Studies in Intelligence Vol. 47 No. 3 (2003)

A. Denis Clift

During the Napoleonic Wars, the French revolutionized land-based communications with the erection of semaphore towers bearing rotating arms to fashion coded signals that could speed by line-of-sight from tower to tower along the coast and across the country at some 200 miles an hour.

The British quickly followed suit in that new era of signals intelligence.

Theft of the enemy’s semaphore codebooks became an important part of the business of war. [1]

JEWISH BANKSTERS’ WAR ON AMERICA & THE WORLD – Library of Rickandria

During the war on terrorism in Afghanistan, “Predator” unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), flying lengthy missions at heights of some 25,000 feet, have been providing multihour surveillance of designated geography, installations, and activity.

The General Atomics MQ-1 Predator (often referred to as the Predator drone) is an American remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) built by General Atomics that was used primarily by the United States Air Force (USAF) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Conceived in the early 1990s for aerial reconnaissance and forward observation roles, the Predator carries cameras and other sensors. It was modified and upgraded to carry and fire two AGM-114 Hellfire missiles or other munitions. The aircraft entered service in 1995, and saw combat in the war in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the NATO intervention in Bosnia, the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, the Iraq War, Yemen, the 2011 Libyan civil war, the 2014 intervention in Syria, and Somalia.

General Atomics MQ-1 Predator - Wikipedia

Tasking to the Predator, as well as electro optical video and infrared images collected by its cameras, move near instantaneously to and from the theater commanders and officials in Washington.

Such communications flow through a secure network of ground stations and satellites, with part of the product traveling through a classified Internet counterpart. [2]

DARPA, Facebook & the Internet – Library of Rickandria

The episodic manned U-2 photography missions of the 1950s and the periodic evolutionary satellite photography missions proceeding from the 1960s have now been joined by the current generation of surveilling UAV eyes.

• Imaging
• analyzing
• decision making

The Internet era brings an on-rush of changes, both revolutionary and subtle, to the work of intelligence—changes in the doctrine and practice of:

• collection
• analysis
• dissemination

and changes in the mindsets and relationships between:

• intelligence and law enforcement
• intelligence and the policymaker
• intelligence and the military commander

Internet Origins

In 1957, signals from the beeping Soviet satellite Sputnik 1 sounded the beginning of the highly visible superpower space race.

Soviet Union & Jewish Ritual Murder – Library of Rickandria

That race produced some remarkable byproducts, from cordless power tools and Teflon to CAT Scanners and Magnetic Resonance Imaging technology.

Out of the public eye, the orbiting Sputnik launched other races by US scientists and engineers.

Mainstream Science: Another Religion Created by the Controllers – Library of Rickandria

The Office of Science Adviser was added to the White House, and, in 1958, President Eisenhower created the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA).

Dwight David Eisenhower (/ˈaɪzənhaʊ.ər/ EYE-zən-how-ər; born David Dwight Eisenhower; October 14, 1890 – March 28, 1969), nicknamed Ike, was an American military officer and statesman who served as the 34th president of the United States from 1953 to 1961. During World War II, he was Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe and achieved the five-star rank as General of the Army. Eisenhower planned and supervised two of the most consequential military campaigns of World War II: Operation Torch in the North Africa campaign in 1942–1943 and the invasion of Normandy in 1944.

One of ARPA’s earliest priorities was to tackle the challenge of linking research centers with one another and with their important sponsor, the Department of Defense.

As this research evolved, the computer’s initial role as arithmetic engine expanded to include the computer as communications medium.

Pioneers in the work of data networking and packet switching applied their talents to create a government-supported computer data network:

ARPANET.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first computer networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet. The ARPANET was established by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (now DARPA) of the United States Department of Defense.

History of ARPANET – Behind the Net – Library of Rickandria

The developers of the first network in the late 1960s—at

• UCLA, the Stanford Research Institute
• the University of California/Santa Barbara
• the University of Utah

—could not have imagined that their work would spawn the global Internet of today. [3]

The work on ARPANET called attention to the vulnerability of the nation’s strategic communications infrastructure.

If the Soviets could orbit Sputnik, who was to say that they were not proceeding to develop the capability for a space-based missile attack?

If a nuclear attack destroyed key command and control centers, it would eliminate our ability to assess the impact of the attack and to decide on and deliver the strategic response.

The Nuclear Hoax – Library of Rickandria

Government attention turned to fashioning a survivable computer network linking the Pentagon and other national decisionmakers in Washington with the Cheyenne Mountain nuclear command and control center and the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command. [4]

Cheyenne Mountain Complex - Wikipedia

Anthony "Tony" Gervin Oettinger (March 29, 1929 in Nuremberg, Germany – July 26, 2022) was a German-born American linguist and computer scientist best known for his work on information resources policy. Oettinger coined the term “compunications” in the late 1970s to describe the combination of computer and telecommunications technologies that would take place as digital technologies replaced analog forms. In 1973 he co-founded, with John LeGates, the Program on Information Resources Policy at Harvard University. He served as a consultant to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and the National Security Council and NASA’s Apollo moon-landing program. From 1966 to 1968 he was president of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He was recognized for his work in the intelligence community with the naming of the Anthony G. Oettinger School of Science and Technology Intelligence of the National Intelligence University. He was Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Mathematics and Professor of Information Resources Policy at Harvard.

Project Paperclip – Library of Rickandria

The Chairman of the Board of Visitors at the Joint Military Intelligence College, Dr. Anthony Oettinger, has written of the Information Technology/Internet era:

“What it all boils down to is that faster, smaller, cheaper electro-optical digital technologies have put into our hands enormously powerful and varied, yet increasingly practical and economical, means for information processing, means that stimulate us to reexamine everything we do to information and with information, and then choose to do nothing, to reinforce the old ways, to modify them, or to abandon them altogether in favor of altogether new ways.” [5]

Intelink

Intelink is a group of secure intranets used by the United States Intelligence Community. The first Intelink network was established in 1994 to take advantage of Internet technologies (though not connected to the public Internet) and services to promote intelligence dissemination and business workflow. Since then it has become an essential capability for the US intelligence community and its partners to share information, collaborate across agencies, and conduct business. Intelink refers to the web environment on protected top secret, secret, and unclassified networks. One of the key features of Intelink is Intellipedia, an online system for collaborative data sharing based on MediaWiki. Intelink uses WordPress as the basis of its blogging service.

Intelink - Wikipedia

Intelink applies advanced network technology to the:

• collection
• analysis
• production

and dissemination of classified and unclassified multimedia data across the Intelligence Community. [6]

William Oliver Studeman (born January 16, 1940) is a retired admiral of the United States Navy and former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, with two extended periods as acting Director of Central Intelligence. As deputy director of Central Intelligence, he served in the administrations of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton under three directors of Central Intelligence, Robert Gates, R. James Woolsey Jr., and John M. Deutch. Studeman retired from the navy in 1995 after almost 35 years of service. Between 1988 and 1992 he was director of the National Security Agency; he was the Director of Naval Intelligence, from September 1985 to July 1988.

In the assessment of the former Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, Adm. William O. Studeman:

“Application of evolving Internet technologies to intelligence applications in the form of Intelink has been a transcendent and farsighted strategy...

Its future application requirements parallel those of the global Internet, so that there is the expectation that, for continuing modest investment, intelligence can continue to ride the wave of Internet growth, with commensurate access to amazing and relevant commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) developments.” [7]

Taking into account the sensitivity of some of the intelligence data involved, the sensitivity of the sources and methods for acquiring such data, and the resulting “need-to know” of those logging on the system, Intelink provides several separate classification families, and forms of services:

Intelink-S, the SIPRnet at the Secret level—the main communications link for the military commands and those operating on:

• land
• sea
• air

Intelink Commonwealth, or Intelink-C, linking:

• the United States
• the United Kingdom
• Canada

A steadily evolving suite of Intelink support services is available, including:

• collaborative tools
• search tools
• search engines

Multilayered, comprehensive Intelink security policies and practices reserving the intranet for authorized users include:

• encryption
• passwords
• user certifications

“...the blistering pace at which the IT [information technology] economy is advancing has made it difficult for any government agency to access and incorporate the latest in information technology.

In-Q-Tel strives to extend the Agency’s access to new IT companies, solutions, and approaches to address their priority problems.” [9]

By investing in technologies that can benefit the CIA and the rest of the US Intelligence Community at the same time that they become available commercially, In-Q-Tel underscores the value of such IT functions as:

• data warehousing and mining
• the profiling of search agents
• statistical data analysis tools
• imagery analysis and pattern recognition
• language translation
• strong encryption
• data integrity

In-Q-Tel’s unclassified work with commercial potential includes attention to such issues as:

• secure receipt of internet information
• non-observable surfing
• hacker resistance
• intrusion detection
• data protection

New Objectives

For the Director of Central Intelligence, the goal is for the Intelligence Community to provide a decisive information advantage to:

• the President
• the military
• diplomats
• law enforcement

"the capability to collect, process, and disseminate an uninterrupted flow of information while exploiting or denying an adversary’s ability to do the same.” [11]

The need for information superiority is, in many instances, causing US intelligence to take dramatically new approaches.

The Internet era has become the Intelligence Community’s new strength as well as its new challenge.

Internet Re-Evolution – Internet of Things – Internet of Bodies – Library of Rickandria

Cold War assumptions driving intelligence collection and analysis—that enemy targets were closed societies, and that superpower rivalry trumped all other issues—are assumptions of the past.

The Cultural Cold War – Library of Rickandria

If the semaphore was the signals intelligence breakthrough at the time of Napoleon, the Internet and its communications channels are at the forefront of the signals intelligence challenges of the 21st century.

SoSHHial Media: The Jewish Hand Behind the Internet – Library of Rickandria

With new transnational adversaries—international terrorists foremost among them—the flood of new information technologies, the easing of export controls on encryption technology, and global access to the Web, the National Security Agency (NSA) is charting new directions in the ways it identifies, gains access to, and successfully exploits target communications.

NSA: The Super-Secret National Security Agency – Library of Rickandria

It is also developing new ways of gauging our information security, given the openness of our society early in the cyber era, the global dimensions of that openness, and the enhanced globe exploitation capabilities that information technology and the Internet give our adversaries.

Can Spirituality Survive in a Hyper-Connected Society? – Library of Rickandria

Michael Vincent Hayden (born March 17, 1945[1]) is a retired United States Air Force four-star general and former Director of the National Security Agency, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He currently serves as a visiting professor at the George Mason University – Schar School of Policy and Government and co-chairs the Bipartisan Policy Center's Electric Grid Cyber Security Initiative.

NSA’s Director, Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, has placed this challenge in the following context: 

“Forty years ago, there were 5,000 stand-alone computers, no fax machines and not one cellular phone.

Today, there are over 180 million computers—most of them networked.

There are roughly 14 million fax machines and 40 million cell phones, and those numbers continue to grow.

Microwave Radiation & Cell Phones – Library of Rickandria

The telecommunications industry is making a $1 trillion investment to encircle the world in millions of miles of high bandwidth fiber-optic cable.” [12]

Challenge to Analysts

Serving Military Needs

• national
• theater
• tactical

Supporting today’s commander requires a complex harnessing of:

• collection
• analysis
• dissemination

• imagery
• measurements and signatures
• signals

The JWICS system allows:

• video teleconferencing
• imagery transfer
• electronic data transfer
• publishing

NISTs are fast-response, rapidly deployable intelligence cells made up of personnel from:

• CIA
• NSA
• DIA

and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA).

They are formally subordinate to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Director of Intelligence, but when they deploy, they are attached to the commander in the field.

The idea is to provide a Joint Task Force commander with the ability to reach back swiftly, efficiently, and expertly to the national-level agencies for answers to questions unanswerable in the field, and to receive warnings of threats that otherwise could not be received.

Using lightweight, high-technology, multimedia communications flowing via Intelink and satellite, a NIST is able to bring the very best intelligence available to the commander in the field. [15]

Truly, the NIST is a remarkable advance in intelligence doctrine and methodology in the Internet era.

I have mentioned, more than once, the:

• national
• theater
• tactical

The world of the analyst in the Internet era is one in which:

• collection
• analysis
• dissemination

And all must be accomplished in collaboration with:

• the FBI
• INS
• Customs

and law enforcement, both US and international.

Charles Holland Duell (April 13, 1850 – January 29, 1920) was the Commissioner of the United States Patent Office from 1898 to 1901, and was later an associate judge of the Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia.

In 1899, Commissioner of Patents Charles Duell urged President William McKinley to abolish the Patent Office saying:

“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”

William McKinley (January 29, 1843 – September 14, 1901) was the 25th president of the United States, serving from 1897 until his assassination in 1901. A member of the Republican Party, he led a realignment that made Republicans largely dominant in the industrial states and nationwide for decades. He presided over victory in the Spanish–American War of 1898; gained control of Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines; restored prosperity after a deep depression; rejected the inflationary monetary policy of free silver, keeping the nation on the gold standard; and raised protective tariffs.

Those fearless words have always appealed to me, as have those of Dr. Dionysus Lardner, who in 1823 advised that:

“Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia.” [16]

Dionysius Lardner FRS FRSE (3 April 1793 – 29 April 1859) was an Irish scientific writer who popularized science and technology and edited the 133-volume Cabinet Cyclopædia.

I quote these gentlemen to remind that we cannot begin to imagine or comprehend where the onward march of discovery and technology will take us in the decades ahead.

These words offer a snapshot of the remarkable doors that the Internet has opened and the formidable new challenges that the Internet era poses for the work of intelligence.

It is an era in which the US Intelligence Community continues to set aside old practices in favor of dramatically new ways of doing business.

This comes at a time when both decisionmakers and military commanders recognize the heightened priority and the central importance of good intelligence in providing for the well-being, the security, and the defense of the United States.

The British East India Company, American Revolution, & a Whole Lot More – Library of Rickandria

RELATED LINKS:

Footnotes:

[1] Stephen E. Maffeo, Most Secret and Confidential (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2000), pp 68-69.

[2] “Predator, A Global Option, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Fact Sheet” (San Diego, CA: General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc., 2001).

[3] “The Birth of Internet,” Leonard Kleinrock, accessed on 2 April 2002:

[4] “The Living Internet,” DARPA, accessed on 2 April 2002: , p.1

[5] Benjamin M. Compaine and William H. Read, eds., The Information Resources Policy Handbook (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999), p. 22.

[6] Fredrick Thomas Martin, TOP SECRET INTRANET (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999), pp. 6-7.

[7] Ibid., p. xliii.

[8] Ibid., pp 53-56.

[9] “About In-Q-Tel, ” accessed on 2 April 2002

[10] Rick E. Yannuzzi, “In-Q-Tel: A New Partnership Between the CIA and the Private Sector,” Defense Intelligence Journal, Vol. 9, No. 1, Winter 2000, pp. 29-30.

[11] Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Vision 2010 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1996), p. 16.

[12] Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, USAF, “Address to Kennedy Political Union of American University,” 17 February 2000, p. 2.

[13] From 1974 to 1977, the author headed President Ford’s National Security Council staff for the Soviet Union and Eastern and Western Europe.

[14] See Carmen A. Medina, “The Coming Revolution in Intelligence Analysis: What To Do When Traditional Models Fail,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 46, No. 3, 2002, pp. 23-28.

[15] James M. Lose, “National Intelligence Support Teams,” Studies in Intelligence, Winter 1999-2000, Unclassified Edition, pp. 87-88.

[16] Norman R. Augustine, “Socio-engineering (And Augustine’s Second Law Thereof),” lecture presented at the University of Colorado Engineering Centennial Convention, 1 October 1993, p. 1.

A. Denis Clift is President of the Joint Military Intelligence College.

A. Denis Clift | U.S. Naval Institute (usni.org)

The views, opinions and findings of the author expressed in this article should not be construed as asserting or implying US government endorsement of its factual statements and interpretations or representing the official positions of any component of the United States government.

SAUCE