Feds Plan 'Fog of Disinformation' To Track Information Leaks 263
skipkent tips a story at Wired's Danger Room, according to which "Pentagon-funded researchers have come up with a new plan for busting leakers: Spot them by how they search, and then entice the secret-spillers with decoy documents that will give them away. Computer scientists call it it 'Fog Computing' — a play on today's cloud computing craze. And in a recent paper for Darpa, the Pentagon's premiere research arm, researchers say they've built 'a prototype for automatically generating and distributing believable misinformation and then tracking access and attempted misuse of it. We call this "disinformation technology."'"
Tom Clancy calls this a "canary trap" (Score:5, Informative)
It's a pretty common idea, really. Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] entry.
Great, now... (Score:4, Informative)
Put the same sort of effort into discovering and prosecuting those who classify documents to avoid embarassment, rather than ensure national security. This group is far larger, and far more dangerous than any group of whistleblowers.
Re:aka... (Score:4, Informative)
Meh. Just be sure to grab someone elses copy and leak that. They;ll trace it back to the other person, not you.
Well then they would get the original leaker wouldn't they? That is the point.
There is nothing new here, other than the apparent plan to plug leaks in government, (or should I say inconvenient government leaks).
Copies of physical documents of sensitive information have often contained minor typos or subtle wording changes in critical and likely to be leaked passages. Churchill ordered this during WWII to see which of his subordinates was leaking.
IBM applied for a patent on this process in the digital world [slashdot.org] back in 2009.