GTRI's first order of business was to create a Web site and a group within the Facebook community. The team also signed up for a G-mail and Google voice mail accounts to be used exclusively for people looking to contact them with information during the competition. Team members deluged their friends with Facebook invitations and encouraged those friends to invite their friends. GTRI issued a press release via its Web site and announced the team's entry via Twitter. The team's Web site received about 3,000 unique visitors prior to competition, and their Facebook group had 850 members.
To ensure that the GTRI team's Web site would appear near the top of any Google search related to the DARPA Network Challenge, Briscoe joined online discussion forums, commented on Web sites where the competition was discussed and did an interview with National Public Radio, being careful to emphasize that any prize money would go to charity.
Both M.I.T.'s and GTRI's teams needed to be on guard against being duped by fake weather balloon sightings. M.I.T. did this in part by checking the IP addresses of e-mails that claimed to be providing accurate coordinates. If the IP address identified a computer nowhere near the balloon that the e-mailer was claiming to have found, the message was looked on with suspicion. M.I.T. also asked its informants to e-mail images of the balloon they had found and/or the image of a certificate obtained from the DARPA officials stationed at each balloon site. These measures proved useful in debunking a report from a supposed informant on the campus of Brown University in Providence, R.I. After analyzing the image sent by the informant, the M.I.T. team determined that the picture was actually a copy of one from DARPA's Network Challenge Web site, doctored to look as though the balloon was hovering over Brown.
The GTRI team also received the Brown University report, which they likewise dismissed as a fake. In addition to studying e-mailed images, GTRI called friends, family and local businesses to help validate alleged sightings. They sent two team members out to Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Park to confirm reports of a balloon there. Sure enough, the investigators returned with a certificate from DARPA authenticating the find.
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Add CommentIn "Three Cups of Tea" Mortensen writes about the use of this by mujahedin during the American attack on Afghanistan.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBasically, what this is documenting is that guerilla warfare has extremely good intel gathering capabilities. We knew that, but I suppose any confirmation is good.
Now, what are we going to do about it?
In a national security sense we would do the same thing to the internet as we would do to the GPS network. Shut down or modify the system so that its usefulness is effectively hindered as a military communication network; artificially high latency (in the order of days) would do the trick, but the infrastructure to pull this off would be enormous. Black holing the global network would be necessary to isolate non-compliant routers. But I don't see anything short of another world war to warrant such efforts. And I don't see another world war happening.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor foreign nets, bomb the internet infrastructure; it's fairly rigid and easily disrupted.
For anything less you just have to deal with it; maybe if our cyber warfare groups were worth their expense they should proactively counter these nets. But that's unlikely since the internet is by it's nature fairly anonymous; so unless we want to attempt to "control" the internet we are going to have to let them use it for their machinations. And doing so would be unconstitutional anyway. So we have no other choice than be reactive about it; pop them after they pop up on the net; make it too dangerous to use for thier pruposes.
Yes, because with America's involvement, the Internet ceases to exist, right? You do know there are other countries in the world, right?
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