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September 12, 2004

Decentralization's Virtues

This LA Times article touting the role of blogs in bringing the CBS document forgery issue to the public eye is doubtless already tearing up the blogosphere, and to an extent, with good reason. The ability of a distributed network of people to uncover this story and to pursue it with such vigor is really quite amazing. And while I have no plans to engage in blogger triumphalism (since, even if the blogosphere really is all that and a bag of snacks, yours truly is the broken M&M at the bottom of the bag of snacks. ;), the ability of a bunch of amateurs to uncover the facts about something like this should offer us a valuable lesson in how distributed systems can solve problems, often better than a group of experts.

I don't believe for a minute that CBS looked at these documents and said "Hey, these are fake, but they support our beliefs, so let's run with them." The vetting process was probably undertaken in all sincerity. But the reporters doing the vetting simply didn't know the right questions to ask. So they got Hodges to confirm that the memos were probably written by Killian without thinking to mention that they weren't handwritten, and they assumed that, when the handwriting expert said that the signature on the memo they showed him was Killian's, that meant that the documents were legitimate. So they ran with the story, and it may yet cost them dearly.

Now compare the performance of the CBS journalists with that of our intelligence agencies in the months prior to the Iraq invasion. Just as I don't believe that CBS deliberately foisted forgeries as legitimate documents, I don't think our intelligence agencies set out to provide President Bush with the ammo he needed to justify the war regardless of what the facts showed. Nonetheless, all of those experts still apparently missed the fact that Iraq's WMD programs, while hardly as harmless as some antiwar types would have you believe, were nowhere near as advanced as people believed. In both cases, agencies suffered a severe loss of credibility (although neither has yet to be punished for that lack) due to their failures. While they both may yet skate clear, the risks of a lack of credibility are severe enough for both a news organization and an intelligence agency that it cannot be risked lightly. Both organizations have significant incentives to make sure that they're right the first time. Yet in each case, they failed.

Let me be clear right now and say that I'm not necessarily arguing that the blogosphere could have done a better job interpreting intelligence than the CIA. But clearly the blogosphere did a much better job of looking at these documents than CBS News. Why?

Motivation. The right side of the blogosphere wants to see Kerry defeated in November, and therefore will look skeptically at anything that threatens those chances. (We saw this from the left with the Swiftvets.) When CBS unveiled these documents, there were plenty of people who had a personal stake in testing their claims.

Numbers. The blogosphere is made up of thousands of people, with tens of thousands of readers. Between all of us, there's a lot of knowledge and experience. That meant it was virtually inevitable there were some bloggers out there who could bring practical experience to bear on the issue.

Balance. All it takes to become a blogger is a big ego and an Internet connection. That means while any individual blogger is probably quite biased, as a whole we come from all points on the political spectrum. That means that whenever one side throws out an argument, the other side is going to do its best to defeat that argument. In this case, that meant the lefty bloggers offered various counterarguments to show that the documents might be real, forcing the righties to counter those arguments in turn. Bad arguments were easily shot down, and the challenge of competition forces each side to come up with better arguments.

The 9/11 Commission has argued that the solution to our intelligence failures leading up to 9/11 can be solved by appointing an intelligence czar who can focus and centralize our intelligence efforts. Yet such a centralizing effort would only serve to further institutionalize the biases of whoever was placed in the position of intelligence czar, further reducing the chances of intelligence contrary to the conventional wisdom being aired.

I'm certainly not going to suggest that we should hand the nation's intelligence over to the blogosphere. Not because we're not experts (although we're not), but because of security issues involved with sources and methods. But perhaps we ought to put aside the idea of creating an intelligence czar and look at a different method of assessing intelligence, such as a competitive model. Give one group of analysts the task of proving that the available evidence points to X, give another the job of proving Y, and see what they come up with. Or maybe create an intelligence 'red team' tasked with tearing down whatever the agencies produce. There are doubtless plenty of other ways of decentralizing intelligence without compromising sources and methods that would move us away from groupthink and safety in numbers thinking. It's time we started thinking about how to put some of them to use.