Maybe now the US Gov can open their pocket book and pay for Skitter? 
Barry Greene (bgreene) wrote:
[moved comment to bottom; top posting bad]
From: Martin Hannigan [mailto:hannigan@renesys.com]
[also hate outlook]
Joe McGuckin wrote:
Um... (noticed on other lists, by the way)
Security Wizardry Cyber Threat Intelligence - The Radar Page
The *entire* point of that, was to make it clear that everything you saw was *manufactured*, that the NSA (and other agencies) are _not_ going to have data up on a screen that pertains to _anything_ during a photo op, with a bunch of reporters and politicos.
I like the skitter chart, but at the Vegas NANOG, Barry Greene disclaimed it and said it was "out of date". I hope the NSA is using up to date data. It would be horrific if they weren't.
My bet is that they have more up to date data.
Maybe now the US Gov can open their pocket book and pay for Skitter?
Well, as I'd said first time around, it was probably just an image that was a part of the overall construction. Amusing to look at, but I doubt whether you can take anything you see there as reality.
Maybe now the US Gov can open their pocket book and pay for Skitter?
DARPA grant N66001-01-1-8909
DARPA grant N66001-98-2-8922
NSF ANIR Grant NCR-9711092
Etaoin Shrdlu wrote:
The *entire* point of that, was to make it clear that everything you saw was *manufactured*, that the NSA (and other agencies) are _not_ going to have data up on a screen that pertains to _anything_ during a photo op, with a bunch of reporters and politicos.
Go forward a few more pictures; check out the dshield map on image 23 
Austin
[warning NOT operationally relevant, just need to clarify]
thanx to those who forwarded this, it was news to us. note that the
AScore image has been used often by government agencies over the past 5
years, and its use doesn't imply any relationship. but in interest of
full disclosure (though i believe it's entirely unrelated to the photo-prop):
in 2005 NSA did supplement (about $100k, and we hope more this year) an
NSF grant, in order to keep skitter (macroscopic topology measurement)
on life support. Joel's DARPA and NSF URLs are from skitter.infancy --
before NSA's rescue maneuver, skitter hadn't had any earmarked funding
in over 5 years (Cisco has also helped fund some analysis, but funding
raw measurement is hard). the NSA funding allowed us to keep it going
one more year, while we try to ascertain its role, if any, in some future,
if any, community-oriented measurement infrastructure:
  http://www.caida.org/outreach/papers/2005/conmi/
(comments/feedback More than welcome.)
in any event, there is nothing classified or covert in the skitter project
or measurement, and in particular we have never made any data available
to NSA that isn't available to any other researchers who can stomach
filling out the required web forms:
http://www.caida.org/tools/measurement/skitter/research.xml
and in case of commercial use, join caida as a member, though we
kind of relaxed that requirement when all the commercially interested
customers were non-profits according to wall street's (apparently
even less validated) measurement methodology.
we have different access control policies for passive (tapped) data,
since that data belongs to the owner of the tapped link, so the owner
controls what happens to it. (afaik, DHS is doing the most to advance
this ball on scaling sensitive data sharing ( http://www.predict.org )
in a way that ISPs support, but it's also severely underfunded within
USG and thus slow to get off the ground.)
not to drive this into the ground (unless it helps), but it bears
recognizing/remembering that NSA has two missions, only one of which
seems to get media attention:
  http://www.nsa.gov/about/about00003.cfm
publically available macroscopic Internet topology data falls into the
first. anyone who thinks NSA needs caida for its SIGINT mission has
never been brought up to speed on the capabilities of either..
(caida is not currently getting any commercial data (network upgrade ->
funding new monitor, building new monitor, installing new monitor, etc.
same cooperative trick, different decade. we don't have it down yet..)
and finally, while we appreciate the international affinity for ASporn,
our real goal (all along) is to improve the integrity of empirically
grounded Internet science, e.g.,
  http://www.caida.org/analysis/topology/rank_as/
  http://as-rank.caida.org/
which additional funding is certainly necessary but not sufficient to
improve. and no, no existing USG agency has financially embraced the
(open, anyway) Internet measurement mission. which is arguably not
the worst case scenario, but i [re]read brin's 'transparent society'
[ http://www.davidbrin.com/tschp1.html ] last month, and it reads much
more eerily with 8 years of empirical data to support his analysis. eeps.
sorry for latency, length, tangents, and operational sub-relevance,
but felt a need to clarify,
k