Another Zionist Trick
Shin Bet seeks to win hearts and minds of Arabs and the pro-Pal West, also rope in some top IT talent on the Web. Good luck with that! No obvious cloak and dagger skulduggery here. Just the intelligence business at its most corporately bland and lifeless. Ha’aretz:
The Shin Bet internal security service launched English and Arabic versions of its Web site yesterday, containing information on the organization’s history and providing data of terror activities and trends.“Understandably, extensive areas of ISA [Israel Security Agency - the Shin Bet's official English name] activity are confidential,” wrote Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin. “Nonetheless, we would like to give you some insight into the ISA, its values, and elements of its heritage and missions. Enjoy the site!” The Web site will be updated regularly and is part of the Shin Bet’s initiative to carry out a policy of “controlled transparency,” the organization said. Since the launch of its Hebrew version five months ago, tens of thousands of people from Israel and around the world have entered the secret service Web site. Some Shin Bet employees have even been permitted to write blogs in a bid to attract young candidates from the computer programming industry to work for the organization’s technology department.“We understand we work for the public, and we believe that we should expose anything we can that doesn’t harm the organization,” said a Shin Bet official. “The organization is not secret, its operations are. We call it ‘controlled openness.’”The agency still refrains from discussing its methods and intelligence, as well as the location of its headquarters.
Esther Levanon, a former top official who helped computerize the Shin Bet, said the Hebrew site was primarily aimed at drawing top talent to the spy agency.
“They want to bring in good people. There are really exciting things going on there, and they want people to know about it,” she said. “They are at the forefront of technology.”
The English and Arabic sites go one step further, trying to counter what the agency perceives as a huge cloud of misinformation swirling on the Web.
“There is a lot of material from unauthorized sources out there,” the Shin Bet official said. “We understand that in the Internet era, people are looking for information and here they will get it on an official site.”
A BBC report suggested it is likely to be somewhat popular with curious Arabs, though BBC’s Arab Service chief suggested the site is basically too boring and lacks enough current, updated material. Judge for yourself. English here. Arabic here. Hebrew here.
Presumably it’s equally boring in all three languages, which makes me wonder how they are going to attract that top talent. Reports talk about Shin Bet agent blogs and operational vid. I just poked around for a couple of minutes, did not find that stuff, and found it basically, as the BBC guy reported, stuffy and corporate. Any top talent out there who had more luck with it than I did, please point the way in comments. They need to crank up the operational vid, put that and the blogs out front, and start saying interesting things if they want to capture any eyeballs, hearts, minds, employees.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 12:01 pm on Tuesday, April 15, 2008
One Response to “Another Zionist Trick”
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April 15th, 2008 at 4:33 pm
Actually, I don’t find anything wrong with that. Intelligence agencies generally want the bland, corporate-style, unnoticeable types, the kind of people who will focus on the seemingly dull, unimportant details, and put together a broader picture, while attracting no one’s attention. What they don’t look for is James Bond.
I know this from my (admittedly short) experience as a civilian clerk and typist for a military intelligence group in Munich in the 70s. You could not have found a more uninspiring bunch of people (except for one guy, who was cute and young, and had already been married four times). I often wonder how far his career went.