By Elizabeth Murray, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
This cuts us hoi polloi out of a very rich – indeed, invaluable – source of raw, unadulterated information to analyze. I’ll bet that the hoi aristoi – the favored journalists, newspapers, and academics – will still get the feed, as long as they remain “cooperative,” apply the approved spin, and don’t act up. That may be why there is no hue and cry this time from the usual quarters. Have they ALL been co-opted?
For the rest of us, it will now be much harder convincingly to expose distortion and spin, since we shall lack access to the original raw material being spun. For example, we will no longer be able to prove that senior Iranian leaders never threatened to “drive Israel into the sea,” or “wipe Israel off the map.”
Perhaps it is the case that one has to have had deep experience working in the political science sub-discipline of media analysis to realize what lucrative intelligence it can yield – today just as much as in the past. Proper analysis of a foreign leader’s remarks is often of far more intelligence value than the hundred million conversations that NSA collects every day and adds to the haystack against the day one or two might come in handy. Or as Dick Cheney has put it, “You never know when you might need it.”
The loss of access to original open sources is a major blow to those of us who know what a fertile field open media is to plow. This decision will be very bad news if it is not reversed.