The WSJ describes how a doctoral student, working on his own time, put together a dossier on North Korea better than anything in open source, and possibly, better than many classified studies. Curtis Melvin did it by creating a “go to place” for intelligence fusion on North Korea and carefully piecing the puzzle together.
Mr. Melvin is at the center of a dozen or so citizen snoops who have spent the past two years filling in the blanks on the map of one of the world’s most secretive countries. Seeking clues in photos, news reports and eyewitness accounts, they affix labels to North Korean structures and landscapes captured by Google Earth, an online service that stitches satellite pictures into a virtual globe. The result is an annotated North Korea of rocket-launch sites, prison camps and elite palaces on white-sand beaches. … An economist who studies developing countries and has traveled from Turkmenistan to Zimbabwe, Mr. Melvin started his project in early 2007 to designate places he visited on two group tours to North Korea earlier this decade. He shared it on several North Korea-related Web sites. …
People soon started sending him locations they knew, from tourist sites to airfields tucked into valleys near South Korea. Mr. Melvin says that sadness for North Koreans’ plight, and the fascination of discovery, motivated him to continue.
Five years ago, while analyzing the way in which newspapers covered an atrocity story describing an American attack on an Iraqi wedding party, I wrote: “although the news media functions as the civilian intelligence system, collecting raw data, processing it and distributing it to the public, for historical reasons it lacks many of the features which professional intelligence systems have evolved over the years: namely a system of grading information by reliability and existence of analytic cell whose function is to follow the developments and update the results.” More recently, looking at an article in which Wikipedia corrected a hoax story far more quickly than the mainstream press, I observed that:
One of the things that Wikipedia does far better than journalism — apart from having “many eyes” to make its bugs shallow, is that it maintains a lineage of its information. For example, the version history of the entry on Maurice Jarre is shown on this page. By treating edits like a database transaction log (which in fact it is), and thereby tracking inserts, edits and deletes, you can ‘play back’ the evolution of a piece of information just like a movie. You can restore to any point in time. This tremendously powerful feature makes Wikipedia, for all its defects architecturally better than the press. You can not only see the hoax entry come and go, it is possible to see how the Wikipedia editors dealt with it.
The question that jumps out of the Curtis Melvin story is why the New York Times, with the resources it had in its heyday, couldn’t do something as neat as this. Why did late 20th century journalism simply ignore the best practice in the intelligence fields and in information technology and stick to the old architecture with all its obvious defects? In the Sherlock Holmes story The Silver Blaze, Sherlock Holmes describes the signifance of the dog that didn’t bark in the night.
Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”
The question of why the newspapers didn’t do it is best left to historians to ponder. Perhaps I was right to say, “one possible reason was that the media did not want to. Newspapers were not in the information business. They were in the narrative business; and in that profession an editor’s chief ambition is to retain the power to keep his tale in the service of whichever great ideology or personal lord he served.” Perhaps Curtis Melvin’s site will evolve into a network of colleagues, who like astronomers, will parcel out North Korea into sectors, according to spectrum and knowledge domain until they discover more about it than perhaps even the Dear Leader knows. Who can say where it will lead: will such efforts continue to flourish or will pressure be exerted to bring the flood of knowledge back within the old bounds? Are we living in the golden age of political discovery that will soon be past or simply waiting on verge of something even greater? Whatever happens next, it’s been a great ride.
What though the radiance
which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass,
of glory in the flower,
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind.
Or maybe just find the waterslide in Kim Jon Il’s palace.
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28 Comments
1. ForNow:Yes, traditional news organizations want to keep control of the narrative. That means maintaining an illusion of more reliability than they have. Perish the thought that they should trade that in for a reputation as a good starting point like Wikipedia.
May 23, 2009 - 10:54 am 2. Thrasymachus:I once read that the medieval students of the ancient anatomist Galen would conduct their dissections as proofs of Galen’s writings, not leatning experiences. Discoveries that did not fit with Galen were dismissed.
Back in the day, as the kids say, newspapers had a crude mission of selling copies. If that could be done by finding new and previously unknown information, well then they would do that. Newspapers now provide social proof for their readers- they confirm what they already think and comfort them in their beliefs, and assure them all the right people think the same way too, and tell them what to think if they are unsure.
I would like to excuse these people. It is human nature, mine too, to want to stay fixed in a known view of reality, to have it confirmed, and not be subjected to conflicting information. But I can’t. Liberals beliee so many bizarre and obviously wrong things, that are completely at odds with reality as anybody with normal powers of observation can verify, that they can’t be excused.
Liberalism is a religion and all the participants in the system, journalists especially, are priests of it. I’m surprised such a story even got into the Wall Street Journal- but it’s done as an economic development story, not a communist oppression story.
May 23, 2009 - 11:08 am 3. mac:The system is changing even as I write this. Starting in the 80’s, I realized that the NYT of my youth was not to be accepted as gospel. That feeling has progressed to the point where I don’t trust them any more than Kim Jong Il’s press flacks. If something I might buy would benefit them, I refuse to purchase it. Using facts, I denigrate them at every opportunity to anyone who doesn’t understand what they’ve done to truth in America. I’m proud to think I’ve played a small part in bringing those lying, America-hating criminals down, and I’ll be a happy man when I see them go bankrupt.
I’m doing the same thing with Obama and I’m seeing that people are beginning to realize what an existential threat he and his accomplices are. It’s amazing what happens when you start telling people that the government in power is ruining the currency–and back it up with facts. That CBO chart of the pending red ink just scares the Hell out of them. That picture truly is worth more than a thousand words.
I’m thinking that by the time this clown leaves office he’ll make Jimmy Carter’s popularity records look high by comparison. The real question is what we’ll have left to work with after he’s done. We’ve got a lot of problems ahead of us as a nation and nothing Obama has done will do anything but make them worse and harder to fix.
May 23, 2009 - 12:03 pm 4. whiskey:What happened to Newspapers is most clearly seen if you look at media closely resembling them: Television, and the “trap of the Brandon Tartikoff strategy.”
Which led to a cul-de-sac of ever increasing ideological conformity in keeping the ever-decreasing demographically, slice of upper income yuppies.
This applies to Comic Books, NPR, and a whole host of media (Comics morphed from widely appealing and cheap stuff aimed mostly at kids to dark and gritty stuff, who’s average readership age is 42!, see Marvel Entertainment’s annual reports.)
Tartikoff was an 80’s NBC programmer who pushed the idea of highly acclaimed shows like St. Elsewhere, Hill Street Blues, and Seinfeld (premiered 1989) that while lacking in broad viewership, had critical prestige and upscale viewers. Who advertisers would pay a premium to reach — the Yuppies.
This model eventually became a trap. During Tartikoff’s reign, such critical shows were balanced out by broadly appealing stuff like “the A-Team” … but later creative people and network execs fell into the trap of trying to reach ever decreasing (due to declining birth rates) amounts of White Yuppies, with high income, and lost both the ability and the desire to make broadly appealing shows. Even CBS, the most watched network and with the only broad, new hit show (the Mentalist) is ashamed of it’s status and would rather be say, AMC or FX with “edgy hip shows.”
The feedback loop is very powerful. Advertisers rush in to pay premium rates for Yuppies. Creative and network execs live the life of Yuppies so can understand them, the broad audience not at all. Making stuff for Yuppies is easy, for the broad audience very hard.
All of this relies on an ever increasing economy fueling Yuppie status displays and such. In turn fueling advertisers demands for the Yuppies so they can sell them more over-priced status stuff.
The side effect is of course ideological conformity. NBC (and the other networks) is very ideologically rigid, wrt Yuppie PC/Multiculturalism, and so on.
The same basic things happened to the NYT. And other newspapers, save the WSJ (specializing in business news) and USA-Today (graphs for weary travelers). Even they however draw from the same PC-ized pool of reporters and editors who wrote exclusively for the Yuppie class.
Liberalisms “bizarre beliefs” as Thrasymachus puts it are due to basically, class-gender struggles of the Yuppie class against threats from the middle suburban class, and their own “Malibu driven” status struggles. “Curb Your Enthusiasm” by Seinfeld co-creator Larry David captures that eternal status struggle very well. It’s like a minor aristocracy that is always jockeying among themselves for social power.
This leaves huge gaps in the information/entertainment marketplace that the internet is filling. For example, Rush Limbaugh and other talk radio guys give out information and opinion aimed at White middle/working class men, a demo almost entirely absent in the media/entertainment targets. Television and much of film absent the Summer Blockbuster is a gay/female ghetto, so Men/boys go to games, or increasingly online games, for entertainment (the online games are free, serious competition for EA and other gaming studios).
If you really want to know, what’s up with North Korea, the Housing Market, the strength of the Dollar, Iran’s nukes, you can go to many sources on the internet, for free, and get the data there. You can even discuss it with others. These opportunities will soon be monetized.
May 23, 2009 - 12:23 pm 5. Pace:“It is human nature, mine too, to want to stay fixed in a known view of reality, to have it confirmed, and not be subjected to conflicting information.”
Does this really require a comment?
May 23, 2009 - 12:32 pm 6. Mad Fiddler:Here’s a shameless link to a silly takedown of the Liberal Hypothesis that relates to Wretchard’s post and some of the comments above.
The linked post is titled “Catechism of the Delusional”
A few excerpted snarky bits:
“There seems to be some unmatchable satisfaction that comes from repeating and embellishing a story you know is too lurid, shocking, or undocumentable for any respectable forum, especially if it enhances *YOUR* status by the telling.
This is part of the inescapable experimentation of adolescence. In the fullness of time most adolescents mature to a point they can recognize bullshit, and give it its proper weight as they balance their assessments of events and people they must deal with.
Unfortunately, there are many people who never progress beyond the stage of mental toddlers. They are doomed to spend their lives in the thrall of whatever unfiltered rumors come in earshot. These miscreants have never acquired the critical skills for assessing the validity of a simple statement, for researching sources to verify or discredit data, or for synthesizing a valid conclusion from facts organized in a logical pattern.
Bereft of an adequate intellectual toolset, they are subject forever to the tyranny of their emotions in evaluating information.
…
A catechism may be roughly defined as a commonly agreed upon set of assertions that are held as received wisdom — i.e., divinely transmitted knowledge — to be accepted without debate and committed to memory by the faithful.
Delusional means actually more than being unable to distinguish between imaginings and reality. It describes the state of being immersed within a self-reinforcing fantasy, in which any new fact or arising that might contradict the premise of the fantasy, is denied by arguments that use the construction of logic, but rely upon the invented elements of the fantasy itself.”
Someone might already have assembled a list of conservative reflexes. My list is a bunch of liberal beliefs that seem to be so deeply etched in the nerve circuits that they don’t even make it to the lizard brain. Like a pin-prick or touch of a hot stovetop, these stimuli travel only as far as the spine, where they trigger a spasm that for many Democrats, is as close to rational analysis as they can muster.
This neatly explains a lot of the present predicament.
May 23, 2009 - 12:36 pm 7. Lifeofthemind:Admiral Poindexter had a lot of good ideas. One reason the MSM were so hot to run him out of town might have been the realization that he represented the future and the MSM was tied to the past.
May 23, 2009 - 1:00 pm 8. davod:“I’m thinking that by the time this clown leaves office he’ll make Jimmy Carter’s popularity records look high by comparison. The real question is what we’ll have left to work with after he’s done. We’ve got a lot of problems ahead of us as a nation and nothing Obama has done will do anything but make them worse and harder to fix.”
Just how will this happen.
May 23, 2009 - 1:27 pm 9. RWE:When I was at the Pentagon I became aware of certain interesting pieces of data related to the PRC. This data indicated to someone of my experience that our policy related to China in a specific area was a disaster. On my own time I collected information from friends, even going on leave to the west coast in one case, and produced an analysis. Which went nowhere.
You see, despite the fact that I knew far more about that particular subject than any Intel type I was not an Intel type. So what I knew and what I had concluded did not count. Some AF Intel guys were very interested but explained that they could do nothing with the data until it had been officially blessed. And that did not happen, because my boss’s boss threw the package away.
And that was that for 6 years or so, when I ended up having the pleasure of testifying before a Congressional investigating committee. I am pleased to report it went quite well and did not in any way resemble the process as depicted on the X Files.
So, no matter the level of expertise of the guy with the info, unless it has been passed through an Intel guy, it is not valid. Now, when you think about it, that requirement also applies to Journalism, doesn’t it? The now-legendary Texas Air National Guard memos is the archtype case. What could a bunch of guys sitting around in their PJs know that a Real Journalist did not? Quite a lot, as it turned out, and since they were not burdened with Real Journalism Attitudes they were able to assemble it into a meaningful story.
May 23, 2009 - 1:35 pm 10. Derek:In science, sometimes a whole generation has to die off before their ideas can be challenged.
Derek
May 23, 2009 - 1:50 pm 11. Ashen:I like NFL network….just sayin.
May 23, 2009 - 3:34 pm 12. killerwhale:I’m just an average white guy who enjoys listening to Rush. I haven’t been emasculated, and I believe in self defense, so, obviously, what is there for me to watch? I’m appalled at the behavior of the “mainstream media”, and I don’t trust them to be objective. So, when I hear about the citizen effort in North Korea, I realize how far we have fallen. I believe that if we don’t have a functional media, then the foxes trully run the henhouse. Is it any wonder that the media is going broke? If they can’t be trusted, then they are worse than useless – I believe they are actually a traitorous, domestic enemy whose time for destruction has come.
May 23, 2009 - 4:04 pm 13. Doug:Journalist/Jihadi Update:
U.S holds journalist without charges in Iraq
In Iraq, Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein was held for two years without trial before he was released last April on the orders of an Iraqi judge under the terms of an Iraqi amnesty law. The U.S. military maintained that Hussein had links to insurgents, but the AP insisted that the allegations were based on nothing more than the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs of insurgents that he had taken on the streets of Ramadi, in western Iraq.
Jassam is the only Iraqi journalist still in U.S. custody, the last to be detained under wartime rules in force prior to a U.S.-Iraqi security agreement signed in December. Under the new accord, U.S. forces are required to obtain a warrant before they can arrest an Iraqi citizen.
Jassam was detained without a warrant “as the result of his activity with a known insurgent organization,” Fisher alleged.
May 23, 2009 - 4:38 pm 14. Doug:Bilal Hussein belmont club – Google Search
May 23, 2009 - 4:39 pm 15. Dave:Killerwhale #12: No need for alarm. Mere panic will do. What worries you has alkways been with us.
It used to take 4-6 weeks for the content of
an intel/interrogation report to make it through channels from DaNang to firebases
in the Quang Ngai and Chu Lai area. I was known to resort to hand-written summaries
delivered by “Black Cats” in order to move information in the right general direction.
(I took pains to add to the notes that the information contained had NOT been reviewed and vetted.)
Back in 1941, all information gathered by Naval intelligence in Hawaii had to be sent to Admiral King in Washington whose intel staff would decide what, if any, would be sent back to Admiral Kimmel at Pearl Harbor.
Two things changed that, 7 Dec 41 and a hardcase named Nimitz.
The media has always been rather useless in this area. What others can now do—-and how they can at least some attention—-is good news, not bad.
So be of good cheer. The situation is desperate, but none too serious.
May 23, 2009 - 4:47 pm 16. Wadeusaf:What the average British Mam and Mister circa 1941 could teach us about gathering intelligence and spotting stuff that was, somehow, just not right. But they had reason then and proximity as well as urgency.
How much about Nazi movements in France did we know before the Nazis?
Collective hearts and minds efforts in battle zones are much more effective in putting together a usable intelligence picture than what actually gets published in the papers. But a reporters unpublished notes may hold more information about the story or other stories than he is comfortable putting out to either inform the public or be scrutinized by the public.
May 23, 2009 - 5:02 pm 17. Doug:Michael J. Totten The Case of Bilal Hussein
—
“I work for AP, and we have had some nausea-inducing internal memos about Bilal Hussein. I have no problem with the presumption of innocence- but I can absolutely guaruntee that if I was accused of very serious crimes I would immediately be suspended from working and AP as an organisation would refrain from assuming anything about me until I was tried.
But that is not the conversation going on within AP. All the memos insist he is innocent- something they can’t possibly know. They also imply that the US military is politically corrupted and is holding Hussein for political reasons rather than the ones given out by the military. It is creepy and makes me doubt the judgement of the people at the top of AP. They’ve been watching too many of those terrible anti-war movies Hollywood seems to churn out every 3 months…”
Posted by: PresterJohn at April 22, 2008 3:09 PM
May 23, 2009 - 5:22 pm 18. Doug:Local Muslims & Reawakening Forces Rescue Iraqi Christian Teacher
May 23, 2009 - 5:26 pm 19. Doug:“File this under:
News you won’t likely read in the mainstream media.”
Memorial Day 2009 salute
May 23, 2009 - 5:33 pm 20. Gringo:The question that jumps out of the Curtis Melvin story is why the New York Times, with the resources it had in its heyday, couldn’t do something as neat as this.
Because the NYT didn’t want to “offend” NoKo.
May 23, 2009 - 6:09 pm 21. Herb:A fascinating things about this story is that there was (’02/’03) a young guy (IIRC at a seminary or something in Mo. or somewhere, undergrad, name escapes me [CRS]) who had researched all of the generally available linkages within the AQ/Iraq/Iran network, by name, alias, meetings and I dont know what all. Used to post the most mind numbingly detailed analyses of who was what, where, why, etc. in Intl Arab Terrorism,Inc. Lost track of him when he went to another blog and slowed his posts down. I fantasize he was picked up as a skilled analyst for CIA and has helped. But have no faith that that is so.
May 23, 2009 - 6:22 pm 22. John Lynch:I don’t understand how media’s roll in news gathering is going to be replaced. Citizen journalists, or whatever we call them, are not even close to gathering enough news to fill the role of the much reviled newspapers and TV networks.
It seems to me that what’s really doing in journalists is competition with themselves. The availability of the same product, for free, on the internet and 24 hour news networks is what is driving newspapers into bankruptcy. It’s not blogs, or anything on the internet itself. The internet is just bypassing the old distribution chain. The actual content produced by reporters on the ground isn’t much different. What we know about what’s happening in Sri Lanka, for example, is brought to us by the same traditional reporting methods. How we’re getting it is different.
So, what happens if the reporters can no longer be paid for because their employers go out of business? Will people start paying for news then? I don’t know.
May 23, 2009 - 8:34 pm 23. Tcobb:This is a symptom of true social evolution. Networks of common interests being formed amongst people who may be spread across the globe. Expertise can form spontaneously. It is no longer confined to the old centers, the professors in the ivory towers and the great kings in their castles. Their monopoly has been cracked, and their stature diminished, and that is not to their liking.
May 23, 2009 - 8:56 pm 24. someone:Herb, you mean Dan Darling’s “Regnum Crucis” blog? (Don’t look up the site, the spammers stole it.)
May 24, 2009 - 1:26 am 25. Doug:Inside the AP
—
“I work for AP, and we have had some nausea-inducing internal memos about Bilal Hussein. I have no problem with the presumption of innocence- but I can absolutely guaruntee that if I was accused of very serious crimes I would immediately be suspended from working and AP as an organisation would refrain from assuming anything about me until I was tried.
But that is not the conversation going on within AP. All the memos insist he is innocent- something they can’t possibly know. They also imply that the US military is politically corrupted and is holding Hussein for political reasons rather than the ones given out by the military. It is creepy and makes me doubt the judgement of the people at the top of AP. They’ve been watching too many of those terrible anti-war movies Hollywood seems to churn out every 3 months…”
Posted by: PresterJohn at April 22, 2008 3:09 PM
@ Michael J. Totten The Case of Bilal Hussein
May 24, 2009 - 2:37 am 26. Don51:In the arena of astronomy, comet hunting has been a particular avocation that the ‘amateurs’ contribute to the professional community. Long nights sweeping the skies in search of that tiny whisp of extra-terrestrial cloud is rewarded with the acknowledgment of naming the discovery after its finder. In essence data mining is similar with the key exception that the scientific community has an office to validate who got there first. Apparently, that community’s ego is less invested in ego than fact.
May 24, 2009 - 4:30 am 27. Blindman:I read the story re North Korea and the Curtis Melvin project. When I finished the story I had the impression that Google Maps really was the tool that moved the effort forward.
The thing about raw satellite photos is that they seem to be believable. I also note that when I want to view the world with Google maps particularly after reading the news, many of the sites I look at are of too low a resolution to be of additional information.
Over the last decade one of the tools of clinical research has been the use of meta-analysis studies. What I mean by this is that the authors pool previous research studies to increase their power of analysis. They draw less universal conclusions but are able to explore bedrock principles with more certainty.
So it is with multi-sourced news events. The analyzer would have to accept the truth of his competitors stories. One outcome of this is that at some point they may have to accept the truth of his competitors opinions.
May 24, 2009 - 7:44 am 28. Beaglescout:This may be too much to ask.
I like this! I’m in the midst of a months-long meditation on a redesign of journalism to make sense in the internet age. The idea of connecting current events to history, vetting the connections, and maintaining a useful and actionable understanding of history as one of the roles of journalism is very new, when compared to the actual performance of journalists. It almost makes journalism into an intelligence service of use to everyone, not just to nations. And it contributes to the transparency of world events, which should make the world safer for us all.
May 26, 2009 - 7:33 pmSorry, comments for this entry are closed at this time.