From Bruce Krasting via The Daily Crux

I had an interesting conversation with a fellow who lives in Europe and has been connected to the spook world in the past. (See this for prior discussions with him.) It went like this:

Paris
Have you been watching the events in Syria? (Read more…)

BK
Not really. I’m not sure what, if any, are the implications of this is.


Paris
You should. Things are moving faster and faster. For example, have you seen the level of fighting in the streets of Damascus the past few days?
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BK
No. It seems there is fighting every day.

Paris
There is now heavy fighting in the capital of Damascus. Clearly, the opposition has grown substantially for this to happen. It also means that the fighters are being armed. They would not take on a battle in the capital unless they were well armed.

BK
Interesting. Where are they getting these arms?

Paris
The same place that the Libyans got theirs, the Qataris and the Saudis.


BK
Ah! How do the Saudis and Qataris get arms into Syria?

Paris
Through Turkey, of course. You don’t think those Turkish jets got shot down by accident do you? This was the excuse for Erdogon (Turkish President) to get involved. Now he is.

BK
Why would Erdogon want to get involved in the Syrian mess?

Paris
He sees himself as a guardian of the Sunni. What we are witnessing is the re-emergence of the Ottoman Empire.

What is happening is that Syria is in a civil war, but behind this is a religious war. Sunni versus Shia.

The fighting today is in the streets of Syria, but in the end, this is a war between the Saudis and the Iranians.

BK
Where’s this headed?

Paris
At this point, the USA is sharing any intelligence it has with all “friendly” interested parties, including the Turks, the Israelis, the Qataris and the Saudis. Given that all of these countries are also “leakers” of info, it is a safe bet that the Russians have the same info and are passing it along to the Iranians.

It’s an equally safe bet the Iranians are very angry at this. In particular, they are pissed at the Qataris. And that gets us right back to the Straits of Hormuz.

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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. (Read more…)’”

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.

The Fog Computing project is part of a broader assault on so-called “insider threats,” launched by Darpa in 2010 after the WikiLeaks imbroglio. Today, Washington is gripped by another frenzy over leaks — this time over disclosures about U.S. cyber sabotage and drone warfare programs. But the reactions to these leaks has been schizophrenic, to put it generously. The nation’s top spy says America’s intelligence agencies will be strapping suspected leakers to lie detectors — even though the polygraph machines are famously flawed. An investigation into who spilled secrets about the Stuxnet cyber weapon and the drone “kill list” has already ensnared hundreds of officials — even though the reporters who disclosed the info patrolled the halls of power with the White House’s blessing.

That leaves electronic tracking as the best means of shutting leakers down. And while you can be sure that counterintelligence and Justice Department officials are going through the e-mails and phone calls of suspected leakers, such methods have their limitations. Hence the interest in Fog Computing.

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