The New HUMINT?

A few months ago, I wrote an article on the Top 5 Things Only Spies Used To Do (But Everyone Does Now).  In that article I stated that one of those things (the #2 thing, in fact) was to "run an agent network."

I equated our now everyday activity of finding and following various people on LinkedIn or Twitter to the more traditional case officer activities of spotting, vetting, recruiting and tasking agents.

While I meant that article to be a bit lighthearted, over the last several months I have been exploring this idea with some seriousness in a class I am teaching with my colleague, Cathy Pedler, and a group of very bright grad students.

The picture above gives you an inkling of the progress we have made.

In this class (called Collaborative Intelligence - "How to work in a group while learning how groups work"), we have focused our energies on critical and strategic minerals.  I have already written about this course (if you want more details go here), but suffice it to say that, recently, we decided to use our new-found skills in social network analysis to see if we could solve a traditional HUMINT problem:  "Who should we recruit next?"

Every case officer knows that their agents' value are not only measured in terms of what they know but also in terms of who they know.  Low level agents with an extensive network of contacts within a targeted area of interest are obviously valuable, perhaps even more valuable than the recluse with deep subject matter expertise.

Complicating the case officer's task, however, is the jack-of-all-trades nature of the traditional HUMINT collector.   Today, the collector needs to tap into his or her agent network to get economic information; tomorrow, political insights; the next day the need is for information to support some military or technological analysis.

Only an expert case officer with deep contacts can hope to be able to respond to the wide variety of requests for information.  In today's fast moving, crisis-of-the-day type world, the question becomes "Where can I find good sources of information ... on this particular topic ... quickly?"

Twitter to the rescue!

You see, the image I referred to earlier began as the 11 lists of Twitter users the 11 students in my class were currently following as they studied critical and strategic minerals.  The students had found these Twitter users the old fashioned way - they bumped into them.  That is, they found them on blogs or in news articles that talked about strategic mineral issues and they followed them on Twitter in order to stay current on their postings.  Since each of the students has a slightly different portfolio (the students are broken into three teams, national security, business and law enforcement and then, within those teams, each student has an area of specific interest), their lists have some common sources but many different ones as well.

The natural next question is, "Who are my sources of information following?"  Using NodeXL to collect the data and ORA to merge, manage and visualize it, the students rapidly discovered who their "agents" were following.  Furthermore, we were able to discover new people to follow -- Twitter users that many people on our initial lists were following (implying that they were potentially very good sources of information) but that the students had not yet run across in their research.

The picture got even more interesting when we merged the results from each of the students.  Once we cleaned up the resulting picture (eliminated pendant nodes, color coded the remaining Twitter users by team, etc), the students had identified over 50 new sources of information -- Twitter users who were posting information relevant to the issue of strategic minerals and vetted by many of the Twitter users we had already identified -- that we had never heard of.  You can see this more focused set of Twitter users in the image below.

While this sounds exciting (and it was, it was...), trying to listen to over 50 new voices seemed to be a bit overwhelming.  The question then became, "Of these 50, which are the 'best'?"

The traditional answer involves following all of them and then, over time, sorting out the wheat from the chaff.  Most people don't have that kind of time; we certainly didn't.  We needed another way to sort them and, thankfully, Twitter itself provides some potentially useful answers.

The first answer, of course, is to look at the number of "followers".  This is the number of Twitter accounts that claim to follow a particular person or organization.  In general, then, the sheer number of people who are following a particular person is a rough measurement of their influence and, by consequence, importance to a conversation on a particular topic.

Most twitterati don't put much credence in gross tallies of followers, though.  Anyone with a twitter account knows that only a relatively small number of their followers are actively engaged with the medium.  Some studies have also indicated that a third or more of these followers are fake or, even worse, bought and paid for.  While this is typically true on some of the most widely followed accounts and is significantly less likely to be true among the people who are tweeting about rare earths, for example, it is still a cause for concern.

Twitter again offers a solution to this problem but it takes a little work to get it.  The key is Twitter's List feature.  Twitter allows users to create lists of people; subsets, if you will, of the larger group of people a particular user might follow.  For example, I have a list of competitive intelligence librarians (there are actually quite a few on Twitter).  Lists are a way for people to follow hundreds or thousands of people but narrow and focus that chorus in a way that is most useful for them.  It allows the savvy Twitter user to filter signal from noise.

Twitter allows a user to not only look at their own lists but to know how many lists other people have created with their name on it.  This is important because it takes time and effort to create and curate a list.  It is almost certain that you have not been placed casually on a list.  Being placed on a list is an indicator of credibility; being on lots of lists even more so.  Like followers, though, the number of lists is still pretty rough and does not give the best sense of the value of a particular Twitter user to his or her followers.  Thus, while the number of lists you are on is not a bad indicator, many people like to use the list-to-follower ratio to assess overall credibility.

In other words, if you had 1000 followers and every one of them had placed you on a list, you would have a list-to-follower ratio of 1.  If only 500 had placed you on a list, then your list-to-follower ratio would be .5.  In practice, list-to-follower ratios of .1 are rare.  Based on my experience a list to follower ratio of .05 is very good and a list to follower ratio of .03 or lower is more typical.

While I am certain that there are automatic ways to collect the data you need from Twitter, we simply crowdsourced the problem.  Dividing the list into 11 pieces, we were able to quickly and accurately collect and deconflict the various data we needed including number of lists and number of followers.  In the end, we were able to rank order the 50 top Twitter users talking about Strategic Minerals in a variety of useful ways.  In all, including the teaching, it took us only about 6 hours to get from start to Top 50 list (For the complete list and more details go here)..

And here is where the analogy breaks down...

Up to this point, we were able to fairly confidently connect traditional HUMINT ideas and activities with what we were doing, much more quickly, using Twitter data.  The analogy wasn't perfect but it seemed good enough until we put the students -- the "case officers" -- into the network.  They stuck out like sore thumbs!

Case officers in traditional HUMINT networks need to be working from the shadows, pulling the strings on their networks in ways that can't be seen or easily detected.  Trying to lurk on Twitter in this sense just doesn't work, however.  My students, who are following many people but are not followed by many, became very obvious as soon as they were added to the network.  The same technology that allowed us to rapidly and efficiently come up with a pretty good first cut at who to follow on Twitter with respect to strategic minerals, allows those same people to spot the spammers and the autofollow bots and the lurkers and even the "case officers" pretty easily.

Back in my Army days we used to say, "If you can be seen you can be hit.  If you can be hit, you can be killed."  Social media appears to turn that dictum on its head: If you can't interact, you can be spotted.  If you can be spotted, you can be blocked.

It turns out, it seems, that the only way to be hidden on Twitter is to be part of the conversation.

Top 5 Books Every Intel Professional Should Read (But Have Probably Never Heard Of)

There are tons of great reading lists for intelligence professionals.  The CIA has a list, The National Intelligence University has a list, The Marine Corps and other military institutions have lists; even intelligence professionals in the business community have lists.

I have noticed, however, that, oftentimes, these lists contain many, if not all, the same books.  Everyone recommends Heuer, everyone recommends Sun Tzu, everyone recommends something of regional or topical interest and for good reason -- these are great books.

Over the last several years, though, I have identified a number of books that I think every intelligence professional ought to read ... but aren't yet on anyone's list.  Typically these are not books about intelligence, or, at least, were not intended primarily for the intelligence audience but still have deep meaning for intelligence professionals in all of the various sub-disciplines.

Without further ado (and in reverse order):

#5 The Lady Tasting Tea:  How Statistics Revolutionized Science In The Twentieth Century.  If you are like me, you probably did not much care for statistics in college.  That is probably because you did not have this book to read.  It is an absolutely fascinating book that tells the story of modern (frequentist) statistics.  Nothing I have read helps put the numbers in context -- what you can get from traditional stats and what you can't -- better.

#4 The Theory That Would Not Die:  How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines and Emerged Triumphant From Two Centuries of Controversy.  Just the title ought to catch the eye of most intel professionals.  Bayes, for those of you unfamiliar with the theory, is the other side of the statistical coin - a different way of doing and thinking about stats that is probably more useful for intelligence than traditional, frequentist, approaches.  This very readable book is a great introductory volume for those who know nothing about Bayes. 

#3 How To Measure Anything:  Finding The Value Of Intangibles In Business.  While this is pitched primarily at the business audience, it really isn't a business book.  It is really a book about how to think about problems creatively.  While there are many tangible strategies discussed in Hubbard's fine volume, it is the attitude that Hubbard has as he approaches seemingly intractable problems that I find most compelling here.  It is a nearly perfect approach for intel professionals confronted with wicked problems.

#2 Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It?  How Can We Know?  What is the correlation between forecasting accuracy and years of experience?   .00.  Between forecasting accuracy and education?  .02.  Between forecasting accuracy and access to classified information?  .02  In other words, almost none.  Philip Tetlock's 2005 bombshell of a book is still not as widely read as it needs to be by intel professionals.  Whether you ultimately agree or disagree with his findings, it is a must read.

#1 Collaborative Intelligence:  Using Teams To Solve Hard Problems (Lessons From And For Intelligence Professionals).  Hackman, like Tetlock, has spent the better part of a decade researching his subject (in this case small teams of intel analysts).  His findings and recommendations about how to structure and manage intel professionals charged with solving difficult analytic problems in challenging environments where collaboration is required are essential reading.  In a world that constantly talks about collaboration, Hackman has done the hard work to lay out a roadmap about how it can and should be done most effectively.

How about you?  Do you have a favorite book that you think ought to be read by intel professionals but no one ever talks about? Leave it in the comments!

Strategic Minerals, Collaboration, Intelligence And...Oh, Yeah...Twitter!

http://strategicminerals.blogspot.com/

I am currently team teaching a class called Collaborative Intelligence with one of our adjuncts, Cathy Pedler.  I like to say that the purpose of the class is to explore "how to work in groups and how groups work."

Specifically, we are tapping into our own research and experience working with small groups of analysts (as well as the research of others) to teach students how to optimize group work processes with particular emphasis on group work in virtual or distributed environments.  In addition, we are also teaching them how to collect useful information and produce analysis using a variety of online and social media tools.  For this part of the class, we are emphasizing social network analysis as a core methodology.

In order to give the class some focus, Cathy and I decided to have the students take a hard look at strategic minerals (such as the "rare earth elements").  In order to share the results of our efforts, we also created a class blog, Strategic Minerals, where students could post both some of their collected information and some of their analysis for others to examine and comment upon.

On the blog you will find a couple of different kinds of exercises.  First, there are INTSUM-like entries that summarize recent news articles but add snippets of commentary or analysis (Note:  For those who have not tried it, blogging software is a nearly perfect way to replace traditional INTSUMs.  You get all of the benefit and none of the costs of creating them the old-fashioned way).

Second, there are classroom exercises, like our recent effort to build a down-and-dirty model of the non-chemical relationships between the various strategic minerals using social network analysis.  Third, and most recently, we have been posting some of our (very preliminary) analysis of the impact of trends in these minerals on national security, law enforcement and business interests in the US.

While none of our current analytic efforts are very sophisticated (Don't worry:  We will get better), how we are producing these results is likely to be as (or more) interesting to many of you as our analysis.  For example, the most recent assignments required the students to produce their analysis without any face-to-face interaction.  Instead, they had to use nothing but the suite of collaborative tools we had been discussing (and using) in class.  If you take a look at the "Methods and processes" section of these most recent reports, you can see how well this worked, what problems they had to overcome, and how they went about making the reports happen.

In the coming weeks we will be diving much deeper into social network analysis, talking a lot more about group dynamics, learning how to use Twitter, Pintrest, Facebook and other social media as collection tools, and producing increasingly complex reports involving larger and larger groups of analysts.

It promises to be an interesting term.  We hope to learn something about strategic minerals but more importantly, we hope to learn how to work in groups and how groups work. 

Follow along at Strategic Minerals!

Myth #3a: I Want To Make A Game That Teaches... (The 5 Myths Of Game-based Learning)

Part 1:  Introduction
Part 2:  Myth #1:  Game-based Learning Is New 
Part 3:  Myth #2:  Games Work Because They Capture Attention 
Part 4:  Myth #3:  I Need A Game That Teaches...

(Needless to say, it has been a strange August.  Thanks for the well wishes and notes of concern.  Hopefully, I am back at it...)

You have a PhD (or you have just been teaching a subject for quite some time) and you like games.  If no one has bothered to make a game that happens to teach anything remotely related to your subject matter, why not just make your own game?  

I have already made the point that good game design is hard (if you want to get an idea of how hard, check out Ian Schreiber's excellent 20 part series:  Game Design Concepts).  Teaching is also hard which makes designing a game that teaches a real...well, you get the point.

None of that is going to deter some of you, though.  If you are still bound and determined to design a game that teaches, whatever you do, don't try to make it a video game.  I have nothing against video games, but they have three strikes against them when it comes to teaching.

Strike One:  Even inexpensive video games cost a ton to make. According to the Casual Games Association, the least expensive games to develop (such as the ones on Facebook) still cost between $50,000 and $400,000.  Large scale games (such as Call of Duty or Mass Effect) can exceed $30 million. No educator has that kind of money laying around for course development. 

Strike Two:  Video games have a very short shelf life.  The technology is advancing so quickly that very few video games hold up well over time.  Most start to look their age within a year or two and many feel old and clunky within 3-4 years.  To get a sense of this drop off, take a look at the steep discounting that typically takes place on video games within the first few years of life:

http://blog.pricecharting.com/2012/03/lifecycle-of-video-games-price-30-years.html

Even if you can design a great game that teaches, if it is a video game, you will have to work pretty hard to keep the game looking fresh and up to date.

Strike Three (A):  A single video game will typically not have enough content to fill a course.  Two of my favorite games of the last year were Portal 2 and Kingdoms of Amalur.  I play both of these games through Steam (for those of you not familiar with Steam, it is like an iTunes for games.  Just like iTunes, it lets you download content directly to your PC and just like iTunes it keeps track of your statistics for you -- how long you play, what you play, how much you like a game, etc).  Steam says I logged 17 hours playing Portal 2 and 101 hours playing Kingdoms of Amalur.  

Both games (which I purchased on sale) provided excellent value for money in my opinion.  Portal 2 is one of the highest ranked games ever and was immensely fun.  Kingdoms of Amalur was designed to be a much lengthier game and was equally fun to play (though many reviewers did not think so...). With an average university course requiring approximately 45 classroom hours and, depending on who you talk to, 2:1 to 4:1 hours outside studying to inside of class, it is arguable (in a rough order of magnitude sort of way) that only video games on the scale of Kingdoms of Amalur could hope to fully replace even a single university course.

Strike 3 (B):  Even if the content is there, relatively few players actually finish video games.  Consider the two games I mentioned above.  Portal 2 is one of the highest rated games of all time.  Players and reviewers loved it.  Heck, I loved it.  I played every level and received every "Achievement" - little electronic tokens of accomplishment that players collect throughout the game.  Steam, of course, keeps track of "Achievements".   Typically, there is at least one achievement associated with completing the main part of the game.  In the case of Portal 2, that achievement is called "Lunacy" (play the game and you will understand why).  I have received this achievement and truly enjoyed the process of getting there.

What is really interesting, though, is that Steam allows me to compare my achievements with the millions of other players who have also played the game.  Only about 56.4% of those who have played the game through Steam have received the Lunacy Achievement.  That is actually a pretty stunning statistic when you consider this is one of the best rated games ever, players presumably volunteered/wanted to play the game and they had to pay between $30 and $60 for the privilege.  It is even harder to imagine a successful class where only 56% of those who start it, finish it.  Kingdoms of Amalur is in an even worse position.  Here only 18.1% of those who started the game played through to the final achievement, "Destiny Defiant". 

**********

OK, so its not as bad as I make it look.  I will readily acknowledge that many of the arguments I make are not as strong as they appear to be.  Indie game designers are bringing extraordinary labors of love to the attention of the masses every day.  The overwhelming success of video games like Minecraft, Braid and Bastion are testaments to what creative people can do on a shoestring.  Likewise, even if one of today's games can't fill a course or routinely get played to completion, you, Kris Wheaton, are the one who said we would have to have multiple games for our courses anyway.  Besides, just because the games aren't here today, does not mean that we shouldn't keep trying.

Exactly.  My point is not to deter game-based learning approaches -- I believe in them wholeheartedly!  My goal is to let teachers know that the process is not as easy and straightforward as it appears.  This is truly a "hard problem" and hard in two fields, game design and education.

I believe the problem will be solved but what are we to do in the meantime?  I recommend two strategies for teachers.  First (and this is the one I use in my Strategic Intelligence class), look for great games that already exist that can teach, reinforce or supplement one or more of your learning objectives.  Second, if you must design your own game, make it a board or card game.  These cost significantly less to design and produce and require much less equipment to play.  They are easier to fit into the constraints associated with a normal 1-2 hour class and, for intelligence professionals, at least, are simply easier to get into the building!

Next:  Myth #4:  The Learning Objectives Come First

Reader Recommended: Intelligence And Art

Look carefully and you can see the lake in the distance.

(Having survived both a surgery scare and the move to our new digs on the hill this summer (see pic for the view out my window...), I am playing catchup.  Rather than continue to post nothing at all, I thought I would go back and re-publish some articles that received good -- or, at least, interesting -- feedback from readers.  Enjoy! - K.)

Wired magazine recently highlighted Kryptos, the James Sanborn sculpture sitting in the middle of the CIA (see the image on the right). While most intel professionals are very familiar with the story behind Kryptos, the article got me thinking again about intelligence and art.

I don't mean to suggest anything as highbrow as "intelligence art" and certainly am not talking about the largely meaningless discussions that tend to revolve around the question "Is intelligence an art or a science?"

I mean the resonance I feel with a certain piece of art when I look at it and contemplate the profession I study.

Probably the most direct example of this is the work of Mark Lombardi. Lombardi is famous for his hand-drawn link diagrams of real events and supposed connections (see the image on the left). It is hard to look at his pieces and not sense that, at least for a while, you have been walking the same path together.

He reportedly committed suicide due to the depression and anger he felt after one of his creations was destroyed when the sprinkler system unexpectedly went off in his apartment (a sentiment shared by any Mercyhurst students who have ever lost their link diagram to a bad flash drive or a computer crash...).

Similar in some ways to the work of Lombardi are the intricate and wholly abstract three dimensional artworks of Janice Caswell. I love the way her work flows across walls and corners. It is almost as if she has developed an intricate analysis of all of the connections represented by some real world event and then removed the names of all of the actors and actions.

Her work (see an example on the right) goes directly to a point I try to teach my students, though. We tend to hyperfocus on the facts and assumptions and logic -- the hard data -- inherent in whatever we are attempting to analyze.

Whenever we try to visualize that information and analysis, however, we are also tapping into the nonlinear and largely inarticulate parts of our brains. Why did you put that in the center of your diagram? Why is his picture so large? Most of the connections seem to go around the sides of your nodes. Is that significant? Caswell validates, for me, the potential importance of listening to that subconscious voice, to try to hear what the quiet parts of my brain are trying to tell me.

(By the way, if you like Caswell's art as much as I do, you should check out the 57 other artists featured at VisualComplexity.com).

Another artist whose sculptural art echoes some of my own emotions when working on intelligence products are the paper-cut models of Jen Stark. These are really quite amazing constructions using nothing more than colored paper, patience and enormous creativity. I think I find them appealing because of the intricate layering and the odd angles and turns her works take (see an example to the left).

The relationship of the last two artists, Paula Scher and Timothy Hutchings, to intel is easy to see -- its geographic. Scher, who I first saw at The Serious Play Conference last year, does these magnificent renderings of geography that are both very close and very distant to what it is that I study. To get a sense of this tension, I suggest that you take a look at some of the closeups of her work (see the map of South America on the right).

Hutchings, on the other hand, does many different things with all sorts of materials (much of it abstract). The parts of his work that draw me closest, however, are the very familiar terrain tables (see an example below) he builds. It is hard to imagine, for most old Army guys like me, that the humble terrain table can be a work of art but Hutchings, in my mind, has done just that.

How about you? Is there anything or anyone's art you look at and think, "That feels like my job?" If so, post it to the comments...
 
Originally published May 8, 2009.