Spy Factory - Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4BItquziNI
Spy Factory - Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0Fw1L_n-ZQ&NR=1
Spy Factory - Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJR4tdXKil8&feature=related
Spy Factory - Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9nGHqbEbI0&NR=1
Spy Factory - Part 5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOSnmLY3O3w&feature=related
Spy Factory - Part 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8yiRt5iqtk&feature=related
Posted on YouTube by "doobsta", February 4, 2009.
NOVA "The Spy Factory" Web Site: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/spyfactory/
Produced by NOVA, the above videos repeat what we have long known about "The Long War": it has been always a war for detectives and poets who have to approach their work from two vectors: untangle skeins of personal and private relationships; become adept at listening to Islam in the way that Islam listens to itself, and more specifically in the ways that Islamists have fashioned for themselves an alternative existence to modernity by way of mind and reversion to a foundation text.
The videos emphasize the operational nuts and bolts that dropped between an ill-coordinated relationship involving the CIA, FBI, and NSA, and they tackle the mammoth job of both gathering communications, shades of Orwell, and ferreting out what to listen to closely, but now and then, as you watch (and are introduced to western bureaucratic and technology driven operations), you'll pick up on the basics involved in driving--truly, wheels, brakes, and accelerators--on the other side of the street.
What you won't have: an internal cultural x cross-cultural decoder.
Only humans have that--and, generally speaking, it's their own culture they decode.
As the narrator notes in Part 6 of the "Spy Factor", "When it comes to human conversations, technology is of little help"--at least as regards comprehending their import.
Engineers elaborate where poets distill, compress, and amplify.
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