The Intelligence of Yahoo!
One of the more interesting data-points produced by a recent Washington Post series into the workings of the Intelligence Community was the stated fact that over 50,000 intelligence reports are produced each year mostly dealing with terrorism and mostly dealing with ‘low hanging fruit’ analysis. This leaves actionable intelligence, such as real time traffic coming from Special Forces groups in say, Yemen mixed in with lower level non-actionable information. Prioritizing data in world of overwhelming data-flow is increasingly a significant problem and while some software tools are developing to help solve this problem. However, faulty understanding around the use of these systems means that they invariably suffer from the same ‘garbage in-garbage out’ problem they are seeking to alleviate.
Meanwhile, over in the world of journalism the battle continues for relevance and revenue. While many traditional news reporting agencies are trying blogs, iPad apps and kindle editions to stay in business a non-traditional news agency – Yahoo! – is trying something different. Yahoo! news is one of those sub-groups within Yahoo! which has developed a dedicated following based on the quality of the product, which isn’t infected by Yahoo!’s otherwise unsteady performance. Its recent offering is called The Upshot and is a news Blog that uses trends from search data to decide what it is going to report on. Simply put the Upshot Blog looks at what people are searching for on the web, and writes stories covering the most popular areas of search. The launch of the new blog was covered by the New York Times.
One way of using this idea within the Intelligence Community could be to assign analysts to topics, which are trending across community networks in the way Upshot is doing with news. If for example a wide number of searches are being conducted on Intellink and associated systems and then an IC analyst could be assigned to write a report on the topic covering the salient issues. While certainly, this shouldn’t be the sole driver of analytical product but it may be a way of introducing greater relevance into analytical units, such as the NCTC, which are coordinating roles over a number of agencies and therefore, should be able to see trends developing within the search patterns on its systems.
