Feds Look to Fight Leaks With ‘Fog of Disinformation’
From the Wired Story:
Pentagon-funded researchers have come up with a new plan for busting leakers: Spot them by how they search, and then entice the secret-spillers with decoy documents that will give them away.
Computer scientists call it it “Fog Computing” — a play on today’s cloud computing craze. And in a recent paper for Darpa, the Pentagon’s premiere research arm, researchers say they’ve built “a prototype for automatically generating and distributing believable misinformation … and then tracking access and attempted misuse of it. We call this ‘disinformation technology.’”
Two small problems: Some of the researchers’ techniques are barely distinguishable from spammers’ tricks. And they could wind up undermining trust among the nation’s secret-keepers, rather than restoring it.
There is a third problem as well: What about lobbyists, members of Congress, to say nothing of the Executive Branch who develop and lobby for policies based on information in decoy documents? No unauthorized disclosure but wasted effort based on bogus information. As distinguished from wasted effort on non-bogus information.
After the assassination of Osama bin Laden, there was an agreement among an identifiable group of executive branch officials on no detailed leaks. Next day, detailed leaks. Don’t need disinformation to know where to start rendering suspects on that one.
If they are serious about tracking leaks, whether to encourage (one department trying to discredit another) or discourage them (unlikely other than to avoid bad press/transparency), may I suggest using a topic map? Best way to follow unstructured information trails.
On the other side, to be fair, people leaking or using leaked information can use topic maps to avoid over-use of particular sources or information that can only be tracked to particular sources. Or intentionally developing information to identify (falsely), particular administration officials as the sources of information.