Le labyrinthe de Dieu

Le labyrinthe de Dieu

Chercheur au CATO Institute, de tendance libertarienne (hyper-libéralisme et rôle très réduit du gouvernement), Julian Sanchez fait une présentation et un commentaire du labyrinthe inextricable que représente aujourd’hui l’ Intelligence Community (IC) aux USA (sur le site du CATO, le 10 août 2010). Le nouveau directeur du renseignement aux USA, qui supervise toutes les agences, explique qu’il existe dans l’univers une seule entité capable de “superviser” tous les programmes classés “Special Access”, sous la protection du “secret défense”, – «[and] that's God».

Sanchez expose ce problème pour attaquer violemment les conservateurs (les républicains) qui réclament avec fureur un “gouvernement réduit” et qui ont laissé se développer ce monstre sans rien tenter pour le contrôler.

«It sounds like a recipe for a conservative crusade: a sector of the government that's seen 150 percent growth in less than a decade yet is “so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine”; one where projects run hundreds of millions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule, where audits and required reporting frequently are neglected, and where officials at the highest levels admit they can't keep track of what their agencies are doing, or even how many contractors they've got on the public payroll. […]

»Yet surely the more obvious question was: Does it work? The only assurance we had that it did came from the very officials tasked with running it — the kind of testimony conservatives rightly greet with an arched eyebrow when it comes from an EPA administrator or a jobs czar.

»When the inspectors general for the IC finally produced an unclassified report on the “President's Surveillance Program” in 2009, they concluded that the large majority of the leads generated by the program had no connection to terrorism — corroborating early press reports in which FBI officials complained of being sent on wild-goose chases. “Most IC officials interviewed” by the inspectors general, the report concluded, “had difficulty citing specific instances where PSP reporting had directly contributed to counterterrorism successes.” The classified version of the report cites instances in which the program “may have contributed” to an intelligence success. It's hard to be reassured that this legally controversial program was the best use of the available resources — especially if it was generating so many false hits.

»Intelligence agencies may be discovering the “fatal conceit” that Hayek ascribed to advocates of economic planning: the belief that sufficiently brilliant experts can effectively aggregate and understand the information flowing through a modern economy. Our high-tech spies now aspire not simply keep tabs on specific suspected terrorists but to harness blazingly fast computers to automatically detect their traces in the bitstream of 21st-century financial and communications networks.

»The result is a community choking on information it cannot process. Every day, according to the Post's report, NSA's collection systems “intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications,” a tiny fraction of which are processed and stored in some 70 databases. A 2005 inspector general's report found that the FBI had collected, just in the previous year, a backlog of untranslated intelligence intercepts amounting to 87 years' worth of audio.

»The information problem faced by analysts repeats itself at the management level. One of the handful of “Super Users” interviewed by the Post, an intelligence official meant to have full access to the Defense Department's classified intelligence activities, conceded, “I'm not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything.” A similarly resigned take was offered by Pres. Barack Obama's nominee to serve as director of national intelligence, Lt. Gen. James Clapper: “There's only one entity in the entire universe that has visibility on all [Special Access Programs] — that's God.”

»The problem is then compounded by the intersection of perverse political incentives with the compartmentalization, the complexity, and, above all, the secrecy in which intelligence work is shrouded….»

dedefensa.org