Brewed Fresh Daily

Says says Zoe Baird, president of the Markle Foundation and co-chair of a task force it funded that produced the first comprehensive study of the information-sharing capabilities of the nation's intelligence and law-enforcement agencies in Fortune Magazine:

In Chicago, the FBI gets a tip that terrorists plan to infect large numbers of Americans with a dangerous virus. But in the past the informant revealed information on smuggling, not terrorism. Agents can't tell if his data are reliable. Meanwhile, in Kabul, someone with al Qaeda associations tells a CIA agent he's heard that sleeper cells are being set up in the U.S. While he can't remember many details, he recalls something about a Northwestern University microbiology student. If the U.S. had good IT systems for intelligence, the two pieces of information in this hypothetical case would be quickly correlated. Northwestern is near Chicago, so the reports together might suggest a credible threat. But held by different agencies and taken alone, each could easily be underestimated�and today that's what is likely to happen... The problem isn't lack of awareness on the part of agency leaders. It's more one of deeply ingrained culture... We need officials to speak out, from the White House on down, about the necessity of building networks to protect us in a networked age.

Yes! We need our elected officals to speak and act differently in a networked age, or be held accountable.