INTELLIGENCE AND INTELLIGENCES

Via the consistently interesting Kent’s Imperative, we have news of a major effort to develop a new domain of intelligence analysis called ” visual analytics“. What is it ? From the NVAC website:

“What is Visual Analytics?

In the fight on terrorism, analysts are bombarded with enormous volumes of data coming from a variety of sources: documents, emails, measurements, images, numbers and even sounds. Often, this information is incomplete, fuzzy, disjointed, or out of context.

Recognizing that humans have a keen ability to process visual information, researchers are creating computer tools—known as visual analytics—that can interpret and analyze vast amounts of data. Visual analytics is the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces. People use visual analytics tools and techniques to:

Synthesize information and derive insight from massive, dynamic, ambiguous, and often conflicting data.

Detect the expected and discover the unexpected.

Provide timely, defensible, and understandable assessments.

Communicate assessment effectively for action.

Although visual analytics has multiple uses, its use in biology and national security is an integral part of our nation’s overall efforts to protect against terrorism and reduce our vulnerability to terrorist attacks. By uncovering hidden associations and relationships, analysts glean insight and knowledge to assess terrorist threats to detect the expected and discover the unexpected. “

This research is interesting on a number of levels.

Traditionally, ever since the IC expanded beyond purely service-based military intelligence it has, starting with the OSS and going forward to today, attracted a relatively limited set of personality types that emphasized certain modes of thought. Broadly, speaking you had field operatives ( think Kermit Roosevelt, Jr, Milt Bearden and Robert Baer), analysts ( Sherman Kent, Robert Gates or Michael Scheuer) and the IT/Cryptologic/R&D crowd that are integral to the IMINT/SIGINT agencies. For the most part, the first and third groups have fed their information to the analysts and the analysts have not had a very direct influence over collection, a compartmentalization that made some sense in the Cold War era ( though not to the extremes to which it was taken, which nevertheless, did not prevent the Soviet Bloc from penetrating America’s IC).

As a group, analysts tend to be cut from a cloth not unlike what you see in professional academics. A strong bias toward verbal-linguistic and mathematical-logical intelligence and vertical thinking expertise, a highly focused outlook whose intellectual narrowness is further aggravated over the course of a career by security requirements and bureaucratic/political “red lines”. The analytical community is not unaware of its own structural tendencies toward cognitive bias; the in-house CIA journal Studies in Intelligence as well as periodic ” reform” commissions have raised these questions repeatedly and diligent analysts attempt to guard against them.

To an extent, the National Intelligence Council should be injecting outside or unorthdox viewpoints or perspectives into the analytical process for high priority, summative, reporting. How successfully the NIC has been at doing this is difficult for an outsider like myself to measure ( has it ever been systematically evaluated?) . While non-career figures are sometimes tapped as National Intelligence Officers, and this is helpful, they too usually come from the same background as do analysts, being academics or think tank experts or perhaps, military officers. This cognitive homogeneity can lead to mental gaps knawn as lacunas of activity where certain patterns are simply not likely to be recognized easily.

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