[Daseal]

I think we as the American public really fail to understand how intelligence works. While there are systems currently being developed and tweak to help information sharing it is quite difficult to put together all the puzzle pieces. You get tons of small hints that you have to look at, in conjunction with other pieces, to give you an educated guess of what, when, where, why, and who. It is far from science and requires the analysts looking at this information to try to put that together. Now we have unstructured data going into place that can improve the quality of searches, but still difficult. A quick and dirty look at what you can do with systems like hadoop/mapreduce in this sense goes a little like this:

Analyst searches for: Obama likes apples.

You could get returns that look like: Obama likes apples (the best), Obama likes Peaches/Apples/McDonalds/etc. Additionally, you'll get other things such as: Romney likes apples, etc. So there's a ton of information, some of it contradictory, etc. It basically pulls out keywords and automatically makes some changes to check things having to do with important parts from all sorts of different sources.

Each intelligence agency has their own nomenclature, internal systems, tips, etc. Obviously, you can't share everything. You can't share sources, etc. Sources are sacred and should be seen by as few people as possible.

That is a very very rough run of what happens. While I'm far from an expert, for those interested -- I could explain a bit more. With all of that said, if you want to know more about the unstructured data stuff, I suggest looking at NetFlix's tech blog. Gives you some nice details on what and how it can do things. In fact, Netflix has nearly eliminated all SQL from their environment.

With that long rant above, I believe that it's impossible to blame any president solely for nearly any terrorist attack. It's very easy to look back at an event with 20/20 hindsight and say "We should have seen it!" I doubt this information even made it to Hill-dog's level. Asking for more security and tips probably happen 40x a day. You have to balance that with budgetary concerns. Budgets for federal government are shrinking quickly and these types of moves have to be more carefully considered before enacting. This probably stopped at the bureau level. This is not the first embassy attack, and it certainly won't be the last. There's only so much you can do in this situation. Would an additional 5 DS agents have stopped this? Very doubtful. Each embassy has quite a few Marines and some DS agents present -- but it would have been hard to stop this type of attack.

This isn't the first embassy/consulate attack and it certainly won't be the last. It's probably more common to see US owned housing get attacked. These attacks rise up quickly and often would be difficult to completely avoid.

When it comes down to it, US intelligence has done a good job of putting together the pieces of the puzzle. We've heard in the news multiple times lately of the FBI thwarting possible attacks. There will always be chinks in the armor where things slide through -- but we have to remember that the whole process is a guessing game, not irreputable facts.