Technology Both Aids, Hinders Intelligence Transparency

The very technologies that the intelligence community relies on to carry out its missions are threatening its ability to provide an accurate picture of its challenges and opportunities. Technology-driven information has no accountability, and many of its disseminators have very little perspective on truth, noted a panel during the final plenary session of the first day of the AFCEA/INSA Intelligence and National Security Summit 2014, being held September 18-19 in Washington, D.C.

Marvin Kalb, Edward R. Murrow professor of practice, emeritus, Harvard Kennedy School, said that technology has advanced so rapidly that the government has to strive to keep up with it. “If technology is ahead of the government’s ability to manage, how does it keep up with governance?”

Panel moderator Bill Nolte, research director, Center for Intelligence Research and Education, University of Maryland School of Public Policy, agreed with that concept. “We do have a problem in managing the technology,” he said. “In the old days, you only had a few news outlets. Now, a private Manning hits the send button and millions of people get information.”

Kalb warned that modern journalism may have become too powerful. “The reporter has become too central a player in decision making, in influencing our political system,” he declared. “The forum in which journalism exists today is too powerful.

“We are being sound-bited to death, and we seem to be enjoying the process,” he stated.

Kalb continued that this rush of information to the general public has led to a decline in the fidelity of news, and the public bears some responsibility for that. “Do people ask if the information has any validity?” he queried. “People have a responsibility to ask this.”