JPB on the CIA

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Matt Oristano <Matt () Oristano net>
Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2002 15:15:36 -0400
To: farber () cis upenn edu
Subject: JPB on the CIA

Dave:

 From Forbes ASAP, this article by John Perry Barlow on American
intelligence gathering, including his 1993 visit to Langley.  It doesn't
get any "absurder" than this...

Regards,
Matt

http://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/1007/042.html

Why Spy?
John Perry Barlow, 10.07.02

If the spooks can't analyze their own data, why call it intelligence?
For more than a year now, there has been a deluge of stories and op-ed
pieces about the failure of the American intelligence community to detect
or prevent the September 11, 2001, massacre. Nearly all of these accounts
have expressed astonishment at the apparent incompetence of America's
watchdogs.

I'm astonished that anyone's astonished.

The visual impairment of our multitudinous spookhouses has long been the
least secret of their secrets. Their shortcomings go back 50 years, when
they were still presumably efficient but somehow failed to detect several
million Chinese military "volunteers" heading south into Korea. The
surprise attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were only the
most recent oversight disasters. And for service like this we are paying
between $30 billion and $50 billion a year. Talk about a faith-based
initiative. . .

. . . A few weeks later, in early 1993, I passed through the gates of the
CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and entered a chilled silence, a
zone of paralytic paranoia and obsessive secrecy, and a technological time
capsule straight out of the early '60s. The Cold War was officially over,
but it seemed the news had yet to penetrate where I now found myself.

If, in 1993, you wanted to see the Soviet Union still alive and well, you'd
go to Langley, where it was preserved in the methods, assumptions, and
architecture of the CIA.

Where I expected to see computers, there were teletype machines. At the
nerve core of The Company, five analysts sat around a large, wooden lazy
Susan. Beside each of them was a teletype, chattering in uppercase.
Whenever a message came in to, say, the Eastern Europe analyst that might
be of interest to the one watching events in Latin America, he'd rip it out
of the machine, put it on the turntable, and rotate it to the appropriate
quadrant.


<snip>


------ End of Forwarded Message

-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com
Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/