"Collecting intelligence information is like trying to drink water out of a fire hydrant. You know, in hindsight It's great. The problem is there's a million dots at the time"
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Intelligence, in Freeh's telling, isn’t a Sherlock Holmes puzzle so much as a flood scene: the hydrant image swaps the romantic idea of secret knowledge for something bluntly bureaucratic and bodily. You’re not “discovering” truth; you’re struggling not to choke on it. That’s the point of the metaphor: it frames intelligence failure less as ignorance than as overload, a system designed to collect everything but not necessarily to understand anything.
The offhand “You know, in hindsight it’s great” carries the lawyerly edge of an implied cross-examination. Once an attack or crisis has happened, every fragment suddenly becomes “obvious,” every memo a breadcrumb, every intercepted call a neon sign. The subtext is defensive: don’t judge agencies as if they were reading a finished novel when they were actually drowning in rough drafts. Freeh is making a preemptive argument against simplistic accountability narratives that treat missed signals as willful blindness rather than a triage problem.
Then he drops the line that matters: “a million dots at the time.” It’s a quiet rebuke to the comforting cliché of “connecting the dots.” Dots aren’t scarce; they’re infinite. The real scarcity is attention, synthesis, and prioritization - the unglamorous architecture of analysis, filtering, and interagency sharing. Coming from a former top law-enforcement official, the context is post-crisis scrutiny: commissions, hearings, and the public’s demand that someone admit they should have known. Freeh’s intent is to reframe that demand: not “why didn’t you see it?” but “how do you build a system that can see anything at all without being blinded by everything?”
The offhand “You know, in hindsight it’s great” carries the lawyerly edge of an implied cross-examination. Once an attack or crisis has happened, every fragment suddenly becomes “obvious,” every memo a breadcrumb, every intercepted call a neon sign. The subtext is defensive: don’t judge agencies as if they were reading a finished novel when they were actually drowning in rough drafts. Freeh is making a preemptive argument against simplistic accountability narratives that treat missed signals as willful blindness rather than a triage problem.
Then he drops the line that matters: “a million dots at the time.” It’s a quiet rebuke to the comforting cliché of “connecting the dots.” Dots aren’t scarce; they’re infinite. The real scarcity is attention, synthesis, and prioritization - the unglamorous architecture of analysis, filtering, and interagency sharing. Coming from a former top law-enforcement official, the context is post-crisis scrutiny: commissions, hearings, and the public’s demand that someone admit they should have known. Freeh’s intent is to reframe that demand: not “why didn’t you see it?” but “how do you build a system that can see anything at all without being blinded by everything?”
Quote Details
| Topic | Decision-Making |
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