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."
Created for a purpose of streamlining the defense (Score:1, Insightful)
It was actually created to pay wages and pensions. Like most of the rest of the government you have to hope there is enough side-effect left over from the jobs program aspect to actually accomplish the publicly stated mission of the dept. In the case of the DHS, maybe it is better that they just stay confined to the jobs program aspect.
Scorched-earth security defeats itself again. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Enough already (Score:3, Insightful)
Given the sudden rise in the number of times I've seen that stupid phrase in the news I'm thinking soon we're going to see a "war online" moddled after the war on drugs and the war on terrorism any time soon with all the associated losses of freedom and shitting on civil rights.
There's military intelligence for you (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Reading between the lines, someone in the military had a brilliant idea on how to find people liable to be extremists. "Lets make our own extremist site", they said. "Just to make sure we get them all we'll make it really fan the flames of Jihad, and tell Muslims why they should join in". What happens. A few people who would be terrorists come a long ... fine. A large number of moderates come along and leave comments like "you're a disgrace to Islam" and move on.. fine. But a sizeable number of Muslims who are not extremists hit the site and become radicalised by it. Some continue to use the site, but some inevitably find other "real" sites.
Someone does an analysis and says "Look, the number of people being radicalised by us who we lose track of is now larger than the number of people who are already radical who come along and get tracked". The military intelligence guys say "what do you mean doing no good, we have dozens of people here talking about extremist acts, and we only lose track of a quarter of them!", totally missing the point that they now have a dozen untracked extremists, and three dozen who are currently tracked whereas without the site they would have had half a dozen untracked ones!
Re:Enough already (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine! The gall of people, smashing two innocent and unrelated words together like that to create a third, wholly unauthorized word. That kind of original thinking and insubordination must be punished. Otherwise, people might catch on that language is created by people, not professors. They might realize that it's all arbitrary, and English is not a science, and barely a legitimate academic discipline at all, but rather the preferred refuge of pompous losers who can't make it in any other field.
You can't..... (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't fix stupid. Truer words were never said. Explains quite a bit about our fine Government too.
Re:You can't..... (Score:1, Insightful)
There aren't enough mod points :)
Re:There's military intelligence for you (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah. One would almost assume it would be easier to switch to alternative sources of energy, bring our troops home, spend a fraction of the military budget on protecting our airliners and ports, and stop sponsoring military dictatorships in the middle east with arms and money.
But, they'd still hate us for our freedom! Or something...
Re:There's military intelligence for you (Score:4, Insightful)
That seems pretty far-fetched.
Re:Enough already (Score:2, Insightful)
I love English just because anyone can shove words together and make a new word.
"English is a language that lurks in dark alleys, beats up other languages and rifles through their pockets for spare vocabulary."
Re:DHS (Score:3, Insightful)
The CIA has been doing its own thing for decades and is very much an outsider when it comes to dealing with NSA, FBI, etc.
And with good reason. It's hard to run black ops with a bunch of lawyers(FBI) and UCMJ indoctrinated officers(NSA) looking over your shoulder. You could debate the legitimacy, necessity, and legality of such operations all day, but in the end you always need a group of people willing/capable/enabled to take care of issues "behind the scenes" without political and legal interference.
Re:Go Cyberwar! (Score:2, Insightful)
You make a good point.
This "report" registers a 9.7 on the bullshit scale.
Forget "TSA physical terrorist security theater", which is costly and unpopular... at least among the non-Fox-News crowd... it turns out that some people don't think it is a good idea to send other peoples' kids to get killed in the name of oil and heroin.
Think "cyberwar terrorist drama" which is MUCH less costly, and in fact does not even really need to happen in order to reap the benefits.
Just drone on about how the "bad guys" have all sort of kiddieporn devilworship muslim terror-commie websites set up, and the United States government is riding to the rescue on the backs of cyber-soldiers protecting the cyber-borders from cyber-attacks using cyber-defense cyber-strategies.
The fake-churchy Fox News trash will eat it up and beg for more.
Domestic equivalent (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Enough already (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow, way to illustrate your lack of reading comprehension. Where did I say that Language is studied by English professors? Many linguists are fine people, like Noam Chomsky. That's why I bashed English as a field, not linguistics. Honestly, though, I'm really bashing prescriptivists, who could come from any field. And foolish post modern deconstructionists who can't tell computer generated nonsense from a real paper.
But none of it is a science. Hell, biology is more of a science. It's philosophy, a bunch of clever ideas and hypotheses unrelated to the real world and lacking any sort of rigorous logical structure.
Now the real question is, do I really believe any of that, or am I just trolling the soft sciences? I'm not even sure myself.
Re:Did I read this right? (Score:3, Insightful)
DoD and NSA just violated a slew of laws [...] CIA seek prosecution
If there was ever a jury I'd never want to be on, that's it.
A government organization with a recent history of torture presses charges against another government organization with a recent history of abusing its power and another with a recent history of illegally spying on citizens...
However you rule, I don't think you're making it out of this unscathed.
Re:Here's all you need to know (Score:3, Insightful)
This is such a stupid quote by the DoD. If they don't want soldiers to die, pull them all out of Iraq. They goal has never been to have no soldiers die, because you can't go to war unless you are ready to lose soldiers. The question should always be are those soldiers' deaths being "spent" on achieving the current military goal.
It's never a question of soldiers dying, it's a question of HOW many soldiers are dying to achieve a specific aim. Saving tens of soldiers' lives now might have cost them hundreds of lives later.
Re:There's military intelligence for you (Score:3, Insightful)
Build. Nuclear. Power Plants.
Re:There's military intelligence for you (Score:3, Insightful)
Jeeze, use your common sense (Score:5, Insightful)
With all the collective intellect of slashdot users, hasn't it even occurred to a single one of you geniuses that maybe, just maybe, this news is a bit of disinformation that has been spread deliberately to obscure some kind of real reorganization/shakeup that is taking place? Huh? I doubt in the extreme that the DOD has gone to war with the CIA, or that they are this blatantly making like the Keystone Kops.
Re:There's military intelligence for you (Score:3, Insightful)
How to make an IED.
How to create deal with a hostage situation.
How to fly a plane.
Where to purchase a dirty bomb.
All of that is good honeypot material without promoting any radicalized viewpoints.
I think the biggest harm is that now several sources of media are trumpeting that there are honeypots in the first place. If terrorists didn't realize that before, they sure do now.
Re:Enough already (Score:3, Insightful)
Some people just don't get it (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm going to rehash an argument that I used a few months ago when there was a news story about the FBI running a similar operation to monitor and prosecute criminals involved in credit card fraud. In that case, a few people argued that the FBI was aiding the badguys by giving them a forum to swap their k0d3z in. They completely ignored the fact that the bad guys would do it any way. If they weren't using the FBI forum, they'd be using another, unmonitored forum to trade the exact same information.
The same situation is going on with this CIA jihadist "honey pot". The jihadists are going to use the internet to discuss what they want to discuss. Our government has two choices. They can either facilitate the information exchange and by doing so, tap into it.. or they can attempt to take down the sites where the discussions are taking place. In the former case they gain useful intelligence. In the latter case they end up playing whack-a-mole and are constantly one step behind the bad guys.
The biggest challenge that the government faces in the "War on Terror" (and for the record, I'm against it. However I do realize the inescapability of it at the current time.) is gathering good intelligence. There simply aren't enough American citizens, or people friendly to the American government who have the necessary linguistic skills and social connections to infiltrate "terrorist" networks. Given the lack of human resources necessary to engage "the enemy" with, the government needs to come up with other ways to monitor what is going on. The honey pot that was just taken down was one of those monitoring tools.
Whoever authorized the take down of the site should be stripped of authority and questioned. They obviously aren't playing for the right team.
Re:Here's all you need to know (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a big difference between soldiers dying because they are accomplishing a dangerous mission, and soldiers dying because they are being ambushed.
There's a difference between merchant ships being sunk because they're accomplishing the dangerous mission of ferrying cargo across the North Atlantic during WWII, and ships being sunk because they are being ambushed by U-Boats.
Under your rationale, the allies should have made use of Enigma/Ultra intelligence to defend any target of any value, without regard to preserving the secrecy of the Ultra project.
In reality, many sailors went to the bottom whose lives could have been saved if the intelligence source were sacrificed. However, I don't know ANYBODY who would argue that the allies would have been better off if they saved a few ships in 1943 at the cost of the Germans switching to an unbreakable encryption system.
Soldiers dying in ambush are no different from soldiers dying taking out a fixed objective where the enemy positions are known. In the end, they are sons and brothers and husbands and fathers, whose loss is a terrible cost which should only be incurred for the greatest need.
However, it is a betrayal to save the lives of a few now at the cost of many more later, or at the cost of the mission. If the lives of a few soldiers is more important than the mission, then we shouldn't be putting them in harm's way in the first place.
This is hardly something new to war. There has been countless debate over things like the decision after the Normandy breakout in WWII France to allow the Germans to retreat instead of cutting them off at a likely cost of many deaths from friendly fire. It is easier to let the war go on an extra six months or whatever and grind through an extra few hundred thousand people than to deal with accusations that your actions killed a few thousand of your own soldiers.
Sometimes in war playing it safe costs more lives than it saves.
Re:Bah (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't that the reason we have one person who is the head of the entire executive branch?
If the CIA wants one thing, and the DoD wants something else, why don't they just ask the president to make a call?
Or is the idea of cutting through bureaucracy so repugnant to government workers that the concept of just having somebody make a decision is completely alien?
Re:Jeeze, use your common sense (Score:3, Insightful)
I know, right? Because, y'know, not like we had enough information to absolutely stop 9/11 from happening if only TweedleDee had shared his pie with TweedleDum...
I have a reasonably high level of confidence that either agency has their shit reasonably together. I have zero confidence that two organizations, both of whom encourage extreme distrust of everyone outside their own hierarchy, have any ability whatsoever to work cooperatively toward ording lunch, much less decreasing international terrorism.
You want my personal take on this? (Well, I'll give it anyway):
The CIA had this really great program that gave them a golden "in" with their targets.
The NSA said "Hey, cool idea, can we play too?"
"Nuh-uh"
"Pleeeeeease?"
"Nope"
"Well screw you guys, you goin' down!".
"Bring it!"
And as a result, two intelligence agencies will now produce significantly less information than either one could have alone.
Re:Bah (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
I think the terrific achievements of British Intelligence were more of a "By jove, if we don't do this right, the german horde is going to march into London" rather than the fappish dalliances of the ruling class, who squeezed in intelligence gathering between tea and cricket.
Re:Enough already (Score:3, Insightful)
The gall of people, smashing two innocent and unrelated words together like that to create a third, wholly unauthorized word.
I think the issue is not the process by which the word "cyberwar" was created (even granted that "cyber" is a word...) but the inherent stupidity of using the already dog tired "war" metaphor in this quite inappropriate context.
The "war" in cyber-war is about as meaningful as the "war" in the "War on Drugs" or the "War on Terrorism." Which is to say, not much. It is a cliche' rhetorical device designed to inspire people who aren't particularly able thinkers.
War is of course a fundamentally irrational activity--economically it is the least efficient and effective way of solving human problems. It fails routinely to bring about any sort of viable solution--see the Basque, the Tamil, the Irish, the Palestinians...--and in the rare cases when it does (WWII, Napoleon, and maybe Bismark's little wars) it almost always involves vastly more cost in money and human life than any of the alternative solutions.
Wars are fought to satisfy our inner monkey needs, in defiance of anything that is good and rational in our nature. People who are unable to control their emotions and who engage in emotion-driven thinking and decision-making are in favour of wars. No one else is, because there is no rational motivation to go to war, except in the face of the most utterly intractable enemy. Even then, alternatives to war are generally available. They just take things that advocates of warfare don't have, like courage, self-control and a rudimentary level of rationality.