As someone who has worked in the Intel Community for 10 years now I can tell you it is much worse then it seems. So much could be done to improve it but, large companies control the bidding processes and it is very hard to bring in a new idea even if you offer to do it for a fraction of the price. I think the best approach could be to start a small company that focuses on gathering intelligence and reporting it to the main stream media. Could be some big money in that and at the same time prove that you dont need to spend (as an example) three million bucks to set up a database to keep track of plain text reports.
A senior counterterrorism official said on Wednesday his agency lacks "Google-like" search capability that could have identified the suspect in the attempted Christmas Day airline bombing.
No problem GoogleCIA plugin can be developed in short time using Closure. All that is needed is some form of Levenshtein distance algo.