Yesterday on CNN's Situation Room, Jeff Toobin commented that the release of 250,000 US Embassy Diplomatic Cables by WikiLeaks shows how information sharing (connecting the dots) has gone too far since 911. Private Bradley Manning, whether he did or did not leak the documents, should never have had access to State Department diplomatic cables. Routine access to diplomatic cables is not needed by a low-level intelligence analyst stationed in Iraq. Secretary of Defense Gates said that "What this illustrates is the incredible amount of trust we place in even our most junior men and women in uniform." To quote one wag, "Trust But Verify".
Hopefully, Secretary Gates understands that the problem goes deeper than the platitudes. The US government's entire concept of "information sharing" is based on the bureaucratic mentality that everyone has to have access to all information for anyone to connect the dots. The idea, as I've discussed in prior posts, is faulty.
The first thing anyone needs to know is that there is information on a person or an event in some government system. That can be handled by a searchable index (see the use case graphic above, click to enlarge). Whether someone gets beyond the index to actual State Department cables, for example, should (1) depend on need to know, (2) be controlled by the agency that owns the data and (3) be carefully tracked and analyzed. Private Manning and every other junior man and women in uniform does not have a blanket need to know. Secretary Gates can' t seriously believe that they do.
Unfortunately and obviously, the information sharing systems in place today (such as DOD's and State Department's SIPR-net) cannot enforce need to know while allowing available information in all government systems to be connected. The systems are faulty because the underlying information sharing concept is flawed. Prosecuting Julian Assange and Bradley Manning, the preferred bureaucratic response, will not solve this problem.
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