Too Much Information

The Washington Post’s report on the bloated and secretive American intelligence community is more a story of today’s information overload than villains with cloaks and daggers. The New Yorker says the information reported on by The Post was already in the public record but that organizing massive amounts of data is often the new task of journalism. These data are also partly responsible for the bureaucratic behemoth that is the American intelligence community. “‘Top Secret America’ is a new kind of journalistic enterprise, pairing expert reporting of the traditional shoe-leather variety with the information-gathering power of the Internet.”