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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.'"
Squadron Leader: "Top hole. Bally Jerry pranged his kite right in the how's your father. Hairy blighter dicky-birded, feathered back on his Sammy, took a waspy, flipped over on his Betty Harper's and caught his can in the Bertie."
Computer: WTF?
Pilot: "Bunch of monkeys on your ceiling, sir! Grab your egg and fours and let's get the bacon delivered."
Computer: (explodes)
This is why we need to legally mandate that all human communication occur in newspeak. Ambiguity is the enemy of security.
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.
Isn't that kind of begging the question? The problem here is, as you said, not being able to discriminate between useful and useless data. So how do we know what's relevant (a.k.a. useful)? Do we only collect data by using humans interpret the data? If so, then the role of the computer is much diminished. Do we automate the process by having computers discriminate between useful and useless data? Well, that's exactly the problem - we can't figure out how to do that yet. Even if we only have relevant data, how do we assign semantic value to the data in order for the computer to properly parse the data and give us semantically useful results?
It's not as simple as just collecting relevant data. Even if it were, that in and of itself is a major hurdle.
Human SIGINT is flawed because they can easily be manipulated, compartmentalized and shut down when neccessary. You can also be relying on people who are flawed morally, intellectually, etc...
An Example
15 of the 19 hijackers fail to fill in visa documents properly in Saudi Arabia. Only six are interviewed. All 15 should have been denied entry to the US. [Washington Post, 10/22/02, ABC, 10/23/02] Two top Republican senators say if State Department personnel had merely followed the law, 9/11 would not have happened.[ AP, 12/18/02More]
At least 13 of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers were never interviewed by U.S. consular officials before being granted visas to enter the United States, according to a congressional report issued yesterday. The finding contradicts previous assurances from the State Department that most of them had been thoroughly screened.
The General Accounting Office also found that, for 15 hijackers whose applications could be found, none had filled in the documents properly.
...
The GAO report found that all 15 of the hijackers from Saudi Arabia applied for visas in Jeddah or Riyadh; two others applied in their native United Arab Emirates. The remaining two, including ringleader Mohamed Atta, an Egyptian citizen, applied as "third-country" applicants in Berlin.
None of 18 separate visa applications by 15 of the hijackers was completed properly, the report said. Thirteen of the 15, who were from Saudi Arabia or UAE, were never interviewed before being approved for a visa, the report found. Investigators were unable to review the applications for four other hijackers, including Atta, because they were destroyed.
If you want to see the actual Visas of some 9/11 hijackers you can go here.
If you want to know why people with such obviously fraudulent Visa applications can get in to the country consider the testimony of J. Michael Springmann. He worked at the Jeddah consulate approving Visas and says he was occasionally overruled by the CIA. Remember that when Springmann was working there they weren't known as terrorists, they were still called freedom fighters.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
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/
You're missing the point, denying the Japanese access to steal and other resources during wartime was, for all intents and purposes, and act of war. Without those resources, Japan wouldn't have been able to hold the ground they had already taken, let alone continue advancing. When the US cut off access to critical war resources, Japan had only two choices: End the war almost immediately and retreat back to Japan proper, or take control of the resources by force. For political and ideological reason, the former option wasn't much of an option at all.
Imagine if the US were fighting a major war (against a powerful, conventional enemy) and OPEC said "No more oil exports for a while". You don't think the US govt would see that as an act of war?