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(U//FOUO) Seeing into the Global SIGINT System - A View from the
Field
FROM: Dave Hurry
SIGINT Technical Director
Run Date: 04/18/2005
SID's Technical Director gives his insights from the recent SID
leadership trip to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan (U//FOUO)
(TS//SI) I'm sitting in Bagram Airbase at the CJTF-76 (Combined
Joint Task Force) CSG element and reflecting on what I've heard so
far in my visits in Iraq, Qatar, and up the road here in Bagram at
JIATF CSG.
(TS//SI) A common theme is the importance of complete visibility
for every member of the global SIGINT system to all the
information across Cryptologic enterprise and our partners' spaces,
and "ubiquitous" access to every other member of the global
SIGINT system working in the same target space. Or to put it
another way, transparency and collaboration across the SIGINT
network. The value of this, of course, is that as we increase our
ability to share information and expertise, each and every member
of the SIGINT system is able to make better decisions; decisions
on where to focus, what to analyze, who to team with, when to
engage, and how to make it all relevant and useful.
(U//FOUO) Every unit we've met with on this trip is making great
use of the NSA databases they have access to and building
networks across geographic and organizational boundaries.
However, they don't have the means to share all of the deeply
insightful information they are gathering from their local customers
and partners with the rest of the SIGINT system. Of course, we've
been talking about this for a while, but this TDY has made it clear
to me that there are key steps we can and should take to advance
these concepts in real-world practical ways. I'd like to explore
some thoughts that I've had during this trip about how to achieve
greater levels of practical transparency.
(U//FOUO) In my view there are four significant challenges to
getting to those greater levels of transparency. It begins with easy
and effective means to capture the actions, decisions, and threats
that our customers and partners are facing. But it doesn't stop with
our customer information; it also extends to our analysis, tasking,
SIGDEV, access insights, and more. Database access is the tip of
the iceberg. What is equally important is capturing the informal
insights into our customers' operations and unobtrusively mining
their target knowledge and views to incorporate into our own
decisions and actions. Based on this TDY, I'm convinced that there
are many ways to accomplish this. Among those many ways, those
which leverage the information repositories and processes already
in use will likely be the most practical and quickest to deliver.
(U//FOUO) We must also retain the context in which our actions,
decisions, and threats are expressed. For our customers,
understanding this context drives to the heart of what our CSGs*,
CSTs*, fusion centers, and tactical SIGINTers are so good at. The
SERIES:
(U) SID Leadership '05
TDY to CENTCOM AOR
1. MGQ's Notes from
the Field - Part 1
2. Field Station Rattler
3. Hello from Iraq!
4. MG Q Iraq Theater
TDY: Day 3, April1,
2005
5. The Art of Sharing:
Insight and
Continuity
6. MGQ's Notes from
the Field - Part 2
7. MGQ's Notes from
the Field - Part 3
8. Summing Up the Trip
9. The Trip in Photos
10. Seeing into the
Global SIGINT
System - A View
from the Field
same goes for the decisions and issues each of us face each day.
Unfortunately, the means to express these perceptions to the rest
of the SIGINT system are largely lacking. The good news is that
I've seen and heard lots of great ideas from the SIGINTers we've
been visiting that show some promising starting points. We need to
give these teams and others across the SIGINT system the
resources to explore these ideas and then be able to apply them
elsewhere in the SIGINT System when it makes sense.
(U) Once we've gathered all of this information, making it
available to the entire global SIGINT system is the next challenge.
This seems to be largely a technical issue, but one that cannot be
realistically solved through a centralized, top-down design.
Instead, simple tools that leverage data federation, enable data
discovery, and provide dynamic access control in a decentralized
way will make it possible for this data to become available across
the enterprise.
(U) That leads us to the fourth challenge: precision delivery that
presents additional information to the right person at the right
time. Only with this last step will we realize the promise of all this
new information to improve the decisions made by each and every
SIGINTer. While difficult, this problem is not impossible. Rather we
need to look more closely at how each of us operate today and use
it to find related information. Our actions and interactions with
databases, web spaces, and analytic tools offers a good source for
finding more about what we need. By connecting our actions with
data-mining tools, we can start to bring related information to light.
We can even begin to automatically identify communities of
interest, forming self-organizing collaborative networks (but that's
a topic for another day).
(U//FOUO) The good news is that many efforts in our
expeditionary SIGINT units and everywhere else across the SIGINT
system are advancing these concepts by necessity. We've not yet
begun to identify and leverage their successes across the global
system, but I think this is an area we can quickly fix and build upon
the focus, energy, and ingenuity of our SIGINTer's around the
world. Today they are the pioneers in the evolution of
expeditionary SIGINT. Their efforts continue to push us forward
into an environment where we share information and expertise
across the SIGINT system. I am indebted to everyone who has
spent their time during this TDY exploring this topic with me and
the commitment and sacrifice they are making for out nation!
*(U) Notes:
CSG = Cryptologic Services Group
CST = Cryptologic Support Team
"(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