Category: Information Operations (IO)

Seems to confirm all that the OSINT movement has been saying for twenty years. He also takes on the Zionist lobby.

Read all about it, spying misses intelligence quotient

Daniel Flitton

The Age, 18 April 2014

It costs about 10 bucks to buy a weekly issue of The Economist, and about $1 billion a year to fund the secret operations of Australia’s intelligence agencies. Which source gives better value for money?

This is the fascinating but as yet largely overlooked question to emerge from Bob Carr’s diary of his time as foreign minister. ‘‘Intelligence figures larger in the job than I would have imagined,’’ Carr writes, and describes the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, tucked in its crypt inside Foreign Affairs headquarters, as ‘‘My own little CIA, my own spies’’.

. . . . . . .

Nothing in the book appears to put any secret sources at risk, even though security types expecting strict control over information will doubtless squirm from the attention.

But for all Carr’s devouring of intelligence reports, he doesn’t seem overly impressed by the shadowy world from whence they emanate. ‘‘One must not be seduced by spies and their agenda,’’ he writes after meeting the CIA chief in Washington. At an earlier meeting, fresh in the job, Carr also spoke with CIA officers on topics ranging across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and China, and came away underwhelmed.

‘‘All this was solid but unexciting. Where were the revelations? Was there anything here one would not pick up from The Economist, let alone [diplomatic] cables? This thought stirred my instinctive scepticism about intelligence. How often do we get to relish the knockout revelation that we can whole-heartedly believe and on which we can base policy, taking our rivals altogether by surprise?’’

Carr is not the first to doubt the value of intelligence, whose reputation is regularly burnished by Hollywood depictions of the all-seeing, all-knowing spies. He approvingly records a conversation with former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger who similarly reported having never been much surprised by intelligence reports.

Carr has a point. Open source material – the stuff of newspapers, academic journals or a chat with an expert – is often regarded as less worthy when placed alongside a report stamped ‘‘TOP SECRET’’ in big red letters. Yet the best answers are regularly to be found in plain sight.

He goes further, warning that spying for spying’s sake carries grave risk. Presumedly this is the ‘‘agenda’’ he worries over. He left the job before leaks by Edward Snowden exposed Australian bugs on the phones of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and his wife, upending ties with Indonesia.

But Carr did see hints of trouble with Jakarta over spy operations emerge during his time. ‘‘The pursuit of intelligence of questionable value has got to be weighed,’’ he writes. ‘‘Weighed against the harm if the intelligence gathering is exposed.’’

This is a debate Australia should be having, rather than beating up on the ABC and other reporters for broadcasting the Snowden leaks. Are we happy to be the kind of nation that covertly listens in on other country’s leaders? Is there a genuine advantage?

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