US Military Shuts Down CIA's Terrorist Honey Pot 213
Hugh Pickens sends in a Washington Post story about how US military cyber-warriors attacked and shut down a CIA-backed intelligence gathering site. "US military computer specialists, over the objections of the CIA, mounted a cyberattack that dismantled an online 'honey pot' monitored by US and Saudi intelligence agencies to identify extremists before they could strike, after military commanders said that the site was putting Americans at risk. The CIA argued that dismantling the site would lead to a significant loss of intelligence, while the military (in the form of the NSA) countered that taking it down was a legitimate operation in defense of US troops. 'The CIA didn't endorse the idea of crippling Web sites,' said one US counterterrorism official. The agency 'understood that intelligence would be lost, and it was; that relationships with cooperating intelligence services would be damaged, and they were; and that the terrorists would migrate to other sites, and they did.' Four former senior US officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the creation and shutting down of the site illustrates the need for clearer policies governing cyberwar."
Re:DHS (Score:4, Informative)
DHS has nothing to do with DOD and CIA. You may be thinking of Director of National Intelligence, who is meant to head up the cooperative efforts of NSA, CIA, DIA, FBI counter intelligence, etc. However, the current DNI is a former Naval officer and is, of course, going to be more sympathetic to the arguments of the NSA (formerly known as Army Signals Intelligence) and DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) than the CIA.
Here's all you need to know (Score:4, Informative)
"Once DoD went to the extent of saying, 'Soldiers are dying,' because that's ultimately what the command in Iraq, what Centcom did, it's hard for anyone to push back," one former official said.
But some experts counter that dismantling Web sites is ineffective -- no sooner does a site come down than a mirror site pops up somewhere else. Because extremist groups store backup copies of forum information in servers around the world, "you can't really shut down this process for more than 24 or 48 hours," said Evan F. Kohlmann, a terrorism researcher and a consultant to the Nine/Eleven Finding Answers Foundation.
Those quotes summarize why they did it and why it was ineffective.
Welcome to the internet, where information never dies.
Re:Enough already (Score:2, Informative)
Wow, way to look like an idiot. Language isn't studied by English professors, it's studied by linguists. This is a very legitimate profession, and in fact every single real linguist I've ever met has been a staunch advocate of the fact that language is made by people, and not a pompous loser at all. They don't sit in their offices plotting out how English (or any other language) will progress. They instead research how it has come to be in its current state, and why it has come to be in its current state. In fact, information theory, a field with applications in neuroscience, electrical engineering, and computer science, also plays a very large role in linguistics.
The English professors who you seem to be adamant about bashing generally study literature, and spanish professors study spanish literature or culture or something else. Sure, foreign language professors might teach grammar, but that's not what they do research and such on. By bashing English literature as a field, you essentially bash every other field related to the study of art, and then some. So please remove your head from your ass.
Re:Bah (Score:1, Informative)
Sadly this is history repeating itself. In WWII German intelligence efforts were grossly ineffective primarily due to the infighting between the SS, Gestapo and the military intelligence agencies. Great Britain's intelligence work on the other hand was extremely effective, for example every single German agent in the UK was either executed or turned. The terrific achievements of British intelligence were largely due to the fact that the intelligence agencies leaders all came from a small ruling class who were closely tied together by bonds of shared educational experiences, family ties and perhaps even homosexual liaisons.
Now the US is big country and our intelligence leaders come from a variety of backgrounds so the British approach can never work here. What we need is strong DOD leadership so that the incessant rivalries between the CIA, FBI, NSA and military intelligence agencies are at least made less harmful I am not optimistic however.
FBI, CIA, NSA, Intelligence Agencies... (Score:3, Informative)
There is a long history here that needs to be taken into consideration... This undermining of our own efforts is nothing new. This has to do with the disparate directives given to different government agencies.
It used to be that the government intelligence agencies had to protect paper documents, "eyes only", and the biggest threat were photocopiers and miniature cameras... not any more.
I wrote about this transformation many years ago.
From my post:
HumInt/SigInt:
Human Intelligence, CIA
Signal Intelligence, NSA
The English have been masters at the spy trade for centuries. In WWII, the United States felt that it should get into the act and turned to the English for guidance.
With their tutelage, the CIA became a formidable tool against the Soviet threat throughout the cold war. We had clearly defined enemies with clearly defined borders. Gathering intelligence became a methodical science... then, once the Soviet Union collapsed, the clearly defined enemies with clearly defined borders went with it.
The growth of the internet created an atmosphere wherein information and 'intelligence' became a commodity. Then the emergence of an enemy that is not only difficult, if not impossible, to clearly define but who also operates entirely without borders. The polar opposite from what the CIA were trained to do.
Not only has this rule-set reset turned the CIA upside-down, it has rendered it all but useless. The UK isn't doing much better either. The problem is that western society itself is at odds with the rules required to make an effective spy agency. Our open government(s), free access to information, laws against spying on citizens and so forth are what both protect our civil liberties as well as create the environment in which our enemies can plot against us.
The CIA knew about al Qaeda operators operating in the USA prior to 9/11, yet did nothing to notify the FBI. This is because of the opposing nature of each agency. The CIA finds a criminal and wants to string them along to see what intelligence they can uncover by monitoring them. When the FBI finds a criminal, they want to string them up. From the CIA perspective, the FBI sure knows how to screw up an investigation and destroy your intelligence network. (In this case, it was the DoD that took down the honeypot.)
The CIA is now dysfunctional to the point of uselessness. In fact, there isn't a single effective spy agency in the western world. The current battle we're fighting and the enemy we face is one that cannot be defeated by military might, it is a war that MUST be fought using intelligence.
So, the administration turned to the only other agency with experience in gathering and monitoring enemies. It also happens that this agency is experts at SigInt, as opposed to the HumInt. The problem is that the NSA is forbidden by law from spying on American Citizens, UNLESS they are monitoring overseas communications. This exception has always been allowed, no warrant necessary. There is no law that states that I have the constitutional right to conspire with enemies overseas.
No other nation even comes close to the SigInt capabilities of the NSA...
It is imperative that the NSA get on top of this nations information security. A staggering number of government agencies are still not even behind firewalls! There is so much bureaucratic stagnation that nothing meaningful has been done to secure this nations governmental infrastructure.
Finally, they are putting an agency in charge that actually *knows* something about security. I applaud this effort wholeheartedly.
Regards,
Joel Helgeson