Once and future intelligence challenges: labor

As we contemplate the prospect of a sustained global downturn – be it recession or even depression – there are a number of issues which will raise their ugly heads in an environment where the forward press of globalization may no longer obscure underlying tensions of instability. These are by no means new issues – although they will play out in new ways among the changed technologies and altered relationships of this new century. In the best tradition of unevenly distributed futures, many are already here with us, although they often go unremarked or unrecognized.

Among the issues that may re-emerge as profoundly important to senior decisionmakers – be they in Cabinets or boardrooms – is the age old question of control between those that work within the enterprise, and those that manage the industry and its capital. The end of history was thought to have changed this with the rise of the creative class, the global middle class, the universal investor class… or whichever other descriptor one would apply to a post-Marxist analytic framework that recognizes the fundamental irrelevancy of old rhetoric in an age of unprecedented opportunity. However, the old lies still seem to have their appeal, as one might now witness in the offshore financial centers of the world, or the major infotech hubs of the emerging markets as Marxists and Maoists and other charlatans of all stripes begin to gain ground.

Even the United States itself is not immune from the renewed tensions between the workers and the structure which provides them their employment. It would have been hard if not impossible to predict, even a few short years ago, that the question of whether or not to eliminate the secret ballot for unionization votes could ever be taken seriously in a free and democratic society. And that such a question is now a linchpin of a Presidential election – albeit one of many, and a poorly understood linchpin at that, even among the chattering salons who routinely comment on such matters – is in its own way almost as baffling.

Unfortunately, this also a subject which has been taboo for generations, at least so far as the intelligence field has been concerned. In the domestic context, from the perspective of national intelligence, this is certainly proper. From the perspective of law enforcement and homeland security agencies that must grappling with the kind of convulsive protest and sustained low level kinetic conflict that marks the most severe of union difficulties (to say nothing of their radical anti-globalization counterparts further to the left along that single issue spectrum), this is perhaps something that might require revisiting in an atmosphere of informed debate. (Regrettably, we fear that such issues may be too rapidly politicized, particularly given the current tenor of the times, for an objective and cool headed debate to flourish before a major crisis might erupt). From the perspective of the corporate entity, it is certainly a topic that ought never have been forgotten – but history seems very long when one’s future is measured in quarterly earnings reports. We note anecdotally that the unions themselves have certainly not forgotten these lessons, as one of the best intel gigs we have ever been aware of was once bankrolled by a particular union’s leadership in order to attract the best and the brightest it might find for its own research and analysis.

For those that have forgotten, a small dose of history to refresh the institutional memory, this time drawn from the writings of the International Labour Office in 1922 (itself certainly no bastion of the bias of industrialists’ privilege): “The attention of the Industrial Intelligence Officer during the last 18 months has been occupied almost entirely with the widespread unrest in the labour.” So too may we as a profession find demands on our collective attention in the coming months of this newly uncertain time, in support of a wide range of clients.

Be it the labor violence of the developing world, the politically convenient rhetoric of entitlement, or the industry destroying burdens of legacy pension obligations, labor issues are a once and future intelligence challenge.

Actual environmental intelligence in history and practice

Given the escalating emphasis on various forms of weather intelligence that continue to occupy parts of the intelligence community, and the robust debates over the proper role intelligence should play in tracking environmental issues, we think it appropriate to remind those now entering the field of the actual rigors of “doing intelligence” as an activity concerned with matters in the real world itself.

While we remain skeptical regarding the utility of applying modern intelligence resources against the account, particularly in light of far greater and more immediate challenges within the transnational issue space, we have noted with interest new experiments that may identify future value for other long range analysis tasks.

However, we remain convinced that a great deal of interest among the younger analysts we interact with has much to do with the comparatively different lifestyles enjoyed by professionals that current address weather intelligence versus those on more traditional accounts. While serving in the Long War, a young entrant into the field has nothing but austerity and violence to look forward to. Those entering the field with the intent of pursuing environmental issues seem to think they will enjoy the European jet set lifestyle in Rio, Davos, Rome, Bali, and the other classic venues of the green political scene. We seriously doubt that this will be the case for a good many of the junior staffers, who are inevitably destined to be buried in the bowels of major agencies.

A more accurate picture of the life of an intelligence professional covering environmental accounts more closely resembles that of the academic’s research assistant – a particularly challenging fate for those who often lack the fundamental scientific education required to parse complex documents and reams of sensor data. We have already found supporting evidence for this proposition in the historical record. The 1978 NFAC paper we previously discussed very much represents a task typical of the field – interacting with contractor subject matter expert specialists in order to produce dense tomes of questionable value when viewed across the time scale these papers purport to address.

Yet there are a number of accounts addressing issues linked to the environment that remain of current relevance to the intelligence community, and offer the potential for a far more interesting career pathway for those inclined toward such deployments. These include examination of the illicit markets for fish and wildlife, as well as assessment of environmental damage from illicit drug cultivation and production, illegal logging, and foreign industrial activities. Like many other aspects of the intelligence profession, these are not the kinds of products that are always in high demand. But they are certainly fitting projects for an analyst’s own private war, especially if given discretionary time to pursue the kind of intel one would wish to do, vice that which one must immediately answer for.

These intelligence activities - particularly involving forestry, fisheries, and wildlife – nonetheless have a long and often overlooked history of their own, albeit one outside of the traditional boundaries of the IC. Early environmental intelligence was for the most part less concerned with potential damage from human action as much as the effective exploitation of natural resources, and understanding the economic aspects of industries in these areas.

Among the earliest environmental intelligence identified in Canada involved supporting settlement efforts on the frontier as early as 1888, and registration of land use for the government’s records. A contemporaneous text reports that “The office at Winnipeg of the Chief Intelligence Officer, Mr. J. H. Metcalfe, has proved of material assistance in protecting and advancing the interests of newly arrived immigrants, directing them to localities where they may find suitable homesteads, or, if not at once prepared to take up lands, to employers who require their services. The scope of the information in this office accessible to persons intending to make homestead entry will, in a short time, be very largely extended. It is proposed to keep there an accurate record of the position of every quarter section in Manitoba and the North West, so that with the least possible labor and delay, intending settlers may be advised upon arrival at Winnipeg where suitable homesteads may be secured.”

In Newfoundland environmental intelligence supported commercial fisheries, offering at least as early as 1892 a “Bait Intelligence Service”, which was “established for the purpose of informing the captains of vessels engaged in the Bunk Fishery, on touching at any port, where bait was to be obtained, thus saving much time which would otherwise have been spent in searching for bait.”

Intelligence was likewise concerned with the fishing fleets which came to call in such ports. In 1914, it was reported that the existing Fisheries Intelligence Service would be extended to the Pacific coast of the United States. “The Bureau has for many years maintained at Boston and Gloucester, Mass., the two principal fishing ports on the northern Atlantic coast, a service for collecting and diffusing information regarding the extent and condition of the vessel fisheries centering there. In compliance with the recommendations of the Bureau, Congress has authorized a similar service for Seattle, the principal fishing port on the Pacific seaboard, by providing for a local agent. Steps hate been taken to institute this service, but difficulty in securing a properly qualified man has delayed the inauguration of the work.”

By 1917, the Fisheries Intelligence Service was extended to Alaska. However, its mission had changed to a fundamentally commercial intelligence mission, with contemporaneous reporting stating “The Bureau has continued to carry out the wishes of the Legislature of Alaska, as set forth in a memorial asking that the Bureau of Fisheries, in conjunction with the Washington- Alaska Military Cable and Telegraph System, arrange to have the prices of fresh fish at Seattle and Ketchikan bulletined every day at the cable office of every town on the Alaska coast where fishing vessels call for the purpose of shipping fish southward and to have once a week the prices of salt fish of the varieties caught in Alaska waters bulletined at the cable offices of the Alaska coast. The War Department, which operates the Washington- Alaska Military Cable and Telegraph System, expressed its willingness to receive, transmit, and post bulletins furnished by the Bureau of Fisheries, and early in July, 1917, the service was initiated, the information thus furnished including (1) the forwarding each day, Sundays and holidays excepted, to Juneau, Petersburg, Ketchikan, Wrangell, Sitka, Valdez, Seward, Cordova, and Skagway the noon Seattle prices for fresh halibut, sablefish, and red rockfish: (2) inclusion with the Seattle quotations on Monday of each week the prices of pickled sablefish, salmon, and herring; and (3) the furnishing from Ketchikan of local information, corresponding to that furnished from Seattle, to the other Alaska towns supplied with the Seattle quotations. The purpose of this service is to keep the fishermen of this remote coast in touch with market conditions, so that they may dispose of their catches more profitably, and thereby be induced to increase the production of fish. The service has met with general favor.”

Fish-finding was likewise a key function of these early intelligence activities. Overhead collection missions were first explored following World War I, no doubt leveraging the military reconnaissance experience gained in that conflict. The experiment does not appear initially to have caught on. As reported to the Secretary of Commerce in 1922, “The daily patrols by seaplanes of the Naval Aviation Service of the menhaden fishing areas in Chesapeake Bay and along the coast between Assateague and Bodie Island Lights begun in June, 1920, were continued until October, when the Navy Department abandoned them on the ground that the experiment had fully demonstrated the commercial value of planes in this fishery. This service was very beneficial to the menhaden industry and was the first thorough test of the value of seaplanes in spotting schools of fish. Under the present unsettled conditions in the fish oil and fertilizer industries it is not to be expected that a service of this kind will be established by the fishery interests.”

However, additional experiments were conducted to leverage other, presumably less expensive assets, for similar collection tasks. “The Bureau has obtained the cooperation of the Director of Naval Communications and the Commissioner of Lighthouses whereby reports of the presence of schooling fish are transmitted daily by radio by the keepers of certain New England lightships to shore stations from which they are forwarded to the Bureau's local agent in Boston. This service was begun about November 1, 1920. Reports of schooling fish are forwarded to the Bureau's local agents in Gloucester, Mass., and Portland, Me., by the Boston agent. Lightkeepers have reported the presence of such fish as mackerel, menhaden, and pollock. The subject has not received a sufficient trial to determine its practical value to the industry or the desirability of extending it to include a number of advantageously located lighthouses.”

For those not acquainted with modern maritime industries, the search for productive fishing grounds through overhead imagery continues to this day. Such fish finding intelligence was (and remains) a key product of the commercial satellite imagery industry. Arguably, the success of the current generation of high resolution systems would not have been possible without earlier commercial revenues from these products. The recently operational Geoeye-1, for example, is a descendent of Orbimage’s earlier SeaStar service, which provided imagery products to some 300 commercial fishing clients. The mission was also inextricably linked to current environmental science, as the platform’s sensor take was also sold to NASA and supported an estimated 2200 oceanographers and other researchers.

Fisheries were not the only environmental intelligence of the period. The forestry service likewise required its own intelligence function to support its firefighting mission. A 1920 text describes the position of the intelligence officer, “His duties are to secure information in regard to the behaviour of fires and the progress of control work”. Forestry intelligence positions could also be found overseas, including a position identified in India in 1924.

The geographic scope and field conditions of the forestry service demanded a particular focus on robust communications architectures in order to convey intelligence information in a timely fashion. These architectures included semaphore, code, and telegraph signals. One 1920 author also proposed the use of carrier pigeons, citing their extensively employment in military and naval operations.

The large areas of interest and limited staffing of environmental intelligence also demanded the recruitment of volunteers to augment official efforts. From 1919 to 1921, fish and game enforcement reported that “It has become possible to build up a very considerable volunteer
intelligence service which is steadily extending over the country, and proving of the very greatest value in putting a practical point to patrol work by focusing attention upon centers of violation. In a territory so comprehensive as southern California, and one whose fishing waters and game-fields are so widely separated, something of this sort is an essential preliminary to effective accomplishment.” However, legal issues apparently prevented the more effective employment of the volunteers in a direct role, proving that even in the earliest days of public-private partnerships, no good effort was safe from meddling by ambitious lawyers. “There was a time when deserving volunteers, desirous of aiding directly the enforcement of fish and game conservation laws, could be specially deputized; but all such unsalaried help has now become impossible owing to the Employers' Liability acts which are construed as placing a fair charge against the conservation funds for any injury that might befall even an unsalaried officer, if operating under authority conferred by this Commission. Since no man can waive the rights of enlisted, so far as possible, as informants and cooperators in such other lines as were possible…”

Like many aspects of the intelligence profession over the years, a number of these historical roles are simply no longer the domain of the intelligence community, but rather have been normalized within the civil agencies and privatized in the commercial world. While they may no longer carry the explicit titles of our profession, and no doubt have been changed as significantly by the introduction of new technologies and new organizational forms as any other activity, the core foundations of intelligence tasks no doubt remain present. For this reason, many of these modern functions may merit closer study, with a particular focus on areas of parallel evolution which may offer benefit to the intelligence community as a whole. These functions may also offer potential gainful employment to those students wishing to pursue the environmental account for its own sake.

Initial operational capability, GeoEye-1

Congratulations to the GeoEye team for a successful flight and successful first light. We hope their bird will fly for years to come, and peer deep into the shadow which surrounds our enemies.

We recall waiting anxiously for news of earlier payloads carried aloft for the old Orbview constellation, and the bitter shock of the failures which only contributed to the phantoms of the imaginary constellations. We are glad to see that this time around there appear to have been no mishaps.

We do find the initial target selection amusing, and we are sure that there is a backstory there somewhere waiting to be told. There is something about small, out of the way Pennsylvania colleges and the intelligence community, isn't there?

We also continue to be impressed by the rate at which spatial resolution capabilities continue to advance within privatized capabilities, which at 16 inches is certainly nothing to disregard. (By way of comparison, this is roughly the equivalent of published resolution figures for the KH-8 GAMBIT series, active in the early 1980’s).

We are pleased to note that far from arguing that commercial capabilities have nothing to offer the intelligence community, a substantial part of the mere $502 million price tag – including satellite, launch, insurance, financing and four ground stations – was paid by the National Geospatial Agency. The fact that additional funding was provided by Google – no doubt to improve the future of its Earth application series and the advertising revenue stream provided thereof – merely reinforces the fact that the commercial satellite imagery industry has certainly come a long way in the past decade. Much of this progress is due to the impact of the Long War, but equal credit is due to the fundamental changes in the way the average consumer now uses overhead imagery derived geospatial products.

Imagine what kind of constellation could have been orbiting, however, had even half of the $18 billion or so publicly reported to have been wasted on the disastrous Future Imagery Architecture instead been allocated towards a common architecture populated by Space Imaging, Orbimage, and Earthwatch / DigitalGlobe in the late 1990’s. It is the ghosts of these constellations which might have been that will most haunt us in the coming decades, we should think.

So as the engineers, mission specialists, and managers of the GeoEye program continue their celebrations in the coming days, we hope they will also lift a glass to the the birds who didn't make it, and those that never were. We certainly shall.

Intelligence and financial crisis, historical edition

It is our contention that troubled times demand increased investment in intelligence activities by private firms, who cannot rely upon the agencies of government or the media to adequately address their interests. This is by no means a new phenomenon – rather, it is a rediscovery of much older principles that were in common practice prior to the 20th century.

The debate over intelligence failures in the current financial crisis thus continues to attract our attention. There are those serving, or having served, in a variety of institutions which claim that intelligence may have indeed staved off the worst of the impact to a specific firm or another. We shall see what to make of these claims once the business schools begin to compile their histories.

It is clear, however, that good intelligence served financial institutions well in earlier times. We find quite early reference to this in a text on the Theory and Practice of Joint-stock Banking, dated from 1836.

“The system of mutual espionage and rivalry which exists amongst joint-stock banks is another source of security to the public. That a system of espionage exists upon every joint-stock bank, at least in Scotland. by their sister banks, who exchange notes and checks with them, must be admitted, after what took place with regard to a joint-stock bank establishment in the west of Scotland. The agents of the joint-stock banks, both in London and Edinburgh, being in constant communication with each other, have early intimation of any departure, by any joint-stock bank, from the true and safe principles of banking. In fact, so long as a joint-stock bank can maintain its credit and good opinion with its sister banks, the public are tolerably safe; and so satisfied are the public in Scotland of this circumstance, that no run took place during the severest period of the panic, in 1825, on a single Scotch bank — the public being well assured that the other banks would give (by a refusal to accept the notes and obligations at the exchange) a clear and distinct notice, that danger was to be apprehended.”

This forthright discussion of commercial espionage would not doubt send many of the current practitioners of competitive intelligence into hysterics. One must note that no distinction was made at the time between the collection of information by overt means versus that of illicit provenance. The legal status of such information, and its use, was also far less clear than in today’s environment. (We must remind our more genteel readership that the first case in law on such a matter – at least that we are aware of - for the first time conclusively draws the line between legitimately obtained information from public or private sources, versus unspecified illegitimate methods, only in 1916.)

Regardless of the means by which it might have been obtained in accordance with the standards of the day, the precedent of relying upon intelligence to avert financial crisis has long been a maxim within the financial industry. Given the perspective of time, one may look back on the recent troubles as much as a failure of institutional memory as a failure of the profession itself.

Plus ca change, edition naval

Recent coverage of the after-effects of the Russian military occupation and what one mightt call the “de-militarization with extreme prejudice” of the Georgia naval facility at Poti has been exceptionally thorough, not least of which due to the effects of the new media and the emerging class of citizen journalists who work within this media. Via Wired’s Danger Room, we note the exceptional detail offered by Gavin Sheridan, following onto earlier reporting and video via Georgian media channels and the incomparable Armchair Admiral.

The reporting brought to mind one of the early publicly disseminated products from the Office of Naval Intelligence. The piece was itself an early OSINT product, a translation of a German commander’s comments on a naval engagement which occurred at Santiago, Cuba during the Spanish – American War in 1898. The contemporaneous open source information environment had already seen American narratives of the action published, alongside detailed order of battle and combat effects. The German account circulated shortly thereafter, during the early months of 1899. With the concurrence of ONI’s Chief Intelligence Officer, a translation of the work was reprinted in the 25th volume of the Naval Institute’s Proceedings that March, providing extensive observations that were no doubt of significant intelligence value regarding the disposition of forces and TTP which featured in the engagement.

The following excerpt captures well the flavour of the account:

“The three ships inspected had all their guns on board. The only ones that could not be found were the two 7-centimeter rapid-fire boat guns, but pivots had been provided on both sides of the stern, where these two guns were apparently intended to be installed for use against torpedo-boat attacks at night. From the slight losses which the American ships claim to have sustained, it may be judged that the training of the Spanish gun crews must have been very inadequate. This is not surprising, in view of the statement of one of the Spanish naval officers to the effect that no target practice is held in Spain in time of peace. Other circumstances also give evidence of very inefficient handling of the guns. The turrets and their guns, with the exception of the forward turret of the Almirante Oquendo, were found entirely intact. The loading apparatus for the 28-centimeter guns (Whitworth, Manchester, 1895) was of the hydraulic order, and the loading time was about two minutes. The 14-centimeter rapid-fire guns also were probably not used to their best advantage, owing to want of experience. There was evidently no lack of ammunition, for near some of the guns a number of cartridges were found, and some of the guns were still loaded, but had not been fired. To what circumstance it is due that the breech-blocks of two of the guns were found lying in the ear of the guns with their pivot bolts torn off, could not be explained. Perhaps this may also be attributed to inefficient handling of the projectiles. Only the port side of the ships was fired upon. The star-board side shows but a few holes, where shots have passed out. Where the course of projectiles could be traced, it was usually ranging from port aft to starboard forward. The destructive effect of the American projectiles is mainly due to the conflagrations caused by them. Aside from a shot through one of the turret roofs, no hits were observed in any of the armored turrets. Neither have any projectiles pierced the side armor, which shows no injuries. Only indentations are noticeable in places where projectiles have struck the armor. Projectiles of 15 centimeters and larger calibers that had hit the ship had in many instances gone out through the other side, making holes about 1 meter square, but without bursting. As the same observation has been made in the bombardments of Santiago and San Juan, it may be assumed that it is due to the uncertain functioning of the base fuse. It is not probable that the Americans used armor-piercing shell, as fragments of projectiles of different sizes found in the vicinity show that explosive shell and not nonexplosive shell were used. Projectiles which had hit smokestacks and masts had gone clear through, making only small, round or oblong shot holes. Hits of small-caliber projectiles (5.7-centimeter) could be noticed in large numbers, and this was corroborated by the statement of an American officer to the effect that they were used in great quantities. The question whether the Spanish had any intention of making use of the torpedo weapon may probably be answered in the negative. The torpedo armaments of the ships, although including a large number of tubes, were so defective that there could hardly be any chance of success as against the powerful American ships. The armaments consisted of two bow, four broadside, and two stern tubes, all above water and of antiquated design, with large cartridges, band-brakes, etc., all located above the armored deck and entirely unprotected. In a very primitive manner the tubes had been partly protected by grate bars lashed with chains. The projectiles were 35-centimeter Schwartzkopff torpedoes with large depth-regulating apparatus. No war-heads were to be found, with a single exception. According to the statement of an American petty officer, the warheads had been left at Santiago, where they were to be used in connection with the mine obstructions. It is true that this does not agree with the fact that a torpedo head exploded on board the Almirante Oquendo. It is possible, however, that the ships retained one or two war-heads to be used in case of necessity as against rams, since the broadside tubes were adapted to be turned in any direction, or perhaps it was the commander's wish to take a war-head along. The following points support the assumption that it was not the intention to make use of the torpedo weapon : a. Not one of the tubes still in existence was loaded, and all the tubes were closed. In the tubes destroyed by shots or otherwise no remnants of torpedoes were found. b. The remaining torpedoes, almost without exception, were lying in their places along the ship's side. No torpedoes were found lying back of the tubes, with the exception of the bow tubes of the Almirante Oquendo. c. There was no pressure in any of the flasks. This is shown by the fact that the flasks were entirely uninjured, although the heat had partly melted the tailpieces of the torpedoes. d. In several of the torpedoes lying on top, the protecting cap for the depth-regulating apparatus had not been taken off, while it is necessary to remove it in order to put on the war-heads. e. In a few of the torpedoes the sinking valves had been put in place, but in most of them they were still found soldered, with connecting links raised. The tubes for filling the launching cartridges were not connected and only on the Almirante Oquendo was the powder charge in readiness.”

Of course, there is little chance that an open source intelligence product of a similar nature would freely circulate today from ONI (or even OSC). ONI was somewhat unusual in this regard, and it is certain that a substantial percentage of the readership of its early products – available through the Government Printing Office – served the private sector as well, given the importance of maritime commerce and its shipping to the Republic. Consider it among the earliest public-private sector critical infrastructure protection partnerships. (We have already documented the interest from a variety of business entities in this kind of intelligence coverage, for which industry sectors had already established their own independent private intelligence functions. These shops were no doubt grateful for dissemination of related government production on matters on mutual interest.)

However, high quality direct access reporting from bloggers and privatized intelligence shops is far more readily accessible in this digital age than the laboriously copied and translated pages of one hundred and ten years ago. While there is a certain quality missing that marked the earlier accounts of professional naval officers, one must admit that raw data conveyed well carries its own sort of quality, particularly when handheld and motion imagery are available. No doubt translations of such reporting will circulate for some time to come among the various European naval forces concerned with potential future action on the Black Sea.

It is examples such as this which increasingly convince us that we are not undergoing a revolution in intelligence affairs, as some commentators might suggest, but rather the re-emergence of older intelligence forms in new contexts enabled by technological innovation.

Vacant intelligence posts at the start of the financial crisis

One of the benefits of having become a strange attractor in the highly networked world of privatized intelligence is that our little skunkworks is frequently passed notice of vacancies and tenders. For us, this is largely an academic exercise, and we eventually soon to publish our thoughts regarding the trends that we see from this perspective. However, this does offer other additional benefits. Knowing the landscape helps our students, both those entering the profession and those changing shops (especially since most of the major intel studies academic programs have simply not done well in this area – but that is a discussion for another day.)

But occasionally the items that cross our desks are also more directly of interest to ongoing questions of intelligence import than merely the problem of allocating scarce human capital more efficiently across a complex privatized intelligence market. In this case, it is a vacancy notice from late August 2008 for a competitive intelligence professional to serve the senior management at the now failed Washington Mutual bank. We had asked yesterday what kind of intelligence support was provided to the executives of the institution, and have at least a glimpse into their aspirations – if not their reality.

The position appears to have been offered as part of the card services division, which while at first blush seems separated from the questions of real estate solvency that plagued the house, may indeed have been impacted by higher order effects created by the complex instruments through which the institution’s various debts were packaged.

The position vacancy announcement is very typical of its kind in a number of ways. The level for which the billet was positioned is clearly more senior than the typical competitive intelligence role, but very much in line with the recommendations of most consulting professionals who advocate that internal units have direct access to senior management. (Of course, one must weigh the fact that at many banks, nearly every executive is a vice president of some flavour or another, but we have known a few where intelligence is relegated almost entirely to a support function, removed from the executive level entirely). The candidate requirements are accordingly scoped to a somewhat more senior individual than the run of the mill applicant, although one might question the actual effectiveness of an individual with only two years’ management experience in a ten year career in such a role.

The position’s focus on the regulatory and competitive environment would certainly have lent itself to addressing the underpinnings of the current financial crisis, had the shop’s strategic responsibilities been met. However, it is unclear whether such a shop, structured to meet consumer demand from a variety of internal clients and external business partners, could indeed get beyond the inevitable tactical level demands. Much would depend on senior management, and many at these levels are rarely interested in the views of a “strategic partner” but rather a staffer who can compress complexity and provide insight in support of difficult decisions. One also notes that warning is never explicitly identified as a responsibility for the position or its direct reports.

The full text of the vacancy announcement is reproduced below.

Manager I, Market Research, Vice President. Competitive Intelligence Team

At WMCS, the Competitive Intelligence team works collaboratively with the senior leaders across the organization to support their research needs, monitor changes in the regulatory environment, and determine competitive best practices. This key position will develop, create, and communicate the strategy for the Competitive Intelligence team in key areas of interest to WMCS. This role will partner with senior leadership to identify key competitive intelligence requirements, analyze information from different sources, assess the value of these sources, and merge with insight related to WMCS.

RESPONSIBLITIES: The Manager I is responsible for providing regular updates on the changes in the competitive environment and working closely with other functional areas (e.g., Acquisitions, Customer Marketing, Portfolio Management) to meet their research needs. This person will leverage competitive data to identify industry trends and implications to WMCS’s pricing, product constructs, and creative treatments. This person will be responsible for integrating external data and internal business expertise to determine market trends and their implication on WMCS’s strategy and offers. More specifically, this role will assume the following responsibilities:

* Act as a key contributor to the ongoing monthly investment decision process for both New Accounts Acquisitions and Customer Marketing campaigns by providing information on competitive pricing, mail pressure, and offer constructs across our target customer segments
* Build out the vision for the Competitive Intelligence team and oversee all relevant competitive intelligence activities
* Act as a strategic partner to senior management by fulfilling research requests and by proactively identifying key changes in the regulatory and competitive environment and their implications to WMCS
* Provide regular updates on the changes in competitive strategies, mail pressure, offers, and pricing and identify relevant insights for WMCS’s business practices and marketing strategies
* Partner with the Portfolio Management and Customer Marketing teams to benchmark WaMu’s portfolio performance vs. other leading issuers and identify opportunities for improvement
* Serve as the key source for competitive intelligence information for specific products/lines of business at WMCS
* Partner with the senior management team to create reporting infrastructure and executive level dashboards
* Provide regular updates to senior management and/or business partners on the meaning and application of research findings

The successful candidate will possess the following attributes:

* Candidates must have a minimum of 7 to 10 years professional experience in a marketing, analytical or consultative role at a major Credit Card issuer, or at a major consulting firm supporting a major credit card issuer
* Must have demonstrated ability to insightfully set the vision for projects that require the proper mix of qualitative and quantitative research methods
* Must have 2 or more years experience guiding research – market or competitive -- for a significant business line
* Must be able to thrive in a team environment, by contributing expertise as well as soliciting/integrating input from subject matter experts throughout the company.
* Proven ability to simultaneously manage multiple teams of researchers/analysts
* Proven competency with sharing research results at the Sr. Manager and Executive level
* Must have creativity, tenacity and enthusiasm
* Must possess an analytical mind, strong written and oral communication, the ability to work with individuals at all levels, the ability to manage multiple projects
* Excellent project management, leadership, teamwork, communication, and organizational skills
* A Masters degree or higher is preferred, ideally in a social science or a business field
* Proficiency in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint

In short, this billet well represented the current state of thinking in the competitive intelligence field. Such a shop could easily have been part of a distributed warning responsibility, which might have had an impact even at such a late date in the crisis had the billet (and its supporting analytic teams) been fully staffed earlier. The question here appears to be at least in part one of execution. We shall leave it to our counterparts in the business, economics, and history academia for the case study of how intelligence flows actually occurred.

However, such a clear alignment with accepted best practices in the field we believe also points back to the failure of the current paradigm. It is not sufficient to relegate warning to a simply structured occasional effort timed to coincide with some window of management attention, or as a “lesser included” responsibility generally considered under the mandate to “provide update on changes” in areas of interest. Warning has to be baked into the intelligence shop’s most basic foundations, alongside opportunity / action analysis. The very nature of warning's tradecraft must also be re-assessed, to revisit once again the process by which scenarios are created and indicators modeled. This is not to cast aside warning as we know it - but rather to revisit warning's earliest implementations, and rebuild its function for a new era.

Financial crisis and changing paradigms of warning intelligence

The continually interesting competitive intelligence forum at Ning has surfaced a discussion which has been much on the minds of a variety of intelligence professionals in both the government and private sector given the cascading collapse of a number of major financial institutions: Was this financial crisis a warning failure? And if so, the natural corollary inquires into the cause and origin of the failure.

In our view, these recent events very much represent intelligence surprise. If nothing else, the unexamined higher order effects of complex financial relationships involving vast sums of cross-border capital flows is far outside the traditional realm of political and economic intelligence, at least as it is usually practiced in the government world. And the rapid contagion dynamics within the financial markets prove that the events are likewise beyond the traditional scope of competitive intelligence, where it is rare that analysis takes into account such sweeping changes across the landscape and its players. Whether this surprise truly rates elevation as a Black Swan, as some commentators have suggested, is itself also open to debate.

There is ample evidence that early indicators were visible, and even that many commentators had previously weighed in on the mounting risks and dangerous uncertainties inherent to the increasingly complex layers of traded instruments, derivatives, and debt that lurk at the center of the current crisis. However, warning is a process – not an event. It matters little that in hindsight one can call out the prescient among the punditry and politicians, and cast blame on those that assumed business would continue as normal against the backdrop of ever increasing housing prices. If warning did not reach, or impact, the right decision-makers – as there is mounting evidence that it clearly did not – then the process of warning failed.

But let us examine this more closely for a moment. Who exactly were the right decision-makers in this crisis? The primary lending institutions? The traders and market makers that were the primary players in moving these instruments? The investors, fund managers, and sovereign wealth entities which funneled so much capital into fundamentally unstable market positions? The risk managers at any of these firms, responsible for anticipating the potential downside of complex financial positions? The world’s various central bankers? The regulatory bodies or their political masters in the parliamentary and executive branches?

These are not questions easily answered. There will be anecdotes aplenty regarding the lack of warning communicated to a wide range of these decision-makers. The first that comes to mind is the ill-fated CEO of Washington Mutual, who was allegedly incommunicado aboard a flight while the most significant transactions in the firm’s collapse were being finalized. This mirrors the earlier circumstances of the CEO of Bear Stearns. While a certain level of plausible deniability may be key to these positions, one wonders what kind of intelligence support these executives enjoyed.

Likewise, if warning was to be issued to an identified group of executives, who would have been responsible for giving such warning? Only a scant handful of the firms involved in the recent waves of disruption could be considered to have a dedicated intelligence function. Of these, few were likely oriented towards a warning posture, as opposed to the many other intelligence functions that constitute the duties of privatized shops within modern enterprises. Among the commercial consulting intelligence providers, the problem can easily have been defined by the lack of articulated customer requirements, and the lack of access and expertise that clearly prevented a more sophisticated appreciation of ongoing events. And one can question whether a warning account focused on what was largely a domestic financial market – despite the dramatic international implications – is at all a proper role for the intelligence community (at least in the United States). Certainly, as it is currently structured, it is nearly impossible to address – and no homeland security function has ever envisioned market shocks as a component of critical infrastructure protection. More damningly, the insights which would have unlocked these mysteries were not secrets to be stolen, but lay in perspectives which were never cultivated.

Again, there are likely case studies to be found in the after action reviews of the wreckage. Lehman Brothers, among the first to fall, most famously hired a former Deputy Director for Intelligence out of CIA to head its Sovereign Risk shop. But the structure and focus that geopolitically focused shop appears not to have been relevant to the manner in which the current crisis developed. Given that Bear Stearns itself allegedly was a leader in providing analytical research and other intelligence products to its investors and clients, the dissemination of these products to the executive level is worth exploring from more than an academic perspective. One can likewise point to other intelligence functions on the Street and elsewhere, stovepiped for threat analysis or market research or technology investment.

What few warning shops which may have existed to cover the sector likely followed the dominant paradigm of competitive early warning, focused on their competitors’ actions, positions, technologies and blind spots rather than the wider political and financial situation. The required optic was simply too large for most shops, whose production is typically serialized in daily or weekly form, no matter how strategic they might otherwise claim to be.

In sum, can one then consider this a failure of warning? There are no simple answers, and we certainly believe that this question will be revisited for years to come in future studies of intelligence surprise. The underlying causes are complex, but are clearly rooted – at least in part – in the lack of systematic warning intelligence coverage of the issues. Whether it was the role of warning intelligence shops to cover these issues is open to debate. However, this may be as much the result of the failure of a warning paradigm developed for a time and place now forever changed. One may liken this change to the decreasing relevance of the traditional state based indications and warning model, now replaced by the emerging strategic reconnaissance paradigm being explored at the cutting edge of the tradecraft.

There are also signs that this is far from over, as we move from the weekend into another turbulent week on the Street (and in financial centres around the globe.) While we may arguably have seen a strategic warning failure (or not), there is still ample need for operational and tactical level warning as the crisis continues. This need creates new opportunities for both the rare successes and failures that will make or break firms and fortunes. Unfortunately, it is exceedingly difficult to surge warning assets to these kind of non-traditional accounts in short order – particularly given the scope of the political, regulatory, and other uncertainties which plague the markets. This is a unique time – and a unique problem set – that will task the professionalism of involved intelligence practitioners beyond measure, given the excessively politicized atmosphere surrounding the issues. There are many intelligence professionals now treading virgin ground, far past the last signpost reading “HC SVNT DRACONES”.

We are reminded of Joseph Nye’s comments about that terrible day seven years ago: “September 11, 2001, was like a flash of lightning on a summer evening that displayed an altered landscape, leaving U.S. policymakers and analysts still groping in the dark, still wondering how to understand and respond.” Lightning has struck once again in New York, and again without effective warning. We expect the impact to the intelligence community – particularly the community beyond the traditional wheel of the major agencies – will be in its own way as profound.

Online education and the new literature of intelligence

We have recently become aware of a fledgling new journal that will offer its own contributions to the literature of intelligence, sponsored by Henley-Putnam University. This institution is one of the newer of the online intelligence studies programs currently growing to fill the gap in traditional university offerings. The new journal’s inaugural issue is to address “The Future of Intelligence Education”, a timely and relevant subject of great interest to ourselves – and we are certain, many of our readers. We look forward to its forthcoming publication.

It is fitting that this topic should be addressed by one of the newer distributed online programs. Virtual education has for too long been an ignored but game changing force in the professionalization of intelligence. The most significant of these efforts is without a doubt the unique Joint Intelligence Virtual University, but JIVU lacks the key outcome of credentialing (and is largely invisible to those outside of the core IC). We have long been aware of the other major such effort, American Military University, whose program relies heavily upon instructors formerly of the Joint Military Intelligence College (now National Defense Intelligence College). We confess a greater degree of familiarity with those efforts, if only due to their longer histories, but remain interested in new programs and the different approaches that other institutions may bring to the table. However, Henley-Putnam also deserves mention for having signed one of the few “star” intelligence professors currently in the game: Robert Clark, the author of the target-centric approach (which we would rate as one of the most consistently misunderstood and misused texts in intelligence education.)

The volume of students handled by these new institutions each year is absolutely transformative – in the order of multiple thousands per year. (By way of comparison, the longest running of the traditional civilian intelligence studies programs at Mercyhurst boasts a student body of a few hundred overall, with a score or so graduating each year.) One of the key distinctions between these academic programs and many traditional intelligence studies offerings can be found in the composition of their student populations. A significant percentage of those attending virtual courses are currently serving professionals, many deployed widely across the globe in support of ongoing missions. These students bring decades of practical experience to the classroom, and challenge educators to make theory relevant in ways that distinctly improve learning outcomes. This also keeps such courses far “fresher” and more closely in tune with the needs of the intelligence community, as many of these professional students are quite vocal when they feel that they are not receiving adequate value for their investment in time and money. (This unique blending could also go a long way to helping improve the research agenda of the intelligence studies academy, but that is a topic for discussion another day.)

The commitment required of such professionals to continue their education - despite the operational and logistical challenges brought on by the press of current operations – is quite impressive. Answering this commitment in kind is one area where we are certain many traditional intelligence studies programs have failed. Most schools are not friendly to the deployed, nor to those who wish to continue their studies through alternative formats – no matter how many times “independent study” options are thrown about during recruiting pitches. Frankly, this has been the great shame of the intelligence academy for too long. It is unconscionable to punish students academically who offer service in the Long War and other crisis missions, while their counterparts who have never served easily breeze through degree programs in the absence of other pressures. We – and many other employers – know which graduate we would prefer to hire, but it is not always easy to bring individuals onboard who have yet to complete their foundational degree. Online education options offer one of the few solutions we have yet seen to address this failing.

The new generation of virtual institutions we hope will also be a catalyst for the greater involvement of intelligence professions in the development of the literature in a form that can be shared more widely with the academia as a whole. We firmly believe that publication models such as Small Wars Journal will be the future of the literature. We have also already seen the impact of the virtual on the traditional, as the editorship of the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence passed to Richard Valcourt of American Military University. No doubt we shall see other similar effects in the near future, and look forward to the improvement of the literature.

Document marking and handling systems in private firms

We have long been fans of exporting the concepts behind document marking systems from the public sector to private firms. Many problems created by the improper handling of sensitive corporate information could simply have been avoided by such a system, and the cultural indoctrination that accompanies these systems. When conducting wide ranging and multi-domain analysis, security markings help provide a sense of boundary between the internal and the external. In some cases – particularly with analysts not yet attuned to the impact of cognitive biases and priming effects – this can create issues if the boundary is allowed to become an artificial distinction within the analytic product itself. However, for those that understand underlying purposes and intent, such systems allow for a degree of liberation – enabling more robust conversations during analytic outreach given knowledge of the essential elements of what must be protected from public knowledge, and what may be safely discussed without risk to client or reputation.

Yet we abhor those firms which have adopted wholesale the same language of classification used in the government itself. Those specific words have driving legal force - and for those individuals which may work between both the commercial and government world, such as defense industry firms or intelligence contractors, these words carry significant psychological freight when it comes time for the inevitable polygraph.

We are reminded to the increasingly widespread nature of this problem in a recent news item regarding an industrial espionage case involving the chipmakers Intel and AMD. (H/t to the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals, who deserve mention as they continue to offer increasing utility through their situational awareness efforts in the industry). Among the documents in question in the case are those which originated from Intel’s most closely held programs, carrying a specific marking first used by the government.

While we understand that such markings allow lazy information technology professionals to simply adopt wholesale the information processing systems used to protect classified information from inadvertent disclosure over open networks, and to enable more rapid review of document discovery requests. Nonetheless, the problems such markings may create are legion – and best avoided.

We thus greatly appreciate the efforts that a number of firms have gone to in order to avoid creating conflicts in this area. We particularly like several of the marking structures we have seen in firms that do business across the Commonwealth countries, as these mirror to a historically pleasing but not otherwise problematic degree the older markings from the dawn of the intelligence community itself. We think this carries a degree of gravitas that is otherwise too often lacking from many commercial endeavors, and is a subtle reminder of the history that both the public and private sector’s intelligence activities share. Such markings, including “Most Sensitive” or “Commercial in Confidence”, are clearly observable yet do not invoke the same considerations as “Company Confidential” or more directly copied national security marking systems.

Crowdsourcing OSINT

UPDATED below

Now that the deadline for submissions is passed, and thus our comments cannot unduly influence responses to the DNI’s Open Source Innovation Challenge, we wish to revisit some of the strategies that emerged in response to the exercise.

The 1995 Burundi exercise sought to use a direct privatization model, in which contractor resources and analysis were directly compared to the IC’s production. Subsequent production level OSINT efforts have rarely involved such an either / or choice, but rather focused on augmenting community capabilities. The original model was largely collection focused, as were most OSINT efforts of the day (and regrettably, far too many even now). The choice of a single firm (admittedly, one of the only in the USG facing OSINT game back then) offered a degree of centralization of efforts and commonality of response. In reality, that single firm pursued an acquisition strategy which leveraged a number of other commercial vendor’s products in specialized areas, from gray literature exploitation to commercial overhead imagery re-dissemination and analytic outreach.

Thus far, we have observed that responses to the latest challenge appear to have fallen into roughly three categories. The first were the highly competitive offerings by subject matter experts and related small teams with prior intra-group connectivity and affiliations, typically executed rapidly and in a low profile manner. The second were the aspirational offerings, typically by individual practitioners, interdisciplinary academics, or smaller firms. These offerings often involved those without direct community expertise covering the identified target set, but who acknowledged a desire to participate in the field. Neither were unexpected responses.

The third class of response, however, is destined to perhaps be the most controversial. It has been described as a “crowdsourcing” approach. To date, we are aware of a singular such effort out of Mercyhurst College’s intelligence studies program, which has also been something of an outlier in the field. Now, the term crowdsourcing brings immediately to mind its alternative label, the LazyWeb – and we are also reminded of the comments by the bright folks over at Oracle’s think tank AppLabs, in which the subtext of such efforts to leverage the wisdom of crowds are revealed.

However, one can rarely call the highly motivated students at Mercyhurst lazy. And while application of this new aggregation model for open source acquisition – we would hesitate to call it production, at least as we currently know it – is indeed innovative, it raises as many questions as it might produce answers.

In this, the crowdsourcing model reminds us of an earlier effort at Mercyhurst to trial new intelligence production approaches using another Web 2.0 technology. We do sincerely hope this effort is more successful than the last. UPDATE: And so it came to pass, with the Mercyhurst effort taking a win alongside the submission from the commercial intelligence firm iJet, out of twenty four total entries. Congratulations are in order - and the first round for the winners is on us.

The most critical issue that we see in crowdsourced OSINT strategies is the problem of denial and deception. One of the enduring tenants of OSINT tradecraft is that the sources consulted ought not ever know the use to which the information will be put. The divorcing of content from use context goes a long way towards reducing the problems created by sources which may attempt to influence rather inform (at least in terms of deliberate active messaging tailored for IC audiences). Rigorous analysis must still be applied to identify and eliminate the effects of source bias and implicit messaging directed at other audiences, but it is far harder for an adversary to coordinate a passive deception campaign seeded into open sources if they are unaware of the OSINT effort, its key intelligence questions, and its collection methods.

Crowdsourcing seems particularly vulnerable to denial and deception given that it relies on explicit calls for participation. Further - beyond mere knowledgability of project topic and intended audience - the publication of the specific indicators sought by the project coordinators essentially provides a roadmap for potentially successful deception themes and associated messaging, as well as the essential elements of information to be protected by adversary operations security and other denial measures. While source validation measures may provide some defense against such deception, it is unlikely to defeat a well crafted campaign executed through appropriate cover organizations and other agents of influence.

Timelines do play a role – short deadline production efforts are less likely to attract deliberate deception. However, if crowdsourced OSINT becomes commonplace, it may serve an adversary’s interests to establish latent architectures which would enable rapid response active measures campaigns designed to exploit the lack of time available for validation and other testing. One could particularly see such a structure evolving in advance of planned actions which an adversary foresees would provoke a high profile international crisis. The information advantage that could be offered in such a situation should such deception efforts influence a targeted decisionmakers' response would be priceless – especially in the critical first hours of a 3 a.m. moment that developed without earlier warning.

One could easily envision an experimental research series which would evaluate the potential susceptibility of crowdsourced OSINT to denial and deception. We hope to see some young researcher take up this effort in the near future.

We would also be remiss if we did not note that another contemporaneous effort – the Gray Goose project - has emerged to address a similar real world OSINT problem using a very different production strategy, one that might be termed rapid community of interest formation relying upon self-affiliation of interested subject matter experts. This effort bears greater examination in depth, particularly as it deliberately – and hopefully more productively - channels behaviors we have previously observed in surge intelligence responses to other crisis events. It also appears to be at least in theory more resistant to denial and deception, but that is a discussion for another day.

While the DNI’s challenge has overall generated a great of discussion, it remains to be seen whether that energy translated into truly innovative finished OSINT products. We eagerly await further conversations on the topic at the conference later this week, along with what we hope will be a future overview level assessment and compilation to be published under the DNI’s auspices. From the perspective of intelligence studies theory, it has been a most fascinating exercise to observe, and no doubt much will continue to come of it.

The privatization of intelligence history

The preservation of iconic history is one of the most important cultural and institutional tasks that the intelligence community can perform to ensure the continued relevance of its traditions as an intellectual pursuit among the generations of professions which follow. A shadowed profession needs more than most the few tangible symbols of what it is we stand for, what we have accomplished, and what we ought to emulate – if not in strict form or function, than in spirit and ideal. It is these few tokens (and their stories) – whether the odd item somehow passed down from those that were there, or the unique place which by virtue of the accidents of geography and function became key to a major program or structure – that also help to cement a shared vision of an increasingly distributed profession.

Many IC leaders agree to this principle in theory. Yet when the heart of the World War II cryptanalytic effort at Bletchley Park was left to decay, the international intelligence community of the Allied powers paid little attention. Of course, this is not a new problem, but efforts to preserve the history of intelligence have ranked low on the priority list in the face of unprecedented wartime demands coupled with the critical need to re-capitalized aging operational infrastructure neglected during the lean years of the 1990’s. And while some might say this is strictly a British problem, the long history of the special relationship – and particularly the key role played by shared signals intelligence efforts in creating that relationship – dictates American concern (and like concern for the rest of the Five Eyes partners).

Thus we find privatization emerging in a new and unexpected manner. In this case, it is a fundraising effort led by the IBM and PGP corporations, designed to remedy with private donations the gaps left by government abandonment. This is a development which resonates on multiple levels.

PGP as a firm arguably exists as a privatized solution to another government shortfall – the need to protect sensitive corporate and critical infrastructure communications from unauthorized intercept. In the early days of the Cold War, this was considered an inherently governmental responsibility – and one that early cryptographic policy reserved only for an exceptionally small segment of the corporate world, usually only directly associated with a highly limited number of defense industrial base or Federal level financial institutions. This deliberate omission of protection for the vast engine of much of the countries economy led to innovation and the re-birth of an entire commercial market. For like in many aspects of intelligence, the state monopoly of the WWII and early Cold War era was a historical anomaly. Commercial codes had long been in use for protection of sensitive international business communications. Yet the advent of professional cryptanalysis organizations – and the computing resources that they developed to aid them in their tasks - would destroy most pre-war systems based on too simple substitutions or primitive algorithms.

While the techniques of public key encryption by which PGP became the world’s standard for commercial communications security were indeed invented anew without prior knowledge of government activities in the area, it is now well documented that these techniques originated much earlier in the darkest corners of the intelligence establishment. However Non-Secret Encryption, as it was then called, merely serves to illustrate the gap between protection offered to the public versus the private sector. (One can make allowances, however, for the desire to keep all aspects of technology possibly used to secure nuclear weapons Permissive Action Links entirely out of the public view in any form. But thus has the world changed now.)

While contemporary industry's interest in Station X is no doubt driven more by the history of computing itself than the preservation of an intelligence icon, it is fitting to see the structures which emerged from the Black Valley step up to ensure that this monument will continue to endure - especially given that no such symbols remain of their own struggles.

h/t Slashdot

Commercializing the honey trap

Japan has long been one of the world’s leaders in the privatization of intelligence functions. Hand in hand with this privatization comes the blurring of the distinctions which define intelligence as a profession itself, and that which are incorporated across a range of interdisciplinary areas. In the 1980’s, the rest of the world most famously became aware of the commercialization of these activities in the realm of scientific and technical intelligence obtained through a variety of joint venture structures and other business alliances. The trend has continued, albeit in new areas and different forms.

Japan is also noted for the relentless consumerization of ideas and concepts into marketable goods and services. Their retail sector evolves at a blistering rate, making the Tokyo schoolgirl the most sought after youth demographic to test new fashion trends and other memetic products.

Thus we are unsurprised to note the intersection of these two trends, profiled in a recent UK article regarding professional sexual entrapment services. The cases are interesting in that they demonstrate both classic human intelligence approaches across a variety of cases, but also in that they represent an apparently profitable market segment. In the United States, private investigators have long known that spurned spouses – and their lawyers – are an easy source of income. Such has been the stuff of a certain genre of crime novel for decades. However, the Japanese incarnation is more subtle, in that the primary focus is on influence operations designed to alter the target’s behavior and perceptions – typically to overcome cultural factors in what is still largely a conservative and tradition oriented society.

It seems to us there is a growing body of lessons learned that might be culled from the cases handled by such services. No doubt none of these lessons are new, nor terribly unique, as the lusts of men and women change little over the years. However, the experiences of these professionals (and equally importantly, the handlers which conduct the equivalent of targeting analysis and other operations management functions) do represent a unique aggregation of unclassified examples which could be used to augment academic studies of what is otherwise the most clandestine of intelligence activities.

No doubt for a young researcher such studies might also be uniquely rewarding. One should hope however that the debriefer is otherwise unattached prior to embarking upon the project.

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.

What’s in an intelligence professional curriculum

In the wake of the summer conference season, and in particular the recent events hosted by the International Association for Intelligence Education (IAFIE), we have been left to ponder one of the enduring challenges of the field’s ongoing professionalization: the widespread disagreement regarding what exactly prospective candidates and serving practitioners ought to be taught in an entry level and continuing education programs. (Note that we deliberately emphasize the need for an intelligence professional curriculum, vice entering into the debates over intelligence education versus intelligence studies. While such discussions have their place, we do not wish to address them here, and have chosen a third terminology as a proxy to encompass both the theory and application intended to serve the practitioners’ needs in order to address both training, education, and the meta- or comparative study of the field.)

One would think that this should be a largely uncontroversial matter. After all, there is widespread agreement regarding a number of the common skills and tasks required of intelligence professionals – particularly in the analytic side of the house (which admittedly has been better explored from the perspective of intelligence theory). There is even a growing consensus on the other qualities required by an intelligence professional, developed as part of a number of human capital competencies modeling efforts that are occurring both within the government and its private sector contractor and competitive intelligence counterparts.

This is not the first time the question has been raised. Several contemporary model curriculum efforts came out of the United Kingdom’s National Intelligence Model, translated in the United States under the Generic Intelligence Training Initiative to the law enforcement realm of the then dominant counterdrug mission circa 2000. Such efforts eventually culminated (through a fascinating pathway of memetic diffusion) in the now popular International Association of Law Enforcement Intelligence Analysts’ Foundations of Intelligence Analysis Training standards. This has essentially displaced the previous standard curriculum model, at least in the criminal intelligence discipline, a defacto mix of the 1970’s era Anacapa training coupled with limited GEOINT and quantitative methodologies that grew out of the NYPD’s COMPSTAT. By default, this is also the dominant paradigm for the emerging discipline of homeland security intelligence, given the now overwhelming participation of state and local law enforcement in the new structures that have emerged in the strange evolutionary turns of the domestic mission and its capabilities.

Other models have been developed and presented from the academic perspective over the years since, involving separate deliberative efforts at four universities, the National Defense Intelligence College (formerly the Joint Military Intelligence College), and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Yet none have been widely adopted, even in principle - and the debates over the topic remain exceptionally heated.

We should note that controversy is of course a matter of perspective. While the latest evolution of curriculum within one particular institution sparked such a degree of debate and dissent that upon the recent departure of one of the significant players involved in implementing these changes, it was joked that the traditional hail and farewell meal was held at an undisclosed offsite location in order to prevent a prominently vocal critic from arriving driving a VBIED. And although this little jest was made without the knowledge of any of the involved individuals that had participated in the debate, it would certainly not be the most contentious faculty meeting we had ever observed. For a real civil war level dispute, one must look to the tenured staff at in other disciplines.

Yet none of these differs markedly in content or kind from the first intelligence curriculum design attempt that we are aware of, a modest but nonetheless foundational study authored in 1965. Those unaware of the true history and impact of intelligence privatization might be scandalized to learn that this was a contractor led effort, explicitly designed to create the government curriculum for the then emerging Defense Intelligence College that resulted from a recommendation contained within the 1946 Gerow Report on officer’s education. The latter is widely considered to be the origin of current military professional education. We would like to see its role in establishing the concept of intelligence professional education likewise remembered, particularly given that it encompasses both education and training concepts.

To be sure, the profession has evolved since this time. Entire new disciplines within the field have emerged, and pedagogy likewise has come a long way. But somehow, practitioners are constantly confronted by those wishing to re-invent the wheel when it comes to implementing a new program. In no other field would it be possible to credibly ignore all antecedents when it came time to discuss program objectives and outcomes, especially when these are ignored in favour of long debates over first definitions. It should not be thus in the intelligence profession.

Likewise, we strongly object to the oft-heard statements that an intelligence curriculum ought to merely concern itself with teaching the basics of critical thinking, writing, and briefing. While these are indeed vital skills, and their mastery strongly correlated with success in the field, they are by no means the only things an entry level analyst needs. And despite the claims that the IC will provide all further necessary instruction on tradecraft topics, we would venture to guess that these claimants have not led a line unit for some time. Similarly, those that have never served outside of the cloistered confines of the most established of the big sixteen may not always appreciate how little training budget (and time) is available to those in other agencies and elements. Again, in few other professional endeavors does one anticipate that college educated entry level candidates are merely blank slates, waiting to be imprinted with the One True Way.

Lastly, we would offer one final consideration for those developing a new intelligence curriculum. Pay no heed to those that demand that the study of intelligence be the academic discipline that dare not speak its name, or that this name be somehow muted and altered to provide greater attraction for interdisciplinary students. Such programs are inevitably a confused pastiche, and fail in the most important function of the educational process: the cultivation of personal passion and the all consuming interest that drives the best professionals. A muted program under a politically sanctified name merely mutes its students, not critics. We cannot as a profession allow the prejudices of those critics to dictate the terms under which new generations come of into the field – particularly given the vital importance of the generation after next at this historic turning point in the community.