So Instapundit will get paid from now on?
CIA using its own blogs to gather, analyze information - By Susan B. Glasser
The Washington Post ( Mmm, they would know if anyone would )
WASHINGTON -- The CIA now has its own bloggers.
In a bow to the rise of Internet-era secrets hidden in plain view, the agency has started hosting Web logs with the latest information on topics including North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il's public visit to a military installation (his 38th this year) and the Burmese media's silence on a ministry reshuffling.
It even has a blog on blogs, dedicated to cracking the code of what useful information can be gleaned from the rapidly expanding milieu of online journals and weird electronic memorabilia.
The blogs are posted on an unclassified, government-wide Web site, part of a rechristened CIA office for monitoring, translating and analyzing publicly available information called the DNI Open Source Center.
The center, which officially debuted this month under the aegis of the new director for national intelligence, marks the latest wave of reorganization to come out of the recommendations of several commissions that analyzed the failures of intelligence collection related to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
They pointed to decentralized and insufficient efforts to tap into the huge realm of public information in the Internet era, and a climate of disdain for such information among spy agencies.
By adding the new center, "they've changed the strategic visibility," said Douglas Naquin, a CIA veteran named to direct the center. But, in an interview last week at CIA headquarters, he added that "managing the world's unclassified knowledge . . . (is) much bigger than any one organization can do."
Today's Open Source Center began life as the Foreign Broadcast Information Service in 1941, when it was charged with monitoring and translating media.
At the height of the Cold War, it was FBIS translators who pored through the latest issues of Izvestia and Pravda from the Soviet Union, providing the little hints such as a word change that might signal something broader for the CIA's Kremlinologists.
The Washington Post ( Mmm, they would know if anyone would )
WASHINGTON -- The CIA now has its own bloggers.
In a bow to the rise of Internet-era secrets hidden in plain view, the agency has started hosting Web logs with the latest information on topics including North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il's public visit to a military installation (his 38th this year) and the Burmese media's silence on a ministry reshuffling.
It even has a blog on blogs, dedicated to cracking the code of what useful information can be gleaned from the rapidly expanding milieu of online journals and weird electronic memorabilia.
The blogs are posted on an unclassified, government-wide Web site, part of a rechristened CIA office for monitoring, translating and analyzing publicly available information called the DNI Open Source Center.
The center, which officially debuted this month under the aegis of the new director for national intelligence, marks the latest wave of reorganization to come out of the recommendations of several commissions that analyzed the failures of intelligence collection related to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
They pointed to decentralized and insufficient efforts to tap into the huge realm of public information in the Internet era, and a climate of disdain for such information among spy agencies.
By adding the new center, "they've changed the strategic visibility," said Douglas Naquin, a CIA veteran named to direct the center. But, in an interview last week at CIA headquarters, he added that "managing the world's unclassified knowledge . . . (is) much bigger than any one organization can do."
Today's Open Source Center began life as the Foreign Broadcast Information Service in 1941, when it was charged with monitoring and translating media.
At the height of the Cold War, it was FBIS translators who pored through the latest issues of Izvestia and Pravda from the Soviet Union, providing the little hints such as a word change that might signal something broader for the CIA's Kremlinologists.
posted by professor rat at 8:48 AM
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