When he was hired by the DIA, he told me recently, his mind boggled at the futuristic, secret spy technology he would get to play with ... 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."

In this essay for the NYT Sunday magazine, Clive Thompson refers to the white paper by Calvin Andrus, The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community, which was recommended here back in July. (Also at CSI. Slides here.)

Following the threads from this article ...

Next up: the ouster of neocon Zalmay Khalilzad, the manipulative pro-consul in Baghdad, and his replacement by Ryan Crocker, a long-time Arabist who recently served as U.S. ambassador to Syria.

Thomas Fingar [2] "manages the production of the President's Daily Brief." He's an SES and an old China hand. He spoke in August, giving a talk entitled Intelink and Beyond: Dare to Share.

"I think in the future you'll press a button and this will be the NIE," said Michael Wertheimer, assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analysis.

In 2004 Wertheimer wrote in the Washington Post:

To succeed we must demand far less near-term intelligence product from the Signals Intelligence community, give it control of its resources and allow it to plan for a disruptive future, a future that is presaged by videos that show an Afghan warlord exhorting his terrorist followers not to use satellite phones for fear of American capture.

He spoke recently at InfoTech 2006; his presentation, Technology Transformation for Analysis: Year One Report, isn't really online, but others at the conference are here.

According to Michael Wertheimer, who held the most senior technical position at th... [ Read More (0.7k in body) ]

Open-Source Spying

A confidential analysis of Internet search queries and a random sample of Web pages taken from Google and Micrsoft's giant Internet indexes showed that only about 1 percent of all Web pages contain sexually explicit material.

No. That's not true. That's impossible!

MercuryNews.com | 11/14/2006 | Study finds Web isn't teeming with sex

What Sun is due to announce Monday is the open-sourcing of both its Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE) and its Java Platform Micro Edition (Java ME) under the GNU general public license version 2 (GPLv2).

Woah!

Macworld: News: Sun open sources Java under GPL

Samsung has partnered with Korea university and developed the machine-gun equipped robotic sentry. It is equipped with two cameras with zooming capabilities one for day time and one for infrared night vision. It has a sophisticated pattern recognition which can detect the difference between humans and trees, and a 5.5mm machine-gun.

Yet another milestone on the path toward robots that hunt, kill, and eat people, and use their flesh to generate electric power.

Samsung develops machine gun sentry robot costs $200k - Newlaunches.com

The British scientist who developed the World Wide Web warns that if left to develop unchecked, the internet could be consumed by "misinformation" and "undemocratic" forces.

He should try AM radio in the US.

My fears for the web's future: Berners-Lee - web - Technology - smh.com.au

Increasingly, many products are being designed with features that intentionally restrict the way the user can behave, or enforce certain modes of behaviour. The same intentions are also evident in the design of many systems and environments.

This is a cool idea for a blog.

A good example post is here. This ought to be in Rattle's bookmark list for the next time someone is offended by his suggestions that the UK can be viewed as a model for just how bad surveillance can get in a "free" society.

We have reached that stage now where we have gone almost as far as it is possible to go in establishing the infrastructures of control and surveillance within an open and free environment... People are resigned to their fate. They’ve bought the Government’s arguments for the public good. There is a generational failure of memory about individual rights. Whenever Government says that some intrusion is necessary in the public interest, an entire generation has no clue how to respond, not even intuitively.

The article quoted here provides some clear examples of abuse of anti-terrorism powers in the UK and a chilling quote from Tony Blair about rebalancing the priorities of criminal trials in favor of prosecutors. If an American politician ever utters such a thing I'll be first in line to volunteer on behalf of his or her opponent. The British people need another bill of rights.

Architectures of Control in Design

Following up on this post from earlier this year ...

Seagate Technology LLC hopes its new security system for the hard drive will become the most formidable barrier between computer data and thieves.

The world's largest hard drive maker says its DriveTrust Technology, to be announced Monday, automatically encrypts every bit of data stored on the hard drive and requires users to have a key, or password, before being able to access the disk drive.

... and on this IBM press release from last month, about their encrypting tape drive.

Seagate to encrypt data on hard drives

The software maker said it will merge its security response unit, its Trustworthy Computing effort and an engineering excellence product in one group to be led by Scott Charney. That unit will be part of the Windows Core Operating System Division, now headed by Jon DeVaan.

By moving the unit inside Windows, DeVaan said Microsoft believes it can "become more effective and efficient at understanding what's going on with security".

This is an important move.

Microsoft moves key security into Windows unit

This could be handy.

Google Code Search

"Right Wing" talk show host Stephen Colbert interviews Apple Prankster.

YouTube - Stephen Colbert Interviews Steve Wozniak