U.S. Intelligence Tests Crowdsourcing Against its Experts: Who's Better at Predicting Terrorist Attacks?

It goes against everything you'd think is common sense. Surely a group of experts would know better than a large group of non-experts. But crowdsourcing has been shown to be pretty effective in areas from Science to the stockmarket, so a victory for it here would not surprise me.

Its too hard to tell between wisdom of crowds and mass histeria.

so called Intelligence experts are people who do a lot of math. They are told to look at history for trends. observing how often certain events took place each year and also what other events were happening at the same time. Was it hot or a cool day? Was it during a time of economic growth when the country was doing well or was it during a 'downturn'? Were we in war or between battles? They collect all sort of seemingly unrelated data and plug it into equations that they feel will predict with an uncertain degree of accuracy about possible future events.

The amazing thing is that governments pay people to do this.

Basically the same equations are used to predict fashion trends. Stripes coming back in this year? Terrorists in stripes? Ask the experts!

The only thing intelligence experts have over the intuition of the everyman in the crowd is dedicated intelligence gathering operatives who actually infiltrate and closely observe the activities of terrorists(or at least suspected terrorists) and they can add that date into their equations.

Those are the time when they change the terror threat color scheme.
It is a science of guessing the future based on observed patterns of the past.
It does work.. to a point. But it is far from an exact science.

ALL OF THE ABOVE, AND THEN SOME..

Franklin Pierce

Why does this remind me of remote viewing or the egg project.

How come people do not see that a militarily army is terroristic?

Get the experts to ask the terrorists.

Bad or "cooked" intelligence assessments got us into a war in Iraq. And now that I think about it, Vietnam, too.

really , only the terrorist knows.

another way to protect lives

the terrorist

Experts are fouled by political leanings.

Intelligence"experts" aren't any better than the average joe at predicting terrorist attacks if they were 9/11 wouldn't have happened.

Who defines a terrorist/terrorism. A person who blows himself up? Someone who leaks top secret documents to reveal a corrupt government? Capitalists or Communists?

The U.S. Government creates terrorists, they want them to blow us up so they can strip us of more rights and make billions off of wars. People can regulate everything better.

Based on my experience in the field, locals do the best at finding the SOBs. Intel just uses the info from the locals in many cases anyway.

they stopped the Christmas time bombing

No they didnt. They created it. If you pay attention, you'd know that entire situation was set up by the intelligence community. It was admitted in House Intelligence Hearings by the Undersecretary of National Security that the bomber was put on the plane by intelligence agents. Several witnesses on the aircraft claimed seeing a man escort the suspected bomber past airport security and onboard the airplane. It was all part of getting the body scanners in the airports, which was created by a company that the head of the TSA was a major investor in.

I think it would be easier if intelligence gathered for national security stopped leaking out to the crowds... we have a right to know some things, but other matters must remain confidential for everyone's safety and the sake of our survival in modern war.

This is a stupid question..... Intelligence Experts are still the best at what they do. Period

Seems to be working pretty good I'd rather experts get it then oh the guy next to me kind of well suspects something then BOOM!

Wisdom of Crowds sounds a lot like a Lynch mob too me.

They are also the best at creating terroists.

neither

no further comments follow

Crowds that think in unison scare me! I am borg... give me orange kool-aid........

Hey no reason to bring the Obama voters into this lol

Better we leave all the thinking to one person, like Obama.

Isn't it obvious? We had the Soviet Union run by technocrats and it failed in less than 100 years....We had Europe run by nobility....it lasted a bit longer but still nothing has worked better than free people freely choosing their leaders.

Apparently the folks in the intelligence community are finally realizing what has been sitting front of their noses for 200 plus years.

Lead by Bugs Bunny....bark

Without any doubt!

We are beyond the old stuff. Now we have Intelligence Experts spying on the Military and everybody in the Military. Every phone call, email, smoke signal is monitored by an outside (in this case inside) agency. The NSA. The 0's private spook network. This administration is obsessed with False Flag leaks and has turned it's attention to the Military.

What a tangled web.

http://prasutagus.wordpress.c...
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/...
http://waronyou.com/forums/in...
http://www.aclu.org/maps/spyi...
http://intelnews.org/2010/12/...
http://www.democracynow.org/2...

You left out Code pink and MoveOn.org.

Those groups are wonderful at locating terrorist just find anyone they call friends and most likely they are Terrorist.

Code Pink sounds dangerous.

The best predictor of "terrorism" is to watch the "State Department" very closely, and see who all they support and get on board aircraft.

Intel experts my opinion should involve gathering info from crowds into their sourcing, Crowds may not be experts, but locals would be more keen on knowing what places would be attacked, problem being you have conflicting sources sometimes.

The other seems to smack of 'chicken or egg'.

Crowds have a mind and they can be ugly. A self-fulfilling prophesy.