More is better. From The Data Quality Act to SIPRNET, a large apparatus handles information. Except at the top.

Pending in Congress is a bill to ensure oversight of intelligence on Iran, aka, trying not to get burned again by intelligence community mismanagement or easily "mangled" data. There, you know, might just a tad of partisan wrangling too. Who is "in power"? Who makes the final decisions? According a similarly toned Res 391: "(1) strongly believes initiating military action without congressional approval in response to Iran's nuclear program does not fall within the President's 'Commander-in-Chief' powers under the Constitution;"

On the one hand, the US government has been portrayed as having a frightening, conspiracy-theory-inducing arsenal of secret intelligence tools. Systems like DHS-DoD's sharing infrastructure (PDF), JWICS, SIPRNET: Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, OSIS: Open Source Information System for the intelligence community, also known as Intelink-U, a less classified part of the greater uber Intelink.

But on the other hand, the US government intelligence gathering and analysis operation has been portrayed as mired in territorial bureaucracy, mismanagement, and able to be easily leaked, hacked, or otherwise compromised. According to Imaginary Weapons, the Pentagon, and if not the larger DOD-US military machine, is often following a bizarre path of non-scientific scams or miracle long-shots, not following practical road of reasonable analysis and defense.

The failures of these intelligence gathering and defense systems on 9/11, or in capturing Osama Bin Laden, or of enforcing (if they did have the correct information), the correct public analysis of Iraq's weapons program are obvious. While The Data Quality Act ('Data Quality' Law Is Nemesis Of Regulation, Federal Agencies Subject to Data Quality Act, ICANN subject to DQA) makes holding EPA or FDA regulations up in court for eager-to-sell industries, conversely there seems to be no regard for "ensuring and maximizing the quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information" used in decisions of war or defense.

So why, then, with the world's best information aren't the world's best decisions being made? Scratching chin. Information, you'd think, can't be bad or good, in an analysis sense. It can be true or false. You probably don't need a smoking gun with the resources given, you probably need smarter, more experienced people in charge.

But lack of information has become, in an age of limitless information, if not an endemic excuse, the absence of information is now an implicit threat. With AT&T; in current telecom mining program called 'Pioneer-Groundbreaker', also known as GEMS (with help from IBM), the miners are collecting more 'actionable data' to hand to people without the expertise to make intelligent decisions. Also making the tenuous assumption that those decisions are made to benefit the public. If the very act of mining the data weren't already morally questionable, then you'd assume, in a strictly qualitative way that more is better. More information, better decisions.

Strictly speaking, not so. More info, rather than better info, is especially useless in the face of an active "One Percent Doctrine".