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 as the 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).
1
“The Future of American Intelligence: The Role of science and Technology in Transforming American
Intelligence”; Kevin M. O’Connell; Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, Stanford, California; 2005.
2
“Openness and Espionage”; Nikolai Brusnitsin; Military Publishing House, USSR Ministry of Defense, Moscow;
1990; p.32
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
3
Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy Fourth Edition; Mark M. Lowenthal; CQ Press, Washington, DC; 2009; p. 181
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.
4
“The Future of American Intelligence: The Role of science and Technology in Transforming American
Intelligence”; Kevin M. O’Connell; Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, Stanford, California; 2005.
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.
5
“Spy Drone and Missile Sub Are on Military’s Budget-Cutting List”; Christopher Drew; The New York Times;
January 26th, 2012.
6
“The Oxcart Story”; Thomas P. McIninch; 11/01/89; Unclassified.
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-QTel, 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. InQ-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
7
“Unmanned Ambitions: Next generation of UAS generates interest, but timing is uncertain”; Larry Dickerson;
Aviation Week & Space Technology; January 24/31, 2011.
8
See “Resisting Retirement: the U-2 Dragon Lady soldiers on with a capability no UAV can match”; Chris Pocock;
C4ISR Journal; January/February 2007.
9
“CIA invests in start-ups. The dividend? Technology”; Kevin Maney; USA Today; March 3, 2004.
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
10
Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy Fourth Edition; Mark M. Lowenthal; CQ Press, Washington, DC; 2009; p. 105
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
11
“Intelligence in the 21st Century”; Admiral William A. Owens; American Intelligence Journal; Spring 1999; p. 19
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 cyberwarfare 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 commented that 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.
12
“Arguments for a renewed RMA debate”; Robert Tomes and Peter Dombrowski; National Security Studies
Quarterly 7, no. 3; Summer 2001.
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.