The Daily Standard has a blog, of sorts, on international affairs, authored by Daniel McKivergan, that is very good. Today it analyzes an article in the New York Times this morning, which quoted various FBI officials complaining about how many leads they started getting from the NSA following September 11. McKivergan’s observations are similar to those by A. J. Strata on the same article that we linked to this morning; an avalanche of leads is what you get, evidently, when you break down the wall between intelligence and law enforcement. Has the Times now decided this is a bad thing?
The Times quotes Admiral Bobby Inman:
Admiral Inman…said the F.B.I. complaints about thousands of dead-end leads revealed a chasm between very different disciplines. Signals intelligence, the technical term for N.S.A.’s communications intercepts, rarely produces “the complete information you’re going to get from a document or a witness” in a traditional F.B.I. investigation, he said.
It sounds as though the FBI is having a hard time adjusting to its new role as a key anti-terror agency.
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