Talk:Inxight

Wikileaks disclosure

Emails said to be hacked from John Brennan on Wikileaks (N.B. according to CNN just now, personal but not classified, "not a sophisticated attack") include a curious section:

Extended content

TAC's April 2007 draft proposal also claimed that a "heavy emphasis must be placed on... introducing information technology tools to support analysis and CIR drafting." Id. at 00209, [para] 1.1. Among the proposed technologies discussed at length in TAC's draft proposal are "Inxight ThingFinder" and "Endeca" (TAC 000215-000216, [para][para] 1.1.3.1.1, 1.1.3.1.2) - the very same two technologies the evaluators found to create risk in connection with TAC's proposal under the Real Time Technical Approach and Historical Technical Approach subfactors. AR, Tab 15 at 1.2, 1.3. TAC's plan to use these technologies, their functions, and their purported benefits also are detailed in a chart set forth in the "New Technology Deployment Recommendations" section of the same draft proposal. Id. at 000231, [para] 1.4.7; see also id. at 000235-000236, [para][para] 1.4.8.1, 1.4.8.2.

Related earlier story: [1]

Alas, not quite so easy to make sense out of this. I assume some secondary sources will throw us a clue over the next few days. Wnt (talk) 21:32, 21 October 2015 (UTC)

I don't see how this is relevant to the Inxight article. Inxight is just a vendor of language processing software. If they'd said that they were using SQL queries to access the data, would we be adding something about Wikileaks to the SQL article? --Macrakis (talk) 16:36, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

@Macrakis: Inxight is a product of SAP SE (indeed, I think the articles are close to being mergeable). SAP is specifically mentioned in the bottom link as an NSA contractor - the article says Sybase's biggest client is the NSA. That article also says it denied building backdoors for NSA. So given the degree of involvement with US government action, being found to "create risk" for such use is interesting. However, I don't know enough to make sense of the pieces and put them together into a story just yet, which is why I posted this to the talk page, in case someone else can bring in some more sources and make sense out of it. Wnt (talk) 16:49, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

If Inxight were found to be introducing back doors into its software installed outside the NSA that would allow the NSA to view its customers' data, that would of course be a huge scandal and definitely relevant to this article. However, that seems unlikely and I have seen zero evidence for it.

The fact that the NSA uses the same language/text processing software (Inxight, Basis Technology) as commercial companies is not, in itself, interesting. I am sure the NSA is also a large user of chips (Intel), of database software (from Oracle and others), of search software (from HP Autonomy, Oracle Endeca, Microsoft FAST, and others), of operating systems (from Microsoft and others), etc. That in itself is not noteworthy. Arguably more noteworthy is, say, investment by In-Q-Tel in Basis.[2] But again, there is nothing inherently secret or sinister about this. --Macrakis (talk) 18:44, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

For now it looks like you're right, and so I won't add anything about this to the article at least unless I see something new. Going to Google News for SAP reveals a ridiculous amount of stuff, and even after you take out the bazillion pointless stock stories, there's a bunch of stuff like [3][4][5][6]. Simply put, Wikipedia's article on SAG is simply waaaaay too small, and doesn't give any concept of the company's scope. Meanwhile, the media doesn't seem to have run any stories about SAG and the Brennan leak, and so the clue I was hoping for still eludes me. Wnt (talk) 21:27, 22 October 2015 (UTC)