Open Source Homeland

We need more of this. All you need is the right language skills, some rudimentary technology, and a desire to make money.

S.C. mom scoops al-Qaida with its videos – Yahoo! News
WASHINGTON – Once her son is off to school, Laura Mansfield settles in at her dining room table with her laptop and begins trolling Arabic-language message boards and chat rooms popular with jihadists.

Fluent in Arabic, the self-employed terror analyst often hacks into the sites, translates the material, puts it together and sends her analysis via a subscription service to intelligence agencies, law enforcement and academics.

Occasionally she comes across a gem, such as when she found a recent Osama bin Laden video — before al-Qaida had announced it.

“I realized, oh my gosh, I’m sitting here, I’m a fat 50-year-old mom and I’ve managed to scoop al-Qaida,” said Mansfield, who uses that name as a pseudonym because she receives death threats.

EFF: DeepLinks

Weve already started scouring newly-released documents relating to the misuse of National Security Letters to collect Americans private information. But dont let us have all fun — you, too, can dive into the docs and help uncover the truth about the FBIs abuse of power. All 1138 pages are freely downloadable with searchable text from EFF’s website, and well be posting a new batch every month.

Weve had over 8000 downloads so far, and the blogosphere is starting to light up with feedback and analysis of the documents, which were disclosed after EFF sued the government under the Freedom of Information Act FOIA earlier this year. Over at Wired, Threat Level reports that much of the mischief at the FBI seems to be emanating from a mysterious “Room 4944”, and this anonymous blogger is asking questions about who knew what when.

The Department of Homeland Security’s ADVISE program is under scrutiny: Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff denies his agency wants to engage in data mining. If this is true, my question would be, “why not”?

Here’s some info on ADVISE from SourceWatch:

“At ADVISE’s core, semantic graphs are used to organize the data entities and their relationships. … A semantic graph organizes relational data by using nodes to represent entities and edges to connect related entities. Hidden relationships in the data are uncovered by examining the structure and properties of the semantic graph. Privacy and support policies are enforced by a security infrastructure. Several interfaces for browsing, querying, and viewing the results of queries are under development, including IN-SPIRE and Starlight, from the DHS National Visualization and Analytics Center (NVAC). The key to fusing disparate data from many sources in ADVISE is the exploitation of ‘precomputed’ relationship information by storing the data in a semantic graph. All nodes are related by the links between them on the graph.”

Sounds like a brilliant system. I hope that the research continues and doesn’t get knocked off its rocker like Policy Analysis Market– a brilliant idea disguised as a disgusting one. The search for bad guys (real ones, like the ones who knocked our buildings down, not fake ones, like the hanged Iraqi) requires using sophisticated tools to know the knowable. If that means we know some harmless secrets about people, so be it.

The next steps is to elect and keep in office a reasonable Executive Branch that doesn’t abuse power. Not simple, I know. But keeping ourselves dumb just because someone may hurt us when we’re smart is no way to live.