Entries Tagged "intelligence"
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The Washington Post on the U.S. Intelligence Industry
The Washington Post has published a phenomenal piece of investigative journalism: a long, detailed, and very interesting expose on the U.S. intelligence industry (overall website; parts 1, 2, and 3; blog; Washington reactions; top 10 revelations; many many many blog comments and reactions; and so on).
It’s a truly excellent piece of investigative journalism. Pity people don’t care much about investigative journalism—or facts in politics, really—anymore.
EDITED TO ADD (7/25): More commentary.
EDITED TO ADD (7/26): Jay Rosen writes:
Last week, it was the Washington Post’s big series, Top Secret America, two years in the making. It reported on the massive security shadowland that has arisen since 09/11. The Post basically showed that there is no accountability, no knowledge at the center of what the system as a whole is doing, and too much “product” to make intelligent use of. We’re wasting billions upon billions of dollars on an intelligence system that does not work. It’s an explosive finding but the explosive reactions haven’t followed, not because the series didn’t do its job, but rather: the job of fixing what is broken would break the system responsible for such fixes.
The mental model on which most investigative journalism is based states that explosive revelations lead to public outcry; elites get the message and reform the system. But what if elites believe that reform is impossible because the problems are too big, the sacrifices too great, the public too distractible? What if cognitive dissonance has been insufficiently accounted for in our theories of how great journalism works…and often fails to work?
EDITED TO ADD (7/27): More.
Russian Intelligence Gets Source Code to Windows 7
I don’t think this is a good idea.
The Toronto 18
Long and interesting article from The Toronto Star on the Toronto 18, a terrorist cell arrested in 2006. Lots of stuff in this article I had not read before.
How to Spot a CIA Officer
How to spot a CIA officer, at least in the mid-1970s.
The reason the CIA office was located in the embassy—as it is in most of the other countries in the world—is that by presidential order the State Department is responsible for hiding and housing the CIA. Like the intelligence services of most other countries, the CIA has been unwilling to set up foreign offices under its own name. So American embassies—and, less frequently. military bases—provide the needed cover. State confers respectability on the Agency’s operatives, dressing them up with the same titles and calling cards that give legitimate diplomats entree into foreign government circles. Protected by diplomatic immunity, the operatives recruit local officials as CIA agents to supply secret intelligence and, especially in the Third World, to help in the Agency’s manipulation of a country’s internal affairs.
Intelligence Can Never Be Perfect
Go read this article—”Setting impossible standards on intelligence”—on laying blame for the intelligence “failure” that allowed the Underwear Bomber to board an airplane on Christmas Day.
Although the CIA, FBI, and Defense, State, Treasury and Homeland Security departments have counterterrorism analytic units—some even with information-gathering operations—the assumption is that all of the data are passed on to NCTC.
The law, by the way, specifically says that the NCTC director “may not direct the execution of counterterrorism operations.”
The Senate committee’s list identifying “points of failure” shows that not all relevant information from some agencies landed at the NCTC.
Perhaps the leading example was the State Department’s failure to notify the NCTC in its initial reporting that Abdulmutallab—whose father had reported him missing in November and suspected “involvement with Yemeni-based extremists”—had an outstanding U.S. visa.
This initial fact, if contained in State’s first notice to the NCTC, would have raised the importance of his status. Instead, Abdulmutallab became one of hundreds of new names sent to the NCTC that day. The Senate panel blurs this in its report by focusing on State’s failure—as well as NCTC’s—to revoke the visa. Neither the department nor NCTC discovered the visa until it was too late.
Two other agencies also failed to report important relevant information.
[…]
How can the NCTC perform its role, which by law is “to serve as the central and shared knowledge bank on known and suspected terrorists and international terror groups,” if its analysts are unaware that additional intelligence exists at other agencies? The committee’s answer to that, listed as failure 10, was that the “NCTC’s watchlisting office did not conduct additional research to find additional derogatory information to place Abdulmutallab on a watchlist.”
True, NCTC analysts have access to most agency databases. But with hundreds of names arriving each day, which name does the NCTC select to then begin its search of 16 other agency databases? Especially when the expectation is that each agency has searched its own.
I’ve never been impressed with the “dots” that should have been connected regarding Abdulmutallab. On closer examination, they mostly evaporate. Nor do I consider Christmas Day a security failure. Plane lands safely, terrorist captured, no one hurt; what more do people want?
Preventing Terrorist Attacks in Crowded Areas
On the New York Times Room for Debate Blog, I—along with several other people—was asked about how to prevent terrorist attacks in crowded areas. This is my response.
In the wake of Saturday’s failed Times Square car bombing, it’s natural to ask how we can prevent this sort of thing from happening again. The answer is stop focusing on the specifics of what actually happened, and instead think about the threat in general.
Think about the security measures commonly proposed. Cameras won’t help. They don’t prevent terrorist attacks, and their forensic value after the fact is minimal. In the Times Square case, surely there’s enough other evidence—the car’s identification number, the auto body shop the stolen license plates came from, the name of the fertilizer store—to identify the guy. We will almost certainly not need the camera footage. The images released so far, like the images in so many other terrorist attacks, may make for exciting television, but their value to law enforcement officers is limited.
Check points won’t help, either. You can’t check everybody and everything. There are too many people to check, and too many train stations, buses, theaters, department stores and other places where people congregate. Patrolling guards, bomb-sniffing dogs, chemical and biological weapons detectors: they all suffer from similar problems. In general, focusing on specific tactics or defending specific targets doesn’t make sense. They’re inflexible; possibly effective if you guess the plot correctly, but completely ineffective if you don’t. At best, the countermeasures just force the terrorists to make minor changes in their tactic and target.
It’s much smarter to spend our limited counterterrorism resources on measures that don’t focus on the specific. It’s more efficient to spend money on investigating and stopping terrorist attacks before they happen, and responding effectively to any that occur. This approach works because it’s flexible and adaptive; it’s effective regardless of what the bad guys are planning for next time.
After the Christmas Day airplane bombing attempt, I was asked how we can better protect our airplanes from terrorist attacks. I pointed out that the event was a security success—the plane landed safely, nobody was hurt, a terrorist was in custody—and that the next attack would probably have nothing to do with explosive underwear. After the Moscow subway bombing, I wrote that overly specific security countermeasures like subway cameras and sensors were a waste of money.
Now we have a failed car bombing in Times Square. We can’t protect against the next imagined movie-plot threat. Isn’t it time to recognize that the bad guys are flexible and adaptive, and that we need the same quality in our countermeasures?
I know, nothing I haven’t said many times before.
Steven Simon likes cameras, although his arguments are more movie-plot than real. Michael Black, Noah Shachtman, Michael Tarr, and Jeffrey Rosen all write about the limitations of security cameras. Paul Ekman wants more people. And Richard Clarke has a nice essay about how we shouldn’t panic.
Malcolm Gladwell on Spies
Translation: the proper function of spies is to remind those who rely on spies that the kinds of thing found out by spies can’t be trusted.
Nice article on the British Operation Mincemeat in World War II.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.