Broadcast Television Tools to Help Intelligence Analysts Wade Through Data

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is preparing to deploy a suite of tools that will help war commanders sift through live and recorded video quickly to pinpoint key clips and highlight information with the ease of sports broadcasters. The system is part of a broader agency effort to establish an intelligence network that will allow analysts in operations centers and troops on the battlefield to find pertinent archival video and associated information no matter who collected the data or where it might be stored.

“The comparison we like to make is to ESPN, or CNN, or MSNBC,” said Charlie Morrison, director of business development at Lockheed Martin Information Systems and Global Solutions. The company is the prime contractor for the system. Former intelligence officers say the video analysis tool would be a drastic improvement over the current process, which is an antiquated “hunt-and-correlate” method that takes too long and often leaves analysts drowning in data.

The Defense Department flies hundreds of sensors over war zones to collect surveillance video. NGA, which has responsibility for archiving the imagery coming off Air Force Predators and other aircraft, wants to improve how it provides that data to ground troops. Intelligence analysts characterize their daily task of wading through hours of footage as searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack. It can take up to a week to find a specific event embedded in 20 million minutes of video. Once that data is located, they encounter additional hurdles to send it forward to troops on the ground.

The suite of commercial-based analysis tools, part of the NGA’s National System for Geospatial-Intelligence Video Services, will compress the time it takes to go through the process, officials said. “What this will do is take the video that you have and make it more accessible, more discoverable and more useable,” said Joseph A. Smith, a retired military intelligence officer who is now the technical executive for the sensor assimilation division in NGA’s acquisition directorate.

This could have applications for law enforcement as well as the military so will be well worth keeping an eye on. Sifting though hours of footage on riots, industrial burglaries and other video surveillance situations is a time-consuming and exacting task which could use some technological assistance.

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Cargo security analysis: bringing intelligence to bear

Intelligence must be at the root of any effective cargo security regime, but there is a need for certificated systems capable of screening whole cargo pallets and large items. That is the view of the International Air Transport Association, which on 2 November opened its security-focused AVSEC World conference in Frankfurt - just days after intelligence-led security checks on a UPS aircraft in the UK and a FedEx Express facility in Dubai uncovered PETN explosives in packages originating in Yemen. The message from providers of screening systems, meanwhile, is that the technologies required to ensure cargo security are available, and what is lacking is a global standard to govern their use. Yet IATA's view on the primacy of intelligence appears to be a point of consensus.

In his address to AVSEC World, IATA director general Giovanni Bisignani argued that cargo security required co-operation between governments and industry in investment, processes, technology and risk assessment. For example, the association sees potential for its e-freight programme - a paperless documentation system launched as a cargo analogue of its e-ticketing initiative - to generate data that could be used to manage security "intelligently and efficiently without compromising speed". Industry's role is not confined to airlines, stresses Bisignani. "The entire supply chain from the manufacturer to the airport has a responsibility to secure shipments," he says. He sees the UK and USA as "well advanced on supply-chain solutions", with the former nation operating a regulated agent system and the latter a certificated cargo-screening programme, in which responsibilities are split between shippers, forwarders and manufacturers. IATA aims to "help all governments develop a similar approach".

This article was written for Flightglobal.com by Niall O'Keeffe. Flightglobal.com is a specialized online news and information website related to the aviation and aerospace industries.

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The Uses and Misuses of Intelligence in Four US Wars

President Harry S. Truman created the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947 to ensure that the policy community would have access to independent intelligence analysis that was free of the policy advocacy of the Department of State and the Department of Defense. The CIA's most important analytic mission was the production of national intelligence estimates (NIEs) and assessments that tracked significant political and military developments and provided premonitory intelligence on looming threats and confrontations.

One gauge for measuring the success of the CIA's intelligence analysis is to measure the Agency's performance before and during four controversial wars: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Three presidents (Truman, Eisenhower, and Johnson) did not interfere with the production of intelligence analysis in these crises; two presidents (Nixon and George W. Bush) tried to slant intelligence analysis; and now President Obama is fighting a war without benefit of the estimative capabilities of the intelligence community.

President Truman wanted sensitive intelligence with the bark on, and that is what he and President Dwight Eisenhower got from the CIA during the Korean War. Unfortunately, the CIA made a series of fundamental errors in its judgments, including failures to understand the policies and actions of North Korean leader Kim Il Sung, ascertain the nature of Kim's dialogue with the Soviets and the Chinese, provide strategic warning of Kim's decision to go to war, and anticipate China's entry into the war.

As a result of these failures, President Truman named the first civilian director of the CIA - Allen Dulles - and supported the creation of an elite Office of National Estimates (ONE) under Harvard Professor William Langer, a senior Office of Strategic Services (OSS) analyst during World War II. ONE consisted of two offices, an upper tier known as the Board of National Estimates (BNE), composed of senior government and academic officials, and an estimates staff composed of intelligence professionals who drafted NIE's. ONE quickly became the focal point of the CIA's intelligence analysis until it was abolished in 1973 by CIA director James Schlesinger, who shared the Nixon administration's desire to end ONE's independence and its dominance within the intelligence community.

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Analyst Skills: The Use of Environmental Scanning

Introduction
For the intelligence analyst there are a number of analytical tools that can be used to determine which of all the competing crimes or hazards should be given the most time, or which of all new trends is likely to affect your agency the most. This can result in tactical, operational and strategic plans being implemented to meet those threats. The environmental scan is one of those tools.

What is it?
The environmental scan provides a systematic overview of the external factors that are important to the organisation (or sector) and indicates whether the organisation can influence them or not. In general the factors are classified in factors influencing the demand/need for services (and products), the supply of inputs to the project/organisation concerned, the competition and collaboration and general policy factors. The factors are also classified with respect to the positive (+) or negative (-) influence on the organisation and whether or not the factor can be influenced or just be appreciated (known and understood).

What can you do with it?
Making an environmental scan results in identifying the impact of relevant factors in the entire environment of an organization or sector (such as in Critical Infrastructure Protection). Whereas people often complain as powerless victims about negative factors in their environment, the environmental scan helps you to take action or adapt yourself to your environment. Scanning promotes an active response to positive (opportunities) and compliant factors, and leads to insights how to live with the ‘hard facts’. While the scan is a simple tool, it nevertheless helps to get a comprehensive view of the chief factors, helping to go beyond reacting to scattered observations.

Source
This information comes from sportanddev.org and is available as a PDF from http://assets.sportanddev.org/downloads/environmental_scan.pdf

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