Fergie's Tech Blog

Blog Pundits Take Lead in Terrorism Intelligence

A New York Times article by Robert F. Worth, via The International Herald Tribune, reports that:

When an Iraqi insurgent group releases a new videotape or claims responsibility for an attack, Western reporters in Baghdad rarely hear about it firsthand. Nor do they usually get the news from their in-house Iraqi translators.

Instead, a reporter often receives an e-mailed alert from a highly caffeinated terrorism monitor sitting at a computer screen somewhere on the East Coast. Within hours, a constellation of other Middle East analysts has sent out interpretations - some of them conflicting - and a wealth of contextual material.

Terrorists have been using the Internet so heavily that the monitors often know more about their communications than military or intelligence officers do.

posted by Fergie @ 6/19/2006 10:12:00 AM