Issues in Intelligence

A superlative exploration of the challenges faced by the United States intelligence community, by the New York Times (registration required, check www.bugmenot.com for usernames and passwords).

Compartmentalization of information, technical tools that are pitifully behind the state of the art, an inability to recognize the importance of open source information – all of those flaws were ones I recognized in a previous job that touched upon the intelligence world. The proposed solutions – Intelink wikis, blogs, enabling Google-like search prioritization via link counts – sound like valid solutions. The greatest impediment to such improvements is cultural; the security bureaucracy surrounding official U.S. government secrets is moribund, hide-bound, and recalcitrant. They exist to ensure nothing will slip from their control, and the idea of doing so deliberately is more terrifying than words can convey, no matter the benefits such openness would accrue to national security. The article understated this issue with one sentence near the end: For all the complaints about hardware, the challenges are only in part about technology. They are also about political will and institutional culture — and whether the spy agencies can be persuaded to change.

The way to attack that challenge is to replace the series of Executive Orders that underlie secrecy rules with legislation centralizing everything from standards about levels of classification to granting security clearances. The biggest failure of the Intelligence Reform Act was that they didn't address this issue. Perhaps retirement and personnel attrition will begin to change the attitudes of the security bureaucracy, but in over a decade of professional experience, I haven't seen an inch of progress.


[transferred from a now-defunct location]