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defrogYou may have heard there was this guy who failed to set off a bomb in his pants this past Christmas.
Anyway, much has been said about the fact that Mr SizzlePants probably shouldn’t have been let on the plane and if only someone had been able to connect the dots, he never would have been able to fail to kill hundreds of people.
Which is of course what everyone was saying back when 9/11 happened, and when Richard “Hot Foot” Reid did almost exactly what Mr SizzlePants did.
It’s easy to say that Junior Bush’s bright idea of taking all the different intel agencies that weren't the CIA or FBI and jamming them under one big fat Department Of Homeland Security – which was supposed to prevent things like this – was a big fat waste of effort and money. Which is true. On the other hand, as security god Bruce Schneier wrote all the way back in 2002, “connecting the dots” in the intel world is nowhere as easy as politicians make it sound:
Throw in the perennial issues of turf wars, office politics, budget restrictions and other things that all govt agencies have to deal with – to say nothing of the political agendas of whoever is President at the time – and you start to see how complicated all this is. There are plenty of successes, but eventually there’s going to be a failure.
Not that this will make a difference on the Sunday chat shows where politicians and media take a very complex system and boil it down into ludricrously simplistic talking points that will fall under one of two categories: “It’s Obama’s fault” or “It’s Bush’s fault”. When Rudy “Nine Eleven” Giuliani can get away with saying that there were no domestic terror attacks in the US while Bush was President – and George Stephanopoulos doesn’t even have the sense to say “Now wait just a minute ...” – yr not going to be hearing a lot of sensible ideas on how to improve security, much less get people to accept the reality that every once in awhile, yr going to miss one.
Anyway, you might want to read this evaluation of what worked and what didn’t in the SizzlePants episode, and also this essay on things we should be discussing when we look at “fixing” intelligence failures. Alternately, you could just put Schneier’s blog on yr RSS feed and keep up with it.
Mister Fixit,
This is dF
Anyway, much has been said about the fact that Mr SizzlePants probably shouldn’t have been let on the plane and if only someone had been able to connect the dots, he never would have been able to fail to kill hundreds of people.
Which is of course what everyone was saying back when 9/11 happened, and when Richard “Hot Foot” Reid did almost exactly what Mr SizzlePants did.
It’s easy to say that Junior Bush’s bright idea of taking all the different intel agencies that weren't the CIA or FBI and jamming them under one big fat Department Of Homeland Security – which was supposed to prevent things like this – was a big fat waste of effort and money. Which is true. On the other hand, as security god Bruce Schneier wrote all the way back in 2002, “connecting the dots” in the intel world is nowhere as easy as politicians make it sound:
Rather than thinking of intelligence as a simple connect-the-dots picture, think of it as a million unnumbered pictures superimposed on top of each other. Or a random-dot stereogram. Is it a lion, a tree, a cast iron stove, or just an unintelligible mess of dots? You try and figure it out.
Throw in the perennial issues of turf wars, office politics, budget restrictions and other things that all govt agencies have to deal with – to say nothing of the political agendas of whoever is President at the time – and you start to see how complicated all this is. There are plenty of successes, but eventually there’s going to be a failure.
Not that this will make a difference on the Sunday chat shows where politicians and media take a very complex system and boil it down into ludricrously simplistic talking points that will fall under one of two categories: “It’s Obama’s fault” or “It’s Bush’s fault”. When Rudy “Nine Eleven” Giuliani can get away with saying that there were no domestic terror attacks in the US while Bush was President – and George Stephanopoulos doesn’t even have the sense to say “Now wait just a minute ...” – yr not going to be hearing a lot of sensible ideas on how to improve security, much less get people to accept the reality that every once in awhile, yr going to miss one.
Anyway, you might want to read this evaluation of what worked and what didn’t in the SizzlePants episode, and also this essay on things we should be discussing when we look at “fixing” intelligence failures. Alternately, you could just put Schneier’s blog on yr RSS feed and keep up with it.
Mister Fixit,
This is dF
