Connecting the Dots We’re Not Allowed To See
Posted by Andy on August 29th, 2006
Michael Chertoff opines today about how blinding our inteligence community is making it tough to stop the next attack.
Imagine that our troops in Afghanistan raided an al-Qaeda safe house and captured a computer containing the cellphone numbers of operatives in Europe. Wouldn’t it be important to know whether one of those cellphone numbers was used to book a transatlantic flight? Unfortunately, today our ability to make that connection remains limited: Information that terrorists readily share with travel agents cannot easily be shared throughout the United States government. That needs to change.
Information sharing and intelligence gathering are some of our most important tools in the global war on terrorism. British authorities, in partnership with the United States and our allies, were able to disrupt the recent terrorist plot against passenger aircraft precisely because of timely, actionable intelligence, properly shared and acted upon before the terrorists could carry out their plans.
But despite the strong links we’ve forged with our European partners to protect our nations, we still remain handcuffed in our ability to use all available resources to identify threats and stop terrorists.
Go read the rest, and ask yourself if we can stop people if we’re not allowed to even track their movements and communications.
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