Do Intel Analysts Believe Info Is Good Just Because It's Secret?

(Note:  This post introduces a new author to Sources and Methods, Melonie Richey.  Mel and I will be working on a number of projects over the next year focused on the intersection of game-based learning, cognitive bias and intelligence analysis.  In her first post for SAM, she introduces us to a new form of bias...)

Heuristics (or "rules of thumb") and biases influence both decisions and the analysis on which they are based.

This is an inescapable fact.

Anchoring bias causes us to hyperfocus sometimes on irrelevant information, confirmation bias leads us to marry ourselves to the first probable conclusion we reach and bias blind spot allows us to do all this operating under the assumption that we, as trained analysts and generally educated people with inquisitive minds, are not biased at all.

These biases are extensively studied and appear in a myriad of interdisciplinary literature ranging from Wizards Under Uncertainty: Cognitive Biases, Threat Assessment, and Misjudgments in Policy Making (cognitive biases in terms of Harry Potter) to The Big Idea (Harvard Business Review) to The Mind’s Lie.

A recent paper entitled The Secrecy Heuristic - authors Mark Travers, Leaf Van Boven, and Charles Judd from the University of Colorado - presents research substantiating a new heuristic that likely affects both intelligence professionals and decisionmakers: The idea that we “infer quality from secrecy” when it comes to intelligence analysis.  In other words, we will give the same information more value just because it is secret.

This paper presents the three reasons that we fall victim to the The Secrecy Heuristic, and outlines the experimental evidence that validates the presence of this heuristic in information quality evaluation.

• “First, secret information is sometimes genuinely better information than public information, particularly in strategic contexts.” As the article elaborates, secret information is something valuable simply because it is secret (think about financial investors and stock market prices – the information is only valuable because not a lot of people are privy to it – this is where the whole concept of insider trading originates). The fact that secret information is sometimes better, leads us to associate that quality with all secret information.

• “Second, people may view secret information as being of higher quality than public information because of personal experience with their own and others’ secrets.” Think about gossip. In a social context, what is a secret? Usually, it is something personal or embarrassing that an individual doesn’t want everyone else to know, but which everyone else (everyone else defined as the immediate social network) would likely take interest in.  Again, this reinforces our bias in favor of secret information.

• “Finally, governments often behave, in foreign policy contexts, as though secret information is valuable and of high quality.” After all, we have multiple intelligence agencies with 100's of thousands of employees dedicated to secrecy; both maintaining it on our soil and revealing it on others. Uncovering secrets led to, as the article references, tracking down the leader of the Pan Am flight 103 bombing, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and Osama bin Laden. It’s not hard to see why secrets are so …well, secret.  This, in turn, reinforces our bias in favor of secret information even when non-secret information is just as valid.

The argument in The Secrecy Heuristic is that “these factors may lead people to use informational secrecy as a cue to infer informational quality” and, lo and behold, they found just that.

In the first of three experiments, the researchers tested whether or not people weighed secret information more heavily than public information in hypothetical foreign policy recommendations. In experiments two and three, the researchers tested whether or not secret information is perceived as higher quality than public information, and in experiment three, how secrecy impacted how favorably the foreign policy recommendation was rated.

On aggregate, “secrecy led to higher judgments of information quality.” For example, on a scale of 1 to 11, the mean judgment of secret information quality was 7.46 where the mean judgment of quality for public information was only 6.93.

In short, secrecy does not necessarily equate to importance, relevance or reliability - we just think it does.

(H/T to Tammy G for pointing us towards this article!)

Improving Intellipedia (YouTube.com)

A friend (Thanks, Chris!) recently pointed me towards a video on YouTube that makes some really good suggestions for improving Intellipedia. You can see it below:



Beyond the quality of the idea (which makes sense to me, though I am in no position to evaluate it), I am fascinated by the choice of venue for the video -- YouTube. Bringing the debate into a public forum is bound to draw some attention from national security bloggers such as the guys over at Danger Room or intel community watchdogs like the guys over at the Federation of American Scientists. It may even interest wiki experts such as the ones at Wikinomics.

I don't know if this external debate will change anything but I don't see how it can hurt. Thanks to ckras, the video's author, for sharing his ideas!

American SIGINT And The Indochina War (NSA and Secrecy News)

In case you missed it, Steven Aftergood at Secrecy News is maintaining a declassified version of the NSA's "Spartans in Darkness: American SIGINT and the Indochina War, 1945-1975". Mr. Aftergood reports, "The author, Robert J. Hanyok, writes in a lively, occasionally florid style that is accessible even to those who are not well-versed in the history of SIGINT or Vietnam." I can see it as very useful in an intelligence history class either for the lessons learned or as supplemental reading material.

Mixed News On Al Qaeda And Iraq... (CRS)

Secrecy News just picked up and posted the newly updated CRS report on "Iraq and Al Qaeda" (Download the full text here). While the report does not provide any solid answers on the current level of Al Qaeda activity in Iraq or the the degree to which it is tied to Bin Laden, it does do a good job of laying out the history and arguments on all sides. Highlights from the summary and full text include (Boldface is mine):

• "Although the connections between Ansar al-Islam and Saddam Hussein’s regime were subject to debate, the organization apparently did evolve into what is now known as Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQ-I). AQ-I has been a key component of the Sunni Arab-led insurgency that frustrated U.S. efforts to stabilize Iraq, but there is debate about how large and significant a component of overall violence was carried out by AQ-I. In mid-late 2007, in part facilitated by combat conducted by additional U.S. forces sent to Iraq as part of a “troop surge,” the U.S. military has had some success exploiting differences between AQ-I and Iraqi Sunni political, tribal, and insurgent leaders. These successes, which in some cases have resulted in the virtual expulsion of AQ-I from many of its sanctuaries particularly in and around Baghdad, have weakened AQ-I to the point where some U.S. commanders believe they have achieved “victory” over AQ-I. However, the most senior U.S. commanders believe it has not been completely defeated and remains dangerous, and some U.S. commanders assert that AQ-I fighters have relocated to parts of northern Iraq."
  

• "Analysis of the broader implications of AQ-I might depend on the degree to which AQ-I is in contact with the remaining leadership of the Al Qaeda organization as it has evolved since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. That relationship remains a subject of debate among experts."
  

• "... perhaps the most controversial question about AQ-I is the degree to which it is linked, if at all, to the central leadership of Al Qaeda as represented by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, both of whom are widely believed to be hiding in areas of Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan."
  

• "... on July 24, 2007, President Bush devoted a speech almost exclusively to this issue. In making an argument that AQ-I is closely related to Al Qaeda’s central leadership, the President noted the following details, including:"
  

• "In 2004, Zarqawi formally joined Al Qaeda and pledged allegiance to bin Laden"
  

• "In line with the increasing AQ-I efforts to cooperate with Iraqi Sunni insurgents, most of AQ-I’s fighters and some of its leaders are Iraqi."
  

• "That AQ-I is the only insurgent group in Iraq “with stated ambitions to make the country a base for attacks outside Iraq.” Referring to the November 9, 2005, terrorist attacks on hotels in Zarqawi’s native Jordan, President Bush said AQ-I “dispatched terrorists who bombed a wedding reception in Jordan.”
  

• "Some experts believe that links between Al Qaeda’s central leadership and AQ-I are tenuous, at best, and that the few operatives linking the two do not demonstrate an ongoing, substantial relationship."
  

• "Still others maintain that there is little evidence that AQ-I seeks to attack broadly outside Iraq, and that those incidents that have taken place have been in Jordan, where Zarqawi might have wanted to try to undermine King Abdullah II, whom Zarqawi opposed as too close to the United States. There have been no attacks in mid-late 2007 that can be directly attributed to AQ-I."
  

Nixon Could've Invented The Internet And Other Gems (Secrecy News)

Secrecy News reports on the recent declassification and release of a previously Top Secret/Sensistive/Codeword document regarding the strengths, weaknesses and, surprisingly, the methods of preparation of the CIA's President's Daily Brief (PDB) under Nixon and Kissinger. Secrecy News highlights the inconsistencies of the CIA's position with regard to the declassification of PDBs (According to Meredith Fuchs at the National Security Archive (and quoted in the Secrecy News piece), "What is most amazing is that one day they say the method of producing [the PDB] is so secret that nothing about the document can be disclosed, and then not long after they release this detailed, hour by hour explanation of how it is produced...") but there are other golden nuggets of information in this document:

• Policymaking vs. Intelligence. There is an extensive discussion about the relationship between the PDB and the NSC's own policy and analysis "Situation Room document" and the degree to which they overlapped and competed. Andrew Marshall, the author of the memo to Kissinger, summed up with the comment "the success of the Situation Room Product probably has driven the CIA's PDB out of the focus of the President's attention". Ouch!

• Office Politics And Intelligence. Check out this quote: "This situation presents a number of awkward problems. The CIA is not likely to suggest stopping production of the PDB. CIA has a major institutional stake in the PDB. It will not give it up easily. Moreover, in a recent discussion with Jack Smith, he strongly expressed his view that the CIA people almost consider themselves almost as part of the President's staff. They have no other natural superior. I told him I thought that view somewhat unrealistic in organizational and bureaucratic terms. But nonetheless, it may be the view of some of them and suggestive of their likely reluctance to given up production of the PDB. Over time they are likely to find out about the current situation if it persists." The condescension is almost palpable here. It is interesting to note that this reaction was only relevant to Nixon. Apparently (according to the document) Kennedy and Johnson thought highly of the CIA product.

• It is also worth noting the number of clear statements of likelihood in this paragraph. The intelligence community has wrestled with the question of Words of Estimative Probability for many years and I wonder if there is a correlation between how the CIA products were being written at the time and the desires of the decisionmakers -- particularly Kissinger. If Kissinger liked, for example, documents with clear statements of likelihood (whether that preference were implicit or explicit), you would expect to find that mirrored in his staff's reports and, more importantly, in his staff's selection of reports for the President to read. Perhaps it was the way they were written that kept them off the President's desk...
  

• Lack of Feedback and Information Overload. Both of these topics are covered extensively in this document. Like WEPs, these two problems have a long history with the intelligence community and it is interesting to see a senior level staffer address them so directly.

• Nixon and the Internet. One of the most interesting discussions comes at the end of the document where the author cautiously recommends a new sort of intelligence portal for Kissinger and the President:

• Sounds a lot like the internet to me, complete with hyperlinks, etc. Apparently it did not happen at least partly because, as the report itself notes, "the balance of experience has been that top-level executives don't like gadgets."