The FBI hasn't Forgotten HUMINT

I was quite happy to read this news story, in which it is reported that the FBI arrested seven would-be terrorists who were allegedly planning to plant explosives in the Sears Tower and a federal building in Miami.

This pleases me for two reasons:

1. Due process. These alleged terrorists were arrested, not shipped off to Gitmo in the middle of the night.


2. HUMINT. The Feds broke this case with old-fashioned police work: they got a lead on the suspects, infiltrated their organisation, pretended to be Al-Qaeda agents, and recorded the baddies planning to do the dirt. Compare this effective investigation with how the NSA (isn't it just adorable that the NSA has a kids site?) and the CIA roll, so addicted to SIGINT that they forgo men (and women--this particular woman was my wife's high school English teacher) on the ground. The biggest problem with SIGINT is that data mining is hard, especially when searching for patterns that exist in very miniscule percentages of your data. The intel thus garnered suffers from an extremely poor signal-to-noise ratio, meaning that almost all leads generated are going to be dead ends. Indeed, this is just what the FBI has found when following NSA- and CIA-generated leads on terror suspects: none of the hundreds of leads actually point to anything useful.

As far as I am concerned, this was a textbook operation, and the FBI agents responsible deserve a big hand from us all for doing their job within the limits of the Constitution.

Just like Kima Greggs says in "The Wire", "a cop is only as good as his informants." Word.