As it’d be a bit hard to miss, if you’ve read the paper today or watched or listened to the news, a gentleman was killed last night after pulling a gun on two security officers at The Pentagon. The shooter, John Patrick Bedell, was a white American male.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not happy that Bedell wounded two guards and caused a great deal of mayhem and confusion. Nor am I happy about the people killed at Fort Hood recently. Or the people who died in Texas after Joe Stack plowed his plane into an IRS office there. Or the victims of the Holocaust Museum shooting, or any of the other incidents of late. I’m not one to celebrate pain and suffering, as a rule.

That said, a big part of me is happy, in a kind of abstract way, that these incidents have happened. And, in a way, a small part of me hopes that they continue to happen.
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One thing that has often amused me about the guidance offered to novice or would-be employees in the intelligence field - be it national security intelligence, law enforcement intelligence, or business or competitive intelligence - is that there are any number of books, websites, classes, and other resources that tell you how to produce a good final product, but there are almost no good examples of actual final products to use as examples.

Intelligence relies greatly on the written word, and while everybody has their own idea of what formats should be used, and so on, there are a lot of more fundamental things that are somewhat universally considered “best practices” - the use of words of estimative probability, for example. There are some very good books that will teach you most of the fundamentals, but they all either leave it to the reader to put all the pieces together, or use samples or examples that are dated and don’t fully reflect modern practices.

If your job is to write, say, press releases, I can assure you that there are lots of classes, books, and resources that show you examples of successful, recent, real-world press releases. If you spend a lot of money to learn to write screenplays, you’re going to learn by looking at real, honest-to-goodness screenplays.

If you’re supposed to learn how to write intelligence reports, you’re given some vague guidance on what’s in vogue just at the moment, and kind of left to fend for yourself.

Strange, isn’t it?
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In 2007 - yes, 2007 - I came across a reference to a paper written by Chris Rasmussen - who some readers might recognize as a NGIA employee and one of the more vocal and visible proponents of Intellipedia. The paper was entitled Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants in the US Intelligence Community, and discussed, among other things, how and why the intelligence community (IC) should adopt reasonably modern information technology, rather than relying on the technology of a quarter-century ago.

I requested a copy of the paper through the FOIA, and asked for the report to be provided in electronic format. Ironically, given the subject of the paper, it was eventually released as photocopies… some two years later.

I don’t know the exact date it was written - Mr. Rasmussen has never bothered to reply to my emails asking about the paper - but I think it was 2006 or early 2007. Given the changing nature of technology, it’s a bit dated in the “real world”, but I’m pretty confident that it’s still very relevant to the IC, which is still thinking - at a glacial pace, I might add - about making a decision about adopting new technology at some point in the future Real Soon Now.

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants isn’t a hugely exciting paper, but it’s been cited in a few public places, and deserves to be available to the world at large. If you have a professional or academic interest in this sort of thing, you can download a copy here (16pp, 5.5MB PDF).

Enjoy…

Google is set to make some waves with today’s announcement concerning its relationship with China, and I’m sure that all the usual suspects will be making all the usual noises about the situation.

Offered for your consideration at this moment, however, is a question I suspect will not figure prominently in any of the discussions of Google, China, and the alleged cyber-attacks that Google has revealed…
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Recently, I waded through the fiscal year 2010 budget request/justification documents for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which for the most part are about as unexciting as you might expect. A couple of things, however, stood out as kind of interesting and worthy of discussion, so I thought I’d go over them here.

Part of the budget documents include performance metrics that the Bureau have assigned to themselves; they then annually grade themselves on how well they’re doing. I’m honestly not clear why this is the case, unless - however cynical it might be - they’re there just to make the Bureau “look good” and successful come budget-request time.
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