The Blog of Harald

According to an article in Forbes, Why Spy? by John Perry Barlow, co-founder of The Electronic Frontier Foundation:

For more than a year now, there has been a deluge of stories and op-ed pieces about the failure of the American intelligence community to detect or prevent the September 11, 2001, massacre.

[…]

the American intelligence system is broken beyond repair, self-protective beyond reform, and permanently fixated on a world that no longer exists.

The article is a good read, if long; lots of juicy tidbits about the politics surrounding American intelligence and security; it’s only as disfunctional as the rest of the American government :-).

But there’s an alternative! Invoke the techniques of the Open Source Software movement, and you get something that (for example) looks like the
Open Source Intelligence Initiative:

assembled from what is publicly available, in media, public documents, the Net, wherever. It’s a given that such materials — and the technological tools for analyzing them — are growing exponentially these days.

I’ve always wanted to be an intelligence operative; here’s my chance!

Thanks, as always, to Spin of the Day for the reference.