Intelligence Technology of the FUTURE!

Jayant Gandhi

Intelligence Technology of the FUTURE!

The fields of intelligence collection and analysis have always had a very close relationship with technological progress. At some instances advances in technology have forced intelligence officials to rethink their tactics and strategies for collecting and analyzing information. At other moments intelligence has driven technological progress to fill in the gaps created by new and pressing intelligence needs. This relationship can be traced all the way back to ancient times with the creation of the first codes giving birth to the field of cryptology (both encryption and decryption). More recently, however, this relationship was brought into the forefront by the Cold War.

The Cold War saw some of the largest and most innovative technical programs in intelligence history. The early success of programs such asthe CORONA satellite imagery and the U2 reconnaissance aircraft programs encouraged a phenomenal growth of “technical intelligence” during the Cold War.[1] This growth was fueled by the growing anxiety on both sides. In his work “Openness and Espionage”, Nikolai Brusnitsin focuses heavily on the rapid advancement of US technical intelligence and ends with a call to resolve the “anxiety over the ever-growing capabilities and scope of intelligence-gathering and spying technology”.[2] This shows how the close relationship developed during the height of the Cold War was still strong in 1990 (only a year away from the collapse of the Soviet Union).

This legacy has carried over into the 21st century, but without the existential threat provided by another super power some have begun to question whether or not technology in intelligence causes more good than harm. Will technology aid the intelligence community in the coming years, or will it make the job of collecting and analyzing information difficult to a dangerous degree?

There are four basic barriers impeding technology’s usefulness: the tumultuous relationship between the intelligence community and policymakers, the rising costs of technology versus the economic downturn, the “Deafening” effect of too much available information, and the problem of disruptive technologies. Each challenge has its unique characteristics that make solving them all the more difficult, however it is not impossible. If these problems can be dealt with then technology will prove to be a valuable friend to the intelligence community.

INTELLIGENCE VS. POLICY

Policymakers are often left out of the equation when discussing issues of technical intelligence, but often have the most say in how technology is implemented. This role becomes even more obscured by the divided nature of the security policy processes. Taking the US as an example of the structure of security policy, there are five main loci guiding the policies: the President, the individual departments (DOD, State Department, DHS, etc.), the National Security Council, the intelligence community, and congress.[3] Each group has its own agenda and goals that it is working towards (although there is the overarching goal of successful national security). These groups can be subdivided further creating even more competing desires.

This results in different requirements being placed on the intelligence community. The inability to set up definitive requirements has made the role of technology in intelligence difficult to pinpoint. On the one hand, having many different goals that must be met opens up the door for new innovative technologies. On the other hand, these same new technologies, given their high cost and complexity, require a level of focus that is difficult to give when the attention of the intelligence community is divided.

The creation of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) was conceived as a means to better manage the intelligence community, and, implicitly, its relationship with technology, but has unfortunately succumbed to the same problems of competing requirements.In his article “The Role of Science and Technology in Transforming American Intelligence”, Kevin O’Connell points out that the DNI has fallen short in its ability to steer the discussions in organizations like the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the National Reconnaissance Office. He states that in these areas focus had been placed on advancement of capabilities without taking into account the “highly diverse set of intelligence requirements…and common government budgetary and acquisition practices”. He cites a comparison done between former and current officials of the NRO to acquire satellite systems that shows there has been a decline in the office’s ability to acquire these systems “within cost, performance, and organizational constraints”.[4] This can lead to money being wasted on less necessary projects while more important ones are not funded.

Communication between the intelligence community and policymakers has to be improved in order to ensure that technical intelligence does not become a financial drain without tangible benefits. The DNI will play a major role in facilitating this communication in the future and as the organizational lessons are learned of how to manage and develop technologies in a structured and focused way the overall quality of intelligence will improve.

MONEY, THE LIFEBLOOD OF TECHNOLOGY

There is one universal truth about technological development: it costs money. Research and development is never cheap, but when discussing the technologies involved in intelligence collection and analysis the prices increase dramatically. Advanced surveillance aircraft and satellite systems are the products of many different high technologies used to both maintain the platform’s function and collect the necessary intelligence. The problem is that, even though these systems are adept at collecting for the IMINT, SIGINT, and MASINT disciplines, their costs easily run into the billions to develop and construct placing a huge burden on the intelligence budget.A good example of how budgetary constraints have impacted technological development is the Global Hawk program.

The Global Hawk was a UAV designed to replace the U-2 surveillance aircraft as the primary aerial reconnaissance tool. Development of the aircraft continued until just this year (2012) when the US decided to cancel its plans to switch for the U-2 to the Global Hawk. The decision to cancel was mainly due to the projected costs of running the Global Hawk being higher than continuing the U-2 program.[5]A very similar story occurred in the 1960s when the US tried to replace the U-2 with the A-12 OXCART. The program lasted just a little over ten years (with only 6 years operational) before it was terminated due to budgetary constraints.[6]

While it is important to note that part of the reason the OXCART program and the Global Hawk program did not succeed was due to the resounding success of the U-2 program, these events, nonetheless, highlight the importance of financial concerns. The intelligence community has to operate within a budget and cannot always spend money on the next “revolutionary” technology.

Currently, this aspect has been exacerbated by the global economic recession. In fact, the interest in unmanned aerial systems (UAS) could not have come at a worse time. An article for Aviation Week & Space Technology comments that while the UAS industry has grown tremendously over the last nine years “the US, which spends more on UAS than all other nations combined is cutting back on expenditures. Meanwhile, most other countries are having trouble finding the money to support their domestic programs”.[7]

So how can the intelligence community still get the technologies they need to improve their capabilities while working with a tightened budget? The answer is two part. The first part is to focus less on developing revolutional technologies and to focus more on evolving already functioning ones in order to improve their performance. This has already worked tremendously well in the case of the U-2, which, through constant upgrades since its original 1950s design, has been able to compete with and even beat the competition.[8] Incremental improvements are not nearly as expensive as completely new designs and sometimes yield the best results.

The other part is to rely more heavily on the private sector to innovate. The CIA’s In-Q-Tel, the venture-capital arm of the CIA, has focused on investing in start-up tech companies that might have potential security value as they develop their products. This works exceptionally well in the tech industry where start-ups appear all the time and are fueled by venture capitalists. In-Q-Tel allows the CIA to keep track of the tech industry and encourage the development of beneficial technologies. The Keyhole EarthViewer (now Google Earth) was just one of the products invested in by In-Q-Tel.[9]

This model may not be applicable to the aircraft or satellite industries where most innovation comes from the larger companies (e.g. Boeing, Lockheed Martin) rather than small start-ups, but the sentiment is correct. By allowing more and more of R&D to be done by these outside contractors a significant portion of the budget is freed up to actually buy and implement the new technologies. In the past, government labs may have provided a degree of secrecy that helped security, but in the age of transparency brought about by the Internet, the marginal value of this secrecy has decreased tremendously. Even if some technology could be created in complete secrecy it would not be long before information about it would disseminated through the Internet.

OVERWHELMED BY INFORMATION

In the aptly named Information Age, one of the biggest problems facing intelligence officers is how to sort through the huge amount of information available to them. Open source intelligence (OSINT) has also risen to prominence in this era because of the Internet. Information is now more readily available to anyone than it has ever been. However, this does not mean OSINT requires no more work on the intelligence officer’s part than clicking the search button on their Google bar.

The Internet that we see through search engines like Google is only a fraction of the total Web. The majority of the Web actually lies on un-indexed sites that make up what is called the Deep Web.[10] This requires a lot more effort on the part of the intelligence officer to search through the proverbial haystacks of sites looking for that one needle of useful information. OSINT has always had the problem of magnitude, but the Internet has aggravated this problem.

Similar problems of quantity can be found throughout the technical disciplines as well. Almost every street in the US is captured in an image somewhere, but going through all those images to find a pertinent piece of information is a nightmare. If the intelligence community hopes to deal with this “deafening” quality of the modern era new methods of analysis are necessary.

Admiral William A. Owens, USN (Ret.), suggests a solution to this problem. The first is a shift from an inductive approach to a deductive one where, instead of putting together pieces of a puzzle to understand, exclusion of extraneous information becomes paramount.[11] This may seem like a simple fix, but it is an important change in the way the intelligence community approaches problems. Inductive reasoning worked well when the key pieces were collected from a very limited pool of generally secret information. However, increases in technological capabilities and the dramatic increase in OSINT have made this way of thinking cumbersome. Developing the intelligence communities deductive reasoning capabilities will be a great help towards dealing with the large volume of the information.

The other hope for dealing with this problem lies with the development of advanced computer software; specifically data aggregator and automatic target recognition. Major strides have been made with both of these technologies. Data aggregators have been functioning on the web for years compiling all the information they can from open sources in order to create profiles of individuals available for purchase from their websites. Automatic target recognition has been harder to develop. Facial recognition for example, which would be used to identify know security threats, has had mixed results and it is still uncertain whether or not it has actually proved useful in the places it has been implemented. Utilizing the In-Q-Tel model to further these technologies would increase the rate of their development and effectiveness.

DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGIES AND INTELLIGENCE

Disruptive technologies are known throughout the private sector for the chaos they create when they appear. They create a new market only to destroy an old one. These same technologies can have a similar effect in the intelligence community. The invention of the camera allowed the discipline of IMINT, the invention of nuclear weapons emphasized the importance of MASINT (seismic and radiological detection), and most recently the Internet has created the realm of cyberspace in which intelligence officers can operate.

The Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) that some of these technologies bring have the biggest impact on intelligence. In the case of the Internet it is clear that the possibility of cyber-warfare has already brought about changes in the way the military operates (i.e. the creation of Cyber Command, the hacking of US drones). For the intelligence community, this new technology has caused many former practices to be questioned and new methods explored.

Some have commentedthat these constant technological breakthroughs have placed the intelligence community in a Sisyphean struggle.[12]The intelligence community is endlessly challenged with counter-balancing technologies or tactics with these disruptive technologies. This view, however, is not entirely accurate.

While it may appear that the intelligence community is always in a battle against technology’s unrelenting progress that is not the true nature of the relationship. It is a much more dynamic relationship where the intelligence community can be involved in guiding the creation and implementation of the disruptive tech. A good example is the Global Positioning System. It was a disruptive technology that created a whole new way of not only locating specific spots on the Earth, but controlling unmanned aircraft, but it was guided from its beginning by the US government. It therefore found its place rather easily in the intelligence community.

As disruptive as disruptive technologies can be they almost always have a net benefit on society, including the intelligence community. They may throw organizations into flux temporarily, but they always come out the better for it (even if only slightly). It is also important to note that disruptive technologies are not the only form of technological progress. In fact, more often than not technology develops through slow incremental changes, which do not pose the counter-balancing problem assumed to come from revolutionary technologies. To say that the intelligence community is bound in a Sisyphean struggle against technology is to completely disregard the overall benefit brought by technological progress.

HOPE FOR THE FUTURE

It may seem at times that technology complicates the business of intelligence due to its high cost and disruptive nature, but for all its faults technology has given us so much. The plethora of information technology has given us may have made the job of the intelligence officer more difficult in the short run, but in the end, once new methods are perfected for working in this new environment, intelligence will be more complete.

Technology, by its nature, is not a foe of intelligence; it constantly seeks to improve upon the old. The problem lies with our own ability to handle it. I am optimistic the “deafening” problem will be ameliorated over the next decade since technology itself is shouldering some of the burden (new search algorithms, data aggregators, etc.). Endeavors like In-Q-Tel have already shown success and should continue to spur innovation for the intelligence community. The financial restraints on technology cannot truly be circumvented, but I believe that if more emphasis was placed on slow evolution of technologies versus the flashy revolutions a stable and economical rate of progress could be achieved.

The largest hurdle facing the relationship between intelligence and technology involves reforming the way policymakers and intelligence officials communicate. The lack of focused requirements is the biggest detriment to technological progress and causes wasteful endeavors that end up making the job of the intelligence officer that much more difficult. Reform also comes slow and with much difficulty to bureaucracies, but it is not an impossible barrier.

Technology has and will continue to be the friend of intelligence collection and analysis well into the foreseeable future. Embracing technology is the only way to move forward, but it must be placed within the proper structure and dealt with accordingly.