Thursday, April 27, 2006

I Always Feel Like...

...somebody’s watching me:
The new Open Source Center (OSC) at CIA headquarters recently stepped up data collection and analysis based on bloggers worldwide and is developing new methods to gauge the reliability of the content, said OSC Director Douglas J. Naquin.

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"I can't get into detail of what, but I'll just say the amount of open source reporting that goes into the president's daily brief has gone up rather significantly," Mr. Jardines said.
I can’t imagine anything from this blog going into the presidential daily briefing, but I can see only good things coming from the CIA or any public official reading blogs. They are open to everyone, including the President.

However, I don’t see what good it would do. When the President receives a briefing entitled “Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.” a month before it happens and the country is still unprepared for 9-11; or, when he receives intelligence from the CIA that says Saddam Hussein didn’t attempt to buy uranium from Niger but he still uses those 16 words in the State of the Union address to convince our country to go to war; or, when the White House situation room receives an email in the morning when Katrina hit (WaPo) anticipating levee breaches but Bush still says a few days later that nobody anticipated levee breaches, it seems that it is not intelligence from the CIA that is lacking. It is intelligence from another source that is in short supply.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

When I read this, I had the exact response you did. If "Bin Laden determined to strike in US" coming from a source with a little more credibility than a blogger didn't affect them, nothing you or I write will.