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(U) Deep Target Knowledge
FROM:
Technical Leader, Russia Product Line
Run Date: 08/22/2003
(U//FOUO) Now that you know where your target is and you have
an idea of how it operates and who its friends are, its time to really
learn who it is and what makes it tick. Analysts often overlook the
importance of understanding the psychology and culture of their
target. They may erroneously allow themselves to categorize
certain scenarios or actions as "unthinkable".
(C//SI) One way of avoiding such failures of imagination is to
operate, to the maximum extent possible, inside our target's
Conceptual Space. This is not to be confused with the target's
Information Space, which has come to mean the target's systems
of communicating and storing information and their content. The
Information Space is tied to the target's technology and is, in fact,
what we as SIGINT analysts target and collect against.
(C//SI) The target's Conceptual Space on the other hand is the
entirety of his frame of reference - its culture (social, religious,
ethnic, national, organizational) and, at the level of the individual,
its personality. To try to operate within the target's Conceptual
Space is to try to live inside its head, to understand enough about
it and its milieu that we have a good sense of what it means, what
it is capable of doing, and how it should react. This has little, if
anything, to do with technology or what we collect and everything
to do with how we assess what we have collected and the context
into which we put it for our readers.
(C//SI) The objective is to be able to understand the target's
communications and documents as their originators did and as
their intended recipients were to have understood them. Clearly
that requires having knowledge of the subject domain (nuclear
physics, trade, avionics, etc). But it also requires a deep
understanding of the relevant cultural context (national, religious
or ideological, ministerial, professional, etc, and their various
permutations). The key to understanding that cultural context is
command of the relevant language(s), both at the general and the
culture-specific level. Vocabulary can, and often does, have more
than denotative value; it can carry culture-bound baggage that
elicits a predictable emotional response from the cultural insider.
For the intelligence analyst, "getting" the cultural reference is often
critical to fully understanding what is going on. Unfortunately,
there are any number of examples of analysts in the Intelligence
Community coming to erroneous conclusions because they lacked
sufficient language and target depth to understand material,
actions, or events within the proper cultural framework.
(C//SI) Once an analyst has the skills and knowledge to operate
inside their target's Conceptual Space, gaining access to the
target's Information Space, particularly its private Information
Space, can lead to a virtuous circle where access to the
Information Space improves the analyst's knowledge of the
Conceptual Space, further increasing the ability to exploit what is
SERIES:
(U) Analysis
1. Strengthening Our
Analytic Capability
2. Active Analysis:
SIGINT That Can
Predict
3. Pattern and Social
Network Analysis
4. Analysis Series:
Follow the People
and Geospatial
Exploitation
5. Deep Target
Knowledge
6. Analysis Series
Wrap-up: Continuous
Learning
extracted from the Information Space.
"(U//FOUO) SIDtoday articles may not be republished or reposted outside NSANet
without the consent of S0121 (DL sid comms)."
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DERIVED FROM: NSA/CSSM 1-52, DATED 08 JAN 2007 DECLASSIFY ON: 20320108