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.

The Jesters tackle counterproliferation

We have several enduring interests that our longtime readers will have noted us discuss before. The first - consumption of interesting audio media - is based on the inevitable realities of the Beltway commute, frequent extended travel time, and long periods of enforced downtime at various airstrips, motor pools, and other transient spaces around the globe. The second is the conviction that better insight can often be generated by the jesters at the futurists' court than the professional prognosticators – or at the very least, the clowns utilized for illustration and the divergence analytic methodology.

It is not often these interests converge. However, there is apparently a growing and vibrant podcasting scene occupied by speculative fiction writers of all sorts, and it is from that space that we were given (by a more science fiction oriented colleague) a story which illustrates – as only a fictional vignette can – the potential difficulties of future counterproliferation activities in the expeditionary and post-conflict environment. Thus we also recommend highly to our readers the short piece “Clockwork Atom Bomb” produced over at the Escape Pod “podcast magazine” (an entity which we had not previously been familiar with, and do not otherwise attempt evaluate). We think the piece will also be of particular interest to those which routinely must argue the effects of perverse economic incentives in transnational issues, and those that handle accounts related to sub-Saharan Africa.

The piece is not recommended for those that take their analytic tasks too literately, or their futures intelligence within too narrowly constrained boundaries of simple linear projection. But it is perfect for a short diversion to recapture otherwise lost time.

Warning impact

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

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

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

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

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

Strange meat in the cooking pot

When instructing intelligence professionals, it is often difficult to find cases which can be used for exercises designed to improve political, military and transnational issues assessments in short sessions – particularly those conducted at the unclassified level - without touching upon accounts in which one or more of the students may have previous experience. While expertise in intelligence is never usually a bad thing, it does introduce distorting effects to the instructor’s attempts to evaluate a student’s mastery of core competencies and learning objectives. We will not go so far as to say it is an unfair advantage for the knowledgeable student – after all, they did invest the time and energy to understand often complex subjects, and this will serve them well in other aspects of their professional life. Nor can we expect students to come to our classroom tabula rasa – in fact, a good organization’s selection process should ensure that even entry level professionals (or academic students) bring something unique to the table; and we by no means are solely responsible for teaching only new candidates in the field.

Further, when finding the teaching cases and other examples to be used in the classroom, we emphasize the need to select the kind of edge incidents which exist at the intersections between a number of accounts. Nothing turns a student off more quickly than thinking a case does not apply to their assignment and needs –particularly so if that student has rarely rotated between organizations and billets, and has a narrowly constructed view of what it means to be engaged in the activity of intelligence. For this reason, we constantly quest for new material which may feed into the kinds of innovative and unconventional cases and exercises that will challenge students to get out of their existing mindset and truly begin to master their craft.

We are thus grateful to tdaxp for pointing out recent media coverage of the tribulations of the pygmies of the Congo (DRC). Amongst the other savagery of the continuing conflict in the troubled country – already an excellent teaching example for a variety of counterinsurgency, counter-smuggling, and other transnational issues problems – recent reporting now adds the problems of human trafficking and cannibalism. This is not the first time such stories have surfaced, but UN investigations are another thing entirely.

We have previously written about earlier, effective teaching exercises involving organ smuggling and corpse trafficking conspiracies. Such teaching cases have been greatly enhanced by the recent media coverage of the bone trade from India, which serve to illustrate well the complex relationships between black markets and legitimate industries in these spaces. We have no doubt that a case built upon the Congo incidents will also be effective in introducing a new set of problems and perspectives for the analyst and manager alike – especially as it more deeply reaches into the challenges of understanding events amongst “people of whom we know nothing”.

Intelligence in the (proto) UN system

Much as we previously remarked upon the true but too oft forgotten origins of commercial intelligence, we have also recently had occasion to be reminded of the obscure history of another overlooked facet of comparative intelligence traditions.

Throughout the confusion of the 1990’s in the emergence of the new world disorder, the requirements of intelligence in the international system were fiercely debated. Along the way, the naive ideals of too many abstract theorists came to dominate, insisting that organizations such as the United Nations did not need, and should not employ, the activities of intelligence – even when forward deployed in support of contingency and peacekeeping operations. This overly idealistic thinking met bruising reality in the conflicts of the Balkans, and the legacies such as Srebrenica live with us still to this day. The Netherlands Institute of War Documentation’s landmark study was only completed in 2002 – including an examination of intelligence operations and liaison relationships notable for its astounding access to primary Dutch sources (if not perhaps its accuracy in other more speculative areas involving the services and activities of other nations.)

But despite the protests of the modern theorists who would fashion the international community in a softer image, there is indeed nothing alien regarding the idea of intelligence in transnational bodies. The use of intelligence for negotiations between alliances of like-minded states, dealing with countries outside of the normalized system, dates back at least to the diplomacy of the Elizabethan age. The collection and analysis of information in support of a variety of intergovernmental purposes continued unabated, even to inclusion under its overt nomenclature in one of the first transnational deliberative bodies.

Once again, via the newly liberated electronic ghosts of tomes from the deep archives, we note a small but overlooked piece of that historical puzzle. It takes the form of a 1934 volume published by the Economic Intelligence Service of the League of Nations. It is the surviving (and now digitally enduring) member of a publication series begun in 1931, providing basic intelligence on international banking systems worldwide dating back 1913. As typical of economic intelligence reporting of the day, the volume is largely a dry compilation of reference level materials, though its analytical framing is rather sophisticated for its day. Unsurprisingly, source material from the Economist is cited frequently – which will no doubt please those at the Economist Intelligence Service who can now lay claim with stronger evidence to a far older intelligence tradition than is commonly recorded.

A subsequent volume was published in 1935, but the next digitally available volume dates from 1942, for which the Economic Intelligence Service’s Financial Section then director, a monsieur A. Loveday, again penned the introduction - noting the publication changes wrought in post-War volumes. From this we might surmise an interruption in publication – or at the very least, distribution - during the turmoil of the intervening years.

This history casts the debates over the role of intelligence in the UN system during 1990’s in a most unfavorable light. If intelligence was suitable for the rather more mundane applications of economic and commercial consumers during the earliest days of what was arguably an even more idealistic international organization, then the application of the same tradecraft to the preservation of effective peacekeeping options – and the lives of those allegedly under the protection of a UN deployment – should have been far more readily acceptable.

Selective memory and forgotten history can have terrible consequences. We doubt there was ever a more compelling case demonstrating the need for rigorous intelligence scholarship, supported by a robust literature.

This incident also reminds us that it is not enough for academics to claim the distinctions of scholarship – they must also write, in a manner that does not merely rehash old arguments and recycle the same primary source set. New research and the rediscovery of older sources are needed, and the writings which result from these studies must have relevance and reach to influence the world of the practitioner. The field cannot afford disconnected abstractions of no applied merit, nor can it endure to see its history and lessons learned to be lost in the dusty stacks for another generation.

Enigmatic biographies of the damned

Via the Economist this week, we learn of the death of an adversary whose kind has nearly been forgotten. Khun Sa was a warlord who amassed a private army and smuggling operation which dominated Asian heroin trafficking from remotest Burma over the course of nearly two decades. In the end, despite indictment in US courts, the politics of a failed state permitted him to retire as an investor and business figure, and to die peacefully in his own bed.

The stories of men such as these however shaped more than a region. They are the defining features of the flow of events in a world of dark globalization. Yet these are not the biographies that are taught in international relations academia, nor even in their counterpart intelligence studies classrooms. The psychology of such men, and the personal and organizational decision-making processes of the non-state groups which amassed power to rival a princeling of Renaissance Europe, are equally as worthy of study both for historical reasons as well as for the lessons they teach about the nature of empowered individuals.

Prospective human factors and leadership analysts are not the only students which would benefit from a deeper pol/mil study of the dynamics of warlords and their followers in the Shan and Wa states. The structures which were left behind upon Khun Sa’s surrender were no doubt of enduring value to the ruling junta, and tracing the hostile connectivity provided to a dictatorial government by robust transnational organized crime is an excellent example of the kombinat model in a unique context outside of the classic Russian cases.

It is our profound hope that the study of such adversaries may also provided needed depth and contrast to the study of historical intelligence reporting regarding trafficking throughout the Golden Triangle, and the wider issues of Asian conflict dynamics, during the turbulent decades of the 70’s, 80’s, and early 90’s. It is rare to look deeply into the histories recounted by one’s adversaries in the non-state realm. But these were the fights that laid the evolutionary basis for the evolution of much harder non-state problems, and were waged on our side for the most part by organizations that were largely divorced from the classic core of the intelligence community for a very long time. These activities are no less worthy of examination, and the lessons learned from those struggles no less important to the teaching of future generations of intelligence professionals than any of the major cases of WWII and the Cold War.

Home-brewed, open source cryptanalysis

Among the odder developments created by the inevitable trends in Moore’s Law of increasing computing power (at ever cheaper price points) has been the feasibility of private cryptanalysis capabilities functioning at effectiveness which only a few years ago would likely have been possible solely with the resources of the nation state.

These bootstrapped rigs as a rule tend to emphasize the lowest possible cost configurations – a natural consideration given that most are assembled on a shoestring budget by university researchers or other computer sciences academic types. They have been assembled for diverse purposes of privacy advocacy, systems research, and some simply for the sheer technical interest of the thing.

We particularly like the COPACOBANA system, a FGPA based parallel computing design optimized to attack symmetric ciphers, created entirely using commercial off the shelf components. The system can typically identify DES keys within less than a week of effort, at a cost of about $10,000 per machine. The now obsolete Data Encryption Standard cipher was a widely used algorithm between its approval in 1977 and its withdrawal in 2002, and remains in use in some legacy systems in the commercial environment to this day. A stronger derivative algorithm, 3DES, also remains more commonly in use in some applications, with end of life projected to 2030. DES did have a good long run, having survived the public disclosure of the previously secret technique of differential cryptanalysis to which it might have been vulnerable, had NSA and IBM not supposedly collaborated on a stronger implementation during its development phases. An earlier custom built FGPA rig - DeepCrack – was built to attack the cipher successfully, but at a cost of nearly a quarter million dollars.

These cryptanalysis systems may be jury rigged, but they are undeniably effective – and cheap. And more powerful implementations are no doubt easily within the budgets of smaller nation-states, if not wealthy non-state actors.

However, it is the development of the alternative track of home-brewed cryptanalysis that gives us pause. One competitor in the attack against the DES cryptosystem was a distributed computing network that relied on the contributions of unused capacity from volunteers’ personal boxen. The DESCHALL project achieved its successful break using 78,000 contributors over the course of three months. The project demonstrated the architecture – more advanced attacks are mostly a matter of optimization and scale.

It is from this that we begin to ponder our greater concerns. The development of very large scale botnets, made up of aggregated collections of individual systems compromised by malware, offer far greater potential computing capacity – both an individual basis per processor as well as in overall numbers of contributing systems. The widely discussed STORM botnet remains perhaps the largest of such malicious aggregates that has publicly identified. While exact numbers remain subject to debate, STORM is believed to consist of up to 50 million individual systems. And while recent indicators are that the botnet is being sub-divided into smaller segments for illicit commercial sale, this kind of capacity in the hands of non-state actors is truly revolutionary. Its potential applications to home-brewed cryptanalysis are clear.

Interestingly enough, the STORM botnet also appears to itself utilize encryption in order to secure its own control communications, and to permit more effective illicit commercialization. (Although surprisingly not a GOST standard cipher). The use of STORM, or the application of similar very large scale capabilities, to the flip side of the cryptographic equation is surely not far off.

If nothing else, it is good reason to accelerate those academic intelligence studies that might have an interest in cryptanalysis.

(Black) Markets in everything

There are few things more bizarre for those of us in the transnational issues side of the intelligence business than to observe the development of new black markets based on government distortions of functioning economies – usually for short sighted political regulation attempting to accomplish what otherwise would be a difficult proposition to sell through free competition.

Many of these illegal markets are driven by burdensome and typically ineffective “environmental” legislation and regulation. One can point to the much lampooned cross border trade in high flush capacity toilets - or to the more serious illegal business of Freon smuggling.

We note a warning scenario for yet another such black market in reaction to overreaching green legislation – this time for the humble incandescent bulb. One commentator at Chronicle of the Conspiracy predicts stockpiling as “some folks will back up the SUV at Wal-Mart and buy cases and cases of the old standby…”

What next, an illicit market in washing machines?

We hear also there may be a new source of machinery and spare parts for phosphate separation (always important for high quality cleaning) on the market soon… seller reports condition, slightly used with occasional catastrophic kinetic damage from falling Israeli iron and energetic materials. Be sure to check the UN trade leads postings for Syria, or contact your local AQ Khan network representative...

The strange higher order effects of post Soviet organized crime

We have recently had occasion to note the increasingly strange ripples throughout areas of interest to the intelligence community, particularly those interests in the transnational issues space, created by developments in post Soviet organized crime. Whether one believes in the model of the Kombinat, or merely in the inevitable cycles of anarchical decay and authoritarian response that may be giving rise to, in the words of the Economist, a “neo-KGB” state - it is clear that the problem set is far from a dead issue, no matter how long ignored in many circles more focused on the immediately pressing problems of the Long War.

One of the largest growth businesses in Russian organized crime occurs in the Parallel World – or whatever cyberspace is becoming in its evolving ubiquity. Cyber attack against financial institutions and consumers is fast creating entirely new classes of network warfare tools and TTP, and forcing defenders to rapidly develop the sophistication of their own responses. The driving energies of these defensive efforts are not merely privatized, but almost entirely the result of the efforts of critical infrastructure owners who have been essentially abandoned by governments which lack the priority focus, the resources and the key people to even begin to discuss the problem set, let alone begin to address action. The developments in this space thus tend to occur along entirely unique and frequently unanticipated lines, with innovation flourishing from far stranger soil than the results of the typical government RFP.

Thus we note with interest a new European toolset designed to expedite analysis of compromised machines for forensic examination. The tool itself seems more an evolutionary advance on previous packages, but it is good to see movement in the space. The recent Estonian flap has definitely driven new interest within Europe on many previously poorly understood aspects of what are in that context intensely regional problems, and it is good to see our allies begin to move towards unique contributions to the shared defense in areas where they might be able to bring new competencies (vice legacy systems and logistics demands). We also immediately would note the potential utility of the item for DOMEX efforts, long languishing in need of further attention (as frequently discussed at Haft of the Spear.)

We hope to see further developments of this nature in the unanticipated higher order effects of otherwise nearly intractable problem sets. The potential benefits to the IC from finding, and exploiting, these reservoirs of expertise and pathways of alternative development could be quite incalculable.

Cultural intelligence and the underground economies of the dead

Once upon a lifetime ago, there was a particular course on strategic intelligence analysis that was offered by a contractor (which shall remain nameless, to protect both the guilty and the innocent in the spirit of the Chatham House rule) in a number of USG and foreign government iterations (one of the few to span so many different countries, from the UK, to Sweden, to Australia, and even South Africa.) The primary audience for this course were law enforcement types, usually at the national level (this was also around the time of the first steps of the UK’s National Intelligence Model) – but these were also the halcyon days of the pre-9/11 world, in which matters of crime and disorder were enshrined by PDD-35 as among the top intelligence priorities for the community. Thus the audiences in some offerings tended to be quite a bit more diverse, so to speak, as an entire generation struggled to come to terms with transnational issues.

One of the more memorable exercises from the course involved class groups assigned to develop what essentially amounted to mission management planning for intelligence issues that were far outside of the current mainstream. The point was to get students out of their comfortable headspace and familiar issues and attack problems de novo. This was usually quite an interesting discussion, and although it was biased towards smaller agencies and functions, it was generally worth the time.

One of the unconventional intelligence issues sometimes presented for class discussion was a semi-notional problem set involving the illegal market for human organs. The initial scenario was based on a popular urban legend of the day projected into a futures scenario, but what was most fascinating were the real world events and incidents that were crystallized into an intelligence problem by many of the more imaginative of the students. Far from viewing the scenario in criminal analysis terms, with simple scams and investigative case outcomes, outlines of entire illicit medical structures and market exchange mechanisms that would be required to support organ harvesting activities emerged – touching on insurance fraud, professional and official corruption, pharmaceutical diversion, customs and border control weaknesses, and the very real challenges of collection against non-traditional targets spanning both domestic and international environments.

We are reminded of this exercise by the following item from the Economist, regarding the growing market for “ghost brides” in the PRC. The practice is a fascinating intersection of centuries old belief systems, draconian and disastrous Communist population control policies, and the emerging illicit markets in a country which knows almost no normal market structures in the first place.

The Chinese practice also recalls the Shi’ite tradition of seeking burial near the tomb of Ali in Najaf, Iraq - where it is believed that the rigours of death will be eased and their entrance to Paradise made faster. Since the medieval age, it has been common for bodies to be sent from around the Shia Islamic world for internment in what has become one of the largest necropolises in human history. This difficult terrain embodied entirely new operational challenges for urban combat during the 2004 actions against the Jaish al Madhi of Moqtada al-Sadr. The practice also spawned an entire industry of professional mourners, supported by unique memorial foundations and other funding structures that developed under the atypical constraints of Islamic financial restrictions – structures which to this day represent serious challenges to the financial intelligence community seeking to track and interdict terrorist funding sources.

Under the British Mandate, a Western power previously had cause to reflect upon these Shia burial practices as an intelligence challenge. The transport of corpses from abroad was restricted on the basis of sanitary considerations, with regulations prohibiting the transport of “wet” remains, and requiring that all bodies have been temporarily interred for at least one year before being permitted passage through the border as “dry” remains (with less likelihood of creating certain classes of disease in the wake of their passage). However, the psychological impact of this regulation, particularly on the devout near the seminary city of Qom in Iran, was far more serious than the British would have ever contemplated. A brisk smuggling trade thus emerged, in which the recently dead of the particularly religious would be moved across the border with false documentation, bribery, and a variety of other means of concealment. These smuggling routes exist to this day, some of them no doubt now being used to transport Iranian manufactured EFP IEDs to cells in Iraq.

We can think of few better examples of the kinds of cultural intelligence challenges that will increasingly come to define the hardest issues faced by the community in assessing the developing world, especially when those are mission critical issues encountered in the context of ongoing stability and support operations. It is exceedingly difficult to inculcate the flexible mindsets and analytical tradecraft practices that will be required to meet these challenges in the future, and this is perhaps one of most significant areas in which the intelligence studies academia could offer substantial contributions to the community. But thus far, cultural intelligence and related transnational issues (especially in the information operations realm) have been regrettably too long ignored…

Transnational issues and the lesser known accounts

We have been remiss in not pointing out the excellent overview of a number of accounts that are certainly off the beaten track in the analytical world that Coming Anarchy has chosen to grace its audiences with in recent days. One post that particularly caught our eye regarding the unique nature of evolving high intensity crime in the Oceanic region.

While similar issues have been increasingly of concern in Africa and Latin America, we have rarely seen such cogent thinking applied to the wider range of the “lesser included”. It serves to spur interesting thought, particularly for those of us concerned deeply with transnational issues and indications & warning.

The community has grown too accustomed in recent years, we think, to focusing on the great first order catastrophic events. The more subtle outlines of higher order effects from the less dramatic, and certainly less tangible, aggregation of actors and their smaller incidents have not only fallen out of vogue but also out of common examination. But it is precisely the subtle corruption of small state systems, overwhelmed by high intensity crime and low intensity conflicts, that will have reverberations throughout the global system. The hollowing out of states by distributed network actors is not merely a matter for concern in the places where there is the obvious stuff of the industrial age (such as the extractive industries), but also the influences of Herds and the other raw materials which are mined by the new economies.

Coming Anarchy’s piece is the kind of thing which brings us up short, and while we cannot abandon first tier priorities in favour of these faint glimmers of futurity, we can pause to contemplate their effects on our own accounts. And hopefully, the community as a whole can begin to institutionalize methods by which outsiders in the academic and corporate world can contribute meaningfully as part of a unclassified exchange in a formalized and ongoing manner.