Stopping the next attack
There have been chilling remarks recently from Cheney and Rumsfeld, among others, that it is not a matter of if another attack will occur, but when. Former CIA director James Woolsey outlines some important steps in his piece entitled "Foiling the Next Attack" in today's WSJ.
He points out that some people did anticipate that 9/11 could happen and did try to get us to focus on the possibility of suicide attacks. Those people did so based not on foreign intelligence but on their own judgment, sparked by other sources of information. Therefore, we must now concentrate on finding, and getting judgments made by, the people who are likely to be right. Woolsey recommends combing academics, Nobel Prize winners, and law enforcement to get creative about anticipating and stopping the next attack.
Woolsey makes other points about intelligence on the next attack:
-- Foreign intelligence will rarely work and rarely gives us advanced notice of an attack. Also foreign intelligence may not be that useful in part because much of the planning for these attacks actually happens in the US, where the civil liberties are strongly protected.
-- Intercepted communications might work, but we have to be much more guarded about sharing the intercepts. After all, we were tapping Bin Laden's phone until it leaked to the press, was reported, and Bin Laden stopped using it.
-- Information about future attacks will come from:
- -- interrogating prisoners captured abroad
-- capturing terrorists' computers in Afghanistan
-- law enforcement investigations here in the U.S.
-- tips from friendly intelligence and law-enforcement organizations in other countries
-- our spies and our collection of electronic intelligence.
-- It is essential that the potpourri of information available to the government--including assessments of our infrastructure's vulnerabilities, foreign intelligence, law-enforcement material, and the hunches of FBI agents and academic analysts--to be pulled together in one place and assessed by experts. The Patriot Act eliminated some of the barriers to sharing information.
Chris Alden
Christopher J. Alden is Chairman & CEO of Six Apart Ltd., the world's leading blogging company. Six Apart acquired Rojo Networks, Inc., creator of an innovative RSS feed reading service, where Mr. Alden was co-founder and CEO. Before Rojo, he was CEO of Red Herring Communications, Inc., publisher of Red Herring magazine -- described by the Wall Street Journal as the "bible of Silicon Valley" - which he helped launch out of his house in 1993. Prior to that he founded Computer Guides, a consultancy.
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