I am going to have to look into this in some depth. I like the idea. Creating a P3P version of the MemeStreams Privacy Policy is something I will put on my TODO list.

P3P: Privacy Primer

Hezbollah guerrillas were able to hack into Israeli radio communications during last month's battles in south Lebanon, an intelligence breakthrough that helped them thwart Israeli tank assaults, according to Hezbollah and Lebanese officials.

Wow! Key management problem?

According to this comment in a post about this on Defense Tech, it appears you are correct:

I trained Soldiers and Marines on the every facet of the SINCGARS system for 6.5 years, from Korea to California. I guarantee it was a lack procedure. You do the math, minus the freq hopping element, if this radio system is properly deployed, it provides 128 bit encryption! No matter how powerful your computer(s), you do NOT break that on the fly.

Even though I know fairly little about how these systems work, I still have trouble imagining anything that could lead to this happening other than a procedure problem related to key management. The way cryptography works in these situations isn't exactly rocket science.

If not a procedure issue, than Hezbollah was able to get the communication keys from within the IDF somehow...

Hezbollah cracked the code (followup)

A blog on social software, collaboration, trust, security, privacy, and internet tools, by Christopher Allen.

It is clear this is an excellent blog just based on a once-over. I'm going to have to catch up on this guy's content.

Life With Alacrity

The reliability of information collected from at large Internet users by open collaborative wikis such as Wikipedia has been a subject of widespread debate. This paper provides a practical proposal for improving user confidence in wiki information by coloring the text of a wiki article based on the venerability of the text. This proposal relies on the philosophy that bad information is less likely to survive a collaborative editing process over large numbers of edits. Colorization would provide users with a clear visual cue as to the level of confidence that they can place in particular assertions made within a wiki article.

Congratulations to Tom, who has been published in this month's issue of First Monday.

The material his article covers was first presented at last year's PhreakNIC Conference. Video of the talk (Google Video) is available. The point where Tom talks about his reliability system for Wikipedia is about 30 minutes into the presentation.

Update: Instalanche.

Update2: Slashdotted.

Puppy smoothies: Improving the reliability of open, collaborative wikis

US policy-makers, war-fighters, and law-enforcers now operate in a real-time worldwide decision and implementation environment. The rapidly changing circumstances in which they operate take on lives of their own, which are difficult or impossible to anticipate or predict. The only way to meet the continuously unpredictable challenges ahead of us is to match them with continuously unpredictable changes of our own. We must transform the Intelligence Community into a community that dynamically reinvents itself by continuously learning and adapting as the national security environment changes.

Recent theoretical developments in the philosophy of science that matured in the 1990's, collectively known as Complexity Theory, suggest changes the community should make to meet this challenge. These changes include allowing our officers more autonomy in the context of improved tradecraft and information sharing. In addition, several new technologies will facilitate this transformation. Two examples are self-organizing knowledge websites, known as Wikis, and information sharing websites known as Blogs. Allowing Intelligence Officers and our non-intelligence National Security colleagues access to these technologies on SIPRNet, will provide a critical mass to begin the transformation.

The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community

CTO of the Center for Mission Innovation at CIA presents these slides today, 18 July, at the NSF's Collaborative Expedition Workshop, where "Participants will explore opportunities for multi-disciplinary and community-based collaboration around national challenges."

The briefing is also available in a PowerPoint version.

Some excerpts:

Complexity theory suggests that from intelligence officers who are allowed to share information and act upon it within a simple tradecraft regime will emerge an intelligence community that continuously and dynamically reinvents itself in response to the needs of the national security environment.

* At CIA, we have created nearly 500 internal blogs in the last 6 months. (a few dozen are active)

* We have an internal Wiki that has generated about 10,000 pages in about a year.

* Used for:
-- note taking,
-- floating/debating trial ideas,
-- broadcast communication,
-- drafting papers,
-- publishing finished pieces (rarely so far)

I think we have some some clue the IC would be interested in tapping into... We know how to route information so it better finds it's right place in the big picture.

Wikis and Blogs for Intelligence

Open Notepad and type in this phrase, without the quote marks and with no carriage return: "Bush hid the facts". Now save it and open it again.

Seriously, try this before you click through this link.

27B Stroke 6: Fun MS bug.

The is one of those rare memes sure to send numerous MemeStreams users into a frenzied state. Javanco was the much loved computer and electronics store in Nashville. When we needed something, we all went there first. The entire staff was awesome. Javanco was one of the heavenly bodies the Nashville hacking scene rotated around. It had quite a history. At one point Sun attempted to sue them when some lawyer searching for trademark abuse saw "Javanco" as "Java n' co", even though it was a family name. At another point, radioactive nuclear waste was found in the basement, after accidently being sold to them with some electronic equipment. Many, many stories. Sadness was felt by all when they closed.

So, the grand news is this.. Jesica has reopened the business as The BotShop, this time selling robot supplies. I could not be more pleased to see this. ROBOTS!

First and foremost...we love robots! We've been selling the OOPic controller for years. And more than anything, we love to hear what our customers are creating with them. It's always something new and exciting, and that's what keeps it fun. Now, on to the company history.

When I went to work for my father in 1996, I began a journey I would have never imagined. The company was started in 1957 by my grandfather, T. Javan Keith, an exceptional company that stood the test of time. The company began as a surplus dealer for a vast array of electronic components and began trading computer products in the 60's.

My father, Javan Keith, opened the computer department in the mid 80's. The company began custom building systems back then. My father stuck to his beliefs that using upgradeable parts to extend the life of the system and avoiding an assembly line created a computer unsurpassed in quality. He also believed that having the most knowledgeable technicians possible kept our level of quality where it should be.

My father was an exceptional man, more concerned with taking care of others' needs than his own. This was reflected in the way he did business. He would never stock anything he wouldn't have himself. Anything sold by us was always something he'd feel comfortable selling to his own family.

In 1999, we sold our long time location at 12th Avenue South in Nashville and moved to Cannery Row. The company discontinued its electronic stock, upgrading itself to "strictly computer." Our in store and on site service departments flourished. We gained notoriety for our exceptional Audio and Video editing systems. We continued to be the place to go for technical expertise and great selection of high quality, low cost cables and adapters.

I became the General Manager and Vice President in January 2001. In September 2001, Dad passed away. I was in the process of doing what was necessary to keep the company in the family. Unfortunately, I was not able to do so. The company was sold in May of 2002. Out of my hands, the company closed shortly thereafter.

As the technology industry is all I know, it only made sense to stay. I'd also been selling robot parts, particularly OOPics for years and just couldn't let it go. Robot stuff is just too much fun.

We hope to provide the quality parts and great pricing for which Grandpa, Dad and the family business were known.

Thank you so much for your support.
Jesica Flowers

The BotShop | Robot Parts and Supplies

In 2005, Greg Conti [2] presented a paper at the IEEE conference hosted by Georgia Tech and at which Rita Katz spoke. Included below is the abstract of his talk. The proceedings were published by Springer, linked here for subscribers. An extended version of the paper is also available directly from Conti, along with PowerPoint slides.

Intelligence analysts are flooded with massive amounts of data from a multitude of sources and in many formats. From this raw data they attempt to gain insight that will provide decision makers with the right information at the right time. Data quality varies from very high quality data generated by reputable sources to misleading and very low quality data generated by malicious entities.

Disparate organizations and databases, global collection networks and international language differences further hamper the analyst’s job. We present a web based information firewall to help counter these problems. It allows analysts to collaboratively customize web content by the creation and sharing of dynamic knowledge-based user interfaces that greatly improve data quality, and hence analyst effectiveness, through filtering, fusion and dynamic transformation techniques. Our results indicate that this approach is not only effective, but will scale to support large entities within the Intelligence Community.

I've gotten a copy of the IEEE paper. I should have a chance to read it later. Looks interesting.

Filtering, Fusion and Dynamic Information Presentation: Towards a General Information Firewall, by Greg Conti, et. al.

Congratulations to Elonka on making prime coverage in the New York Times ...

For nearly 16 years, puzzle enthusiasts have labored to decipher an 865-character coded message stenciled into a sculpture on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters in Langley, Va. This week, the sculptor gave them an unsettling but hopeful surprise: part of the message they thought they had deciphered years ago actually says something else.

On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Sanborn left a phone message for Elonka Dunin, a computer game developer who also runs an e-mail list for enthusiasts trying to solve the "Kryptos" puzzle. For the first time, Mr. Sanborn had done a line-by-line analysis of his text with what Mr. Gillogly and Mr. Stein had offered as the solution and discovered that part of the solved text was incorrect.

Within minutes, Ms. Dunin called back, and Mr. Sanborn told her that in the second section, one of the X's he had used as a separator between sentences had been omitted, altering the solution. "He was concerned that it had been widely published incorrectly," Ms. Dunin said.

Ms. Dunin excitedly started sending instant messages ...

Another CIA leak?! Can't these people keep a secret? Shesh!

Ok. So let me see if I am following correctly. I'll translate into Rummy.. As I understand it, there are known knows, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. This was a known known intelligence, that turned out to include an unknown known error due to Sanborn. Now the full information is in the hands of hackers and terrorists everywhere, looking to break the CIA cafeteria.

Information about anything in regard to the CIA cafeteria must be heavily protected, and must not leak into the public domain.

And now, your moment of zen.

Good job Elonka. You rock.

A Break for Code Breakers on a C.I.A. Mystery