Schneier on Security

Anonymous • November 30, 2005 3:14 PM

Okay this is more entertainment than is safe for me to have at work 🙂 Makes me wonder if there are established correlation or cross-reference logic algorithms to test the likely veracity of information and assign it something akin to a credibility rating … the amount of caffeine in my system might have prevented that sentence from making any sense.

In a nation where, allegedly, you can be prosecuted for espionage for tearing out a page of a US phone book and giving it to The Wrong Foreigner (I always wondered about that), I’m shocked that it has taken our intelligence community this long to come up with something like this. Or has it just taken this long for them to announce it?

Also, the FBIS are studs, everyone one. Period. I <3 those people.

Anonymous • December 2, 2005 2:04 AM

What a good idea.
Why the heck didn’t they do this before? This annoucement means the CIA, inexusably, hadn’t a good working plan to encorporate information from the public sphere into its general analysis of intelligence, despite this information being a more reliable source of information compared to spies and secret information, and despite such a plan to analyse public information being more easily testable (to find its flaws).

At least Negroponte’s somewhat candid about it.

Plainly, while lies and dis-information can permeate the public sphere, there are, generally, counterarguments to those myths and lies also in the public sphere, and an astute fud-cutter like a cia agent could make use of this information, without, necessarily, understanding all the details. This kind of honest analysis information of public information is more reliable, I think, that the secret sphere, where the process of verification is ad-hoc, or, evidently, just not done even attempted (and sometime it just cannot be verified).

Recently, I think the CIA has (obviously) placed too much faith on the information from covert operatives simply because the information was covert, and ignored (as an organization) the information from the public realm that could cast doubt upon secret intelligence. Info from ‘covert’ sources went straight to the top and formed the basis of policy. Info from drudging fact checkers and skeptical thinkers was infinitely filtered, and never made it to the top in a coherent way. At least, that’s the ‘official line’, and it fits well with what’s known of the missed opportunities to maybe try to prevent some of 9/11, and perhaps have avoided some of the crap that was spread leading up to the war in iraq, and perhaps would have prevented some of the odd policies and decisions by the US during the initial active combat operations in iraq, and subsequently.

Probably there were as well more political, plain sickening, noble, or incompetent reasons for the initial war policy justifications. But a prudent analysis of how government used intelligence to form policy and the methods of gathering intelligence could have identified the potential for failure before it manifested itself (all these processes are just the basic role for a government, in any situation, not just intelligence). If the intelligence agencies were set up properly, government wouldn’t have allowed the tenuous rationales for the iraq war to be so easily made, and so easily got away with publicly conflating the noble, political, incompetent, (etc) reasons. There wouldn’t have needed to be such a political 9/11 commision, since the government would have been able to say straight away what was possible to know, and what was possible to prevent. This was foreseeable well before the war, and before 9/11, and to both government and the public, and certainly the movers of both major political parties, whoever was president.

I hope Negroponte’s predecessors are asked hard questions about why this is ‘new’ policy.