Tuesday, November 30, 2004
using public voluntary grid computing for security / intelligence.
this (Log on to be a satellite spy) gave me an idea: various projects use donated computer time via screensavers, etc. to attack various compute intensive problems, like protein folding or seti. why not use the same sort of loosely coupled grid computing to solve national security problems ? these could be strictly cpu intensive - or they could include human input as well. want to be an amateur spy ? yes, there are clearly numerous problems to solve with that, but those could be solved and still let the internet group mind effectively solve what are otherwise uneconomical problems. reduce your taxes by donating time.
an interesting by-product of this public effort would be the implicit creation of a tool that the official agencies could use as well to coordinate to a central intelligence repository. and hell, this would be global.
what to do about individuals or groups intentionally filing erroneous info ? good question. fun to solve.
so, the “homeland security” department/agency/whatever has kept such a low profile over the years as to appear to have been completely ineffective. why haven't they done things like this ? except for telling people to spy on their neighbors. what a waste.