Tuesday, September 25, 2007
The Operation was a Success, but is the Patient Already Dead?
Jeffrey R. Cooper's paper, Curing Analytic Pathologies looks at the current state of the CIA and its analysis arm. A review by Secrecy News is a little depressing, but it's a fascinating read. There's no peer review within the CIA and due to secrecy compartmentalization, one analyst may know something important and relevant to a second analyst's work, but never know about the second analyst's report. Possibly the worst revelation was the fact that the CIA became essentially a newsletter to the President. I think calling the CIA a newspaper to the President is a little inaccurate, so I used the analogy of a newsletter. The government is trying to change that with Intellipedia, which is wikipedia.org for spooks.
The reason I am bringing up the CIA at this point is that computer network security and analysis has many parallels with intelligence gathering and analysis. The problems are similar as well - never enough knowledge about the remote network you are dealing with, people compartmentalizing information that would be helpful to you, the risk of losing credibility if you get it wrong too many times, and senior managers playing politics with your results.
The reason I am bringing up the CIA at this point is that computer network security and analysis has many parallels with intelligence gathering and analysis. The problems are similar as well - never enough knowledge about the remote network you are dealing with, people compartmentalizing information that would be helpful to you, the risk of losing credibility if you get it wrong too many times, and senior managers playing politics with your results.
Labels: network security national security politics
