From: John Perry Barlow
Sent: Thursday, December 19, 2002 1:07 AM

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                               --------->  B a R L o W F R i e N D Z ----->

[snip --XJ]

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1. The All-Seeing Spy.
2. Can Intelligence Get Smart?
3. May the Holy Who Knows Bless Us, Every One...

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[snip --XJ]


THE OFFICE OF INFORMATION AWARENESS AND YOU.

If you've seen my business card or letterhead in the last 15 years, 
you will know that I use a pyramid crowned with the All-Seeing Eye as 
a kind of personal logo. Indeed, an extremely spare version of it - 
originally designed for me by Danny Hillis - can be found at the top 
of this BarlowSpam.

Of course, you'll also find it on the back of the dollar bill. It's 
an element of the Great Seal of the United States, though it's a 
great deal older than the Republic. The Egyptians used it, and it's 
likely they borrowed it themselves, whether from a still more ancient 
civilization or from, say, the same visitors from the Pleiades that 
some folks believe did all the heavy lifting for them. I adopted it 
for a variety of reasons, including its American and Masonic 
associations, the way it combines the crass with the ideal, and the 
opportunity to pass myself off as a fully self-disclosed Illuminatus.

But I mainly resonate to this old symbol because to me it connotes 
tolerance, a universality of viewpoint, and the unity of all things. 
The Eye sees all sides of the pyramid. The Eye understands and 
accepts.

There have been other, less positive takes on it. The conspiracy 
theorists, notably Robert Anton Wilson, have long believed it to 
represent shadowy social malignancies - secret societies far weirder 
than (though related to) the Masons that are the hidden 
puppet-masters of the world. To them, the All-Seeing Eye symbolizes 
the folks who brought you the Kennedy assassinations, the New World 
Order, the Roswell Cover-up, the Trilateral Commission, the CIA, the 
KGB, the Carlyle Group, and almost any ugly concentration of unearned 
power to arise over the last thousand years or so.

I never saw it that way, but I find myself wondering all of a sudden 
if the paranoids weren't right about it after all.

I say this because one of the scarier sights I've encountered in the 
haunted house that is the 21st Century is the new logo of the 
Information Awareness Office. Check it out. Take a deep breath and 
click on http://www.darpa.mil/iao.  (Interestingly, this may not work 
outside Fortress America. I have heard reports that one can only 
access it from inside the U.S.)

There you will find the All-Seeing Eye leering down menacingly on the 
whole globe (with special attention focused, you will note, on the 
Islamic quarter). This is not the benign eye who sees all and accepts 
all with the compassion of understanding and the strength of wisdom. 
Naaah. That Eye's so last Millennium.

We now have a new, improved Eye ultimately designed to peer into 
every cranny of your private life and from that knowledge build a 
safer future for multinational corporatism.  It is unilateral 
omniscience equipped with an ideology, a moral agenda,  a zest for 
imposed order, and the overwhelmingly dominant supply of Weapons of 
Mass Destruction (along with the proven capacity to use them).

It has a motto. "Scientia est Potentia." Knowledge is Power. I've 
been mouthing that phrase for years in my efforts to arm the wretched 
with liberating knowledge. Upon that principle, I've done my little 
best over the last decade to electronically convey to every peasant 
on the planet the power to grow that comes with knowing. Now we have 
that same formula flipped. The Office of Information Awareness seeks 
what they call Total Information Awareness. Not to arm you but to 
disarm you.

Total Information Awareness is what you get when you acquire access 
to all the digital databases in America, public or private, and 
collate them into one great Mother of All Databases.

This could ultimately include your bank statements, your grocery 
purchases, your grades in school, what you checked out from the 
library, your e-mails, your tax returns, your phone call records, all 
the porn movies you've ever watched in Marriott Hotels, every place 
you filled your car over the last year,  the record of your scuba 
dives, your medical costs - indeed, everything that makes up the 
thick digital slime trail we all leave behind us in a deeply 
digitized society. Having assembled all these yottabytes (that's 2 to 
the 80th power) it would then data-mine the whole matrix in search of 
patterns that might correspond to evil-doing.

For example, it would easily find everyone in America who'd bought a 
ton of fertilizer, purchased 500 gallons of diesel fuel, and rented a 
truck. Such a search would almost certainly spot the Oklahoma City 
bombing before it happened. Which sounds like a great thing until you 
realize that such a search would also lag huge number of farmers and 
ranchers for more invasive investigation.

Until recently, just about all of the information I mentioned above 
would have been off-limits to the government. Not long ago, I didn't 
worry that much about commercial data collection, since I figured 
that, for example, all Amazon wanted to do with my data was to find 
books I hadn't heard of but would want to buy if I had. Further, such 
information was legally protected from government scrutiny unless I 
were a named suspect in an investigation.

Now, thanks to the USA PATRIOT Act (or , if you prefer the official 
title, the Uniting and Strengthening
America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and 
Obstruct Terrorism Act ) and a subsequent declaration in May by 
Ashcroft's Justice Department, the government can request from any 
entity, whether Amazon.Com or the local library, that it turn over 
all its digital records for unspecified examination. Furthermore, the 
Act makes it a criminal offense for that entity to tell its patrons 
that the records are being examined. This new power has been invoked 
frequently, it appears, but we have no way of knowing when or from 
whom.

(It was recently revealed that all the dive shops in America had been 
forced to secretly declare to the government the names of everyone 
who had taken dive training in the last year. Terrorists will be 
wanting to learn how to dive, I guess. Only when one brave dive shop 
operator in LA risked arrest by refusing to cooperate and going 
public about it did the operation stop.)

Even given these sweeping new authorities, I ordinarily would not be 
terribly concerned about a government effort to collect, collate, and 
search all the digital information in America. Hell,  the U.S. 
Government currently lacks the capacity to examine its own 
information, let alone yours (I will discuss this at greater length 
in an article I recently wrote for Forbes ASAP on the incompetence of 
Intelligence, which you will find following this one.)

But the Information Awareness Office is the brainchild of a very 
smart man who is working inside a very smart agency. It is, as you 
probably know by now, being created under the supervision of Admiral 
John Pointdexter, who, while Reagan's National Security Advisor, 
cooked up much of the Iran-Contra plot. (I had thought at the time 
that being convicted of 5 felonies would end Poindexter's career in 
government service, but I underestimated him.)

It's being born inside the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. 
DARPA, as its more generally known, is a place where leviathans of 
technology stride forth regularly to alter the world as we know it, 
as often for good as ill. DARPA gave us the Internet. It's small - 
only 240 personnel - smart, anti-bureaucratic, and capable. DARPA 
doesn't try to develop in-house where the bureaucracy can make giant 
hairballs of most initiatives. It out-sources, and generally to the 
right places. DARPA's proven capacity to make technology happen is a 
large part of why we should take the Information Awareness Office 
seriously.

Even if, in all the hue and cry that has followed its revelation, the 
IAO is aborted, it is one of many related endeavors that have 
received less publicity. For example, DARPA has recently been 
conducting research into imposing a new set of Internet protocols 
that would tag all the packets in Cyberspace with unique markers that 
would make anonymous Internet use effectively impossible.

John Markoff quoted from the proposal in his New York Times article: 
"We envisage that all network and client resources will maintain 
traces of user eDNA so that the user can be uniquely identified as 
having visited a Web site, having started a process or having sent a 
packet. This way, the resources and those who use them form a virtual 
`crime scene' that contains evidence about the identity of the users, 
much the same way as a real crime scene contains DNA traces of 
people."

These new protocols would tie neatly into the current Microsoft/Intel 
plans to create "trusted computing" platforms in all PC's. Although 
Wintel project is mostly about stopping copyright piracy, it lends 
itself well to turning the Internet into a surveillance tool for the 
government. In this model, no one would be able to get online without 
providing a unique identifier, probably biological, that would, as 
Markoff put it, "be
turned into an electronic signature that could have been appended to 
every Internet message or activity and thus tracked back to its 
source."

What we see here is a technological vision and depth that is 
generally beyond most governmental capacities. But we can no longer 
be assured that we will be spared their despotism by their 
incompetence. Even the best and brightest have now been seduced by 
the belief that terrorism is threat that justifies turning their 
intellectual resources to creating the most intrusive personal 
investigation system ever conceived.

With such a system comes immense power of extortion. When the 
government can know all our secret shames and we can know nothing of 
what it has gathered about us and how it interprets those data, we 
are at an enormous disadvantage should we seek to raise our voices 
against it.

Moreover, what was devised to combat terrorism can be used to 
investigate other "crimes" of a more cultural nature. We've already 
seen evidence of this with behavior the new Federal Transport 
Security Administration. In the past, private security screeners at 
airports were exclusively focused on finding weapons or threats to 
the aircraft.

There have been several times over the years when. while rifling my 
bag, one these rentasnoops turned up a joint or some similarly 
"criminal" material, gave me a significant look, and put it back 
where he found it. This is not how it is with TSA. If a member of the 
TSA finds evidence of *any* kind of criminality, whether related to 
transportation security or not, they are required to turn you over to 
the police.

We can be assured that the quest for Total Information Awareness will 
have similar guidelines. Which implies that the same posse that's 
currently asking itself "Who would Jesus bomb?" would finally have 
the means to impose its cultural practices on you while preventing 
you practicing your own.

Such a system would also have an appalling capacity for error as well 
as a susceptibility to absurdly arbitrary leaps of judgement. (I keep 
thinking of the movie Brazil, in which a computer error that turns 
the name "Tuttle" into "Buttle" causes a haplessly innocent family 
man to be tortured to death. ) I recently heard that the government 
had examined all of Safeway's California customer relations 
management files to look for people who had been buying a lot of 
hummus (a well-known terrorist delicacy). Imagine what the idiots 
looking for hummus-eaters will ask of a system that can know 
everything.

At the heart of all this is a profound assumption: that to intend a 
crime - to sin in one's heart - is no different from committing it. 
When we can digitally and personally track all the patterns of 
behavior that customarily lead up to a criminal act, we won't need 
tanked telepaths like the ones in Minority Report to spot 
"pre-crime." The massively parallel Beowulf arrays down at the OAI 
will have identified the perpetrator before he's perpetrated. No 
longer will one be innocent until proven guilty. He can now be guilty 
without ever committing a crime.

I have long maintained that we are headed to a future of completely 
transparency, where both personal privacy and institutional secrecy 
would vanish and we would be forced, as are people in small, gossip-y 
towns, to create societies tolerant enough to accept an certain 
amount of personally eccentric behavior and even private, though 
widely-known, scandals.

Instead, we know seem headed into a future where The All-Seeing Eye 
can know everything about us and we can know - or say - nothing about 
It. I can't imagine leaving a less promising future to my 
descendents. Nor can I imagine why the American people are so willing 
to inflict such a future on their kids that driving a few blocks to 
vote against it was too much trouble.



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SEEING ALL, KNOWING NOTHING

One of the most personally chilling things about the Information 
Awareness Office is that it bears some faint similarity to something 
I proposed in last August's edition of Forbes ASAP. In that piece, an 
unedited version of which now follows, I wrote about why the failure 
of American Intelligence to spot the 911 gang seemed inevitable to me 
and what I thought we might do to create a system that would be more 
effective.

My proposed Open Intelligence Office would use many of the data 
collation and mining techniques that are being implement by 
Poindexter's skunkworks. There are several important differences 
however. The OIO would sift through public, not private, data and 
would do so as openly as possible

I believe, as the following piece makes clear, that secrecy is the 
mortal enemy of truth.

It is also, fortunately, the mortal enemy of institutional 
competence. I now pray that it will continue to be, since, as this 
administration loves its own secrecy as much as it hates yours, our 
best assured hope may be that it will become so bad at processing 
information that its systems simply won't work.

Now. Here's that article ->

CAN INTELLIGENCE GET SMART?
For Forbes ASAP, August 2002
by John Perry Barlow

	Insanity consists of endlessly repeating the same process 
hoping for a different result.
						- Albert Einstein

Lately, there has been a journalistic eruption of stories and op-ed 
pieces about the failure of the American intelligence to detect or 
prevent the 911 Massacre. Nearly all of these accounts and opinions 
seem breathless with astonishment at the apparent incompetence of 
America's watchdogs.

I'm astonished that anyone's astonished.

The visual impairment of the our multitudinous spook-houses has long 
been the most open of their secrets. One only had to track their 
record of predictive failure, which has been consistent. Clear back 
in 1950, when, only three years old, they were still presumably 
efficient, they failed to detect several million Chinese military 
"volunteers" headed south into Korea.

The lowlights since then have been too numerous to detail, but I'll 
mention a few. The Bay of Pigs. The Tet Offensive (and the entire 
Viet Nam War, for that matter). The Iranian hostage rescue attempt. A 
host of terrorist bombings in Lebanon, New York, Kenya, Tanzania, and 
Oklahoma City. The (utterly unanticipated) fall of the Soviet Union. 
The evaporation of the Iron Curtain. And, last but hardly least, both 
attacks on the World Trade Center. And for service like this we are 
paying somewhere between 30 and 50 billion dollars a year, though 
absolutely no one seems to know for sure. Soon it will be more. Talk 
about a faith-based initiative.

Of course, their opacity permits them to claim secretly preventing a 
Pandora's boxcar of other nameless calamities. But, knowing what I 
now know of their culture and methods, I'm not convinced. But most 
folks go on believing in them. And probably will continue to despite 
the recent evidence.

Further, to the extent that public awareness of the problem is 
raised, solutions will be proposed - the president's bone-headed 
Department of Homeland Security being an exquisite case in point - 
that will exacerbate it, at least to the extent that something 
irretrievably broken can be broken even further.

Despite my sense that this screed is a fool's errand as well, I feel 
compelled to detail what I think has gone wrong, based on a decade of 
both fighting with and consulting to the intelligence "community." I 
also have a modest proposal for an entity that might actually provide 
our decision-makers with a clearer sense of what's going on in the 
world.

Back in 1992, I shared the public delusion that the CIA, NSA, DIA, 
ETC. were not only effective but super-human in their capacities. I 
should have known better even then. I had already spent a couple of 
years battling the NSA over its export embargo on strong encryption 
algorithms. Despite my sense that one might as easily ban the export 
of wind, I kept thinking they knew something I didn't. It turned they 
did not - as is revealed in Steven Levy's excellent history Crypto - 
but rather that their Reality Distortion Field, reinforced by the 
presence of 35,000 NSA employees who had been trained to suspect even 
their own families, was more persuasive than mine.

My inflated notion of the intelligence of Intelligence was an ironic 
symptom of 60's cultural blindness. Raised in a world gone nuts, and 
in the absence of a credible God, we wanted to think that there was 
some directed ordering principle to human affairs. These mysterious 
initialed entities filled the filled the metaphysical gap and 
provided us with a world that made at least a malignant kind of 
sense. All events of historical consequence, whether the Kennedy 
assassination or either Bush election, were assumed to be the 
handiwork of a conspiracy that originated just south of the Potomac. 
Such beliefs are more vigorous than ever, here and elsewhere.

Ten years ago, I held them myself. But that was before the 
intelligence agencies started soliciting my opinions - as they have 
at intervals in the years since - affording me an opportunity to 
behold organizational inner workings that remind one less of James 
Bond than something from the movie Brazil.

I was introduced to this world by a former spy named Robert Steele, 
who, in the fall of 1992, called me up and asked me to speak at a 
Washington conference, that would be "attended primarily by 
Intelligence professionals." What should I speak about? "Oh, tell us 
how you think information works." This sounded like good fun.

And Steele seemed like a very interesting guy, if unsettling. A 
former Marine intelligence officer (who was instrumental in creating 
the Marine Corps Intelligence Center), Steele moved to the CIA and 
served three overseas tours in clandestine intelligence, at least one 
of them "in a combat environment" in Central America during our least 
palatable period of involvement there.

After nearly two decades of service in the shadows, Steele emerged 
with a lust for light and a belief in what he calls, in 
characteristic spook-speak, OSINT or open source intelligence. Open 
source intelligence is knowledge assembled from what is publicly 
available, in media, public documents, the Net, wherever. Given that, 
in the Information Age, such materials - and the technological tools 
for analyzing them - are growing exponentially, this is a very good 
idea, but not one that is necessarily going to be popular in a 
culture where the phrase "information is power" means something 
brutally concrete.

Steele is blazingly bright, but he also has a gung-ho, and indeed 
somewhat eccentric, personal style that doesn't endear him to the 
stylistic descendents of James Angleton and Allen Dulles. Thus, even 
though he is right, I think, about many things, he seems doomed to be 
a lonely pamphleteer. (One of his pamphlets, On Intelligence, runs 
about 500 pages and provided inspiration for some of the solutions I 
will suggest later.)

In any case, back in 1992, Intelligence was awakening to the Internet 
and Steele's conference, the First International Symposium on 
National Security & National Competitiveness, was attended by about 
629 members of the American and European intelligence establishment, 
including many of its senior leaders. For someone whose major claim 
to fame was hippie song-mongering, addressing such an audience made 
me feel as if I'd suddenly become a character in a Thomas Pyncheon 
novel.

Nonetheless, I sallied forth, confidently telling the gray throng 
that electronically networked information would dramatically alter 
the nature of their organizations, that power lay not in concealing 
information but in distributing it, that the Internet would endow 
small groups of zealots with the capacity to wage credible assaults 
on nation states, that hackers could easily run circles around spies. 
I told them, far too confidently, that secrecy was doomed.

I didn't expect a warm reception to these tidings, but it wasn't as 
if I were interviewing for a job. Or so I thought.  But when I came 
off-stage, a group of calm, alert men awaited. They seemed eager, in 
their undemonstrative way, to pursue these issues further with me.

Among them was Paul Wallner, who was in charge of Open Source 
initiatives at the CIA. This was a function of something called 
Community Affairs, a multi-agency entity that sounded to me like it 
might oversee contributions to the United Way recruit spies to coach 
Little League teams. It turned out their mandate was hairier than 
that. It was their sorry lot to maintain the peace between the 
various institutions of intelligence whose natural contempt for one 
another makes the Army-Navy game look like a cakewalk. Wallner was in 
charge of efforts to get them all to accept the validity of 
information which they had not gathered by their own means. (Which is 
to say, nearly all information, but which they culturally regarded as 
highly suspect.)

Wallner wanted to know if I would be willing to drop by the agency, 
have a look around, and discuss my ideas with a few folks. I took 
them up on it. A few weeks later, in early 1993, I found myself 
passing through the gates of the CIA headquarters. It was like 
stepping back in time. The Cold War was officially over, but it 
seemed the news had yet to penetrate where I had gone. I entered a 
chill silence, a zone of paralytic paranoia, an obsessive secrecy, 
and a technological time capsule that was straight out of the early 
60's.

If, in 1993, you wanted to see the Soviet Union, still alive and 
well, you'd go to Langley, Virginia, where it was preserved in the 
methods, assumptions, and architecture of the CIA. Even the wall 
paper in various halls consists of old maps of Moscow. Post-card 
pretty pictures of Russian churches and palaces adorned the walls. 
They had become so focused on the enemy that had fallen prey to the 
usual risk of having an enemy. As Nietzche said, "Battle not with 
monsters, lest you become a monster - and if you gaze into the abyss, 
the abyss gazes also into you."

Among the liabilities of resembling the Soviet Union has been a 
willingness to accept astonishing technological backwardness, using 
the opposing monster's capacities as the benchmark. Upper case 
teletype machines were in most of the places one might expect to see 
computers. (I was told that until shortly before my first visit 
there, a lot of information had moved around the building in the sort 
of pneumatic tubes that I'd seen as a boy in old department stores.)

At the nerve core of The Company, there were five analysts sitting 
around a large wooden lazy susan. Beside each of them was a 
chattering teletype. 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. Not exactly high 
tech.

On a later visit, I was going through the inner security checkpoint 
with Esther Dyson. There was a sign admonishing us to turn over all 
recording devices, among a number of other proscribed items. Esther 
dutifully went through her purse and pulled out a floppy disk. "Would 
you regard this as a recording device?" she asked, with the slightest 
imp of a smile. Yes, they agreed solemnly, she would have leave that. 
I then showed them my laptop, which had an internal microphone, 
recording software, and a large hard disk, though I didn't mention 
the capacities this combination endowed it with. After examining it 
suspiciously, they let me through with it.

The most distressing discovery of my first expedition was the nearly 
universal frustration I encountered among the people I talked to at 
the intransigence of the beast they inhabited. They felt forced into 
incompetence by the cultural practices of information hoarding and 
non-communication both within the CIA and with other related 
agencies. They hated their primitive technology. They felt 
unappreciated, oppressed, demoralized. Worst of all, they seemed to 
realize that the "free world" was passing them by.

"Somehow, over the last 35 years, there was an information 
revolution," one of them said to me bleakly, "and we missed it."

The dogma of secrecy is another - and probably the most persistently 
damaging consequence - of "the Soviet Factor." Staring fixedly at the 
glossy, hard surface of what Churchill called "a riddle wrapped in a 
mystery inside an enigma," they imitated those characteristics as 
well. There many been efforts by elected authorities to loosen their 
white-knuckled grip on information. None of them have worked.

The most recent of these was the 1997 Commission On Protecting And 
Reducing Government Secrecy, led by Senator Patrick Moynihan. The 
Moynihan Commission released a withering report charging Intelligence 
with excessive classification and citing a long list of adverse 
consequences ranging from public distrust to concealed, and therefore 
irremediable, organizational failures.

Moynihan proposed a bill in 1998 called the Government Secrecy Reform 
Act.  Co-sponsored by the likes Jesse Helms and Trent Lott, this 
legislation was not out to gut American Intelligence. But the spooks 
fought back effectively through the Clinton administration and so 
weakened the bill that one of the co-sponsors, Congressman Lee 
Hamilton, concluded that it would be better not to pass what 
remained. It was reintroduced again in 2000 as the Public Interest 
Declassification Act, but it had been so thoroughly amended under 
pressure from the Administration and the intelligence agencies that 
most of its former proponents abandoned it.

What little remained of it was eventually wrapped into the 2001 
Intelligence Appropriations Bill that was passed later in 2000. But 
the only anti-secrecy provision that remained in the bill, a 
directive to establish a public interest declassification board, has 
never been implemented. Thanks to the vigorous interventions of the 
Clinton White House, the cult of secrecy remained unmolested.

One might be surprised that the last administration would be so 
pro-secrecy. In fact, they weren't. But they were the dog being 
wagged by the Intelligence tail. Indeed, one highly placed White 
House staffer told me that they were "afraid of the NSA."

Much later, in May of 2000. I had another of my Thomas Pyncheon 
moments. I found myself speaking to a conference called The 
Intelligence Community Collaboration Conference (a title that 
contained at least four ironies). The other primary speaker was 
General Mike Hayden, the newly appointed director of the NSA. He felt 
powerless, though he was determined not to remain that way.

"I had been on the job for awhile before I realized that I have no 
staff," he exclaimed. "Everything the agency doesŠis being managed 
several levels below me." In other words, the NSA had developed an 
immune system against external intervention. I'm not sure the folks 
in the White House had any reason to fear the NSA, but suddenly it 
was easier to see why they didn't think they ran it.

Hayden recognized how excessive secrecy had damaged Intelligence. It 
was, he felt, an artifact of the past and he was determined to fix 
it. "We have a long history of not sharing information. These high 
walls kept a lot of things from getting in as well.  We were 
America's information age enterprise in the Industrial Age. Now we 
have to do that same task in the Information Age, and we find 
ourselves less adept."

He also vowed to diminish strong competition with other agencies. 
(This is a problem that remains severe, even though it was first 
identified by the Hoover Commission in 1949.) He decried "the 
stovepipe mentality" where information is passed vertically through 
many bureaucratic layers, but rarely passes horizontally.

The NSA he described was also, by his account, as technologically 
maladroit as its rival in Langley. He wondered, for example, why the 
Director of what was supposedly one of the most sophisticated 
agencies in the world would have four phones on his desk. Direct 
electronic contact between him and the consumers of his information, 
namely the President and National Security staff, was virtually nil. 
There were, he said, thousands of internally generated operating 
systems inside the NSA, most of them incapable of exchanging 
information with one another.

He recognized the importance of getting over the Cold War. "Our 
targets are no longer controlled by the technological limitations of 
the Soviet Union, a slow, primitive, under-funded foe. Now they have 
access to state-of the art.  In 40 years, the world went from 5000 
stand-alone computers, many of which we owned, to 420 million 
computers, many of which are better than oursŠ.It is absolutely 
necessary for the agency to undertake a cultural change.""

It was a great speech. It said what I intended to say and better. But 
Hayden was encountering deep passive resistance. While General Hayden 
spoke, the two or three hundred high ranking intelligence officials 
in the audience sat with their arms folded defensively across the 
their chests. The body language was clear. When I got up to 
essentially sing the same song in a different key, I asked them, as a 
favor, not to assume that posture while I was speaking. I then 
watched an hilarious Strangelovian spectacle when, during my talk, 
many arms crept up to cross involuntarily and were thrust back down 
to their sides by force of embarrassed will.

That said, this is probably a good place to make important 
clarification. I draw a clear distinction between the institutions of 
Intelligence and the folks who staff them. All of the actual people 
I've encountered in Intelligence are, in fact, intelligent. Very. 
They are usually funny, in a dark, understated way. They are 
dedicated, as one must be to devote his life to unsung service at low 
pay to an endeavor that may not accomplish any purpose beyond its own 
self-preservation. How can the institutional sum add up to so much 
less than the parts? Because another, much larger, combination of 
factors is also at work: bureaucracy and secrecy.

The great sociologist Max Weber wrote around the turn of the century 
about the nature of bureaucracy and the capacity of such institutions 
to become a kind of meta-organism. The great creatures have, in his 
view, survival mechanisms that take little regard for human 
well-being, and indeed, are fairly immune to control by the very 
humans that comprise them. He used the word Shicksal (which roughly 
translates to "fate") to describe their sublime immalleability. He 
considered them dangerous to society. He thought they were 
particularly dangerous to democracies, since democracies are full of 
good intentions which they develop bureaucracies to implement while 
being, as the same time, too unfocused in their authority to present 
much risk to them once established.

Weber also said this pertinent thing in regard to the cultural 
importance of secrecy to bureaucracies and their self-preservation:

The concept of the `official secret' is the specific invention of 
bureaucracy, and nothing is so fantastically defended by the 
bureaucracy as this attitude, which cannot be substantially defended 
beyond these specifically qualified areas.

Of course, it gets a lot worse when the bureaucracy is actually 
designed to be secretive and is wholly focused on other similar 
institutions.

The counter-productive information hoarding, the technological 
backwardness, the unaccountability, the moral laxity, the suspicion 
of public information, the arrogance, the xenophobia (and resulting 
lack of cultural and linguistic sophistication), the risk aversion, 
the recruiting homogeneity, the insularity, the preference for data 
acquisition over information dissemination, and the inutility of what 
is disseminated, all of these problems are the natural, and now fully 
mature, children of bureaucracy  and secrecy.

And these symptoms are embedded at a very granular level in the 
cultures of Intelligence. Individuals within that environment hold a 
strong belief that job security and power are defined by the amount 
of information once can stop from moving. One becomes more powerful 
based on his capacity to know things that no one else does. The same 
applies, in concentric circles of self-protection, to his team, his 
department, his section, and his agency. How can data be digested 
into information in a system like that? How can what little 
information is produced safely enter the infidel world of the Other, 
a category that unfortunately includes those for whom it was intended.

How can we expect the CIA and FBI to share information with each 
other when they're disinclined to share it within their own 
organizations? And it's gotten so bad that one of the revelations of 
the House Report on Counterterrorism Intelligence Capabilities and 
Performance Prior to 9-11 was that none of the responsible agencies 
shared the same definition of terrorism. It's hard to find something 
when you can't agree on what you're looking for.

The information they do divulge is flawed in a variety of ways. The 
"consumers" (as the spooks generally call policy-makers) are unable 
to determine the reliability of what they're getting because the 
sources are concealed.  Much of what they get is too undigested and 
voluminous to be useful to someone who is already in data-shock. And 
it's cumbersome. As one general put it, "I don't want information 
that requires three security officers and a safe to move it around 
the battlefield."

As a result, the consumers are increasingly more inclined to get 
their information from public sources. Colin Powell says that he 
prefers "the Early Bird with its compendium of newspaper stories to 
the President's Daily Brief. [The CIA's ultimate product.]

The same is true within the agencies themselves, it appears. While 
their finished products rarely make explicit use of what's been 
gleaned from the media, they routinely turn there for their own 
information. On the day I first visited the CIA's "mission control" 
room, the analysts around the lazy susan often turned their attention 
to the giant video monitors overhead. Four of these were showing the 
same CNN feed while the fifth displayed static.

Secrecy also breeds technological stagnation. In the early 90's, I 
was speaking to personnel from the DOE nuclear labs about computer 
security. I told them I thought that their emphasis on classification 
might be unnecessary since making a weapon was less a matter of 
information than industrial capacity. The recipe for a nuclear bomb 
has been generally available since 1978 when John Aristotle Phillips 
published plans in The Progressive.  Give me five kilos of enriched 
plutonium, ten gallons of tritium, a good machine shop, and some 
competent help, and I can make a bomb. I have the information. What I 
don't have is the plutonium and the tritium, which require an entire, 
highly industrialized nation to produce. Given that, I couldn't see 
why there were being so secretive.

The next speaker was Dr. Edward Teller, who surprised me by not only 
agreeing but pointing out both the role of open discourse in 
scientific progress as well as the futility of most information 
security. "If we made an important discovery, the Russians were 
usually able to get it within a year," he said. He went on: "After 
World War II, we were ahead of the Soviets in nuclear technology and 
about even with them in electronics. We maintained a closed system 
for nuclear design while designing electronics in the open. Their 
systems were closed in both regards. After 40 years, we are at parity 
in nuclear science, whereas, thanks to our open system in the study 
of electronics, we are decades ahead of Russians." This is a point 
that American Intelligence would do well to contemplate.

There is also the matter of budgetary unaccountability. The Director 
of Central Intelligence or DCI is supposed to be in charge of all the 
functions of Intelligence. In fact, he has control over less than 
15th of the total budget, only controlling the CIA. Several of the 
nine different intelligence reform commissions that have been 
convened since 1949 call for consolidating budgetary authority under 
the DCI, but this has never happened. (Nor have many of their other 
recommendations been instituted.)

With such hazy oversight, the intelligence agencies have become lazy 
and wasteful. They spent their money on toys, like satellite imaging 
systems and big iron computers (often obsolete by the time they're 
deployed) rather than developing the organizational capacity for 
analyzing all those snapshots from space, or training analysts in any 
other languages besides English and Russian, or infiltrating 
potentially dangerous groups, or investing in the resources necessary 
for good HUMINT (as they poetically call information gathered by 
humans, who are operating on the ground).

Fewer than 10 percent of the millions of satellite photographs have 
ever been seen by anybody. Only one third of the employees at the CIA 
speak any language besides English. Even if they do, it's generally 
either Russian or some obvious European language. I'm told that, on 
September 11, there was no one at Langley who was fluent in Arabic. I 
would guess there weren't any skilled Pashtan speakers either. Of 
what use are the NSA humungous code-breaking computers if no one can 
read the plain-text they extract from the encrypted stream?

Another systemic deficit of Intelligence lies, interestingly enough, 
in the area of good old-fashioned spying. Though it's intentions were 
noble, the Church Committee had a devastating effect on this 
necessary part of intelligence work. They caught the CIA in a number 
of dubious covert operations and took the guilty to task.

But rather than listen to the committee's essential message that they 
should renounce the sorts of nefarious deeds that the public would 
repudiate and limit secrecy to essential security considerations, the 
intelligence leadership responded by pulling most of their agents out 
of the field.

When asked these days why they have not infiltrated organizations 
like Al Queda - where, because of the passionate beliefs of their 
members, a good turn-coat is hard to find - intelligence officials 
protest that infiltration takes too long. I'm not persuaded. They've 
had plenty of time. Rather, I believe the main problem is 
bureaucratic risk aversion.

The decline of HUMINT is another area where reflexive classification 
has played a damaging role. There are a great many knowledgeable 
folks scattered around the globe who would be likely to cooperate in 
an effort to make America's policy-makers better-informed - 
journalists come to mind - but they are not willing to share their 
information if everything they say is immediately classified beyond 
their ability to repeat it to anyone else. In addition, they may not 
be willing to get the security clearances presently required of them. 
(I certainly wasn't.)

The list of intractable and systemic dysfunctions in our intelligence 
would fill many volumes, and, during the many reviews over the last 
forty three years, it has. Despite all the efforts aimed at 
sharpening these tools, they have only become progressively duller 
and more expensive.

We enter an era of asymmetrical threats, distributed over the entire 
globe, against which our most effective weapon is understanding. We 
are protected by entities that are geared to gazing upon one 
centrally located symmetrical threat using methods that optimize for 
obfuscation. What is to be done?

Surely not the proposed Department of Homeland Security. We already 
suffer the paralysis that arises from a huge bureaucratic hodgepodge 
over which the putative manager, the Director of Central 
Intelligence, lacks the budgetary authority that actual leadership 
requires. How much sense does it make to assemble an even larger 
collection of agencies under an executive who would have almost no 
capacity to manage the flow of funds?

How much sense does it make to spend even more billions on a system 
that has shown such a pathetic return on investment? (As one highly 
placed DIA official said to me, "Giving us more money at this point 
would be like feeding a fat woman ice cream as preparation for her 
running a marathon.")

Having realized that our informational digestive processes are 
constipated from excessive classification, how much sense does it 
make to impose an even broader blanket of secrecy?

Given that our intelligence agencies already lumber under as much as 
nine layers of management, how much sense does it make to lather on a 
couple more?

None, none, none, and none.

I believe it's time to start again, modestly and with a blank 
cultural slate. Just as General Motors realized that its culture 
could not compete with the Japanese and set about to create a new one 
with the Saturn Division, I believe we should create a new 
intelligence skunkworks along lines that are fitting to the times. I 
know, we already have 11 intelligence agencies that are incapable of 
talking to one another, but I think we're capable of making a new one 
that is distinctly different, the existence of which is hard coupled 
to its ability to produce better intelligence than one can get by 
reading the New York Times.

We might begin by asking with a clear mind what intelligence is for. 
The answer is simple. Intelligence exists to provide decision-makers 
with an accurate, comprehensive, and unbiased understanding of what's 
going on in the world. Intelligence exists to define reality for 
those whose actions could alter it. "Given our basic mission," one 
analyst said wearily, "we do better to study epistemology than 
missile emplacements."

If we are to be serious about defining reality, we might look at the 
system that presently defines reality for most of us, which is the 
scientific community. The Scientific Method is straightforward. 
Theories are openly advanced for examination and trial by the other 
members of the field. Scientists toil ceaselessly to create systems 
that will make all the information available to any of them available 
to all. They don't like secrets. They base their reputations on their 
ability to distribute their conclusions rather than the ability to 
conceal them. They recognize that reality is based on the widest 
possible consensus of perceptions. They know that their primary goal, 
objectivity, can only be derived by creating the largest possible 
collation of beliefs any one of which might be skewed by the 
subjective paradigm of their advocates. They are committed free 
marketeers in the commerce of thought. This method has worked 
fabulously well for five hundred years. It might be worth a try in 
the field of intelligence.

Intelligence has been focused on gathering information from expensive 
closed sources, such as satellites and clandestine agents, which it 
then compartmentalized into a solid that could not be condensed into 
useful meaning in most cases. Let's attempt to turn that proposition 
around. Let's create a process of information digestion where 
inexpensive data are gathered from largely open sources and 
transformed into knowledge that is terse and insightful enough to 
inspire wisdom in our leaders.

The entity I envision would be small, highly networked, and generally 
visible to the public in its processes. It would open to information 
from all available sources and would classify only the information 
that entered in a classified form. It would rely heavily on the 
Internet, the public media, the academic press, and an informal 
world-wide network of volunteers - a kind of Global Neighborhood 
Watch - that would submit on-the-ground reports regarding local 
events.

It would use off-the-shelf technology and use it less for gathering 
data than for collating and communicating it.  By virtue of using a 
streamlined technological acquisition system that didn't require 
conformity with the labyrinthine requisition system used by the 
Department of Defense, it would be able to use tools that were still 
state-of-the-art when they were deployed.

I imagine it being staffed initially with librarians, journalists, 
linguists, scientists, technologists, philosophers, sociologists, 
cultural historians, theologians, economists, philosophers, and 
artists, all of whose native cultures assign prestige on the basis of 
their ability to share information rather than squatting on it. Its 
budget would be under the direct authority of the President, acting 
through the National Security Advisor. Congressional oversight would 
reside in the committees on science and technology (and specifically 
not under the Joint Committee on Intelligence).

There are two problems with this proposal. First, it does not address 
the pressing need to re-establish clandestine human intelligence. 
Perhaps this new Open Intelligence Office could also work closely 
with a Clandestine Intelligence Bureau, also separate from the 
traditional agencies, that would consist of infiltrators and moles 
who would report their observations to the Open Intelligence Office 
through a technological membrane that would strip their identities 
from their findings. They operatives would be legally restricted to 
gathering information with harsh penalties attached to any engagement 
in covert operations.

The other problem is the Saturn dilemma. Once this new entity began 
to demonstrate its effectiveness in providing insight to 
policy-makers that was concise, timely, and accurate (as I believe it 
might), there would almost certainly be an effort by the traditional 
agencies to haul it back into the Mother Ship and break it. (As has 
essentially happened to Saturn.) I don't know how to deal with that 
one. No one at the CIA would happy to hear that the only thing the 
President and Cabinet read every morning was the OIO report. Measures 
would be taken.

But I think we can deal with that problem when we're lucky enough to 
have it. A more immediate problem would be keeping the existing 
agencies from aborting the Open Intelligence Office as soon as 
someone with the power to create it started thinking it might be a 
good idea. And, of course, there's also the unlikelihood that anyone 
who thinks that the Department of Homeland Security is a good idea 
would ever entertain such a possibility.

  Still. We have to do something, and preferably something useful. The 
United States of America has just taken its worst hit from the 
outside since 1812. Our existing systems for understanding the world 
are designed to understand one that no longer exists. It's time to 
try something that's the right kind of crazy. It's time to end the 
more traditional insanity of endlessly repeating the same futile 
efforts.

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[snip --XJ]

*************************************************************
John Perry Barlow, Cognitive Dissident
Co-Founder & Vice Chairman, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Berkman Fellow, Harvard Law School

[snip --XJ]