mostly research stuff
(”capo di tutti i capi” - “boss of all bosses“)…okay, so i just wanted to be the 11 thousandth person to weigh in on the “elGoog news source patent” crap….and it is just that, total shit...while i’m confounded by the debate coming from the general public, i’m fully amazed by the complete omission of any direct or indirect statements noting how this model maps to the activities of much larger global intelligence agencies…hello? ever heard of osint? if you’re like ‘osint? is that catholic…from the apocrypha?‘, then i suggest you read up at the best site for information on “open source intelligence,” or check out the kazillions of osint resources i’ve pulled together right here at passingnotes…
a couple of years ago at the annual conference for the society of competitive intelligence professionals in boston, i was fortunate enough to hear the capricious (former) cia director of osint (mark lowenthal) wax poetic about the state of osint…but what really caught my interest was some dialogue which i’m going to try to spew back for you right here…
…intelligence agencies have long monitored news sources across the globe - not just the sources, but i mean the individual journalists (ouch, should we talk about dan rather again? or stephen glass types?)…each outlet (paper, broadcaster etc) has a scored slant (hard right, left etc) and is mapped to specific political and corporate connections (yeah, chomsky was onto something with the whole 15/25 firms control all world news thing)…as journalists move pub to pub, their attitudes and opinions are monitored, along with the ongoing reliability and credibility of the writer as a generally valuable resource for open source intelligence gathering…that’s a very peter rabbit version, but you get the drift…
you can read a bit more about this in a very formal piece about “Open Source Intelligence: Private Sector Capabilities to Support DoD Policy, Acquisitions, and Operations” from defense daily network and oss (salient excerpt: “Journalists on the Ground. LEXIS-NEXIS was used to identify journalists of varying nationality who had been on the ground recently and were intimately familiar with personalities and the situation. Such individuals publish less than 10% of what they know, and have current appreciations for personalities, logistics, corruption, and other key factors of high interest to the Country Team.“)…or how about this excerpt: “OSINT Is A Resource Multiplier and Public Value. The range of multi-lingual and multi-media open sources and services is so varied in terms of coverage, reliability, and relatively low cost, that a truly professional OSINT endeavor can save DoD at least as much as it costs in preventing the waste of internal man-hours and funds against less than excellent sources, while also increasing the quality of the information available to policy-makers, acquisition managers, and commanders.”…do you notice anything? do they seem to give a shit about website traffic and incoming links? duh…all of ‘em know that without some humint in place, the osint-finds-everything idea is kinda like pissing in the ocean waiting for high tide…
my point? well, when it comes to the patent idea from elGoog, i’m deeply concerned that they do not understand what ‘reliability and credibility’ mean to intelligence seeking citizens, researchers, or others - public or private sector…it’s not about links, traffic or other quantifiable data, it’s about the author (the individual author, you know, that sentient nose-picking being) as well as the parent organization of the author, that parent’s affiliations (and associated prohibitions or endorsements for certain veins of content) and a number of other qualitative criteria, all of which require divine human interaction and review to engender highly effective sorting and filtering for intelligence gathering initiatives…this is old news to competitive intelligence professionals who monitor markets and news sources for corporate clients, gov folks who monitor overseas and domestic news sources…but for some reason, it’s not even on the elGoog agenda…until something deep and real happens with artificial intelligence, it’s unlikely that an algorithm from some propeller heads in california will obviate the need for strong human researchers and analysts capable of synthesizing text by evaluating source reliability and credibility on a personal and organizational network level using eyeballs and brains and abstract thinking…for example, the IMN is a prime candidate for the new elGoog news algorithm, but it’s just one example of precisely what is wrong with this approach to automation…honestly, i’m much more interested to see how stuff like newsblaster shakes out over the coming years with additional government agency funding…
this blog is mostly safe for work, though i sometimes throw around a 'fuck' or two. you'll find a bunch of my articles from CI Magazine, SCIP online, other research pieces and some other crap. enjoy. there's lost of content here related to getting information about, around, from and through people and organizations...
Mr. Yahoo
May 5th, 2005 at 6:48 pm
Very interesting connection to “OSINT” and that is news to me. News is a very complicated content resource and while the Google approach might be widely criticized, it is at least a start.