Saving Lives with Design 430
valdean writes "Last year, the White House declassified an August 2001 intelligence brief entitled: 'Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.' Among other things, the brief mentions that Bin Ladin 'wanted to hijack a US aircraft.' So why was it ignored? Graphic designer Greg Storey thinks part of the reason is poor design. He set out to modify the format of the original document into a more legible one."
hindsight (Score:5, Insightful)
It was ignored on purpose. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:hindsight (Score:5, Insightful)
Not possible to take all threats seriously (Score:3, Insightful)
Design or not... (Score:5, Insightful)
What should have the government done? Put the whole country under martial law? Shut down all commerical businesses and transportation and unroll millions of miles of razor wire?
It was a lose-lose situation. Too bad they didn't replace the 85 year old baggage scanners earler.
News for nerds? (Score:1, Insightful)
Threat Matrix?? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Oh, that Bin Laden warning? Nah, I didn't take it seriously... I only read Threat Matrix 15 and above"
Better that these kind of documents all look the same, and *force* people to read every word. Those that don't read every word aren't doing their jobs properly.
Re:Design or not... (Score:2, Insightful)
i may be wrong, but i'm pretty sure box cutters were perfectly legal on planes at the time. changing the baggage scanners wouldn't have made a difference
Signal to noise. (Score:4, Insightful)
Whenever anything happens, you can always find SOMEONE who predicted it, that doesn't mean they knew it was coming. It just makes it easy to pick the signal out of the noise when you know what you're looking for.
He was 100% right. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:hindsight (Score:3, Insightful)
i'm saying that it may be oh-so-clear to us now how important this document was, so we may think that it's the fault of the design that it was overlooked; but at the time, regardless of they design, they felt it was overlookable.
at the time there was no design problem. it was simply not an important document. we only think to blame the design now because, using hindsight, we know the document was important.
Re:hindsight (Score:3, Insightful)
Even the "design issue" of the original post presuposes that in and amongst a digital info glut, we have ex ante knowledge about which information to highlight with pretty red boxes.
Shit happens. A lot. Continuously. There is no way to centrally control it. In real life, there is no root.
The sooner we dispense with the fiction that any entity (esp. government) can "monitor" and "act on" relevant information, the sooner we might move to a realization that no single entity can dictate behaviour on planet earth.
The self-defeating meme of US foreign policy is that they just need enough analysts to absorb the information and produce a plan of action.
Re:News for nerds? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:News for nerds? (Score:5, Insightful)
When dealing with the presentation of information, clear design is essential. Those who write software, and especially those who work with UIs should always be mindful of it.
That said, this guy prettied up a document and filled it with gibberish. He has some interesting ideas and some solid concepts, but his demonstration of it is lacking. A control number because he thinks it looks cool, etc. He does not present a solid case for why the information in the original document would have been acted on had it been presented in his way. In fact, the issues surrounding this document go more to the nature of intelligence information and the ability to assess it than to the typeface that was used. I know some people think this memo is a smoking gun of incompetence, but hindsight makes everyone a genius.
In any case see Tutfe's examination of the way in which engineers tried to convince NASA not to launch the Challenger for a better deconstruction of improperly formatted information leading to a catastrophe.
Re:Signal to noise. (Score:3, Insightful)
Regarding TFA, the design of the document is almost certainly a minor factor among the possible reasons it was ignored. (And yes, I've read my share of Tufte.) However, knowing this president, it might have held his attention longer if it had pretty illustrations of planes flying into buildings on the cover. And perhaps it should have been titled "My Pet Terrorist."
Re:Can someone please explain... (Score:1, Insightful)
The photographic evidence contradicts the conspiracy, tin-foil hat story, but as always, people who try hard to believe in a conspiracy simply ignore all the evidence (photographic and otherwise) that doesn't fit their conspiracy theory.
On a related note, the Bush administration would like to thank all the conspiracy nut jobs, as they do a great job in distracting from the real issue, which is, how could an adminstration fuck up so hard and how come that not one person has been held accountable for this gigantic fuck up?
Re:News for nerds? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's fashionable on Slashdot these days to criticize the US. I'd say more but I fear mod retaliation.
Considering that a large portion, and probably the majority of Slashdotters are American, I wouldn't say it's a case of being fashionable. Instead, I'd argue it's a fight against fallacy and illogic. Much of the action of the US government is driven by fear, greed, and emotion, which runs counter to the typical geek way of analysing and responding to a situation. To us, the actions and methodologies of the US government are at best unreasonable and at worst insane. There is no fashion to flame the US here -- it's just the collective psyche of Slashdotters rejecting the counter-intuitive mannerisms of the powers that be.
lol (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Signal to noise. (Score:1, Insightful)
Typical designer megalomania (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's clear, simple design that's at issue, why not just have a crude drawing of a 747 flying into the White House with a 24-point header reading LOOK OUT, GEORGE!
Fuck. I'm going to have to wash my fucking brain after being around this much stupidity.
Ignore motives, blame format (Score:5, Insightful)
It's all moot anyway. They wanted a war to legally embezzle $300 Billion from Americans in contracts, and wanted to fool everybody about it so they could get a second term in the white house. Mission Accomplished.
It's now well-known that Hussein didn't have the weapons, was never a threat, and yet the war was started anyway. They've played it down pretending that they're learning about Hussein's lack of weapons at the same time we are, but that's not true. They knew it all along. Ask yourself about the sort of ethics somebody would need to have to do what they've done.
Now ask yourself if those ethics are consistent with seeing a memo and disregarding it.
Anybody who buys into the idea that the attacks were the result of poor design is a FOOL. The system may be imperfect, but it worked. The memo got to the top of the chain in time for Bush to do something about it. He did nothing.
Death + destruction = politics (Score:5, Insightful)
If political leaders everywhere including the wannabes were put in the fields to do hard labor, there would be no death and destruction in the world at all, except for natural causes.
Sadly the plants would suffer.
Re:News for nerds? (Score:2, Insightful)
I know this is offtopic but does anyone have any statistics about the geographical location of Slashdotters?
Re:Not possible to take all threats seriously (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:News for nerds? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's fashionable on Slashdot these days to criticize the US.
I don't understand this response at all. The original article examined a process, saw something that was suboptimal, and suggested an improvement. And that's considered criticizing the US?
If we've reached the point where we are unable to improve our internal processes because doing so would admit an imperfection, then we are truly fucked.
Re:Design or not... (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, if that's too difficult, Bush could have just asked his head of counter terrorism, Richard Clarke, if the threat was serious and what he ought to do about it. Even that, apparantly, was too much to ask from our boy wonder.
Re:Why was it ignored? (Score:2, Insightful)
For the neocons to "make" it happen, the president would have to have such a huge consolidation of power, across so many branches of the armed services, legislature, and his own office that it is laughable to even suggest it. If "the neocons" were actively participating in the murder of 3000+ americans, well, lets just say we'd have heard about it by now.
The democrats certainly would have ben able to find a smoking gun in the 4 years since then. No conspiracy that large could be kept secret. People like you are the reason the country re-elected Bush.
I am a republican but, no Bush apologist. I would have liked to have seen a decent democratic run last year. Unfortunately all I got from you guys was "Bush is the devil, he bought bin Laden the plane tickets!" insane, stupid, poorly reasoned arguments about how Iraq would be better off if we hadn't gone (they wouldn't sometimes sacrifice is required to improve something you Hollywood pussy Dems always seem to forget), about how the country is worse off because of Bush (I don't know about you but my salary is up 130% over the last 5 years, I own a house at 5.5%, I have health insurance which I didn't during the Clinton years, and I've been able to get completely out of debt except for my house.. so to me I think Bush has done a good job on the home front.).
Anyway, I would have voted for Edwards if you guys had put him up instead of that cold fish Kerry. Edwards was a hard working, smart, thoughtful, well reasoned person who was a great example of achieving the american dream. Unfortunately you guys decided the spoiled, aristocrat who's never had to work a day in his life would be a better representation of your values. And now you bitch about it.... Idiots you picked him
We knew since 1995 (Score:3, Insightful)
Part of Operation Bojinka [wikipedia.org] involved a similar attack in the US:
A report from the Philippines to the United States on January 20, 1995 stated, "What the subject has in his mind is that he will board any American commercial aircraft pretending to be an ordinary passenger. Then he will hijack [the] said aircraft, control its cockpit and dive it at the CIA headquarters."
There were plenty of warnings during the Bush and Clinton administrations. The warnings were not really ignored either. The FAA would issue warnings and airports would go to a heightened state of alert. (This happened during the summer of 2001, but the heightened state of alert was over before September.)
The problem is that there was no support for anything that would actually make a difference.
e.g., drastically tougher screenings, attacking Afghanistan, rounding up people with expired or suspicious visas, FBI investigations into foreign students in US flight schools...
Politically, there was no way Clinton or Bush would have gone for any of those things. Clinton already caught enough shit from the Republicans + left-wingers after his cruise missile attack on a terrorist training camp.
Re:Not quite right... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:News for nerds? (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot is NOT the place for any politically heated talk because it does not provide a proper forum for discussion. If you read over a thread after the dust has settled, all you see is the groupthink modded up, and anything opposing groupthink modded down to -1. It's interesting when you think about it: there is a form of mass censorship on Slashdot, in which people who speak out against the groupthink are silenced (in that they are modded down), and those who tote the party line cruise high at +5. The ironic part is that these heated discussions often center around complaints about the same sort of censorship by the government. Double-standards and hypocrisy abound.
Talk about uninformed (Score:2, Insightful)
Document design? DOCUMENT DESIGN! Catch goddamn trip on the clue train here, you people. Clinton told the secret services to go gently on Saudi Arabia, but Bush specifically told them to DROP all investigations that looked like they were going to finger anyone important. Like, for example, any members of that nice Bin Laden family that the Bushes have always got on so well with that they were allowed to leave the country while all other flights were grounded.
Document design! Christ, talk about wanting to believe the lies.
TWW2
Re:Design or not... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Typical designer megalomania (Score:1, Insightful)
(1) uses color to draw the eye and indicate level of alert. COLOR! It's useful for getting attention (in sentient beings, anyway)
(2) contains a numeric threat level which indicates quantitatively the degree of alarm the alert merits
(3) is laid out much better, with a nice executive summary in the boxes at the top to enable presidents and other simple minds to quickly grasp the rudiments of the problem: who / what / when / where
(4) uses COLOR in the text to draw the eye to salient features of the alert.
I think you're so totally missing the point here that you wouldn't know it if it bit you on the ass. Are you seriously suggesting that the design of the original memo couldn't be improved one iota for enhanced efficiency and quicker comprehension? Keep looking for that brain of yours; it needs a good rinse!
Rehash of Edward R. Tufte's challeneger work? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Improve the design of EVERY intelligence brief (Score:2, Insightful)
You miss the significance of the redesign: in the original memo [airbagindustries.com], it is difficult to tell at a glance what the key details; of course, the title summarizes these, but only roughly. These design flaws are reduced (if not removed) by the revised design [airbagindustries.com].
Of course, we can't tell which memo will be important, and as a result we don't know which data should be paid attention to. The reason? Because the current design is inefficient, it is more difficult to spot and correlate trends and patterns. With this proposed design, it is easier to highlight potential threats, simply because its design is both clear and simple.
Re:News for nerds? (Score:3, Insightful)
You are wrong that only groupthink posts get +5 moderation. Wait half a day, and read at +5. Then you'll see a balanced reaction at most articles, with many critical posts modded up. Bad mods most often happen at the start of a comment phase; in the end most get quite OK.
Re:The spoon explanation. (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, that just means that instead of King George we'll have his idiot brother [jeb.org] occupying the White House in 2008, with the same old crooks [wikipedia.org] pulling the strings behind the scenes.
Re:Same Clarke who attacked Bush in 2004? (Score:5, Insightful)
He approved the request, but who made it? Clarke has come clean, why did the rest of the administration cover it up?
Would this be the same Richard Clarke who was head of US counterterrorism for eight years under Bill Clinton
Yes, and you left out the foiled Millenium bombings. I'm not a big fan of Clarke's, but he's been right about the threat posed from bin Laden for a long time now.
Or the same Richard Clarke who blamed Bill Clinton for not destroying terrorist training camps after the USS Cole bombing?
Do you think Clarke was wrong here?
If Clarke is right about anything, it's only because he's like a stopped clock.
He seems to be a lot better bet than either Clinton or Bush when it comes to assessing terrorist threats, don't you agree?
Re:Too much text (Score:1, Insightful)
Stir up conflict and you create a perfect platform for political bandwagoning and patriotic mobs -- no conflict and focus would have been on internal policies...
Re:hindsight (Score:3, Insightful)
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
(grossly understated, actually--reading a goddamned memo about a known terrorist planning to attack the US is worth ~3,000 lives, two of the world's tallest buildings, part of the Pentagon, four planes, a "smaller" 40+ story building, the Patriot Act, $300bn+, >1.5k troops, 2 wars (so far), well over 100k innocent civilian deaths, our economy, major loss of respect in the eyes of the world, a state of fear, a society on the fast track back to the 1800's and before, and my future.)
And the best you got is "hindsight is always 20/20"? FUCK YOU!
Yes we did (Score:3, Insightful)
Sometimes you have to take risks to get things done.. Sometimes you win, other times you loose.
Re:The spoon explanation. (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems inocent enough but can cause alot of problems. Sharpened (metal) spoons are somethign that would definatly bypassed the security at the airport. It is also somethign that could have been planted on the plane without looking out of place.
As for bold type and stuff the article mentions, It probably wouldn't be too goo of an idea. Once the president starts just looking for bold type instead of scanning the entire document, he is likley to miss things that some lower level official didn't deem important. Maybe we need to hire another cabinate member whos job is to read the reports entirely after the president and attempt to place the inteligence data into a more percice perspective and then verbaly express any concerns. This would double check the existing inteligence agencies opinion and ensure that at minimum, somethign is known byt the president.
Re:Why was it ignored? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is classis psychopathic libertarian reasoning. A psychopath is someone who only cares about themselves, and has no concern for anyone else. So things look great for you? Wonderful! who cares about anyone else?
Re:hindsight (Score:4, Insightful)
I think this comes from the belief that shit happens and you can't stop it so you might as well give the job to a friend who can't stop it either. I disagree. The politicisation of important US security institutions is going to result in very bad security.
Am I missing something? (Score:3, Insightful)
Tufte's well-known critique of the Columbia presentation, and his famous critique of the Challenger data, centered on the use of visual evidence (idiotic charts, statistically incompetant graphs) and, in the former case, on the manner in which the medium (PowerPoint) butchered the message by making chopping it up into incomprehensible hamster pellets of information.
The author here seems to be making the case that ugly typeface and a poor use of color are to blame; that if we just added a few horizontal rules, maybe put the PDB on nice stationary, it would have been more effective.
When facing a dearth of actionable, analyzable data (like a chart with 4 data points), Tufte is likely as not to advocate doing exactly what the original PDB did, which is to stuff it into prose paragraphs.
Tufte's design criticism work is serious, if perhaps overrated. This new one is just an advertisement for a web designer.
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:hindsight (Score:3, Insightful)
This also happens on sites like slashdot
hawk
Re:hindsight (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, Bush doesn't matter much in this topic. The author's point was simply to keep the existence of the document in the news. By that measure, he's done a good job, regardless of what he chose to highlight about the document.