When he was hired by the DIA, he told me recently, his mind boggled at the futuristic, secret spy technology he would get to play with ... If the everyday Internet was so awesome, just imagine how much better the spy tools would be.

But when he got to his cubicle, his high-tech dreams collapsed. "The reality," he later wrote ruefully, "was a colossal letdown."

In this essay for the NYT Sunday magazine, Clive Thompson refers to the white paper by Calvin Andrus, The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community, which was recommended here back in July. (Also at CSI. Slides here.)

Following the threads from this article ...

Next up: the ouster of neocon Zalmay Khalilzad, the manipulative pro-consul in Baghdad, and his replacement by Ryan Crocker, a long-time Arabist who recently served as U.S. ambassador to Syria.

Thomas Fingar [2] "manages the production of the President's Daily Brief." He's an SES and an old China hand. He spoke in August, giving a talk entitled Intelink and Beyond: Dare to Share.

"I think in the future you'll press a button and this will be the NIE," said Michael Wertheimer, assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analysis.

In 2004 Wertheimer wrote in the Washington Post:

To succeed we must demand far less near-term intelligence product from the Signals Intelligence community, give it control of its resources and allow it to plan for a disruptive future, a future that is presaged by videos that show an Afghan warlord exhorting his terrorist followers not to use satellite phones for fear of American capture.

He spoke recently at InfoTech 2006; his presentation, Technology Transformation for Analysis: Year One Report, isn't really online, but others at the conference are here.

According to Michael Wertheimer, who held the most senior technical position at the N.S.A. at the time and was part of a team that Baginski had asked to assess sigint capabilities, there were employees in the field who were still focussing on ancient technologies, such as what was called “manual Morse code”—people speaking dots and dashes out loud. “About seventy per cent of our resources were going toward traditional industrial-age stuff”—put up an antenna, aim it at the sky, and vacuum up everything you could, Wertheimer said—in inverse proportion to where his team had concluded that important information would be found. “I wanted them to stop the vacuum cleaner, to get at the secrets worth knowing,” Baginski said. “You just wind up drowning in data, and you’re not necessarily any smarter.” She called it “hunt, not gather,” a phrase that later became associated with everything she tried to change.

Juan Cole, featured in this article, comments on the leaked Rumsfeld memo:

Rumsfeld doesn't understand the magnitude of the crisis ... Rumsfeld spends more time plotting out how to manipulate the American public than how to win the war.

It is about how we talk, how we are perceived to set goals, what is made to look like progress. It isn't actually about getting progress.

I highly recommend the Everyman Library edition of Joan Didion's collected nonfiction.

Cole does not think much of Brecher's bribery idea:

I mean, bribing people to be your puppets is bad enough, but citing Saddam's policies as an example for how Iraq should be run is absolutely outrageous.

A recent interview with Zalmai Azmi, CIO at the FBI. There is not much on offer; he says all the right words, but it comes off as a performance, rather than genuine consideration. Here's another. (He does a lot of these, the apparent purpose being to say, The FBI is Thinking About the Issues.) Here's a typical insight:

That's why we largely stay away from bleeding-edge technologies and stick with cutting-edge, because we don't have the money to risk nor the luxury of a do-over.

Azmi's official bio describes him as an enterprise architect, previously for the Executive Office for the United States Attorneys.

LA Times on Intellipedia

"It moves us away from homogenized intelligence."

Matthew Burton, in a 2005 issue of Studies in Intelligence, talks about his colossal letdown. (Also online here.)

Q&A: U.S. Northern Command's CIO calls Unix 'the Betamax of software'

From John Negroponte, recently:

Imagery Way Ahead is designed to develop a suite of capabilities that is, among other things, comprehensive, survivable, persistent, timely, adaptable, innovative, credible and integrated, Negroponte said.

The DNI exercises long-term influence on Defense intelligence activities via budgetary and personnel authorities. In the first major programmatic decision, the DNI resolved the long-standing impasse over the risk associated with acquisition strategies to meet future overhead imagery requirements (the "Imagery Way Ahead"), which was enacted as part of the Fiscal Year (FY) 2006 Defense Appropriations Bill. In addition, the DNI realigned measurement and signature intelligence (MASINT) responsibilities in the IC and appointed a MASINT Community Executive in July 2005 to improve management of MASINT resources and use of the data they provide. The DNI has also acquisition oversight authorities related to the acquisition of major systems and has already exercised those authorities in several joint milestone decisions with the Secretary of Defense.

Here's an expired related job posting:

Northrop Grumman Corporation IT/TASC Support Division is seeking an analyst to provide senior-level policy, staff and technical support to the Office of the Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Collections (DDNI/C) on major MASINT issues affecting the Intelligence Community. Support in particular the new MASINT Community Executive as the MASINT is coordinated at the Community level. Support the transformation and evolution of the Office of the DNI. The incumbent will monitor a range of cross-Community intelligence issues; conduct studies and other investigations into Community issues; prepare papers, memos, briefings, and talking points; provide substantive and technical advice on intelligence collection issues such as architecture, integration, Community processes, collection platforms, subdiscipline matters, management, organizational development, budget, and Community policy.

Open-Source Spying