U.S. command in Afghanistan gives Army 60 days to fix or replace intel network
The Pentagon’s main battlefield intelligence network in Afghanistan is vulnerable to hackers — both the enemy or a leaker — and the U.S. command in Kabul will cut it off from the military’s classified data files unless the Army fixes the defects within 60 days, according to an official memo obtained by The Washington Times.
The confidential memo says the Army’s Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS) flunked a readiness test and does not confirm the sources of outside Internet addresses entering the classified database.
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Phi Beta Iota: Rep. Duncan Hunter is bought and paid for by Palantir, the primary rival to the D-Sigs system. Palantir remains under a huge cloud for its racketeering, industrial espionage, and other failures of ethics and good judgment as well as engineering. This attack on D-Sigs is NOT about the flaws in D-Sigs, but rather about Palantir's unethical and totally unjustified attempt to leverage corrupt members of Congress to force themselves on analysts who are doing perfectly well with M3 and other tools already installed and already fully paid for. We can do better, but until we have a DNI that actually understands the bloody tip of the spear, and really wants to produce decision support instead of just spend money, what we have will have to do. Under no circumstances should Palantir be considered for imposition on analysts in the field. SILOBREAKER would be faster, better, cheaper….and lend itself quite easily to both external document integration, and multinational information-sharing. And just for the record, in 1988 the USMC told GDIP that it needed to be able to get everything, in every discipline, for any given time frame, for any given one click grid square. At the same time the USMC told GDIP that every datum in every discipline needed a geospatial attribute along with date time group. We still cannot do that (Cross discipline near real time fusion), even when the assets are right there in the same neighborhood. Furthermore, the needs of someone in a mobile platform are vastly different from those of an analyst in a watch center — the first needs to be able to verbally rely what they want and get back a picture with range, terrain, and timing or a concise verbal precis that does not require fiddling with an idiot computer while moving at high speed over rough terrain. The latter needs wizard tools for visualization, anomaly detection, and so on, as well as the ability to rapidly collate all-sources in all languages to create an on demand and often in extremis product tailored to one brain, one pair of eyeballs, riding on the edge of the bleeding spear. This is not something US intelligence “leaders” spend any time thinking about. They are too busy approving Taj Mahals, the latest being the NSA facility in Utah that requires 1.7 million gallons of clean and very scarce water EACH DAY to operate.
See Also:
1976-2013: Intelligence Models 2.1
Berto Jongman: Forbes Pimps Palantir
Berto Jongman: Palantir “Demo” on Identifying Rebel Groups in Syria
Journal: Palantir, Flush with Cash, Sued for Industrial Espionage and Racketeering
Stephen E. Arnold: Content Processing SUCKS
Stephen E. Arnold: Palantir Anomalies in Funding, Litigation, & Media
Stephen H. Arnold: Palatir, PRISM, & Poop — PR Over Substance, Again
