I do not believe it.
Feinstein: We got no warning
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, tells NBC's Andrea Mitchell the intelligence community has to do a better job monitoring Twitter, Facebook and other "open-source" intelligence.Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, says the intelligence community never warned Congress or President Barack Obama that a potential revolution was brewing in Egypt — partly because it wasn't reading Facebook and Twitter.
The performance of the intelligence agencies has been debated since Thursday, when Stephanie O'Sullivan, the Obama administration's nominee for principal deputy director of national intelligence, told the committee that they warned the administration of instability in Egypt at the end of last year.
Several senators on the committee challenged O'Sullivan at the hearing, and in an interview today on MSNBC TV, Feinstein indicated that it wasn't true.
"There was a good deal of intelligence about Tunisia [but] virtually nothing about Egypt," Feinstein told NBC News' Andrea Mitchell. "So there was, to my knowledge, no real warning, either to the White House or, certainly, to the Senate Intelligence Committee or the Congress."
She added that even though the protests apparently were organized in public on Web sites and social media platforms, "I don't believe there was any intelligence on what was happening on Facebook or Twitter or the organizational effort to put these protests together."
But Feinstein hedged a bit when asked whether the episode was an intelligence "failure."
"I would call it a big intelligence wakeup," she said. "... Open-source material has to become much more significant in the analysis of intelligence."
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