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New Forum Member Poll

If you are a GI Forum member I’ve got a new poll up about the potential for near term attacks in the US. If you’re not a member please consider signing up and joining the fun.

Terrorism on the Wire

Evan Kohlmann of the CT Blog steps into my wheelhouse:

The United States is gradually losing the online war against terrorists. Rather than aggressively pursuing its enemies, the U.S. government has adopted a largely defensive strategy, the centerpiece of which is an electronic Maginot Line that supposedly protects critical infrastructure (for example, the computer systems run by agencies such as the Department of Defense and the Federal Aviation Administration) against online attacks. In the meantime, terrorists and their sympathizers, unhindered by bureaucratic inertia and unchallenged by Western governments, have reorganized their operations to take advantage of the Internet’s more prosaic properties. […]

To counter terrorists, the U.S. government must learn how to monitor their activity online, in the same way that it keeps tabs on terrorists in the real world. Doing so will require a realignment of U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies, which lag behind terrorist organizations in adopting information technologies. At present, unfortunately, senior counterterrorism officials refuse even to pay lip service to the need for such reforms. That must change — and fast…

Caveat: I am not a Foreign Affairs subscriber so my comments are limited to the 500 word preview and what I remember of Evan’s comments on NPR this past weekend. Color me irresponsible if you wish.

Lashing together the follies of the cyber-hypsters and the presumption that the government is not already doing what he suggests is a little naïve. It is a basic tenant of intelligence collection that you drive your adversary off of channels you have no or little control to one that you “own” and it can be argued that given the flow of Internet traffic around the world , the capabilities of our intelligence agencies (in particular one in Maryland), and recent reporting about online surveillance activities, it is a little hard to believe that anyone thinks we are not already doing exactly what the author is recommending. If nothing else one need only note the rending of hair and gnashing of teeth that takes place when someone discovers that terrorist-related Web site is hosted by a US firm “and the government is doing nothing about it!” to catch the hint that maybe, just maybe, we have good reason to keep those sites alive.

I don’t mean to belittle the risks associated with “cyber” terrorism. Everyone I know – practicing experts, not talking heads - is in the “cyber-as-supplement” camp. As someone who has been involved in these issues to one degree or another for many years, the best description of the situation that might be offered is “the concern is real, the threat is exaggerated.” With the ‘Net becoming a primary source of information around the world, it makes little sense to take down or adversely impact the very medium that allows, to channel Brian Jenkins, a lot of people to watch but has yet to cause a lot of people to die.

I also don’t want to give the impression that the work being carried out by the folks at SITE or Internet Haganah is hurting CT efforts – sometimes you gotta send people to /dev/null – but there is a balance to be achieved that is hard for many to accept.

Maybe it is unfair for someone who was neck deep in the “cyber terrorism” portfolio to level such criticism, but given the age we live in I’d rather improve the baseline of knowledge about this area, not perpetuate the idea that Uncle Sam is an analog basket case. Dude, let’s grab a beer.

Politics or Prudent?

There is a big difference between politicizing intellience and pointing out that there may be precious little intelligence to politicize. Fred certainly has his views, but whatever they may be the fact remains that US intelligence has a hell of a time going after hard targets like Iran. Identifying gaps and - in light of post Iraqi Freedom discoveries - pointing out that thinking ‘worst-case’ or (my appologies) out-of-the-box is not out of line. If I may be so bold, it is that kind of agressive challenge that has long been lacking in IC oversight. The standard drill is to come over every so often to look at what all the money bought; I don’t ever recall anyone asking me how right I was or why - if I was constantly wrong - I couldn’t do my job. As we attempt to deal with an aspiring nuclear (war) capable nation hell-bent on wiping the earth clean of infidels, we ought to be welcoming these challenges now, so that we don’t have to have the discussion about “how come you never . . .” later.

Editorial Judgment

If Web readers in Britain were intrigued by the headline “Details Emerge in British Terror Case,” which sat on top of The New York Times’s home page much of yesterday, they would have been disappointed with a click.

“On advice of legal counsel, this article is unavailable to readers of nytimes.com in Britain,” is the message they would have seen. “This arises from the requirement in British law that prohibits publication of prejudicial information about the defendants prior to trial.”

UK laws about publishing information that might bias a jury are apparently sacrosanct but US laws about protecting classified information, eh, not so much.

HLS: Not Serious IXX

The federal research agency in charge of countering emerging terrorist threats such as liquid explosives is so hobbled by poor leadership, weak financial management and inadequate technology that Congress is on the verge of cutting its budget in half.

The Homeland Security Department’s Science and Technology Directorate has struggled with turnover, reorganizations and raids on its budget since it was established in 2003, according to independent scientists, department officials and senior members of Congress.[…]

But with DHS’s well-documented start-up problems, the S&T Directorate has been thinly staffed and deprived of money. Its reorganization was put on the back burner by Secretary Michael Chertoff, who took over in March 2005. Meanwhile, its management problems sapped the confidence of administration officials and congressional funders, analysts said.

The resulting turmoil has swept up its leaders. Navy Rear Adm. Jay M. Cohen, its fourth permanent or acting head since 2003, came onto the job this month, after the London plot became public.

In February, the Bush administration announced it would carve $315 million from the agency’s $1.3 billion budget to create a new radiological and nuclear detection program. The agency’s previous director, Charles E. McQueary, decided he had accomplished all he could and resigned.

When you can’t keep a guy in the head shed for at least a year, things aren’t broken, they’re crushed. This is a shame because a good S&T directorate can do amazing things. Going Ginsu on the budget  won’t kill the directorate, but should force DHS leadership to pay attention to the geeks for a while and provide the focus necessary to get things back on track in the future. In the mean time however don’t think that the TSA striptease is going to stop any time soon.

Brainstorming Intel Reform (anyone under 40 attend?)

(Pardon the long post, but after week of fishing I’ve got a jonesing . . .)

Senior U.S. intelligence officials meeting in Denver on Monday (8/21) revealed new measures to try to fix the nation’s ailing intelligence system, which insiders say leaves the government overloaded with data but unable to answer key questions.

One leader compared the 16-agency U.S. intelligence community to 8-year-old soccer players bunching around the ball with much of the field uncovered. That could mean potential deadly misreads on terrorism, Iraq, Iran, China and North Korea.

U.S. intelligence collectors “have become vacuum cleaners on steroids,” said Thomas Fingar, deputy director of national intelligence, at the opening of the four-day Information Sharing Conference.

Yet intelligence analysts - 50 percent of them with less than five years of experience - are mired in uncertainty over who should have access to what, Fingar said.

Find me the honest analyst that maintains that sentiment and I’ll show you a political animal angling for SES. The only people falsely fretting about what to share are those with budget dollar signs in the eyes and dreams of building their own ricebowl or taking over someone elses. Come on Tom, you know how it works.

The result is vast amounts of unanalyzed information that “is just data. We are awash in data,” he said, calling for a system-wide revolution.

“Otherwise, we become a very expensive irrelevance. … If we don’t believe it is doable, we all ought to resign,” he told several hundred conference participants at the Hyatt Regency Denver at Colorado Convention Center.

Among the reform measures [being planned]: 

• Launching an experimental “Wikipedia”-style approach to a major intelligence challenge - understanding the situation in Nigeria - in which all analysts across the 16 intelligence agencies are invited to contribute what they know, as the public does at the online free-encyclopedia site Wikipedia. The idea is to see how much can be learned across agency lines, not just among analysts with Nigeria as part of their portfolio.
• Creating a new standard format for intelligence reports that all agencies would use so that every analyst in the intelligence community can have access to all the information. The new format would give place, time and a rating on source credibility, stripping away pages of routing information and source details that can impede analysis.
• Mobilizing a “geek squad” to persuade veteran analysts to embrace new technology. For example, rather than jot notes in margins of intelligence report printouts and then file them away, veterans adept at asking the right questions would jot notes electronically and then file the annotated documents in a common- access electronic folder.
• Building a database listing all analysts and their expertise so leaders can know who does what. Then they can form teams across agency boundaries. An estimated 100,000 people work in the U.S. intelligence community, the bulk of them in the Defense Department.
• Assigning analysts at two agencies to answer the same question, such as an assessment of Iraq’s new government, with one team using widely available open-source information and the other using classified material. [...]

God, where to start . . .

The intel cycle is of course the root of most of the evils here. People who harp on the gatekeeping that goes on in the MSM would stroke out if they were aware of the hoops one has to jump through to ask a simple question and get back an answer. Things are so slow you might not know you have a chance to ask a question until after the opportunity is gone. Culling collection and production management staff and building a “marketplace” for tasking and response that puts collectors and analysts closer together is a start. Build in Ebay-style rankings and you’ve got both your refined collection-production cycle and a mechanism to evaluate performance at the end of the year.

Moving to a blogging environment cuts out the frivolous system of hardcopy, glossy color production and the support staff that keeps it all alive. Not that we don’t need editors (the Weekly Standard staff is chuckling as they read this) but when you can put your assessments out in real- or near-real time why be forced to slip customers a bootleg copy while they wait a month or more  for the “official” version? NIC meetings? Analytic exchanges? Ridiculous when everyone is boucing ideas and vetting thoughts 24/7. Political manipulation? Unlikely when all your work is “public.” Build in a Digg-style rating system and you’ve got not only a way to push the best analysis to the front, but (once again) a way to evaluate performance at the end of the year.

The Wiki-idea is another good start and should have been implemented much earlier. That they’re merely dabling with Nigeria (not a ‘nothing’ problem but not exactly front-page material) is telling. There is no reason why they should implement it community-wide now for all subjects, save for fear that those pesky aforementioned gatekeepers would be cut out of the loop.

The new report format idea is a make-work snow-job. Crafting a script to strip away all admin overhead in reports is a trivial exercise. In fact if I’m not mistaken I think I did the very thing in roughly ‘94 with my scary TA-270 skillz.

Frankly I don’t put a lot of stock in the “geek squad” idea. Look, I knew guys who still worked with pencil, paper, magnifying glass (yes, he was old) and guhor stick when the IBM XT was the standard computer workstation in the IC. In a sense things haven’t gotten better for that crew; it has gotten worse. By all means tap their expertise, but don’t burn a lot of cash thinking you’re going to turn them into power users. Retire them, put them in an IC Reserve, and let them do what they really want to do: dig deep, think big thoughts, write down big ideas.

The expertise database is another BS suggestion. Find me the agency that doesn’t have one already, and let’s not forget the data call for just such info that came down in, what, ‘03? There is also the NIPF procress, which puts all the relevent SMEs together several times a year. It isn’t a matter of not knowing who to call, but breaking down the barriers that preclude their effective cooperation.

The “Burundi Experiment” where OSINT competes with other -INTs is nice theater but that battle was fought and won. A more significant step forward would be to require that every assessment start with a base of OSINT and a sprinkling of other -INTs when they are necessary to complete the picture. Not only would this show how cheaply we could run the IC, it helps facilitate all that State and Local-level sharing everyone keeps saying they’re going to do, and makes declassification/downgrading for wider public consumption that much easier when the next controversy comes down the pike (like you know it will).

Anyone Listening?

A shameless plug for my old boss:

 

Still, Donavan Lewis, chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s threat analysis division, wants the United States to think more about long-term trends.

“China has shifted its dependence away from the United States to [countries such as Malaysia and South Korea], while our dependence on them has grown,” he said during a Defense conference in Salt Lake City in May. “We’ve got to adjust our thinking, our calculus about how we put together a system of systems.”

He admits to being worried about the possibility that “subversive functionality could be embedded” in technology.

“The Defense acquisition community is not used to thinking of itself as part of computer security,” he said.

A common refrain that has not gained a lot of traction despite being proven right again and again and again. Less a question of a falling tree making a sound as it is a platoon of woodsmen wearing ear plugs. Fair enough, but something to keep in mind the next time someone screams “intelligence failure!”

Technology, you seductress

JackBe, provider of enterprise solutions that integrate SOA and AJAX to deliver the next generation of rich Internet applications, announced Phase I delivery of a Web-based intelligence briefing solution for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Powered by JackBe’s NQ Suite AJAX software platform, the application will be showcased at the DNI’s “Information Sharing Conference & Technology Exposition, Intelink and Beyond: Dare to Share” at Table #906.

The initial implementation, called “Overwatch,” consists of a personalizable, desktop-like intelligence asset dashboard or ‘webtop’ developed using JackBe’s NQ Suite AJAX development platform, and a middle tier that discovers and displays intelligence data sources without any additional front-end or back-end development required. The entire solution is accessible through a standard Web browser, with no proprietary downloads or plug-ins required.

Man, almost makes a brother want to apply for his old job (though with everyone leaving who would I b!tch to over coffee?

This is what I meant below about “what works” and dreams. Functional, familiar, and most importantly: deliverable.

Don’t Hold Your Breath

I can’t help myself . . .

A tiny software company has been tapped by the new U.S. spy chief to lead a “tremendous leap forward,” in technology and policy that will enable the sharing of sensitive information between intelligence agencies and state and local law enforcement and other first responders.

The project aims to design and build a sophisticated platform that will allow counter-terrorism information — including personal data about Americans — to be securely shared in a variety of ways that reflect and respect the different rules in place in different agencies to protect individual privacy and information security.

“The aim is to create a trusted environment using the public Internet,” said Charles Jennings, co-founder and CEO of the software company, Portland, Ore.-based Swan Island Networks, Inc. [...] 

[DNI Official Russel] said the project was an example of “spiral development” where, instead of the usual linear progression from requirement, to development and then to purchase, prototypes are developed as requirements evolve.

“Policy and technology are being developed in tandem,” he said. But he acknowledged that the project could only be research at this stage. “You have to define the (policy) parameters before you can engage in significant (procurement) activity,” he said.

In the name of all that is holy, do we really need to go through this nightmare again? Please don’t make me recycle any number of past posts about the dramas associated with gov’t and in particular IC IT projects. Google “NSA” and “Siobhan Gorman” and you’ll get the picture.  I hear publicly and privately that Meyerrose is moving forward smartly in this area, but based on this description we’re in for more of the same. So much fancy and expensive work associated with these projects, when a strong fusion of existing technology provides all anyone could want. Hell, right now any number of people in the field are sharing “sensitive information” between each other w/o all the overhead . . . and not for nothing, but we tried to do this behind the walls in really trusted areas and it flew like a lead zeppelin. I’m not saying “we tried it once and it failed so forget it,” I am saying that there are dreams and there are things that work; given what is at stake can’t we focus on what works?

Post Vacation Catch-Up

For those of an Ichthyological bent, the scores as of EENT Friday were:

Walleyes 0, Me 1
Largemouth Bass 0, Me 1
Smallmouth Bass 0, Me 3
Pumpkinseeds 0, Me 4
Perch 0, Me 2

And I noticed while I was gone that:

The Army has figured out that there is more to Jean Larteguy’s poem than another piece of paper to clutter up the orderly room bulletin board.

One of the last victims related to Able Danger finally learns his fate.

Speaking of ignored and untapped pools of valuable data, Regime of Terror has scored a nice interview with someone else who doesn’t think HARMONY is full of falafel recipes.

In a rare moment of foresight the Pentagon has apparently figured out that shining a light on the dark continent just might be worthwhile after all.

More as early as I can tomorrow (in particular the DNI meeting in CO) but there is a van to unpack . . .

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