DNI Open Source Innovation Challenge 2008

We are unabashed believers in the unique contributions offered by open source intelligence as a discipline, and have been greatly pleased to see the increased prominence of such efforts within the Intelligence Community over the past decade. Today’s OSINT is a far cry more advanced from the early days of the 1990’s, when the first glimpses of the potential offered by the information revolution were visible in the newly opened media markets of the Soviet Union.

One of the most dramatic shifts since that time has been the development of OSINT as more than a mere data gathering function, increasingly focused on providing insight through rigorous analysis and imaginative exploration. Analytic outreach naturally goes hand in hand with open sources. And while the intelligence community is still grappling with the best manner to encourage and develop such efforts, this evolution is a fascinating space to observe and participate in.

Thus we are immensely interested to see the results of the DNI’s Open Source Innovation Challenge for 2008. This is a frankly unprecedented effort - and long overdue. Announced via email and on their public blog, the invitation speaks for itself:

Special Announcement

The Open Source Innovation Challenge

We are pleased to announce an exciting opportunity in conjunction with the DNI Open Source Conference 2008: "The Open Source Innovation Challenge." This is a unique occasion for representatives from academia; think tanks; industry; the media; federal, state, local, and tribal government; and other diverse sectors to use open source information to address real intelligence challenges. Subject matter experts from any field can apply innovative research techniques, thus giving new insight to the Intelligence Community.

Can you provide the most innovative and relevant answer to the Challenge questions?

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has provided two Challenge questions (below) and instructions to all conference registrants. Those who choose to accept the Challenge can submit a answer for one of the two challenge questions posed. Entries will be reviewed by a panel of judges consisting of senior IC representatives. The three entries judged to be the best answers to Challenge questions will be announced during the opening plenary session of the DNI Open Source Conference on September 11th and the answers will be presented at the concluding conference plenary on September 12th. The Challenge is open to all conference registrants, including those who are not able to attend due to overwhelming registration demand.

Challenge Questions

1. Using the best open sources to inform your answer, is Al Qaeda a cohesive organization with strong and centralized control, intent and direction?

2. According to open sources, who will be the global leader in alternative fuels and why?

Challenge Guidelines

1. Challenge Participants and Entries: Entries can be submitted either by individuals or teams, with no limit to the number of individuals on a team. Teams can consist of individuals from any number of organizations, rather than representatives exclusively from a single university, company or organization; multidisciplinary teams are encouraged. Each person, however, can only enter the Challenge once—as an individual or part of a team, not both. At least one member of each team must be a registered conference attendee and entries from individuals must be submitted by a registered (not necessarily a confirmed) attendee. Entries should address one of the two Challenge questions proposed; entries attempting to address both questions will be disqualified.

The remainder of the full guidelines may be found here.

This seems to us an excellent opportunity for a number of academic and private sector shops to demonstrate their mettle in front of a very serious – and no doubt quite attentive – audience. The timing – and timelines – reminds us more than somewhat of the Burundi exercise of years past. This is certainly no coincidence, and we have long felt it was time to update the original work performed for the 1995 Aspin-Brown Commission on Intelligence in a modern context.

To all those participating, bonne chance.

Additional layers in the forgotten history of commercial intelligence

As part of our continuing interest in the privatization of intelligence, we have sought to surface a number of long forgotten antecedents to the modern incarnation of professional intelligence activities that were conducted in both the early government contracting environment and the purely commercial world. Through this research we have come to believe strongly that the prevalent conception underlying many of the current controversies over privatization is based an inaccurate perception; namely that intelligence is historically (and some argue, only the proper) province of the state monopolies which emerged from World WWII until the immediate post Cold War era.

However, nothing could be further from the truth. History in this case has been written by the official agencies, and as a result the wider community beyond the wheel has largely been downplayed or entirely left out. While this may have helped to build the necessary mythology to cement organizational culture in the early years of many a new government agency, it is unhelpful from the perspective of professionalization - and even moreso when attempting to understand the dynamics of resurgent privatized intelligence activities. This has also led to a number of significant fallacies in recent discussions regarding the current state and future trends of the field, most notably in academia.

We continue to find indicators in support of our case. We have identified commercial intelligence units with histories dating back as far the contemporary literature of “official” intelligence itself, and have traced the evolution of terminology and duties throughout the decades. Some of this research has previously appeared in these pages.

To this evidence we would add the following commercial intelligence activities which also ought not to be lost to time, identified in brief references throughout a number of texts buried in the forgotten archives.

• An intelligence office of the National Insurance Convention of the United States, proposed in 1871 to track fraud and risk from New York offices, as a fee based service for the industry as a whole. This effort no doubt was intended to provide an American alternative to the famous and longstanding intelligence service operated by Lloyd’s of London.
• The Commercial Intelligence Department of the Associated Trade and Industrial Press in Washington DC, established in 1885 and referenced in multiple publications from 1896 to 1899 advertising its intelligence products for sale. These included a “neatly type-written” list of the “leading hardware dealers in Mexico, Central and South American countries” that had been “compiled from first sources”, available at a cost of 5s.
• An Intelligence Department of the English Fisheries Board, referenced in 1886, whose services included “weekly statistics of the fishing-industry, the appearance and disappearance of certain fish at particular spots, the number of fishing-boats employed, the methods of fishing employed, and the meteorological condition”
• A “Special Intelligence Report” on the “Progress of the Work on the Panama Canal during 1885”, published in 1887. Among this product’s consumers were the American Geographical Society of New York and the Institution of Civil Engineers in Great Britain
• The biography of the Managing Editor for a publication entitled “Commercial Intelligence” from 1898 to 1903
• The Commercial Intelligence Section of the Canadian Manufacturer’s Association, referenced in 1904
• An Intelligence Department of the American Electric Railway Association, referenced in 1915 as part of the claims organization
• An unnamed “commercial intelligence firm in the Netherlands” identified in an advertisement published in 1920, seeking information regarding mahogany and oak lumber exporters.
• The Chicago Intelligence Bureau Inc., advertised in 1922 after having been founded by three former “newspapermen”
• An otherwise unidentified Market Intelligence Service at Montreal, referenced in 1925
• The Intelligence Department of Midlands Bank in the United Kingdom, first identified in the obituary of its founder in 1926 and subsequently referenced in multiple publications from 1951 to 1956
• The Commercial Intelligence Department of the Imperial Bank of Canada, referenced in 1947
• The appointment of a Market Intelligence Officer at the Gas Council in the United Kingdom, announced in 1968
• The appointment of a Market Intelligence Manager at International Janitor, Ltd. announced in 1968
• The Economic Intelligence Department of Bank of London and South Africa, referenced in 1967, 1971 and 1972
• Economic Intelligence Department of Norges Bank, referenced in 1981
• A “Market Intelligence Center” in Taiwan, referenced in 1988
• An Intelligence Department at the Salvage Association in the United Kingdom, referenced in 1989

None of the activities of these groups are entirely unfamiliar to the modern eye. While many primarily involved the collection and dissemination of basic and current intelligence often without any further analysis, one must remember that so too did most contemporaneous government intelligence activities of the day – a style of production that persisted largely unchanged until the 1950’s (and continues even to this day in a number of shops in both government and corporate practice).

The fundamental business models of privatized intelligence are also visible in this history, whether in the form of pay for product, subscription, industry association, or corporate department. The success – or failure – of certain variants over others (as clearly indicated by prevalence and longevity) points towards some of the core determinants which shaped the contemporary market for intelligence . One can argue that the same dynamics impacted even the (comparatively) distorted market within the state level monopolies, but that is a discussion for another day.

There are no doubt reams of documentation as yet uncovered, particularly within the larger of these institutions which remain extant, and within the archives that may have passed into the hands of libraries and university collections. This is a mine for fundamental research in the intelligence field that has yet to be fully tapped. There is no doubt that it will be the future source of much value in the literature of intelligence.

The uncanny valley and the virtual briefer

We have long had a soft spot for the idea of virtual briefers – that is, interactive software agents which can deliver customized presentations to intelligence consumers. While nothing will ever likely beat the effectiveness of a real mind delivering insight regarding issues on which they have directly worked in a manner tailored the consumer’s interest, and being available for discussion and debate in real time, the virtual briefer could take the place of a large segment of the other briefing cases. Anyone who has spent time in the community knows these well – the interminably long, bullet point by bullet point monotone recital of someone else’s key judgments by a speaker who ought never have been placed in that position.

There have been multiple experiments along these lines, dating back ill-fated virtual newsreaders in the comparative dark ages of the Internet. Recently, lightweight video and audio production capabilities have seen a resurgence for delivery of prerecorded briefings and lectures (for which we are grateful, given the need to fill otherwise unproductive downtime in the friction of travel or commuting.) We are also aware of one relatively recent academic experiment at Mercyhurst’s intel studies program to create a new style of video briefing (or rather, a modernized lightweight version of the kinds of products frequently seen in the Reagan era White House, or even in visually dominant shops such as NGA) – although the results of that study have still regrettably not been made public. While these efforts all have their place, and have provided valuable lessons learned – especially when it comes to the gaps which must be overcome – the concepts are simply not sufficiently advanced to allow for effective widespread implementation.

However, the need for alternatives to the classic briefing continues to grow, especially as the range of consumers outside of the traditional spectrum served by the IC also grows. How many otherwise productive analysts have been sapped on a more or less fulltime basis by the need to support the multiple times daily briefings given in the many watch & warning oriented shops around the community? How many thinkers are burning themselves out at 3am to prepare for a consumer’s morning ritual? And how many of those briefings continue to be delivered to ever lower echelons of consumers merely interested in avoiding having to read a written product rather than in the true back and forth discussion and engagement of well executed briefing?

We thus continue to feel that there is a strong case for the further development and implementation of virtual briefers, at least in certain situated instances. We have been encouraged by advances in the key enabling technologies that would be required to make a robust implementation of this happen. Among the most critical are those that overcome the previous gaps in the cartoonish delivery offered by previous generations of avatars. However, most attempts at photorealistic avatars have thus far foundered in the uncanny valley – the response of the audience to appearance and behavior which is nearly, but not quite, entirely human.

Recent news out of the video gaming industry may however offer a potential solution to at least this part of the problem. At least of one firm has made exceptional progress – at least by evidence of the demonstration video – in bridging the uncanny valley.

Of course, conversational agents still have a long way to go. Without such agents, we would reiterate our previously expressed our concerns regarding the removal of the opportunity for human interaction between analysts and high value intelligence customers.

As a stopgap, one can however easily envision a hybrid structure evolving, in which basic briefings are delivered in a syndicated fashion by virtual talking heads, while a lightweight response interface captures any comments or questions from the consumer for routing to the appropriate analyst. It is certainly not real time, but for a wide variety of consumers such asynchronous but more tailored service may be exactly what they have been looking for when they cannot afford – or sustain – the level of analytic effort required for full time briefing support.

We have reason to believe that it will be the private sector intelligence shops that may adopt such virtual briefers first, as they have also been the early adopters of podcasts, webcasts, and other innovative delivery options. (We would not venture to lay odds on whether it will be a Stratfor, an iJet, an Economist Intelligence Unit, or some other entirely unknown shop - perhaps in the competitive intelligence arena - that takes this plunge first. And we would be even more foolish to predict which one might first succeed.) Yet one can easily see how a subscription based service could easily syndicate the dissemination of selected products – crafted by the usual suspects who lurk in the cubicle mazes or darkened basements – but delivered in a unique format tailored for the busy consumer. Likewise, one might envision a successful offering by a small competitive intelligence department located an otherwise large organization with extensive demands as yet unmet by traditional product formats. And with the new options for flash based video available from smartphones (including the increasingly ubiquitous iPhone), such a service - in whatever form it may emerge and evolve to thrive - is likely not too far off in the distant future.

Medical intelligence and the PRC Olympic gymnastic team

The controversy over the allegedly altered official age records for the PRC’s Olympic gymnastic team has provided an excellent teaching example for the benefits of medical intelligence. There are a number of indicators which have been surfaced through open source reporting, including missing baby teeth, biometric anomalies, and altered official records and state agency news stories. These are compelling evidence in their own right to support further inference.

Of course, more sophisticated techniques are available for intelligence professionals. Such techniques have long been a staple of leadership analysis, in which foreign figures are closely examined for potential medical anomalies. The importance of accurate assessments of the health of foreign leaders was driven home after the failure to understand the severity of the Shah of Iran’s illness, which directly led the United States to underestimate the revolutionary climate of the country in 1979.

The discipline has been covered repeatedly in the intelligence literature, first in a (now declassified) Studies in Intelligence article, Remote Medical Diagnosis. The history of the methodology and its use was also revisited in an article published in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, “CIA’s Medical and Psychological Analysis Center (MPAC) and the Health of Foreign Leaders”. There is a robust and well tested tradecraft available to help address these outstanding questions, even based solely on media recorded to date.

One particular analyst of our acquaintance leveraged practice honed in the far less rarified world of gossip magazines into an uncanny talent at spotting plastic surgery in handheld imagery. Needless to say, it is competency that one does not often find listed in human capital inventories – even in leadership analyst or medical intelligence vacancy postings - but yet one that has numerous uses in the intelligence profession. (Including, one might add, settling informal wagers taken over particular points of dispute that from time to time circulate through the vault.)

The application of these analytic methodologies is certainly not infallible, particularly when assessing the age of young females. A number of high profile mistakes have occurred in cases involving online pornography (albeit mistakes usually made by less well trained criminal investigators carrying with them a host of cognitive biases, rather than objective medical professionals focused on the art and science). However, the International Olympic Committee could certainly avail itself of far more robust diagnostic options than remote analysis alone might otherwise afford in order to reduce the potential error rate.

Regardless of the outcomes of further medical assessment, the controversy itself offers additional insight for political and leadership analysis. The insecurities of an authoritarian leadership - so desperate to prove itself on a world stage that it resorts to unsportsmanlike conduct and faked ceremony - demonstrate the impulses of the Communist government’s decision-making process as clearly as any other operational code yet documented. The reaction – or lack thereof - from a disconnected internationalist body mired in its own Utopian fantasy has also been instructive (and equally, could easily have been predicted by anyone who has spent any amount of time in the cloistered and anti-intellectual environment of Lausanne).

The truth will out. If nothing else, the case also demonstrates the value of intelligence to a wide variety of non-traditional consumers in this new millennium.

Intelligence and the 300 at 3 a.m.

Much has been made of the extended cadres of foreign policy advisors employed by the Obama campaign – purported to exceed some 300 subject matter experts and other assorted wonks, organized into a virtual think tank of sorts.

From a professional (and entirely apolitical) perspective of intelligence theory, the existence of the 300 is enough to give pause, especially since such innovations in political campaigns tend to be rapidly adopted in future election cycles. Shadow policy structures directly advising future candidates – perhaps even semi-permanently organized, as in the British model – may well become a recurring feature of the US party system. It is not our place to comment on the appropriateness of such a structure. However, these individuals are more or less entirely disconnected from the US intelligence system, and are relying on unknown information source of uncertain validity (presumably much if not all derived from the open source domain) to advise future leaders on matters in which there likely exists a substantial body of classified reporting. This classified view likely presents a far different picture than the open source would on a number of key issues. (One can look to the Mitrokin Archive’s revelations, for example, as but one hint of the re-evaluation that must necessarily occur in foreign policy relations when intelligence information is taken into account.)

This time around, it appears that the McCain campaign’s advisors are fewer in number, and being loosely organized likely play a lesser role in determining the candidate’s stance on any given issue. And the sitting Senator has long had access to classified intelligence (as does his opponent by virtue of the same office, albeit for a far shorter time period). This decision advantage is likely somewhat akin to that enjoyed by incumbent Presidents against outside challengers in previous elections. And while there are those who have been named as part of the 300 that were previously consumers of classified intelligence products, in most cases these individuals have been out of access for at least a decade. Again, from an apolitical intelligence theory perspective, this is quite sobering. To paraphrase CIA’s former Balkan Task Force - whose original comments came against the backdrop of the dispute between different factions arguing over the conflict in that troubled region - each campaign is entitled to its own policy, but not its own version of history.

The question of what intelligence support a campaign ought to receive, and how far that support should extend (beyond the traditional briefings provided to the candidate himself), are not easy to objectively address – particularly in a hyper-politicized election season. It is perhaps among the thorniest of aspects of intelligence – policy relations that have yet arisen in the new millennium. But it is nonetheless a critical consideration, and especially so in cases of crisis situations. For while intelligence theory recognizes that the community is not the only voice advising decisionmakers, most theoretical discussions assume that intelligence is part of the process – something that is not assured in the campaign stage. Among the questions which should be examined include how such intelligence support can be delivered, how to avoid politicization of that intelligence in the atmosphere of a hotly contested campaign, and how arrangements can be constructed to prevent leaks in a temporary and highly transient environment of moving facilities, rotating staff, and constant media attention.
The manner in which these questions are answered may well set the pattern for a subsequent administration’s use of intelligence, and shape key relationships between decisionmakers and the community. And more importantly, the international impact of any candidate’s actions during the early stages of a crisis event – such as the now infamous 3 a.m. call - is magnified by the instant global media environment moreso now than at any time in previous history.

Such 3 a.m. moments particularly highlight the need for (and the potential problems of) providing warning intelligence support. The first reaction of a surprised campaign has international impact, and may well be a significant factor in foreign responses during the early hours of a crisis depending on how those abroad view any particular candidate’s prospects for electoral success. (For a historical example of such an assessment by foreign decisionmakers, one need only recall the covert overtures made by the KGB’s Washington residentura to the Kennedy campaign at Kruschev’s request, which occurred against the crisis backdrop of negotiations over the fate of two RB-47 reconnaissance pilots downed in Soviet territory in July 1960). The Georgia / Russia incident provides a more contemporary example, and future analysis will by necessity have to consider the influence of both the official US reactions and the candidates’ responses on the Russian view of achievable conflict objectives in the first days of the fighting.

US Presidential candidates have not lacked for those former intelligence officials now willing to offer policy advice - and even their own visions of intelligence community reform. However, true professional intelligence support has been far less consistent. This merits greater attention.