Intellectual property claims as denial & deception measures in medical intelligence

Following yesterday’s clear demonstration of the official embrace of open source intelligence comes a sharp reminder of that discipline’s limitations. The field of medical intelligence – and in particular, epidemiological intelligence – has been one of the areas in which OSINT has seen great successes. These successes are all the more important as they have involved the integration of specific scientific and technical expertise into collection, analysis, and visualization of extremely hard problems across very large scale geographies and populations. However, much of the underlying open source information and reference materials have only been made available due to the predominate ethic of free information exchange which prevails in scientific sharing and peer review. A recent Washington Post article (via Futurismic and Open the Future) highlights a new concept that may threaten the fundamental availability of those underlying materials.

This concept - viral sovereignty – immediately brings to mind the worst days of the Cold War, in which the Soviets sought to conceal information regarding large scale disease outbreaks to preserve the illusion of a superior socialized medical system, and in some cases such as the 1979 Sverdlovsk outbreak, prevent revelation of their clandestine biological warfare programs. The newest iteration of these ideas couple the same statist impulse towards censorship with a distorted view of the intellectual property market, resulting in a truly poisonous brew. One might consider such paranoia- and profiteering- driven claims a unique type of denial & deception measure aimed directly at the OSINT mechanisms of governments, pharmaceutical firms, and international organizations.

We would not wish to see a future where fundamental medical information regarding new disease outbreaks is simply not available in certain high risk countries. The potential higher order effects of such short-sighted decisions are readily considered – including the “surprise” global emergence of highly virulent new infection strains from unreported lower level outbreaks. Such a state of affairs could simply not be permitted to exist unchallenged, and as a result it is likely that a number of nations (particularly regional neighbors most likely to be impacted by such outbreaks) might then turn to clandestine collection means to acquire what previously was the open domain of science itself. This raises serious proliferation concerns, if new disease variants are obtained by BW aspirant countries (or non state actors) but are not otherwise widely known among nations which have abandoned biowarfare programs. One could also anticipate a surging demand for such clandestine collection measures for industrial espionage purposes, especially in countries where the legalities and ethics of an open competitive intelligence profession simply does not exist.

Such frictions would not only distort legitimate markets for pharmaceutical advances, but also would fundamentally impact the iterative and collaborative nature of modern medical research. And the first victims of these negative effects would likely be the unfortunate citizens of the country seeking to employ spurious intellectual property claims in this manner.

Real strategic communications and the wages of ignoring diplomacy

We have long noted our continuing interest in the world of soft power, and in the intersection between it and the harder aspects of military and intelligence instruments. It seems the topic gains much momentum in recent days, to our great pleasure. Zenpundit brings up a series of interesting points regarding the challenges of the contemporary information operations environment, and how these differ from the world of Kent, Langer, and his younger brother – a pioneer in the field of leadership analysis. The incomparable Mountainrunner has been leading an examination into the continued misinterpretation of Smith-Mundt, along with excoriation of the ineffective machinery for public diplomacy at State – a discussion also joined by Swedish Meatballs and Political Warfare.

In these discussions, several important concepts continually resurface in various forms. The first is that of the information threshold – the sensemaking barrier below which modern attention deficit and information overload so degrades signals in the IO environment as to render them meaningless. Related is the idea that certain actions will always speak louder than words, especially in given unanticipated higher order effects.

It is against this backdrop which we measure the shameful performance of Columbia University in giving a podium to our adversary’s propaganda. Ridiculous though the Persian pretenders statements may be to Western ears, one cannot help but reflect how many times a Farsi narrated video of the events’ dubious “highlights” will be shown to legions of adoring Basiji and the true believers among the Pasadaran.

We feel that one who previously violated the sanctity of international diplomacy should not be allowed to rest secure in its protections when it is convenient for them to seek to do so. In an alternative history, yesterday’s events could have provided a platform for a real strategic communications message of lasting historical import – as opposed to the disgraceful, but ultimately brief, irrelevance that transpired.

A nation that understood the value of actions in its public diplomacy, and the strategic worth of unpredictability, would have seen the Iranian hostage taker seized by the Mobbe – a body of men that would have been comprised of those NYPD, NYFD, and ordinary citizens who remember well the costs of inaction. It would have seen the very cranes once used to remove the remains of the fallen towers now choking the life from a man whose orders are also responsible for the deaths of Americans, in the same manner in which his own regime carries out its hangings in the public square. The image of his kicking feet would have graced the front page of every fishwrapper and news weekly across the globe this morning.

In this alternative history, America’s cowboy image is used as a weapon against our enemies – not as a strategic weakness which must be overcome through perception management and re-branding efforts. It is an alternative history which would have evoked an earlier time, when the affairs of nations were conducted by serious men for real stakes – rather than in the senescent pretence of “dialogue” with one who comes to the table in bad faith, with the blood of our people on his hands from an undeclared war stretching across the decades.

Troubled times call for difficult actions. We fear that only more dark days lie ahead because the nation is unwilling to undertake the kind of messages carried by that brief counterfactual thought experiment.

The difference between intelligence, covert action, and policy

If true, this story illustrates why the machinery of intelligence and covert action should always be kept separate from the other instruments of policy and national power.

It is also one of those times when one looks back at the decision to involve DCI George Tenet directly in negotiations in the Middle East (in his titular capacity, no less) as the height of folly. After all, there are plenty of Arab conspiracies which attribute everything wrong in the world to that particular organization… and bringing them to the table by name did nothing but add fuel to that fire for generations to come.

In the same light, we look at the old Department of Justice efforts to train and equip PA police… we wonder how many of those individuals may have been executed in the streets in the past few days – or who are doing the killing themselves?

Nothing so blunts a nation’s capabilities than the use of those scarce resources for missions that other agencies and organizations should have done, but failed at. One can say the same risks lie in store for the “Department of Everything Else” long advocated by Tom Barnett.