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From: spaf@xxxxxxx
Date: July 21, 2004 11:01:52 PM EDT
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Subject: A washingtonpost.com article from: spaf@xxxxxxx
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This may be of interest to some IP readers....
Crippling Innovation -- And Intelligence
By Michael A. Wertheimer
On Dec. 8, 1941, the Signals Intelligence elements of the U.S.
government were in a quandary. How could Pearl Harbor have occurred,
given their spectacular success in breaking Japan's top diplomatic
code? The answer was simple: In their zeal to succeed in the diplomatic
arena, they had failed to place enough emphasis on Japanese naval
traffic, the one source that could have given some warning of the
attack.
Although they are more than a half-century old, Pearl Harbor's
lessons are relevant today. Indeed, given the current debate about the
role of intelligence in assessing Iraq's efforts to develop weapons of
mass destruction and in disasters such as that of Sept. 11, 2001,
history compels us to ask if we are once again allowing technological
success to blind us to an emerging threat.
Consider today's "diplomatic code" analogue: voice communications.
The numbers are staggering. In 2002 there were about 180 billion
minutes of international phone calls representing the communications of
roughly 2.8 billion cellular and 1.2 billion fixed-line subscribers
worldwide. Excluding North America, the bulk of these communications
are made possible by several hundred satellites orbiting the globe.
Despite these daunting statistics, our nation has turned the
challenges of accessing and "mining" these communications to discern
the intentions of our adversaries into an immeasurable success. But
ironically, as with the focus of code breakers before Pearl Harbor,
this very success represents the single greatest threat to the
continuing viability of Signals Intelligence. Specifically, it inhibits
critical investments to create equal capabilities for the
communications medium of choice for a growing number of commercial
providers and their customers: the Internet. The reasons are
threefold.
First, the demand by Congress for better business practices in the
acquisition and development of systems inevitably forces decision
makers to choose investments that provide the surest near-term returns.
Developing solutions to access and process communications in the
high-speed world of the Internet is expensive, risky and
time-consuming.
Second, customers of intelligence, such as the CIA, FBI, State and
Defense departments, and the White House, have come to rely on -- and
demand -- an uninterrupted stream of intelligence. But the sources and
methods used to obtain this information are kept tightly guarded for
fear that inadvertent disclosure will tip off our adversaries and deny
us critical intelligence in the future. This means we are effectively
keeping these customers in the dark about strategies for new types of
collection they might wish to influence.
Third, recent perceived intelligence failures have dramatically
shifted longer-term strategies toward temporary fixes of dubious value.
To gain an appreciation of the emerging challenge, consider these
facts. A single strand of fiber-optic cable exceeds the capacity of
all the telecommunications satellites orbiting the globe. This year
alone, e-mail volume is expected to be the equivalent of 40 copies of
the fully digitized holdings of the Library of Congress.
Another important medium, instant messaging, is now estimated to
generate 530 billion messages per day. Complicating matters further,
phone calls can now be sent directly over the Internet using a
technology called Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP). AT&T, Teleglobe,
British Telecom, Time Warner Cable, Telecom Italia and Deutsche Telekom
began offering VoIP services this year, signaling the beginning of a
major conversion away from traditional telephone networks. Indeed, by
2005 enough fiber-optic cable will have been laid to carry, by similar
analogy, one Library of Congress every 14.4 seconds.
What has been the reaction to this challenge? In the National Defense
Authorization Act for fiscal 2004, Congress revoked the National
Security Agency's "milestone decision authority," effectively stripping
the NSA of its ability to directly manage its own modernization
program. This authority now rests with the undersecretary of defense
for acquisition, technology and logistics -- a situation that will
severely restrict the NSA's ability to invest broadly in unproven but
highly promising, and in some cases competing, technologies. The
additional delay this introduces in acquiring such systems will be
devastating, particularly since the turnover of technologies on the
Internet typically spans months, not years. Moreover, the people who
know the most about what is needed will be further removed from the
point of decision.
The emergence of transnational and terrorist targets as national
priorities has made intelligence consumers in the government eager for
intelligence on demand. Tactical requirements for near real-time
intelligence supporting operations by ground troops and law enforcement
continue to grow. Given a dollar to spend on intelligence, the most
profitable near-term return continues to come from existing systems.
This inverted cycle of demand and supply comes at the expense of
laying the groundwork for future capabilities, an expense largely
hidden from customers who might wisely choose to demand less from the
intelligence community in the near term, given the long-term stakes.
Perhaps the most profound, and discouraging, event for the
intelligence community in the past three years is the message sent by
the various Sept. 11 investigative commissions: The failure to share
data was the single greatest factor in the failure to detect the
attack plans, a conclusion that clearly underlies the more provocative
fact that no "smoking gun" was found. Indeed, the provocation is this:
It would have been worse to have collected clear and compelling
intelligence before Sept. 11 and not to have analyzed it than to have
had no such information in the first place. And the subtle consequence
is this: Analysts are hesitating to pursue new sources for fear that
they will be unable to process the resulting data without new tools and
technology -- investments that are difficult to justify because their
return is unproven.
In his influential book "The Innovator's Dilemma," Clayton M.
Christensen describes how extremely well-managed, successful companies
can ultimately fail when confronted by "disruptive innovations." Such
innovations are often mistaken by incumbents as too expensive, without
proven applicability and lacking a sufficient customer base. Much like
the code breakers shortly before Pearl Harbor, we risk not heeding the
disruptive shift that is occurring with the growing dominance of the
Internet. History -- and best business practices -- obligate us to
encourage "disruptive innovators" to create new sources and methods for
intelligence and let the natural evolution of innovation deliver
reduced costs, greater capability and larger markets. To succeed we
must demand far less near-term intelligence product from the Signals
Intelligence community, give it control of its resources and allow it
to plan for a disruptive future, a future that is presaged by videos
that show an Afghan warlord exhorting his terrorist followers not to
use satellite phones for fear of American capture.
We would do well to understand that today's cryptologists must no
longer look only to the sky for answers.
The writer was a cryptologic mathematician with the National Security
Agency for 21 years, the last three as the NSA's senior technical
director. He is with RABA Technologies LLC, an information technology
consulting company in Columbia.
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