Yesterday, I wrote about India’s plans to develop their own version of the Department of Homeland Security, and why I thought this was a bad idea. Today, I stumbled across a quote which I think sums up the whole issue:

“The most debilitating factor in the Indian intelligence war on terrorism has been the reluctance, and even refusal, to share information among the intelligence and security agencies.”

Creating a new agency that doesn’t talk to any of the other agencies isn’t going to change anything, other than add a new scapegoat for future failures. Information sharing, not bureaucracy, is what the country needs most right now, and fusion centers could well be an answer to that problem.

(From the India Times, via Analyst’s Corner.)

Assorted goodness, short-attention-span style:

Government and military intelligence analysis is “old news”, but law-enforcement intelligence is still an uncommon enough “emerging field” that it attracts attention when it’s done right. Modern law enforcement agencies collect and generate enormous quantities of raw information, but it’s unfortunately infrequent that anything useful is done with it.

Pirates attacked a cruise ship yesterday, off the coast of Somalia. Nobody was injured, and the cruise ship was able to outrun the pirate speedboats. (Go figure.) At what point do we just give up and start forming ships up into convoys with military escorts again?

On a related note, a week or two ago, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation aired a 20-minute segment on Somali piracy, which you can listen to right here (20min, 9.3MB MP3). Interesting stuff!

From the BBC, of all places, comes a fascinating look at the influence of Yiddish on American culture.

And, because it’s important to end on a happy note with these things, you may sleep comfortable tonite knowing that Iran has flippantly dismissed Israeli threats as merely “a form of psychological war.”