A memory-chip and an APIC? Nope, that's not a keylogger.
The problem is not, and has never been,
collecting information. The problem is what to do with it... and being able to actually do something useful with it, quickly enough to be useful. The objective of an intelligence organization is
to tell you today what the enemy is going to do tomorrow. Collecting mountains of information isn't going to do that. Secretly installing keystroke-loggers into a laptop isn't going to do that either. Ditto cell-phones, RFID tags or anything else. All that this can do is to give you yet another massive data-feed. Yet another reason for disk-drive salesmen to be happy.
I am given to understand that there are over 8,000 hours' worth of wiretap recordings that the FBI has yet to review. Whether this story is true or false, it is plausible. 333 man-days to collect it, then 333 more man-days to transcribe it, and then ...
then what? Lots of very expensive information,
old information.
In my humble who-cares,
any "new centralized bureaucracy" isn't going to work. The homeland-security agency is simply yet-another Federal Agency in a long list... the OSS, the CIA, the NSA, and
CENSORED other black-sheep organizations. It's yet-another attempt to tie together all these intelligence feeds
centralized, at the top, when an enemy such as a terrorist probably requires government action that works like they do ...
decentralized, from the bottom-up.
If the earlier organizations failed at their mission, logic says that in time this one will too. But today, things are different. And
what is the difference? The Internet. Ubiquitous, fast, plentiful, and emminently
de-centralized. Put that into the hands of local officials. Give them the
means to collaborate.
The local sheriffs, the beat-policemen, the private investigators ...
these people know what is happening in their communities. They know how to fight crime, even massive crimes like flinging aircraft into buildings. Give them the means to securely communicate among themselves. Give them "wiki"-like capability (hell, just
use Wiki!) to draw their own threads among disparate bits of data and to share those threads with colleagues. When someone in Podunk notices that someone has just purchased a thousand pounds of ammonium nitrate, he should not have to "figure out" who to call in order to get that information noticed. When someone notices that middle-eastern folks are taking flying lessons but don't seem to want to know how to land the airplane, provide a pathway for that information... not "straight to the top," but "straight to the
everyone-at-once." Securely, of course.
This is the strategy of "ten thousand eyes" ...
vigilance. You are relying upon the tens of thousands of existing law-enforcement officials who are already out there, instead of trying to supplant them with one bureaucratic organization that's supposed to dole-out "intelligence." It didn't work well in WW2, which is why Douglas MacArthur insisted upon getting his own feeds of ULTRA intelligence directly within his own command theatre, and he defied even the President to get it.
The "terror cell" strategy
assumes that the opponent has a big, centralized organization that tries to work like a funnel in reverse, slurping up all of this information and channeling it to
one guy at the top who's supposed to make the decision. Since the various cells are small and do not even know about each others' existence, the information that would lead to them is much too scarce to be noticed
if a centralized bureaucracy is used. So the cells appear to be able to strike at-will, and the bureaucrats, desperate to be seen doing
something, tell us to buy duct-tape.
What your centralized agency focuses on doing is
providing the secure means to communicate, search, and share that information... not
up, but rather
across. And I think that existing Web technologies could be used to do that. Hell, the Internet itself could be the backbone of communications, with a tie into the existing classified-grade networks as needed.
Per contra, what Washington seems to be trying to do is to secretly requisition a download of all the sales receipts from every farm-supply store in the country ... dump it into SAS and try to make the connection. They keep all of this activity 'secret' probably so that no one who knows better will be caught laughing their asses off.
