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Data-Sifting For Timely Intelligence Still an Elusive Goal
gyrogeerloose writes "Although there was evidence to suggest that the Japanese navy was up to something in December 1941, that information was scant and came too late. Today's intelligence agencies have another problem altogether — more information than they can deal with, and computers aren't helping as much as one might expect for reasons that will be familiar to Slashdot readers: computers can crunch numbers faster and more accurately than humans, but they're still easily baffled by language as it is commonly used in the real world. Metaphor, slang and simple figures of speech can confuse the best algorithm and, as quoted in the linked article in the San Diego Union-Tribune, 'A system that takes a week to discover a bombing that will occur in a day isn't very useful.'"
We use an expert system to try and figure out what air traffic controllers are doing in a simulation. It is a big system and making it fast means trading alot of memory for speed. Identifying rules to categorize what a subject is doing is hard, especially because you see things that arent' expected when you think about what rules the system can use to identify a category of interaction. Looking at a stream of recording of system events is similar to looking at a stream of intelligence hits like 'subject crossed border x', 'subject a called subject b', 'subject purchased x, y, and z with credit card #k at mid #l with location coordinants (m,n)' The hardest part is that the system wants context but computers don't do context very well. To do it fast, you have to come up with vectors representing context state and rules and accept a certain amount of errors. Data can easily run into the hundreds of gigabytes for only 1 hour of monitoring a self contained experiment. It is fun though...
Which is why human intelligence is much more useful than signal intelligence (data mining).
Exactly. If people can't sift through the mass of information (and misinformation) we have today, what hope does a computer have? Just look at how hard it is to find "The Truth" in todays news, or on the Internet...
In the mid 1990s I watched a video tape of "The Falcon and the Snowman". It is based on a real story of a young man who worked at a sensitive location at TRW (his father was in the FBI and got him the job through the old boy network) which was responsible for sending and receiving CIA cables from overseas. Sometimes, they mixed up the TWXs and they saw cables they weren't supposed to. It was by this that he learned of how the CIA helped in the overthrow the government of Australia in the 1970s, the famous Whitlam constitutional crisis. You can read about it on Wikipedia. It can be debated how effective or ineffective the CIA's efforts were, but they've never denied their involvement, and in fact it was alleged that John Kerr was a CIA asset. Anyhow, so one day in 1997 or 1998 I was sitting at my SunOS x86 workstation at work, back before NAT had become popular, and I decided to surf the web and visit some lefty Australian web sites that discussed the extent of CIA involvement in overthrowing Australia's government in the 1970s. Several days later, I noticed SNMP requests coming into my workstation, scanning for any information about it. If I hadn't set my workstation to log absolutely everything, if it wasn't a UNIX workstation, if I didn't control the Cisco router and access list and so on and so forth I never would have seen it, it would have been a standard SNMP request. In fact, I didn't log for everything and who knows what other queries came to the machine. I saved the request for years but then lost it in a hard drive crash. It came out of a US army intelligence division (.MIL) that was based in Quantico, Virginia and which had some long acronym which I now forget. I thought the military wasn't supposed to monitor the communications of US citizens, but apparently not in this case. Also, as soon as I saw this, I thought of how I had read about Whitlam and the CIA on the Australian web site days before, and that was the only thing I had done on the machine that they might have been interested in. With the Patriot Act etc. who knows what will be happening.
It was strategically the right move.
I think the outcome of World War II demonstrates that it was not the right move strategically. Tactically, perhaps, if the Japanese military planners were expecting the U.S. to enter into war, but it was a strategic disaster for them over the long run.
This ain't rocket surgery.
Intelligence is worthless without an intelligent decision-making process. During the run-up to the second Iraq War, the CIA sent Iraqi-Americans related to Iraqi nuclear scientists to inquire about the status of that country's nuclear program. Thirty Iraqi-Americans were debriefed by the CIA and sent independently of each other. All thirty returned with news that the Iraqi nuclear program had been run into the ground by a relative of Saddam, that the scientists lied about their progress to Saddam to stay in his good graces, and that Saddam was bluffing by denying UN inspectors.
In fact, a few scientists reported that Iraq had no real capability to make nuclear bombs since the early nineties. A crucial centrifuge facility had been destroyed in the first Gulf War. The facility had been unknown to Western intelligence until Saddam's hand-picked boss ordered it to be moved to a safer location. American intelligence detected the activity. They didn't realize that was a nuclear processing facility but knew it was a military target. Thus, the facility was put as a secondary target on the Air Tasking Order designating targets for air bombardment.
One day, a fighter-bomber returning to its carrier had unexpended laser-guided munitions because its primary target had been masked by weather. Back then, American planes could not land with unexpended munitions because the explosives were not inert and posed a risk of fire or explosion. The air traffic controller directed him to the nuclear facility. The bombs hit their target and that was the end of the Iraqi nuclear program.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/