Collectors! What Three Things Do You Wish Policymakers/Commanders/Analysts Knew About Your Job? (RFI)

Back in the early 90's I was looking at the Balkans.  I had a bunch of info that made me think there was a small, unidentified weapons cache that needed to be confirmed.

I was very proud of myself.  I had narrowed the search area down to about 10 square kilometers.  At the time, I just so happen to be collocated with the imagery collectors so I went down and asked them, "Hey, can you find this cache for me?" I suspected we had the images and I thought it would be a relatively straightforward task.

I already know what all the IMINT collectors out there are thinking.

"What a dumbass!"

And you are right.  I was a dumbass.  But what happened next changed my attitude about intelligence collection activities forever.

The senior photographic interpreter took me over to a light table (yeah, it was that long ago...) and handed me a huge photo and what amounted to a jeweler's loupe.  "Knock yourself out," he said.

It took me only minutes to realize the enormity of the task that I had casually tried to pawn off on the IMINT guys.  Trying to find something so small in an area so large was an incredibly difficult and time consuming affair.

Over my career as an analyst, I was lucky enough to have similar experiences with professionals in other collection disciplines.  Understanding the challenges and capabilities of collectors made me, I think, a better, more efficient analyst.

I am teaching a class this term where I am trying to get my student-analysts to come to many of the same realizations.  Called Collection Operations for Analysts, the goal of the class is to make them more aware of the challenges and capabilities of HUMINT/Primary Source, IMINT, SIGINT, MASINT and even OSINT collectors.

SO...I need your help!  I would really like to give my students the perspective of working collectors.  I am NOT looking for anything classified (of course) or overly technical.  I am looking for the top three things collectors in each of these disciplines really wish that analysts, primarily, but also policymakers, decisionmakers at other levels, commanders with limited intel background and maybe even the general public understood better about their collection discipline.

For example, if I were a SIGINT collector, I think I would want the people I support to have a better feel for just how much stuff there is out there.  The volumes of traffic are huge in this collection discipline and even the largest organizations' ability to collect, process, translate and interpret are incredibly small.  I think if more people had an appreciation for this fact of 21st century communications, some of the stupider things said about SIGINT ... well ... wouldn't get said.

But don't let me put words in your mouth!  This is your chance, collectors!  And I am not just interested in national security collection, either.  I would love to hear from law enforcement and business professionals and even from SAM's international audience!

You can drop a comment below or, if you are uncomfortable with that, drop me an email at kwheaton at mercyhurst dot edu.

Thanks!

The Media In 2014...From Predictions Made In 2004!

One of my favorite short films back in 2004 was one called "Epic 2014".  It was faux documentary that purported to report on the media scene in 2014.  It walks the viewer quickly through the history of the internet from Tim Berners-Lee up to 2004 (when the film was made) and then it begins to "report"/speculate about what the next ten years will hold.

If you haven't ever watched it or haven't watched it in awhile, take 8 minutes right now to take a look:



There is some silly stuff here (like Google-zon) and the video does not really hint at the rise of stuff like Facebook and Twitter (much less Instagram and Tinder...).

But the takeaway is an eerily prescient statement concerning the current state of the internet:

"At its best, edited for the savviest readers, [the internet] is a summary of the world - deeper, broader and more nuanced than anything available ever before.  But at its worst, and for too many,  [the internet] is merely a collection of trivia, much of it untrue, all of it narrow, shallow and sensational. But [the current state of the internet ] is what we wanted.  It is what we chose."

I don't know of anything that is quite this well done (or this insightful) about the future of the internet over the next 10 years (leave a comment if you do!) but I suspect that much of what we will be looking backwards at will involve new technologies like the one demonstrated in the 2 minute video below from Microsoft:



In case you are curious, the hardware and software capable of doing all this is coming to you next year.

IBM Creates Interactive Map/Infographic Of CIA World Factbook (IBM.com)

IBM, in order to demonstrate some of their latest web based technologies, has taken the data from the CIA's World Factbook and re-mixed it in the form of a stunning, interactive infographic.  

The final product allows the user to much more quickly engage and compare the data for the various countries in the world.  The screenshot to the right does not (as usual) do the product justice.  I have zoomed in on central Africa to show some of the detail but you can just as easily take a look at the whole world and can instantly get a sense of where various regions lie with respect to any of the data the World Factbook contains.  

I strongly recommend you go here to see the full product.  Play around with it; I think you will be impressed.

If you are interested in additional information about IBM's initiative, you can go to the cryptically named IBM ILOG Elixir Blog or to Information Aesthetics, where I first picked up on this product.

Note:  This has been a very good week for maps (See also here and here) ...

Chinese, Russian, Turkish Hackers Almost Certainly Targeting, Penetrating US Energy Provider Networks (Project Grey Goose)

Jeff Carr, author of Inside Cyber Warfare and IntelFusion, along with Sanjay Goel at the State University of New York, Albany and other contributors, has recently completed another of the Grey Goose reports, this time on hacker attacks on the power grid, both domestically and internationally.

The report's key findings are chilling:

• "State and/or Non-state actors from the Peoples Republic of China, the Russian Federation/Commonwealth of Independent States, and Turkey are almost certainly targeting and penetrating the networks of energy providers and other critical infrastructures in the U.S., Brazil, the Russian Federation, and the European Union."

• "Network attacks against the bulk power grid will almost certainly escalate steadily in frequency and sophistication over the next 12 months due in part to international emphasis among the G20 nations on Smart Grid research, collaborative development projects and the rich environment that creates for acts of cyber espionage"

• "The appeal of network intrusions against the U.S. Grid is enhanced by two key factors:"

• "90% of the U.S. Department of Defense's most critical assets are entirely dependent on the bulk power grid."
• "Most Grid asset owners and operators have been historically resistant to report cyber attacks against their networks as well as make the necessary investments to upgrade and secure their networks."

Grey Goose reports are volunteer efforts to analyze various cyber threats through the use of open source information. Previous reports have analyzed the Russia-Georgia cyber war and the evolution of cyber warfare.

In the interest of full disclosure: Jeff kindly listed me as a "reviewer" in the recent report but my input was limited to a little light editing. I don't consider myself a cyber war expert. I do think, however, that Jeff's record and the records of his co-contributors' speak for themselves and believe that those interested in this area (and those who should be interested in this area) need to read this report carefully (whether you ultimately agree with its conclusions or not).

Intel Legend Art Hulnick On The Future Of OSINT (ISN)

The ISN, on one of its recent podcasts, scored a very good (if too short) interview with Professor Arthur Hulnick (see picture at right). Art currently teaches intelligence related courses at Boston University and has for a number of years. Before that he was at the CIA for several decades and has contributed significantly to the open body of literature on intelligence through his books (including Keeping Us Safe: Secret Intelligence and Homeland Security (2004) and Fixing the Spy Machine: Preparing American Intelligence for the 21st Century (1999)) and many articles.

Art is one of those guys who has been around, as we used to say in the army, "since Christ was a corporal" and is always worth listening to. Unfortunately, the ISN did not make an embeddable version of the podcast but you can get it on iTunes, download the MP3 or just go to the ISN site to listen to it.

Open Source Nuclear Targeting (FAS.org)

One of my students recently pointed me towards a well researched and thought-provoking article by the the Federation of American Scientists titled, From Counterforce To Minimal Deterrence.

The article laid out the FAS's argument against the US's current nuclear strategy, Counterforce, in favor of their suggested alternative, Minimal Deterrence. Under this proposed strategy, the US would maintain only about 500 nuclear weapons or just enough to deter anyone foolish enough to consider using a nuke on the US. Currently, according to the FAS, the US has about 5200 active nuclear weapons.

Anyone interested in the argument and counter-argument on this proposed strategy shift should see the FAS site. What really caught my eye, however, was the notional target set that the FAS developed in support of their position. They decided to target Russia and set up their list such that they could effectively threaten punishment sufficient to make the use of nuclear weapons by Russia appear undesirable. In other words, how many targets and of what type would you have to be able to take out in order to be able to deter (in this hypothetical case) Russia from using nukes on the US?

In the end, the FAS settled on 12 targets. You can sort of see them in the image below or you can download the KMZ file from the FAS and see them on Google Earth. Hitting the 12 targets with relatively small 3 kiloton bombs (Fat Man, by way of comparison was 21 kilotons) destroys everything within 1000 feet of the blast and continues to damage everything within a little more than a mile from the blast. The FAS projects some 46,000 dead and another 67,000 wounded from strikes on these 12 locations.

As horrific as these casualty counts are, the FAS suggests its strategy, designed to deter potential aggressors with this level of force, yields results that are substantially better than those of previous US government funded studies including one in 1979 that used less than 100 of the more than 20,000 nukes the US had in its stockpiles at that time. That study resulted in estimates of 836,000 to 1,458,000 dead and another 2.6 to 3.6 million wounded.

Obviously, this analysis only works for state actors and rational state actors to boot. No amount of nuclear weaponry is likely to deter determined non-state actors (the some 10,000 weapons in the US arsenal at the time did nothing to stop 9/11 for example...). Likewise, irrational state actors are equally unlikely to be deterred by large stockpiles of nuclear weapons believing, as they tend to do, that nuclear explosions have no impact on divine beings.

It does leave one wondering, however, about the fragility of the modern state. If an attack (albeit one that completely destroys) only 12 targets is sufficient to bring a modern state to its knees (or to make it think that it will be brought to its knees which seems to be closer to the goal of deterrence), how many and, more gruesomely, which targets would do the same to China or the EU or the US?

Cool OSINT T-Shirt (GreyLogic)

Jeff Carr (of IntelFusion and now GreyLogic) has designed a pretty cool OSINT themed t-shirt to accompany his current Grey Goose effort. Check out the "T" here and order one for yourself here.

Must Read Report On Recent Cyberwar Attacks (GreyLogic.com)

Jeff Carr (who blogs at IntelFusion and runs GreyLogic) released his most recent report on the evolving state of cyberwar late last week and it is a good one.

Focused primarily on three recent attacks, the report contains well-written, clear, evidence-based findings. Jeff's report goes beyond just the technical findings, however, and pulls the strings together in a way that will be of high interest to the non-technical reader as well.

This is part 2 of the Grey Goose Project which uses an "open innovation intelligence model focusing on identifing and tracking Non-state hackers and the companies and governments that support them."

Non-governmental versions of both Part 1 and 2 of the Grey Goose Report are available online. The non-gvernmental versions focus on the findings and conclusions derived therefrom. The governmental versions contain much more of the concrete evidence on which those findings/conclusions are based. The Government version can be requested via e-mail from a government e-mail account. Jeff indicated that it will also be available on A-Space and Intellipedia.

(Full Disclosure: Jeff was kind enough to send an early copy of both reports for me to review prior to publication. I received no pay or compensation of any kind for providing feedback. I have no formal relationship with GreyLogic or Intelfusion other than Jeff's a friend and we both blog about the same kind of stuff.

Bottomline: The reports were good when I got them and Jeff has only made them better since.)

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.

Bin Laden Found! (MIT International Review)

...according to two UCLA geography professors in the MIT International Review. Using what sounds a lot like IPB, they figured out where Bin Laden couldn't go, probably wouldn't go and narrowed down their estimate to one of three building complexes in Parachinar, Pakistan.

The image of the buildings is taken from the report (which is free to download) but they are just Google Earth pictures. All of the analysis is based on open sources and some reasonable assumptions and is getting some massive play on a variety of sites right now.

It reminds me a bit of what Jeff Carr did with the Grey Goose Project...

Pump Up Your Google Search Skills (YouTube via Digital Inspiration)

Digital Inspiration featured this excellent short video on getting the most out of your Google searches featuring Matt Cutts, a senior engineer at Google. The video starts out with a number of well-known tips but quickly gets to some stuff that I did not know Google could do. Even if you are an expert, this is a good 5 minute refresher course on getting the most out of Google.

OSINT Product On Russian Hackers And The Georgia Crisis Out Tomorrow! (Intelfusion)

The Grey Goose is about to fly! Nope, this is not an obscure quote from a numbers station; its a real product.

About 2 months ago, Jeff Carr over at Intelfusion set out to put together an OSINT team to take a look at Russian hackers and how they supported (or not) the Russian war effort in Georgia. Specifically, they sought to conduct "analysis of Russian hacker blogs in an effort to uncover connections that may not be readily apparent."

Jeff releases his initial round of results tomorrow. If you are interested in a copy, check out his post here for the instructions.

"And The Winner Is..." (DNI Open Source Innovation Challenge)

As many regular readers of this blog already know, the Mercyhurst College team of Mike Butler, Shannon Ferrucci, Ray Wasko, Drew Brasfield, Dan Somavilla and Chris Hippner (sponsored by MCIIS Director Bob Heibel) won the DNI's Open Source Innovation Challenge last week at the OSINT Conference in DC. The Mercyhurst answer is embedded below:

MCIIS DNI OSINT Challenge -- Winning Entry - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: MCIIS DNI OSINT Challenge -- Winning Entry

A few quick notes on the doc. First, it is uploaded to Scribd, so you can download it there. Second, the document here is a PDF. The submission was in MS Word which meant that the embedded video worked directly in the doc. With the PDF version, you have to click on the link in the caption to see the video in the document on YouTube (or you can just watch the embedded version below:



In addition to the 3 page (max) document, the team had to put together a six slide presentation in case they won. The team's presentation is actually a slide show, complete with narration, animation, music and embedded videos and other do-dahs and knick-knacks. Very cool but bandwidth hungry. Don't try watching the video of the entire presentation below unless you are on a fast connection.




Final Notes From The Open Source Conference:

• I understand that iJet, the other team that won the challenge, had at least one Mercyhurst alum, Bradley Perry, on their team. Congratulations to them and to him as well!
  
• There are several great blog posts out there about the conference if you missed any of it. The DNI's blog has, presumably, the official word but HOTS provided an extensive series of notes and Cryptome did a great job with pictures of the conference. I suspect that there are others that I have not seen. If you know of any, please post them to the comments.
• Speaking of posts about the conference, you have to feel sorry for this guy....

Congratulations once again to the team for their excellent performance!

We -- All Of Us -- Won! (DNI Open Source Conference)

According to the DNI's official blog for the Open Source Conference going on in DC right now, Mercyhurst College had one of the two winning entries in the Conference's Open Source Innovation Challenge!

As most of you already know, the challenge was to tackle one of two analytic questions using only open sources and to do it in one week. The Mercyhurst team consisted of Mike Butler, Ray Wasko, Shannon Ferrucci, Dan Somavilla, Drew Brasfield and Chris Hippner and was sponsored by the Director of the Institute of Intelligence Studies here at Mercyhurst, Bob Heibel. They addressed the question: "Using the best open sources to inform your answer, is Al Qaeda a cohesive organization with strong and centralized control, intent and direction?" The other winning entry came from iJet Intelligent Risk Systems but I don't have any additional details.

The students involved were all unpaid volunteers and gave up their Labor Day holiday and the week before classes started in earnest to participate in the challenge. Their ability to self-organize, manage the collection effort (more on that in a minute), synthesize and analyze the vast amount of information that streamed in and produce an innovative and original document amazed both the faculty and their peers.

(Note to employers: One of the biggest advantages of hiring a Mercyhurst grad as an entry level analyst is also one of the most difficult to explain: By coming here and staying in the program, these students self-select to become analysts. Typically they do so because they really like doing intelligence analysis. They like the time pressure, they like difficult problems and they shoulder the responsibility of "getting intelligence right" very well. We told these students at the outset that the competition would be fierce and that their chances of winning were slim. We knew that this would not matter because we have 350 more students here just like them...)

One of the cooler things this team did, of course, was to crowdsource their efforts. I helped them put out the call for input right after Labor Day and many thanks to HOTS, IntelFusion, Soob and all the other bloggers that picked up the call and re-broadcast it. Also thanks to the members of IAFIE, INTELST, all of the alumni and all of the friends of the program for all of their help getting the word out and contributing to the process. I have not yet seen the list of all of the contributors but I have been told it is lengthy. If, as the DNI's new Vision 2015 document tells us, commitment, courage and collaboration are the core values of the intelligence community then everyone who offered a bit of advice, analysis or information without any expectation of reward deserves some of the credit, in my opinion.

On the analytic side, the team was clearly standing on the shoulders of giants. They benefited enormously from a wide variety of previous authors on the topic and their meticulously sourced document gives full credit to them. I also think they benefited from the expertise of Mercyhurst's own experts, Bob Heibel, former deputy director for counter-terrorism at the FBI and Steve Marrin, who had many, if not all, of these students in his terrorism class last year.

The presentation of the products and the slide show they put together along with it are due to be presented later today at the conference. Sometime after that, I will post both the document and the slide show here for anyone interested in the results.

DNI's Official Open Source Conference Blog Up And Running (DNI)

The DNI has a top secret blog (no links from the main conference site to the blog that I could find) and a couple of staffers (presumably) roped into live blogging the events at the ongoing Open Source Conference in DC. If you are interested in the conference but were not able to attend, the live-bloggers are doing a reasonably good job of keeping up with the content. Comments are enabled as well so it is a good way to be there without being there...

Puttin' The Open Into Open Source: MCIIS Innovation Challenge Team Looking To Do Some Collaborating!

The ODNI's Open Source Innovation Challenge set off a brief wave of excitement here at Mercyhurst late last week. There were a lot of pumped up students ready to take on the two challenge questions (Really -- they live for this kind of thing). Then everyone realized that you had to have a registered conference attendee on the team to submit an entry and registration was already closed...

The students set up one team anyway (under the sponsorship of Bob Heibel, our only registered attendee) and have been hard at work on their submission since then. Realizing that there was a ton more good open source info out there than they could possibly get at in a week, and taking full advantage of the rule that sets no size for the teams, the students have adopted an "innovative" approach to the problem: crowdsourcing.

They have asked me to help them get the word out that they are looking for anyone with anything relevant to the Al Qaeda challenge question: "Using the best open sources to inform your answer, is Al Qaeda a cohesive organization with strong and centralized control, intent and direction?"

You can send any info you think might be relevant to mciis.innovationchallenge@gmail.com, their group account, but they need the info ASAP as they have to submit their final report by 5 SEP 08.

Specifically, they are looking for reliable open source information from any source (academic studies, think tank reports, social network analyses, first hand observation, whatever...) that is relevant to the question of AQ and the level of centralization in its command and control. They have a few specific collection requests as well for anyone out there who might have something or know of something:

1. Instances of documented conflict between Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda and other al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist groups.
2. Instances where ties with Bin Laden’s al Qaeda existed but terrorist groups were documented as autonomous and conducted independent acts of terrorism.
3. Instances of terrorist groups taking Bin Laden’s al Qaeda propaganda techniques and adopting them for their own purposes.
4. Instances of self radicalized terrorists forming independent self generated terrorist groups (other than the London and Madrid bombers).
5. Instances of groups that had sworn their allegiance to Bin Laden’s al Qaeda shifting to pursuing their own agendas that may have even run contrary to the wishes or mission statement supported by Bin Laden and al Zawahiri.
6. Links to quantitative lists of attacks by al-Qaeda and affiliated groups/splinter groups etc.
7. Differences in standard operating methods and tactics between Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda and splinter groups.

Many readers of this blog are already working on their own entries, I know, but if you are one of those people who got closed out of registration or aren't going to get to go to the conference for other reasons, you can still play by helping the students out (they will give full credit to everyone that submits something). If you can't help but you know someone who can, don't hesitate to refer them to this post.

Win or lose, they have also agreed to let me post their final product here on SAM when the results are in, so stay tuned...

Open Source Intelligence: A Strategic Enabler Of National Security (ISN)

I have known Chris Pallaris, the Executive Editor at the International Relations And Security Network (ISN), for a little over a year and have always found him to be intelligent and articulate on intelligence and international relations topics. He has demonstrated this skill once again in his recent short paper on the value of Open-Source Intelligence.

There is little here that will be new to an experienced intelligence professional but that does not appear to be the article's intended audience. Instead, I think that Chris seeks to inform and (to put it bluntly) influence those strategic decisionmakers who don't know what they are missing by failing to pick up on the RIA ("Revolution in Intelligence Affairs").

In this respect, this short (3 page) article succeeds admirably. Chris outlines the strengths and weaknesses of OSINT clearly and concisely and even provides a sketch of what he thinks would constitute a robust and cost-effective OSINT Center.

Worth the read but, more importantly, worth passing to those who make decisions about intelligence budgets.

Debating Open Source Intelligence In Australia (The Age)

One of Australia's oldest and largest newspapers, The Age, recently published a lengthy article (Thanks, Chris!) on the potential value of open source information to the Australian intelligence community and bemoaning the fact that open source isn't used as much as it should be. Sounds familiar...

Resource Round-Up (Link List)

Here are a couple of interesting or useful sites I have run across over the past week...

Finding Information On The Internet: A Tutorial. UCal Berkeley librarians, I love you! This tutorial is fantastic! It is a great resource for OSINTers and intel studies students.

Priority Planning Model And Worksheet. There are two kinds of people in the world: Those that use priority-planning-model-worksheets and those that don't. If you are of the first persuasion, you probably already have your own system. If you are of the second, you will read this post, commit to getting yourself organized, download the template, half-way fill it out and then lose it on the way to somewhere. Which means the main reason to click on this link is for all the other tips that Ian's Messy Desk has to offer including brief tips on 9 Key Steps For Preparing A Speech or How To Build Your Self-Confidence...

Email Based File Conversion. Converting documents from one format to another can be a pain, particularly when you are on the road. Digital Inspiration lists a number of services that will take your document or audio file, convert it and then send it back to you in another format. I have not tried these services out yet so if any of you have any experience with them (good or bad) please post it to the comments.

How To Reform Intelligence Reform (Testimony)

Robert Hutchings, Diplomat in Residence at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton and formerly the Director of the NIC, recently testified before Congress regarding the state of intelligence reform. In what has to be one of the bluntest reports on record, Hutchings lays out his problems with recent reform efforts and outlines five recommendations for "reforming the reform". It is compelling testimony with a number of surprising insights that make this a "must read". Highlights include (Boldface and italics are mine):

• "Let me first preview my bottom line: namely, that the organizational changes that led to the creation of the office of the DNI were undertaken without addressing the other aspects of the 9/11 Commission recommendations. The result, I fear, may leave us worse off rather than better."

• "The pre-war debate was never about the intelligence but about the policy. Yet the policymakers who launched the war and the members of Congress who voted for it, chose to blame it all on faulty intelligence. Neither the 9/11 Commission nor the WMD Commission addressed the failures of policy, which were vastly more serious than anything the intelligence community did or failed to do."

• "Democrats attacked the intelligence community to get at the president; Republicans attacked it to protect him. What both sides agreed on was to stick it to the intelligence community."

• "Let me hasten to add that the intelligence community did and does need reform. But these reforms were debated in the worst possible climate for sound judgment."

• "This idea is also tied up with what I call the “coordination myth”: namely, that it is somehow possible to “coordinate” the work of hundreds of thousands of people across dozens of agencies operating in nearly every country of the world. Anyone who has worked in complex organizations knows, or should know, that it is possible to coordinate only a few select activities and that there are always tradeoffs, because every time you coordinate some activities you are simultaneously weakening coordination among others."

• With those thoughts in mind, let me offer five suggestions for intelligence reform, none of which entail further organizational change.

• First, fix the “demand” side of the problem.

• In 2004, when I was Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, we produced a bleak assessment of the Iraqi insurgency that incurred presidential wrath when it leaked to the New York Times. But the real story was that the President hadn’t read it – not even the one-page “Presidential Summary”! (This is the second time this has been brought up in the last week. See With Spies Like These for the previous reference).
  

• This is not a marketplace in which intelligence products have any intrinsic value; they are freely and routinely ignored.

• Second and relatedly, create an interagency strategic planning group.

• Interagency planning may seem obvious, but it does not happen because administrations do not want it. Individual departments certainly do not: they want their own pet projects held close until the last possible moment rather than having them run up against the competing ideas of other departments.

• Third, strengthen Congressional oversight, as the 9/11 Commission recommended.

• In the past year or so there have been two National Intelligence Estimates on terrorism – with quite alarming findings. But to my knowledge no Congressional hearings on those estimates have occurred. On the second of those estimates, concerning threats to the homeland, General Hayden said (at the Council on Foreign Relations) that 70% of the information came from detainee interrogations. This is worrying for two reasons: it shows how poor our penetration of terrorist networks still is, and this dependency on (often dated) detainee information can turn into a circular argument for continuing our disastrous detainee policy. Have there been Congressional hearings to look into this?

• Fourth, accentuate the strategic coordinating role of the DNI and de-emphasize the centralization of operational functions.

• Let me focus on the very first of the 33 “enabling objectives” of the 500-day plan – to formalize a “National Intelligence University.” I think I know what a university is. What the IC intends is not one; it is a training center. Calling it a university is a triumph of form over substance.

• This then leads to my fifth and final recommendation: begin the evolutionary process of changing the culture of intelligence.

• This will entail a radical re-conceptualization of what “intelligence” is and should be. We have moved from an era in which clandestinely acquired information accounted for a large chunk of what we needed to know (or thought we needed to know) into one in which our “secrets” count for relatively little for most of the issues that affect our national well-being. (Again, see With Spies Like These... for a recent reference to this same issue).