Aug 12 2006
The Essence Of Intelligence
I was surprised to find a very rational and reasoned discussion of why the US must continue to gather intel and disperse leads to law enforcement in the manner we have been doing since we corrected a lot of quaint and dangerous legal theories after 9-11. This article in the New Republic explains well why governments collect a lot of innocent information to detect those few bad guys:
There is another problem as well: to get the information it needs, the government must also get a lot of information it doesn’t need. Honest taxpayers must fill out elaborate tax returns so that the government has the information it needs to catch tax cheats. Securities laws require detailed reporting of often pointless information, but those reports help the government spot stock frauds. In those settings–as in most white-collar investigations–the government must gather a great deal of information about a great many innocent people in order to target a few guilty ones. So, too, with respect to terrorism: The government will never identify would-be terrorists if it must know who they are before it begins investigating them. No doubt, British agents targeted some people incorrectly during the course of their long inquiry into the plot to blow airplanes out of the London sky. That is the nature of such investigations; the police make mistakes sometimes. Thankfully, the enterprise of gathering information is self-correcting: The more the police learn, the better they can do the job of separating the innocent from the guilty.
Please read the whole thing. If more Democrats thought like this they would give the Reps a run for their money. Unfortunately this kind of clear thinking is beyond those poor Kos Kids and their new political leader, Ned Lamont.
As a general rule you find what you want in the last place you look, not the first, second or and so on
Remember when the Democrats cheered that they had killed the Patriot Act?
As far as I can tell, the paranoid view of intelligence so current on the left and the libertarian right seems to be based on the bizarre notion that each of us has our own personal “spook” combing through our records and phone calls 24/7–no personal life, no vacation, no sleep, no meals, no potty breaks, just total prurient dedication to learning every uninteresting detail of every single person’s life. The reality is that, in the current threat environment, if our intelligence gathering efforts are to be effective our intelligence gatherers (who are, in reality, relatively few in number) must for the most part rely on impersonal, automated methods and have no time to waste on anyone who doesn’t pose a real threat.
It would be interesting to have some person from the left or libertarian right explain their vision of intelligence to the rest of us:
1. What is the nature of the threat that we are faced with?
2. How can we identify those who pose a threat, and how can we distinguish them from those who don’t?
3. What further information might we need to shut down that threat?
4. Realistically, how can that information be obtained? Is there, for example, a realistic way to obtain such information without also gathering a great deal of utter drivel?
5. Concretely, what danger is posed by gathering the information that is needed to protect us from the threats that we are faced with?
And so forth. Sadly, you’re not about to get a fact based analysis of intelligence from any prominent member of the “opposition”. Contrary to the loony left, the people who are really indulging in “scare tactics” are those who are seeking partisan political gain at the price of crippling our intelligence capabilities.
In the wake of the latest terror plot, AJ is absolutely right to be focusing again on NSA and FISA. Does it really make sense to have NSA provide more protection to the British than to Americans? And yet that would be the result if we were to actually adopt the restrictions on intelligence gathering that the left proposes. We all need to remember that FISA was born of a (most probably) unconstitutional powerplay on the part of the legislative branch, intended to shackle the executive by encouraging and then preying upon false fears of ordinary people who knew next to nothing about the real world of intelligence and rarely gave a thought to the very real threats that we face. There is a great deal of public education to be done in this regard.
Does it bother you to know that you are on television(being recorded) 24/7 if you are in Walmart? Not if you aren’t planning to steal something or maybe having a rendevous. That’s been going on for years, why hasn’t the ACLU caught on to this? HINT: they wouldn’t have a case and I bet they even shop there sometimes.