Opinion: February 2009 Archives

The U.S. Intelligence Communities' internal wiki Intellipedia has gotten glowing press reports and accolades, as well as input from thousands of analysts. However, the wiki still struggles to make a permanent home in the spy agencies, according to one of its evangelists.  READ MORE

OPINION:  This is not unusual, all too often technologies like this are a poor fit and/or hyped and implemented before they are sufficiently mature.

In a recent NY Times editorial Prof. John Arquilla from the Naval Postgraduate School discussed how swarming, smaller-scale terrorist violence appears to be an emerging threat.

The basic concept is that hitting several targets at once, even with just a few fighters at each site, can overwhelms counterterrorist forces that are often manpower-heavy, far away and organized to deal with only one crisis at a time. This approach worked in Mumbai, India, last November, where five two-man teams of Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives held the city hostage for two days, killing 179 people. The Indian security forces, many of which had to be flown in from New Delhi, simply had little ability to strike back at more than one site at a time. READ MORE

The U.S. House of Representatives has passed a bill that seeks to reduce the over-classification of intelligence information and increase the amount that gets shared. "Though hard to believe, sheriffs and police chiefs can't readily access the information they need to prevent or disrupt a potential terrorist attack because those at the federal level resist sharing information," U.S. Representative Jane Harman said. "Over-classification and pseudo-classification -- stamping with any number of sensitive but unclassified markings -- remain rampant." READ MORE

BACKGROUND: The House Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing and Terrorism Risk Assessment had a Hearing: "A Report Card on Homeland Security Information Sharing" in September 2008. Recommend folks read the testimony by John McKay.  He presents a good summary of the "real state" of information sharing programs. MORE

The annual "Report Card" produced by the American Society of Civil Engineers concludes the nation's infrastructure programs still stands at a D average. Deteriorating conditions and inflation have added hundreds of billions to the total cost of repairs and needed upgrades. ASCE's current estimate is $2.2 trillion, up from $1.6 trillion in 2005. READ MORE