U.S. Army: Wikis Too Risky
David Axe writes on Danger Room:
They might not build $150-million F-22 stealth fighters, but in other ways insurgents and terrorists are amazingly tech savvy. For one, they're hip to using grungy, bare-bones websites to spread tactics and ideology across the planet on the cheap, transforming once-isolated local and regional conflicts into genuine threats to global stability. Author John Robb calls this "open-source warfare," and believes it's the most important force shaping the 21st century.More here.
If so, we're screwed. Seven years after the launch of Wikipedia -- the user-edited online encyclopedia that brought the "open source" concept to the masses -- the U.S. Army is still playing catch-up. The Army's idea of harnessing the 'net is to launch isolated websites, put generals in charge and lock everything behind passwords, while banning popular open-source civilian websites. Colonel James Galvin, head of the Army's "Battle Command Knowledge System," openly admits that when it comes to the collaborative internet, the bad guys have a "niche advantage."
posted by Fergie @ 2/18/2008 11:57:00 AM
1 Comments:
It's a bit disappointing that the most press our government has gotten for using technology was Congress assistants editing their employers' Wikipedia pages. And, though I'd bet that nobody in the government is young enough to have been in an adopting age during the Internet boom (dot-com bubble, or even shortly before that), it doesn't mean that they shouldn't look into this World Wide Web thing.
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