Too Much Information

No one will believe me if I said that my motto (one of them) is “The less said the better”, especially after reading my musings on anything under the sun in my blog posts. I believe in the right of a free press, and every other article of our constitution. I believe also that we as citizens have a right to be informed. But there is always a delicate balance between freedom and servitude, between information and dangerous detail, between intelligence and stupidity.

For years, it has been said that a foreign country does not need covert operation to spy on America, but only needs to read TIME magazine, or watch TV, or just Google something to be informed about what America has up its sleeve.

I think a case in point is the recent exposure of the Al Qaeda plot to destroy an American passenger plane. I was stunned to hear on Hardball tonight details of the CIA intelligence that caused the plot to unravel . I may have missed some of it, but it seemed that one of the guests was saying too much about the operation, the Saudi operative who volunteered to carry out the bomb, the infiltration of Al Qaeda, the type of bomb, the precautions being worked on to assure that such a bomb will be detected in the future, and so on. I then wanted to refresh my memory of what I had heard, so I pressed the Google news button on this blog (over there on the right under links), and there it was again.

We can be certain that Al Qaeda heard or read the same thing on Al Jazeera. I would bet that there is some kind of purge going on right now to destroy other operatives of the CIA. I would also bet, that they would look at any one who is too interested in carrying out a suicide bombing, and figure out that they may be TOO interested and look for a known quantity to deliver the goods. The odds are also that the Al Qaeda brain trust is looking at ways to improve the bomb that was intercepted in order to avoid detection on the next attempt.

I don’t want to belabor my point here, lest I too give out too much information. I know it takes years to build up a network that is trusted to safeguard truth and freedom in the American way. While information gathering, and speaking about it is an important freedom, I think it is important for those who have intelligence to speak less about it, rather than offer a conduit to those who would undo our way of life in a most violent manner.