Tuesday Miscellany!

[maxomai]

• We've often heard "The NSA's PRISM-style surveillance would have stopped another 9/11." Bruce Schneier puts that myth to bed here. Also, check out today's NSA Exploit of the Day on his blog.


• The DEA and the Sinaloa cartel of Mexico had a sweet deal going for ten years. The Sinaloa Cartel would provide intelligence to the US on other cartels. In exchange, the US would look the other way as the Sinolas brought billions of dollars in drug profits back to Mexico. In the DEA's defense, we've made bigger deals with worse players.


• How meth fuels the Syrian civil war.


• CNN bloviates about Hillary Clinton's "Iowa Problem."


• Steven Levy gets inside the NSA. Unsurprisingly, the NSA sees themselves as the good guys, believes they are protecting our privacy, and really hates Snowden.

Comments

High Tech does not equal high success

[arkham4269.livejournal.com]

For the most part, technology has been a big loser in intelligence. Instead of spending all this money on whiz-bang tech, they could have done better dumping more money into HUMINT as well as creating an entire Joint Taskforce which did NOTHING except take all the intelligence and put it into a searchable data-base. So much of my time in OEF was wasted inputting data like a clerk and not actually analysing it.

Really, I can't emphasize this enough. The biggest challenge in intelligence is processing the raw data into intelligence. If anything, NSA is making their job HARDER but trolling their nets so widely! Actionable intelligence comes from knowng your target, then *targeting* your collection assets against those targets. It's not listening in to EVERYBODY and expecting to hit gold.

Sure the drones for real-time recon are awesome but they are still simply a camera in the air and people have been spoofing that since WW I against the Mark I eyeball. You need people on the ground, who know the culture and speak the language to learn what's actually going on. Because without knowing what is going on down on ground level, all you're really doing is dropping death on what you *think* is down there. Given USAF's success ratio (20%) in Bosnia, that isn't good enough.

As a OEF vet, I find it unconciouable that the Bush administration threw away a mission we should have won in a walk by instigating OIF. However, I fault Bush and Obama (and probably Clinton and Bush I) that while we're spending all this money abroad, our southern neighbor, you know the country we share a border with, stuggles not to become a narco-state.

We share a border, a history, in many places the language and all. We have the tools, the people to go to town on Mexico and their issues. I mean with so many refugees, immigrants and 2nd generation Latinos, we have plenty of people to pull from to fight against the corruption in Mexico.

...of course if things got better in America, then so many of our companies couldn't continue to exploit their workers while poisoning the environment. Plus if things go better in Mexico and Latin America, where would we get our cheap labor that the Right makes money off of even as they demonize them to their base?