Comments on: Maltego and the science of 'open-source' snooping

Maltego, a new "open-source intelligence" tool, makes data mining a poor person's chore using open data sources.

[The_Decider]

"Maltego doesn't snoop into closed data repositories, but instead mines publicly available data and helps to make inferences and connections between the disparate data sets"

You are forgetting that a lot of data that should be closed is not due to corporate incompetence.

[AndrewMohawk]

"Maltego works on Linux or Windows, but not the Mac." - actually Maltego does now run on the mac, you can check out the forum article ( http://www.paterva.com/forum/index.php/topic,48.0.html )

[giladby]

"The product isn't open source in any way: that's just a clever marketing moniker. It's only "open source" in the sense that it pulls from open data sources and remixes them in interesting ways."

hehe.. actually, open source is used here correctly - the original term of the phrase as used by the intelligence community (e.g. NSA etc) is information which is available from public source - non secret information.

So it is open source, it's just not Open Source :-)

Gilad.