Contagions and their higher order effects

Anyone who attends conferences or tradeshows on a routine basis is painfully aware of the risks of common illness created by bringing thousands of strangers together in a small series of rooms for several days – especially when programs seemed entirely designed to keep participants on the move, and consuming either the typical rubber chicken plates – or worse yet – boxed meals.

Thus it was from the recent DNI OSINT conference. There seems to our (admittedly anecdotal sample) that most attendees last week have fallen ill within a short number of days. Of course, there has been significant overlap with enough other events within the relatively small conference circuit for intelligence professionals, creating a more ideal environment for incubating pathogens. After all, September has been the INSA’s Analytic Transformation, NDIA Disruptive Technology, DNI OSINT, and DNI Proteus conferences.

However, while this year’s sicknesses are merely the usual expected issue, our Red Cell attuned eyes do wonder what the potential impact of a targeted, small scale biological attack would be for such an event – particularly given the highly cross disciplinary, interagency nature of these kinds of conferences. Of course, this is exactly the value which brings participants together, but a longer incubation strain could inflict significant damage.

This potential for damage is nonetheless offset by the nature of who typically attends such conferences. After all, the working level grunts usually can’t break away for an event, nor get travel approvals through layers of management. Perhaps the net result might even be an increase in productivity, assuming that the chain of infective transmission doesn’t spread too widely within the vaults once participating managers are back at their home agencies…

While this has been an idle thought experiment, and we are rarely given to commenting on the reasons for our little band’s absence from blogging, suffice it to say our group’s interest in the abstract is driven by personal experiences (admittedly of an entirely more mundane nature) in this matter. At the very least, it was the conversational upside of inevitable biological realities. And we would not be surprised if next year on the conference circuit we see the comeback of the Asian style designer medical masks, as well as the increased presence of indoor biodetection sensors – if only for the experimentation, modeling & simulation folks to mull over in a very different kind of crowdsourcing exercise.

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.

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.

Warning impact

It is fair to say that Google has had a tremendous impact in any technology area that it seeks to invest its time and resources. Even when those investments have failed to materialize viable commercialized outcomes, the underlying advances in theory – and the less heralded aspects of hands-on operational experiences – have no doubt been of immense import in many sectors which simply had never before seen attention of that kind or scale.

We thus note with great interest the Google.org charity wing’s decision to explore new early warning solutions. The initial applications for this warning capability are envisioned to be in the area of emerging infectious disease – making the search engine perhaps the largest player in the medical intelligence field outside of the US government itself.

The implications are potentially stunning – not the least among them a possibility for the evolution of an entirely distinct indications and warning doctrine from a major external source, one that is natively rooted in new technologies and the lessons of distributed, knowledge work era communication and collaboration structures. Re-inventing I&W for non-state and transnational issues – especially the abhuman factors of biological threats – promises to be the most significant contribution to the warning field since Cynthia Grabo’s foundational work.

We further note that this is the kind of leading edge outcomes that In-Q-Tel should be exploring, perhaps through a public-private sector partnership model.

Let us hope the project will bring to results the kind of potential we can now glimpse. Given the foundation’s focus on metrics of success – in a manner for more rigorous than any government program is ever held to account for – we have reason to be optimistic. Whether such results can translate effectively into the realm of intelligence is another matter – and one that future intelligence scholars will no doubt be positioned to explore.

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.

Epidemiological intelligence reconsidered

Some time ago, persistent virtual worlds made news for an unusual incident in which a plague spread widely through a massively multi-player fantasy game in an unanticipated fashion, due to the complexity of the system’s design. There was a great deal of speculation as the ramification of this event – some of it mirroring the longstanding discussions around self-replicating “gray goo” and other nanotechnological questions, some of it quite unique in its own right. The event even spawned serious scientific papers, and responses by other researchers.

The question of the potential utility of virtual worlds for examining epidemiological effects in simulation remains a fascinating area of study. It is a natural extension of other research attempting to track in a similar fashion the effects of viral ideas – memes – within simulated virtual populations for information operations / psychological operations studies. This is the sort of analysis which may dramatically alter the manner in which medical intelligence professionals approach their craft in the future. The watch desks of tomorrow, rather than being tied to a series of open source intelligence portals and medical information database feeds, might well also be linked to a shared situational awareness simulation, with the ability to rapidly generate scenario projections based on new reporting or analytical inference. Certainly, there has been enough cross-boundary interest in the problem that we expect to see surprising innovation in the near future. It is certainly long overdue given the need, especially in the face of recent exercises attempting to examine the impact of pandemic scenarios which were certainly less than robustly designed and executed.

In its own way, this is by no means a new problem. Among the most interesting books we ever had the pleasure to peruse on related subjects was Plagues, Poisons And Potions: Plague Spreading Conspiracies in the Western Alps c.1530-1640. We discovered this work once upon a time buried in the back shelves of the bookstore of the British Museum, and discovered it had a striking relevance for those interested in non-state actors’ motivations in biological terrorism / biological warfare incidents. The book is based largely on primary source records from Swiss city governments throughout the Savoy which were suffering through major disease outbreaks. A recurring series of cases are documented in which individuals deliberately attempted to spread disease to uninfected populations – motivated by cult conspiracy, simple hatred, and criminal profit. Given the evidence of other recent cases involving deliberate biological infection, it appears human nature remains little changed in nearly five hundred years.

We also note in a related vein the Swedes’ take on the potential dual use implications of some medical intelligence programs. While we differ with their analysis in that we are confident in the benign nature of US and allied programs, we would definitely see reason for concern in investments in such activities by some states (or their non-governmental organization counterparts) with proliferation interests.

Epidemiological intelligence remains a fascinating discipline in which the contributions of a number of different professions converge in a manner that is very rare in the community. There remains much ground for formal study to advance both the analytic tradecraft and the literature of the discipline, and perhaps to inspire similar interdisciplinary approaches in other areas of the profession.