| Perhaps the most interesting point is that exclusive access to data, long the most apparent advantage of intelligence agencies, may be declining in importance. The rise of the global Internet, increasing open exchange of public information, and increasing amounts of commercially available data (e.g., satellite imagery), is placing added importance on high quality analysis that can make sense of the flood of data already available to analysts prior to the September 11th attacks. High quality analysis is a key opportunity because the raw data have to be synthesized to be useful, because analysts do not have enough hours in the day to comprehend the raw data streams themselves, and because the knowledge that is used to synthesize and prioritize analysts' attention needs to be adaptive.
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