Richard Clarke: Why everyone warned about Trumps Russia ties couldnt believe their eyes [View all]

[kentuck]

https://qz.com/989368/richard-clarke-why-the-journalists-spies-and-politicians-warned-about-trumps-russia-ties-couldnt-believe-their-eyes/

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First, the warning is often about something that had never happened before. And so decision makers exhibit “First Occurrence Syndrome,” the failure to take seriously a warning about a possibility with which they had no prior experience. The dikes in New Orleans had never failed, but when they did, the whole city was flooded. No foreign power had ever tried seriously to change the outcome of a US election with their own concerted intelligence operation, but if Russia did indeed try, well, they may have soaked some voters, just like Katrina’s waves topped the New Orleans levees.

The second factor we have repeatedly found is that the person giving an accurate warning is often an expert armed with data, but who is also an outlier in their field. Other experts were not giving the same warning. What we found in most of the disasters we reviewed was that the expert exhibited “Sentinel Intelligence,” meaning that they had a unique ability to spot an approaching problem well before others.

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Former US ambassador Robert Ford accurately predicted the rise of ISIL two years before it happened and well before other analysts. Winston Churchill foresaw the threat of the Nazis and was mocked as a war monger by other British leaders. Roger Boisjoly and other Morton-Thiokol engineers screamed warnings that the space shuttle Challenger would explode on take-off on a cold January morning in 1986. And indeed, many experts on Russia and cyberattacks now agree with what Steele said a year ago, that Russia systemically interferes in democratic elections using sophisticated data analysis, amplified phony news stories, and false on-line identities in social media.

The third factor is that the disaster being foretold sounds “outlandish,” more like the plot for a Hollywood movie than something that would happen in the real world. NASA astrophysicist David Morrison has warned for years about the danger from large asteroid impact with Earth, but often had difficulty being taken seriously because two popular science fiction movies were the first most people heard of this risk. What Steele described in his “dossier” sounded like a plot outline for an updated version of the movie The Manchurian Candidate.

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