Showing posts with label National Security. Show all posts

Give it back!

February 24, 2006
According to a recent article "Secret program reclassifies documents" :



"Researcher Matthew Aid has discovered a secret reclassification program that has moved thousands of declassified pages out of the National Archives and Records Administration's facility in Maryland. Some groups, such as George Washington University's Nation Security Archive, are fighting to end the program, arguing that the government has no right take back information it has published. The reclassification has been ongoing since 1999 as the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Defense and Justice departments take back information they say had been inadvertently published. The National Security Archive describes some of the documents that have been reclassified as uninteresting and mundane."



And from The National Security Archive :



"Washington, D.C., February 21, 2006 - The CIA and other federal agencies have secretly reclassified over 55,000 pages of records taken from the open shelves at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), according to a report published today on the World Wide Web by the National Security Archive at George Washington University."



OSINT has greatly evolved from President Nixon's remark in respect to the CIA “What use are they? They’ve got over 40,000 people over there reading newspapers.”, whereas Secrecy is a major weakness to the national security of a country in a very complex way. I feel that sometimes, you need the average citizen's unbiased opinion on a major issue, but I guess I'm not into politics, just figuring out what is going on at the bottom line!



More on Secrecy, Intelligence, Misc :

Making Intelligence Accountable
Why Spy? The Uses and Misuses of Intelligence (1996)
Intelligence Analysis for Internet Security : Ideas, Barriers and Possibilities
U.S. Electronic Espionage : A Memoir
Terrorism prevention in Russia : one year after Beslan
Crypto Law Survey
Cryptome
Project on Government Secrecy
Shhh!!: Keeping Current on Government Secrecy



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Visualization, Intelligence and the Starlight project

January 23, 2006
Today, I came across a stunning collection of complex networks visualizations, that reminded of how we must first learn to visualize and than go deeper into VR. Until, I first visited this project, the Atlas of Cyberspace was perhaps my favorite visualization resource, rather outdated, still has a lot to show. 

Visualization is important for today's greatly developed knowledge networks, data mining, and even information security or basic network management issues. But at the bottom line, who always has the best toys, or at least develops them? The academic world? Sort of, except that they need the private sector to go public, so that leaves the U.S military in my point of view :) and they sure do.


The Starlight - Information Visualization Technology is simply a remarkable concept that these folks actually turned into a reality. It uses both structured, unstructured, spatial and multimedia data and provides real-time output, and if you also consider that the project is reportedly down several years ago, for me it opens up the question, who's the successor?

It's national security applications and the syndication of data sources are so clearly visible, that reducing paper-work, platform dependence, information sharing, and perhaps not another Able Danger scenario(if one actually happened!) is the biggest advantage of such a project.

Going back to the "reality"(yeah sure!), in case you've never seen ChicagoCrimes, the free database of crimes reported in Chicago, it's yet another great initiative that again visualizes based on reports and Google Maps, and you don't need a security clearance to use it :) What's else to mention, is CNET's introduction of "The Big Picture" in cooperation with Liveplasma.com of course, clearly, the waves of information flow must be somehow filtered and there's a clear, both, commercial, public and intelligence need for it. Even VR investments are actively taking place, a lot's to come for sure!

Some concepts and clips on visualization :

TouchGraph Google Browser
Real-Time and Forensic Network Data Analysis Using Animated and Coordinated Visualization
F-Secure's visualization of the 1st PC virus, and W32.Bagle, and you can actually see the clip itself.
Visualization study the U.S - clip

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