When alleged Boston Marathon bombers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev came face-to-face with law enforcement officers in an early morning shootout on April 19, they encountered "at least a dozen police ­officers from four departments [and] exchanged up to 300 rounds of gunfire with" Tamerlan, the older of the two men, reports the Boston Globe. 

"In the ensuing 10 minutes, police officers fired what may be an unprecedented number of rounds in a single police incident in recent state history. They apparently wounded both suspects, but also sprayed the neighborhood. Shots fired in the battle left at least a dozen nearby houses pockmarked with dozens of bullet holes, including a second-floor bedroom where two children slept." 

Among the casualties, according to the Globe, may have been MBTA Transit Police Officer Richard H. Donohue Jr., who "eyewitness accounts strongly suggest...was shot and nearly killed by a fellow officer." 

Friendly fire incidents are rare in US law enforcement, in large part because most cops don't engage in the kind of blazing gunfight that occurred in Watertown last month. The officers encountered two undoubtedly dangerous men. But did the extraordinary display of force, which included a lockdown of the Boston metropolitan area, put civilians at risk and unjustly impinge on their civil liberties?  

The kinds of tactics we saw in Boston are what we're used to seeing in Iraq and Afghanistan. Security cordons. House to house searches at gunpoint. That comparison isn't lost on some experts. 

“It’s arguably a wartime situation,” Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police ­Executive Research Forum in Washington told the Globe. “Police agencies are not generally prepared for the kind of wartime situation that these officers encountered.”

I spoke with Wexler this morning and asked him why the manhunt for Tamerlan and his 19-year-old brother didn't qualify as a normal law enforcement matter. The brothers were clearly a public threat; they'd killed an MIT police officer shortly before the shootout. But police manhunts for dangerous killers are hardly novel. Why did Boston become a "war zone" because of the presence of these fugitives? 

"Based upon who I’ve talked to, and I’ve talked to people in Boston about this [including the police commissioner], they encountered individuals who had bombs. That’s just not your usual policing incident, domestic incident," Wexler says. "That took those normal kinds of encounters, if you will, to a higher level. Police don't usually deal with improvised devices in the United States." The Tsarnaev brothers are alleged to have set off pressure cooker bombs, similar to the ones they detonated at the marathon, during their fight with police. 

The public bombing of civilians is rare in the US, but not unheard of. And police have responded with less severe measures during similar incidents. Police did not lock down the city of Atlanta after the 1996 bombing at the summer Olympics. The city of Washington endured the terror of snipers in 2002, but roads wren't closed, and people were allowed to leave their homes. 

Tom Ricks, a veteran observer of many battlefields, thinks law enforcement may have gone too far. Quoting a military special operator, he notes that Dzhokhar didn't have a nuclear device or a biological weapon. He was one man on the run. 

But Wexler said that police couldn't have been sure about the brothers' intentions or their capabilities. They didn't know whether they planned to mount more attacks or would try to flee Boston for another city. That uncertainty, given the brothers' demonstrated capacity for violence, justified the forceful response. 

"It’s very unusual, but it worked," Wexler said. 

I did double moderator duty for a set of discussions yesterday at the New America Foundation. Broadly speaking the subject was the domestic applications (domestication?) of unmanned vehicles. Everything from flying drones to driverless cars. Since there's not a lot of drone technology in use in the US today, a lot of the conversation was speculative. But it was also hugely imaginative and fascinating.  

You can watch all the presentations here. What most impressed me about the commentary was that for all the justifiable anxiety associated with the deployment of this technology--our experiences with it are laregely informed, after all, by the use of lethal drones in war zones--most of the panelists were optimistic about the positive effect unmanned vehicles could have. Maximizing crop yields. Monitoring endangered species. Search and rescue assistance. Drone cargo planes. New ways of gathering news.To hear some of the panelists tell it, our robot future is very bright. 

There was plenty of skepticism and caution, for sure, particularly on the obvious privacy implications of flying cameras and sensors. But I think the mix of "pro" and "con," if I can reduce it to that level, tells you that the discussion about drones is becoming more nuanced and sophisticated. Drones aren't all good. They're not all bad.  

If you want the blue sky view on where drones may be flying in the US, check out the segment "A New Technology Takes Flight" with Missy Cummings, a former Navy fighter pilot turned MIT robotic scientist, and Michael Toscano, who runs the largest trade association for unmanned vehicles. 

And for a good look at how drone technology moved from the battlefield to the homefront, listen to Konstantin Kakaes' short discussion. He also makes some excellent points that run contrary to assumptions--including mine--about how useful drones may be. 

The Defense Department yesterday released the names of three airmen killed when a KC-135 tanker crashed near Chon-Aryk, Kyrgyzstan, on May 3. They were assigned to the 93rd Air Refueling Squadron, Fairchild Air Force Base, Washington. The cause of the crash is under investigation. Witnesses reported seeing the aircraft break into three parts in the air and hearing an explosion. 

I wrote a few years ago about the Air Force's long and painful attempt to field a new fleet of tankers, which are among the oldest planes that the service flies. This latest crash brings to mind a fatal accident in 1999, when a tanker with the Washington Air National Guard went down near an air base in Germany after its horizontal stabilizer spontaneously locked into an extreme "nose-up" position. The aircraft pitched, becoming almost perpendicular to the ground, and then stalled and crashed short of the runway. All four crew members aboard died. 

The Air Force grounded 350 tankers and inspected their stabilizers. Investigators never determined the cause of the malfunction, but the crash provided yet another reason to replace the KC-135 fleet.  

The Air Force and its primary contractor, Boeing, probably can't build the new tankers any faster. But if this latest crash is found to be the result of a mechanical defect, that will add new urgency to the process, just as it did 14 years ago when old tankers started falling out of the sky. 

Investigative Reporters & Editors, the country's main professional association for public accountability journalists, is seeking nominations for a new and arguably ignominious distinction: The Golden Padlock. 

"This honor acknowledges the dedication of government officials working tirelessly to keep vital information hidden from the public," said David Cay Johnston, president of IRE, a Pulitzer Prize winner who writes mostly about tax and finance issue . "Their abiding commitment to secrecy and impressive skill in information suppression routinely keeps knowledge about everything from public health risks to government waste beyond the reach of citizens who pay their salaries."

You can submit nominations to goldenpadlock@ire.org. You can nominate an agency--or an individual!--and should detail "reasons and/or media coverage detailing the intransigence."

I know a certain military public affairs officer in New Mexico who so deserves this. 

More than a decade after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, US intelligence agencies are doing a much better job sharing information about terrorism and other national security threats. Their challenge now "is largely one of information overload," says a new report by the Congressional Research Service, published last week. 

"Analysts now face the task of connecting disparate, minute data points buried within large volumes of intelligence traffic shared between different intelligence agencies. According to a [Director of National Intelligence] statement from July 2010, 'Terabytes of foreign intelligence information come in each day, vastly exceeding the entire text holdings of the Library of Congress, which is estimated at 10 terabytes.' In the additional views section of the Senate report on the Christmas day bombing attempt, Senators Saxby Chambliss and Richard Burr noted that analysts who could have connected the dots prior to the incident struggled to search the large volume of terrorism-related intelligence available to them. The same problem was identified at the FBI in the aftermath of the 2009 Fort Hood shooting." 

The crippling dilemma of information overload is not news. (See here, here, here.) But in the context of the Boston Marathon bombings, and the inevitable questions that will follow about who knew what when, it's important to keep this salient fact in mind: The US intelligence community does not have a problem collecting information. It has a problem understanding much of it. 

(Thanks, as always, to Steve Aftergood at the Federation of American Scientists for posting this CRS report, among many others.) 

If you want an idea of what "cyber warfare" means to the US Navy, check out this short video about the Tenth Fleet, home to the Navy's cyber warriors.

It's a bit melodramatic--though not so bad on production values. But it tells you how the Navy sees its role in the "fifth domain" of combat; protecting networks, stopping attacks, and, when necessary, pairing cyber offense with "kinetic" military force. 

"Cyberspace is where the battles of the future will be won or lost," says the film's narrator. It's a hotly debated point, of course. But if you want a window into why the Navy--or at least the Tenth Fleet--believes this is true, have a look.  

Is David Petraeus about to jump into the world of high finance? 

ValleyWag has gotten this terribly intriguing tip about the former general/CIA Director's possible comeback: "He has been making the rounds at a number of New York-based venture capital and private equity firms and one very knowledgeable source said Petraeus is slated to announce a relationship shortly." The source points to KKR & Co. as a possible landing spot. 

More intriguing still, at least to me, is speculation that Petraeus could join the high-profile data-mining outfit Palantir. I can say from personal experience with Petraeus that he has been deeply impressed by the company, which did its early breakout work in the national security and intelligence communities. Petraeus even requested a meeting with the CEO after reading this story I wrote about the company in 2012. 

Petraeus had recently become CIA Director, and apparently he didn't realize then that Palantir had a long history with his new agency. In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital arm, was an early backer of Palantir. And the spy agency also gave the fledgling company an extraordinary test bed for its software: 

"According to a government official familiar with the episode, the CIA allowed Palantir to set up its software in the agency’s counterterrorism center, the hub of its global campaign to track down terrorists. The official was astounded that a little-known company from Silicon Valley was allowed to place its equipment on a network that pulses with some of the most highly classified intelligence the government collects. The CIA let Palantir use some of that intelligence to show off its software, the official says, an extraordinary departure from normal security protocols.

"Palantir didn’t disappoint. The official says the company worked for several months without pay and convinced the CIA that its technology could do what it claimed."

Osama bin Laden may have met his fate at the hands of military men. But it's a lesser-known fact that, for more than a decade, many of the CIA officers who were tracking the terrorist leader were women. Indeed, for as long as the CIA has been in the business of finding the founder of al Qaeda, and eventually killing him, women have been leading much of the hunt. Some say it's work to which they're particularly well suited. 

The CIA established a group devoted exclusively to gathering and analyzing intelligence on bin Laden, known as Alec Station, in 1996. Counterterrorism wasn't the high-stakes, career-advancing line of work that it would become after the 9/11 attacks. And the members of Alec Station, many of whom were women, took a professional risk by pigeon-holing themselves into a profession that didn't seem to have a future. 

But this tight band of CIA officers, some of whom called themselves "the Sisterhood," had found a bit of refuge from the male-dominated culture of the agency, in which no woman has ever served as director. They also found a rare, and at the time maybe even unique kind of intelligence work, in which analysts--the traditionally desk-bound thinkers of the agency's Directorate of Intelligence--worked closely with those who ran spies and did the clandestine work of espionage in the field, the members of the agency's Directorate of Operations. Historically, those sides didn't mix much on a personal or professional level. But at Alec Station, analysts and operators worked together, and in fairly short order they realized that the man whom much of the CIA had written off as a feckless wannabe jihadist was poised to become extraordinarily dangerous. 

The story of how the CIA first got onto bin Laden's trail, and how it ultimately pointed Navy SEALs to his physical address in Pakistan, is the subject of the new documentary Manhunt, premiering Wednesday night on HBO. Directed by Greg Barker (Sergio, Koran by Heart), it "stars" some of the former members of the Sisterhood and other CIA officers who joined in the hunt for bin Laden and his al Qaeda brethren before and after the 9/11 attacks. The film is based on the book Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--from 9/11 to Abbottabad, by journalist Peter Bergen, the author of four books on al Qaeda who produced bin Laden's first television interview, for CNN in 1997.  

The film Manhunt is a work of broad ambition, so broad, and covering so many years, that after the first half hour, when we were still not very close to Abbottabad, I wondered how Barker would ever bring the story to a satisfying conclusion. (Even though we all know how this story ends.) But the film succeeds by turning the bin Laden story into a personal and intimate one, told entirely through the perspective of the people who actually tried to track him down. 

Not every member of Alec Station is here, nor is everyone who played a central role in bin Laden's ultimate demise. But those who speak on camera do so without aliases or disguises, and in numbers that, as far as I can tell, is unprecedented for any work of film or television. If Manhunt weren't also an engrossing story, it would still be notable just for brining into the Klieg lights so many people who spent their lives in the shadows. 

The film portrays intelligence work up close, with a particular emphasis on the role of women. Cindy Storer, a former CIA analyst, and Nada Bakos, a former CIA targeting officer who tracked al Qaeda in Iraq, demonstrate how to locate a terrorist using fragments of disjointed and often contradictory information. We watch them tack photos and bits of paper to a white board, connecting the items with colored lines. The picture doesn't come together as quickly as some of Carrie Mathison's jazz-fueled intel binges on "Homeland," but like that fictional representation, real-life analysis is tedious, frequently maddening, and often unproductive. But when it pays off, it does so with lethal effects. 

There are times when Manhunt feels like fiction. Marty Martin, who was in charge of the operational hunt for bin Laden after 9/11 and most purely represents the spying-side of the agency (now known as the National Clandestine Service), is as flamboyant and mischievous a character as you'd expect to find in an espionage potboiler. He's full of war stories and serves as the brawn to the analytic brains, and, visually at least, a strong masculine counterpoint to a story dominated by women. 

But like a good spy story, not everything is what it seems. Far from butting heads with his women colleagues, either owing to their gender or some link to the "other side" of the CIA bureaucracy, Martin fuses with them. And the farther we get in time from the 9/11 attacks, the more the distinctions across the CIA between men and women, analysts and operators, start to fade, until they become arbitrary. Bakos represents the final synthesis of the two--a targeting officer is both an analyst and an operator. And the blending of those two worlds brings us to the modern CIA, which is more a global paramilitary organization than a Cold War spy house. 

Manhunt is a work of empathetic storytelling. Barker doesn't want to tell you the story of finding bin Laden so much as show you how the hunters did it. And because you walk in his subjects' shoes, you feel their triumphs and their failures acutely. You can imagine yourself sitting in an office like theirs, doing mind-numbing work and taking it home in your head at night. You can grieve with the CIA officers who talk, through tears, about their friends and co-workers who were killed in a suicide bombing in Khost, Afghanistan, in 2009, an event that the film accurately portrays as a turning point in the CIA's war against al Qaeda--it galvanized the agency to recommit to finding bin Laden. These testimonials make the bin Laden story, which has been the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters, accessible. 

Manhunt inevitably draws comparisons to that other big movie about killing bin Laden. But while Zero Dark Thirty purports to be a work of journalism, Manhunt actually is. There are no pseudonyms or character composites. And when some of the same events are portrayed in Zero Dark Thirty, which is a superb film, they feel beyond the realm of our everyday experience. We can more easily imagine ourselves like Storer, showing up to work every day and banging her head against a desk, than we can see ourselves on the deck of a  Blackhawk helicopter, wearing night-vision goggles and carrying an assault rifle. 

Barker's empathy imposes certain limits on his film. You don't know where he stands on some of the most controversial and socially important questions of the bin Laden story, such as whether torture produced information that helped the CIA finish their manhunt. When Barker and I met in Washington a few weeks ago, he told me it's the mark of a successful film that you can't say for sure what he thinks. Not everyone who watches Manhunt will be satisfied with Barker's approach, which leaves some very big questions about some very dark days not fully answered.  

But we shouldn't expect every story about bin Laden to be told through the lens of a moral dilemma. It's enough, at least for this film, to show people doing a job, one that was measured in years and lives lost, and that changed those who did it, just as it changed history. 

The United Kingdom is embarking on a national program to train the next generation of cyber warriors to protect the country's infrastructure. 

From the Guardian:

"The UK is now so short of experts in cybersecurity, they could soon command footballers' salaries... Ministers support plans for a national competition for schools in the hope of encouraging teenagers, especially girls, to become so-called "cyber Jedi"--defending firms, banks and government departments from an ever increasing number of online attacks." 

Two thousand schools will participate in a pilot project beginning in September, as part of Cyber Security Challenge UK, the Guardian reports. Then, the program would roll out across England and Wales.

Stephanie Daman, the group's director, tells the newspaper, "Kids need to know there is a real career in this, because they have no concept at the moment. And we need to spark their interest. It's a profession like law or accountancy, with well-paid salaries.

"A lot of companies are desperate to hire people for the roles in cybersecurity, but they have not been able to find the number of qualified recruits. There is a huge gap in terms of the number of properly qualified people in this area, and we need to tap into talent we know is out there." 

In a sign of how seriously the government takes that shortfall, Michael Gove, the UK education secretary, recently "ripped up" school IT curriculum "in part because it does not have a cybersecurity element," according to the Guardian. 

There's a similar and growing effort on this side of the pond to train the next generation of "cyber ninjas," as some involved in the effort like to call them. High schools have teamed up with technology advocacy groups to recruit more young students into college computer science programs, with an eye towards working in the cyber security industry. Rhode Island congressman Jim Langevin, for instance, has organized high-school hacker competitions in his state.  

In December, the SANS Institute, which trains military and intelligence personnel in the cyber arts, sponsored an international cyber competition at the Washington Hilton. A group of high schoolers were selected to compete against the world's best hackers in the early rounds. 

The National Security Agency also sponsors a nation-wide contest in which teams from the military service academies face off against some of the NSA's best cyber warriors. Cadets at the Air Force Academy, which now has a separate educational track for cyber warfare, recently took first place. 

As in the UK, there aren't enough people in the workforce right now with the high-level of skill that the US government demands, hence many of these efforts to go down to the roots of the education system. But you're going to see this demand coming more from the private sector, as financial services companies, utilities, media organizations and others increasingly find themselves the targets of malicious hackers and are virtually powerless to do anything about it. They're not going to wait around for the government to protect them. They'll hire their own cyber armies to do that job. 

In 2002, members of the Pentagon's Criminal Investigation Task Force sent reports about the interrogations of prisoners Guantanamo Bay back to Washington. There, a small group of researchers in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency applied cutting-edge data mining tools to the reports in order to find connections between the detainees and terrorists. But instead of finding links to al Qaeda or militants, the analysts discovered that some of the detainees were innocent and had been captured in Afghanistan without cause or evidence. 

Far from speeding up the release of the detainees, this information was used as a kind of baseline for what a "non-terrorist" looked like. The data tools then were re-calibrated to disregard certain attributes in the interrogation reports and to search for others that were deemed germane to the interrogators' work. The innocent prisoners--termed "dirt farmers" in military parlance--remained at Guantanamo for the time being. 

I reported this information in my book, The Watchers, which came out in 2010. I mention it again today in light of a post by Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic, which points back to an earlier article by Jason Leopold about an important chapter in the Guantanamo saga that you may have forgotten, or overlooked at the time. 

Top Bush administration officials were aware, as early as August 2002, that the "vast majority" of the initial group of 742 detainees at Guantanamo were innocent of any connection to terrorism. That was the sworn statement of Lawrence Wilkerson, formerly the right-hand-man to Colin Powell at the State Department, in a 2010 lawsuit by a former Guantanamo detainee. The innocent men at Guantanamo, Wilkerson said, were swept up in a harried and "incompetent" process that produced no evidence for the basis of their detention. 

This made news at the time. And though it wasn't exactly a revelation that there were innocent people in Guantanamo, Wilkerson advanced the story by swearing that senior officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, were aware of the problem and did nothing about it. Their view, according to Wilkerson, was that "innocent people languishing in Guantánamo for years was justified by the broader war on terror and the capture of the small number of terrorists who were responsible for the September 11 attacks, or other acts terrorism." 

Friedersdorf asks why this story hasn't gotten more traction, and says the next time Powell appears in public, journalists should ask him to respond to what Wilkerson said. (He was asked at the time but said he hadn't read the full statement.) I'd be more interested in what Cheney and Rumsfeld have to say. 

I don't have a great answer for why this story hasn't been repeated more often. But I think it's important to note that Wilkerson and other senior Bush administration officials were not the only ones who knew about the innocent detainees at Guantanamo. This extended down to the level of the interrogators themselves and to counterterrorism analysts. This was hardly a secret held at the highest reaches of power. It was a widely known fact, and at the time, little was done to address it. 

(Also worth noting, a similar statement from Wilkerson, made in 2012, was attached to this declaration by an attorney for prisoners in Afghanistan.)