There is a lengthy but fascinating article in this week's New York Times Magazine that examines the inherent tension in a system that requires both secrecy and efficiency. An efficient system tends to be open, transparent, and collaborative, whereas a secret one is, well, none of those.
Imagine for a moment that you work for a massive company whose intranet denies you access to Google (and all other major search engines), has no system for instant messaging (or other real-time conversation programs), frowns upon work-related blogs, and bans any kind of wiki knowledge-management. You'd be selling short your own company's stock while frantically sending out resumes, right? Unfortunately, the intelligence community is basically that company, with all of those issues largely due to a combination of secrecy concerns and a slow-moving bureaucracy.
As you can imagine, this situation infuriates anyone -- whether young or old -- who understands the power of the internets. I would argue that it's virtually always worse for intelligence elements to remain unconnected, with the exception, perhaps, of operational information, and nearly every study and group indicated that the lack of interconnectivity in intelligence was one of the reasons for the failures surrounding 9/11. The article explains the root of some of these shortcomings, but it does make one significant error -- the issues are described in the past tense. To the best of my knowledge, nearly all these difficulties continue.
The piece describes a tech-savvy analyst who joined the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2003, saying:
When he was hired by the DIA, 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 collosal letdown." The spy agencies were saddled with technology that might have seemed cutting edge in 1995.Connecting the dots requires good technology along with good information. The article indicates that the agencies are beginning to embrace technology, but at least as of this past spring, progress was minimal. The FBI's problems with their tech systems are infamous, and most agencies don't have adequate internal applications, let alone ones that are inter-agency.
Hopefully the piece signals a huge effort towards improvement, and it's hard for me to imagine the government allowing the quoted individuals to go on the record unless there was an effort to fix these issues. Either way, technological advancement and innovation should be at the top of the priority list for intelligence agencies, and Congressional oversight and remedies are sorely needed.
