thanks for your reply.

“In the military, each major formation has an intelligence capability. It is natural and a good idea for police departments to develop the same capability. However, the problem becomes information sharing.”

do you think,perhaps it’s fair to say

that’s the major problem when identified

on a “domestic” level??

what happens when the major cities EACH run their own foreign intelligence services??

how can that(redundancy of personelle,decision-making,organizations,

authority,etc) be beneficial

to the nation as a whole?

isn’t that redundancy,at some point,

less of a safeguard,and more a waste of resources??

________________________________

“We will keep secrets and confidentiality.”

in the journalist-as-hero world,

there is no room for this mindset.

it’s “sunshine laws” 24/7,

as though everyone in the world

has the same values and shares the same ends.

imo,that’s the definition of naieve.

i have no concrete proof,

but anecdotal evidence suggests

political science

is no longer taught at the university level.

In the military, each major formation has an intelligence capability. It is natural and a good idea for police departments to develop the same capability. However, the problem becomes information sharing. Law enforcement organizations need to develop a network to share information across jurisdictions and with the feds. They already have a template for doing this in the various national crimminal information data bases. The problem is not in sharing data with the Federal LE an IC organizations. We will keep secrets and confidentiality. The reverse is not always true.

http://counterterror.typepad.com/the_counterterrorism_blog/2005/10/the_challenge_a.html#more

it’s relevant to the discussions of the past week:

The CounterTerrorism Blog

October 11, 2005

The Challenge and Divisiveness of Information Sharing in Today

Mobilizing early for a false alarm destroys warning credibility for a real event. There are a lot steps short of total mobilization that can be effective when the warning is vague and uncertain.

I doubt you will calling for a state emergency after the first normal influenza case this year.

And I will always advocate for early mobilization and activation rather than waiting for confirmation from a CDC lab or other law enforcement capability.

There’s another level to Bloomberg’s actions. I blame Katrina. If I were in Blooomberg’s shoes I would have acted much as he did, to show my city that we have things under control..not like in NOLA.

Local response and preparation for disasters has been one of the top topics recently. On everyone’s mind. Houston officials made sure their citizens were evacuated, yet Rita mostly passed them by.

Hopefully our complacency is a thing of the past, though I suspect it won’t take long before we go back to our casual ways.

As a member of the warning community, I think the time has come to bring in state and local officials and train them how to evaluate and deal with warning information. I agree theat the Mayor would have been derlict in his duty had he not taken some action given the information that he received. However, as I said before, his response was too public and as a result he has squandered a lot of capital. The City of New York needs to develop better plans to respond to potential threats. The Governor has in the New York National Guard (42nd ID) an instrument with combat experience that he can designate as his planning agency. The Mayor and the Governor should work together on this.

Bloomberg’s action confirmed many of the fears the warning community about the advisibility of passing sensitive intelligence information to the state and local level.

If New York had been attacked and Bloomberg hadn’t acted on previous knowledge, you would have been the first in line to throw bricks at him. A word in your shell-like ear: if you don’t stop spewing incredibly brain-dead, knee-jerk conspiracy trash, people of good will may stop listening to you.

Surprising, but true.