Outpost History

From SentryOutpost

Frontiers are inherently dangerous places. Sentries, patrols, watchtowers, garrisons, and outposts become our response to the dangers lurking beyond our safer interiors and along the roads of culture and commerce. The networked age is no different than the age of those ancient watchtowers, as the network now brings those dangerous frontiers into the very shelters of our homes.

In February 2000, in the wake of the massive coordinations necessary to cope with Y2K, Sentry Outpost was founded as a collaborative think tank for security professionals and theorists studying virii, malware, spam, phishing, information theory and other threats to share intelligence and strategy, to contemplate emerging cyberthreats together so that we could anticipate them rather than just react to them.

The Outpost is not an organization in the traditional sense: there are no leaders or management structures, no mission statements or shareholders. Instead, the Outpost is a humanistic protocol: a practice and process by which information is exchanged about sensitive topics between people serving as problem solving nodes. By adopting the strategies and structures of the wild lands instead of the domesticated pastures we help to immunize our efforts from traditional weaknesses.

Because of the variety of people who participate in the Sentries, we embrace a spirit of "share what you will, but learn from anything you can." The agreement we make with each other is that this learning will be used to advance the causes of civilization.