IRIS Anti-Terror Proposal Implemented

On January 8, I proposed a solution to the massive backlog of untranslated Iraqi documents:

The severe shortage of reliable Arab translation resources has shown itself to be a major security vulnerability and a recurring theme. In short, it can be solved by turning to an open source collaboration model (with security provisions where necessary)

This idea has now been implemented:

US puts Iraqi documents on the Web
Goal is to speed up translation of files

It's the same "open source" principle that drove the successful development of the Internet and of powerful free software like the Linux operating system. Instead of hiring a team of brilliant professionals to analyze Iraqi documents in secret, the open source systems will use hundreds of clever amateurs, who'll publish their work for anyone to analyze and improve upon.

A month after I posted the proposal, a group of Pajama Media bloggers including Roger L. Simon deserve great credit for proposing it to Congressman Hoekstra, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and other high-level security insiders. While it is possible that others had published the idea before me, it is conceivable that Simon read the idea at IRIS given that he linked to two IRIS Blog posts the previous month. Simon reported that Hoekstra "was surprised" by the idea. The Boston Globe reports that Hoekstra then spearheaded a campaign to pressure Negroponte to release the documents, soon convincing the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Pat Roberts. Negroponte adopted the idea, and on March 15 began releasing millions of pages of untranslated Iraqi documents.