Homebrewed
June 23, 2006
Consider:
- Seven radical (black) Muslims arrested in Miami
- Mid-2005 Population of black men between 20-39 in US prisons: ~ 500,000 (DOJ BJS)
- In 2004, # Muslim men in just federal facilities ~9,000 (DOJ OIG)
- % of Muslims in federal facilities who declare affiliation with Sunni or Nation of Islam: 85
All elephants are gray, but not all large gray animals are elephants. Either way, something this big regardless of its color has the potential to squash you under foot.
More at Terrorism Unveiled, Captain’s Quarters & Tom J’s (where we find out that infiltration does work)
Journalistic Success (Update)
June 23, 2006
That’s what we can call subsequent terrorist attacks. Don’t I mean intelligence failure? No, because by all accounts intel is doing everything it can to keep us safe without imposing the “papers please” environment fear-mongers would have you believe we are marching towards. By its own admission there is nothing wrong or illegal about the Swift program; there are no debatable points like the NSA intercept program yet exposure of what has been a successful program is for some reason worth rendering useless.
Eisenhower told reporters when D-Day was going to happen. Shocked, they asked him why he did it. His response was something along the lines of, “I know you’re responsible and will do the right thing.” My how things have changed. I don’t think reporters today are any less intrepid than their predecessors (though I don’t believe Ernie Pyle let stringers do his work), but I do firmly believe that they do not believe that we are in as valid, significant and deadly a war as was WW II. That’s why stories like these are going to continue and that is why victory is going to be that much more difficult.
More at Instapundit, Power Line, Michelle Malkin, Mac’s (with addt’l insights).
Update I: Former colleague TN weighs in:
Inadvertently they are making it both harder for the terrorists to operate and easier for us to find them. Hawala use will become even more prevalent, but eventually the accounts have to be balanced and cash has to flow. This means more guys with bulging suitcases and more Green Quest activity. You remember how it works, right? Drive them to use a means that you have more control over.
Andrew McCarthy says it better than most:
The blunt reality here is that there is a war against the war. It is the jihad of privacy fetishists whose self-absorption knows no bounds. Pleas rooted in the well-being of our community hold no sway.
Sooner Rather Than Later
June 22, 2006
The mailbag fills up early today:
When are you neocons going to give up? 500 shells is not a WMD program! They are so old they probably wouldn’t even work! Even your own president doesn’t care!
Dude, easy on the exclamation points . . .
If your reading comprehension skills were up to snuff you’d notice that said just last night that there were not the items we were looking for (not in a Jedi-like way either) though they are indicative of the problem that was Iraq: lying nut dealing with bad guys, holding on to bad things, and trying to gather up more of both. I’m not sure how many files that document the presence of terrorists in Iraq pre-war you need to see, or how many items of WMD we need to find (that the terribly effective and totally thorough UN and ISG said were not there) for you to understand that while things are leaning in “our” favor, the fact of the matter is that we do not fully know what was going on in Iraq. The IDA/JFCOM study is a good start, but there is much, much more data on hand that needs to be addressed. The final chapter has yet to be written.
I AM disturbed about the lack of enthusiasm in the administration about these discoveries, but I also know that still waters run deep. Saddam didn’t get his goodies by rubbing a lamp and asking a Genie for them, and when you’re trying to keep the few sort-of friends you have and are trying to avoid making outright enemies of others, you tend to let things slide. I don’t agree but I understand.
I also understand all too well that there is one thing our Uncle doesn’t like to do and that is publicly acknowledging his shortcomings, and keeping our inability to effectively deal with this material quiet is standard operating procedure. It can be fixed, it isn’t rocket science, but that would require people in charge who actually thought the work was important. Got enough scars from that fight, thank you.
My biggest concern, which I have voiced over at the Standard, is that we’re turning this into a very useful but classified-unclassified history that no one will see for thirty years. There is a lot of material on hand that could be put to good use today. I don’t know about you but I’d rather use this material to solve various Middle East (and European) problems sooner rather than later.
Time to Vote Again
June 21, 2006
. . . on NK launch / no launch / shoot-down options at GroupIntel Forums:
http://groupintel.net/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/9901014161/m/7341046191
Book Review
June 21, 2006
Monograph really. Judge Posner’s Remaking Domestic Intelligence. An excellent treatment of the subject. If it isn’t on Charlie Allen’s bookshelf it should be.
Techies: Pay Attention
June 20, 2006
In a striking departure from the hush-hush culture of intelligence community IT, the CIO’s office for the Director of National Intelligence is running an open online forum about certification and accreditation issues, as well as other technology matters.
It might not seem like it, but this is very, very important. It is probably the most open and engaging effort related to reform I’ve seen (hosting blogs behind OSC firewalls don’t count) and if there is one area that needs a shake-up, it is IC IT. If you are involved in the field and care about related issues at all, get on the blog and start weighing in.
Bravo, General, Bravo.
So Many Lost Opportunities
June 20, 2006
A perfectly good and entirely feasable idea via Bruce Schneier:
There are a variety of encryption technologies that allow you to analyze data without knowing details of the data:
I am reminded of the after-action meeting held after a major cyber threat event about, oh, eight years ago. In one room sat the working-level experts who dealt with the case; nearly all agencies, a wide variety of disciplines. Out of the meeting came a couple dozen solutions to nearly all the problems that continue to plague both public and private security pros. The tech solutions used by places like NSA (not entirely unlike those mentioned in the article) were often cited as ways to deal with issues of privacy . . . good solutions all around.
Why no progress since then? How come you’ve never heard of these solutions?
Why bother publishing an after-action report, which would highlight your amazing shortcomings, when not publishing helps maintain the illusion that your agency is ‘all that’? Publication might prevent your ability to slide into a nice private sector job or maybe a gig in academia. Publication? The saving of billions of dollars and countless man-years of labor? Improved privacy while at the same time allowing for better analysis? No, there will be none of that while some fools are in charge (name withheld to protect those who have no hope of defending themselves).
Mailbag
June 19, 2006
Did you see Bruce’s post this morning? So much for your profiling argument.
Which is what exactly?
Were we to continue the parlor game of listing terrorist attacks and linking them to race or religion I’m fairly confident that there would be more tick marks in the swarthy-ethnic-man column than in the pissed-off-whitey column. In as much as so many things boil down to a numbers game, you’re still better off giving a little extra scrutiny to guys who look Atta-like and leaving old men carrying Medals of Honor alone. I’m behind employing behavioral techniques too because it helps address anomalies, but waving your hand and dismissing any particular methodology is a sure-fire way to end up . . . well, Atta-like.
Going Purple
June 19, 2006
As part of an effort to break down barriers between intelligence agencies, [Intelligence Community] employees will be required to serve tours of duty outside their home offices to qualify for promotion into the government’s senior ranks.
A directive mandating “joint duty” assignments was recently issued by John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence. It is one of a series of steps taken this year by Negroponte to better integrate operations among the 16 federal agencies that make up the intelligence community. […]
The intelligence community, or IC, has always encouraged employees to move between agencies on temporary or rotational assignments, but the practice has not worked well because it lacked structure and uniformity, Sanders said. In particular, he said, the new program will try to address employee concerns that rotational tours put them at risk of being “out of sight, out of mind” when promotion opportunities arise in their home agency.
It would be nice to think that this was some new thing and that the DNI is blazing some kind of trail, but that wouldn’t be true. The fact of the matter is that such a community-wide program has been in existence for some time. The “new” part of this effort is the actual requirement that it be a part of any effort to advance beyond grade 13, which was basically something that agencies paid lip-service to in reality. Pre-joint-ness becoming an ICO basically meant your old office forgot about you for a while, and when you came back they forgot that you had all this new knowledge and new skills. If you hated your job and hated your boss (and the feeling was mutual) going the ICO route was a nice way to get a change of scenery while either hoping that the boss would retire or your new office would find a billet for you. Almost no one who actually wanted to go the ICO route for all the right reasons actually got to go.
Don’t get me wrong: this is a good idea, but like a lot of HR-centric things in the IC the unintended consequences are going to be huge. The reality – separated from the rhetoric – will be exposed fairly quickly.
For want of some OPSEC, a Jihad Lost
June 18, 2006
I predict that US and coalition forces will be out of Iraq much sooner than anyone expects. I base this prediction in part on the intelligence and military aftermath following Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s death; though not necessarily for the same reasons that other commentators have offered up.
Frankly, I think al-Qaida in Iraq is too stupid to succeed in even the mid-term much less survive any “long war.” The broader war against terrorism is still going to take a considerable amount of time, but as far as Iraq goes I’m prepared to bet that this is a one-act show and the curtain is closing.
Why do I say they are too dumb to win? Al-Qaida’s own words and actions reveal the depth and breadth of their knowledge about their primary enemy. They know that they cannot stand toe-to-toe with us in a straight-up fight, so they have to resort to terrorist tactics in order to have any kind of kinetic success. They know that we have reconnaissance satellites, remotely piloted drones and a host of other intelligence gathering methods and mechanisms, so they divide into cells and mingle with the population so as to camouflage their existence and activities.
They are also aware of our efforts to seize and exploit paper documents and computer equipment, yet they insist on producing reams of incriminating paper and gigabytes of damning digital evidence. This from people who can apparently memorize an entire religious tome, often in a language that is not their own. They take the time to devise code words for bombs and weapons that are trivial to decode; strong encryption software that can keep an NSA supercomputer busy for weeks is cheap if not free but apparently they refuse to use it.
This is in part why current and former intelligence officers like me get so upset about unauthorized disclosures to the press about sensitive and on-going intelligence programs. The common refrain from the First-Amendment-now-and-at-all-costs crowd is that terrorists are too smart to use the phone, send email, or conduct some kind of activity that can be picked up by our intelligence services. Yet with every new terrorist captured – golden nuggets compared to the Zarqawi gold mine - we find that they are not all that smart after all; their notebooks and cell phones reveal all their important contacts, their computers expose their deepest thoughts and most sensitive plans.
Some have raised the issue of authenticity. To the best of my knowledge no one in al-Qaida writes fiction for a living, which means that it is unlikely that captured media is not authentic. If you have a global Jihad to run you cannot easily juggle between real documents and those clever fakes designed to fool US intelligence without forgetting which is which. Revelations mined from seized notebooks or computers may not be the whole truth because no one individual may be aware of the big picture, but if you are the man in charge, what you commit to paper or keyboard is likely to be as comprehensive a set of data as can be hand without our developing the ability to read minds.
Operational and technical security can be somewhat onerous, but even a few extra minutes of precaution can mean all the difference in the world. Had Zarqawi bothered to encrypt his laptop and thumb drive we wouldn’t be hearing about 500+ raids and 100+ terrorists killed so quickly after his death. The digital media would have been sent off to Washington DC to disappear into the bowels of a cryptographic torture chamber. In the mean time everyone in the al-Qaida in Iraq food chain would have scattered, become more wary and much harder to hunt down. In this scenario the death of Zarqawi would have indeed been a shot in the arm to al-Qaida because as far as the terrorists would have been concerned he died without selling them out; a stand-up guy who would not rat out his brothers. Yet because he couldn’t be bothered to perform the most basic and prudent security measures, Zarqawi sings louder and faster in death than he ever would have if captured alive.
We can only hope that al-Qaida keeps recruiting potential martyrs because the day they start bringing in people who want to live to see their precious Caliphate become reality is the day we are going to be in real trouble.
