The Transformation is Neigh
6 Oct 2008
By Kristan J Wheaton for ISN
In June 1815, according to legend, financier Nathan Mayer Rothschild stationed a scout on the outskirts of the battlefield of Waterloo. As soon as the battle was over and it was clear that the Duke of Wellington had won, the scout supposedly raced back to the London banker to deliver the news. The result, so the story goes, is that Rothschild made a fortune on the London Stock Exchange the next day.
In April 2007, Seung-Hui Cho, a mentally ill student, committed suicide at 9:51AM after having killed 32 people and injured another 23 at Virginia Tech University in the US. By 3:16 PM the same day, news of the massacre had been posted to Wikipedia, the open, online encyclopedia. Within three hours, over 300 changes had been made to the page as new information poured in. Within two weeks, over 8000 edits had been posted, causing a local newspaper, The Roanoke Times, to external pageacknowledge that Wikipedia had “emerged as the clearinghouse for detailed information on the event.”
The contrast between these two stories, and the implications for intelligence, could not be more clear. The story about the Battle of Waterloo, while false, is believable because in 1815, only someone with Rothschild’s immense fortune and connections would have the resources necessary to acquire and the opportunity to take advantage of such an important piece of information.
By 2008, the situation has almost reversed itself. Now, the crowd, armed with a variety of speedy communication devices and simple, online tools with which to exploit them, can increasingly outpace the most sophisticated news and intelligence capabilities. As then-director of the National Security Agency, Michael Hayden, in congressional testimony on the threat posed by terrorist groups external pagepointed out in October 2002, “Al-Qaida did not need to develop a telecommunication system. All it had to do was harvest the products of a three trillion dollar a year telecommunications industry; an industry that had made communications signals varied, global, instantaneous, complex, and encrypted.”
However, the changes that modern telecommunications technologies and their associated applications have brought to the world are only the most visible of those that are already affecting intelligence affairs. Three other trends, the ascendancy of the “open,” the collapse of the so-called intelligence cycle and the changing perception of intelligence in the public eye, are likely to completely revolutionize intelligence over the next 5-10 years.
The ascendancy of the 'open'
Much has been made in recent weeks of the use of open sources, or freely available information, in intelligence. On 12 September 2008 the US Office of the Director Of National Intelligence closed the second annual Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) Conference in Washington DC. Registered participants for the event rapidly exceeded available slots as organizations from all around the world sent people to attend the widely publicized convention. Interest in open sources in the US intelligence community, however, significantly predates the media hype associated with the recent conference or even its predecessor in 2007.
Sherman Kent, often referred to as the “father of intelligence analysis” within the US intelligence community, estimated in 1947, that 80 percent of the information the intelligence community used came from open sources. As he states in his 1949 book, Strategic Intelligence For American World Policy, “Some of this knowledge may be acquired through clandestine means but the bulk of it must be had through unromantic open-and-above-board observation and research (See Kent Sherman, Strategic Intelligence For American World Policy (1949), Princeton University Press, P 3-4).” By 2006, former director of the US Defense Intelligence Agency, Lieutenant General Samuel Wilson, had external pageraised that estimate to 90 percent.
Much of the recent interest in open source intelligence, however, comes, directly or indirectly, as a result of the withering critique of US intelligence capabilities in the aftermath of the 11 September terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after the coalition invasion of that country in 2003. The 9/11 Commission external pagefound the US intelligence community “too complex and secret” while the WMD Commission went even further, devoting several sections in its report to external pagerecommendations involving the expanded use of open source information.
While the US intelligence community adopted many of these recommendations and has moved decisively to correct some of the worst imbalances and oversights in the use of open sources in intelligence, the ascendancy of the “open” in intelligence work goes beyond open sources of information. Today, increasingly, intelligence communities around the globe are playing catch-up to the proliferation of open systems. The US intelligence community, for example, announced the development of Intellipedia in 2006, five years after Wikipedia, and only recently publicized its deployment of external pageA-Space, modeled after the highly successful social networking site, MySpace, which went online in 2003.
Part of this hesitancy to adopt open systems is due to the focus – some would say excessive focus – many intelligence professionals put on secrecy and compartmentalization. Some secrecy serves to legitimately protect sensitive sources and methods as well as to preserve a decisionmaker’s options. Excessive secrecy and compartmentalization, however, can effectively lock down important information, virtually ensuring that it cannot get to the right people at the right time. This is sometimes done for reasons that have little to do with the goals and purposes of the organization. So pervasive was this last problem that it led Rodney B McDaniel, executive director of the US National Security Council under President Ronald Reagan, to external pagecomment in 1987 that “[…] there are two uses to which security classification is put: The legitimate desire to protect secrets and protection of bureaucratic turf. As a practitioner of the real world, it’s about 90 bureaucratic turf; 10 legitimate protection of secrets as far as I’m concerned.”
Collaboration, one of the Enterprise Objectives in the first publicly available US National Intelligence Strategy, has been elevated to one of the intelligence community’s “values” in current DNI Mike McConnell’s external pageVision 2015 document. Furthermore, in the US’s Intelligence Community Directive 205, analysts have been external pageordered to “leverage outside expertise as part of their work.”
Collaboration and outreach imply openness and a variety of easy to use, off the shelf tools to maximize it. Moreover, where the US$60 billion US intelligence community leads, other national, law enforcement and commercial intelligence enterprises are likely to follow. The only other option is to retreat back into some sort of slow-moving, inflexible, safe-but-irrelevant organizational structure that remains in a permanent state of reaction to the fast, agile threats surfacing and strengthening daily. Ultimately, there is only one logical choice for the intelligence community and, as internet entrepreneur Dick Clarence Hardt put it at the Open Source (of the software variety) Convention in 2005, “Open and simple wins.”
The collapse of the intelligence cycle
There is not much theory that intelligence professionals agree on, but virtually all of them point to the so-called “intelligence cycle” when asked how intelligence works; until pressed, that is.
This consensus opinion, that intelligence flows effortlessly from the decisionmaker’s intelligence requirements, to collection of relevant information, to analysis of that information, to production of the intelligence product and then back to the (sometimes) satisfied decisionmaker, falls apart under the slightest pressure. Indeed, no seasoned intelligence professional actually believes that intelligence works, or has ever worked, in this fashion. The actual process is much less linear and much more complex.
Yet the myth persists. In fact, in many countries, it directly or indirectly drives training and funding decisions and permeates policymaker’s attitudes about intelligence. Ask a lawmaker about intelligence and, if they know anything at all, they will likely talk about the intelligence cycle.
Several attempts have been made in recent years by practitioners and academics to modify the cycle, to make it more realistic. Only one, former CIA analyst and author Robert Clark, has tried to throw it out entirely. His model, which he refers to as target-centric intelligence, supposes a group of professionals, intelligence and decisionmakers alike, that are concerned with a particular target (See Clark, Robert; Intelligence Analysis: A Target-centric Approach (CQ Press, 2006)). Each contributes information and extracts analysis from a shared understanding of the target. Radical in its approach to understanding intelligence, Clark’s vision of how intelligence does (or should) work has failed to supplant the hoary image of the comfortable, if counterproductive, intelligence cycle.
The intelligence cycle is one of the few governmental processes to survive the Cold War unscathed. The West, for example, has gone from containment to détente to engagement and globalization while the US Army has transitioned from active defense to the Airland Battle doctrine to network-centric warfare over the same time frame. Decisionmakers in areas such as these are beginning to demand sophisticated intelligence processes to support their modern doctrines. Much of the response to these demands has been ad hoc. The external pageNational Intelligence Support Teams the US deployed in Bosnia in the 1990s resemble in intent, if not in scale, the “external pagefusion cells” in Iraq today. In both cases, from what little public information exists about their inner workings, it is clear that these initiatives are successful and that processes, very different from the intelligence cycle, are at work.
Until an intelligence agency documents one of these new processes, validates its particulars and can explain it in terms as simple and straightforward as those of the intelligence cycle, the old standard is unlikely to be discarded. Such a task is easily within the ability of any number of national and commercial intelligence organizations and the first to do so will have a decisive competitive advantage over the rest. Under these circumstances, it would seem that the intelligence cycle’s days are numbered.
The changing perceptions of intelligence
When asked to consider intelligence, most people conjure up images of Hollywood spies, codes and assassinations. While such images represent a glamorized and unrealistic version of actual intelligence work, for those working inside government and private intelligence organizations, it is still true that most did not deliberately set out to become intelligence professionals: They stumbled into it.
However, this is changing at an accelerating pace. More and more commercial, nongovernmental and law enforcement enterprises have begun to realize the value of having specialists who can extract meaning from the vast ocean of potentially relevant but unstructured and often unreliable or even deceptive information available. Dependable estimates regarding the future plans and activities of competitors, criminal organizations and terrorists, in addition to similar information regarding other states, are in particularly high demand.
Collecting and analyzing this type of information, especially in the private or law enforcement sectors where traditional anything-goes intelligence activities are illegal or unethical, requires highly trained professionals. Even the US intelligence community has had to turn to external pageoutside contractors for as much as 27 percent of its workforce.
Several large organizations, such as the International Association of Law Enforcement Intelligence Analysts and the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals train intelligence professionals in techniques appropriate for these sub-disciplines of intelligence. Increasingly, however, students attracted to intelligence careers are pursuing those interests in more traditional academic settings.
As the demand increases for entry level analysts and other intelligence professionals with these skills and abilities, the supply of colleges and universities offering such specialist programs will also likely increase. Already there are a number of schools offering bachelor's and master's degrees in intelligence studies or applied intelligence in the US and in other countries and this number is set to grow. The Iexternal pagenternational Association Of Intelligence Education, an organization that seeks to “advance research, knowledge and professional development in intelligence education,” has grown from 60 founding members to well over 400 members from 49 organizations from around the world over the last 4 years.
As the educational infrastructure grows to meet the demand for this new kind of knowledge worker, students will increasingly come to the discipline of intelligence directly, in much the same way they now come to engineering or architecture. Likewise, employers from government and the private sector will look to educational institutions to fill their entry-level intelligence positions. Research funding directed at expanding the theoretical basis of intelligence work and at validating elements of the intelligence professional’s tradecraft will encourage younger employees of the various intelligence communities to jump ship for a life in academe.
Eventually, some educational institutions will begin to offer professional degrees in intelligence studies in much the same way many universities now offer advanced professional degrees in law or education. This normalization of intelligence as a profession will likely become, in turn, a self-reinforcing cycle, dramatically changing the ways ordinary people and institutions see intelligence.
The revolution is coming
These four trends – the advances in technology, the growing importance of open sources and open systems, the urgent need for new processes and the changing way people think about intelligence work – are combining to form a powerful force that will revolutionize intelligence over the next 5-10 years. There will be nay-sayers and the movement forward will not be without difficulties.
Intelligence is at a crossroads, however, and the choices are clear. On one side lies increasing irrelevancy as diminishing returns from slow, inflexible, overly classified systems fail to justify their expense. The other choice, which at least avoids the death spiral, is not without its own perils, however. The way ahead is unclear. Without a generally accepted understanding of what intelligence is, what it should do and who it should do it for, intelligence will continue to merely react to the changes outlined in this paper, conjuring up more and more makeshift solutions and never quite living up to its promise.
Intelligence will not disappear, though. What may change is who does intelligence best. The first entity to come to grips with these key trends and questions, to understand the core of the intelligence function and how to weave that into the fabric of the technological and other changes around us, will not only hold an invaluable edge in business and law enforcement, but in national security as well.