Bruce Schneier points to an excellent interview with James Bamford, the journalist who’s written three books on the NSA (National Security Agency)- 1982’s The Puzzle Palace, 2001’s Body of Secrets, and now The Shadow Factory.

One of the things Bamford is interested in explaining is why the NSA hasn’t worked very well in the last few years, and his analysis is striking:

NSA was never designed for what it’s doing. It was designed after World War II to prevent another surprise attack from another nation-state, particularly the Soviet Union. And from 1945 or ’46 until 1990 or ’91, that’s what its mission was. That’s what every piece of equipment, that’s what every person recruited to the agency, was supposed to do, practically — find out when and where and if the Russians were about to launch a nuclear attack. That’s what it spent 50 years being built for. And then all of a sudden the Soviet Union is not around anymore, and NSA’s got a new mission, and part of that is going after terrorists. And it’s just not a good fit. They missed the first World Trade Center bombing, they missed the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, they missed the attack on the U.S. embassies in Africa, they missed 9/11. There’s this string of failures because this agency was not really designed to do this. In the movies, they’d be catching terrorists all the time. But this isn’t the movies, this is reality.

The big difference here is that when they were focused on the Soviet Union, the Soviets communicated over dedicated lines. The army communicated over army channels, the navy communicated over navy channels, the diplomats communicated over foreign-office channels. These were all particular channels, particular frequencies, you knew where they were; the main problem was breaking encrypted communications. [The NSA] had listening posts ringing the Soviet Union, they had Russian linguists that were being pumped out from all these schools around the U.S.

Then the Cold War ends and everything changes. Now instead of a huge country that communicated all the time, you have individuals who hop from Kuala Lampur to Nairobi or whatever, from continent to continent, from day to day. They don’t communicate [electronically] all the time — they communicate by meetings. [The NSA was] tapping Bin Laden’s phone for three years and never picked up on any of these terrorist incidents. And the [electronic] communications you do have are not on dedicated channels, they’re mixed in with the world communication network. First you’ve got to find out how to extract that from it, then you’ve got to find people who can understand the language, and then you’ve got to figure out the word code. You can’t use a Cray supercomputer to figure out if somebody’s saying they’re going to have a wedding next week whether it’s really going to be a wedding or a bombing.

It seems to me that futurists may be in a similar state. The NSA needed to look hours or days into the future, using an incredibly specific set of signals, while futurists look years into the future and use a very broad set of signals- indeed, it seems that almost anything can be a “weak signal,” which can either be a sign of healthy curiosity or poor discipline- but the underlying issues are the same.

Over the past few years I’ve had some working contact with people from… various institutions in the greater Washington, DC area… and my sense is that 1) they’re all really smart and dedicated, and 2) know that they’re trained for a different challenge than the one they’re now facing. It’s a familiar position. The more I’ve thought about it, the more it strikes me that futurists’ practices have evolved in the last forty years to serve a world that is less and less important. This was a world in which small elites- strategists, CEOs, politicians, people with their hands on nuclear triggers or levers of power- ran the world (or everyone assumed they did). It was a world in which the future could be considered at particular times- during strategic reviews or five-year plans. It was a world that we affected through texts, presentations, brainstorming exercises and scenarios.

i have the bad feeling that the world has changed enough to make these old assumptions and practices obsolete. Okay, not completely obsolete: corporate strategy is going to be around for a while, if only because no one has yet come up with anything better. The question is, what’s next for the future?