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Changes

My friend Matt (the other, more taciturn GroupIntel blogger) and I envisioned GroupIntel as a multi-faceted, multi-user environment for discussions and analysis on intelligence and security-related issues. For those who are not aware GI also includes a Wiki and discussion forum. Participation environment-wide has been small but productive and anyone (national, state, local or otherwise) who takes the time to register is welcome to join the fun.

While I’ve loved monopolizing the GI blog I should have let it revert back to its original purpose long ago, so I’ve gotten off of the shared soapbox and found my own at Haft of the Spear (drop me a note if you need me to explain it to you).

Old posts (hopefully with old comments) will be slowly migrated to the new site over the next week or so. Links to pals old and new will be added in time and comments/trackbacks will be on as long as the spam stays away.

GI will still be around though future content will adjust to reflect this latest change. For the pure, unadulterated blather and gibberish you’ve come to enjoy, please bookmark or subscribe to the new site.

Thanks,

Michael

Politics or P*** Poor Performance?

Recent U.S. intelligence analyses of North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs were flawed and the lack of clarity on the issue hampered U.S. diplomatic efforts to avert the underground blast detected Sunday, according to Bush administration officials.

Some recent secret reports stated that Pyongyang did not have nuclear arms and until recently was bluffing about plans for a test, according to officials who have read the classified assessments.

The analyses in question included a National Intelligence Estimate a consensus report of all U.S. spy agencies produced several months ago and at least two other classified reports on North Korea produced by senior officials within the office of the Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte.

The officials said there were as many as 10 failures related to intelligence reporting on North Korean missile tests and the suspected nuclear test that harmed administration efforts to deal with the issue.

I’m not quite sure what to make of this. The obvious answer is a pre-emptive strike against any potential political games coming from inside the IC after we leave a few smoking holes in the NK landscape. I’ll leave that discussion aside for now.

More importantly I think it should demonstrate to anyone and everyone that because we don’t know a whole lot about what is going on behind Kim’s curtain we’re probably going to be making some bad pol-mil decisions in the near future. I mentioned this on the tube and in a previous post: we don’t do hard targets very well. Do we try hard enough? Given the propensity to avoid long-term, risk-heavy activities I’d submit that we do not. If that’s the best we’re going to do then the result is that we force ourselves to make decisions with more “unknown unknowns” than we should.

On whom should we affix blame? The analysts can only work with the data they have and as stated previously they don’t have much; the DO mandarins, who didn’t get to where they are by getting PNG’ed; the Executive who doesn’t provide sufficient motivation and topcover; or the Representatives who stand ready to sacrifice the former and lambaste the latter no matter what the outcome?

Update: Spook86 prefers the obvious route (can’t say I blame him).

Who is really sharing intel?

Criminals covet your identity data like never before. What’s more, they’ve perfected more ways to access your bank accounts, grab your Social Security number and manipulate your identity than you can imagine.

Want proof? Just visit any of a dozen or so thriving cybercrime forums, websites that mirror the services of Amazon.com and the efficiencies of eBay. Criminal buyers and sellers convene at these virtual emporiums to wheel and deal in all things related to cyberattacks — and in the fruit of cyberintrusions: pilfered credit and debit card numbers, hijacked bank accounts and stolen personal data.

A long article of little interest to non-technical, non-INFOSEC folks, but it highlights something important that most people overlook and that is the fact that the bad guys have got the intel/knowledge sharing thing down pat. Their world is fast, dynamic and open; perishable data gets around quickly to those who need it, lessons-learned are disseminated in near-real-time, and people are open and trust each other. Whether you’re talking about HLS networks or ISACs or the IC the verdict is in: when it comes to sharing intelligence the bad guys are doing what the good guys are still mostly talking about.

IC.blogspot.com

Something Matt and I have been pimping for a while now (and the primary motivation behind the GroupIntel concept) covered here (up through ZenPundit, across 1 Raindrop, nothing but Mayfield).

Of course we are brought back to reality by Kent’s Imperative and from insights provided by my own sources who point out that there is the on-the-job blogging and then there is the “real” work that has to be done (lest you thought pin-headed Cold War GS-15s were going to let the whippersnappers get away with not filling out production worksheets and and checking off boxes on their COLISEUM taskers).

All things considered there has been a fair amount of progress, but we’ve got a long way to go before the IC can turn on an issue a’la Rathergate (your personal politics aside) or Green Helmet Man and produce comparable results in the same timeframe.

Up The Academy

An interesting proposition on the radio today spurred on by this story, about the need for a National Security Academy set up along the lines of West Point or Annapolis. Similar service obligation but a focus on the skill sets required by IC agencies.

If I am not mistaken the recent intel reform legislation talked of providing scholarships and setting standards for intelligence education within the community, but there is nothing that suggests there was any intent to create an institution along the lines of what was mentioned.

As it stands now the only IC agency that I’m aware of that confers degrees is DIA’s Joint Military Intelligence College (BA, MA). The Kent School does not issue degrees though for all practical purposes you get college-level instruction on the analytic discipline. NSA’s National Cryptologic School courses run the gamut from very basic technical classes to graduate-certificate-level knowledge about related disciplines (you can get an NSA-focused JMIC degree via a joint program). All the Service graduate schools and NDU of course offer programs in broader national security studies, as do a few universities. The only physical college I’m aware of that has a full-blown intelligence studies program is Mercyhurst and in cyberspace it is APU. Myriad schools offer courses in terrorism related studies.

The question remains: is a National Security Academy - a brick and mortar presence - the way to go? I’m inclined to say “no” but I’m open to your opinions.

First of all, we’re talking about Uncle Sam here, so even if they got things in gear now you’re still looking at 3-6 years before you find an institution you can take over, co-opt, or break ground for. Then you’ve got to hire faculty and staff, you’ve got all sorts of overhead to deal with and perhaps most importantly: you’ve got a counterintelligence nightmare on your hands. Granted, not everyone who graduates is going to get into the IC or other national security organs, but a lot are. As a public institution, with Web sites and email addresses and year books - every FIS in the world is going to have a roster of potential exploits in their hands. There is also the question of what the heck you do with your life if you don’t pass the voodoo box test or there is a hiring freeze and you are suddenly unemployable in your chosen profession? Do you have to pay The Man back for the book learnin’ he gave you? Does the gov’t write off that class year?

My information may be dated, but last time I checked graduates of the Service academies were among the least likely to put in 20 years. By and large ROTC graduates stay longer and climb higher in the ranks. Part of that is due to the larger number of new officers that come from the ROTC ranks, but I suspect that there are other dynamics involved. The same would probably be true for NS Academy grads, who can not only work for Uncle Sam, but for all those bandits trying to sell products and services to him.

I think VDH had it right when he called on the Cold War Russian-Studies approach. Have the gov’t come up with a core curriculum and areas of emphasis/majors, provide some funding, and let the academic marketplace do the heavy lifting. In the end you’ll be drawing from a much larger pool of candidates, the FIS’s have to work harder, and if there is a RIF because world peace has spontaneously broken out, well, its no skin off Uncle Sam’s nose.

More on intel education in this Kent’s Imperative post (scroll down).

**** or Get off the Pot (Updates)

Last February, top F.B.I. officers from across the nation gathered in a high-security auditorium for the latest plan to reinvent the crime-fighting agency to take on terrorism.

Philip Mudd, who had just joined the bureau from the rival Central Intelligence Agency, was pitching a program called Domain Management, designed to get agents to move beyond chasing criminal cases and start gathering intelligence.

Drawing on things like commercial marketing software and the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping without warrants, the program is supposed to identify threats. Mr. Mudd displayed a map of the San Francisco area, pocked with data showing where Iranian immigrants were clustered — and where, he said, an F.B.I. squad was “hunting.”

Some F.B.I. officials found Mr. Mudd’s concept vague and the implied ethnic targeting troubling. How were they supposed to go “hunting” without colliding with the Constitution? Would the C.I.A. man, whom some mocked privately as Rasputin, take the bureau back to the domestic spying scandals of the 1960’s? And why neglect promising cases to, in Mr. Mudd’s words, “search for the unknown”?

The skepticism is just one sign of unfinished business at the bureau. Five years after the Sept. 11 attacks spurred a new mission, F.B.I. culture still respects door-kicking investigators more than deskbound analysts sifting through tidbits of data. The uneasy transition into a spy organization has prompted criticism from those who believe that the bureau cannot competently gather domestic intelligence, and others, including some insiders, who fear that it can.

[...]

After interviewing more than 60 intelligence officials for a new book on counterterrorism, Amy Zegart, of the University of California, Los Angeles, reached a dismal verdict on the F.B.I.

“If you look at, for example, the four key ingredients for counterterrorism success — agents, analysts, managers and computers — the F.B.I. is struggling to get the basics right on all of them,” Ms. Zegart said. “New agents still get more time for vacation than they do for counterterrorism training. Analysts are still treated as glorified secretaries.”

I don’t know why the thought didn’t come to me earlier (alcoholic blackout?) but reading this latest account of FBI fits and starts as it tries to become both an intelligence and counterterrorism agency on top of a law enforcement agency I am had to ask myself: why are we spending so much time trying to retrofit the Bureau when it is painfully clear that it does not want to be anything more than it is?

There are any number of texts explaining why the FBI can do the domestic intelligence (in the most benign sense) job and the CT job; and an equal number of arguments against those positions. So far proponents of the former have won out, but judging by the comments made by Bureau staff in the first few paragraphs of the story it seems to me that they are not much interested in doing what is necessary to fulfill intelligence and security needs. Note that they talk a good game about how they’re improving in the intelligence and CT fields, but they’ve either driven out anyone who tries to make changes or stick whatever executive short-timer they can into what is arguably one of the most important jobs in the agency. Nobody who is serious about a mission has seven bosses in five years.

The answer, at least the cynical DC answer, is that while they may not be interested in carrying out the missions, they are MORE interested in NOT letting anyone else do them. Give up the missions - quarter-hearted attempts though they may be - and you give up money and power and no good, self-serving bureaucrat (no pun intended) is going to do that.

If the Executive were serious about homeland security and serious about making sure we don’t have to fight terrorists here, there would be a strong and decisive move to help the Bureau unburden itself from the domestic intelligence and counterterrorism missions. Spin it off, give the charter to someone else, anything but leaving it in the useless limbo it is in now.

Update: Who says I don’t have friends?

Update II: It gets worse.

A Rare Feel-Good

Randi Greenberg, information systems security manager for the Homeland Security Department’s U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology program, has the task of securing information collected for the program. That is no small order. Other DHS bureaus — such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and Citizenship and Immigration Services — contribute information to US-VISIT.

Nothing pressing or significant, just a shout-out to a grad school classmate done good.

CIA CIO Gets Bump Up

CIA director Michael Hayden has upgraded the profile of his organization’s CIO to provide a direct-reporting relationship between the top technology official and his own office.

Smart, and recognition that an agency in the information business needs to have their “information officer” near the top of the pyramid.

Trying to Get Cu-ber Right

Ever since President Fidel Castro was sidelined for what was said to be abdominal surgery last July, Cuban officials have maintained that the country’s leader will return to his post. … But U.S. officials tell TIME that many in the U.S. government are now convinced that Castro, 80, has terminal cancer and will never return to power.

I was not a big Cuba tracker, but from what I am led to believe we’ve never got Cuba right. Doesn’t help that you have folks like this operating in the system.

Cuba is illustrative of something I pointed out a couple weeks ago at AEI. All our serious targets are hard targets and we don’t do hard targets very well (ergo we’re really good at easy stuff). Cuba is just a few miles away, we’ve got Cuban ex-pats coming out our ears and the country is still almost as elusive as North Korea or China. If we can’t get Cuba right the probability that we’ll get even harder targets right is pretty low. That means more risk-taking, more original thinking, or when it comes down to hard-decision-making-time: more ambiguity.

As Well They Should

House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Peter Hoekstra is still pressing U.S. intelligence agencies to look for possible weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—even though intelligence officials say further work is unlikely to reveal anything new about Saddam’s WMD programs.

Isikoff and Hosenball at it again. Read if you like but the song remains the same; we’ve found bits and pieces, the Duelfer Report is sacrosanct, and attempts at due dilligence are just political maneuvers. Of course left out are questions like “why shouldn’t we be suspicious when items that should have been destroyed still around?” and ”who judges any state of affairs by only looking at 10% of available data?” Anonymous insiders also make an appearance, poo-pooing any further work in this area. Probably the same ones that used to stiff-arm those of us who argued the captured media would reveal a lot more than interrogated prisoners and inspections would. We were right then, but don’t let success get in the way of cut-and-run.

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