CIA Abolished! New Agency Formed (Reuters)

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

In a surprise move, President Obama moved to abolish the CIA today and replace it with an agency more closely associated with the issues of the 21st Century.

According to a Reuters report, President Obama stated, after signing the executive order, "The CIA is an institution born of the post WWII environment and fundamentally an instrument of the Cold War. While it has often served this nation honorably and well, its time is past."

According to the AP, replacing the CIA is the newly formed Social Network Intelligence Agency (SNIA). Overwhelmed in recent years by technological advances such as wikis, blogs and cloud computing, the new agency will attempt to exploit these technologies in the interest of US national security.

Based on a Top Secret study completed in the last years of the Bush presidency, the new SNIA will focus largely, but not exclusively, on social networks. "We took a hard look at it," said one agency insider speaking on condition of anonymity, "and we decided we had the resources to either watch our Facebook pages and update our Twitter status or spy on foreign governments and terrorist groups, but not both." He continued, "In these days of budget austerity and economic crisis, something had to go."

For more on this story see ...

Two New Job Hunting Resources (How To Get A Job In Intel)

Two of our students (Thanks, Mike and John!) recently pointed me towards some interesting resources if you are looking for a job in the US national security intelligence community.

The first is a new resume database sponsored by the Director of National Intelligence. The service allows job-seekers to submit their resumes one time and have it be available to the entire intelligence community for up to a year after submission.

I don't see this as a replacement for more traditional ways of applying for jobs in the US IC but it is a welcome addition. I think it will help the IC most in those crisis or hard to fill positions (like if something major goes down in Burkina Faso and you are one of the few speakers of dioula in the US...).

The other resource was actully put together by John. It is a list of links to all of the contractors he could find who, according to John, currently "have openings for either intelligence analysts, cyber analysts, or both." The links go directly to the career/jobs page of the 40+ companies he identified so there is no needless hunting and pecking through some corporate website for the right place to search for positions and apply.

Related Posts:

How To Get A Job In Intelligence

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.