And you blend that with information that’s available to most any expert in the field-databases that are put together by academic institutions or businesses in some cases, observations from people in the field who are not intelligence officers, but are knowledgeable observers. ![]() On the information that goes into an intelligence report, it’s a combination of intelligence that’s gathered through clandestine means, whether it be signals intelligence, where you copy an email or tap a phone or human intelligence, where you have a spy talking to you or technical intelligence, like a picture that you interpret-that’s the information that you go out and gather. It’s trying to provide information to help better decisions. So the intelligence community doesn’t just wander off and write about what catches its fancy. Kathy Gilsinan: What distinguishes the Trump dossier from an intelligence product?ĭennis Blair: An intelligence product is written to answer a specific question that’s of interest either to policymakers or to operational leaders in the field, and it generally starts with a particular intelligence requirement: “What will ISIS do next?” at the high end, down to “Where are the IEDs in Aleppo?” on the low end. A condensed and edited transcript of our conversation follows. So what information qualifies? And how does the intelligence community process or try to verify alleged information like what’s in the Trump dossier? I spoke about these and other questions with Dennis Blair, who was the director of national intelligence, overseeing the intelligence community, in 20. Though members of the intelligence community had been made aware of the dossier as far back as August 2016, James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, emphasized this week that the dossier was not, itself, “an intelligence community product”-American intelligence officials had neither produced nor verified the contents of the report, but summarized parts to provide policymakers with the “fullest possible picture of any matters that might affect national security.” (Further confusing matters, it appears a former British intelligence official did produce it.)Īs Stanford’s Amy Zegart notes, all intelligence is information, but not all information is intelligence. And it was a news leak about those two pages that precipitated the publication of the full opposition dossier. That was the length of an “annex” appended to the classified government document on Russian election hacking, reportedly summarizing some allegations from the other document, the private firm’s dossier on Trump. And what has publicly linked these two reports of different genres is two pages.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |