

The Limitations of Intelligence - antsar
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/the_limitations.html

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jessaustin
On the topic of the agencies' own success criteria: Schneier theorizes that
NSA measures "by amount of data collected". While he declines to speculate as
to the CIA's criteria, he suggests that their surprise at the end of the Cold
War was not to their credit.

I think this is a misunderstanding. Any agency of the federal government
measures success first and foremost by the volume of federal resources it
consumes, and by the swelling of that volume over time. This priority is
seldom articulated, and it isn't as though the "real" mission is ignored, but
the structure of the organization and the incentives to which its members are
subject make it obvious. To take the example of the NSA, their commitment to
_copy all the data_ is really a commitment to maintain their size at a fixed
ratio with a quantity that will grow indefinitely.

Some might say this is a failing of the system, but it's enough to just
recognize it as a property of the system. If we want the federal government to
do a job, it usually will, but its performance will have this grow-spending-
always, mission-as-afterthought quality. That isn't too terrible when the job
at hand is redistributing wealth among the citizens: at least there's a chance
that the progressive and regressive impulses will cancel out. When the task is
actively destructive to the nation and the world, however, the organization
must be controlled in some manner. No such entity will limit itself.

We are equipped to curb the excesses of e.g. the Department of Agriculture.
However, the "secret" agencies have gotten a free pass from public scrutiny
for 75 years. The answer to the dilemma is to end the culture of secrecy. No
action of the USA government should be concealed from its citizens. There will
be trade-offs involved with switching to this policy. Certain operations will
be difficult or impossible when they can't be hidden from view. Those
operations are typically counter to the long-term interests of the American
people anyway, and the sooner they are stopped the better.

The unsavory, if still limited, view we have now of the actions of these
agencies, speaks not of a failing of those agencies, but of our failing to
understand their basic nature, and govern them accordingly.

~~~
bazillion
Highly incorrect. NSA success is measured through a reporting system that
tracks which reports are cited in other reports, and which reports get used in
briefs (and the relative level of brief). This mechanism is used to determine
the relative importance (funding) of certain functions, and used to cull
functions that are not ultimately reportable. The ultimate say-so in targeting
comes from the administration, based on what information they're most
interested in.

~~~
jessaustin
So there is a possible future in which the President, his advisers, and others
in the executive branch throw out so many reports and briefs as "useless, not
worth the paper to print" the stench of ineptitude so overwhelms the NSA brass
that they spontaneously decide, themselves, to stop building in Utah and not
_collect all the data_?

Yeah, right. Pull the other one. Next you'll tell me an incumbent chief of
police has realized the folly of The Drug War.

------
ilaksh
Let me say first that I am a technologist and I do have generally speaking an
optimistic view of the future where technology actually solves most of our
problems. I believe in the concept of the singularity where super-intelligent
AI makes human intelligence irrelevant. I have a completely different
worldview from almost everyone reading this thread so what I am about to say
will probably just be dismissed as "conspiracy theories" or something but I
need to say it just in case some people may be able to get something out of it
without dismissing it out of hand.

Its going to be difficult for anyone who routinely exposes themselves to
mainstream news sources to see any of what I am about to say as being
credible. Especially in the tech community where rose-colored glasses are
almost ubiquitous.

He wonders why they didn't stop the Syria chemical weapons attack and the
Boston one. The reason is that those were false flag attacks. The Syria attack
was committed by US-backed rebels and then blamed on the regime in order to be
used as propaganda to motivate the extension of the covert proxy war in Syria
into an overt one involving the US forces directly.

The Boston attack was used to motivate gun control which is important for
securing the state against dissident factions when the economic situation
deteriorates dramatically as it is likely to at some point when a substantive
challenge to the petrodollar status is mounted.

Back to the war in Syria, I urge everyone to take a look at some maps of the
middle east and Africa and make an X in all of the countries where the US and
allies or related countries have been involved in recent decades (centuries).
You will see that this is a long term military campaign rather than a series
of isolated wars. Also take a look at a list of countries by proven oil
reserves. Also look up 'petrodollar'.

[http://www.indymedia.org.uk/images/2007/01/359290.jpg](http://www.indymedia.org.uk/images/2007/01/359290.jpg)

The Afghan War should be considered the Third Opium War as it was largely
motivated by the Taliban wiping out the heroin cash crop belonging to the
Anglo establishment and intelligence agencies.
[http://publicintelligence.net/wp-
content/uploads/2012/11/Afg...](http://publicintelligence.net/wp-
content/uploads/2012/11/AfghanOpiumSurvey2012-1.png)

The purpose of the NSA is not to control terrorism. It is to keep tabs on
potential enemies of the US, both domestic and foreign. All US citizens and
foreigners are actually considered potential enemies of the state. The closest
thing for people to understand is to compare it to the East German Stasi. This
type of apparatus may seem unnecessary now while the US is fat, happy and
sitting pretty, but like I mentioned, the petrodollar cannot continue forever,
and the state knows that. Economic conditions will some day change very
dramatically and lead to large-scale hunger, and at that time the previous
removal of citizen's arms and vast surveillance network will make the state
much more secure in the face of growing domestic dissent.

Of course since most people have a totally different world view and are
constantly bombarded by propaganda on television, this will all just seem like
nonsense to you.

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dmarusic16
I know it's sort of orthogonal to the point Schneier is making, but to my
mind, many of his suppositions relating to Syria are off. I don't think doing
preventative strikes even if we knew Assad was about to gas hundreds of
civilians were on the table. That logic--prevention--was used in Libya and it
has rightly fallen out of favor with the Obama administration, mostly because
Libya has proven to be a real shit-show. In any case, attacking before a crime
is committed is a dangerous precedent to set on the world stage, a recipe for
perpetual war.

The limits of intelligence are real, but the Syria example is not the best one
to use to illustrate the point.

~~~
jessaustin
_...mostly because Libya has proven to be a real shit-show._

Did rational people expect otherwise? Fool us once, shame on the military-
industrial-media-lobbyist complex. Fool us seventeen times...

------
lutusp
> I don't know how the CIA measures its success, but it failed to predict the
> end of the Cold War.

The answer is obvious -- the end of the Cold war hinged on the end of the
USSR, and the end of the USSR was not a matter of intelligence, but broad
historical forces and chance. If the CIA had had perfect field data, it still
wouldn't have predicted the end of the Cold War, because the Russians didn't
see it coming either.

This wasn't an intelligence failure, because no one had the required
intelligence.

~~~
snowwrestler
I agree, and would add that the mission of the CIA is to assess foreign
threats to the U.S.

The end of the Soviet Union was not a threat to the U.S., thus predicting the
exact date of its occurrence was not a priority.

~~~
smacktoward
The sudden end of the Soviet Union was a _massive_ threat to the United
States.

The Soviet Union was a regime that by the 1980s had amassed a stockpile of
tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, which were stored and deployed across
the vast interior of the USSR. The regime was the only guarantor of the
security of those weapons. A breakdown of the regime would (and did) throw
open the question of _who now controlled those weapons._ A new successor
state? Individual breakaway republics? Factions within the army or internal
security forces? Non-state actors? Random locals who happened to show up at a
silo with a big enough mob behind them to claim them?

The USSR also had huge conventional forces stationed across Eastern Europe,
Asia and Africa. If the authority these forces reported to were to suddenly
break down, how would they respond? Would factions among them split and fight
each other? Would a general use his tanks to set himself up as King of Poland?
Would a revanchist politician rally the army to establish a military
dictatorship?

With hindsight we know the answers to these questions, but at the time we did
not. Which is why intelligence agencies exist -- to help answer them.

Thanks to quick thinking and quick action by both Americans and Russians (and
Ukrainians, and Belarusians, and Kazakhs, etc.) in the years following the
dissolution of the USSR, Soviet conventional and nuclear forces were (mostly)
secured. (See [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/story/2009/09/2...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/story/2009/09/20/ST2009092002315.html) for an example of one story
from that time.) But there were no guarantees at the time that things would
turn out as well as they did. So the question of whether the USSR was breaking
up _should_ have been of urgent interest to the CIA, because a breakup that
went bad could have had catastrophic consequences for the US and the world.

~~~
snowwrestler
That's a great point and I did not think of it that way. Thanks.

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lifeisstillgood
I think it is worth reviewing the "Schneier Doctrine" as I understand it:

Principles

* Security is a trade off between safety and freedom / cost

* Prevention is not always the most cost effective trade-off. Emergency response is often better.

* Stories make a huge difference in how humans perceive threats around us - and can therefore make a difference in correcting the perceived threat model to match the actual threat model.

Doctrine (not sure he has ever voiced these...)

* Define National Security quantatively (less than 1,000 expected deaths, or loss of less than 1% GDP its not national security). If someone slaps a National Security Letter on you today, its laughable, if personally threatening. If they slap a NSL on you _when that means they seriously think a 1,000 people could die if you do not comply_ its not laughable.

* Massively increase spend on post-event support (ambulance, decontamination).

* Run public security "games" where teams of experts kill as many of us as possible using only items found in CostCo. (Trying to reframe the perceived threat model to meet the actual threat model). Simon Cowell could present it.

~~~
ryusage
You're basically correct about his principles, but I feel like your post makes
it sound like Schneier's just trying to save money and doesn't care about the
actual lives involved.

I think an important point is that it is literally impossible to prevent all
crime. Not only is it impossible, but as you try harder and harder to prevent
it, you get diminishing returns _and_ an increase in false positives (which we
also want to avoid). So yeah, there has to be a tradeoff. If you can't ever
get the number of deaths down to zero, then you have to decide, how low is
close enough and how much are you willing to sacrifice to get there?

Right now, we're sacrificing a crap ton, and it's really not clear that it's
gaining us all that much.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
I beleive Schneier does care and was not intending to come across as
belittling such things. Despite the Chuck Norris meme I am sure he is as human
as the rest of us :-)

Its just we do live in a world where somehow we must efficiently allocate
resources. In the UK we use a term QALY (Quality years of life) which is used
to decide between which operations should go ahead (likelihood of success x
expected number of qualifty years) - so a 80 year old looking for kidney
dialysis is lower down the list than a youth looking for a common hip
replacement. The US does it simply on income.

We should I feel have a debate on these things - why is it cars can kill
thousands but a cancer drug cannot kill one or two. These trade offs get made
in odd ways - and while I doubt we shall ever have politicians campaigning on
the slogan "vote for me, only a tiny percentage of you will die because of it"
its an important discussion.

I would suggest also a poll taken in the security / check-in lines at JFK:

    
    
      Would you support allowing one major terrorist outrage 
      a year if it would reduce queueing at airports by 
    
      a) 1 hour, 
      b) 2 hours 
      c) eliminate queues completely?
    

:-)

------
corresation
Who assumes that what the intelligence report says now is actually based in
fact and not in convenient fiction? The US poised to attack Syria -- having
long supported the opposition -- and the stars needed to align to help that
happen. For a released intelligence report to yield the very strongly desired
results, among a collection of agencies with a long history of bending the
truth (patriotic so long as it served the end goal), should be met with a
hefty serving of skepticism.

~~~
ryanackley
Totally agree, Call me a cynic but Schneier doesn't mention the possibility
that the administration knew they could have effectively prevented their use
but they don't really care that much about chemical weapons or the people of
Syria. In fact, they may have seen their use as a political opportunity to
provide justification for furthering American interests in the middle-east.

