1 year ago
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We begin today with Macarena Vidal Liy of El País in English tracing part of the origins of the Discord intelligence leaks back to the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.
It is a situation that goes back to 9/11 and the attacks against the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon, according to representatives of the intelligence services. Back then, intelligence agencies were at the opposite end of the spectrum: they had an excessively compartmentalized system, where one department did not share its information with the department next door. This lack of coordination prevented intelligence agencies from connecting the dots about the plans hatched by the Islamic extremist network Al Qaeda, which was able to hijack four passenger planes and crash them, in attacks that cost the lives of more than 3,000 people.
The committee that investigated the 2001 attacks harshly criticized that “on-a-need-to-know-basis” mentality. That position assumes that it is possible to know in advance who will need to make use of that information. The system implicitly assumes that the risk of inadvertent data disclosure outweighs the benefits of sharing it more widely, the report published in 2004 states.
If the pendulum swung back then to facilitate the disclosure of information and for people in charge of national security to have as much data as possible when making decisions, it could now very well swing back in the opposite direction again. The Pentagon is conducting a review and update of its classified document distribution lists to reduce the number of individuals allowed to see sensitive data.
I seen this analysis on the topic but not with this detail.
