@altgate

Facebook For Spies?

Tonight I saw this little piece on CNN about how the CIA had developed "Facebook for spies."  They had some spook on talking about how they had streaming video "like YouTube" and file sharing "like Google Docs."  Apparently they’ve spent $5MM building this.

You’re kidding, right?  Tell me we’ve got holographic, 3-D visualizations, neural nets, artificial intelligence and crazy data manipulation tools.  Tell me there’s some prototype pre-crime unit, but don’t tell me in 2008 that the CIA is experimenting with Facebook and YouTube.  I really hope this is some sort of disinformation program…

Minority_report_2

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Categorised as: Current Affairs

  • http://www.c4i.org [=REDACTED=]

    Well you shouldn’t be so surprised when you look at what the CIA used to use for clandestine communications – that other three-letter agency – AOL. (Not even Web 1.0!) (Ref: 1997′s The Peacemaker with George Clooney and Nicole Kidman – and I bet you thought I was going to say AT&T.)

  • http://blog.jedchristiansen.com jedc

    HA! Yeah, not so much.

    I used to work day-to-day on the military’s classified network. Until 2005, search on the military network was done via AltaVista (or it’s equivalent). Only that year did they manage to get a Google box on the classified side.

    There are certain innovations that are built for the government that do take years to make it to the civilian side (my first thought is satellites, space tech, etc.). But where the civilian side can innovation without government subsidy (aka, web tech) the government will always be years behind. Partly because of a conservative outlook to change, but a fair bit is having to re-engineer solutions to work on the other side of the classification wall.