TransTracker 's Bookmarks tagged intelligence →  View Popular

Since BRIDGE is Dan's brainchild, I've asked him to convey its purpose and function:

BRIDGE is designed to enable crowd-sourcing of intelligence applications--following the iPhone AppStore model--by providing a low barrier-to-entry platform to stimulate innovation and enable analysts to discover next generation capabilities that have value to their mission.

BRIDGE takes the Wiki model which enabled end users to easily contribute textual content en masse, and extends it to technology providers, enabling them to contribute technologies that enhance the intelligence mission in a matter of days. It is important to emphasize BRIDGE is not a Web2.0 tool, it is a low barrier to entry environment where promising Web2.0 tools can be placed - and analysts can use them to uncover their value prior to acquisition.

Since BRIDGE exposes key web services that emulate the mission environment, promising tools can be plucked from BRIDGE and quickly integrated into classified environments. This enables providers to develop against these endpoints in an unclassified setting, get feedback from users enabling shorter development spirals, mash-up new combinations of services, and dramatically reduce the time it takes to transition software to the mission setting. BRIDGE uses a "perpetual beta" model giving users an EARLY look at technologies--and a chance to provide feedback while they are still maturing.

Another unique characteristic of BRIDGE is that it provides an environment for Analytic Outreach--a place where IC analysts can reach out to expertise elsewhere in federal, state, and local government, in academia, and industry. New communities of interest can form quickly in BRIDGE through the “web of trust” access control model--access to minds outside the intelligence community creates an analytic force multiplier.

Hot Grinds



• HotGrinds serves as an evidence-based structured discourse forum at the crossroads of a wiki, a collaboration platform and social network


• Semantic search, expertise identification, and management overviews of debate provide greater collective awareness and enhanced collaboration

insular, stove-piped work is being replaced with barrier-busting exchanges of informed viewpoints across the globe. Here’s how the NIC authors break it down:

Global Trends 2010: “… relied exclusively on expertise within the U.S. Intelligence Community.”

Global Trends 2015: “…engaged more numerous and more varied groups of non-US Government experts, most of whom were American citizens.”

Global Trends 2020: “…we greatly expanded the participation of non-American specialists by convening six seminars on five continents.”

Global Trends 2025: “In addition to increasing still more the participation of non-USG experts from the United States and abroad to develop the framework for the current study, we shared several drafts with participants via the Internet and a series of discussion sessions across the US and in several other countries.”

Secure Computing’s third-quarter Internet Threat Report
predicts that 2009 will see an increase in politically motivated
attacks such as those experienced already in Estonia and Georgia
(the nation, not the state).

However, for the time being, the surreptitious theft of data
from information technology systems, as Chinese hackers are alleged
to have done in this country, is likely to remain a more serious
threat.

Cyber attacks against infrastructure haven’t risen to the
level of real warfare or terrorism. Although the Estonian attacks,
suspected of having been carried out by Russian partisans in a
dispute between the nations, interfered with some online commerce,
denial-of-service attacks seldom have more than nuisance value in
disrupting some one-way communications from Web sites.

Studies indicate that the wholesale disruption of systems is
more difficult than often thought, and as systems become more
diverse, interconnected and complex, bringing them down only
becomes more difficult.

For the foreseeable future, Internet warfare is likely to remain
the domain of spooks operating under the radar rather than cyber
attackers carpet-bombing our infrastructure.

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.

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.

The revolution is coming