Thinking about how local knowledge and more sources of information usually let the best information blossom, I was imagining what would happen if the Department of Defense went open source with its information.

If every bit of intelligence was just disseminated to the public, individuals could make their own calls about what to do with it, best protecting themselves. In movies they always fear starting a panic, but that is because we don’t hear the threats all the time. They would become commonplace and after an initial rough period I imagine threats that are truly serious would be taken the most seriously.

As for troop deployments, I think that could be open source, too. If our strategies were truly about “defense” then why does it matter if those who want to attack us know exactly how we would retaliate? I would think that would be a greater disincentive to actually attack. In order for this to make much sense, though, the U.S. would have to be much less aggressive and dramatically change its foreign policy in order not to piss people off.

The problem that I found in my own thinking, though, was about intelligence gathering. In order to get the information to spread to the public, there needs to be good intelligence gathering. If all of those strategies were revealed and open, then I’m not sure how valuable intelligence that could actually expose threats would be discovered.

So I stopped thinking.

Anyway, I probably got a little off topic, forgive me.