Intelligence Tools For Understanding Any Website (YouTube)

Jeffrey Kotvas on the always insightful Competitive Intelligence Forum points to the excellent video below that reviews various online tools for understanding the traffic patterns behind any website (sort of a modern and open-source version of the much more venerable intel sub-discipline of traffic analysis...).

The video, put together by Scrappybusiness.com, focuses on the use of these tools by intelligence professionals in the business world but these tools might also be of some use to amateur (and, perhaps, professional) cyberthreat analysts as well. 



For those of you not familiar with the Competitive Intelligence Forum, I recommend you check it out as well. There are lots of good places to talk about intelligence on the internet these days but the CI Forum is one of the best. Founded by longtime CI professional, Arik Johnson, this social networking site for those involved in intelligence work for the business community has really taken off and now boasts over 1300 members. Click on this link to preview the site.

Related Post: 
Using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tools To Do Intel Analysis

What If The Gulf Oil Spill Happened In My Home Town? (IfItWasMyHome.com)

The website, IfItWasMyHome, allows the user to place the BP Gulf oil spill over any town or city in the world.  It is an enormously useful tool for visualizing the current size of the spill and the area it actually impacts.  The picture below is a screenshot taken with the spill centered on Washington DC.  For the interactive version of the site (where you can put the spill over your town, too), go to IfItWasMyHome.com or click on the picture below. 

How To Grade Sources (Link List)

Dax Norman at the National Cryptologic School has done the most authoritative work on general reliability of online sources with intel specifically in mind.  You can find his JMIC/NDIC thesis on the topic and his matrix here.  We teach Dax’s approach in our classes as his research is the best I have seen on the subject and the research was done with the needs of intel analysts in mind.

In the 1997 version of the CIA’s Analytic Tradecraft Notes, the Agency seems to abandon the traditional A1, B2, etc system in favor of a new, less rigorously defined taxonomy.

FBIS used to (and probably still does within the OSC) publish source notes with each of its translated articles.  The BBC does some of this at the end of its Country Reports (See this example).

The website of any library associated with a research university will likely have a section that talks about source reliability.  Here is an example from Cal Berkeley on online sources and here is an example from George Mason on non-web-based sources.

One of my students, Kristina Jakomin, recently completed a study in my Advanced Analytic Techniques class into what law enforcement analysts tend to refer to as “statement analysis”.  She synthesized the “rules’ (such as they are) into a handy cheat sheet and ran a classroom exercise that suggested that these rules were useful in ferreting out some deceptive statements/sources. She then applied the rules to some statements made recently by Hamid Karzai. You can go to her website to see the results…

Finally, I have a student, Nimalan Paul, who is doing a comparative study of HUMINT source evaluation techniques for his master’s thesis.  Nimalan comes to us from the rough and tumble world of Indian primary source (ie HUMINT) intelligence in the business world and will be looking at best practices across all three intelligence communities (national security, law enforcement and business) to see what the common denominators of HUMINT source reliability are. I expect results on that research by this time next year if not sooner.

Memorial Day Isn't About Sales Or Cookouts... (CNN.com via FlowingData)

CNN has created an excellent infographic that brings home the human cost to the US of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Click on the picture below or the this link to see the interactive version.

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The Effects Of Labels On Analysis (Thesis Months)

(Note: At the risk of making this an all-Jeff-Welgan blog, I thought this week I would cover Jeff's thesis work on the effects of labels on analysis right on the heels of last week's discussion of his work embedded in the new book, Hyperformance).

Does a name matter? Shakespeare says, "No, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet" but most psychologists would disagree. The well known "framing effect" shows that the way a question is asked can determine how people will answer it. Likewise, psychological campaigns aimed at dehumanizing an enemy often accompany wars.

Jeff Welgan, in his thesis called, The Effects Of Labels On Analysis, tests these ideas in the realm of intelligence analysis. Some of you may remember taking Jeff's survey last year. In it, he presented a fictitious scenario set in the Horn of Africa. Each participant was asked to read an identical report of an activity. The only thing that changed was the word used to describe the group conducting the activity. Specifically, Jeff tested the words "group", "insurgent", "rebel", "militia", or "terrorist". He hypothesized that the specific word used would affect the analytic conclusions that participants would draw.

Jeff did not aim his study at a random sample of the general population, however. He took pains to engage analysts in the national security realm, in law enforcement or in business. The results in the image to the right are self-reported (the inevitable cost of a web-based survey...) but he was fairly careful in his approach to getting participants. In all, some 233 of you participated in the experiment (Many thanks!).

Despite his hypotheses, it was unclear what he would actually find. These psychological biases are deep-seated and robust but, on the other hand, there is good research to suggest that credible evidence helps overcome framing issues and intel analysts are typically trained to be on the lookout for sources of bias. As Jeff stated, "My thesis will examine to what extent the quality of analysis is at risk, if it is indeed at risk, as the differing connotations of these labels would suggest."

In the end, the labels wound up making little difference for trained intel analysts. As Jeff bluntly stated, "My hypothesis that these particular labels have significant meaning, and many individuals have a preconceived idea, or cognitive biases, regarding the kinds of actions each of these particular groups conduct must be rejected at this time due to an overall lack in statistical significance across the labels."

This is clearly good news for the intel community at large. It certainly suggests that at least some of the training to defeat at least some of the cognitive biases is working.

The full text of the thesis is below or can be downloaded from Scribd.com.

The Effect of Labels on Analysis