slopes that ought not to be considered slippery

in combination with short-sightedness:

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1962643,00.html

If this is anything like based in fact--and there are enough things pointed to in this article to make it pretty easy to check--then I _really_ want to know why this apparently hasn't received any US media coverage.

This looks like a classic case of what can happen when law enforcement officials decide that the pursuit of a particular goal is more important than their overall mission--to put it rather antiseptically. Put another way, it's an account of what appears to be major malfeasance on the part of some Department of Homeland Security personnel--possibly including some highly-placed ones--including complicity (after the fact) in multiple murders.

national intelligence services and social software

Open-Source Spying

The title is quite misleading, really; the article has nothing to do with open source, and actually less to do with spying than to do with managing and working with the information generated from spying.

Aside from that, though, it's a very interesting overview of some of the issues that have been identified inside the various US' three-letter agencies regarding the tensions between existing bureaucratic practice, attempts to modernize, the need for "need to know" restrictions, the need for distributed high-quality analysis, and the need for relevant information.

If I had more faith in the US government's goals and observance of its (supposed) principles, in some ways this sounds like an interesting set of problems to try to help solve. If nothing else, though, I think that Microsoft is a big enough bureaucracy for me to practice breaking my head against for now.

A provocative question: what effects on policy might result from the widespread adoption, inside the intelligence services, of such tools as wikis, blogs, and hyperlinking?