Librarians of Babel: Intelligence’s Three Big Problems in the Information Age
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By Zachery T. Brown
December 05, 2018
The U.S. Intelligence Community faces major challenges resulting from the information revolution. First, an exponential increase in the volume of data being generated threatens to overwhelm an already over-tasked collection and analytic structure. Secondly, the vast majority of useful information today is publicly-available, a fact the IC has struggled to come to terms with and that could obviate its classified collection model. Lastly, both of these problems contribute to a growing disengagement by the end-users of finished intelligence, American policymakers.
In 1941, Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges wrote “The Library of Babel,†a short story about an enormous library, its numerous rooms full of randomly- assorted books. The library, its inhabitants believed, contained every book that had ever been written, and every book that could ever be written—that is, every possible combination of the thirty-six alphanumeric characters theoretically existed somewhere in its vast network of honeycombed rooms. On the downside, this meant that the vast majority of the library’s books were gibberish. But there were also, theoretically, books of unimagined brilliance.
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2018/12/05/librarians_of_babel_intelligences_three_big_problems_in_the_information_age_114003.html
