Bulletin board for terrorists

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The 15 intelligence agencies John Negroponte will now oversee employ just under 100,000 people. Most turn their noses up at anything not stamped with a secret classification, preferably "TOP SECRET." Tongue-only-half-in-cheek, one veteran intelligence analyst conceded, "I'm not interested in anything unless I know it's been stolen."

But there is now a recently discovered open source gold mine with rich nuggets the intelligence community still hasn't figured out how to exploit. At the beginning of the year, the exploding blogosphere was estimated to contain about 10 million blogs. Last week, according to National Security Agency and Defense Information Agency experts, there were more than 180 million blogs all over the world.

The bloggers are frustrated would-be editors, journalists, private detectives and a multitude of others craving recognition for their special knowledge in a wide variety of subjects and specialties. A blog and an attitude are the only requirements to become an instant pundit with a worldwide audience.

DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), prodded by NSA, is trying to figure out how to vacuum clean these electronic bulletin boards for coded messages in seemingly innocuous phrases. Blogs would greatly facilitate coordination of terrorist acts at the same time in different parts of the world. The cyber Hoover would be a super Google.com that already processes information with giant databases and super computers capable of several trillion operations per second. (One trillion seconds ago was 29,000 years before Jesus Christ.)

Dan Gillmore in his book, "We the Media," argues today's bloggers are the direct descendants of revolutionary pamphleteers, such as Tom Paine, spreading dissent, holding those in authority accountable, and encouraging citizens to participate in a newly emerging public sphere, or global village.

Bloggers relentlessly hounded three media stars and eventually knocked them off their lofty perches while the mainstream media panted, trying to catch up. The powerful executive editor of the influential New York Times was the first to bite the dust for ignoring a wayward black reporter who faked exclusive stories. Next "blogged" was Dan Rather over the veracity of documents on which CBS based a story about George W. Bush's National Guard service. Mr. Rather lost his evening anchor, but still managed to salvage his berth at "60 Minutes II." Three others took the fall instead.

CNN's top news honcho Eason Jordan was the next high flier to crash. Liberal orthodoxy took it on the chin. But this was not a victory for conservatives. It simply telegraphed bloggers would hit whenever and wherever they spotted dishonesty and hypocrisy. Conventional wisdom is now the target.

MSM -- shorthand for mainstream media -- was taken by surprise. Its agenda-setting power was going the way of the dodo. Bloggers build their own agendas, brick by brick, reinforcing one another with cyber pats on the back. Important tidbits exchanged by two Washington insiders on the shuttle between Washington and New York and overheard by a blogger will span the globe faster than conventional e-mail.

Last summer, the Republican and Democratic conventions accredited bloggers alongside MSM. The blogosphere had come of age. But no one foresaw where it would take us a few months later. When anyone who's anyone in Washington goes out to dinner, he or she must decide what part of his or her life is on or off the record.

Blogger monitors say the lines between public events and ordinary social interactions are being erased, changing the way we do everything, from dating to working, and just plain living. Futurologists see emergence of global participatory democracy that will force national politicos to make the environment a priority for global governance. Think tanks study models of global governance for global health problems -- and the bloggers are forcing these issues out in the open.

Reporters Without Borders, the journalistic equivalent of Medecins Sans Frontieres, argue this new form of blogging journalism is the ultimate in freedom of expression. The World Editors Forum is more circumspect. It advocates a barrier between MSM and blog publishers with a code of ethics for bloggers. The Blogger Social Media Group fires back, arguing a blog is not a one-to-many but a many-to-many medium.

Bloggers say they are a collective intelligence, which is preferable to a single reporter and his editor. The MSM process is opaque and oblique, say the bloggers, whereas "ours is the ultimate in transparency." Bloggers also compare their cyber product to market research information. "The bloggers act as fact checkers and we always need fact checkers," says Bertrand Pecquerie of World Editors Forum.

Some major corporations have started company blogs. The problem is that disgruntled employees can add embarrassing bullets at the drop of an altercation with a supervisor.

Whatever the arguments, the majority (52 percent) of a general public survey said bloggers should have the same rights as traditional journalists, while 27 percent had no opinion. Newspapers lose circulation and advertising to the blogosphere. Instapundit.com ramped up to 100 million pages to become the second-most-cited blogger on Technorati in a few weeks.

Technorati alone logs about 40,000 new blogs a day. The number doubles every five months. South Korea, a country of 50 million, already has 12 million bloggers.

The average Internet user now spends three hours a day on line -- and an hour and a half watching television. That's four hours a day. Blogs are bound to increase the daily average. Sex is still the favorite topic for on-line journals. The very private has never been more public, said one wag.

Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large of The Washington Times and of United Press International.