Thursday, December 2, 2010

Stop Information Sharing? When did we start?

The Wikileaks debacle has many people calling for restrictions on information sharing - it must be all the innovation since 9/11 that is putting us at risk - right?

Wrong.  There has hardly been any innovation and widespread upgrades of information sharing technology - the systems that were compromised were likely designed in the 60's and 70's, deployed years later, and patched into the 21st century.

The fact that someone could download everything to a thumb drive undetected is crazy - and if detection was possible - who was asleep at the wheel?

Moving our inforamtion sharing capabilities to some new approaches will continue to be the answer - we're not going to make the proverbial sow's ear into a silk purse no matter how many defense contractors we put on the job.

It seems the world is moving too fast for the government to keep up, and that this is just another example.  There will be a hue and cry for more money to spend plugging the leaks (pun intended), but the reality is that the infrastructure is caving in from its own weight, and can't be fixed fast enough.  There are plenty of people willing to throw money at the problem, and an even greater throng willing to catch it and make promises of fixes to come.