The Other Intelligence

The Challenges of Interoperability

KMWorld recently explored the continuing problems with government agencies' "interoperability."  Or, their ability to share information and ideas through IT.  This is not an easy task, since each government agency -- whether it's federal, state, or local -- have their own IT technologies and requirements: 

For almost 10 years, large metropolitan areas have been working on interoperability issues, but in many cases those efforts have been limited to getting telecommunications systems to communicate with one another. Sharing data during an emergency has proven a more difficult knowledge management challenge.

Especially since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, there’s been a sense that better information sharing protocols are needed. For instance, during Katrina, officials in emergency operations centers (EOCs) needed to know where all the rail cars in the area were and what type of hazardous material was in each one, so they could send out HazMat teams to check on them. Many were under water.

During an emergency, officials also must know the status of hospital facilities near a disaster area, says Drew Sachs, VP, crisis and consequence management, for consultancy James Lee Witt & Associates, a part of GlobalOptions Group. "That data is often not readily available to an EOC," he adds.

Despite agencies’ efforts to improve sharing real-time data, portals or intranets linking multiple emergency response agencies and jurisdictions are still rare. "You won’t find many midsize cities that haven’t touched on this, but few have a complete solution in place," says Sachs.

Yawn

I don't know what makes this news exciting: 

In a FT.com report, Thomas Fingar, the Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis said that A-Space would be “MySpace for analysts” that will break down firewalls across the “traditionally stove-piped intelligence community.”

A-Space will initially be voluntary “to assuage worries of spies concerned about blowing their cover.” The service will be equipped with web-based email and software that recommends areas of interest to the user “just like Amazon suggests books to its customers.” The site will also allow users to create and modify documents and determine user privileges

The US Director of National Intelligence will open the site to the entire intelligence community in December.

MySpace is old technology in the Web environment.  It just tells me that our IC is still a few years behind the curb, instead of being ahead of it.

Waking Up to Open Source

Office of the Director for National Intelligence recently held a conference on open source.  Proceedings and presentations are here.

Another Panel

Federal Computer Week reports that the Department of Defense has established a new panel

in charge of integrating Defense Department activities that could aid the military in fighting terrorism worldwide...The group, dubbed the Combating Terrorism Coordination Council, is headed by Joint Staff Director Army Lt. Gen. Walter Sharp and Ryan Henry, principal deputy undersecretary of Defense for policy, sources say....

The council’s task is to integrate a number of counterterrorism-related DOD initiatives that so far have operated independently of one another. These initiatives are: improving the military’s ability to conduct stability, reconstruction and counterinsurgency operations;  building up foreign security forces; developing irregular warfare skills and doctrine; and other activities under the Bush administration’s global war on terrorism label, several sources said.

We'll see.

Not Miller Time

After nearly ten years (and 9-11), the FBI is implementing Phase I of its new case file management system, Sentinel. 

The upgrades mark the first of four phases for the six-year effort, known as Sentinel and designed to take the place of the failed $170 million Virtual Case File project...[FBI Director Robert] Mueller told congressional appropriators that Sentinel's second phase is more important than the first because it will affect more field agents. He said the second phase could come a year to 18 months after the first starts. The interim would be used in part to incorporate lessons learned from the first phase, he said.

About those NSLs

The FBI is taking flak from "privacy advocacy groups" (ie, leftist, anti-American groups) for something they deserve to get flak on:  abusing National Security Letters (NSLs).  Privacy, er, leftist, "advocacy" groups are crying foul as spokespersons were throwing out various cue-the-ominous-music statements about the dawning of Big Brother, etc.   

(Their nightmares of course come out of their ever-fanciful imaginations of jack-booted Rightwing Christian Thugs, breaking into their peace-loving homes to steal their weed plants and finally establishing a Dispensationalist Christian Theocracy.)

All this, of course, is their excuse for their ongoing efforts to undermine the PATRIOT Act reforms that really are assisting our counterterrorism efforts.  However, the NSL problems are self-generated for the FBI, and will likely get worse before they get better.  In a bureaucracy as entrenched and technophobic as the Bureau's everything revolves around avoiding trouble, controversy, responsibility and ever-more burdensome paperwork.

As a former FBI ops analyst, I agree with Mike Tanji at Haft of the Spear:  it's the bureaucracy.

It's a bureaucracy (no pun intended). Even among gov't agencies it has long been a stand-out in its ability to frustrate and hinder . . . and that's just how employees are treated.

Note that not only is internal training/procedure broken, but those pinged for data were at least as ignorant if not more so.

Problem identified, course of action identified and solution underway, but don't look for critics to focus on that aspect.

Another reason to look with a jaundiced eye at their general IT and data mining projects. Cannot expect people to feel confident if you continue to demonstrate that you don't have your s*** together.

As an Intelligence Operation Specialist I spent most of my time practicing mindless paperwork procedures, almost all of it in hard copy.  You see, in 2003, when I was there, the only things automated were a few WordPerfect macros used to format documents.  Everything else was done in hard copy.  My job was to assist in preparing applications requesting surveillance under  the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), but you may have just called me a junior priestess of paperwork procedures.

The memorandum requesting an application required three or four signatures, but the signature of manager B could not be dated before the signature of manager A.  Signature C had to be given on the same day as that of B, but not all three on the same day. 

Get it?  There's more.

One of the senior managers -- like the Deputy Director for Something or Other -- had this horrible, evil woman as "support" staff who would "edit" your memorandums.  If she found a single space after a period here or a comma misplaced there, she would return the memorandum even if there were no other problems, and you had to start the whole signature process over again. 

That's just the memo.  You have to get to the application in order to really see the paperwork flowing, including a form that had to be signed by -- if I remember correctly -- five different people, some in the field, some at FBI headquarters.  And that's before it went to the lawyers for review.  Once it went through the lawyer process, you had to rewrite the application paperwork and start the signature process all over again with even more signatures. 

Get it? 

Now before 9-11, an average ops analyst (that's me) supported work around one or two FISA applications.  If you had three, you were really, really busy.  At one point in 2003 I was managing twelve, and from what I hear it's far worse now than it was when I was there.   

Now the processes could have been altered.  They could have introduced business process software.  They could have streamlined the signature process, etc.  I don't know.  Given my understanding of the institution and its bureaucracy, what I see in the near future is not less use of the NSLs, but more mindless paperwork procedures to burden agents and staff (all in the name of "oversight" and "accountability"), and even less interest for them in following the rules when the pressure is on.

Good Try by the FBI

UpDATE (6/14): TechNewsWorld reports on the issue.

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In one of those cue-the-ominous-music moments, ABCNews' The Blotter, has an "exclusive" report on an FBI budget proposal noting funding for something called the National Security Analysis Center (NSAC).  It's a planned analytical service that will exploit 1.5 billion records to do "predictive analysis."

For some reason, this is raising "concerns" among the usual crowd of  politicians and reporters. 

First, the size.  1.5 billion records is nothing.  Any decent sized commercial data service - like Equifax -- has that many records on one server.  Without trying, I search about that many on any given day using a combination of commercial online databases like Lexis-Nexis and public sites like the Library of Congress catalog or WorldCat.
Size means nothing, especially in predictive analysis. It's the quality of the data.

Then there's the issue of predictive analysis itself.  As Jeff Jonas points out, depending on the data and how you're using it, predictive analysis has had little success in counterterrorism applications.  But again, it depends on the data and how you're using it.

I have a deeper question not posed by the Blotter: Can the FBI do it?

When I was at the FBI in 2003, the agents and analysts were still using Automated Case Support (ACS),  a DOS-based monstrosity that had about as much functionality as an 80s-era "portable" word processor.  As you can guess, along with the DOS-based case system, you had DOS-based thinking about information systems all along the chain of command. 

Back then, I had recently left a "transitional" position working on Raytheon's much-maligned R&D project called Genesis, and I was trying to describe it to career analysts and  Special Agents.  Not one had ever heard of data-mining, and none of them understood how such tools could be helpful.  It's not that they weren't smart folks; it was the institutional culture that saw all IT through the lense of ACS, an awkward business process tool.

Predictive analysis technology requires good data, but it also requires good analysts, skillfully mining and interpreting that data.  It's not technology and money.  Those are available in abundance here in DC.  It's the leadership, vision, management, and skills that should be of greatest concern.  The Bureau has always had technology advocates here and there, and I'm sure there are folks there now who are interested in this type of work, but the institution's management is still unable to deliver a functional alternative to ACS. 

With this in mind, how much support will something like the NSAC have among the rank and file and who will staff it?

Fresh ideas

Michael Tanji at Haft of the Spear commemorates the annual "Bad Grades" list of federal agencies' network security programs.

Less Useful Each Year

Uber-analyst Thomas Barnett points out that a key intel assessment of China is "less useful each year."

The report wasn't that bad, just stunningly limited in its war-within-the-context-of-war mindset, which is par for the course. Having the Pentagon be our primary interpreter of China's rising power is pathetically limited, like interpreting a football game by only watching the field judge recite his calls But such is our 19-th century view of "power."

Use More Open Source

Cross-posted at Making Sense of Jihad

Federal Computer Week reports on a new CSIS study on the government's use of open source information.  The study offers excellent, practical recommendations.  It also offers some of the clear-headed, even-handed discussions of open source's potential and its limitations:

1. Use the information correctly.

“The goal isn’t to find actionable intelligence,” Sanderson said. “It’s to provide context.”...Freely available information can offer invaluable context for framing the secret information that intelligence agencies tend to favor, the CSIS report argues. The bias toward putting more weight into secret information obtained through espionage is a holdover from the Cold War and relies on assumptions, Sanderson said.

2. Understand the role of technology.

Al Qaeda had been using the Internet quietly for years before the 2001 terrorist attacks....“The ready availability of sizeable numbers of computer engineers and scientists at the service of transnational terrorism also enables the cyber caliphate to add to its toolkit the ability to send instructions to followers using seemingly innocuous coded messages or more advanced, state-of-the-art encryption techniques,” the CSIS team discovered.

3. Use software tools effectively.

CSIS’ network uses collaboration software — Microsoft Groove, in this case — for communication, including threaded discussions.

4. Choose participants carefully.

Terrorism experts are not the only people suited to become part of a trusted information network, Sanderson noted. Journalists, academics and consultants — people who frequently travel to regions of the world where useful information is available — are all potentially good choices.