Spy Agencies Turn To Online Sources For Info

palegray.net sends us to US News and World Report for an article about increased spy agency use of online sources. Turning to well-known destinations such as NPR and Wikipedia, folks in the intelligence world are increasingly filling their reports with information gleaned from the public domain. "A few days ago, a senior officer at the Pentagon called his intelligence officer into his office. The boss had heard a news report about China while driving to his office and wanted some answers. It wasn't a tough assignment, given the news coverage, but there was a hitch. 'There was plenty of information in the public domain about the topic,' recalls the intelligence officer, a 10-year veteran. 'And yet, if there wasn't some classified information cited in my report, the boss would never believe it was accurate.'"

Comments

incompetence

[globaljustin]

With all the resources the DoD, CIA, FBI, etc. have at their disposal, this shouldn't happen. Sure, occasionally the MSM or a blogger will scoop the military, but with the hundreds of thousands of people we pay with our tax dollars to do this, it shouldn't be very often.

Incompetence has taken hold of our government like never before, and we have been experiencing the effects since before 9/11.

Re:How naive can people get?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is called "official cover", but the spies aren't in any way covert (it now US law that if a memebr of, say, the CIA has ever been posted overseas with official cover, they can never do covert work - because CIA managers tried to get cute and lots of people died).

And if the deceased who passed away due to the CIA managers' mistake were government employees, then at least no innocent life was lost.