Open-Source Spying: Into the mainstream (!) [ NYT ]

 In addition, civil libertarians are alarmed by the idea of spies 
casually passing sensitive information around from one agency to 
another. “I don’t want the N.S.A. passing on information about innocent 
Americans to local cops in San Diego,” Weinberger said. “Those laws 
exist for good reasons.”

In many ways, the new generation of Web-savvy spies frames the same 
troubling questions as the Patriot Act, which sought to break down the 
barriers preventing military spy agencies from conducting operations 
inside the United States, on American citizens, and then sharing that 
information with domestic groups. On a sheerly practical level, it makes 
sense to get rid of all barriers: why not let the N.S.A. wiretap 
American conversations? Vice President Cheney has argued forcefully that 
these historical barriers between agencies hobble the American military 
and intelligence forces; the Patriot Act was designed in part to 
eliminate them. Terrorist groups like Al Qaeda heed no such boundaries, 
which is precisely why they can move so quickly and nimbly.

Then again, there’s a limit to how much the United States ought to 
emulate Al Qaeda’s modus operandi. “The problems the spies face are 
serious; I sympathize with that,” Shirky told me. “But they shouldn’t be 
wiping up every bit of information about every American citizen.” The 
Pentagon’s infamous Total Information Awareness program, which came to 
light in 2002, was intended to scoop up information on citizens from a 
variety of sources — commercial purchase databases, government records — 
and mine it for suggestive terrorism connections. But to many Americans, 
this sort of dot-connecting activity seemed like an outrageous violation 
of privacy, and soon after it was exposed, the program was killed. James 
X. Dempsey, director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, 
maintains that the laws on spying and privacy need new clarity. The 
historic morass of legislation, including the Patriot Act, has become 
too confusing, he says; both spies and the public are unsure what walls 
exist. While Dempsey agrees that agencies should probably be allowed to 
swap more information than they currently do, he says that revamped 
rules must also respect privacy — “otherwise, we’ll keep on producing 
programs that violate people’s sense of what’s right, and they’ll keep 
getting shut down.”

For all the complaints about hardware, the challenges are only in part 
about technology. They are also about political will and institutional 
culture — and whether the spy agencies can be persuaded to change. Some 
former intelligence officials have expressed skepticism about whether 
Meyerrose and Fingar and their national-intelligence colleagues have the 
clout and power to persuade the agencies to adopt this new paradigm. 
Though D.N.I. officials say they have direct procurement authority over 
technology for all the agencies, there’s no evidence yet that Meyerrose 
will be able to make a serious impact on the eight spy agencies in the 
Department of Defense, which has its own annual $38 billion intelligence 
budget — the lion’s share of all the money the government spends on 
spying. When I spoke to Wilson P. Dizard III, a writer with Government 
Computer News who has covered federal technology issues for two decades, 
he said, “You have all these little barons at N.S.A. and C.I.A. and 
whatever, and a lot of people think they’re not going to do what the 
D.N.I. says, if push comes to shove.”

Today’s spies exist in an age of constant information exchange, in which 
everyday citizens swap news, dial up satellite pictures of their houses 
and collaborate on distant Web sites with strangers. As John Arquilla 
told me, if the spies do not join the rest of the world, they risk 
growing to resemble the rigid, unchanging bureaucracy that they once 
confronted during the cold war. “Fifteen years ago we were fighting the 
Soviet Union,” he said. “Who knew it would be replicated today in the 
intelligence community?”

cont'd....
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/magazine/03intelligence.html?_r=1&oref=slogin