What color is the sky in Aflie's World?

An important idea within intelligence is that information be compartmentalized, so no one person has a complete view of a given situation. For example, Valerie Wilson, noted in an interview on NPR, that when she first heard about the false claim from Colin Powell at the UN that Saddam Hussein had been importing yellow cake for nuclear weapons from Niger, after she had reported that this was not the case, she assumed that the Bush Administration had a separate source. She would have no knowledge of it because the identity of the source, and the information itself was compartmentalized.

Let's think architecture. Imagine a bunch of people walking around a dark room with paper bags over their heads. Each is trying to glean information by touch and at every opportunity they grope each other for more information. Nobody is allowed to remove the bag from their heads or turn on the lights in order to have a view of the Big Picture.

Now take a step back. Imagine all those people with bags over their heads not just in one room, but sixteen large rooms, all of which are also darkened and full of people frantically running around and bumping into each other. People in these sixteen rooms not only bump into people in their own rooms, but in the other fifteen rooms as well, when they're out and about. These sixteen rooms usually work at cross-purposes and fight the people in other rooms for budgets and access to the most treasured rooms in the building--upper floors.

Then imagine in the basement you have thousands of policemen, park rangers, IRS agents, state officials, and people who process hunter's licenses, all of whom are crammed into tiny little one person rooms, each with plastic bags over their whole bodies, like human pupae, and all of whom have a little chip in their heads which we'll call ideology or indoctrination. This indoctrination allows them to contribute to the system and also to look, within their narrow worlds, for people who don't fit into the accepted paradigm. People who can then be flagged for further examination by the agencies a few floors up.

At the very top of the building are politicians, high level intelligence people, and people who have great commercial, religious, or technological power within the society. Mostly they have the best interests of the country at heart, but when they see all these "tools" available to them and the useful fools trying to do the right thing on the lower floors, they often confuse their own interests with those of the nation.

And then they think that these systems serve them, and not the people of the Republic as a whole. If you want to control the apparatus of power, you need to get your nabs on th levers in the top floors; the levers that control the lower floors.

Getting to the crux of a given national security crisis or situation is not brain surgery. What you need is the Alfred O'Mega personal guesstimator which says that the way to ascertain the severity or negative impact of a given situation is to assume the worst, but take two steps backwards, because the situation is rarely as bad as it seems. So as of this writing Iran doesn't have a bomb yet, but they're two steps away from having one, and they will have one. And when they have the bomb they will be at least two steps away from using it against their direct enemies (Saudi Arabia and Israel).

In other words the situation stinks and it certainly rankles, but it's rarely as bad as the worst case scenario. Back to our archtectural social metaphor. Outside the building, sitting on the corner of the street begging, holding forth on topics both legitimate and ridiculous, are the purists, fanatics, the victims of real torture and oppression at the hands of despots; dispossessed intellectuals, and people like Alfie who are just sort of contrarian tinkerers. People who reign over an empire of one.

These are the volunteers who aren't privy to the Big Picture but have it pretty much worked out in their minds, either through prism of a belief system, or more often through the application of common sense.

These individuals are both necessary and useless, uncontrollable, but given the rapacious needs of the system for both control and information in equal measures, must somehow be managed or accommodated. The ones who have really suffered are also useful for trotting out on stage at times when the System needs to justify itself. Nothing focuses the mind like somebody who has had their house burned down and who has seen their women raped to death in Bosnia or Sudan to justify the state of your nation.

Now imagine these buildings in a city. The buildings come in various sizes, multiplied by hundreds of countries and tens of thousands of corporations, ideologies, and communities of like-minded folk, all of whom have, or who are getting, "tools" to help them monitor their situation, to see what condition their condition is in. Then you get an idea of what the world that we live in is really like.

High level people in tiny intelligence shacks in the third world have access to more information on your average American citizen in the skyscraper down the street, than they should have.

The US government doesn't especially care, because they almost certainly asked the guy in the shack to monitor the Americans in the first place in order to avoid a lawsuit in the domestic courts by a bunch of limp-wristed civil libertarians. But just try suing a sovereign nation my friend. Not to mention the fact that, with the best will in the world, the US Government can't look after their own high level people or vested interests, much less a bunch of gnats, or citizens I suppose you might call them, crawling around the grounds of the skyscraper. These are people you don't want to hear anything from, except come polling day. The facilities managers who run America Towers, have bigger problems from skyscrapers like China and Russia building above their permit code, so who gives a crap about the rights and wrongs of the individual?

What's wrong with the System? Well, everything, but nobody has conceived of a good alternative, because it used to be much worse under all other forms of government. If you buy into this worldview then you can be forgiven for thinking that life is just one long information war, fed by every more invasive technologies. So what position should you take with these guys? The same one that they should take: Don't confuse your own personal interest with that of the nation.