The Christmas Day Intelligence Failure – Part III of III: Deadly Transparency

In Part I I boiled down what went wrong.  In Part II I commented on the fix.  And now finally, I think it is important to point out what scares me most.

Sometimes transparency will get you dead.

If you had an arch enemy that was working feverishly to locate and kill you, would you publish your travel schedule, security strengths and weaknesses … down to the hour of the night you will be sleeping and the closest window?

Press accounts like this make me want to throw up.

Excerpt: “About four months before the attempted bombing on December 25, the NSA intercepted telephone conversations in which the leaders of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula talked about the possibility of using an unidentified "Nigerian" bomber in an attack, according to intelligence officials.”

Every al Qaeda operative (big fish or little fish) in the Arabian Peninsula that said anything on the phone about this attack is going to think they were overheard.  As such, they are ALL going to be more careful next time.

Consequences: Bad guys improve their tradecraft.  US intelligence loses signal – going deaf is a bad thing.  Net net, the likelihood of bad things happening in future, without detection, increases.

Well this is just [expletive ending in ‘ing’ omitted] great news … for the enemy!

I am a big fan of transparency, but when it is details from our play book … we are going to have to have some better judgment.

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Comments

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=766425653]

In this specific scenario, are you suggesting that these terrorists didn't already know that phone lines are monitored by the NSA? It's pretty well known that they have this ability.

People get caught all the time by what they shouldn't say or email. And remember criminals typically think they will not be caught before they try to commit a crime.

[Ian Story]

I think that the point being we don't need to remind the bad guys that we're watching them and cause them to get more careful...it will lessen the mistakes that they make. One wonders though if since they know that we watch them, if they deliberately pass misinformation...and then if we know that they know that we know... :)

In the end though, I think it is better to focus on the successful stops, not the HOW people were stopped...although our society (and media) always are fascinated with the details (and there are many good reasons why folks that are involved in civil liberties are concerned with no transparency), to Jeff's point, revealing too much can be more harmful in the end.

Here's a creepy thought - I wonder if any of these bad guys read Jeff's blog?

[David Mattox]

There is a difference in assuming that all communications are monitored and seeing evidence that your personal communications have been monitored. People are not nearly as careful when there is only a general notion of a threat. Crime still occurs even though criminals know that the police are out there looking for crime. But if criminals know that police are targeting a specific city block then they will avoid it. The NYT story gave a specific example. The persons involved in that particular communications transaction will recognize it know that they have being personally targeted and will adapt accordingly.