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The iBigot List

Teri O’Brien at The American Thinker considers the impact that Apple-like compartmentalization would have on . . . well . . . the IC:

So, I think [DNI Negroponte] should resign, and President Bush should give [his] gig to Apple CEO Steve Jobs. To understand why, check out the article in this morning’s Wall Street Journal “At Apple, Secrecy Complicates Life, But Maintains Buzz.”

“While many tech companies assign internal code names to products, Apple goes a step further. It often gives different departments dissimilar code names for the same product, current and former employees say. If a code name leaks, Apple can more easily track down the department from which the leak originated.

Apple managers carefully track who knows what about secret projects, maintaining “disclosure lists” of those who have been briefed, according to the former and current employees. When employees receive documents containing sensitive information about unannounced products, the documents are often watermarked with the recipient’s name, a practice meant to discourage carelessness.”

It’s good old-fashioned CI practice, but gums up the works from a broader intel perspective. Put up too many barriers and it becomes impossible to effectively understand a given problem. I think we’ve had enough of that, thank you very much. It also does little to stop purely partisan leaking at the highest levels (the name McCarthy ring any bells?) because by design such individuals get access to all the eggs in the basket. I’m sure there are technical solutions that would permit widespread sharing yet also allow for granular tracking, but given the generally dismal success rate of even simple IT projects in this domain, I wouldn’t get my hopes up.

Ever Forward

Charlie is on the job:

Years without an intelligence strategy to secure U.S. borders resulted in uncoordinated and sometimes incomplete threat information about immigrants, a top counterterrorism official said Wednesday.

Only over the past year has the Bush administration begun to develop plans to analyze border security gaps with information gleaned from all the intelligence agencies, the official told a House committee.

“When I came in, we did not have an intelligence campaign plan against the border,” said Charles Allen, who joined the Homeland Security Department last fall as its intelligence chief. “I agree with you that we should have done more earlier, but we are now at this vigorously.”

That light at the end of the tunnel just got a little brighter.

Discarding an Important Tool

Given a chance to cut back on future leaks, the Senate balks:

The U.S. Senate has refused to protect whistleblowers in intelligence agencies.

The Senate last week passed a markedly different version of whistleblower protection legislation than the U.S. House of Representatives had previously approved, resulting in a call by one congressman for the creation of an independent office to monitor intelligence agency whistleblowers, GovExec.com reported Monday.

On a 96-0 vote, the Senate on Thursday passed a bill listed as S. 494 that would provide expanded protection to most federal whistleblowers, but would not cover employees at several intelligence agencies. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairwoman Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, co-sponsored the legislation.

You’ll never stop partisan leakers, but there are legitimate blue-badged whistleblowers that need this kind of help. Few have the intestinal fortitude to go all the way, but they should have the option.

Intelligence Reporting: Is “Good Enough” Good Enough?

To say that I am on the anti-secrets-publication bandwagon would be something of an understatement, but while listening to various editors and reporters on the radio talking about the rightness or wrongness of revealing classified material during a time of war (which is a debatable point in some circles), a couple of questions occurred to me:

• How many reporters on the national security beat have a hands-on background in the field?

• How long have they been working these issues?

• If I or one of my former colleagues decided to joint the ranks of newspaper journalists, would we publish the same stories?

• What would make us hold off on a story; what would make us push for publication?

• What would practitioners consider good (read: safe) reporting on the national security beat?

So I Googled a bit and talked to few friends and came up with the following:

I found bios of varying levels of detail on about ten-odd national security / intelligence beat reporters for major newspapers and wire services (this is no scientific study by any means and if time allows I’ll try to enhance a bit). Three were military veterans and two had experience of some kind in the intelligence field. Everyone covering the beat had at least a decade of experience in the field. There are a few fields of endeavor in which I believe that authentic credentials can only be gained by being-there and doing-that, and intelligence is one of them. Reporters can read about how it is done and they are briefed by gov’t sources, but by and large on this beat the number of reporters who know what real-live intelligence work involves are nominal. I know Arkin was an analyst and Pincus was in CI (though whether that was as an agent I don’t know). Everyone else is essentially an “expert” in the field thanks to book learnin’, which is not completely useless, but it is incomplete.

All of my former colleagues who currently or previously worked in the intelligence field said that they would only consider publishing stories like the NSA surveillance program and the SWIFT program after evaluating both the potential harm and potential good that might come from publication. No one was prepared to put anyone in danger, but by the same token no one was willing to serve as a rah-rah mouthpiece for anyone’s DNI or National Security Adviser. No one was prepared to publish technical details about ongoing operations or discuss current capabilities that were in use, but compiling such data for a larger historical work (read: book) was considered kosher. Would a former practitioner eventually publish the NSA and SWIFT stories? Yes.

What do people in the field think would be suitable for your morning fish-wrapper? A random sampling of headlines from the recent past serve as examples:

• Goss Vows to Rebuild, Expand CIA (Priest, 2004)
• Hussein’s Aims, Capabilities Often Differed (Priest, 2004)
• 3 Iran-Contra Theories Await Inquiries by Counsel, Panels (Pincus, 1986)
• Senators Seek Better Defense Imagery (Pincus, 2006)
• Bush’s Intelligence Moves Don’t Attain Scope Urged by 9/11 Panel (Pincus, 2004)
• Nominee Says NSA Stayed Within Law on Wiretaps (Lichtblau, 2006)
• Extension of Patriot Act Faces Threat of Filibuster (Lichtblau, 2005)
• Pentagon Office in Spying Case Was Focus of Iran Debate (Risen, 2004)
• ’85 Hijacker Is Captured in Baghdad (Risen, 2003)

Basically, any sufficiently motivated intelligence officer who wanted to become a reporter would be able to do a serviceable job and provide adequate coverage of the pertinent issues, but they most certainly would not win any major journalism prizes. The flip side of that coin is that the people doing the job currently are doing a decent job; when they are not doing the one thing that people who truly understand the nature of the work and the impact of their actions would never do.

For a more personal take on the issue from someone who knows both sides of the coin very well, read Dan Verton’s editorial from earlier this year.

Various posts on the publish-and-perish discussion at NRO (Andrew McCarthy) (Rich Lowry), Heather MacDonald at the Weekly Standard, Captain’s Quarters, Hugh Hewitt, LGF, Roger Simon, Powerline . . .

Haste Makes Waste

Nearly five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security continue to clash over who is in charge of coordinating and vetting information on terrorism. As a result, state and local authorities continue to get conflicting or incomplete information - sometimes none at all - on threats inside the United States, officials say.

The feud over control of the information caused federal agencies last week to miss a White House deadline for outlining how it should be distributed to state and local authorities, intelligence and counterterrorism officials said yesterday.

Sloppy legislation in a rush to show progress. Fair enough, people wanted quick action. The bigger issue: none of these jack-holes can get past the fact that the intention was to make things better, not upset rice bowls. Lessons to be learned:

• The Intel war as two fronts; your “neighbor” across town takes the first magazine, while the actual enemy is engaged much later in the battle. The slightest edge that can be gained by pointing to written authorities means more money, people and other resources. That you might be the wrong agency to take the lead matters not one bit. Success in an internal political fight is easy; success against terrorists is hard. Guess which battles get you to the 7^th floor faster?

• The utility of any given piece of information wanes with time. The agency that hordes a given piece of information may be the last place that could make the most use of it. The longer such battles go on the more useless any piece of information from the Federal level becomes. States would do well to network and improve their own sharing efforts at their level and below. With a more comprehensive picture across a broad spectrum they will be able to divine golden nuggets. Beats waiting for a Federal stage coach to deliver one.

So Much Data . . .

. . . so little privacy:

Almost every piece of personal information that Americans try to keep secret — including bank account statements, e-mail messages and telephone records — is semi-public and available for sale.

That was the lesson Congress learned over the last week during a series of hearings aimed at exposing peddlers of personal data, from whom banks, car dealers, jealous lovers and even some law enforcement officers have covertly purchased information to use as they wish.

Remember that the next time someone rails about how Uncle Sam is the bad guy and how violated they feel.

When to Publish

You will probably only find it in a second-hand bookstore (I found mine in Ottawa), or you can wait a month and maybe Amazon will be able to find a paperback version for you, but a great book on a fantastic intelligence success is The Double-Cross System by Sir J.C. Masterman. The short version: British intel caught and turned every Nazi spy the Third Reich sent into the country during WW II. If you have trouble with dates WW II ended in 1945; Double-Cross was published in 1972.

WMD: Moving at the speed of government (Running Updates)

Pesky details courtesy of Captain’s Quarters:

I think that we have known of a handful of recovered chemical-weapons shells, but not 500. That number has more significance. An artillery company could have laid down a very effective attack on an enemy position, quickly killing or disabling them in a manner outlawed for decades. Of course, that had been the entire point of the UN Security Council resolutions — to strip Saddam of that capability — and he obviously retained it, and lied about it.

Link to DNI memo at Captain Ed’s here.

The good captain and others have raised the question: “why now?” It would be foolish to discount politics, but a casual glance at the memo and accompanying fax suggests to me that the NGIC assessment was only recently completed (“recent” being a relative term but if I had to guess within the last three months, give or take). Author(s) were probably done earlier, but there is editing, coordination, more editing, more coordination, agenda-fitting alterations, etc. It’s very complicated.

500 shells isn’t why we went into Iraq, though it is a nice appetizer. Throw in the currently translated DOCEX cachet and more left to come, unanswered questions from people who were on the ground, (and a little insider knowledge) and you begin to wonder just how many indications one needs to call that quacking, webbed-footed, feathered creature walking down the sidewalk a duck . . .

Related posts at The Corner here and here.

PS: Way to go Col. C. Long way from HI, eh?

Update I: Listening to Sen. Santorum on the radio talking about how he had to hunt this thing down and pester NGIC and DNI to declass for over two months (so my estimate wasn’t that far off). WTF IMI. And people thought I was nuts when I said no one in the IC cared why we went to war after we went to war. He’s not even on an intel committee! Hello, oversight!!!

Update II: Additional input from Powerline.

Update III: Spook86 at In From the Cold includes some important background and confirms my suspicions about timeline, agendas, etc.

Update IV: Pointing to the Dulfer report as “evidence” that the disclosure yesterday isn’t all that is kind of a weak defense of your position, but if certain quarters want to go that route that’s fine. There are a lot of IC agencies that would love to fill their open billets with that kind of brainpower.

See, when you find large stores of WMD after the “comprehensive” report is issued (from 2003-till recently) it doesn’t prove the discoveries false, it suggests that – as Fezzik says to Vizzini in The Princess Bride– “comprehensive” doesn’t mean what you think it means.

We can do this (clap, clap) if we try (clap, clap) we can do this, if we try v-i-c-t-o-r-y

Update V: They are very smart fellows at the Strategy Page, but I don’t particularly buy the arguments posed here because there are so many ways to address them. Regardless, they deserve your attention.

Please, Stop with the “Privacy” Arguments

First, in light of recent events and because I am a good steward of the virtual planet, allow me to recycle this post as well as this one.

Second, and at the risk of beating a dead horse, could we please stop with rating from privacy advocates about how government investigation into large pools of data is a violation of privacy? To coin a phrase, there is no privacy, get over it. To be more specific: there is no meaningful data protection law. SB 1386 in California (and the imitations in a dozen+ other states) makes people feel good, but it isn’t proactive nor is it particularly fool-proof. Proposed federal legislation in this area would be even weaker that state laws from a “privacy” perspective because the loopholes are big enough to drive a DHL truck full of missing bank record tapes through.

We don’t have “privacy” laws we have “recovery from careless practices” laws. Real privacy laws would have helped prevent your personal data from ever being in a position to be compromised from careless federal employees or criminal syndicates. As it is all that data is just that – data - and it is treated as such. A whole industry – a very lucrative one – has built up around the rapid and smooth collection, processing and delivery of personal data. You would not be able to lead the life that you do were it not for the fact that the 1s and 0s that make up your virtual life could not effortlessly flow through the information systems of both public and private enterprises. We are as likely to get true and meaningful data privacy law as we are congressional term limits.

The presence of real data privacy laws would have made data mining programs like those being carried out by NSA and CIA/Treasury very difficult. From a life, liberty and happiness perspective, I’m fairly glad we don’t have such laws.

Sometimes the Panda needs more than a hug

A former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst has pleaded guilty to illegally holding classified documents and admitted in a plea agreement to passing “top secret” information to Chinese intelligence officials.

Ronald N. Montaperto, the former analyst who held a security clearance as a China specialist at a U.S. Pacific Command research center until 2004, pleaded guilty to one count of unlawful retention of national defense information […]

According to U.S. intelligence officials, Montaperto was among a number of U.S. intelligence officials who came under suspicion of being informants following the defection of a Chinese intelligence official in the late 1980s. The defector revealed that Beijing had successfully developed five to 10 clandestine sources of information here.

Montaperto also was part of an influential group of pro-China academics and officials in the U.S. policy and intelligence community who share similar benign views of China. The group, dubbed the Red Team by critics, harshly criticizes anyone who raises questions about the threat posed by Beijing’s communist regime.

Gee, I wonder why that would be?

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