22 April 2007
The Association
How would you divvy up nearly seventy billion dollars? What would you spend it on if you had some of it?
The Association wanted to help us know, and they threw one of their memorable conferences last week to provide a showcase of the leadership to talk about where things are going. For reasons of non-disclosure, I can only tell you it was held in a secure facility that has an ornamental SCUD missile in the lobby.
The theme of the symposium was about the role of Intelligence in the Long War, which sounds more ominous than something that is not likely to have that name past the next election.
The leadership all made appearances, and I am sorry I can't tell you who they are or what they said. That is the nature of things. The closing address, by an official who is in a position to know, was frank and far-reaching in goals. In fact, it was electrifying.
The conference was a sell-out; every seat taken. It is a unique event, since every attendant has to have an advanced clearance. That makes it pretty exclusive, and the tables for the exhibits were all sold out as well, as were the sponsored coffee breaks and box lunches.
That is important. Two days is a big investment for the people in the audience, and the ones who come from as far away as San Diego and Los Angeles to see if they can get a clue on where the Intelligence Community and it's $68 billion-a-year budget is going.
You would recognize the corporate players, so I won't bother to enumerate them here. I was pleased to see my company's logo placed prominently on the large corporate banner, and on the slide that dominated the jumbo-tron screen in the Auditorium where the classified sessions were conducted.
It is anybody's guess as to how much is really being spent on intelligence. There is a move in the Senate to declassify the “Top Line” on overall spending, and the Deputy Director for Collection inadvertently mentioned last year that the official budget was “$44 billion.”
A former Chief Financial Officer told me privately that figure was wrong, but it is “close enough for government work,” as we say in the trade.
Of course, that does not include the “supplementals” which are passed to conduct operations in the theater, nor the $18 billion that is buried in other accounts in the Pentagon. So, let's throw another six billion for the wars, give or take, and add the Pentagon funds, and you can see we are talking about a pot of money that is pretty significant. That is why the contractors like this event so much, and why the government finds it useful to attract new ideas.
The government cannot do the work itself, since almost all the new missions and tasks mandated since 9/11 that are not “inherently governmental” in nature are performed by private contractors.
The community is in an awkward position, since it had barely started executing the provisions of the Intelligence Reform Act under the first Director, and now are trying to execute Director McConnell's “Hundred Days” plan to fix the problems. This framework was echoed across the two days of discussion. The Community has a year or so to make the start, and then momentum will have to be built to carry reform forward.
In the display area during the sponsored coffee-breaks near the ornamental captured SCUD, some community leaders indicated that things would change fundamentally, not at election time a year from November, but right after the Fabulous February Primaries in ten months.
Jockeying for influence, the states have jammed so many contests into the second month of 2007 that things should be just about wrapped up for whoever the nominee is going to be, months before the Conventions and more than a half year before the Election itself.
This will be the longest transition in American History, and that is why this conference and these speakers are so important.
A career NSA mathematician and current senior official in the Office of the Director gave a compelling presentation on improving the quality of training to young analysts. His discussion of “Analyst Boot Camp,” in which young members of the intelligence community from all agencies are thrown together in intensive field training was worth the conference fee all by itself.
He also had the best one-liner of the conference, when he described the culture of the NSA workforce:
“An extrovert at NSA is the one who is staring at the tip of your shoes.”
The kicker was the closing speaker, who is in a position to know exactly what is going on. His list of problems likewise was no surprise to the conference attendees, but extremely useful in setting an agenda in meeting requirements. I could rattle them off, as you probably could, too:
The antique provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) are a real hindrance to effective operations. They were drafted more than thirty years ago, when the cell phone and computer did not exist in the ways they do now. The speaker summed it up nicely by saying that at one end of Pennsylvania Avenue this argument is about putting the American public under surveillance, and at the other end it is about catching terrorists.
That is at the mission end of the problem. Underlying the problems with mission are problems with the basic infrastructure that keeps it running. He thinks that our counter intelligence capability- the ability to find bad apples already in the system- is broken, and the security process that is the gate-guard to the secret kingdom a topic for a humorous monologue.
He ruminated a little about money, which is both the root of all evil and great fun if you can get enough of it. The people that manage big chunks of cash have at least the same sensitivity to security that the government does, and a lot more incentive to keep a tight ship. In an environment where the delay of a financial transaction by mere seconds can enrich the ethically challenged, the banking community does not address the problem of reliability by sending some junior-college gumshoe out to talk to the neighbors of the employees.
The speaker smiled said that if they did that to him, none of his neighbors would even know who he was, and he has been living in his house for a decade.
He said the money people watch what people do, not where they live. They look at keystrokes.
Every time he mentioned how screwed up security is, he was interrupted by applause from the audience.
I was moderately surprised to hear him say that the threat he fears the most is the one from Cyberspace, a place I spend a lot more time than I would like. He thinks that with a room full of the right people he could bring the nation to its knees, if he chose to. He bases that on the fact the capabilities already exist to exploit and attack networks with virtual impunity. What we cannot do is defend them with complete confidence.
That made me feel a little queasy, all that talk about keystrokes and exploitation. But it is a new world, you know? I don't know what the difference between a government gum-shoe in person and a cyber-sleuth is, except that neighbors used to lie to the gumshoes for you. Now they don't even know who you are.
Keystrokes may be the only relaible way to see what people are up to, and in that spirit, I guess I am happy that the extroverts at NSA will be looking at the tips of your shoes.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com