Insight problems, red cell mindsets and alternative analysis

We have long held mixed opinions regarding the computer security guru Bruce Schneier. While he often says interesting and provocative things, and has a distinct flair for memorably naming common phenomena (including introducing nomenclature such as security theatre, which even senior Transportation Security Administration officials have adopted in their own verbiage). At the same time, his off the cuff commentary frequently reaches far beyond his area of expertise into things of which he clearly has limited knowledge, but which he asserts with the same confidence – with less than useful results. It is a classic problem of the expert’s paradox, one frequently seen in those SME’s that spend a great deal of time in the media’s limelight.

Despite this caveat, we do commend to our readers a recent piece in which Schneier has brought to our attention an interesting course in computer security. The course attempts to inculcate the “attacker’s mindset” into new students, teaching them to view problems from the adversary’s perspective in what intelligence professionals will recognize as a classic red cell fashion. He notes that this kind of thinking is quite alien to most engineers. We concur, and to this category we would also add lawyers, most economists and political scientists, as well as others of like inclination which have been educated within the formal strictures of similar academic disciplines that do not value alternative models outside of their own recognized boundaries.

We are happy to see such matters being discussed in the otherwise normally disconnected halls of the academy. We feel it crystallizes an approach to addressing one of the core problems of the intelligence profession – that of teaching analysts about insight problems, and in particular the kind of insight problems that require experiential epiphanies to begin to understand. Much of the lack of creativity and loss of imagination in the intelligence field can be attributed to attempts to bound non-deterministic problems too tightly within the confines of a given methodological approach. While structured analytical techniques are vital to exploring the fleeting quicksilver of insight, those who try to squeeze too hard will find that quicksilver escapes their grasp. You cannot teach insight – you must inspire it, and teach the methods which can reliably generate such inspiration.

We view this as a vitally important and almost entirely neglected aspect of current intelligence education and training. Given that alternative analysis has been enshrined as a requirement to meet community standards, and that formal red cell efforts continue to proliferate throughout many agencies and organizations, cultivating the kind of analysts which can perform well in those environments is vital. And unfortunately, most current instruction falls woefully short of that which is needed to accomplish such a task.

Arguments in intelligence history

We occasionally note the scrum which emerges as the topic of intelligence history is approached within the context of larger political science debates. In this case, Sic Semper Tyrannis has resurfaced the debate over the utility of social science derived approaches to intelligence analysis practice; centered around Sherman Kent himself and the original Ivy League influenced R&A, first raised back in 2005. The current piece expands the discussion into a wider examination of the use of intelligence within a supposed political school of thought allegedly shared by several recently prominent decision-makers. Though we find the formulation “neo-con” to be a particularly unhelpful analytical framework, both too heavily influenced by recent political rhetoric and prone to use as a shorthand masking too many anchored and unexamined assumptions; the piece does offer some value in summarizing a set of arguments of the contemporaneous back and forth of Soviet analysis that is rarely well captured in modern study. Also quite interestingly, whatever one’s take on the issues themselves, the discussion does illustrate the impact of the academic and privatized intelligence tradition on key community history, influenced which are too often overlooked and thus all too rarely taught.

We also note the very differing perspectives on the first exercise of alternative analysis, the famous Team B studies, to other views about the experiment referenced by Former Spook over at In From the Cold. It’s an old stalking horse of the intelligence academia, and in our opinion, too much of the subsequent debate over these cases has been influenced by contemporaneous political maneuvering intended to protect a government monopoly on intelligence in the face of a unique privatization challenge. We note that alternative analysis has now been enshrined into community practice – thus the lessons of the original competitive analysis exercise could not have been nearly so negative as many subsequent commentators would insist, whatever one might believe about the relative estimative accuracy of each team’s conclusions. Tradecraft may well be advanced by even imperfect experimentation, so long as methodologies are refined in subsequent iteration.

We also wish to thank Non Partisan Pundit for the kind words in the comment thread, and hope we may continue to strive to earn the appellation “not only well written and informative, but it's also refreshingly free of politics.” An intelligence practitioner is always intended to be professionally apolitical – a fact that we believe is not stressed nearly enough to the younger generation in an environment of highly politicized media, and the ongoing football between the Hill and the Administration (and back again). We see not only the ethical obligations inherent in this requirement, but also the practical benefits to the apolitical approach, as exemplified in Tetlock’s research into expert judgment, best approached through his recent work cast in Berlin’s metaphor of the fox and the hedgehog. We also look forward to the Pundit’s further examination of intelligence studies issues, such as the discussion of the effect of “yes men” within closed regimes.

Understanding the village

The following piece from Marginal Revolution catches our attention as yet another example of the growing utility of interdisciplinary approaches to those aspects of the intelligence that have not been traditionally served by the national and technical collection apparatus.

The tool is strikingly simple – a piece of software designed to ease data collection and processing burdens for studying epidemics in developing nations. The package will run on common mobile phone platforms, typically ubiquitous in such environments – or otherwise exceptionally cheap to obtain and circulate. Strategic communication branding, anyone?

The potential applications however go far beyond epidemiology – or even other aspects of medical intelligence. We can immediately see a use for such a tool in a number of information operations, civil affairs, and cultural intelligence settings – not to mention any of the political intelligence activities that require survey information. Less obvious mechanisms for overt human derived reporting also suggest themselves, given a degree of preparation and planning.

There are distinct limitations to what might be accomplished using this approach, but with those limitations in mind it is quite possible to develop new and innovative collection programs leveraging this capability against the kinds of questions it may suitably answer. This is precisely the kind of experimentation – and extensible designs – that ought to be coming out of the intelligence studies academia, in support of forward deployed intelligence professionals.

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.