unprofessional in any job...
but as confirmation or background, knowing, for example, that all the aircraft from a given squadron were doing a flyby [smh.com.au] would confirm or disprove other reports about their activities and / or readiness....
Re:The spooks don't trust this source because... (Score:1)
This is nothing new. (Score:2)
Think about it. Who hit the beaches of Somalia first? Not the Marines, CNN, who somehow got ahold of classified operational information and knew the location and time before most of the Marines did(that pissed off alot of the Marines there).
In the wake of 9/11, the first thing my intelligence officer did was set up a TV and turn on CNN. For that whole week that tv was running 24/7 on either CNN or MSNBC.
Open Source intelligence is nothing new... this article makes it seem revolutionary. Its not.
Puzzle in Boston (Score:1)
I realize there are a lot of government jobs in the Big Dig...
Seriously, does anyone know what is so important about the Boston airspace?
Re:Puzzle in Boston (Score:1)
Actually, I do know now (this is from Jim Fallows, author of the article). Just after that issue went to press, the no-fly restrictions in Boston were changed.
Previously they were a 15-mile radius centered on Logan airport.
Now they are a 4-mile (I believe) radius centered on a bunch of LNG tanks in Boston Harbor. Apparently it was about LNG all along.
Bazaar politics is about taking decisions (Score:1)
Half of the funds are spent in the way that neighbour associations decide in public debates. From the moment this model was adopted, the city has made spectacular progress in public infraestructures.
Porto Alegre has been chosen as the meeting point for the World Social Forum [forumsocia...ial.org.br] as an acknowledgement of its innovative democratic operation.