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| Home Front: WoT |
| Overwhelmed by Success and Paranoia |
| 2006-06-21 |
| June 21, 2006: The current American efforts to "improve intelligence" continue to run into two seemingly intractable problems. First, agencies continue refusing to share data. The usual excuse, that such sharing would threaten sources, is wearing thin. The National Intelligence Director has asked for examples of such damage to sources, and has not received any. The fanatical dedication to the protection of sources is hard to overcome. A particularly valuable source is usually someone on the inside, who could be killed if the connection to American intelligence services was revealed. But as a practical matter, the vast majority of the "burned" (exposed, and often killed) sources were the result of a traitor within the intel or law enforcement agency. But logic has nothing to do with this. The institutional desire to protect sources is so strong that a major effort will be required to effect a change. The smart money is on things staying the way they are. The other problem, the inability to analyze all the information collected, is more likely to be solved. This was a problem that arose during the Cold War, when spy satellites and electronic eavesdropping systems were developed, and quickly began to generate far more data than could be examined and analyzed. This is still a major problem. For the last two decades, there have been several major efforts to deal with the flood of data using computer systems. Huge databases and software that can scan large amounts of data quickly and extract the useful bits, were developed. Typically, only a few percent of the material collected (including a lot of written reports) are useful. It's really a needle in the haystack problem. The current war on terror has, as wars tend to do, spurred development of more effective screening and analysis tools. This has put the spotlight back on the sharing problem. The more data you have, the better the screening software can work. This has also led to another problem. Some political groups have invoked fears of 1984 and "Big Brother" by calling the new techniques invasive and a threat to personal liberties. This makes politicians leery of getting behind any large scale automated data analysis systems. The 1984 angle is more hysteria than anything else. It comes up any time some pressure groups notice that the quantity of personal data has been growing at an enormous rate over the last few decades, and that the government, as well as commercial firms, can analyze it. This is much ado about nothing, but it makes for great headlines, and can easily be used to frighten people. The military gets around all this by calling the analysis systems something else, and keeping quiet about it. But because of the institutional, technical and political problems, the intel agencies are still overwhelmed with data. The new software sifting systems are showing results, but only here and there. No big breakthroughs, and when these do occur, no one will be releasing press releases. |
| Posted by:Steve |
| #3 The usual excuse, that such sharing would threaten sources, is wearing thin. While this line made me bristle and leary of this article - I still maintain that one of the biggest mistakes made by our intelligence sources is that they keep too much secret. The public can help if they know enough. You don't have to give it all away. Amber Alerts broke the barrier for law enforcement believing that locking away every secret for later use is beneficial overall. Open source, while locking away the really, really secret stuff...has to be the best way to go. |
| Posted by: 2b 2006-06-21 15:51 |
| #2 There is some truth to this, however. You could say that with each person in an agency brought into a secret, the probability of a leak goes up incrementally; with inter-agency sharing, the probability increases logarithmically; and with cross-governmental sharing, geometrically. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2006-06-21 15:03 |
| #1 First, agencies continue refusing to share data. The usual excuse, that such sharing would threaten sources, is wearing thin. It's like MSM and confidentiality of sources. Both are done on 'professional' courtesy, for each other, given the amount of leaks from the CIA. The other problem, the inability to analyze all the information collected, is more likely to be solved. And timeliness, which the uniform military seems to have solved in its operations in Iraq. Maybe the job needs to be turned over to DoD and the library, shifting, and bulk publication work retained by the old departments. You know like counted the tonnage of wheat, rice, petroleum, etc is produced, amount of land under the plow, and the amount of national GDP kept in numbered Swiss bank accounts. |
| Posted by: Cheagum Cleatch4688 2006-06-21 12:09 |