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In the latest edition of Foreign Affairs, former National Intelligence Officer for the Near East Paul Pillar reaches into his bottomless bag of excuses for why the IC – in particular the CIA – is blameless for 9/11 and pretty much everything else:
Can’t get everyone you need in the room, rushing something less-than-optimal out the door, the data points supporting a sea change in how this business should be done keep piling up.
National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs), are supposed to be a collaborative effort of every agency (in reality, every agency with a dog in that particular fight). Whether you value the findings in recently declassified NIEs or not, most of us have a pretty good idea of what any sort of product produced by committee is like. There is a saying about enjoying sausage and avoiding knowing how it is actually made that applies.
I appreciate the advice everyone gave, but in light of this recent news (thanks John), the apparent lack of interest by dead-tree outlets, and my general impatient disposition, I’ve opted to eat my own dog food. Abstract below the fold.
For the sake of readability (columns, fonts, borders), if you are going to print it out, download from here; if you’re going to read it online, download from here.
Juan Cole make some good points, steps in some well-worn potholes. More at ThreatsWatch.
Talking about plans for this future has been going on for years. Nice to see the dialog has not stopped. Next step: re-arranging deck chairs …
Punishment for an intelligence officer if they tried to pull something like this; at least unemployment, probably a fine and possibly jail. Punishment if your ex- or neighbor does it: zip.
The subtitle of the story is: “From government to big business, if you have a dirty secret, Wikileaks is your nightmare.”
The question is: Beyond the “I just don’t like secrets” argument, absent a serious, robust mechanism for investigation and prosecution, of what use is such an effort?
Any more and pretty soon you’re talking real money …
I promised Zen a more thorough response, so here goes …
Our inability to recruit people with the right skills and employ our HUMINT capabilities in a particular manner has been addressed before – with more colorful language – here and other places. The point is clear: to kill fleas you have to lay down with dogs.
Police think the graduate student who shot and killed five students last week at Northern Illinois University took steps to thwart investigators trying to figure out why he did it.
In addition to removing the hard drive from his laptop computer, Steven Kazmierczak also removed the SIM card - a key computer chip - from his cell phone, a police source said.
If you toil in Bolling you are familiar with the halls/walls/offices built out of file cabinets. Cabinets that few have ever seen opened in years, if at all. So it is with both caution and dread that I point out how an organization really interested in building a physical environment where people can concentrate and think (and yes, collaborate) puts their money where their rhetoric is.
As the Kent’s Krew points out:
We think there are lessons in these designs which can be distilled for the new IC. We are certain that given the option, many of the best and brightest would vote with their feet in favour of such environments - should they ever become available in an enlightened organization.
A consultant you probably should not be writing checks to:
Some opponents of the directive, which include several former Office of Management and Budget officials, say that National Security Presidential Directive 54/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23 authorizing intelligence monitoring of all federal agency network will create a new set of information technology security problems and raise privacy and civil liberties concerns that had been avoided until now.
Continue reading "The Intelligence-Security Disconnect: Wider the Higher You Go " »
It’s funny how popular you can get these days by screaming “political interference.” Contrast the experiences of two different intelligence officers: one spent two years in a junior position at one agency and was perpetually oppressed by partisans that ran the show; the other (yours truly) spent nearly 20 years at different agencies and grades and has no idea what the political disposition of either his colleagues or his superiors were. One has a book deal and the other, oddly enough, does not.
More data points piling up on federal service woes and the growing sense that, for as cool as some of the work can be, life in the .gov swamp is a prospect of diminishing returns:
One of the analysts working with the [NYPD] Intelligence Division, who asked to be identified only as Anthony, was born and raised in Little Italy and left a job with a major consulting firm in the Washington area to return to New York City.
From West Point to the Pentagon
Leavenworth and back down
Seven years after the launch of Wikipedia – the user-edited online encyclopedia that brought the “open source” concept to the masses - the U.S. Army is still playing catch-up. The Army’s idea of harnessing the ‘net is to launch isolated websites, put generals in charge and lock everything behind passwords, while banning popular open-source civilian websites.
[…]
Galvin advises patience. “Our leaders are getting comfortable working in that [collaborative] environment,” he says. And that means Army wikis aren’t far off. But even if they arrived tomorrow, they’d still be seven years late.
Questions about the unfortunate circumstances of this woman:
1. Is there no one at the office who will teach her how to shoot? (update: there is, never mind)
2. Steve Emerson has a target on his head, how does he afford to move around?
3. Ditto Salman Rushdie (maybe Emory is a gun-free zone?)
I don’t doubt people want to kill her, but why are taxpayers being asked to foot the bill?
Alternatives beyond working remotely and living where they allow you to carry?
U.S. officials say the Pentagon is planning to shoot down a broken spy satellite expected to hit the Earth in early March.
The Associated Press has learned that the option preferred by the Bush administration will be to fire a missile from a U.S. Navy cruiser, and shoot down the satellite before it enters Earth’s atmosphere.
In response to what though, I wonder … ?
Lawrence Wright’s article on DNI McConnell in the New Yorker has so far been a great read, but I get so annoyed at lines like this:
Unfortunately, intelligence officials have a poor record of safeguarding civil liberties within the country, nor do Americans have any obvious recourse if they learn that they have been spied upon.
… if we’re all just a bunch of automatons picking randoms spots on a map to blow the crap out of because that’s how spooks get their jollies:
“I found myself standing at that crater, talking to a man about how his family was destroyed, how children were killed, and there was this bunny-rabbit toy covered in dust nearby, and it tore me in two,” Garlasco said. “I had been a part of it, so it was a lot harder than I thought it would be. It really dawned on me that these aren’t just nameless, faceless targets. This is a place where people are going to feel ramifications for a long time.”
Having actually seen the impact of war machines before I got into the business of helping direct them, I came to this epiphany in reverse order. Nevertheless …
Lots of people don’t like Marc (who worked down the hall from me) for various reasons. He’s an easy target so I don’t give that lot much credence. He’s a valuable asset that our Uncle lost and HRW gained:
Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles J. Dunlap Jr., the service’s deputy judge advocate general and an advocate of air power, said Garlasco’s background has helped him build relationships in the military.
“I think that Marc is the prototype of what many nongovernmental organizations are seeking — that is people with real expertise,” Dunlap said. “I have not always agreed with Marc, but I have never found him to be driven by an ideological agenda.”
Facing a rapidly growing backlog of immigration cases, the Bush administration will grant permanent residency to tens of thousands of legal U.S. immigrants without first completing required background checks against the FBI’s investigative files.
What could go wrong?
One, it would be so absurd that it would run the risk of being misfiled under “fiction.”
I mean, check this out:
There is a reason why the Russian space shuttle looks so much like ours.
There is a reason why Chinese space launch vehicles look so much like ours.
1979 people …
Nothing I’ve not railed about before. Just keep this in mind the next time someone tries to pimp you a line about benign growth.
Cool for marketers, verboten for our Uncle.
Who is more likely to hold on to all the data?
Who is more likely to lose it?
… KMT, they all look alike to me.
I recently asked - not rhetorically - why the Pentagon was apparently purging the one guy who actually seemed to put some thought into what radical Islamists were saying.
Continue reading "How to Lose the War, Ideas and Otherwise" »
Not that Miranda is completely correct; not that the Staties are entirely without sin, but reading the Departure Assessment of Embassy of Baghdad memo, I heard a familiar set of tunes:
Since they are kind enough to let me post there, I feel obliged to play tag once again. This time I will keep with what I think is the spirit of the game and pick the closest book I am actually using/reading and post accordingly. You see, when I last played and grabbed the actual physically closest book (due to random chance since I was re-organizing my office) I was accused of being a poseur.
So, here you go:
The second entry is for swap space, and the third entry is for only the sectors in the DOS partition. Entries 4, 5, and 6 are FFS file system partitions. To summarize, the device name and location of each partition that a FreeBSD user would have to access to is given in Table 6.7
File System Forensic Analysis, Brian Carrier
… Just as I suspected:
Nabila Mango, a therapist and a U.S. citizen who has lived in the country since 1965, had just flown in from Jordan last December when, she said, she was detained at customs and her cellphone was taken from her purse. Her daughter, waiting outside San Francisco International Airport, tried repeatedly to call her during the hour and a half she was questioned. But after her phone was returned, Mango saw that records of her daughter’s calls had been erased.
A few months earlier in the same airport, a tech engineer returning from a business trip to London objected when a federal agent asked him to type his password into his laptop computer. “This laptop doesn’t belong to me,” he remembers protesting. “It belongs to my company.” Eventually, he agreed to log on and stood by as the officer copied the Web sites he had visited, said the engineer, a U.S. citizen who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of calling attention to himself.
Wait, it gets better:
Check out Noah’s choice of graphics before telling family members about new Danger Room posts. ;-)
I was called a philistine and worse for suggesting that virtual worlds like Second Life were anything but digital paradises where people were able to free themselves of pesky meat-space hindrances to inter-personal joy like their middling looks or inadequate personality. Today brings with it a small bit of vindication:
On a positive note, the DNI set aside the usual bag of suspects and picked a new HLS director who actually understands the myriad problems facing the system.
… blackmail.
And someone explain how this makes any sense:
You can prove a computer has been compromised (hacked). However, it is virtually impossible to say definitively that a computer has not been hacked. Our ability to defend against this type of assault on individuals in the political, academic, business or industrial spotlight is very limited.
I mean shucks, it’s too bad there is no sound way to help prove someone was the target of a “cyber-assassination attempt.” (I feel dirty just typing the words …)
Next time you see a sexy title like this: save yourself some time and trouble.
Zenpundit at Chicago Boyz, hosting the Osinga Roundtable. First critical (and critical) review from Wilf Owen of Asian Military Review. Closing ‘graph:
