Posner at Hopkins

Judge Richard Posner, speaking on CSPAN on the intertwined roles of intelligence, counter-intelligence and law-enforcement, commented that law-enforcement alone cannot win the war on terrorism, mostly because the way of thinking is somewhat "alien" to law enforcement. As an example he cited the arrest of a group in Miami. He noted that they had a dream, but no materials, training or resources.

"What they did have was an FBI informant," he said.

Instead of playing out the line to see what kind of connections the group develops, or the paths they take in their search for help, the FBI went in and arrested them. The FBI, he said, is not used to the intelligence game; once they have enough evidence, they make the arrest.

Yet, those types of methods aren't completely foreign. The FBI has spent decades setting stings to take down criminal enterprises. Some went on for years. Perhaps the more serious problem, then, is not ability, but resources.

Posner also suggested that bloggers and others could be utilized as first-line analysts in spelunking through the voluminous open-source material available on the internet; magazines, journals, web pages, etc.

The down-side of this, of course, are the likely thousands and thousands of amateur sleuths out there proffering their grand theories.

- Murphy