On 16 January 2010, Herbert Meyer, who served during the Reagan Administration as Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council, wrote the following:
“No one among us is perfect, or even close to perfect. In the real world, intelligence failures will happen from time to time no matter how honorable, hardworking, or talented the men and women are on whom we rely to keep us safe. But after so many intelligence
Full Meyer Op-Ed
failures in such a short time, we have got to stop making the same mistake over and over again. This week's Washington cliché is that our system failed. No. Systems don't fail; people fail. Put the right people in charge, and the “system” will fail much, much less frequently.”
I couldn't agree more with Mr. Meyer.
The final chapter of my book, Cash on Delivery: CIA Special Operations During the Secret War in Laos, is titled “Speaking Truth to Power – Lessons Learned”. In it I wrote, “It probably is wonderful that so many politicians, wide variety of pundits and family members of victims of terrorist attacks have taken such an interest in the organization of the CIA and other intelligence community agencies. I see no reason why they should not criticize what they see and understand about what the CIA has or has not done. However, they do not know the full story and they ought to know they do not know it. Yet, they proceed to suggest just how the CIA should be re-organized, without any experience in the collection, analysis and dissemination of intelligence and without all the details of how any particular intelligence, and certainly not how all of it, was collected, analyzed and disseminated. Most often, the solution they suggest boils down to rearranging the lines and boxes on organization charts. People populate the boxes on organization charts. How can it be that the perceived failures they are correcting were merely the result of the boxes not being connected properly among the lines? If the failures were the fault of the people, why don’t they ask that all those people be fired or demoted? Would that do any good? You cannot just go out and hire experienced intelligence professionals from a vast pool that just happens not to be working for the CIA at the time. Intelligence professionals must be grown from seed; they cannot be transplanted from mature plants. Yet, reorganizations are always proposed as changes of the alignment of lines and boxes or the creation of more lines and boxes added to the top of the whole structure, e.g. the National Counterterrorism Center or the Director of National Intelligence. Just how does adding more people to boxes and placing them on top of a bureaucratic structure make it better? Where do the people come from? If they are experienced intelligence professionals, how did anyone figure out how to identify the ones who were not part of the problem? If they are not experienced intelligence professionals why does anyone believe they will have what it takes to lead such a complex undertaking that has no valid lateral experience other than to mature within the intelligence structure?”
Reorganizations look good on paper and play well in the media, but they don't solve the true problem of a lack of first class leadership. When there is a failure to “connect the dots” you need to determine why the people you have did not or could not make the connections. Then you must take remedial actions to lead those people to better performance and to inspire them to, in the words of the U.S. Army, be all they can be.
Intelligence organizations like the CIA will still fail to connect all the dots and will still lose officers killed in action, no system can be perfect and the fight against terrorism will not be without casualties, but when we have failures or casualties we must be able to figure out whether there was nothing we could have done, or whether the leaders we have failed in their duties. Then we replace those leaders and do our best to give them the remedial training they need to become better, if and when they lead again. If we have the best leaders we can get, they will determine how the lines and boxes should be connected and we should expect they will be correct.
In a 2008 academic paper, President Barack Obama's appointee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs advocated “cognitive infiltration” of groups that advocate “conspiracy theories” like the ones surrounding 9/11.
Phi Beta Iota: Sunstein is a serious person, #2 after Lawrence Lessig in terms of general positive influence on the information era from a legal point of view. He is, however, very ignorant and naive when it comes to government “conspiracies” to lie to their own publics, as has been clearly established with respect to the assassination of JFK and Martin Luther King, the USS Liberty attack by Israel, 9/11, and Iraq (935 documented lies). Unlike John Pilger, Sunstein is a “courtier” and has yet to find his freedom from being “validated” by an “establishment” that is actually violating the public trust in its failure to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth in the public interst.
Hackers seeking source code from Google, Adobe and dozens of other high-profile companies used unprecedented tactics that combined encryption, stealth programming and an unknown hole in Internet Explorer, according to new details released by researchers at anti-virus firm McAfee.
“We have never ever, outside of the defense industry, seen commercial industrial companies come under that level of sophisticated attack,” says Dmitri Alperovitch, vice president of threat research for McAfee. “It’s totally changing the threat model.”
Phi Beta Iota: We believe the American software era is ending, and the BRIC (Brazil Russia India China) era is beginning. Most interesting to us is the underlying philosophy that seeks to join free public access to software with embedded controls that protect or restrict–take your pick–access to “forbidden knowledge” including pornography.
Honest Science 101
Antarctica and the Myth of Deadly Rising Seas
On Monday, scientists from the Norwegian Polar Institute reported that they'd measured sea temperatures beneath an East Antarctic ice shelf and found no signs of warming whatsoever. And while the discovery's corollaries remain mostly blurred by the few rogue mainstream media outlets actually reporting it, the findings are in fact yet another serious blow to the sky-is-falling-because-oceans-are-rising prophecies of the climate alarm crowd.
This initiative is a joint effort between Ushahidi, UN OCHA/Colombia and the International Network of Crisis Mappers (CM*Net). OCHA/Colombia recently deployed Ushahidi for an earthquake response excercise so we're very grateful for their invaluable contribution to this Haiti deployment. We're completing the customization of the platform as fast as we can. Please follow @Ushahidi on Twitter for updates and help spread the word, especially to colleagues inside Haiti. Please do contact us if you want to help. Our thoughts are with the people of Haiiti and with our humanitarian colleagues on the ground.
Structure effondres | Collapsed structure – Structures a risque | Structures at risk – Personnes prises au piege | People trapped — Route barree | Road blocked — 1. Urgences | Emergency — Seisme et repliques | Earthquake and aftershocks — 2. Menaces | Threats — Secours Medical | Medical response — 5. Autre | Other — 6. Nouvelles de Survivants | Survivor News — 4. Secours | Response — Recherche et sauvetage | USAR Search and Rescue — Sans courant | Power Outage — 3. Urgences logistiques | Vital Lines — Refuge | Shelter — Morts | Deaths
Phi Beta Iota: This is a very early look at how a Global to Local Range of Needs Table could be implemented.
See also:
Boston Globe Photos
Phi Beta Iota: Now imagine the Peace Jumpers distributing 20 Google Ground-Level GPS-Enabled 360 View Photo Bicyles that transmit to an immediately established Wide Area Network and then up to a circling AWACs. If we applied just 10% of DARPA's budget to steering and leveraging the global private sector–Google is not the only one with innovative ideas, by now we would have a Local Range of Needs Table down to individual and household levels, and could precision-drop “just enough, just in time” Peace from Above. The Navy is *always* 4-6 steaming days away from anything.
