…for a developing story that broke a few days ago, I learned, just as I was getting back from the Demo 2006 conference. This blog does technology, not politics, but this article from the Christian Science Monitor talks about a new government program called “ADVISE” that uses data mining to troll news, blogs, even e-mails, so I thought it worthy of inclusion here.

Basically, this is all about a different kind of open source from the one us tech folks usually write about. This is “open source intelligence” — which government types, in their classic acronym-speak, also term “OSINT.” See this Wikipedia page for background. It turns out, however, that it really is related to the open-source software movement, in a way, as pointed out in this article from 2002.

For more reading on OSINT, here’s a CIA news release and a CIA secure log-in screen.

This is just a quick item of interest I wanted to pass along. It caught my eye especially because I’m currently working on a paper about how email mining is actually a coming new business application as well. So many of our technologies get their start in government.

Now back to our regularly scheduled blog program…

[Written on my lunch hour in St. Paul, MN.]