Saturday, May 15, 2004
Reforming America's Intelligence Services
Friday's paper brought an excellent Op-Ed by Christopher Whitcomb on the problems of our intelligence agencies and how to reform them. Whitcomb has worked in the business both at the desk and in the field and brings this experience to his analysis. The main problem as he sees it is the myriad of agencies and divisions responsible for intelligence, each with a different mission. Unfortunately, his solution, making the CIA into an agency actually able to combine all the others into an integrated whole "with one mission", strikes me as likely to end up both more dangerous to our society and more inflexible than the patchwork that exists today.
However, one of his examples suggests a possible avenue for improving the system significantly. He offers this example of a key problem:
"Let's say a C.I.A. asset in Syria attends a meeting in which terrorists talk about plans to detonate a dirty bomb in a mall in Iowa. Common sense might dictate that the case officer immediately pass this information on to the local police or the F.B.I. — but that could never happen."
He then goes on to describe the many impediments. Police officers lack security clearances. Their actions might compromise the sources and methods of the CIA. Moreover, other agencies would want the information first, including the Department of Energy, the State department and FEMA, etc., etc. Simply deciding who gets access to this information could take hours. "Need to know" parameters would need to be established and so on.
The example is chilling. Yet it suggests that the key problem here is not so much the lack of a superagency as the lack of a reliable system for channeling urgent information. It should possible to develop a computer-assisted methodology for almost instantaneously channeling any urgent information of this sort to first providers, such as the Iowa police. The information could be automatically and almost instantaneously cleansed of what they do not need to know, such as where it came from, the agency doing the providing etc. Initially, they need only to know the specificity as to time and place that is available, the magnitude and nature of the danger, and the degree of confidence the system has in the information. The rules requiring putting information into this rapid response system should be spelled out for all possible participants, including ordinary citizens using 911.
Friday's paper brought an excellent Op-Ed by Christopher Whitcomb on the problems of our intelligence agencies and how to reform them. Whitcomb has worked in the business both at the desk and in the field and brings this experience to his analysis. The main problem as he sees it is the myriad of agencies and divisions responsible for intelligence, each with a different mission. Unfortunately, his solution, making the CIA into an agency actually able to combine all the others into an integrated whole "with one mission", strikes me as likely to end up both more dangerous to our society and more inflexible than the patchwork that exists today.
However, one of his examples suggests a possible avenue for improving the system significantly. He offers this example of a key problem:
"Let's say a C.I.A. asset in Syria attends a meeting in which terrorists talk about plans to detonate a dirty bomb in a mall in Iowa. Common sense might dictate that the case officer immediately pass this information on to the local police or the F.B.I. — but that could never happen."
He then goes on to describe the many impediments. Police officers lack security clearances. Their actions might compromise the sources and methods of the CIA. Moreover, other agencies would want the information first, including the Department of Energy, the State department and FEMA, etc., etc. Simply deciding who gets access to this information could take hours. "Need to know" parameters would need to be established and so on.
The example is chilling. Yet it suggests that the key problem here is not so much the lack of a superagency as the lack of a reliable system for channeling urgent information. It should possible to develop a computer-assisted methodology for almost instantaneously channeling any urgent information of this sort to first providers, such as the Iowa police. The information could be automatically and almost instantaneously cleansed of what they do not need to know, such as where it came from, the agency doing the providing etc. Initially, they need only to know the specificity as to time and place that is available, the magnitude and nature of the danger, and the degree of confidence the system has in the information. The rules requiring putting information into this rapid response system should be spelled out for all possible participants, including ordinary citizens using 911.
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