Private Intelligence

Kover pointed out to me the other day that one of our former classmates from Dartmouth, Ben Wallace-Wells, recently had a piece published in the New Yorker. Way to go, Ben. (But the real question is if he'll ever get to post on the Daily Irk.) The article is about an Iraqi woman in the U.S. who is part of a small group of civilians who work in intelligence. She and her staff spend their days scouring the Internet for information about terrorists and then they sell that information to the government and media. The article brings up a number of interesting questions about private intelligence gathering like its impact on the media and the terrorists themselves.