Perspective Intelligence

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.

The recent edition of the Economist’s Technology Quarterly has a good round up of the expanding military use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV’s). One of the most arresting parts of the report deals with the growing demand for ‘renting time’ on UAV fleets. The impetus for this comes from the intelligence needs of smaller countries, which are not being met by their immediate allies. Of course this market also opens up a whole host of options for private sector intelligence analysts. For example, security analysts at shipping companies could rent time on UAV’s to ‘clear’ the routes for their ships of known maritime security hazards or oil company analyst’s could have UAV’s overfly their vulnerable pipeline routes looking for anomalies. Companies such as Insitu seem to be offering just that.

For now the costs are pretty high at $2,000 an hour, but as with all technology driven innovation this is likely to come down. There is also of course the option of building your own UAV’s an idea boosted by the editor of Wired Magazine, Chris Anderson. His DIY Drone’s blog gives a wealth of information on developing your own UAV. However, renting time and perhaps more crucially, analysis from one of the entrants into this new market will no doubt become of feature of future private intelligence analysis.  As timeshare private jet companies struggle in the downturn they may want to diversify into UAV’s — fromNetJets to NetUAV’s.

I recently had the fortune to attend a seminar by David Orban on the ‘Internet of Things’ hosted by Singularity University at the NASA Ames Research Park. This subject is of deep interest with regard to the future collection of intelligence a fact acknowledged by the National Intelligence Council’s Disruptive Civil Technologies Conference (appendix F). The basic idea surrounding the ‘internet of things’ is that all things become nodes in a global network and to some degree act autonomously or to put it another way, “Our washing machines can ask for soap”. This new or developing network creates a new category of object, known as a Spime [SPace +tIME] – a phrase coined by the science fiction writer Bruce Sterling. A Spime was defined by David Orban as an object with memory, computing capacity, location awareness and sensors. These Spimes already exist just not yet to scale. The leading driver of spime networks was initially thought to be RFID tags but actually it is smart phones that are providing the most compelling current platform. A great example of one such, spime is an application developed for the iphone by WideTag – called WideNoise. This uses the iphone to collect decibel readings posting them to a map to determine where the quieter areas in the world are. Following the presentation we divided into groups to design a Spime.   Read the rest of this entry »

The excellent Dark Web project at Arizona Universities Artificial Intelligence Lab has recently completed research into the use of Web 2.0 media by International jihadi groups. While fascinating in some respects it also clearly demonstrates how traditional text-mining attempts to collect data can be applied to some Web 2.0 applications, but miss the mark with virtual worlds.

The leader of the lab Dr. Chen kindly forwarded their research paper to me and it can be linked to here (Cyber Extremism in Web 2.0: An Exploratory Study of International Jihadist Groups or here). In essence the Dark Web project’s methodology is to search for material with extremist or terrorist style language (but please read the paper for a better description of methodology). Interestingly, they concluded that sites such as Facebook and MySpace, which have been big components of the Web 2.0 milieu are not suited to the propagation of extremist views,

“We did not consider social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, although they are a major component of Web 2.0. Based on our preliminary exploration, we found that the prevalent amount of personal data on these sites, the tight social linkages, and the potential issue of “guilt by association” (for site owners and “friends”) may have discouraged extremists from using such a medium.“

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