Cryptosmith

Critics and comics sometimes say that government insiders get more accurate information from CNN than from the CIA. Now we have ‘open source spying’ (Wall Street Journal). There’s a grad student who, via his “North Korea Uncovered” web site, is documenting all sorts of details of that notoriously secretive country. Thanks to Google Earth, he is constructing an annotated map of the country, highlighting prisons, nuclear activities, palaces, and so on.

While I don’t believe this sort of thing can, by itself, eliminate the CIA, but I really believe we could cut our spying costs and improve the results by opening up the analytical process. There’s a claim that our cheapo F-16s did better than the more costly fighters during Iraq I – there may be lots of ways improving defense while spending several billion less.

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