Hookerint

By on May 18, 2012 in Data Manipulation, History

Panjandrum’s Sinai escapades prompts me to comment on intelligence activities in that particular region from the past.

The Bible details how Moses tasked 12 intelligence agents with a mission to explore the Land of Canaan.  The agents were chosen from each of the twelve tribes and clearly there were political motivations in choosing these intelligence operatives.. All of the agents reported back a finding that Canaan was a land flowing with milk and honey. Ten of them assessed that the defences of the country were too fearsome and could not be taken. Only two of the twelve spies had an opposing view. What is interesting is that the ten suggested that the contradictory two should be stoned to death.

This is interesting – Moses had multiple sources within his intelligence agency but the majority (and false) assessment caused the majority to call for the elimination of opposing contrary views.  It would also appear that in Moses’ intelligence agency the sources were also the analysts, and these analysts also had political responsibilities and that’s sometimes a very dangerous thing.

(if you are coming over all déjà vu about dodgy dossiers, that’s my point)….

For this intelligence failure (and I would argue that it was a failure in intelligence management), God sentenced the Israelites to 40 years in the same wilderness that Panjandrum explored, (but probably without the diarrhea.)   It is said that today Alastair Campbell is spending his 40 years in the wilderness for similar failures, combining analysis with overt political influence.

40 years later, the Israelites were under the command of Joshua (as it happens, one of the two dissenting spies).  Joshua used a different intelligence process. His two professional operatives were sent to Jericho where they recruited a hooker as an agent.  Hookers make good intelligence agents.  The subsequent invasion was successful. The hooker was paid her price. (usually a good idea, I’m told). The hooker (Rahab) even facilitated the escape of the intelligence operatives when their cover was blown. After the war, Rahab joined the Israelites and was given a new identity.

Two intelligence operatives exfiltrating from the hooker's bedroom

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Old Testament is full of other references to spies and special forces operations – perhaps for fun I’ll return to them in the future.  Before I finish this though, a tangential discussion of “hookerint”.  This quote from a Canadian official in the 1870’s discussing with British spymasters how intelligence could be gained from the emerging Fenian Brotherhood in the US who posed a threat to British and Canadian interests. He suggested that spymasters should set out to obtain:

 “one or two clever women whose absolute virtue stands questioned by the censorious” to get “susceptible members of the enemy leadership into their toils and thus as Delilah with Sampson possess themselves of their secrets.”

To translate the flowery language of the time, I think he’s suggesting they “hire hookers as spies”.

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All Sources

By on May 18, 2012 in Uncategorized

The post below got me thinking about Arab adventures, and also about sources of information…

British Survey of Egypt, 1933

About fifteen years ago I found myself living in Egypt, and being a keen (if somewhat inept and navigationally challenged) mountaineer I spent a lot of time in the mountains of Sinai[1]. Quite by chance, I managed to get hold of a full set of the British Survey of Egypt maps of the area. Although these were hand drawn in 1933, they are still without doubt the best available maps of Sinai. They are also exquisitely beautifully drawn.

After a few uncomfortably close shaves on long, solo trips out to the hills I came across the rather interesting publication shown below in a second hand book shop. Now I’m not an Arabist, an explorer or a historian, but this document is one of my most treasured possessions as it contains a very interesting article called ‘Bedouin Place-Names in Sinai: Towards Understanding A Desert Map’, by a chap called Clinton Bailey.

It turns out that if you see the word sadd on a map, you’d better pick another route – it’s an impassable precipice in a narrow water course (a dried up waterfall). Mashash, on the other hand, is a lifesaver – water is obtainable just below the ground, if you scoop away the sand with your hands. And so on.

Before I happened to chance upon it, if someone had told me that one of the most important sources of information for an expedition into the interior of Sinai was the ‘Palestine Explorations Quarterly’ from January – June 1984, I would have laughed and thrown my GPS at them.

So, if this post has to have a point, rather than be a pleasant reminiscence and ramble, it would be this:

The most valuable of intelligence lurks in the most unlikely of places. ‘All Sources’ doesn’t mean IMINT + HUMINT + SIGINT. It means much, much more than that.

[1] Up until the point that I was arrested by an Egyptian army patrol on suspicion of drugs smuggling and/or being an Israeli spy, and kept in a somewhat overcrowded cell for a few days, all the while suffering from a rather nasty bout of diarrhoea. But that is another story.

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The Arab Bulletin

By on May 15, 2012 in History

The Arab Bulletin was a remarkable intelligence periodical that recorded and analysed a broad range of intelligence during the upheavals of the Arab world from 1916 – 1919.   Given the ongoing upheavals in the region today it is interesting to review this singularly unusual intelligence entity.

The Arab Bulletin was the periodical intelligence product of the “Arab Bureau” a British intelligence entity established in 1915 in Cairo during the First World War.  The Bureau was ostensibly a section of the British Cairo Intelligence Department. It was established to “harmonise British political activity in the Near East[and] keep the Foreign Office, the India Office, the Committee of Defence, the War Office, the Admiralty, and Government of India simultaneously informed of the general tendency of Germano-Turkish Policy.  In truth it never sat comfortably and the strains between it and the India Office in particular turned very hostile at times.  The Bureau was manned by an unusual bunch of diplomats, spies, soldiers and intellectuals, including TE Lawrence, Herbert Garland and Gertrude Bell (never has a woman been so influential on Arabic politics)

T E Lawrence claimed perhaps somewhat ambitiously to have been the instigator of the Bulletin. But he is known to have perhaps embellished his role in such matters.  It was intended to be a secret bulletin of intelligence matters relating to the Arab world.  Only thirty copies of each edition where ever printed, and circulated very carefully amongst policy makers and military officials.  There was an unusual rider associated with the Bulletin that instructed that its contents could never be quoted from, even in secret communications.  In the three years of its production it analysed the range of political and military developments and indeed the British perception of the emerging Arab nations.

This interesting summation of its editorial policy from an early editor is worthy or repeating in full”

 “Since it was as easy to write it in decent English as in bad, and much more agreeable, the Arab Bulletin had from the first a literary tinge not always present in Intelligence Summaries. Firstly, it aims at giving reasoned, and as far as possible definitive summaries of intelligence, primarily about the Hejaz and the area of the Arab Revolt. Secondly, the Arab Bulletin aims at giving authoritative appreciations of political situations and questions in the area with which it deals at first hand. Thirdly, it aims at recording and so preserving all fresh historical data concerning Arabs and Arabic-speaking lands, and incidentally rescuing from oblivion any older facts which might help to explain the actual situation: likewise, any data of geographical or other scientific interest, which may be brought to light by our penetration of the Arab Countries during the present war. It is part of the Editor´s purpose that a complete file on the Bulletin since its beginning should be indispensable to anyone who hereafter may have to compile for official use a history of the Arabs during the last three years, an Intelligence Handbook of any Arab district or even a map of Arabia.”

What I find intriguing was the range of sources which the Bulletin utilized. These include:

  • Published and unpublished enemy statements: extracts from newspapers, communiqués.
  • Information obtained by standard methods such as the capture of letters, interrogation of prisoners and of neutral travellers. Captured documents included the Turkish account of events leading up to the Arab Revolt.
  • Topographical intelligence was supplemented by the use of aerial reconnaissance.
  • As early as October 1916 the British were intercepting wireless signals between the Turkish HQ, in Damascus and the beleaguered garrison in Medina.
  • Extensive information was derived through systems of local friendly contacts. An excellent espionage network had been established in Syria before the war, partly through the consular offices but equally through the efforts of less formal agents. A particular station-master, for example, kept a record for the British of every man and parcel transported into Damascus by the Hejaz railway. From the start of fighting the mobile Bedouins in Sinai were particularly valuable as spies, as were some agents in Hauran and Jabal Druze who after 1917 were able to send reports by carrier pigeon to an army loft in Bethlehem.
  • Regular campaign reports were submitted by the Bureau´s officers in the field.

The Bulletin also received a variety of essays and articles on special topics from its contributors, many of whom wrote at length and with scholarly exactness. Hogarth, an eminent historian wrote on the history of Turco-Arab relations, while Lawrence set forth his prescriptions for British relations with the Arabs. Unsigned articles dealt with diverse matters such as the prospects for trade in the Persian Gulf. Lengthy articles are also found from Philby (father of Kim Philby) describing his first crossing of Arabia.

Here’s an extract from a Bulletin of a piece by Lawrence in 1917, giving pithy and hard earned ‘commandments” based on his experience. Many of his rules would apply today.

It is also fair to say that the Bureau was not averse to attacking other allied intelligence agencies with whom it disagreed.  Here’s a Lawrence critique of the British Intelligence Department in Basra, under the control of the British Indian political sphere – it’s quite devastating. Lawrence described the head of the intelligence department in Basra as:

“very excellent but he has never been to Turkey, or read about it, and he knows no Arabic. This would not necessarily matter, but unfortunately his staff do not supply the necessary knowledge”

In summary the story of the Arab Bureau and its intelligence product provides a useful example of a  maverick and unorthodox irregular warfare intelligence operation, with very real lessons for today’s Arab spring revolutions. There’s a good book on it here.

 

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The paradox of intelligence

By on May 15, 2012 in Uncategorized

Post from Andy Green

I’m currently reading the new book by Jim Al-Khalili called Paradox – sub-titled The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Physics.  Actually a brilliant read for anyone who enjoys scientific puzzles and conundrums – and very digestible too.  In it, I’ve  just been reading about Hungarian scientist and inventor Leo Szilárd who in 1929 published a key paper which created something of a stir.  It was entitled “On the Reduction of Entropy in a Thermodynamic System by the Interference of an Intelligent Being”, and in it he proposed a version of a previous enigma, Maxwell’s Demon, which became known as Szilárd’s engine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now I’m no quantum physicist; in fact I’m no physicist of any kind. So in lay terms this enigma revolves around the fact that a system, at the molecular level, only performs as it does because it is being interacted with by a sentient being. I certainly won’t bore you with the explanation of how this enigma is resolved, but I think in principle it is a bit like intelligence analysis.

In the same way that “the internet don’t surf itself”, data does not resolve itself into actionable intelligence without the interaction of a sentient being – for sentient being, read analyst.  Yes, there are some great tools out there that support the analyst – indeed one could argue that powerful web scraping robots such as Kapow are actually the internet surfing itself – some with mega algorithms that can manipulate data to make life easier for the analyst.  But fundamentally it is the interaction of a sentient being on those data, at the conceptual level, which makes the difference.  Those that lead the way in intelligence analysis – for example Palantir -  understand this principle at its very core and design their platform and supporting tools with this absolutely in mind.

What’s that got to do with thermodynamics, quantum mechanics or scientific enigma?  Not a lot really, I just like to pretend I understand it.

 

 

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On Fetish, Savages and Hocus-Pocus

By on May 13, 2012 in Uncategorized

Taking up where Roger left off on his last post, Here’s a passage from HG Wells about the evolution of human thought:

“There is no sort of savage so low as not to have a kind of science of cause and effect; he very easily connected an effect with something quite alien to its cause… You give a child a certain berry and it dies. You eat the heart of a valiant enemy and you become strong… We call the system of cause and effect in the mind of a savage Fetish; but Fetish is simply savage science. It differs from modern science in that it is totally unsystematic and uncritical and so more frequently wrong.

The expert in Fetish, the Medicine man, was the first priest. He exhorted, he interpreted dreams, he warned , he performed the complicated hocus-pocus that brought luck or averted calamity. Primitive religion was not so much what we now call religion as practice and observance, and the early priest dictated what was indeed an arbitrary primitive practical science”

Now, I’ve never tried interpreting dreams, but as an analyst I exhort, I warn, and (according to non-analytical brethren) I perform complicated hocus-pocus in the hope of averting calamity.

Wrong Fetish?

That last bit is about hocus-pocus is quite important: many analysts would like to maintain an element of mystery about their work, as if the answer is more impressive if you don’t show your workings. But if you don’t show your workings, the analysis can’t be verified or challenged – people simply have to accept what the High Priest of Analysis has come up with. And that’s dangerous.

The good news is that the analytical environment is changing fast (this is where a slightly strange blog post comes full circle, back to Palantir, the analysis platform mentioned by Roger in his post below). There are tools within Palantir which allow for every stage of the analytical process to be reviewed and examined, and for competing hypothesis to be explored (see image below). Great news for analysts who care about getting things right – but bad news indeed for the peddlers of hocus-pocus.

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I hear a rustle in the hedgerow…

By on May 11, 2012 in Data Manipulation, Intelligence 101

There’s a theory that the evolution of homo sapiens has built into the human brain an exceptional ability to identify threats or even just anomalies amongst a bombardment of stimuli.  So, in theory, humans are good at seeing an out of place item in a vast array of data or “noise”, prompted by a “survival” instinct . The explanation normally starts describing how prehistoric man had to sense the presence of a predator or more simply “food” on the plains of Africa or in the jungles of Borneo. If you don’t spot the deer hiding in a clump of grass you’ll starve to death, and if you don’t spot the tiger hiding behind a bush, you’ll die too.  I don’t know whether this is true but I do feel that humans are good at seeing patterns of data and anomalies to patterns . They are good at extrapolating tiny bits of “data” into something that makes sense.  A friend of mine is a bird watcher and I’ve seen his remarkable ability to identify a species of bird by the oddest things – the pattern of flight glimpsed for a fraction of a second , or some other tiny glimpse of a trait.

There are also the phenomena of  Apophenia and Pareidolia

One aspect of these abilities is that they appear to err on the side of caution – hence we perceive images of the Virgin Mary in a piece of burnt toast and a rocky outcrop on Mars, from a particular angle, we interpret as a “face”. In security terms these might be “false positives”.   I’m now avoiding the urge to stretch this into challenging areas , such as “religion and associated beliefs”  – that’s for another time, and some care.

One aspect of this “ability” is that humans are quite poor at distinguishing the difference between a tiger in bush and something that sounds like a tiger in a bush – the brain joins a few too many dots sometimes. Natural selection may have favoured erring on the side of caution and the human being scared by anything that sounded like a rustle in the hedgerow, or something that went bump in the night.  Predators tend to avoid snakes that look like poisonous snakes. And people believe weird things because of our evolved need to believe weird things.

I think this aspect is interesting to explore in terms of intelligence analysis.  Intelligence analysts are paid and encouraged to see patterns and anomalies within them, and very often they see a pattern or anomaly that might actually not be there. But we aren’t good at telling the difference.  When this is layered on top of a habit I have discussed earlier – the human habit of developing a nice narrative even when one is unwarranted – we get into dangerous areas. Interestingly history, (and the intelligence community) is very poor at recording “false positives” because no-one, especially not an intelligence analyst likes to admit they were wrong.  So one basic Law of Intelligence 101. It’s OK for an analyst to be wrong.  When you do get an assessment wrong, don’t just move on, get an objective observer to help you understand why you went wrong.

Modern tools like Palantir are proving that good intelligence tools help analysts spot data anomalies or patterns, and this is pretty important – they still emphasise the special ability of the human to “see” the pattern and the need to keep the man in the loop – even if the man in the loop sees a few too many false positives.

Now, a challenge. Name me an incident from military history where an intelligence analyst saw a threat that didn’t really exist…, and where the analyst openly admitted it.

 

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The Jihad Games

By on May 9, 2012 in Technology

An interesting and thought provoking guest piece from Dan Fox. I will never look at “Call of Duty” the same way again…

Have you seen The Hunger Games yet? If not, don’t bother. I know it puts me in a minority of something approaching one in the world, but seriously: it’s rubbish.  For those who have avoided the adaptation of Suzanne Collins’s hugely popular books, the plot revolves around an authoritarian future in which a continental government keeps the otherwise restless and previously warring masses entertained and distracted with an annual fight-to-the-death tournament between 24 teenage “tributes”. Sort of like The X-Factor. With bows and arrows. (If you want visions of the future how they should be realised, just download Bladerunner, Twelve Monkeys and The Fifth Element; if you want half-decent portrayals of bloodthirsty voyeurism in the mix, add Battle Royale, Rollerball, Running Man and The Truman Show).

Anyway, its one saving grace for me is that it at least combines my two main professional interests: security policy and game mechanics. All a little more fascistic and lethal than I would normally advocate, true. But we all start somewhere.   Fortunately, there is a less fictional example of where these two areas merge. And one that should be of far greater interest (not least by virtue of being, you know, real).   Each week, across the world, seven billion hours per week are spent gaming. Many organisations, from Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, to the most successful commercial brands, to educational establishments of all levels, are trying to address how this dedication to playing can be harnessed to influence and motivate. The answer has come in the form of gamification: the application of game mechanics to non-game activities or environments.

One of the best breakdowns of what makes a game a game is given by Jane McGonigal, the American academic and game designer based out of California, in 2011’s Reality Is Broken.   She defines a game as needing a goal – a final aim and win condition for which players strive. There also have to be barriers – such as rules or time limits or other restrictions; feedback – points, scores or rewards; and that it’s voluntary – everyone agrees to and about the other three elements (and to take part in the first place).  Laid out like that, it’s possible to perceive many an everyday activity as a ‘game’, or as having the potential to be turned into a game. A popular book with policy makers in recent years has been Neal Gabler’s Life: The Movie, which argued that the entertainment industry became so dominant in the 20th Century that nearly all aspects of daily life have become a branch of it and that our behaviour – seeing ourselves in roles, fulfilling plots and narratives that we set for ourselves – reflects this.

In this century, however, the influence has moved away from Hollywood, and north to Palo Alto and Seattle. Online and digital forms of media and entertainment now hold sway over the way that we interact and behave. Life: The Game is all around us.    Nowhere is this truer than on the web. And nowhere is this truer on the web than with social media platforms. McGonigal’s four basic elements of a game are clearly matched.    There are goals: to communicate, connect and promote There are rules and restrictions: etiquettes, how much time you have, competition with all the other data. The feedback is quite clear: the number of your friends or followers, retweets, likes, shares, badges, statuses, comments, and the basic traffic statistics. On some platforms, this is even more explicit. Apps like foursquare and SCVNGR are game mechanics in themselves.

Within these ‘games’, influential behaviour can easily be applied. Robert Cialdini’s six principles of persuasion are the basis for much of this. Especially reciprocity, getting people to commit and be consistent, and reinforcing social proof.    Using the web, promoting influence and understanding game mechanics all come together when considering wider models of behaviour.   B J Fogg’s Behavioural Model (FBM) sees behaviour occurring at the convergence of motivation, ability and trigger. Daniel Pink places the crucial point at the convergence of our desires for autonomy, mastery and purpose. Games provide the opportunity to experience of all these and to achieve what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was the first to term cognitive flow. At the point of balance between challenge and ability in a task we enter a flow between anxiety and boredom. In flow, we are extremely focussed, have a sense of active control, lose self-awareness, time distorts, and the task itself becomes the only justification for continuing it.

The starkest example of gamification influencing people on the web is extremist websites, at both the jihadi and white supremacist ends of the spectrum. Studies by Jarret Brachman and Alix Levine have identified game mechanics that keep people engaged in these spaces, such as: reputation points; differentiated avatars, and font colours and sizes; access to restricted parts of the site (a good example of Cialdini’s scarcity motivator at work); fundamentalism metres; promotions to Administrator or Moderator statuses; and platforms for collecting and trading photographs, videos and documents. Their conclusion is that “like virtually every other popular online social space, the social space of online jihadists has become “gamified,” a term used to describe game-like attributes applied to non-game activities. It turns out that what drives online jihadists is pretty much exactly what drives Internet trolls, airline ticket consumers, and World of Warcraft players: competition.”

The intelligence challenge is in anticipating when this playing in a virtual space becomes doing in an actual place.

 

Dan Fox is a UCL Honorary Research Associate at the Institute for Security & Resilience Studies, and Co-Founder of The Game Trainers.

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Tools and the Trade

By on May 8, 2012 in Intelligence 101, Technology

A post from our newest employee  ”Rob” currently undertaking his Palantir Capstone assessment.  We think he’ll pass….  This article emphasises again what a dynamic and interesting place the intelligence world is right now.

Over the course of history, warriors have had their combat effectiveness progressively multiplied by military technology. In contrast, intelligence operators tasked with ‘forewarning to forearm’ have continued to rely on aptitude and training to be useful. During the era of smart weapons and network centric warfare, many analysts remained ‘offline’, wrestling with rusty filing cabinets, dysfunctional databases or generic analysis software to drive processes. An uncomfortable observation is that only enterprising analysts have ever been truly productive: intelligence has been largely produced in spite of systemic limitations rather than because of the a system’s analytical capability.

Thankfully (from an analyst’s perspective), the modern threat environment, which stubbornly continues to reward initiative and rely on human judgement to verify targets, has sufficiently exposed the capability gap so as to stimulate serious and prolonged technological development. In recent years – a period which appears to mark the beginning of the intelligence trade’s heyday – the analyst is being augmented with purpose designed power tools to improve productivity and disseminative potential. Automated extract, transform and load (ETL) tools look set to empower the collator too.

The implementation of Palantir for example, has been identified as ‘a game changer’. This suggests that the integration of cutting-edge intelligence systems with intelligence processes may bring about changes to the parent organisation which are comparable to those precipitated by the revolution in military affairs  and the automation of industry. If this is the case, what can we expect from an ‘intelligence revolution’?

Below is a crude spot-the-difference diagram illustrating the subsequently bulleted speculations on how the traditional OSINT cell could evolve following the integration of Palantir and Kapow technologies.

1)    Increased intelligence output – various tools within Palantir facilitate well-established – but traditionally resource heavy – analytical techniques to be applied to data in a near-instantaneous fashion. An analyst can subsequently apply banked time to increase the quantity or improve the quality of their analysis.

2)    Leaner data farms – the days of the untrained data inputter (monkey) may be numbered. Kapow is ideal for the bulk collection of structured OSINT data and easily outpaces a manual copy-and-paste process. Humans remain competitive when it comes to the ETL of unstructured and specific information which rewards an adaptive approach. While the ratio of collators to analysts has traditionally been in the region of 3:1, this could decrease as collators are armed with automated collection tools.

3)    Training and specialisation – adoption of intelligence technologies demands an up-skilling of operators so as to allow them to apply and drive the new systems in the most effective way. The increased financial investment in operators may lead to stricter selection requirements and fewer, but higher calibre entrants. Rather than the traditional collator-to-analyst career path, the collator may become a distinct operator specialisation, comparable to the separation between information collector and analyst in HUMINT.

In conclusion, substantive changes are afoot, and revolution or not, this is an exciting time to be an intelligence operator. Organisations are likely to increasingly replace the static knowledge provided by subject matter ‘experts’, with open-minded operators, and support them with the tools and training to rapidly and efficiently derive intelligence from dynamic information environments. The onus on trade tool acquisition will therefore shift from the individual to the organisation: incentivised by the prospect of realising competitive edges afforded by the new technology.

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