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DNA202.008
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1998-03-02
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5KB
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102 lines
CIA the Counter Intelligence Authority
By: Stormbringer [DnA]
As technology stumbles towards the twentieth century.
The United States turns 217 years old, the officials
responsible for the computers and communication of the
nation's intelligence agencies are in no mood to tango. For
many of their systems are antiquated, inefficient, and
sometimes dangerously ineffective. Their resources are
being taxed by the changing demands of the cold-war
politics. They need more money to update their systems,
yet a Democratic Congress appears intent on cutting the
overall intelligence budget by more than a billion. To top
it all off, the IS officials in the intelligence community
face an internal cultural bias against computer. Some CIA
officials are lead to believe the computer is the sources of
all intelligence security leaks.
The U.S. intelligence community, under the leadership
of the CIA, is undergoing a quiet revolution in culture
and methodology. The IT components of the efforts is being
led by Michael L. Dillard, Chairman of the information
policy board in the Office of the director of
Central Intelligence, essentially the intelligence
community's CIO. Dillard has the authority to do the job.
He reports directly to the director of central
intelligence, R.James Woolsey.
Dillard and Woolsey's charter includes the position of its
own- as well as government departments such as the Bureau
of Research and Intelligence in the State department,
the intelligence elements of the various Armed Forces, the
Energy Department's intelligence component, the National
Security Agency, even Factor in the ad hoc task forces
and working groups set up to handle specific areas of
concerns such as terrorism, narcotics and transitional
criminal activities, and it's a potentially cacophonous
collection of sources to manage in a real-time environment
and with an extremely limited margin for error. The
intelligence community's work is breathtaking in scope. Raw
data floods in daily from every conceivable source.
Technical collection efforts such as signals
interception and high-resolution imaging from spy satellites
and other sources are combined with the reports of agents
and secret sources around the world and "open sources,"
such as newspaper articles and radio broadcasts. All
this information flows like a river into a system that
must select, analyze, and evaluate significant data, and
then rehash it into a easy-to-understand nfo-packets to the
dirtbag policymakers.
But overall the system is not working as well as it
should like all thing in politics. The need to reform long
been acknowledged by members of the intelligence community.
The CIA alone runs 10 data processing systems under the
current system of classification and compartmentation, there
is virtually no interpretability between them. This has
left them in public embarrassment. Recently, for example,
the agency was accused of covering up part of the BNL
scandal, in which an Italian bank used U.S. Agriculture
Department guarantees to help Saddam Hussein finance Iraq's
arms buildup before the Gulf War. These accusation came
soon after the CIA denied all actions of its affair.Then
soon found the requested documents in a file box under
a staff member's desk.
The current reforms began last year under the former
director of the central intelligence Robert Gates and have
continued under Woolsey, who was a member of the committee
that made the original reform recommendations. Late last
year, before the annual convention of the Association of
Former Intelligence Officers, Gates identified the targets
for intelligence community reform as nothing less than "our
mission, our structure, our long-term size and budget, and
our culture."
These changes come at a time when intelligence
consumers are demanding interactive, multimedia systems that
better meet their needs and time constraints. Given the
current climate of budgets cutbacks and growing demands, the
community may undergo a major restructuring that will force
wider use of distributed, multimedia computer and
communications systems.
Indeed, the intelligence community has had an explosion
of literally thousands of databases. Open sources alone
command 4,000 databases of all kinds; the most sensitive are
kept off-line. Many paper files are never converted
to digital form. With the intelligence community creating
an estimated 20,000 digital records a day the job of
digitizing and transferring older paper files is relegated
to the to-do pile.
The agencies are researching and developing software
tools to break through this logjam by helping analysts
search very large databases. This effort is being managed
by the Intelligence Community Management Staff, a separate
entity charged with implementing much of the reform.