Category: Communities of Practice

Seems some of the same old flaws we have highlighted for years…hoarding info giving a false sense of power, no appreciation of the value of OSINT- social media, and silo's of information concordant with age old turf sequestration. DNI has done little to reduce the overall intel community's friction but added to it…makes me believe the intel community has way too many layers and internal bureaucracies to be effective…too big to function but big enough to fail dramatically,yet, not change…..no organizational learning…we never learn we never learn.

Intelligence Lessons From the Boston Attacks

Scott Helfstein

Foreign Affairs, April 23, 2013

Last week’s attack at the Boston Marathon, like the attempted car bombing of Times Square almost three years ago, shows that the line between local conflicts and global ones has become thinner. Faisal Shahzad, the would-be terrorist in 2010, had legally lived in the United States for seven years and had earned citizenship the year before hatching his plot. He would later say that he was inspired to carry out the attack by the radical Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, but the United States discovered that the plot had, in fact, been organized and possibly financed by an extremist group called the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which usually targets the Pakistani state and military. The organization’s attempt to strike in the United States showed that its own distinction between the near and far enemy had become increasingly blurred.

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Continue reading “G. I. Wilson: Intelligence Lessons Learned in Boston — and the Lack of Honest Competent Counterintelligence in the USA”