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The link to the story is here [nytimes.com], but you might need to register (free).
Here are just a few points from the 7,500 word cover story.
. . . spies are beginning to wonder why their technology has fallen so far behind . . . many of them believe the answer may lie in the interactive tools the world’s teenagers are using to pass around YouTube videos and bicker online about their favorite bands.
Zalmai Azmi — currently the chief information officer of the F.B.I. — was working at the Department of Justice on a data-sharing project with an intelligence agency. He requested data that the agency was supposed to have scrubbed clean of all classified info. Yet when it arrived, it contained secret information. What had gone wrong? The agency had passed it through filters that removed any document marked “secret” — but many documents were stamped “SECRET,” in uppercase, and the filter didn’t catch the difference.
Meyerrose’s office is building three completely separate versions of Intellipedia for each of the three levels of secrecy: Top Secret, Secret and Unclassified.
…top-secret information is becoming less useful than it used to be . . . . The time is past for analysts to act like “monastic scholars in a cave someplace,” he added, laboring for weeks or months in isolation to produce a report.
The most valuable spy system is one that can quickly assemble disparate pieces that are already lying around — information gathered by doctors, aid workers, police officers or security guards at corporations.
The Spying 2.0 vision has thus created a curious culture battle in intelligence circles. Many of the officials at the very top . . . are intrigued by the potential of a freewheeling, smart-mobbing intelligence community. The newest, youngest analysts are in favor of it, too. The resistance comes from the “iron majors” — career officers who occupy the enormous middle bureaucracy of the spy agencies.
[edited by: lawman at 12:16 pm (utc) on Dec. 3, 2006]
[edit reason] Fix Quote Tag - Edit To Conform To TOS 10 [/edit]
Wrong. Not a clue, I recall sitting down with two officers explaining how people are found using the most basic of searches these 2 were dumbstruck.
The placement was a man fleeing from seriously heavy drug dealers, I didnt rate his chances.
