Data Has Its Limits: Searching for Stories in "Top Secret America," Wikileaks

Judge Richard Posner isn't a fan of "Top Secret America," the Washington Post's investigative project that landed with a big splash but hasn't seemed to produce many subsequent ripples. The project, one thought highly-enough of by the Post for them to give it its own website, recounted how post 9/11 there's been a sprawling growth in the U.S. intelligence community. The three articles anchoring the series were coupled with dizzying array of infographics and charts and network maps that threatened to overwhelm the written piece of the world. Posner had his own problems with the actual written component of "Top Secret America," but the criticism is parallel. Quoting numbers showing that the U.S. intelligence footprint is really, really big and then pairing it with quotes showing that even insiders find that world really, really complex doesn't a story make:

The report is, in fact, a disappointment. It is descriptive rather than analytic, and the description is based entirely on two types of data, neither of which contributes to an understanding of the nature and problems of the nation’s intelligence system. The two types are statistics indicating the size and organizational complexity of national security intelligence, and expressions of exasperation at that size and complexity by former or current insiders.

And:

Merely counting the number of people, parking spaces, square feet of building space, and other countables lovingly recited in the Post‘s report conveys no useful information and will impress only naïve readers who have somehow failed to realize that the U.S. government and its major components are huge.

It seems like there might be something similar to say about the recent Wikileaks document release on the war in Afghanistan. The added wrinkle there is that the three major news outlets involved -- the New York Times, the Guardian, Der Spiegel -- were kinda forced into a corner by the sequence of events, and provoked into producing a story. (Though it's far more complicated than that; read Clint Hendler's wonderful account of how it all came to be.) After all, 90,000-plus incident reports and related materials, it sure seems like there has to be a story in there. And yeah, all that material might have been enormously useful for a individual reporter in helping him or her flesh out his or her understanding of the war. Such a tremendous cache of data, there has to be a story in there. But several days out, the only persistent narrative is that Pakistani intelligence were engaged in double-dealing in the period 2004-2009. Many people knew that. The ones that didn't seem like the are going to need more of any actual story to turn that knowledge into something productive. It's tough to hang an enhanced world view on raw data.

The "Top Secret America" and Wikileaks accounts have implications for the open data movement, a push to put more information into the wild that is championed at the upper levels of the White House (with Data.gov, for example, and the IT Dashboard). But in the early days of the open data revolution, we've heard far more about setting data free than we have about building the tools, and skills, and professions that turn that data into something that advances our understanding of the world. The danger in not worrying about that second step, the presentation step, is that without it, momentum threatens to get lost. Resources get misdirected. Wells get poisoned; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has taken to tweeting that Julian Assange and his source(s) "might already have on their hands the blood of our troops or that of our Afghan partners." People are potentially left more confused than when they started. That might not be Assange's problem. But it does seem to be the Washington Post's problem (and not only because they paid two reporters two years to work on the project). But it also seems to be the Post's opportunity, if they can build a corp of reporters who are information tamers, not conduits of data.

Somewhere in the rush to embrace the future, we seem to be forgetting a lesson as old as time: people like stories.