Further to the Google prediction market

We were surprised to note the widespread discussion throughout the blogsphere regarding the Google prediction market paper. Something there clearly captures the imagination in a way that the art and science of forecasting rarely otherwise can.

Today’s discussions have also surfaced a fascinating item not included in the original paper itself: an influence diagram of successful and unsuccessful forecasters. Surprisingly, represented as a heat map, one clearly sees an unprecedented proximity effect in clusters of both winners and losers. There is also a strong temporal correlation to these trades on the prediction market, further reinforcing the idea of action from a shared information base.

The representation also reminds us of other recent comments regarding geographic impact on social networks at the esteemed Network Weaving blog.

We have long been proponents of virtual distributed intelligence production – especially given the realities of life in the DC metro. And given the personalities of most intelligence analysts (stereotyped or otherwise), the prevalence of VTCs and telcons for interactions even within the national capital region, and the highly asynchronous schedules of so many professionals working in 24 / 7 environments such as watch desks or fusion centers, we had frankly thought little lost when virtual teams were properly organized and managed.

Now the ‘plex no doubt has a very different organizational culture than the IC, and we are uncertain that these findings may be applied more generally within our field. We would particularly question cross-domain validity given the number of critical interactions already mediated by networks even in the most physically cohesive of teams, such as the requirements and evaluation process, or almost every element of coordination and review.

Yet still we find our gaze retuning time and again to the heat map. There is clearly an aspect of information contagion at work – for both good and ill. Bad ideas seem to have the same stickiness and spread as did accurate analysis. And despite the high levels of reorganization and mobility within specific offices, the contagion seems to have persisted. While in the IC we might immediately recognize the office as a “sick shop” with poor management or destructive internal dynamics, we cannot so blithely make the same statements regarding a corporation with which we are nowhere near so familiar.

Overall, and irrespective of specific elements of the discussion, we find ourselves wondering at this glimpse of what production management and consumer outcomes could look like in a transformed IC. For those that have advocated tracking more closely metrics for assessing analytic performance, this is perhaps the best model of the potential utility of such efforts we have ever seen. One could imagine similar representational overlays charting production output, consumer feedback, citation, or even employee retention / satisfaction.

This is definitely something to ponder at length.

Alternative DOCEX models

We have frequently mentioned our aversion to involving lawyers in intelligence analysis in these pages. It is our strong belief – confirmed by countless personal experiences as well as professional anecdotes and case studies provided by others – that the current model of legal education irreversibly introduces a mental model and mindset which is inimical to the successful practice of intelligence as a profession – particularly any form of creative, strategic intelligence against non-traditional targets.

However, we unfortunately find that more and more young lawyers are entering the field. The overabundance of new graduates from an increasing number of law schools has produced more candidates than the traditional job sources within the legal profession can provide for. These graduates typically carry with them a crushing level of school loan debt, and to the inexperienced HR type, look like they have overlapping skills in the areas of research, argumentation, and writing. Despite surface appearances, the model of legal argumentation – oriented around shaping perceptions for advocacy in an adversarial setting - is profoundly different from that required to penetrate mysteries (as opposed to solving puzzles), and to piece together contradictory and constantly changing raw information into a coherent narrative designed to inform decision-maker options rather than persuade to a specific course of action.

This does not mean we are unwilling to keep tabs on what the folks in the legal field are up to, however. Via the fine folks at Volokh Conspiracy, we note an interesting story in the Washington City Paper regarding another higher order effect of the current glut of attorneys – legal temping. What interests us is not the tale of woe relayed by the newly minted and underemployed members of the Bar, but rather the manner in which the profession has sought to solve a problem which is in a very rough way equivalent to the document exploitation challenges faced by the IC.

DOCEX (now DOMEX) has long languished as a less than priority focus despite its vital contributions to key accounts. Our colleague Michael Tanji has written previously on potential for new collaborative models to attack large DOCEX / DOMEX tasks, and the resistance to those models that has been encountered even in theoretical discussion alone. No matter whether one agrees with the Army of Analysts model or not, DOCEX is an area deeply in need of the application new tradecraft and new methodologies – enabled by technology more current than the field driven database designs that have characterized most exploitation software to date. It says something profound – and none of it good – when it is a law enforcement support organization that can lay claim to what may be the most sophisticated standing DOCEX capability in the United States (though sophisticated only by comparison, and never mind about the hard target language requirements…)

We do think that the large scale legal discovery processes deserve a second look for potential adaptation by those engaged in DOCEX/DOMEX tasks. This is not because we wish to involve more lawyers in the community, but rather because there has to be a better way of organizing the kind of labour that these tasks require. While we are leery of any effort that seeks to create a machine by process, we are always willing to learn about methodologies and approaches that might better serve the task at hand.

The genteel competition among allies

It is a maxim that one never has true alliances in intelligence, only mutual interests. The longstanding UKUSA intelligence liaison, as well its Four Eyes partnerships with the other countries of the democratic Anglosphere, if often held to be a counterexample to that dictum. And given the levels of cooperation in the Long War – especially involving special operations and other operational activities – one can see the merit to the argument.

Yet at the same time a genteel competition between the cousins still takes place, with small victories substituting for times when grand policy changes are inappropriate or impossible. This is most often expressed in the subtle manner of counting coup – forcing a liaison officer to inadvertently exceed his brief, or worming one’s national way into another country’s unilateral operation. Its usually nothing more than a fun game, resulting in bureaucratic embarrassment and individual red faces at worst – and good practice for the day when one must liaise with a “partner” in the multinational environment whose interest are not nearly so benign. If take too far, it sometimes can result in ruined operations and burned programs – but usually there are plenty of older and wiser heads around to ensure the game doesn’t stray too far outside of bounds.

Thus we note with amusement the purported cryptologic success of the Australian Defense Forces during the 1980’s, during their attempts to enhance capabilities against opponents using other than Warsaw Pact standard equipment. One can surmise that this included Identification Friend Foe (IFF) systems as well as other electronic warfare (EW) programs - such as jamming pods and their related processing databases.

For as much as those in Oz may express frustration at the American’s purported unwillingness to share their toys in this case, one should remember that one of the great publicly debated “intelligence failures” of Desert Storm - only a few short years later - was the supposed lack of non-Warsaw Pact EW intelligence. Given the large numbers of Western systems in use by the Ba’athist Iraqi forces – much of French origin – the Cold War postured US forces were alleged to be poorly prepared to address this wider spectrum of threats. Similarly, many of the regional threats (or competitors) faced by Australia during the 1980’s (and today) may well have utilized systems that the 1980’s US EW establishment was simply not postured to address.

All in all, a fascinating bit of history and a good lesson in the difficulties of liaison relationships over the course of the Cold War. One can reasonably surmise that while the issues at hand may change in the new environment, many of the same dynamics will persist. For those interested in further exploring the history of the Wizard War during that time period, we recommend highly the Journal of Electronic Defense, which often includes not only case study articles but an excellent series of first person oral accounts from those that worked those accounts back in the day.

Web n ruminations for the IC

Whatever network one routinely uses to conduct the business of intelligence analysis and production, the idea of Web n technologies and innovation has certainly begun to creep into common discourse within the community. Whether through Intellipedia, A-Space, reputation systems, or other still emerging variants of the wiki and the blog, there has been an encouraging degree of movement in recent years.

We are unabashed fans of experimentation in these areas. Unfortunately, too few times have the results of these experiments been examined with a dispassionate eye, nor recorded in formal publication – particularly by those not immediately involved in acting as proponents for the new technology. This alone has meant the art and science cannot advance beyond the basics of advocacy in this area, and into the hard business of implementation, refinement, and normalization. To move forward an idea is to find its flaws and correct its weaknesses through repeated efforts, rather than the repetition of the same effort.

We thus hope the new Mercyhurst Intelligence Studies program’s student blog at Web 2.0 and the Intelligence Community will evolve beyond mere advocacy and into solid academic research into the effectiveness and limitations of the tools and techniques of the driving philosophy of the next generation Web. It is fitting perhaps that it is not the established academics that will lead such research, but rather the students themselves – the next generation of professionals which will soon enough enter the community but who already demand the very cutting edge of commercial best practices.


h/t once again to Haft of the Spear, and to Zenpundit for the reference to A-Space at Network Weaving

Brandy with the Mechanical Turk

We have long been staunch advocates of commercial overhead imagery systems, and from the earliest days of their uncertain launch and performance we would vocally proclaim their potential to any and all – most of whom who would darkly mutter about NIIRS, classification, and mission availability.

However, commercial IMINT has so far exceeded any hopes we could have dreamed in the early days of the 90’s, having been brought to widespread use by Keyhole / Google on a scale previously unimaginable. The resulting sophistication of new processing techniques – from humble mash-ups to the surprising benefits of the open source model of many eyes – has given us great reason to reconsider the infamous “bottlenecks” in the architecture of other national technical means. Perhaps it is not the nature of the problem that has so bedeviled those of us seeking to expand the percentages of raw take examined for interpretation and analysis, but rather the model of the solution which is defined so very much by implicit and unquestioned assumptions.

The strange case of a missing billionaire “adventurer” has given us further evidence that other production models may well exist. High resolution imagery was acquired by a private donor’s tasking of the DigitalGlobe constellation, and it has been populated into Amazon’s innovative Mechanical Turk system – a fascinating technology designed to facilitate the development of architectures of participation to effective harness ad-hoc volunteer efforts. The system’s name, of course, derives from the famous chess playing automaton of the 18th century Austria-Hungarian court.

We wish the searchers bonne chance, for we know well the damnable difficulties of wide area search problems. We would also hope that any of our readers in the professional geospatial community might consider lending their unique talents and expertise to the search. (Those wishing to do so may contribute at the Steve Fossett Missing Mechanical Turk page.) We hope that a suitable flask of good brandy – in the model of the Saint Bernard rescue dogs – is close at hand on the day of the searcher’s success.

The effort is a dramatic example of innovation, however, that will have utility to the GEOINT community long beyond this crisis. This may well be the esteemed Mr. Fossett’s greatest legacy to the intelligence community – although we do hope he returns safely to provide many more candidates for nomination. We could easily see a trial program initiated for similar analysis of open source imagery and geospatial extraction, through an albeit less public architecture. USGIF certified schools and other intelligence studies programs would be a natural first home to such an experimental platform. This may also bring IMINT and geospatial analysis instruction into the mainstream of the intelligence studies curriculi, despite having long languished in the backwater of a narrowly perceived technical corner.


h/t Slashdot

Backlash against conference season

Former Spook has an interesting item regarding political backlash against the long established tradition of the conference season.

While we are no defender of government waste and abuse, and can list a few dozen conferences which are nothing more than the fig leaf over vacations for senior managers with no real responsibilities of their own, we find ourselves troubled by the implications of this exercise – not of legitimate oversight, but of the continuing game of political “gotcha” that has so bedeviled DOD and the IC in recent years.

At the same time we are attempting to revolutionize both military affairs and the intelligence community through information sharing, and break stovepipes and fiefdoms through collaboration, we are not supposed to spend funds on travel and convention rooms to do it?

To be sure, VTCs have brought us a lot of benefits, as have more persistent collaborative environments such as Groove/Jabber, Intellipedia, and many of the various account specific portals created within the several classified and SBU networks. We have high hopes for similar benefits from virtual worlds such as Second Life. But we have found that collaboration in those environments works best when individuals periodically have a chance to meet face to face, and especially when they can have discussions on informal ground in less than official contexts.

The conference season for has some time been for us a time of renewal, in which we are energized by exposure to other issues and accounts, and through these exchanges find new ways of thinking and new players in the professional space. In many cases, it may be the first time that introductions are made that will later be of immeasurable import in a crisis – because the first time you exchange business cards shouldn’t be during or immediately after a major terrorist attack or other intelligence failure.

We know a number of good young analysts which count on a single conference a year (if they are lucky, and mission requirements do not suddenly interrupt) as a rare chance to get out of the office and meet others, both working similar accounts as well as those in unrelated but intellectually stimulating fields. Several may even use their limited leave time (and personal funds) to attend – or volunteer to perform administrative scut work far beneath their normal responsibilities simply for a chance to be in the room. We have seen firsthand the benefits to moral and productivity that these occasions create, and the damage over time that is caused to shops which do not encourage such interactions.

Frankly, the typical DC venues used in the conference season are one of the primary arguments in favour of the “centralized” community in the greater Metro area. But we have found that we greatly favour the offsites out of town, where other players from dispersed geographies can also come out to play, and where the temptation to head back to the office in the middle of the day to deal with “pressing demands” are reduced – and where participants are more likely to hit the bar after a long day, allowing for far better networking, than to head home and maintain their pockets of splendid isolation.

Nothing good comes for free, but the higher order effects of the conference season are well worth the investment required to bring it about. And after all, cramped economy class seating, less than favourable flight times, sub-economy class rental cars from off brand chains, dingy “government rate” hotel rooms, and a per diem that barely buys a decent steak dinner are hardly the luxuries of say a typical Congressional junket, let alone a normal function in corporate America.

Predictive markets in futures studies

The concept of using markets as a predictive intelligence tool for future studies has been too often critiqued by those who do not understand the nature of conclusions which can be drawn from market data. While we may question the collective groupthink that sometimes dominates on particular issues, and often find ourselves quite contrarian to the whole, the concept is an interesting one and deserves far more attention and exploration than it has been given. The politicization of the concept in the wake of media attention a few years ago has not helped in the least.

We have seen a few new efforts in the space - not least of which in Google’s internal predictive market - and there is even a journal for the field, but we fear that too much of the potential value has been destroyed by the politics of the thing, at least for this generation.

We also find the introduction of the economic element the most critical aspect of the successful predictive market. We have long been deeply suspicious of the arbitrary introduction of quantitative values into inherently non-numeric intelligence problems, and regrettably have seen far too much of a trend in recent years (especially in certain segments of the academy) that seeks to assign a false precision to ideas which exist entirely within subtle variations of the gray, better communicated through language and narrative than dry figures attempting to establish an aura of pseudo scientific rigor. The economic element is indeed another arbitrary figure – but there is something that focuses the mind when the scales are well perceived in terms of other weights such as opportunity costs or even the simple fixed pool of limited resources.

Thus it is with interest we note that the Long Now Foundation’s efforts to create a predictive market of its own, Long Bets. The Long Now effort has produced some very interesting forecasting and think pieces looking at the truly out years perspectives on the human condition, and its efforts here look quite promising. The market itself is largely a pairwise establishment, between those offering predictions regarding future scenarios, events, and drivers and those who would challenge the statement against a fixed sum to be donated to charity by the inaccurate party. As such, it is far less a mechanism for determining the wisdom of the crowd than it is a matter of watching the alpha geeks. For currently, the participants that are backing and challenging these predictions, are a smaller elite of highly connected, typically highly interesting individuals with strong existing public records in analysis and forecasting of difficult issues in complex and dynamic problem spaces. But this is very much a thing interesting in its own right.

In a way, this reminds us of the process in use at Stratfor, as recounted by their “Chief Intelligence Officer” George Friedman, in which their analysts are forced to make predictions for an internal record (apart from published FINTEL) regarding their assigned accounts on a quarterly and annual basis. These predictions are permanently tracked and make up a part of the analyst’s performance review and professional development process. (We would be very interested to see a study of their results over time correlated with other measures of analyst performance, if only from the perspective of a kind of reputation mechanism.)

The Long Bets effort bears watching. And more importantly, this is a low overhead mechanism that can easily be duplicated within the intelligence community, perhaps even as simply as establishing a short Intellipedia page to track IC internal versions (although the key financial elements are another matter entirely…. Perhaps the “bets” can be paid in non-currency commodities of unique value only within the vault…)

Understanding analytic productivity

We have been increasingly interested in the radical changes to analytical functions, and the glimmers of what could be serious new changes in analytic tradecraft best practices that might result, caused by the increasing emphasis on new fusion centers, watch desks, and other operations-focused environments.

These are environments starkly different from the typical analyst-in-a-cube model of previous generations. While they are a departure from the conventional, they are not entirely unique. One can look to many WWII and Vietnam era intelligence operations centers and analytical cells as prior examples – also focused on (then) current and contingency operations. We are even jaded enough to recall the once vogue idea of the “war room” for every crisis, taken to its highest pinnacle by the political campaign types and the competitive intelligence folks. (We recall Fuld even had a virtual training package by the same name for the corporate types).

Fads come and go. However, there are elements of enduring value to the fusion center model, else it would continually be re-discovered. Some of these may simply be administrative – reducing the friction of security coordination requirements for meetings, co-locating agencies and networks which might otherwise hide behind their insularity, or simply creating an entity with enough bureaucratic throw weight to fight for and hold its own independent analytical judgments. Others we suspect have more to do with the productivity of the fusion center environment – the energies of such places, and the pressures of the mission, are felt much more keenly throughout. Ops tempo is always higher – occasionally even approaching the speed at which crisis events or major accounts are actually moving - no mean feat, this, when most of the workforce is wedded to a 9 to 5 or shorter mentality.

In light of these considerations, we have been keenly curious as to why such greater productivity might result. We have our own theories regarding the insights created by connectivity and the effects of stimulus on analyst performance, but we also know this is only part of the answer. Other elements lie in culture, and still more in the field of cognitive psychology.

Web Worker Daily has an interesting piece on the implications of the latter for knowledge workers of all types, in reaction to an increasing media backlash against newer production models. We don’t know that we buy into these theories, yet, but it is interesting to see them surfaced and to play with them in the context of our profession. In many ways, the community is quite a bit further behind the curve in this area, as the unique demands of security and exclusivity have kept many of the mobility and multi-function innovations from rapid introduction. However, things are proceeding apace (especially in light of new demands created by homeland security and military support to tactical operations), and we expect in the coming years to grapple with the same kinds of issues.

On virtualization

We are certainly great fans of virtual offices. Unfortunately, we have rarely been afforded the benefits of the new technologies (despite how widely they have been implemented even for secure channels, if only to reduce the number of bodies which have to fight cross town DC traffic for meetings). When we have, though, it has always been a most positive experience (even if it involved time in the field under otherwise less than pleasant circumstances.)

We have long believed that the federal side has been the most resistant to teleworking and the attending decentralization that it brings. We are therefore surprised to note the higher percentages of adoption reported recently (and covered here at Web Worker Daily.) Of course, we would think that large portions of the intel community would fall into the “not eligible” category, but we suppose things like the National Virtual Translation Center and the Joint Reserve Intelligence Center serves to even that effect out somewhat.

While we hope to see much more of this sort of thing in the future, at present there is simply too much embedded inertia, and too many complications with security and interoperability to fully realize the potential. After all, it is all that can be done to assure connectivity between various buildings, let alone a distributed workforce in a virtual office. (There is a reason why the fusion center concept has proven so popular in forcing everyone under the same roof, and to bring with them their networks…)

There is also much to be said for the kinds of informal hallway conversations which are the lifeblood of the unanticipated identification of linkages and emerging issues. Right now, the tools of the virtual office simple do not allow for such robust levels of interaction between analysts (especially the more introverted, technical, and task focused sort). As greater adoption of the wiki and the blog progresses, along with even more informal mechanisms such as an IC version of Twitter and fast VOIP enabled telepresence, perhaps this will change.

For now, we are happy to see any progress at all. We are aware of small teams which are effectively managing to do unusual and good things out in the world, relying heavily on virtual offices for both their own interactions and reachback. These models, if given a chance to compete fairly in the marketplace of ideas, will either prove themselves or fail. And from them, perhaps we will find the lessons learned to move to a better way of life than the vault.

Higher order effects of the Metro and the hinterlands

The intelligence community is not the only knowledge work field in which the deleterious effects of concentration in major metropolitan areas are surfacing. The legal community is also struggling to come to terms with the implications of new communications and collaboration technologies, and what they will mean for a business that has for centuries been conducted face to face – and by culture and convention, in a very specific sort of environment, much like the business of intelligence.

One of the most interesting counter-points to the seemingly inevitable virtualization of everything is the line:
Relationships mean everything, and when the majority of your workforce aren't virtual marketers, you bet on what your workforce knows.

The gentleman lawyer also makes a very interesting point that parallels our earlier questions regarding the potential evolving distributed structures of the intelligence community as more and more contractors seek to move core analysis and production tasks out to less costly locales in flyover country.

The trend of using high priced space exclusively for client meetings may come around, and the creation of 'client reception areas' in many recent firm renovations point in that direction. I could see a metropolis-hinterland kind of effect, where firms put the rainmaker partners in downtown offices, and farm 'the work' out to less expensive premises. That of course, would require a clear separation between lawyer classes. Another can of worms that would be very difficult to resolve within big firm cultures… If this concept was undertaken, I'd bet on the support roles leading the exodus.

The issues of “divided classes” of intelligence professionals are even more significant perhaps than might be faced in the legal field, as are the potential human resources issues created when the advancement of one’s career may also involve relocating to the greater Washington Metro area from the comparatively idyllic (and far more family friendly) environs of the south, west, or wherever the “alternate” community centers develop. The next generation of talent may find this lifestyle incompatible with their continued interest in the profession, especially when connectivity offers a great range of options on the outside than ever before.

We are also greatly interested in the higher order implications of divorcing production from client-facing activities, above and beyond quality of life, compensation, and other human resources issues. The software industry has had previous experience with the management issues that surface in such cases, but it is a far different thing to outsource specific tasks done by highly introverted and technically focused engineers and developers than it is to physically disconnect the subject matter experts and analysts (however introverted or not they may actually be) from the briefers and program managers which must maintain relationships with the policy-makers and other supported action elements. The primary questions when evaluating such structures will revolve around whether or not alternative workflows and processes, using new collaboration technologies and approaches, can support the robust level of interactions needed to ensure that both teams stay on the same page. After all, the history of intelligence producer – policy relations has never been easy, even when both sides are in the same room. Can mediated technologies offer solutions to older problems, and even if so, what new issues will arise in the future?

Again, this sounds like an excellent area for the intelligence studies academia to begin to offer substantial contributions with practical application of theory to the field, especially if validated by experimental research…

Intelligence activities in the native medium of the blog

We are not prone to navel gazing regarding the now unremarkable magic of the world of lightweight web publishing tools. (That’s so 2002, as the cool kids might say…).

However, we find ourselves occasionally drawn into the ongoing distributed conversation regarding the growth of blogging within the intelligence community itself, particularly as the idea spreads within the walls (thanks in large part to some visionary efforts and some hard work to create acceptance and adoption.) From time to time, we find ourselves writing on such matters as reflections emerge in open publications, much as we have when discussing related issues of wiki technologies.

In this case, we find ourselves once again welcoming the end of another academic year for many intelligence studies programs, and the deluge of new student publications, term papers, and theses has begun right on schedule. We happily expect that between the major universities, and the military service schools, that we will have much reading to last us through the idyllic evenings we intended to spend relaxing in a hammock this summer.

This year, we are fascinated to see the continuation of a trend towards the use of blogging tools to publish these student efforts on the open net. We are not yet certain of what to make of this – for sure, it is a far better means by which to ensure readership and availability of material which might otherwise slip unnoticed into the great gray literature slush pile. But there are also systemic concerns, especially when the content of certain papers (even though they may be drawn entirely from open sources and presented in an unclassified academic context) may offer our adversaries advantages in concealing, denying, or deceiving the community’s efforts to understand their intent and behavior.

This is a subtle issue, but it does have the potential to influence the willingness of the community to engage academia in the long term – if only by giving fuel to the arguments against sharing discussions of methodology, target interests, and conceptual standards. (We do think that in most cases benefits outweigh potential risks – especially if a keen eye towards OPSEC and counter D&D concerns remains foremost in mind, and the selection of topics chosen with care and deliberation. Regrettably, this is not always the case.)

We also have not decided if the blog format is entirely the best manner in which to see new academic papers and longer term study type products presented. The native strengths of the blog, much like the cable, are in the short form; but this tends to obscure the levels of supporting detail and nuanced argument which are critical to more robust intelligence products – and particularly to those efforts exploring new dimensions of methodology and analytic tradecraft. Blogging also tends to encourage a very different tone than is normally appropriate for finished intelligence or academic pieces, but this may not entirely be a bad thing given the predominance of lengthy, dry tomes of no particular redeeming value which so characterize other segments of the community’s output – and unfortunately also large parts of the field’s literature.

This however begs the question: which then are intelligence activities that have a native affinity for the medium of the blog? Blogs, while created initially as a publishing and distribution tool, have much more to offer than merely functioning as an advanced dissemination system (as much as we like RSS for that purpose when dealing with short, recurring product streams.) They also by convention and customary usage occupy a unique niche between the formalized rigidity of finished production and the otherwise uncaptured ephemera of working notes, partial drafts, non-papers and coordination commentary.

Blogs can function to foster social growth and interactions within communities of interest – whether within their comments pages or (as we prefer) through the distributed effects of common linkages between multiple independent authors. In this, they do so more slowly than the rapid, transient connections of sametime (or the physical world counterparts of conference asides and deskside chats); and frankly the process tends to produce a higher quality of intellectual result much more closely aligned with Sherman Kent’s original vision of the interactions which would produce the body of intelligence literature. The only difference is the technology, which brings with it levels of speed and accessibility that could not have even been conceived in his day.

“The literature I have in mind will, among other things, be an elevated debate. For example, I see a Major X write an essay on the theory of indicators and print it and have it circulated. I see a Mr. B brood over this essay and write a review of it. I see a Commander C reading both the preceding documents and reviewing them both. I then see a revitalized discussion among the people of the indicator business. I hope that they now, more than ever before, discuss indicators within the terms of a common conceptual frame and in a common vocabulary. From the debate in the literature and from the oral discussion, I see another man coming forward to produce an original synthesis of all that has gone before. His summary findings will be a kind of intellectual platform upon which the new debate can start. His platform will be a thing of orderly and functional construction and it will stand above the bushes and trees that once obscured the view. It will be solid enough to have much more built upon it and durable enough so that no one need get back in the bushes and earth to examine its foundations.

Now if all this sounds ponderous and a drain on time, I can only suggest that, so far, we of the Western tradition have found no faster or more economical way of advancing our understanding. This is the way by which the Western world has achieved the knowledge of nature and humanity that we now possess.”

We are very interested in the continued exploration of the matter, and will continue our own humble examination of the subject as we may. We wish the new crop of intelligence studies graduates well in their own endeavors in this area, and hope that they will continue to contribute in accordance with the original Imperative.

For those of our colleagues and readers which would wish to offer commentary, advice, or encouragement, the following are a few of the new student papers-as-blogs in the field.

Content Analysis Technique
Terrorism Social Network Analysis
Qods Force Targeting Methodology

In this case, all are out of Mercyhurst, but others are no doubt coming soon and we expect we shall write on those presently enough. Do not be shy, nor spare the full weight of judgments in order not to offend - for few things are worse than the unjustified ego of young analysts who have never received adequate critique due to the diplomacy of their seniors (a thing we have observed all too often as of late in many an intelligence studies program.) Analysts develop in the competition of ideas, and learn from the hard realities of failure. If they do not fight for it, they do not grow.

Spare cycles and private wars

We are not sure which is worse – the fact that a Sandia National Labs employee, at the height of the Long War, had such poor discretion and ethical baseline as to become a cyber-stalker, or had enough free time to do so without impact to professional performance.

We however generally view the hitherto unexamined excess capacity identified by Mr. Anderson with great interest. It is the primum mobile driving the Imperative to pursue the art and science of intelligence, and to document it in a robust and shared body of literature. Without those “spare cycles”, much of what craft which is currently passed along from master to journeyman would not exist, or be lost with retirement and re-assignment.

We are just as fascinated by the means by which such energies may be focused across the profession, through participatory architectures, new organizational structures, or new processes. Unfortunately, for the most part those that have spare cycles in the Long War are those that have the least to contribute – else they generally would have found themselves another home and a more engaging mission. Those with the best potential for insight and imagination are too heavily tasked already – driven by the relentless demands of current production and of mission critical needs.

We are nonetheless reminded that there are entire classes of individuals whose true contribution potential remains untapped by virtue of failing HR processes, inefficient bureaucratic structures, or the simple lack of the right inspiration and management. These individuals offer the potential to provide the kind of energy envisioned by Mr. Anderson, given the right conditions.

There are also those who have reached temporary professional plateaus, in which the often near vertical learning curve of the craft has given way to the kind of autonomic “servicing” of targets with little demand for innovation or growth. These analysts are often at greatest risk of burnout, but may lack other options for greater engagement on new issues demanding higher levels of intellectual intensity. This also represents untapped sources of potential energy for new cross boundary and cross functional efforts.

The community needs better mechanisms for utilizing these spare cycles. In many ways, this problem is closely linked to the sacrifice of human lifetimes caused by the bureaucratic and technological constraints under which the profession as a whole labors. Solving many of those pointless sacrifices would enable additional spare capacity to feed new functional uses for the right minds, including encouragement of time spent on analysts’ own “private wars” – the accounts of greatest professional interest to them on an individual level, even if those issues may not be the most pressing requirements currently faced by the community (or the target to which they are currently assigned.)

We have seen initial options for this sort of encouragement and channeling of these energies presented in the growth of new collaborative and communication environments, including wikis and blogs, that substantially mirror other mechanisms found in the outside world. But there are a number of other Web 2.0 innovations that could prove of value to the community, and other new tools specific to the profession that have yet to be developed. We would greatly wish to see more efforts directed at establishing the first principals which will enable their creation and adoption in the same manner as Intellipedia and other radical emerging innovations. It is from such striving that we feel the greatest advancements in the field may yet emerge, as the community transforms from the industrial age legacy to its as yet unknown future.

Pay no attention to the body behind the curtain

From Rough Type comes a well timed, and well executed, critique of the overarching (and over-reaching) philosophy that is increasingly shifting Wikipedia and its successors from a tool of utility to an engine of epistemology.

There are too many great lines to recommend anything but to read it all (and as always we offer great respect to those who quote the Bard well in theme and principal). We are fascinated by both the post and its comments, as this is an explicit debate over similar questions that we have raised regarding the most effective use of wiki’s within intelligence community contexts. Intellipedia will face the same challenges (in addition to other more unique pressures based on the oddities of culture and technology within the environments which host it.) But we are also interested in how the philosophies and drivers being laid out in the arguments between the open source world’s major supporters, detractors, and the juries of technologist and creator opinion. (The public having already apparently voted with their eyeballs and clickstreams.)

That interest stems largely from our contention that Intellipedia will not be the only way to use the wiki as a tool within the intelligence community (hardly a unique idea, as new projects and environments spring up daily), but more controversially, that things like an encyclopedia may not be the best means to utilizing that tool within the community. And the distinctions between, and proof of success, for new attempts will be in understanding the reasons and drivers for positive results from this new social technology and its associated production methods.

Open source, community based production economies are further examined within a second post at Rough Type, which discusses the monetization of YouTube contributions against the backdrop of current academic arguments over the revolutionary nature of participatory systems (first outlined in the Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler.)

The parallels between the evolving structures of open source movement and the new architectures being implemented in the intelligence community are again strikingly clear. Within the walls of the IC, there is stronger evidence for the contention that there has not yet been a model for accurate valuation of the participation economy. Indeed, the entire literature of intelligence as a professional body has largely been a non-economic affair, from the earliest days of Studies to the present, where the bulk of serious contributions originate still from practitioners volunteering additional time and thought away from their primary accounts to help advance the state of the craft. (These volunteers, driven by their own muse or by the Imperative itself, also stand in stark contrast to the academic intelligence studies field in a manner which is outlined in the comments.)

The multi-player (government, contractor, inter-agency & task force) dynamics of contributions to these participatory architectures deserves further study. It is our belief that market type drivers can be identified and encouraged, which will allow for more robust and useful implementation of these new tools for intelligence specific applications.

H/t and our thanks to Zenpundit for pointing out both Rough Type posts

Watching the wiki grow

The following fascinating video illustrates the growth of the Wikipedia entry on the VT shooting incident over the first 12 hours.

The intelligence community still has not entirely come to terms with the impact of new tools such as the wiki, although it is making great progress in at least some forms through early adopters and the younger generation which natively embraces such technologies. We have however been disappointed by other experiments in wikified intelligence production, as much as we continue to believe that the medium offers promise in creating better options for virtual distributed collaboration in analysis and authoring.

We strongly suspect that one of the reasons Intellipedia works well is because it is essentially duplicates the functions of the now vanishing “shelfware” products and mentoring processes that previously functioned to tie together new analysts and their more experienced counterparts on specific accounts and targets. Both of these essential functions have been largely overtaken by the recent upheaval in the community, aggravated by factors including the state of permanently high operations tempo, the creation of new players of interest who lack other key connectivity to the established community, and the major demographic changes within many agencies.

Other wiki applications are not yet so clear. There have been strong arguments, and some moderate demonstrations, that the tool can play a role in replacing smartbooks, watch logs, and other “pass-down” shared documents, particularly in environments where there may be significant temporal distance between analyst shifts. Wikis have also reportedly been experimented with in coordination of exercise events, and would seem to offer promise in presenting a shared “reality” framework for simulated material.

The VT incident above highlights the potential utility of the wiki in incident management and shared situational awareness roles. The increasing proliferation of intelligence operations and fusion centers throughout the community has created unique analytic tradecraft requirements for watch officers and analysts - who typically are only taught skills and TTPs developed by their cubicle-bound counterparts.

The wiki as a tool may offer new options for the evolution of more unique tradecraft better suited to rapid analysis under crisis conditions. Interestingly, one of the first areas in which wikis might be used to contribute to such a new subspecies of the tradecraft may be in enabling structured argumentation and analysis between multiple contributors in a more explicit and transparent fashion. (Whether structured analysis methods are best suited for the operations center environment is another question entirely, but a question that has seen at least some initial attempts to examine in a systematic manner. See the JMIC Occasional Paper “Intelligence Analysis in Theater Joint Intelligence Centers: An Experiment in Applying Structured Methods”.)

Not all problems can be solved by the same kind of hammer. However, we are fascinated to watch the results of the continued trial and error of beating new objects against the wall. At least it saves the pain we would encounter when the only options we had was the pounding of our heads.

h/t to Bitter

He who owns the platform, redux

The following item cited by SmartMobs reminds us how very applicable the earlier noted lessons of control achieved through better processing, exploitation, and analysis – rather than mere ownership or creation of the raw data – are when examined across disciplines and INTs. In this case, they examine OSINT and social network analysis applications based on user-generated content.

While in the civilian world, that buzz phrase may drive much investment; the quieter versions of participatory architectures found within the community are also facing similar issues in the strange and uniquely competitive marketplace between agencies, programs, and dueling subject matter experts.

But what may seem a short term “victory” in the turf wars for a specific program may in fact be the roots of its downfall. Even the “best" practised, uber-authoritarian walled garden of “collaborative expertise” becomes essentially irrelevant if it strangles the contributions of its experts through attempts at control based on philosophies of ego or proponency – something we have seen in many of the non-inclusive small wikis and other similar “sharing” platforms being generated both inside government and by its academic partners, attempting to copy the concepts of Intellipedia and other like tools. In the worst case scenarios, over-controlled efforts die as their contributors invest time and effort elsewhere; or are fatally crippled as new contributions originate only from those without experience or access to more productive and vibrant environments.

Even experiments which fail teach valuable lessons. However, the manner in which these lessons are taught, and the next generation learns, will dictate whether the efforts are valid. Certainly though, the energy and drive of the individual analysts on the line will count far more in the long run towards developing and validating new techniques for distributed collaborative production – and capturing the ephemera of those activities as lessons learned and best practices should certainly count far higher in the schoolhouse and literature’s priorities than simply creating yet another “me too” attempt at a technological fix.

The future of the VTC

The Video TeleConference (VTC) is one of the little heralded advances which has so transformed the nature of command and staff decision making during this Long War, as it moved down from the most senior command ranks (as in Kosovo) to ever progressively more connected lower echelons. (For good or for ill is for the historians to decide, should there ever be a concerted effort to review this humble administrative technology amongst all of the other wiz-bang geek toys now given to us humble knuckledraggers.)

The future of the VTC may be emerging, however, from an unlikely spot. Virtual “actors working in real time from remote locations have been beamed onto a stage where they performed with live, in-the-flesh actors.”

As fascinating as this sounds from the futurists’ perspective, we cannot help but remember the old teleconferencing system originally established for nuclear command and control, for use by the National Command Authorities in the dark ages of the 1960’s. This older system was quite visually striking, involving the use of mannequins seated at a conference table, whose features were a transparent model of the individual designated to be virtually present. Into that shaped screen model was projected a video of the speaker from the remote location. All in all, for the time no doubt the very model of the modern virtual environment, and the think tank (RAND, we believe) and its government sponsors were undoubtedly and justifiably as proud of it as those actors are of their mediated creation. However, looking back, will we find such artifacts as quaint, and as disturbing, as their early warfighting counterparts?

Among the great unpublished historical images of the Long War will be any one of the number of rooms installed in numerous palaces throughout the theatre, marked by a high dollar cost plasma flat screens, with diligent staff clustered around the only faint light in the otherwise darkened room, the other circuits on overstressed electrical systems having blown out but the all important VTC still active… sic transit gloria mundi.

Calling for the enclosure of virtual walls

We admit to a fascination in the abstract with the developments taking place in virtual immersive environments within the Parallel World, as corporate entities and knowledge workers come to terms with the capabilities of these new tools for collaboration and communication. Given that more than half of our working lives are mediated by networks, interacting with those we never see (and may never even be able to name due to cloaks of professional anonymity of group voice and official paranoia); anything that assists in managing distributed collaborative analysis and production (particularly given the importance of virtual simulations for training applications in other fields), is something we are eager to explore.

Regrettably, it is also impossible for a variety of reasons to replicate these experiments within the walls, even if a team of practitioners could be found which would be interested. The protocols and boundaries of the community’s strange intellectual spaces conspire against it.

It need not always be so, however. There are developments on the horizon, beyond the ever ready suggestion of a massive multi-agency or DNI funded GOTS effort doomed like most other attempts to replicate commercial innovations within the damned reaches of the bureaucracies. We shall see where such open source development tools lead.

We are not really asking for much, we think. Just a small, virtual environment for immersive collaboration with a limited number of peers, with appropriate security and certifications. Make it portable, and remote hosted with little to no IT intervention in any given location (the burden carried by the network service provider and host / sponsoring agency.) See where it takes us…

Call this a lazyweb post, for some bright young contractor team to come to the table with something already in proof of concept. Maybe hosted at the university level, to let the academics write their papers and push the idea at some conferences. Dig up some engineers to team with, to import CAD models and imagery of some cool and useful things. Spawn copies and competition and grow the space.

Call us once you have something to play with - we'd love to join you in the sandbox. Until then, we have our wine and our dreams, as the poet once said.