They are a bit pricey, Werner, but as the saying goes "If one thinks education is expensive, one should try ignorance"... ;-) Along that line, I ran into the item below in Frobes the other day. Very best! Joe U.S. Intelligence: How Bad Is It? Robert David Steele 04.18.06, 6:00 PM ET How inept is our secret national intelligence bureaucracy? Here is an example: In August 1995, at the request of the Aspin-Brown Commission, which wanted to test secret against open sources, I called five private-sector information providers and asked them to provide the commission, overnight, with as much information as possible about the civil-war-torn nation of Burundi. After one working day, they provided the following: * From Oxford Analytica, 20 two-page executive reports on the political-military implications of Burundi, Rwanda, and the attendant genocide, for the United States, the United Nations and Africa in general. * From Jane's Information Group, concise tribal orders of battle created over the weekend and one-paragraph summaries of every article they had ever published on that conflict. * From East View Cartographic, a complete list of all immediately available Russian military maps with contour lines at very fine levels of detail (today the U.S. still lacks such printed maps for 90% of the world--if computers fail due to bullet holes or moisture or sand, our troops literally go blind). * From Lexis-Nexis, a list of top journalists who cover Burundi, all immediately available for a detailed debriefing. * From the Institute of Scientific Information, a list of the top academics in the world on all aspects of the conflict, the tribes and the conditions, each immediately available for debriefing. * From Spot Image, complete commercial imagery for all of Burundi, less than three years old, cloud free, at a very detailed level of resolution. Meanwhile, the U.S. intelligence community had one of those bland little schoolroom maps of the country with no detail, and a regional economic study with severely flawed premises. _http://www.forbes.com/technology/2006/04/15/intelligence-open-source_cx_rds_0 6slate_0418steeleside.html_ (http://www.forbes.com/technology/2006/04/15/intelligence-open-source_cx_rds_06slate_0418steeleside.html) --------------------------------------------------- Technet Mail List provided as a service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8e To unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in the BODY (NOT the subject field): SIGNOFF Technet To temporarily halt or (re-start) delivery of Technet send e-mail to [log in to unmask]: SET Technet NOMAIL or (MAIL) To receive ONE mailing per day of all the posts: send e-mail to [log in to unmask]: SET Technet Digest Search the archives of previous posts at: http://listserv.ipc.org/archives Please visit IPC web site http://www.ipc.org/contentpage.asp?Pageid=4.3.16 for additional information, or contact Keach Sasamori at [log in to unmask] or 847-615-7100 ext.2815 -----------------------------------------------------