by Gregory F. Treverton

About the author: Gregory F. Treverton is senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation, senior fellow at the Pacific Council on International Policy, and author of the book Reshaping National Intelligence for an Age of Information.

The old and new worlds of intelligence met on September 11, 2001, when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Terrorism is an old-world problem in new-world circumstances. The new world is much more open, with vast amounts of information, much of which is neither owned by US intelligence agencies nor can be regarded as reliable—for example, that stew of fact, fiction, and disinformation known as the Web.

Openness needs to be put at the heart of the intelligence business. Exploiting secrets used to be the...