An effective intelligence service must pick and choose its targets very -- very -- carefully. And that's a matter of judgment

A judgment on intelligence

By Herbert E. Meyer 

“If you try to know everything about everything, you wind up knowing nothing about anything,” writes Herbert E. Meyer. Meyer points to the recent allegations that U.S. intelligence has been listening in to Angela Merkel's phone conversations and he suggests that a vital part of intelligence is lacking in Washington.


Despite everything you've gleaned from spy novels and movies, the most important raw material for a successful intelligence service isn't information; it's judgment. If you don't know what information is worth collecting, and if you cannot figure out what this information means soon enough and clearly enough for policymakers to use it -- you lose.

The latest case in point is the fuss over allegations in the German press that our country's intelligence service has been listening in to Angela Merkel's cell phone conversations. From the moment these allegations began to surface, American commentators and television talking heads -- a few of whom have actually served in US intelligence, most of whom claim to be intelligence experts because they once, perhaps, were allowed to read a classified document -- have been pooh-poohing these allegations as much ado about nothing. "Everyone does it," they pronounce, usually with a shrug and a wink. "So what's the big fuss?"

Yes, it's true that from time to time allies do spy on one another. France, for example, is infamous for running industrial espionage operations against America's leading high-tech companies. (It doesn't seem to have done the French much good; their economy is a basket case.) But just because our allies put more effort into spying on one another than spying on their real enemies, that doesn't mean we should too.

In the real world of intelligence, it isn't possible to know everything about everything. You can never have enough spies, enough satellites, or even enough bandwidth to monitor all humanity. And even if you had an unlimited supply of spies, satellites and bandwidth, there aren't enough analysts in the world, let alone in Washington DC, to make sense of what's been collected.
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