Chaos Program

A doctoral candidate in Virginia developed a highly accurate (as far as we can tell) and probably one of a kind map of North Korea (Wall Street Journal article here). This may become important in light of other developments, including North Korea’s announcement of having done a second, successful underground test of an atomic bomb (see AP story here).

Earlier this year, researchers for the Open Security Foundation used seemingly unrelated newspaper articles to learn details of the Heartland Systems data breach, one of the biggest data hacking incidents yet known (Wired story here), before the breach was made public.

Both of these items reminded me of an old story about one of the first people to study serial murder. This was a detective (whose name I should be able to remember but can’t just now. Sorry!) who began studying newspapers from all over California in order to find similar murders that were not thought to be linked, as likely as not because they were in different jurisdictions so that the investigators involved did not even know about them. He discovered quite a few links no one else had noticed this way.

This sort of research to link up scattered, seemingly unrelated information is called open source intelligence gathering and we may not be far from the time when you can get a degree in it and (hopefully) lots of high-paying jobs. The term should not be confused with open source software or artificial intelligence. This intelligence is the kind that concerns intelligence agencies like the CIA. And the open just means not hidden. read more »

A few years ago when I took a course in web development, I had an assignment to survey a number of different websites all from the same industry. Since I worked for a newspaper at the time, I chose the newspaper industry. After spending many hours on this assignment, my conclusion was that the newspaper industry was completely devoid of creativity or any thought, whatsoever, about the needs of the consumer. I found the web pages for all the different papers to be essentially the same, offering the same news in the same format, with the same crappy navigation system using the same old web 1.0 (or maybe 0.8) technology.

Since then, we have had a few years for web technology to develop and for companies to learn the ropes of the new system. For the most part, though, newspaper web sites haven’t improved beyond adding some video and maybe a search function. Circulations are down, advertising is way down but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of creativity going toward finding solutions.

Or does there?

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I work for someone who often talks about “disruptive technology” and how hard it is to keep it alive. He believes that not only is the project we are building disruptive in the context of the technology world but also in the company itself. One definition of disruptive technology is found at the old standby, Wikipedia “A disruptive technology or disruptive innovation is a technological innovation that improves a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically by being lower priced or designed for a different set of consumers.”

The term came to my mind in a completely different context, though, when I was reading an article [at DefenseTech] about the U.S. Army and the developing – and struggling – doctrine of hybrid war. I was already familiar with the somewhat different concept of asymmetric warfare, in which a very weak opponent (such as Al Qaeda in Iraq) uses guerrilla or terrorist tactics to go after a much more powerful foe (such as the United States) [See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_warfare for more on asymmetric warfare]. But the term hybrid war was new to me.

According to the article, hybrid war is fought against (surprise!) hybrid enemies who “come equipped with high-end, precision guided weapons, yet fight in distributed networks of small units and cells more akin to guerrillas.” This put me in mind of the Afghani Mujahideen of the 1980s, who used U.S. supplied stinger missiles against the invading Soviets. This kind of warfare is not fought with the traditional tank columns and carrier groups but can still do terrible damage. It is made possible both by modern weaponry and by the cleverness and determination of small group leaders. read more »