Good Intentions, Some Misrepresentation, July 5, 2008
Arnaud de Borchgrave
The basic idea being executed by CSIS is sound: identify top experts and get them to discuss the terrorist threat and particularly how it is morphing and developing.
Unfortunately, CSIS does not do citation analysis, and builds its networks the same way the US intelligence community does, drawing on a limited number of individuals known to the expert in charge.
Also unfortunately, CSIS does not do multi-lingual capture and analysis, something the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS)/Open Source Center (OSC) is finally trying to get a grip on, but they lack the expert linguists across the 12 variants of Arabic and the other 32 languages necessary to fully map socio-economic and ideo-cultural mass movements and micro-gangs.
At 84 pages this rates four stars for good intentions. In the comment I provide a URL for the Earth Intelligence Network. At the menu item labeled EarthWiki, the Amazon reader can see the top authorities identified by citation analysis for all ten of the high-level threats facing humanity (terrorism is ninth, and not as a threat but rather for its potential in causing mass casualties).
