Part 2 -- The Importance Of A Clear Definition Of Intelligence (What Is Intelligence?)

Part 1 -- The Problem of "Intelligence"

Why, then, is there this lack of consistency in defining intelligence? On the one hand, it is not unusual for non-professionals to have romanticized notions of what a certain profession does. For example, largely because of the prevalence of courtroom dramas on film and TV, many people tend to believe that lawyers spend much of their time in court. In fact, the opposite is true. Most lawyers spend very little time in court and some lawyers spend no time at all participating in jury trials. It is easiest, then, perhaps, to attribute the common public misconceptions about what intelligence is and what it does to an entertainment industry with an insatiable appetite for espionage dramas.

Easy, perhaps, but dangerous as well. The ability of the non-professional to understand the capabilities and limitations of intelligence, the relatively limited role of secrecy in most intelligence activities and the part intelligence actually plays in policymaking in business, law enforcement and national security activities is critical to sound decisionmaking. Yet, textbooks on American government rarely give more than a passing mention to the role of intelligence in the US government and it is highly likely that no more than 25 colleges and universities offer courses in intelligence at present.

This lack of understanding is particularly dangerous in a democracy. The perception of excessive secrecy and unaccountable power common among many US citizens is clearly contrary to the fundamental tenets of democracy and freedom these same citizens want. As Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), General Michael Hayden has said:

• “As a secret organization serving an open and free society, CIA has been granted an enormous public trust. That’s what secrecy is in a democracy. Not a grant of power, but a grant of trust. Each day, we have to earn that trust—as our democratic system demands—by acting as our fellow citizens expect us to: Skillfully, boldly, and always in keeping with the laws and values of our Republic. That’s our social contract.” (21 JUN 07, Speech, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations)

The responsibilities inherent in this “social contract” cut both ways, of course. Not only does the public have a responsibility to better understand intelligence and its function in modern decisionmaking but also intelligence professionals have a responsibility to better explain what it is they do and how they go about doing it.

That is, as soon as they figure it out themselves.

While the confusion in the mind of the public is, at least, partly understandable, the lack of consistency among intelligence professionals is baffling. It is one thing for the average person to be unable to define “law”. It is another thing entirely for a lawyer not to know (or, at least be able to find) what “law” is. Yet, that is precisely the position intelligence professionals find themselves in today.

Arriving at a clear definition of intelligence is particularly important for people seeking to teach intelligence. Our desire is to spend most of our time teaching how to do intelligence; to prepare the next generation of analysts and other intelligence professionals for the challenges that lie ahead, not to merely re-hash the arguments of the past. In order for that to make sense, we need to establish an operational definition of intelligence – one that students and instructors in business, law enforcement and national security intelligence courses can translate into a set of theoretical concepts and practical skills that represent not only today’s best practices but also provide direction for researchers going forward.

Tomorrow -- The Reasons For A Lack Of Definition

What Is Intelligence? (Part 1 -- The Problem Of "Intelligence")

Introductory note: My colleague, Jim Breckenridge, and I are spending the summer thinking and writing about intelligence. For us this means intelligence in the national security arena, of course, but it also means intelligence in law enforcement, business and countless other areas where we see intelligence or intelligence-like activities. I hope to post some of Jim's thoughts later this summer, but I decided to start with one of my favorite topics, "What Is Intelligence?" I find the answer to this question -- which I intend to lay out in a multi-part series -- to be particularly interesting.

Two other quick notes. First, this is yet another example of what I like to call "experimental scholarship" -- using blogs or other new technologies to publish and solicit peer input for what would normally be considered "scholarly" works (For earlier examples see my series of posts on using wikis to do intel analysis, word usage in recent NIEs and re-defining words of estimative probability). Second, those of you familiar with my earlier work might note the eerie resemblance of parts of this series of posts to my 2006 paper, with Mike Beerbower, titled "Towards a New Definition of Intelligence" in the Stanford Law and Policy Review. Full credit goes to Mike for his contribution to this evolution of my thinking.

The Problem Of Intelligence

At first blush, the question asked in this post, “What is intelligence?” seems like an easy one. Everyone knows – or thinks they know – about intelligence. It is about spies, secrets and James Bond. Intelligence is at least as old as Sun Tzu, the Chinese general who discussed the use of spies 2500 years ago, and is perhaps as old as recorded history.

More recently, it is what the US "lacked" before the attack on the twin towers on September 11, 2001 and what "failed" in Iraq with respect to Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction. Law enforcement agencies, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), both claim they need more intelligence to do their jobs. Even businesses now gather intelligence on their markets and their competitors and charitable foundations use intelligence-like capabilities to watch their particular interests.

If intelligence services were an industry, it would be about the same size, at $100 billion (including all national security activities and a rough estimate of the amount law enforcement and the business community spends on intelligence and intelligence-like activities), as the engineering services industry in the US. It would be five times the size of the architectural services industry.

The US Intelligence Community is the best known intelligence organization but it is by no means the only one in the US. This community of 16 government agencies, however, employs over 100,000 people (only a small percentage of which are “spies”). That is substantially larger than the number of employees at either 3M or Microsoft, over 5 times the size of Google and 20 times the size of T. Rowe Price. If the US Intelligence Community were a company, it would be about 45th on the Fortune 500 list of the largest companies, somewhere between Microsoft and Sears (Even within the government, however, it is a large organization, with over three times the budget of the State Department). In many communities, intelligence organizations are major employers and the problems these organizations face are more like the ones faced by big business than they are like the ones faced by the heroes of the latest spy thriller.

Despite its size, longevity and importance to world affairs, the profession of intelligence, what it is and what it does, is not widely understood – even among those who do it. Consider the following four activities:

• Writing a highly classified report on crop yields in a small African country.
• Executing a secret coup in an enemy country.
• Conducting routine police patrols in a crime-ridden part of a large city.
• Openly talking to a competitor’s employees at a local bar.

How “intelligence like” do they seem to you? How well do they fit your own, internal definition of intelligence? Imagine now a scale from 1 to 5 where 1 is an activity that is not “intelligence”, that does not fit your internal definition of intelligence, and where an activity that received a 5 would nearly perfectly fit your internal definition of intelligence. How would you score the activities above?

No matter how strongly you feel about your responses, the truth is that different people answer these questions very differently. In fact, I have asked these same questions, and others, of hundreds of students and intelligence professionals alike and there is rarely a consensus in terms of scoring. For many of the questions, the distribution of the final scores deviate little from what you would expect from random chance.

Why would this be so? Consider the activity of writing a highly classified report on crop yields in a small African country. Some people focus on the fact that the report is highly classified; Top Secret, perhaps. For these individuals, intelligence is about secrecy. Secrecy in intelligence, however, is usually about how difficult it is to collect the information, not how useful it is once it has been acquired. Those who tend to focus on the utility of the report note that this report, with its narrow focus, will likely be of interest to a relatively small number of users. Intelligence professionals, in particular, typically view it as the kind of report that the intelligence community routinely generates for background purposes, in case some decisionmaker needs it at some time in the future. The classification of such a document, taken in isolation, generally gets little weight from experienced intelligence officers.

Now consider the activity of executing a coup in an enemy country. This, for many unfamiliar with intelligence, is the essence of an intelligence activity. It is the substance of novels and films and fills the popular conception of what intelligence is and does. Many intelligence professionals do not see this type of activity as intelligence at all, however. The information collected and analysis conducted regarding the enemy country much more closely meets their internal definition of intelligence. The decision to act, to actually engineer and execute a coup is, in these professionals' minds, an act of policy. The fact that covert action falls within the realm of US intelligence organizations is, for them, an accident of history, not a fundamental intelligence function.

The final two activities on the list above, a police officer on the beat and talking to competitors in a bar, highlight how intelligence, as a profession, has grown outside its traditional, national security, boundaries. Businesses, whether they are looking at their competitors, their markets, or the physical security of their employees, are increasingly using the tools and methods traditionally available to the intelligence professional. In fact, as will become obvious in Jim's discussion of the broader history of intelligence, business necessity has often driven intelligence activities and improvement in intelligence capabilities. While it may seem like the idea of law enforcement intelligence is also new, it, too, dates back centuries. While most people don’t think of the cop on the beat as a collector for the law enforcement intelligence professional, that is exactly the role (among others, obviously) that individual serves.

Tomorrow: The Importance Of A Clear Definition Of Intelligence

Iranian Missle Engineers Redefine "Awkward Pause" (LiveLeaks via Gizmodo)

Gizmodo is carrying a LiveLeaks video this morning of the alleged launch of an Iranian rocket. 

Crowdsourcing Imagery Analysis (Wikimapia)

I have written previously about the value of the Google Earth Community for leads and other hard to find information concerning virtually any geographic location. Tasks like identifying and describing geographic locations on a map are perfect for crowdsourcing, where lots of people throw a little bit of time at a project. While I would not center my business, law enforcement or military plans around such data, it can provide very useful leads.

Wikimapia, which is very much like the Google Earth Community, allows users to post data concerning any place in the world. When this service first came out, I didn't think it would be able to compete with the Google Earth Community. Apparently, I was wrong.

I gave Wikimapia a second look today (Thanks, Rachel!) and was very impressed with the quantity of information and detail available. Take a look at the image of Bushehr Iran below.
Of course this is just a screenshot and I added the title and the website but the yellow box highlighting the Iranian HAWK site is all Wikimapia. Yeah. I thought it was pretty cool, too.

All of the little white boxes are sites that have been identified as something by someone. A good number of the sites identified are in the native language of the country making this a useful training tool for linguists as well.

Related Posts:
Excellent Competitive Intelligence, Law Enforcement World News Mapping Resources
NGO Intel: Southern Poverty Law Center's Hate Groups Map
COOLINT Part Deux: "The World Through The Eyes Of Editors In Chief"
COOLINT: Heat Map Of Search Terms By Country
9 Great Map Resources
Terrorism Threat Map
Famine Early Warning System
Excellent African Map Source
High Priced Oil Adds Volatility To Power Scramble (NY Times)
World Port Index

How To Evaluate The Credibility Of A Source (Wiki-how)

Wiki-How has a good, short article on how to evaluate the credibility of a source (Thanks, Mike!). While this article was obviously written in the context of an internet-based source, there is the possibility of a broader application here.

The main points are:

1. Think about how reliable you need the information to be. (Comment: I particularly like this as a starting point.)
   
2. Consider the medium with which you are working.
3. Research the author.
4. Check the date. (Comment: I would add check the date of the information not just the date of publication. I've been burnt on this one...)
   
5. Investigate the publisher.
6. Determine the intended audience.
7. Check the reviews.
8. Evaluate the source's sources. (Comment: This is a particularly effective way to teach source reliability to students. They don't expect it, which makes the less more "memorable")
9. Identify bias.
10. Investigate the financial or funding sources for sponsored research.

Related Posts:
How To Communicate Your Weaknesses In An Interview
How-to Sites