INTELLIGENCE AGENCY BLOGGING GEEKS: NY Times Mag discovers new intel philosopher's stones. Will they turn gold into lead?

The New York Times Sunday mag's "Open Source Spying," written by Clive Thompson, purported to reveal how US intelligence agencies are being rewired by young analysts into usefulness via blogging and wikipedias.

DD is going to demolish this fancy in a few strokes.

First, eyeball the messenger -- Clive Thompson.

Thompson writes about tech stuff on an infrequent basis for the magazine. If you're ill-informed but interested what the future may hold and doubly keen on reading of young geek personalities as coloring characters, it's good stuff.

Consider Thompson's NYT mag piece from February 2004, "The Virus Underground." In it Thompson investigated teenage virus-writers with funny names, a fairly captivating subject, and one DD covered for about a decade.

However Thompson couldn't stay away from government experts and doomsday predictions, hopefully with computer viruses dragged in for variety.

And so, DD blog reprints this cool paragraph from the magazine:

The profusion of viruses has even become a national-security issue. Government officials worry that terrorists could easily launch viruses that cripple American telecommunications, sowing confusion in advance of a physical 9/11-style attack. Paula Scalingi, the former director of the Department of Energy's Office of Critical Infrastructure Protection, now works as a consultant running disaster-preparedness exercises. Last year she helped organize 'Purple Crescent' in New Orleans, an exercise that modeled a terrorist strike against the city's annual Jazz and Heritage Festival. The simulation includes a physical attack but also uses a worm unleashed by the terrorists designed to cripple communications and sow confusion nationwide. The physical attack winds up flooding New Orleans; the cyberattack makes hospital care chaotic. 'They have trouble communicating, they can't get staff in, it's hard for them to order supplies,' she says. 'The impact of worms and viruses can be prodigious.'"

Should have held that one a little longer. My bald pate ducks to the golden fools, so eager to concoct journalism-ready rigged terror scenarios in which the future is so accurately divined.

So now that the stage is set for wisdoms you are about to receive on the revolution in secret intelligence tea-leaf reading . . .

"In July, [a group of managers and staffers at an intel agency cited by the Times] decided to create a test blog to collect intelligence," wrote Thompson. "It would focus on spotting and predicting possible avian flu outbreaks and function as part of a larger portal on the subject to collect information from hundreds of sources around the world, inside and outside of the intelligence community. Avian flu, [a manager] reasoned is a national security problem uniquely suited to an on-line community effort, because information about the danger is found all around the world. An agent in southeast Asia might be the first to hear news of dangerous farming practices, a medical expert could write a crucial paper on transmission that was never noticed by analysts . . . "

Almost sounds good but, c'mon, fellows, you're reinventing the wheel for a second or third-rate market. The health science pros are better and have been at it longer.You want Pro-med mail and CDC's Mortality and Morbidity Weekly, among other things -- not another bunch of non-pros aggregating news clippings and citations.

Next up, the canard of a Google-like searchable index of intelligence databases and blogs automagically creating an eruption of truth through critical masses of emergent intelligent behavior.

DD has worked its way through this as GlobalSecurity.Org Senior Fellow over the past few years and has one, among many, illustrative retorts to the so-called massive intelligence of mobs and network-distributed received wisdoms.

Here's Google's result on a WMD and terrorism related query: "how to make ricin"

The result, topmost in Google, linked to and downloaded all over the world by would-be terrorists, is a child's copy of a recipe for grinding castor beans that does nothing except produce castor bean powder containing a very small amount of the toxic protein. It also contains a step that destroys the protein.

Ah, the Delphic wisdom of the electronic world's hive mind.

Said one intel analyst on the secret blog phenomenon: "You demonstrate you're an idiot, that becomes known, too."

Other vignettes:

"What most impressed [one spy] was Wikipedia's self-governing nature."

"Once the intelligence community has a robust and mature wiki and blog knowledge-sharing webspace . . . the nature of intelligence will change forever."

"By this fall, more than 3,600 members of the intelligence services had contributed a total of 28,000 pages. Chris Rasmussen, a 31-year old 'knowledge management' engineer . . . spends part of every day writing or editing pages . . . "

" . . . Michael Wertheimer, chief technology officer, whose badge clip sports a button that reads 'geek.'"

At one point, the writer -- or one of his sources, or all of them, seem to float the idea that if only such methods had been in place prior to 9/11, all the disjointed information would have floated to the top of the great vat of all that is known and voila, revolution in intelligence affairs. WTC saved!

How prove you that in the great heap of knowledge?