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JPB on the CIA
From: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2002 15:28:51 -0400
------ 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/
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- JPB on the CIA Dave Farber (Sep 23)