My son David alerted me to Army Reserve Captain Kris Alexander’s article calling for blogs on Intelink. Alexander wants the intelligence community to follow the Army’s example in making blogs available to soldiers;
“The first step toward reform: Encourage blogging on Intelink. When I Google "Afghanistan blog" on the public Internet, I find 1.1 million entries and tons of useful information. But on Intelink there are no blogs. Imagine if the experts in every intelligence field were turned loose - all that's needed is some cheap software. It's not far-fetched to picture a top-secret CIA blog about al Qaeda, with postings from Navy Intelligence and the FBI, among others. Leave the bureaucratic infighting to the agency heads. Give good analysts good tools, and they'll deliver outstanding results.”.
Intelligence analysts – actually, all knowledge workers – face the ethical challenge of telling the truth when they are uncertain about their knowledge of the truth. Analysts work for large institutions and large institutions are – and must be - resistant to change. Institutions are created, in part, to be sure that good things keep happening and, in part to prevent bad things from happening. Sooner or later changes to the existing structure or prevailing mindset becomes one of the “bad things” to be prevented. Intelligence managers must prevent alerting the White House in response to every analyst who runs around shouting that “the wolf is coming”. Sometimes this prevention of unreasonable alerts develops into a corporate mentality of of institutionalized denial.
As a former intelligence insider, I can recall analysts claiming an ethical dilemma when managers overruled their warnings. In some cases their analysis was unsound. In others, it was sound, but could not be heard because of the corporate culture –the Columbia shuttle disaster is an excellent example.
Alexander makes the case for blogs as a means for analysts to make their positions known. It would be much less expensive than our currently efforts at intelligence reform. Blogs are a means of confronting denial. They contain self-correcting mechanisms that tend to prevent "crying wolf" in order to attract attention.
My guess is that it will happen, with or without, the approval of Intelink managers. The Intelligence community will have about as much success resisting blogs as the institutional church had resisting the printing press.
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