Wild Bill Donovan would have loved the Internet. The American spymaster who

游客2024-04-10  8

问题     Wild Bill Donovan would have loved the Internet. The American spymaster who built the Office of Strategic Services in World War II and late laid the roots for the CIA was fascinated with information. Donovan believed in using whatever tools came to hand in the "great game" of espionage—spying as a "profession". These days the Net, which has already remade such everyday pastimes as buying books and sending mails, is reshaping Donovan’s vocation as well.
    The latest revolution isn’t simply a matter of gentlemen reading other gentlemen’s e-mail. That kind of electronic spying has been going on for decades. In the past three or four years, the World Wide Web has given birth to a whole industry of point-and-click spying. The spooks call it "open-source intelligence", and as the Net grows, it is becoming increasingly influential. In 1995 the CIA held a contest to see who could compile the most data about Burundi. The winner, by a large margin, was a tiny Virginia company called Open Source Solutions, whose clear advantage was its mastery of the electronic world.
    Among the firms making the biggest splash in this new world is Stratford, Inc., a private intelligence-analysis firm based in Austin, Texas. Stratford makes money by selling the results of spying(covering nations from Chile to Russia)to corporations like energy-services firm McDermott International. Many of its predictions are available online at www. Stratford. com.
    Stratford president George Friedman says he sees the online world as a kind of mutually reinforcing tool for both information collection and distribution, a spymaster’s dream. Last week his firm was busy vacuuming up data bits from the far corners of the world and predicting a crisis in Ukraine. "As soon as that report runs, we’ll suddenly get 500 new Internet sign-ups from Ukraine," says Friedman, a former political science professor. "And we’ll hear back from some of them." Open-source spying does have its risks, of course, since it can be difficult to tell good information from bad. That’s where Stratford earns its fame.
    Friedman relies on a lean staff of 20 in Austin. Several of his staff members have military-intelli-gence backgrounds. He sees the firm’s outsider status as the key to its success. Stratford’s briefs don’t sound like the usual Washington back-and-forthing, whereby agencies avoid dramatic declarations on the chance they might be wrong. Stratford, says Friedman, takes pride in its independent voice. [br] What can we learn about Bill Donovan?

选项 A、He was skilled in searching information in the Internet.
B、He used to serve the CIA during the Second World War.
C、He took the "great game" of espionage as a profession.
D、He had a new job that was closely related with the Net.

答案 C

解析 首段第3句的破折号表示the“great game”of espionage等同于spying,根据破折号后的spying as a“profession”也可确定C正确。首句是一个虚拟语气句,表明Donovan在世的时候还没有互联网,这样看来,A无从说起;第2句表明二战期间CIA还不存在,B不正确;该段末句中vocation是指Donovan以前所做的间谍工作,该句表明现在的互联网给间谍工作带来了新的形式,D是对Donovan’s vocation的错误理解。
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