Stone Ghost facts for kids

STONEGHOST is a special computer network used by several countries that are close allies. It helps them share important information about defense and security. The main countries using STONEGHOST are the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. Some people also believe New Zealand is part of this network. Together, these five countries are known as the Five Eyes.

This network is managed by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in the United States, along with similar defense intelligence groups in the other countries. STONEGHOST is very secure, meaning it has strong protections to keep information safe from people who shouldn't see it. It holds information about military topics, secret intelligence gathering (called SIGINT), and national security. It's not for the very highest level of secret information, which is handled on other systems like Intelink-Top Secret. In the past, STONEGHOST was sometimes called "Intelink-C" or "Q-Lat."

Keeping Information Safe

STONEGHOST is designed with very strict rules to make sure the information shared on it stays private and secure. This includes both physical security, like where the computers are kept, and digital security, which means using strong computer protections.

In 2022, some experts who used to work in intelligence wrote about how countries share secret information. They mentioned that even though countries work together on systems like STONEGHOST, their own national rules for handling secret information might not always be exactly the same. This means they constantly work to make sure everything lines up perfectly for sharing sensitive data.

A Story About Security

In 2012, a Canadian military officer named Jeffrey Delisle was involved in a situation where he tried to share information from the Stone Ghost system. This event showed how important it is to keep such networks secure and protect sensitive information. It highlighted the need for everyone with access to understand the importance of national security.