ELINT - Or The Fine Art Of Feeding The Dog

You all remember the joke about the blind man whose dog pisses on his leg. A passer-by sees this and watches the man offer the dog a biscuit. Leading to this question and answer:

" Why do you give that dog food when it has just pee'd on you?"

" So's I can find out which end to kick..."

I tried the biscuit this last evening with a mildly revealing posting on my personal blog. I followed it up with an insincere apology on Facebook. So far I have three bites on the FB page and I have filed away the information for future use.

This is akin to the air force practise of flying a snooper plane close to an enemy coast with a load of radar detectors aboard to see what sort of electronic response you get - what lights up. Clever air forces also arrange for ground-based detectors to watch at the same time in case the snooped-upon decide to send up interception. Really clever air forces correlate data from the snoop, a satellite aloft at the same time, a ship and a sub, and ground stations and file it away for future use. The best air forces decoy out an interception....and then don't let the interceptor go home again.

It's a good model for commercial and personal electronic communication. This blog is linked to Facebook and Twitter and I think our IT maven has made arrangements for anything I type to fly over there automatically. Then a flood of statistics comes back and makes pie charts somewhere on the computer. Then I get fed the pie so that someone knows which end to kick.

No no no, that can't be right.

I want to see this blog linked to Spy, Sneek, CreepRound, and ShuffleThroughThe Bins - all good legitimate electronic forums for businesses. This will increase the amount of information - and false names - that return to the central data base and will enable us to construct bigger and better pie charts with thicker crusts and more apples inside. Then all we need is a big 'ol wheel of red cheese and a pot of coffee and the REAL writin' can begin.

Eh?

Uncle Dick