User talk:Hcberkowitz/Control-Declassified

Steven Aftergood
As my own Wikipedia contributions make obvious, I am a fan of the work Steven Aftergood does at FAS. Patrick Radden Keefe has an excellent personal profile of him on pages 89-94 of his 2006 book on SIGINT, "Chatter." Keefe says of his first meeting with Aftergood, "While his conviction and persistence are almost evangelical, his rhetoric has none of the flinty inflexibility that is present in die-hard civil libertarians or law-and-order types. In an intellectual arena dominated by two stratified, static positions, Aftergood seems to be that rare thing, a nuanced and dynamic thinker.   Moreover, he is so patient and persuasive in articulating his position that he often makes a radical idea seem positively middle-of-the-road."

I corresponded with Aftergood via e-mail in February of 2003 about possible work with FAS shortly before a March trip to Washington where I interviewed with SSCI. In his new book "Bush's Law," New York Times reporter Eric Lichtblau tells the story of calling Aftergood to get his response to a statement by DNI McConnell, who said that because the debate on updating FISA was taking place in public rather than being resolved behind closed doors, "Americans will die." Don't have the exact quote because the book isn't in front of me, but I recall Aftergood telling Lichtblau that he had to listen to McConnell's remarks several times to be sure he was hearing them correctly. What he seems to be saying, Aftergood said to Lichtblau, is that "democracy will kill us."

Accept my apology, if one is necessary, for commenting on a rough draft of an essay under development in your userspace. I am not a "Wikistalker" - I just enjoy your efforts enough to periodically click on your contribs link to see if you've made any recent interesting-sounding edits. Plausible to deny (talk) 01:44, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Some IC resource links
I stumble across some things in the course of my web browsing that are essentially over my head, but I think that someone with your background and pedigree could appreciate them and put them to wider use here on Wikipedia. The first is a blog with an impressive list of links that I've only just begun to explore:

http://kentsimperative.blogspot.com/search?q=links

And the second is a bibliography of materials on the literature of intelligence:

http://intellit.muskingum.edu/maintoc.html

... that I found as recommended reading for an MIT Open CourseWare class:

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Political-Science/17-951Spring-2005/CourseHome/index.htm

Feel free to disregard any or all of it if is old news to you. Plausible to deny (talk) 17:47, 30 April 2008 (UTC)