****************OFF TOPIC************
Military and C4I
12/3/98
I(nternet) Spy
Free Intelligence Service Does Its Snooping By Computer
By Mark Sauer
STAFF WRITER
When rebels stormed the Japanese ambassador's residence in Lima, Peru, shortly before Christmas, a request immediately went out over an e-mail network of professional spies: Does anybody have photos and the floor plan of the mansion where scores of hostages are being held?
Ten minutes later the information was available.
It wasn't provided, however, by any of the myriad U.S. intelligence agencies. And even though some $30 billion is spent by U.S.taxpayers annually on the spy business, this dispatch didn't cost them a dime.
Dozens of similar e-mail postings are delivered daily by G-TWO Intelligence, an exclusive, grass-roots Internet service developed by an SDSU premed student at his small, rented house in Ocean Beach. "I like to uncover that which is hidden," explained Eric Nelson, who is also a staff sergeant in the Marine Corps Reserve.
G-TWO is an acronym for Get The Word Out, as well as a play on the military's G-2 designation for a unit's intelligence officer. Nelson, who started G-TWO 18 months ago, relies exclusively on "open source" material -- that is, unclassified information available to anyone clever enough to know where on the Internet to look. Most of the three dozen or more daily G-TWO postings originate from World Wide Web pages, news and wire services, government and academic news services, open-source archives and other Internet services.
He sees G-TWO, which is free to subscribers but costs Nelson his $19.95 monthly Internet-access fee, as an experiment. "I want to see how fast, complete and accurate open-source intelligence can be," said Nelson, who, at 6-foot-4 and sporting a GI haircut, tends to stand out among his college classmates. He contends that cumbersome classification structures (not to mention turf wars and jealousies) within the government's alphabet-soup intelligence agencies (CIA, FBI, NSA, DEA, etc.) and intelligence wings of the four military services often prevent "those in the trenches from getting information they need by the time they need it."
Critics contend the U.S. intelligence system is broken, that getting information from one agency to another is laborious and grossly inefficient. "I was hungry for information. I knew what was lacking and I knew what was out there on the Internet," Nelson said. "So I created G-TWO and people like me are eating it up like candy." Any terrorist, rebel faction, militia, rogue government or anarchist with a PC and modem has access these days to vast caches of information on the Internet, information that once was the sole province of exclusive agencies such as the CIA, KGB or British Secret Service.
Nelson, who makes it clear that G-TWO has no official standing with the Marine Corps or any other government entity, contends that Cold War thinking remains a barrier to efficiency in the Information Age. "Who's running the intelligence agencies? People from the pre-Internet era who haven't realized that many of their methods are archaic and many of their services have been embalmed by Internet technology," Nelson said.
"I don't mean to take a shot at our intelligence community. But the Internet is larger than the government and cannot be controlled. The Internet is like Col. Colt's six-shooter -- a great equalizer. "At best we can become friends with the Internet and try to manipulate it to our benefit."
Spy vs. spy
Nelson limits membership on his electronic mailing list to military intelligence and counterintelligence officers and agents, unit commanders, senior military commanders, members of the alphabet agencies and the State Department, and certain defense-industry executives and academics.
The 300 or so carefully screened subscribers not only receive information, they also field requests and provide answers and analysis to other G-TWO subscribers within minutes or hours -- information Nelson claims could take days or weeks to obtain through conventional government channels.
For example: When a terrorist's bomb in a housing complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killed 19 U.S. airmen last June, a 10,000-word analysis containing dossiers on Saudi dissidents, background on Mideast political intrigue, warnings issued by governments worldwide and pertinent news summaries was available on G-TWO within 36 hours of the blast.
A G-TWO subscriber logging on might find a directory of postings with topics such as: "A bomb blast in Pristina (Yugoslavia)"; "NSA Web page hacked"; "Senators lambaste gov't secrets"; "NYPD to use deadlier bullets"; "European course in tropical epidemiology"; or "Special report: Mideast gas and germ warfare."
"What Eric does is invaluable," said an intelligence officer and G-TWO subscriber in the secretary of defense's office, who asked that his name not be used. "You can go through it in the morning and get a good feeling of what's going on generally."
A naval intelligence officer with 15 years' experience said open sources have "long been of use to operational intelligence officers, but till now it was hard to get the information you needed in a timely manner."
"With G-TWO, it is almost like having a 'virtual intelligence center' with analysts with expertise on areas around the world," he continued. "If something occurs in Comoros (East Africa) ... or Iraq or North Korea, G-TWO will carry the key information. More important, it will provide the opinions of people from academia and industry, experts in the region."
Terry Murray, a retired Marine Corps intelligence officer now working for an Orange County defense contractor, said it was inevitable, given the immense information available on the Internet, that someone like Nelson would come along with something like G-TWO.
"For the government to duplicate what Eric provides for my company would take probably 200 people," Murray said. "Before the Cold War ended, the CIA focused great groups of researchers to look into these kinds of topics. That isn't done anymore."
But if hundreds of professionals in the U.S. intelligence community find Nelson's open-source roundup indispensable, why doesn't the government provide its own open-source service?
G-TWO subscribers interviewed said intelligence agencies do use open sources to some extent but are wary of such information because the reliability cannot always be verified. "We must remain cautious when lives are at stake," said John Collick, a Marine Corps gunnery sergeant studying at the Joint Military Intelligence College in Washington and a former Army intelligence instructor with 16 years' experience in the field. "If the 'enemy' puts false information out as open source and we accept it at face value, American military men and women will die."
No time for sergeants
Nelson, 35, has a master's degree in psychology and is a member of the high-IQ organization Mensa. He has spent nine years in the Marine Reserve (the last two as a counterintelligence specialist) after washing out of active duty in 1983 because of a bum knee. "I've had a chance to look at both sides of the information available to the intelligence community -- classified and unclassified. Let me tell you something, unclassified is always the best stuff," said Nelson, whose main computer for G-TWO is a 200 megahertz, 2.5-gigabyte hard-drive job with 32 megs of RAM, a 33.6 modem and Windows 95 operating system.
Nelson is aided in his open-source endeavor by Alijandra Mogilner,a mother of three who holds a Ph.D. in anthropology, speaks four languages and spends about six hours a day on her computer at her Old Town home, scouring the Internet for G-TWO stuff. Special software enables Mogilner to translate foreign news reports and governmental press releases for G-TWO postings."The Kurds send me information, the Tamil (Sri Lanka) Tigers, the Bahrain Freedom Movement. They all want their side out there. My kids say I must belong to 'Revolutions Are Us,'" said Mogilner, who has daughters ages 30 and 22 and a son, 15.
A writer for the past 15 years, Mogilner said she has penned scripts for the Children's Television Workshop on PBS and articles for a variety of publications, including Smithsonian magazine, and has written "things you don't tell your mother about." Using her Macintosh Quadra computer with its 4.7-gigabyte hard drive, Mogilner scours obscure Web pages and databases of far-off cities, provinces, countries and companies to learn quirky facts, such as the size of a new oil pipeline in Iraq.
She consistently beats wire services such as the Associated Press by 24 hours or more on breaking stories, Mogilner said, by getting information directly from the source onto G-TWO almost instantaneously.
"One reason G-TWO is effective is because of our ability to view news in its cultural setting," said Mogilner. "For example, something coming out of the Middle East that could pose a serious threat might be buried in the government's official rhetoric that the intelligence guys aren't inclined to wade through.
"Like an hour of, 'Allah is great! Allah is good! And, uh, by the way, we've put out a fatwa (death contract) on Newt Gingrich.'"Mogilner said she was an early Internet convert, a pioneer cyberspace researcher who has provided open-source information to news and information services from here to Europe. "The computer and I are old friends," she said.
But neither she nor Nelson make any money from G-TWO. Both say they are doing it to "provide a service for the guys in the field."
Boon or threat?
Nelson, whose goal is to teach medicine in Third World countries once he gets his medical degree, said he undoubtedly has ruffled some bureaucratic feathers with his open-source service. "Any time you upset the status quo, not everyone is going to be pleased about it," said Nelson, who would like nothing more than to secure a federal contract to provide his open-source service to all government intelligence agencies. "Upsetting people was not my intent, but I have learned that I have garnered some enemies. Some people apparently see G-TWO as a threat."
But Tom Crispell, a spokesman at CIA headquarters in suburban Washington, said he has never heard of G-TWO and can't see how a service providing unclassified information would cause concern at the spy agency.
Meanwhile, G-TWO subscribers who were interviewed are mixed on the subject of how Nelson's service is viewed by the powers that be. Some say confidentially that there is a camp within the government's intelligence community that fears being upstaged by G-TWO; others insist that most spy-agency managers welcome anything their agents find useful.
"I don't see it as much of a threat," said Marshall Windmiller, professor emeritus of international relations at San Francisco State University and an expert on the intelligence community. "It all boils down to government bureaucrats getting lazy and sloppy over time, and when that is exposed, some get upset about it," he said.
"But in principle, the various agencies are supposed to share everything. They do guard their sources carefully and there are turf wars all the time. The director of the CIA is supposed to coordinate information, and the National Security Council is supposed to be a liaison with the various intelligence agencies.
"But there's so much information available that processing it all and deciding who should get what is a real job," Windmiller continued. "It requires someone with background and judgment to do it."While he can't take it to the bank, Nelson is proud of written praise he has received from top military and intelligence officials -- including a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (whom he would rather not identify).
Nelson's response: Aw, shucks.
"I do this because I love my country," he said. "I appreciate what it means to live in the United States, I really do. This is my way of paying something back."
|
