Outsourcing May Be The Only Option For U.S. Intelligence
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The American company Uber provides transportation services online throughout the world and offers an adjusted route for drivers using their cars.
Lately the American intelligence community has expressed a wish to receive feedback from Uber and other commercial Start-Up companies about the roadmap it created after five years of data analysis. The wish to incorporate Start-Up companies comes from the American intelligence community’s interest in their knowledge and technology to help find an answer for national security challenges in the country.
The roadmap is the result of a workshop that included 40 companies, who do classified work and a government analysis of the intelligence community’s science and technology needs. The goal is to synchronize private sector research with governmental intelligence so as to help put together a forecast on future threats. The intelligence community is interested in the the insights and ideas of these companies to help face the current and future challenges.
So how can Uber help the director of national intelligence? In an interview with NextGov, David Honey, DNI director of science and technology, said “Maybe they’ve got scheduling algorithms that would help us with our logistics problems. If we can leverage those kinds of tools, maybe we gotta adapt them a little bit, but that certainly beats having to go and pay for those things from scratch.” The American intelligence needs certain capabilities but there just isn’t enough funding due to budget cuts.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper last month described some information-munching difficulties confronting analysts, such as tracking down lone wolf extremists before they manage to take action. “With the way people radicalize on their own, or are radicalized via social media where they don’t leave out a signature, they don’t emit some attribute or trait or behavior that would lead you to begin watching them”, Clapper said. This difficulty is increasing with the use of encrypted communications, he added. When a man is recruited to ISIS, for instance, he will begin conversing with his operator via encrypted communications, making it next to impossible to track either of them.
In conclusion, it seems that the problem isn’t with lack of programmers or minds to work for the CIA, but sometimes there are gadgets and services that social media or private companies provide that can be channeled to intelligence work. Social media, in many cases, can indicate developments that weren’t accessible in the past. In the past, “the best open source information source would have been CNN,” Honey said. “But today, with all the social media activity that’s out there, we need to understand what’s coming before it gets here — not after it’s already here and now we’re behind the curve in understanding how to interpret it.”
