During WWII, statistician Abraham Wald was asked to help the British decide where to add armor to their bombers. After analyzing the records, he recommended adding more armor to the places where there was no damage!
This seems backward at first, but Wald realized his data came from bombers that survived. That is, the British were only able to analyze the bombers that returned to England; those that were shot down over enemy territory were not part of their sample. These bombers’ wounds showed where they could afford to be hit.
Said another way, the undamaged areas on the survivors showed where the lost planes must have been hit because the planes hit in those areas did not return from their missions.
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Phi Beta Iota: The US secret intelligence community is largely worthless, providing “at best” 4% of what the President or a major commander needs, and virtually nothing for everyone else. They keep doing the wrong thing righter, instead of the right thing. To do the right thing requires integrity. Go figure.
The revision expanded the government’s surveillance authority, permitting intelligence agencies to collect information on U.S. soil without a warrant identifying a particular individual — as long as the government could assure a surveillance court that its targeting procedures are designed to find people who are not U.S. persons and who are overseas.
U.S. government has typically attempted to block such challenges by arguing that litigation would reveal state secrets or that the plaintiffs lack standing to sue. But in March, a three-judge panel accepted the argument of the plaintiffs, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, that the law had harmed them by forcing them to take draconian measures to avoid government interception of their phone calls and e-mails to overseas clients.
Despite intense focus on Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Middle East in the last decade, U.S. spy agencies are still lacking in language skills needed to talk to locals, translate intercepted intelligence and analyse data, according to top intelligence officials.
Telegraph, 20 September 2011
The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks prompted a major push for foreign language skills to track militants and trends in parts of the world that were not a Cold War priority.
But intelligence agencies have had to face the reality that the languages they need cannot be taught quickly, the street slang U.S. operatives and analysts require is not easy, and security concerns make the clearance process lengthy.
As recently as 2008 and 2009, intelligence officials were still issuing new directives and programs in the hopes of ramping up language capability.
“Language will continue to be a challenge for us,” Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said at a congressional hearing last week.
“It's something we're working at, and will continue to do so, but we're probably not where we want to be,” he said.
Phi Beta Iota: Languages are not hard–what is hard is the “leadership” culture incapable of leading. US citizens by birth are never going to learn foreign languages as needed. There are just TWO solutions, both executable today, all it takes is integrity at the top, long missing:
1. Exempt case officers and others “on the street” from the idiotic security clearance requirements. Hire to qualifications and manage to risk. This includes restoration of the “principle agent” category as well as the third-country subject-matter expert category. They never see secrets, they just do what they do, very well.
2. Adopt the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) model of regional field stations in which multinational cadres of case officers and analysts are supported by US money and US technology. Again, they never see secrets and are firewalled during active ops.
The number of persons who held security clearances for access to classified information last year exceeded 4.2 million — far more than previously estimated — according to a new intelligence community report to Congress (pdf).
The report, which was required by the FY2010 intelligence authorization act, provides the first precise tally of clearances held by federal employees and contractors that has ever been produced. The total figure as of last October 1 was 4,266,091 cleared persons. See “Report on Security Clearance Determinations for Fiscal Year 2010,” Office of the Director of National Intelligence, September 2011.
In 2009, the Government Accountability Office had told Congress that about 2.4 million people held clearances “excluding some of those with clearances who work in areas of national intelligence.” (“More Than 2.4 Million Hold Security Clearances,” Secrecy News, July 29, 2009). But even with a generous allowance for hundreds of thousands of additional intelligence personnel, that estimate somehow missed more than a million clearances.
Likewise, one of the many startling findings in the 2010 Washington Post series (and 2011 book) “Top Secret America” by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, was that “An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.”
But remarkably, that too was a significant underestimate, according to the new report. In actual fact, as of October 2010 there were 1,419,051 federal employees and contractors holding Top Secret clearances.
As high as the newly determined total number of clearances is, it may not be the highest number ever. In the last decade of the cold war, a comparable or greater number of persons seems to have had security clearances. In those years the size of the uniformed military was much larger than today, and a large fraction of its members were routinely granted clearances. Thus, as of 1983, there were approximately 4.2 million clearances, according to 1985 testimony (pdf) from the GAO. But that was an estimate, not a measurement, and the actual number might have been higher (or lower). By 1993, the post-cold war number had declined to around 3.2 million clearances, according to another GAO report (pdf) from 1995.
The unexpectedly large number of security clearances today can presumably be attributed to several related factors: the surge in military and intelligence spending over the past decade, increased government reliance on cleared contractors, and intensive classification activity that continues today.
Phi Beta Iota: For $80-90 billion a year, $15 billion or so of which is the cost of maintaining one of the most extraordinarily inept and unreliable secrecy systems on the planet (much much larger than those of all dictators combined), we get, “at best” 4% of the intelligence (decision-support) that the President or a major commander needs, and nothing for everyone else.
Study says US government, business need to kick network security up a notch
Michael Cooney
Network World, 12 September 2011
There is an urgent need for businesses and our government to develop high-level cyber intelligence as a way to combat the unacceptable levels of online security threats because the current “patch and pray” system won't cut it in the future.
That was the major thrust of a study by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance's (INSA) Cyber Council which went on to state that such a cyber-intelligence discipline will demand discussion of the unique training, education and skill sets that will be required to successfully conduct meaningful collection and analysis in the cyber domain.
“While there is a great deal of focus on current cyber security issues, there is little focus on defining and exploring the cyber threat environment at a higher level,” INSA stated. INSA describes itself as a non-profit, non-partisan, public-private organization.
The group says the dilemma that exists in the current cyber intelligence apparatus is that the Department of Homeland Security has the authority but lacks the experience and capabilities to orchestrate a comprehensive approach to cyber intelligence. The Department of Defense has much of the actual cyber intelligence capabilities, and private industry owns most of the infrastructure. “Ultimately, INSA's Cyber Council would like to see a meaningful partnership among all relevant government agencies and the private sector to ensure seamless sharing of threat information, timely analytical judgments, and reasoned, measured responses to clear threats.”
The group made a number of suggestions to help businesses and government build this intelligence community including:
Develop strategies (beyond current “patch and pray” processes), policies, doctrines, legal frameworks, and overall global context for cyber intelligence matters
Increase global business, diplomatic and other forms of engagement, which should discuss potential ways to create more stability and mutual security in the cyber arena in order to reduce the potential for cyber conflict, theft, sabotage, and espionage
Support development of deterrence, dissuasion, and other high level concepts and measures for maintaining peace and stability at all levels of conflict and crisis
Define cyber intelligence professions, needed skillsets, training, and education for both industry and government needs.
Enable the creation of cyber intelligence related polices, approaches, and pilot efforts across industry, academia/non-profits, and government that provide unclassified situational awareness and indications and warning data, analytics and 24/7 unclassified and classified (as appropriate) reporting to government agencies, trusted industry, and global partners.
Corporately define specific activities, plans, and intentions of adversaries; continuously identify current and emerging threat vectors, and support our plans and intentions
Identify the specific technical means utilized or planned for cyber attack operations in deep technical detail to include supply chain issues, paths to be exploited, nature and character of deployed infections, systems/product weakness, effects, and anticipated planned or ongoing adjacent activities
Maintain detailed cyber situational awareness writ large
Participate in the rapid control and release of cyber means in order to ensure a viable intelligence gain and loss awareness
Identify what criminal activities are ongoing or have already happened in cyber networks, do formal damage assessments in these areas, and support development of improved defenses
Partner on research and development in the challenging areas of attack attribution, warning, damage assessment, and space related threat collection and analysis
Organize and support counter-intelligence and counter-espionage (CI/CE) activities, with special focus on identifying/using auditing tools and processes to deal with the insider threats
Create a consistent and meaningful approach for the cyber equivalent of Battle Damage Assessment (BDA)/Combat Effectiveness Assessment
Establish public-private partnership cyber outreach forums that address these areas in a comprehensive, practical, and executable fashion. These forums can take the form of commissions that study the demand for cyber intelligence and value added to cyber security.
Phi Beta Iota: The US is not just lacking in cyber-intelligence, it is lacking in all forms of intelligence qua decision-support. The US intelligence community lacks integrity, and General Keith Alexander and General Jim Clapper and Mr. Mike Vickers have all been given too much money with zero adult leadership. Top Secret America is a disgracefully dysfunctional enterprise, and now richly deserving of almost complete shut-down. Congress and the White House have failed to be ethical or intelligent in this matter.
It's an interesting anomaly of Barack Obama's presidency that this liberal Democrat, known before the 2008 election for his antiwar views, has been so comfortable running America's secret wars.
Phi Beta Iota: Full story below the line together with a detailed indictment of David Ignatius for spreading such blatant lies on behalf of the secret world and in direct contradiction to the President's actual fears and concerns.
Phi Beta Iota: Below are the three traditional forms of covert action, and the four new forms. CIA stinks at all of them, but so does the US military. No amount of excellence at the tactical level can overcome either comatose leadership at the agency level, or a strategic thinking vacuum at the national leadership level.
