John McQuaid

New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelley is talking about jamming cellphones when a terror attack occurs. During last month’s attacks on Mumbai, perpetrators took direction via cellphone from “handlers” who were apparently following the media coverage. Thus they could relay both general information about the authorities’ response as it unfolded and specific information coming from outside the besieged hotels. Conceivably, even those multiple Twitter feeds coming from the chaotic scene could have been part of the terrorists’ information universe – though it’s not clear if they were, or how useful that gusher of information would be.

So jamming cell phones could have some utility – like cutting off the power during a hostage situation, cut off all access to the outside world. (Of course, cellphones might stop working on their own because the system gets overloaded, as it did during 9/11 and Katrina.) But this would raise a host of technical and legal issues. Could they isolate and individually jam the phones in question? (Unclear – if they could do this quickly, it would probably be more useful listening in.) And how narrowly could the jamming area be targeted? Even if it could be limited to a single building, that would also jam the phones of hostages (or would-be John McClanes) whose communications with the outside world might be useful or important. As well as the phones of journalists and onlookers outside who are documenting the event to the outside world.

The authorities might view the intense focus by gadget-wielding observers to be part of the problem, conveying too much information to the world at large that could filter back to the terrorists. But an information quarantine itself could be dangerous and counterproductive, arrogating a lot of power to the state – like the universal eavesdropping technology Batman reluctantly employs in The Dark Knight.

In truth, I doubt that onlookers with cellphones pose a major problem for antiterrorism strategists, but this does show some of the difficulties of confronting an unfolding attack amid a cloud of digital information. Gadgets and the Internet give everyone eyes on everyone else. It sounds like 24 or a movie thriller, but it’s potentially very messy indeed in real life.

Michael Hirschorn is getting hammered for his speculation in the Atlantic that the New York Times could be out of business in a few months. Obviously, that’s unlikely. But his overall thrust – that the Times print edition will likely fade away and be supplanted by something that resembles the Huffington Post, a combination of aggregator and original journalism – is probably correct. The Times is, of course, the best newspaper in America, and the breadth of what it covers is remarkable. But let’s face it, with the huge smorgasbord of news sources available online, it’s far less remarkable than it used to be. The basic function of the daily newspaper’s print edition – to tell you all you need to know about your community (or in the case of the NYT, the world) in a single package – is no longer essential. The NYT’s relative, walled isolation online (its initial stab at aggregating notwithstanding), modeled on the daily paper experience, isn’t adapted to the way people imbibe news today.

I don’t know that the NYT-as-HuffPost outcome – which includes a fraction of the original journalism the Times does today – is inevitable, though. The Times brand has power and in may be worth more online than we think.

The paper has managed to make its business model work up to now by turning itself into a tastemaker for the boho class, embedding serious journalism amid lots and lots of lifestyle sections. People still want to be told what to wear, what to eat, and where to vacation by an (allegedly) unimpeachable cultural authority. That’s one advantage that may translate to the web (provided its purveyors actually understand the web) even as tastes fragment and diversify.

I am no intelligence expert, but have followed the sad bureaucratic history of the CIA out of the corner of my eye for years, just because it’s so … awful.  The agency has repeatedly been the victim either of its own internal pathologies, which are substantial, or the politics of intelligence gathering, which are treacherous. It’s not like, say, the Department of the Interior, where a new secretary can come in, put a new stamp on things, alter the agency’s entire policy trajectory. And there have been very few successful CIA directors in recent decades. Would-be technocratic reformers like John Deutch failed. George Tenet, a smart political operator who was popular inside the CIA and out for a while, ended up making untenable political compromises on Iraq and torture that that damaged the agency.

So I don’t quite understand why Dianne Feinstein and Jay Rockefeller are objecting to Obama’s pick, Leon Panetta:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who this week begins her tenure as the first female head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said she was not consulted on the choice and indicated she might oppose it.

“I was not informed about the selection of Leon Panetta to be the CIA director,” Feinstein said. “My position has consistently been that I believe the agency is best served by having an intelligence professional in charge at this time.”

A senior aide to Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), the outgoing chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the senator “would have concerns” about a Panetta nomination.

Rockefeller “thinks very highly of Panetta,” the aide said. “But he’s puzzled by the selection. He has concerns because he has always believed that the director of CIA needs to be someone with significant operational intelligence experience and someone outside the political realm.”

As objections go, these are weak. Of course expertise helps in any endeavor. But there is no reason that the CIA director has to be an intelligence expert. George H.W. Bush, considered one of the more successful directors, had no prior intelligence background. And the notion that the agency should somehow exist outside of politics is absurd. Obviously politics should not color intelligence findings, as they did on Iraq. But the CIA is a government agency with a large budget, a damaged reputation, and sharks of various kinds constantly circling it, looking to impose their own agendas (including, one has to assume, Feinstein and Rockefeller). It will benefit from having an outsider with his own power base and experience at the uppermost levels of government – assuming he has a clear idea of the agency’s role going forward and how it should serve the president. Whether Panetta can master the CIA’s internal politics is, of course, the biggest open question. But he probably has a better shot than an intel professional, who is more likely to be “captured” by various internal factions.

Panetta is unlikely to be a Porter Goss, the GOP congressman brought in by the current Bush administration to bring a less-than-cooperative CIA to heel – a project that thankfully failed. Goss, of course, was a former CIA agent.

Update: Laura Rozen rounds up the various reactions – stunned, angry, happy. And Josh Marshall says, correctly, I think, that this is the first real political story of the year – i.e., something that, unlike the various sideshows of late, will have tremendous implications for government and the world.

Usually, governing involves some experimentation. You never know if policies are going to work until you try them. It wasn’t clear in the 1990s that welfare reform would be effective. Few thought George W. Bush’s Medicare drug benefit would be anything but a disaster. But those were all small potatoes compared to some of the things Barack Obama will be deciding. We are about to embark on a vast improvisation on economic policy that stands a very good chance of failure.

It’s frustrating, but let’s face it: nobody really knows how the U.S. and global economies will respond to the huge stimulus package soon (we hope) to come out of Washington. There’s the straightforward notion that a boatload of federal spending will create jobs, at least for a while. And that tax cuts will put money in people’s pockets, which might make them feel better, even if they don’t spend it. But both of those are primarily short-term outcomes – desired ones, of course – but mainly political in nature. Beyond that horizon things are very dark and confusing indeed.

Can a stimulus do the job? Well, maybe. It is, in the end, all we have. Amity Shlaes wrote a piece last week recounting how many of FDR’s improvisations didn’t work.  But when Shlaes goes on to give her own prescription, it’s colored by her dislike of taxes and spending. Is a capital gains tax cut really the answer? Again?

Happy New Year. I decided to take a break from blogging over the holidays, figuring a reboot would be beneficial. Frankly, my blogging had suffered because of Twitter. For me it began last year as a kind of adjunct to blogging – a place to throw out observations, stray fragments of ideas, etc. But then it morphed into something a little bigger than that – though what, exactly, I can’t quite define. Sometimes it was pure procrastination, frivolity, fun. Other times, Twitter became a kind of field for cultivating bloggable ideas, or ideas for journalism, or about the nature of journalism itself. It became not a distraction from other things but an end in itself. But was this ultimately *useful* – a waste of effort or an investment in something? And if it was the latter, what was I investing in?

This is about the nature of reading and writing today. Of course these activities are ever more interactive, more immediate, and, er, shorter in duration than ever before. They are ever more likely to involve direct give-and-take with others in real time. The “investment” is not just in self-expression, in reporting facts or disseminating ideas effectively, but it’s also in the iterative process itself – how the social network feedback shapes and reshapes your thoughts.

It’s endlessly alluring, the long braid of thoughts and observations, and the capability to weave yourself into it. It’s funny, dramatic, provocative, weird. And the Twitterverse is vast and spans more geographic and intellectual area every day. But because it’s a conversation among millions, it is also not terribly deep. It is enriching in some ways, not in others. Social networks are self-selecting, so the conversations trade on shared attitudes and assumptions that may go unchallenged. There isn’t much opportunity for rumination; it’s hard, for example, to craft an argument or in 140 characters (though a worthy challenge to try). The key is knowing when to dive in and when to step back and reap some of the dividends of Twitter by plowing them back into other forms – and vice versa.