Interesting Maps: Worldwide Risk, South China Sea, Hurricanes And The Arctic

Lots of interesting maps out there these days.  Here are a few that tell their stories better than most...

Marsh is a insurance broking and risk management firm with a pretty long track record.  Founded in 1871, you have probably never heard of them because they work with big companies to help them figure out their insurance needs.  They do about $6 billion a year and have upwards of 30k employees in 130 countries. 

What I like about them is that they put a lot of their research online.  Obviously, all of it has an insurance "edge" to it (that is probably less exciting than it sounds, by the way) but you don't have to wade through a ton of small print to get to some meaty stuff on just about any region of the globe.

Which is why their Political Risk Map is so interesting.  You can take a look at a screenshot of part of the map below but to find out what all the pretty colors mean and to see the rest of the world, you are going to have to go to the site itself.

Marsh Political Risk Map

Drilling down into just one part of the globe - in this case, the South China Sea and environs - requires a more nuanced view of risk and there are a few, very good, recent, mapping tools to help make sense of it all. 

The first was put together by the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative.  AMTI is housed within the highly regarded Center for Strategic and International Studies and offers a substantial body of analysis on issues in and around the South China Sea.

Particularly impressive is the map below (just a screenshot - click the link for the interactive version) that lays out all of the claims and counterclaims to various chunks of ocean in the area.

AMTI Maritime Claims Map

Equally impressive is the very detailed and highly interactive reporting done by the talented people at Reuters Graphics.  Their article, Concrete and Coral is an excellent primer for those not familiar with this hotspot.  I have taken a screenshot of one of the many graphics but it does not do the article justice.  You really have to see it to get the full effect.

Concrete and Coral

One more hotspot and one more map!  This time it is the Arctic Sea, which, because of ice loss due to climate change, has become yet another slowly growing crisis.  While much of this crisis revolves around resource extraction and which country owns what, it is worth noting that there are a lot of people who make this part of the world their home as well.

GRID-Arendal was formed in 1989 in an agreement between Norway and the UN.  In their own words, "We transform environmental data into credible, science-based information products, delivered through innovative communication tools and capacity building services."  Their maps (and the accompanying text and data) on indigenous people in the Arctic Circle certainly accomplishes this goal.  Again, I provide just a screenshot of one of the many maps and resources they have provided below.  Check the entire site for more!

Indigenous Peoples Of The Arctic

Finally, as most Americans (particularly those in the south) know, it is hurricane season again.  Many areas are still trying to recover from last year's devastating series of hurricanes and the good people at NOAA are already saying that this year is likely to be as bad or worse.

NOAA provides a very cool interactive mapping tool that let's you examine historic hurricanes and their tracks in a number of different ways.  I was curious, so I set out to find how many hurricanes had impacted the Erie, Pennsylvania area (where I live)  Much to my surprise, there were five since 1955!  Check out the full site to search for your home town.

NOAA Historical Hurricane Tracks

What Is Crowdfunding And Why Is It Important To Intelligence? (ENTINT)

http://widget.launchrock.com/

Six more days...

If all goes well, in six days, I intend to launch my first game, Widget, on Kickstarter  (if you are interested in the game itself, you can get more info by clicking on this link).  Once launched, I will have 30 days to get "funded" by various "backers".  If I fail to reach my pre-designated goal, I get nothing at all.

That's how crowdfunding works.

Well, at least, that is how Kickstarter works.  Kickstarter is the oldest and most popular crowdfunding platform currently available.  For those of you unfamiliar with these platforms, you probably should be.  This is not just for entrepreneurs or people interested in entrepreneurial intelligence, either.  There are implications here for intelligence professionals at all levels of business ... and law enforcement and national security, too.  

Let me explain.  Kickstarter is by no means the only crowdfunding site these days.  IndieGoGo and RocketHub are two popular alternatives, but there are a growing number of these sites.  The pace of this growth is likely to increase in 2013 as new laws are set to come into effect that will allow contributors to take small equity interests in start-ups (the current crowdfunding model centers on what typically amounts to pre-sales of a product or service).  Forbes expects revenues generated by crowdfunding sites to double, from 3 to 6 billion USD, in 2013.  Increasingly, this is the way everything from music to games to books to electronics will be funded at start-up.     

Savvy intelligence professionals in the business world should be watching these sites for potential competitors that might emerge from successfully funded projects.  Likewise, given the underfunded nature of most start-ups, it makes equally good sense to see successful crowdfunded projects as a no-cost extension of your own R & D programs - buying out small companies with proven products may well be less expensive than developing them in-house.   Finally, understanding crowdfunding is going to be an increasingly essential element of providing entrepreneurs any meaningful intelligence support.

Law enforcement intelligence professionals should also be taking note.  While there is little evidence of criminal activity in crowdfunding activities to date, with an increase in money, crime is virtually certain to follow.  Fraud of all kinds, money laundering, illegal or unsafe products are all activities which the reputable sites work very hard to avoid but, with the expected growth, criminals will inevitably carve out new niches in the market.

While national security intelligence professionals might not be interested in some artist's new comic book, many of these sites either specialize in or actively promote innovative hi-tech product development and design.  In fact, some academics are even turning to crowdfunding sites to fund their research.  Everything from geo-mapping to verification of information on the internet to pens that can draw in 3D have been funded by crowdfunding.

Crowdfunding is both an innovative and disruptive practice that is set to become much more important in the coming years.  In my opinion, it is worth staying ahead of this particular curve.

Top 5 Things Only Spies Used To Do (But Everyone Does Now)

There has been a good bit of recent evidence that the gap between what spies do and what we all do is narrowing -- and the spies are clearly worried about it.

GEN David Petraeus, Director of the CIA, started the most recent round of hand-wringing back in March when he gave a speech at the In-Q-Tel CEO Summit:

"First, given the digital transparency I just mentioned, we have to rethink our notions of identity and secrecy...We must, for example, figure out how to protect the identity of our officers who increasingly have a digital footprint from birth, given that proud parents document the arrival and growth of their future CIA officer in all forms of social media that the world can access for decades to come."

Richard Fadden, the Director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), added his own thoughts in a speech only recently made public:

"In today's information universe of WikiLeaks, the Internet and social media, there are fewer and fewer meaningful secrets for the James Bonds of the world to steal," Fadden told a conference of the Canadian Association of Professional Intelligence Analysts in November 2011. "Suddenly the ability to make sense of information is as valued a skill as collecting it."

Next I ran across a speech given by Robert Grenier, a former case officer, chief of station and 27 year veteran of the clandestine service, given at a conference at the University of Delaware.  In it, he describes the moment he realized that the paradigm was shifting (and not in his favor):

"Grenier said he came to realize the practice of espionage would have to change when he received a standard form letter at a hotel overseas, while undercover, thanking him for visiting again.  When he realized electronic records now tracked where he had been for certain date ranges, he said he knew the practice of espionage was going to have to change.  “It was like the future in a flash that opened up before my eyes,” Grenier said."

(Note:  While I could not embed the video here, the entire one hour speech is well worth watching.  The part of particular relevance to this post begins around minute 8 in the video.   This is, by the way, fantastic stuff for use in an intelligence studies class).

Finally  (and what really got me thinking), one of my students made an off-handed comment regarding his own security practices.  I needed to send him a large attachment and I asked for his Gmail account. In response, he gave me his "good" address, explaining that he only used his other Gmail address as a "spam account", i.e. when he had to give a valid email address to a website he suspected was going to fill his in-box with spam.

That's when it hit me.  Not only is it getting harder to be a traditional spy, it is getting easier (far easier) to do the kinds of things that only spies used to do.  The gap is clearly closing from both ends.

With all this exposition in mind, here is my list of the Top 5 Things Only Spies Used To Do (But Everyone Does Now) -- Don't hesitate to leave your own additions in the comments:

#5 -- Have a cover story.  That is precisely what my student was doing with his spam account.  In fact, most people I know have multiple email accounts for various aspects of their lives.  This is just the beginning, though.  How many of us use different social media platforms for different purposes?  Take a look at someone you are friends with on Facebook and are connected to on LinkedIn and I'll bet you can spot all the essential elements of a cover story.  Need more proof?  Watch the video below:


The only reason we think this ad is funny is because we intuitively understand the idea of "cover" and we understand the consequences of having that cover blown.

#4 -- Shake a tail.   It used to be that spies had to be in their Aston Martins running from burly East Germans to qualify as someone in the process of "shaking a tail."  Today we are mostly busy running from government and corporate algorithms that are trying to understand our every action and divine our every need, but the concept is the same.  Whether you are doing simple stuff like using a search engine like DuckDuckGo that doesn't track you or engaging "porn mode" on your Firefox or Chrome browser, or more sophisticated stuff like enabling the popular cookie manager, NoScript, or even more sophisticated stuff like using Tor or some other proxy server service to mask your internet habits, we are using increasingly sophisticated tools to help us navigate the internet without being followed.

#3 -- Use passwords and encrypt data.  Did you buy anything over the internet in the last week or so?  Chances are good you used a password and encrypted your data (or, if you didn't, don't be surprised when you wind up buying a dining room set for someone in Minsk).  Passwords used to be reserved for sturdy doors in dingy alleyways, for safe houses or for entering friendly lines.  Now they are so common that we need password management software to keep up with them all.  Need more examples? Ever use an HTTPS site?  Your business make you use a Virtual Private Network?  The list is endless.

#2 -- Have an agent network.  Sure, that's not what we call them, but that is what they are:  LinkedIn, Yelp, Foursquare and the best agent network of all -- Twitter.  An agent network is a group of humans who we have vetted and recruited to help us get the information we want.   How is that truly different from making a connection on LinkedIn or following someone on Twitter?  We "target" (identify people who might be useful to us in some way), "vet" their credentials (look at their profiles, websites, Google them), "recruit" them (Easy-peasy!  Just hit "follow"...), and then, once the trust relationship has been established, "task" them as assets ("Please RT!" or "Can you introduce me?" or "Contact me via DM").  Feel like a spy now (or just a little bit dirtier)?

#1 -- Use satellites.  Back in 2000, I went to work at the US Embassy in The Hague.  I worked on a daily basis with the prosecutors at the International Criminal Tribunal For the Former Yugoslavia.  That collaboration, while not always easy, bore results like the ones that led US Judge Patricia Wald to say, "I found most astounding in the Srebrenica case the satellite aerial image photography furnished by the U.S. military intelligence  (Ed. Note:  See example) which pinpointed to the minute movements on the ground of men and transports in remote Eastern Bosnian locations. These photographs not only assisted the prosecution in locating the mass grave sites over hundreds of miles of terrain, they were also introduced to validate its witnesses’ accounts of where thousands of civilians were detained and eventually killed."  It is hard to believe that only 12 years ago this was state of the art stuff.

Today, from Google Earth to the Satellite Sentinel Project, overhead imagery combined with hyper-detailed maps are everywhere.  And that is just the start.  We use satellites to make our phone calls, to get our television, and to guide our cars, boats and trucks.  We use satellites to track our progress when we work out and to track our packages in transit.  Most of us carry capabilities in our cell phones, enabled by satellites, that were not even dreamed of by the most sophisticated of international spies a mere decade ago.

-----------------------

If this is today, what will the future bring?  Will we all be writing our own versions of Stuxnet and Flame?  Or, more likely, will we be using drones to scout the perfect campsite?  Feel free to speculate in the comments!

Geospatial Analysis Of Gerrymandering In Pennsylvania (An Advanced Analytic Techniques Project)

One of my students, Karl Gustafson, used an interesting combination of geospatial and political data to create a video (see below) that examines some historic cases of gerrymandering in Pennsylvania.  He used this as background for looking into what appears to be some pretty clear cases of gerrymandering in the making.


While the production quality on the video is none too slick, Karl does a good job of using a series of overlays, a clear, direct script and the features of Google Earth to explain what gerrymandering is and how it has been used ion the past and how it is currently being used to literally re-shape Pennsylvania politics.

You can see Karl's evaluation of the methods and processes he used here.

Intelligence And Crowdmapping

I realized today that, while I had written in the past about the idea of crowdmapping, I had never actually used that term in a post before.

That was a mistake.

Don't get me wrong, Group editable maps have been around for some time and are quite successful.  We have used CommunityWalk, for example in a number of projects and it has served its purpose excellently.

CommunityWalk Map - North Caucasus Violence Sep-06 to Nov-06



Likewise, automatically edited maps are also quite helpful.  The comprehensive map at RSOE EDIS, for example, just recently got some new competition with Google Public Alerts.

Crowdmapping, though, is something a bit different.  Here, dozens and sometimes hundreds of people are providing information from a variety of sources (including the web, of course, but also through SMS and Twitter) that are then mapped in real time.

Right now, this space is occupied almost exclusively by Crowdmap.com, an offshoot of the much admired Ushahidi project.  It is not too hard to see a time, however, when other companies and organizations will enter this space with competing offerings.

I, along with a small group of intrepid students, have been experimenting with this system for a few months and, while managing the input has proven to be more challenging than expected, the potential (and the relative sophistication of Crowdmap) is enormous.

The best way to get a sense of the value of a crowdmap, however, is to look at them.  Below are three of my favorites:  Syria Tracker (a map tracking eyewitness accounts of missing, killed or arrested people in Syria in English and Arabic), China Strikes (a map tracking instances of labor unrest in China), and Energy Shortage (a map tracking reports of energy related issues worldwide).  You can see all of these maps below (Syria Tracker is live; the other two maps need to be clicked on to get to the live versions).

80+ Church Burglaries In 400 Days. Can You Help? (Crowdsourcing Analysis)

St. Paul, Minnesota has a problem. Over the last year or so, 80+ churches have been burglarized. The St. Paul Police Department has asked anyone with any information on the burglaries to call them and has, apparently, released some of the data regarding the thefts -- which gives us all an opportunity to help.

I was first alerted to this opportunity by the blog Entropic Memes, which has done quite a bit to get the word out. The success of Jeff Carr's Grey Goose project and Mercyhurst's students own effort with the DNI's Open Source Challenge suggested that this was also a project that was perfect for some sort of "crowdsourcing" effort (i.e. giving it to lots of people and seeing what they could do with it).

The only piece missing seemed to be a platform around which the information and analysis could congregate. I contacted a couple of people at Dagir Co. to see if they could help. Dagir is a new company that is in the business of providing solutions to tactical and operational analytic problems for business and law enforcement. I had seen some of Dagir's custom analytic tools and knew they had the skills to pull a collaborative analytic platform together quickly.

• Full disclosure: Dagir is run by Mercyhurst grads. I had many of them in my classes while they were here. I thought I was calling in a favor but when they heard the reason why, they were more than happy to contribute their time and expertise.

The guys at Dagir actually built two platforms for us to use. The first is a loosely structured wiki where anyone who has a few minutes to spare can help. Simple things like plotting the location of a church that HAS NOT been burglarized or reading and commenting on the one of the ongoing analytic discussions would add value to the product.

More sophisticated analysis is also possible through the second tool, an interactive geospatial analysis tool that permits the user to play with the data in a variety of interesting ways (the picture above is a screenshot of the tool). Want to search for only those burglaries that involved forced entry through a window? You can do that. Want to see how the pattern of burglaries emerge across time? You can do that, too. The Dagir team has even put up a "How-to" section on the wiki for those that really want to explore the power of this geospatial analytic tool.

The wiki platform also allows people who want to contribute to the project to upload any analysis (sophisticated or otherwise) or just plain information that might be of use to the rest of us. It really is a flexible set of tools (I was also glad to see the Dagir guys settled on Wikispaces as the wiki platform of choice. It is a very easy to learn wiki platform).

Even if you can't find the time to help analyze the data, watching the project evolve from this point should be an interesting case study in how these kinds of efforts work and how they might be improved in the future. It could also be an interesting classroom extra credit assignment for those who are interested in crime mapping or collaborative analysis.

CIA National Clandestine Service Ad On YouTube (YouTube via Got Geoint?)

The US Geospatial Intelligence Foundation's surprisingly hip Got Geoint? blog pointed to an interesting recruiting ad from the CIA (see below). The content is about what you would expect but the venue -- YouTube -- seems new. Worth a look (Another thing worth a look is Got Geoint? It is destined to be the Danger Room of the Geoint beat...)