Top Secret Intranet: How U.S. Intelligence Built Intelink - the World's Largest, Most Secure Network

Rating:
Summary: Invaluable Information
Review: Best reference of Intelink acronymns - for those who care.

Otherwise if you know what PKI, SGML and digital certificates are, this book is a bust. No discussion of impementation details. No discussion of firewalling, intrusion detection, encryption techniques (except to mention a few commonly known ones) or even VPNs.

Do they really use SSL and DES to protect our national secrets? That's scarier than a "dark and stormy night"!

Promises: "Security and Information techniques you can use right now" - no techniques here - just general discussion of common-sense principles

Promises: "Preview the future of intranets and extranets" - yeah right - from the newbies:

"AOL offers Internet access, updates on weather, email, news, sports, and stocks, multimedia entertainment, and their own search engine. Successful intranets like Intelink must have at their disposal a similar vast array of mission relevant tools" Page 160

Should Promise: "Interesting inside look at Gov. bureaucracy in action!"

Note: This book had to pass review by security agencies and this may be the reason it is so vapid.

Another Note: CD is somewhat interesting or I would have given this book a "0"

Rating:
Summary: Invaluable Information
Review: I am a contractor associated with the Intelligence Community. This book has proven invaluable to me and my company, and I highly recommend it to anyone who deals with this area. The CD Rom contains previously unavailable information that was very helpful to me.

Rating:
Summary: Good Efforts by Good People Buried in a Bunker
Review: I was given this book at Hacker's (the MIT/Silicon Valley legal and largely very rich group, of which I am an elected member) by a NASA engineer, went to bed, could not get the book out of mind, got up, and read it through the night. If it were not for the fact that Intelink is largely useless to the rest of the world and soon to be displaced by my own and other "extranets", this book would be triumphal. As it is, I consider it an extremely good baseline for understanding the good and the bad of how the U.S. Intelligence Community addresses the contradictions between needing access to open sources and emerging information technologies while maintaining its ultra-conservative views on maintaining very restricted access controls to everything and everyone within its domain. I have enormous regard for what these folks accomplished, and wish they had been able to do it openly, for a much larger "virtual intelligence community" willing and able to share information. For a spy, information shared is information lost-until they get over this, and learn that information not only increases in value with dissemination but is also a magnet for 100 pieces of information that would never have reached them otherwise, the U.S. Intelligence Community will continue to be starved for both information and connectivity....an SGML leper in an XML world.

Rating:
Summary: Sensitive Techniques???
Review: The book presented a fundamental knowledge of an Intranet, which may be applied in the business world. The only thing Top Secret about the book was just the words on the cover which is a sales pitch.