Lawrence Wright has an excellent interview with US Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell in the last edition of the New Yorker. Read the whole thing; but here are three highlights.
First, note McConnell’s assessment of the relative place of terrorism on America’s threat list – which chimes with remarks made here in the UK by Richard Mottram before Christmas:
I asked McConnell if he believed that Al Qaeda was really the greatest threat America faces.
“No, no, no, not at all,” he said. “Terrorism can kill a lot of people, but it can’t fundamentally challenge the ability of the nation to exist. Fascism could have done that. Communism could have. I think our issue going forward is more engagement with the world in terms of keeping it on a reasonable path, so another ism doesn’t come along and drive it to one extreme or another. And we have to have some balance in terms of equitable distribution of wealth, containment of contagious disease, access to energy supplies, and development of free markets. There are national-security ramifications to global warming.”
He looked down at the patchwork quilt of the Pennsylvania countryside. His thoughts quickly turned back to terrorism. “One of the things I worry about most would be something like a pandemic, particularly if it could be weaponized, like avian flu,” he continued. “You could turn that into a human virus. You could have fifty million to five hundred million deaths.”
Second, the article notes the interesting creation of:
…an intelligence version of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which was created in 1958, after the Soviet launch of Sputnik, and led to the development of the Internet, the Global Positioning System, night-vision goggles, Predator drones, and Stealth aircraft….
Like DARPA, the O.D.N.I. version sponsors radical innovation — “game-changing breakthroughs,” as [ODNI head of science and technology, Steve] Nixon puts it. The program has only a few dozen employees, but it expects to collaborate with private businesses, nonprofits, and universities. The most significant product of this effort so far is Argus, a program that monitors foreign news reports and other open sources looking for evidence of bird die-offs, crop failures, an unusual number of death notices—anything that could provide an early warning of an epidemic, nuclear accident, or environmental catastrophe.
The program, which began in 2004, spotted the appearance of avian flu in 2006 and a recent outbreak of Ebola in Angola. During flu season last year, the program tracked more than a thousand socially disruptive diseases simultaneously. Argus now monitors a million Web pages in twenty-eight languages and in nearly every country in the world—except the U.S., where such scrutiny would stir concerns about domestic spying.
Finally, a useful piece of advice given to McConnell by Colin Powell, when the latter was Chairman of the JCS and the former his intelligence officer:
“Tell me what you know, then tell me what you don’t know, and only then can you tell me what you think. Always keep those three separated.”
