But What Do the Experts Know, Anyway?

A quick hit this evening/early morning. The CIA Journal has an interesting article suggesting that overt sources of information (that is, analysis of publicly available information) might be better and more effective for national intelligence purposes than covert, or secret information. [link]

Here is how Stephen Mercado, an analyst in the CIA Directorate of Science and Technology puts it:

We need to rethink the distinction between open sources and secrets. Too many policymakers and intelligence officers mistake secrecy for intelligence and assume that information covertly acquired is superior to that obtained openly. Yet, the distinction between overt and covert sources is less clear than such thinking suggests. Open sources often equal or surpass classified information in monitoring and analyzing such pressing problems as terrorism, proliferation, and counterintelligence. Slighting open source intelligence (OSINT) for secrets, obtained at far greater expense when available at all, is no way to run an intelligence community. Also, we must put to rest the notion that the private sector is the preferred OSINT agent. In the end, I would contend, the Intelligence Community (IC) needs to assign greater resources to open sources.

Mercado's point strikes me as intuitively correct, and, indeed, could well describe the blogosphere, which tends not to break new news, but rather spends its time analyzing information that has already been made publicly available. In the end, much like the CIA process that Mercado is describing, bloggers can (but don't always) add significant value by assembling connections between disparate facts and by identifying trends or explanations that the mainstream media either aren't reporting or aren't paying attention to while they cultivate their "inside sources" hoping to acquire new "secret" information.

In any event, in view of the President's violations of FISA to collect "secret" information, this article made me wonder even more whether the politicians and cronies in charge really know what they're doing?

What I'm Pondering At the Moment

The New Criterion has an interesting article about demography. [link] The basic thesis is that while we in the Western world are worrying about social justice, pensions and healthcare, demographic trends among Muslims who don't share our "democratic values" call into question the viability of Western countries altogether, with the demographic end being closer than we think. As the article puts it,

If a population “at odds with the modern world” is the fastest-breeding group on the planet—if there are more Muslim nations, more fundamentalist Muslims within those nations, more and more Muslims within non-Muslim nations, and more and more Muslims represented in more and more transnational institutions—how safe a bet is the survival of the “modern world”?

I'm not sure I agree with all of the assumptions in the piece, but the thesis is certainly provocative.

One quote, however, did grab my attention, which is why I am pondering the article. It is this:

Permanence is the illusion of every age. In 1913, no one thought the Russian, Austrian, German, and Turkish empires would be gone within half a decade. Seventy years on, all those fellows who dismissed Reagan as an “amiable dunce” (in Clark Clifford’s phrase) assured us the Soviet Union was likewise here to stay. The CIA analysts’ position was that East Germany was the ninth biggest economic power in the world. In 1987 there was no rash of experts predicting the imminent fall of the Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact, and the USSR itself.

Rhetorically, it's an easy step from this kind of thinking to the author's conclusion, and in that sense, the thesis is compelling. But again, I'm still working it out.

Anyone care to contribute their own thoughts?