Elicitation Techniques For The Intelligence Professional (Slideshare.com)

Elicitation: "Acquisition of information from a person or group in a manner that does not disclose the intent of the interview or conversation. A technique of human source intelligence collection, generally overt, unless the collector is other than he or she purports to be."

You don't hear much about elicitation. An element of intel operations tradecraft, many consider it the seedier side of HUMINT (or, as the business guys call it, "primary source") intelligence in the corporate world.

The best introduction to this world, in my opinion, is John Nolan's excellent book Confidential (which you can now buy in paperback).

Another useful product came across my desk the other day, however. One of my students (Thanks, Nimalan!) forwarded the very interesting slide presentation at the bottom of this post by Stephan Hernan who appears to be an independent analyst working health, science, and communications technology issues.

Whether you are curious about elicitation generally or are more interested in the counterintel implications of these techniques, I recommend the slide show:

CI Elicitation Tactics: The Art and Science of Obtaining Game Changing Business Secrets

View more presentations from Stephen Hernan.

Exciting Opportunity: Analytic Best Practices Conference, July 11-13, 2010 In Ireland!

Analysts and decisionmakers...
Academics and practitioners...
From both sides of the Atlantic...
From the business, national security and law enforcement intelligence communities...
For three days...
In Ireland!

I gotta say, I am pretty pumped about the 2010 Dungarvan Conference on analytic best practices, July 11-13, 2010.

Mercyhurst is sponsoring the conference in order to begin a more robust dialogue between and among all of the stakeholders and sub-disciplines of intelligence. We want to explicitly recognize both the common ground and the good thinking that exists across the entire field of intelligence analysis.

We are holding the conference in Dungarvan, Ireland to make it relatively easy for US participants and easier for our European friends (and our US friends living in Europe) to attend the conference. Likewise, Mercyhurst is expanding its campus to Dungarvan and we want to take maximum advantage of this uniquely beautiful location for all attendees.

You can find more information about the conference on the Conference website. Registration is now open! Hope to see you there!

Can't Be Both: Visually Displaying Inconsistencies

I like finding inconsistencies. It means that something is wrong with my argument. Inevitably, addressing the inconsistency leads to greater nuance in my analysis. That, I would argue, is a good thing.

One of my most popular recent posts (see the "Top Posts" box to the right) was on form and content and what intelligence products say by the way they look.

Today, I saw this infographic (via FlowingData, by way of the Consumerist, and originating at The Physicians Committee For Responsible Medicine) and it started me thinking along those same lines again:


Assuming the data is accurate (and I have no reason to suspect it), it does a good job of pointing out the inconsistency between what the government says we should eat and what foods the government actually funds (through subsidies).

Understanding how to display these kinds of inconsistencies is important to intel analysts, too. For example, one of the most common inconsistencies leveled against the intelligence community is that it is both all powerful and incompetent. It can't be both (obviously) but how can you capture this inconsistency in a graphic? See my graphic design-challenged attempt below:
I simply used Google to search for the phrase "CIA is all powerful" and "CIA is incompetent" and then made the graph based on the number of hits the two phrases received. It is not rocket science and it is definitely not a very good graphic but it makes the point, I think. Furthermore, I can imagine a much more complex graphic muddying the waters

• By the way, ADM Blair will be glad to hear, I suspect, that the phrase "DNI is incompetent" yields no hits...Of course, neither does the phrase "DNI is all powerful".

• Note, too, the powerful new metric I have created: The I-TOT -- the Intelligence is Taking Over The-world index (Hat tip to NGA for the idea).

Lesson learned? Simplicity wins. Simple graphics communicate big inconsistencies in analytic findings best. This is probably pretty obvious to a graphic designer but, for me, it was a bit of an insight.

Get Detailed Feedback On Your Writing, Explore Your Searches More Fully And View The Best Jobs In America (Link List)

Some really interesting stuff crossing my desk recently...

Paper Rater. This one is a must-have, must-distribute for anyone who spends any time writing. You just cut and paste whatever it is you are working on into the online editor and it spits out an immediate and detailed report of the issues with it. It even reports on possible plagiarism! My experience with the tool is that it tends to over-report problems but it doesn't appear to miss much that is truly an issue. Paper Rater strikes me as a painless, tireless, first draft editor. Via Lifehacker.

What Do You Suggest? Anyone who has ever played around with Google knows that it has a built in "suggest" feature. So, if you typed in "intelligence", for example, the first suggestion Google would make would be "Intelligence test". What if you could see all the choices, sorted by relevance and number of hits in a kind of branching tree? Very cool and potentially useful. Take a look at the output below:


Via Lifehacker.

Best Jobs In America Infographic. I have previously reported on CNN's evaluation that I personally have the best job in America (combination of Intel Analyst (#9) and College Professor (#3)). Now I have this cool infographic to prove it (Click on the picture to get the full chart). Via Boing Boing and Thanks, John!.

New Intelligence-related Wikipedia Articles (Wikipedia)

Image via Wikipedia

Each year, I have my intelligence communications class write articles on intelligence or intelligence-related topics for Wikipedia (You can see previously published lists of these articles here and here).

I do this for a number of reasons and, if you are interested, you can read about those here.

This year's crop covers some pretty interesting topics (none of which have been covered in Wikipedia before):

Network Crack Program Hacker Group
Porter's Four Corners Model
Sergei Ogoltsov (Soviet Deputy Director Of State Security 1951)
War Plan Gray
Zomi Revolutionary Army
Bradley Heithold (Commander, Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency)
William Alvin Lloyd (Lincoln's personal spy)
US Bomb Data Center
Robert Lipka (Spy)
Spain's Technological Investigation Brigade

All of these articles have already begun to undergo the inevitable Wikipedia editorial process but much of the original effort is still there.

Finally, if you are interested in what makes a good Wikipedia article, there is some very interesting research that has just come out of The University Of Arizona that indicates that the quality of the article depends on the type and quality of the collaboration that produced it. (Thanks, Allen!)