Open Secrets
I recently found and greatly enjoyed this New Yorker article, entitled "Open Secrets: Enron, Intelligence, and the Perils of Too Much Information," by Malcolm Gladwell (of The Tipping Point and Blink fame). See here for my review of Blink.
Open Secrets is a long (7,000 word) article that goes into considerable depth on the topic of open source intelligence -- basically, finding things hidden in plain sight.
Early in the article, Gladwell introduces the distinction between puzzles and mysteries:
The national-security expert Gregory Treverton has famously made a distinction between puzzles and mysteries. Osama bin Laden's whereabouts are a puzzle. We can't find him because we don't have enough information. The key to the puzzle will probably come from someone close to bin Laden, and until we can find that source bin Laden will remain at large.
He then proceeds to deftly argue that the Enron debacle could easily be mistaken for a puzzle, when in reality it was a mystery. Most or all of the information needed to recognize that Enron was at risk (e.g., the complex special-purpose entities) was disclosed in public documents. The problem with Enron, Gladwell convincingly argues, wasn't too little information but too much.
He goes on to describe the Screwball Division, a US World War II intelligence outfit that relied entirely on public information:
That secret turned out to be the V-1 rocket and most of the inferences the analysts made turned out to be correct. Another excerpt:
Propaganda Analysis
The article ends with an example that cleverly and clearly supports Gladwell's hypothesis about Enron. In 1998 six Cornell business school sudents decided to do a term project on Enron for an advanced financial analysis class:
Gladwell is a delightful writer and this is a topic that should be of interest to virtually everyone. So my recommendation: this is a must read article.
