Saturday, December 22, 2007

Failure Is Spelled With Both A W And A BJ

Wired has an article expressing alarm at the ability of Chinese intelligence to "turn" an outsourced translation service in Hawaii. Bill Gertz, who did the original reporting for the Washington Times said:


China's intelligence service gained access to a secret National Security Agency listening post in Hawaii through a Chinese-language translation service, according to U.S. intelligence officials. ... According to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity, China's Ministry of State Security, the main civilian spy service, carried out the operations by setting up a Chinese translation service in Hawaii that represented itself as a U.S.-origin company.

In 2002, right after the September 11 attacks, the Legislative branch found US translation and analysis capabilities to be woefully inadequate because of 1990s cutbacks.


Hayden says NSA simply could not afford to keep them. The agency "already [had] squeezed the retraining limit dry" after 1990s cutbacks, he adds.

Or were the 90s cutbacks W's fault?