Essays Tagged "UPI"
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Outside View: Security at the World Series
The World Series is no stranger to security. Fans try to sneak into the ballpark without tickets or with counterfeit tickets. Often foods and alcohol are prohibited from being brought into the ballpark, to enforce the monopoly of the high-priced concessions.
Violence is always a risk: both small fights and larger-scale riots that result from fans from both teams being in such close proximity—like the one that almost happened during the sixth game of the American League Championship Series.
Today, the new risk is terrorism. Security at the Olympics cost $1.5 billion. Some $50 million each was spent at the Democratic and Republican conventions on security. There has been no public statement about the security bill for the World Series, but it’s reasonable to assume it will be impressive…
Outside View: Fixing intelligence
A joint congressional intelligence inquiry has concluded that 9/11 could have been prevented if our nation’s intelligence agencies shared information better and coordinated more effectively. This is both a trite platitude and a profound proscription.
Intelligence is easy to understand after the fact. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to draw lines from people in flight school here, to secret meetings in foreign countries there, over to interesting tips from informants, and maybe to INS records. Connecting the dots is child’s play.
Doing it before the fact is another matter entirely and, before 9/11, it wasn’t so easy. There’s a world of difference between intelligence data and intelligence information. Some data did, before the fact, point to 9/11, but it was buried in an enormous amount of irrelevant data leading to blind alleys, false conclusions, and innocent people…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.