The Revolution in Intelligence Affairs - The Diigo Meta page

• 27 Oct 08
  

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  intelligence new_media social_media

  • Now, the crowd, armed with a variety of speedy communication devices and simple, online tools with which to exploit them, can increasingly outpace the most sophisticated news and intelligence capabilities.
  • However, the changes that modern telecommunications technologies and their associated applications have brought to the world are only the most visible of those that are already affecting intelligence affairs. Three other trends, the ascendency of the “open,” the collapse of the so-called intelligence cycle and the changing perception of intelligence in the public eye, are likely to completely revolutionize intelligence over the next 5-10 years.
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  • • The ascendancy of the “open”
    • the ascendancy of the “open” in intelligence work goes beyond open sources of information. Today, increasingly, intelligence communities around the globe are playing catch-up to the proliferation of open systems. The US intelligence community, for example, announced the development of Intellipedia in 2006, five years after Wikipedia, and only recently publicized its deployment of A-Space, modeled after the highly successful social networking site, MySpace, which went online in 2003.

    • Collaboration, one of the Enterprise Objectives in the first publicly available US National Intelligence Strategy, has been elevated to one of the intelligence community’s “values” in current DNI Mike McConnell’s Vision 2015 document. Furthermore, in the US’s Intelligence Community Directive 205, analysts have been ordered to “leverage outside expertise as part of their work.”

      
      

      Collaboration and outreach imply openness and a variety of easy to use, off the shelf tools to maximize it.

    • The only other option is to retreat back into some sort of slow-moving, inflexible, safe-but-irrelevant organizational structure that remains in a permanent state of reaction to the fast, agile threats surfacing and strengthening daily.
    • The collapse of the intelligence cycle
    • This consensus opinion, that intelligence flows effortlessly from the decisionmaker’s intelligence requirements, to collection of relevant information, to analysis of that information, to production of the intelligence product and then back to the (sometimes) satisfied decisionmaker, falls apart under the slightest pressure. Indeed, no seasoned intelligence professional actually believes that intelligence works, or has ever worked, in this fashion. The actual process is much less linear and much more complex.
    • The changing perceptions of intelligence
    • More and more commercial, nongovernmental and law enforcement enterprises have begun to realize the value of having specialists who can extract meaning from the vast ocean of potentially relevant but unstructured and often unreliable or even deceptive information available.
    • Collecting and analyzing this type of information, especially in the private or law enforcement sectors where traditional anything-goes intelligence activities are illegal or unethical, requires highly trained professionals.

    • Increasingly, however, students attracted to intelligence careers are pursuing those interests in more traditional academic settings.

      
      

      As the demand increases for entry level analysts and other intelligence professionals with these skills and abilities, the supply of colleges and universities offering such specialist programs will also likely increase. Already there are a number of schools offering bachelor's and master's degrees in intelligence studies or applied intelligence in the US and in other countries and this number is set to grow.

    • As the educational infrastructure grows to meet the demand for this new kind of knowledge worker, students will increasingly come to the discipline of intelligence directly, in much the same way they now come to engineering or architecture.
    • Eventually, some educational institutions will begin to offer professional degrees in intelligence studies in much the same way many universities now offer advanced professional degrees in law or education. This normalization of intelligence as a profession will likely become, in turn, a self-reinforcing cycle, dramatically changing the ways ordinary people and institutions see intelligence.

    • The revolution is coming

      
      

    • These four trends – the advances in technology, the growing importance of open sources and open systems, the urgent need for new processes and the changing way people think about intelligence work – are combining to form a powerful force that will revolutionize intelligence over the next 5-10 years.

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