[Punctuation errors in the original. Accurate text in PDF:
http://cryptome.org/ddni-openspy.pdf
]
Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2008 18:25:06 -0500 (CDT)
From: Office of the Director of National Intelligence
<odni@service.govdelivery.com>
Subject: Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Collection Glenn Gaffney
Addresses the DNI Open Source Conference 2008 (09/11/08)
Remarks and Q&A by the Deputy Director of National Intelligence for
Collection
Mr. Glenn A. Gaffney
DNI Open Source Conference 2008
Washington, DC
September 11, 2008
MS. SABRA HORNE (ODNI Senior Advisor for Open Source/Outreach): Good
morning. Welcome ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the Second Annual
DNI Open Source Conference. We re thrilled to have you here.
I m Sabra Horne, Senior Advisor for Outreach and the organizer for this
event. We see many familiar faces here, a lot of the wonderful folks
we ve worked with over the past few years as well as those of you who were
able to attend the conference last year.
But in this last year, we ve added many, many, many new faces to our friends
and family list those of you who know that using open source is vital in
ensuring that we protect our national security. Our list of friends
and family has grown, and grown, and grown. You recognize that open
source information is critical in transcending the confines of the traditional
Intelligence Community. In thinking about how we could top the success
of last year s event, we wondered, was it possible? Is it important
for us to gather Intelligence Community professionals with subject matter
experts from around the world to address our most pressing questions?
We wondered, is there a need for intelligence professionals to listen, to
learn from the experts who they can get the most productive information
from?
We heard from you and 3,500 of your closest friends; the answer was yes.
Our goal with this conference is to bring together that ever expanding network
of folks who know that open source information is critical. So to you,
the fortunate 1,800 who were able to get in the door today, we say, we proudly
announce to you that we have here representatives from over 80 colleges and
universities, from 35 states, 47 think tanks, 56 nongovernmental organizations,
representatives from state, local, tribal agencies from 38 states, from 370
private firms, from 60 media outlets, and from 38 countries around the
world. And with this motley crew, we can and we will break down the
barriers to collaboration, overcome our challenges of disconnected networks
of different languages, lexicons, and acronyms, of jurisdictions, states,
and country borders, to develop and enrich symbiotic relationships to best
meet our security challenges.
In creating this exciting agenda, we listened to you. So this agenda
was created by you and for you. Over the next two days, you will hear
from many of our top leading experts in the Intelligence Community as well
as subject matter experts from around the world. We ll hear from Glenn
Gaffney, our Deputy Director of National Intelligence for collection, about
his vision for the new universe of open source information. You ll
hear from General Hayden, who will talk about the importance of open source
within the Central Intelligence Agency. Unfortunately, General Clapper
is not able to join us but we ll hear from Christine McKeown, the Assistant
Deputy Undersecretary on how open source is affecting the DOD.
Tomorrow morning, we have a special focus on Homeland Security and we ll
hear from Mr. Charlie Allen in regards to the new developments with Open
Source as DHS. And we ll have an exciting panel discussion about privacy,
technology, and open source. Many, many things to CENTRA, especially
Steve Schlaikjer, Patricia Rader, Jaclyn Harnett (ph), and Meredith for all
the amazing hard work and good humor and good cheer and diplomacy.
So thank you so very much. We also want to thank Harold Rosenbaum and
the rest of CENTRA for all the support they ve provided us over the year.
You told us this year that you wanted more training and hands on experience
with open source capabilities. So here, over the next two days, we
will actually train over 1,000 individuals in open source trade craft.
Many thanks to Mark Johnson from the Open Source Center for achieving this
amazing feat. Thank you, Mark. Plus, we have demonstrations and
learning centers all around this venue. So please make sure you get
around to see them all. We ve slowed the breakneck speed of last year
s conference a bit so that you all have more time to mingle, chat, and network
with your colleagues. So please take advantage of that. We also
have areas, business center areas over in the other part of the venue, where
you can actually relax and enjoy a bit of a cup of coffee and some conversation.
Don t miss, also, our Meet the Speakers session which takes place this afternoon,
where you can mix and mingle. Please keep in mind that this is a completely
open, unclassified, public event, so please keep in mind your comments at
all times. Finally, we d be remised if we didn t note that today is
Patriot Day and we didn t note the changes in information sharing that have
taken place over the last seven years since the tragic events of 9/11.
Before that day, could we have imagined the information sharing that takes
place? Could we have imagined gathering 2,000 individuals in this room,
with media, with international partners, to share information? I don
t think so. So to the sacrifice of others, our gratitude is great and
our memories long. And also in accordance with the presidential
proclamation, we will note, at 8:46 A.M., a moment of silence in recognition
of those who have fallen.
Now, it s my honor to introduce Mr. Dan Butler, our Acting Assistant Deputy
Director of National Intelligence for Open Source. Mr. Butler has been
part of the DNI since the very earliest days of its stand up and served as
the senior advisor for policy. His 25 years in military intelligence
and law enforcement gave him a great appreciation for open source.
And it is his vision for the broadening and furthering of the wider open
source community that drives him to this day. Mr. Butler. Enjoy
the conference.
(Applause.)
MR. DANIEL BUTLER (Acting Assistant Deputy Director of National Intelligence
for Open Source): Sabra, thank you and also, I d like to echo Sabra
s thanks to CENTRA Technology and the great team that CENTRA put on organizing
this conference this year. They ve done a terrific job, a lot of good
work behind the scenes. I want to thank FBC, also, for organizing our
Tech Expo, which is occurring right across the atrium. I strongly encourage
that you visit our exhibiters. They have some remarkable new capabilities
that they would like to share with us in the community and share with all
of you, who come from the broader community beyond the Intelligence
Community.
Want to thank our co-host, the DNI Open Source Center, Doug Naquin.
Thank you, director for supporting us this year and co-hosting the conference
and the Department of Homeland Security, Charlie Allen, Barbara Alexander.
He s the senior executive responsible for Open Source. They ve been
terrific in helping us put together a fantastic conference what I anticipate
will be a fantastic conference for all of us here today. And, of course,
I want to thank all of you. Thank you for coming. Those statistics
that Sabra just recited are very impressive and they it excites me to know
that we have been able to draw 1800 people out of the 3500 people that wanted
to come to the conference to join us here today in collaborating on how we
can use open sources better to perform our mission of creating decision
advantage.
Let me start by echoing comments that you saw in the video right at the outset
from Director McConnell, our boss, here at the Intelligence Community.
Admiral Mike McConnell talked about the thing that he thought would be most
important if there was only one thing that his tenure was remembered for
and that was collaboration. And I see no better example of collaboration
than what we re doing today. The great work that we ve done bringing
so many experts and practitioners, analysts, collection-requirements managers,
operators, collectors together within the Intelligence Community to work
on open source issues. And more importantly, collaborating beyond our
community to include so many of you that are here from academia, the private
sector, think tanks, and our international partners. Thank you very
much for joining us.
Congressman Rob Simmons, in the video that you saw at the outset, mentioned
that we ve come along way and I couldn t agree more. We really have
come a long way and I d like to highlight for you just a few things that
I ve seen occur in the three years that I ve been here at DNI. In 2005,
Ambassador Negroponte, our first DNI, established an office in his office
focused on open source issues. And I ve had the privilege of serving
in that office for three years.
Ambassador Negroponte established the DNI Open Source Center and he built
that around a real a venerable institution that for over 40 years has done
nothing but hone the fine craft of open source intelligence, the farm broadcast
information service. The new DNI Open Source Center has done remarkable
work and I think you ll see some of that today and you ll learn some of it
as our various speakers tell you what we ve been able to accomplish in just
the last three years.
In 2006, we published an open source vision for the Intelligence
Community. This little red book, which I d like to call it the little
red book to tease my former boss, Eliot Jardines, our first Assistant Deputy
DNI for Open Source. And yet, it s had a profound effect on our
community. Just 12 pages have driven an awful lot of reform, change,
innovation within the Intelligence Community and beyond. We wrote the
first Intelligence Community directive on the National Open Source Enterprise
in 2006 and we established a highly collaborative community collection committee
focused on open source intelligence strategy, planning, and policy.
This collection committee, which advises my boss, Mr. Glenn Gaffney, on open
source issues, is comprised of senior executives of flag offices from across
the community that meet regularly. Typically it s been about six times
a year and their agency subject-matter experts, who meet much more
frequently. Typically a month every month on various issues and they
meet regularly to approve our open source enterprise. They re doing
terrific work and you ll hear a little bit more about that today.
In 2007, I would say if you had to capture in one word what we started to
do it would be invest. We invested in greater open source capacity
across the community. We expanded the DNI Open Source Center, their
capacity to provide open source research and analysis on very difficult
issues. We expanded access for Intelligence Community analysts to quality,
commercial open source products and services and, of course, we organized
our first DNI open source conference.
In 2008, we established foundational open source training and dramatically
increased the training of Intelligence Community analysts in fundamental
open source skills. We delivered training and open source exploitation
to several state and local fusion centers across the country, a program that
s expanding over the coming year. And we re using this conference this year,
as Sabra mentioned, to whet your appetites and deliver more introductory
training to a broader array of government professionals.
We invested. We continued to invest in 2008. We invested in dedicated
open source support to AFRICOM, the newest combatant command, a very unique
hybrid command, an exciting initiative that you ll hear more about tomorrow
from General Clapper s representative, Ms. Christine McKeown. We invested
in open source proof of concept innovation projects. Several of these
were in direct support of AFRICOM and we leveraged open source expertise
and outreach networks of the Department of State, the U.S. Army s Foreign
Military Studies Office, and the Marine Corps.
We invested in the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, in my opinion,
one of the crown jewels of our national open source enterprise. We
invested in IC librarian professional development, something that was long
overdue. We invested in the National Virtual Translation Center, a
critical capability that allows us to reach out and tap the skills of capable
linguists across the country and around the world virtually. You ll
learn more about that today and tomorrow. You ll hear from our director
of the NVTC, Mr. Jeff Robinson, and Ben Thomas, from the DNI s foreign language
program office.
In 2008, we worked hard to strengthen our partnerships with academia and
private industry and with the close collaboration of open source experts
and analysts from across the community, we designed and have fielded an Open
Source Collection Acquisition Requirements management system we call it OSCAR
to connect intelligence consumers, analysts and collections requirements
managers with providers of quality open source intelligence from across our
national open source enterprise.
Finally, we ve revised our vision and strategy for the first time since
2006. You ll hear important ways we have revisioned, as I like to say,
later today from the director of the DNI Open Source Center, Mr. Doug Naquin,
and a panel of colleagues and experts and senior representatives from the
Intelligence Community, the Department of Defense, and the Department of
Homeland Security. I strongly encourage you to hear Mr. Naquin s
presentation and learn more about how we re building our open source enterprise
of enterprises.
That brings us to today. We ve done a lot but where do we go from
here? How do we continue to leverage open sources to achieve clear
decision advantage over our adversaries and how does this fit into our long-range
vision for the Intelligence Community s future? First, I d like to
say a word about humility and that s probably not a word you hear often being
uttered from the lips of someone in the Intelligence Community. But
it s important that we think in terms of humility as we tackle the problems
that we have in the Intelligence Community. According to Wikipedia,
humility is one of the seven capital virtues, something we d all do well
to have in greater abundance. And I m reminded of something Ted Turner,
the founder of CNN once said, If only I was more humble, I d be perfect.
(Laughter.)
We in the Intelligence Community must recognize that we re not perfect, far
from it. But a little humility goes a long way and I put that in the
context of open source. We don t have all the experts, all the best
ideas, all the answers. In today s day and age, a little humility on
our part will free us to be more open to outside expertise, ideas, and
answers. I like how Carol Dumaine, the Deputy Director at the Department
of Energy s Intelligence and Counterintelligence Office puts it. As
Carol might say, We need to move from thinking of ourselves as an Intelligence
Community to a community of intelligence. I think our humility is
on display today and we invite you into our open source community of
intelligence. Help us achieve the wisdom and decision advantage we
need over our adversaries.
Secondly, I d like to call your attention to DNI s new Vision 2015, a globally
networked and integrated intelligence enterprise. These are easy to
get your hands on and get a copy of. This is a very bold vision for
the future. It captures, well, the world we will operate within the
next decade over the next decade and I think it illustrates our humble
recognition and we must adapt and learn from experts wherever they reside.
I d like to just pull out three quotes from DNI Vision 2015. First,
there is no typical customer. We will be providing intelligence to
a computer-literate generation that grew up with the Internet and user-generated
content, for example, YouTube, blogs, wikis, in which they acted as both
consumer and contributor of information in an on-demand environment.
Second, to respond to the dynamic and complex threat environment of the 21st
century, our operating model must emphasize mission integration, a networked,
knowledge-sharing model that rapidly pulls together dispersed and diverse
expertise and resources against specific missions. And third and this
is probably my favorite line in Vision 2015 no aspect of collect requires
greater consideration or holds more promise than open source information.
Transformation of our approach to open sources is critical to the future
success of adaptive collection.
Thirdly, today, I d like to call your attention to the DNI open source challenge,
where we challenged you, the community the broader community our community
of intelligence to demonstrate how we might transform our intelligence enterprise
to deliver clear decision advantage to our customers in the future.
You ll hear more from Dr. Mark Lowenthal this morning as he introduces the
process that we went through to conduct this very innovative outreach to
the broader community and I think you ll be impressed by the submissions
that we received and that will be presented to you tomorrow.
Finally, I call your attention to the visionaries, leaders, and talented
practitioners who imagined what is possible and challenged us to defy convention,
embrace innovation, and fully exploit open sources to achieve decision advantage
and they re all around you in you this room today and they ll be all around
you over the next two days during our conference. Please take advantage
of that opportunity.
It s my pleasure, today, to introduce one of national security community
s true visionaries, a leader focused on the future, an innovator. His
biography in your program tells it well, so I won t recite that. An
astrophysicist, a career intelligence officer, and I would be so bold as
to describe him as one of our community s most creative, unconventional thinkers
and leaders, Director Mike McConnell s deputy and the Intelligence Community
s senior executive responsible for leading, inspiring, and coordinating our
vast Intelligence Community collection enterprise to include our national
open source enterprise, our Deputy DNI for Collection, Mr. Glenn Gaffney.
(Applause.)
MR. GLENN A. GAFFNEY (Deputy Director of National Intelligence for
Collection): Good morning. I m going to wander around a bit because
it s my practice to wander around. As the Deputy Director for Collection,
I get asked to come and speak in a number of different forum and a lot of
times those are classified forum and a lot of times when you re in those
forum, you ve got a podium, you ve got a sign above your head, and that sign
above your head usually sets the classification level. And I learned
very quickly that one of the things that made me uncomfortable was standing
in front of a podium where we were dealing with special access programs because
I d stand in front of the podium and the sign above my head said SAP, all
right? And so I ve trained myself to get away from the podium.
While it may be true, I see no need to advertise it. (Laughter.)
Thank you for the opportunity to come and speak to this great conference.
I heard nothing but wonderful things about last year s conference and was
excited to have the opportunity to come and speak, to meet you all here
today. It is important to be here. It s important because of
the critical nature of open source and this intelligence enterprise and it
s important for the opportunity that it represents in terms of what open
source can do for the future of the intelligence enterprise.
Now, one of the things that I got asked very early in my new life as a
congressional cat toy within the DNI was, Glenn, what s the future of
collection? Where are we going? Not where we re going with HUMINT,
not where we re going with SIGINT, not where we re going with our space program
or any other aspect of the program. We re going to work all those things
and we do all those things and we do them very well but it s a broader question
and it s a question that comes to the DNI. What is the future of
collection? And I thought, well, as the Deputy Director for Collection,
I probably ought to ponder on that for a little bit. And so in thinking
through and I came up with what amounts to two words: integrated
performance. It s that simple and it s that complex.
We are an incredibly well-resourced intelligence enterprise. We use
that enterprise and optimize that enterprise and have been doing so for many
years with great effect against some of the most pressing challenges that
this nation and our allies face. But if we look at the world across
the board, and I m sure you ve heard it in other forum before, we don
t own the technology playing field like we once did. Anyone surprised
by that statement? It s not there for us the way that it was for us
before. It s there more from a collaborative and interactive nature
but it contributes. That lack of owning, that technological playing
field creates a more level playing field across the board.
When you take that piece and then you look at what could argued be the cost
per bit of information, globally, goes down weekly. Add to that that
the cost of entry into the intelligence business has gone down
dramatically. A laptop and a modem and you re in the game. You
may not be any good at it but you re in the game. And so if we think
of cost per bit going down, not owning the technological playing field, lower
cost of entry into the business, we see a level a more leveling of the playing
field, a leveling of the playing field relative to the intelligence enterprise
and those who would do us harm.
And so when I sat back and I thought from a DNI perspective, as the Deputy
for Collection, as I look out at this incredible enterprise with the
responsibility for oversight and how we move this forward, what do we see
as the future of the enterprise? The future must be the speed at which
we integrate this incredible resource to deliver new advantage for this nation
and our allies leadership in protecting and defending democracy and our
citizenry. That s what it s about, the speed at which we take these
great things that we have developed and braid them together with singular
purpose to answer critical questions that are at this nation s right at this
nation s doorstep, is the way that we will achieve and it will be the definition
of our strategic advantage going forward.
Open source is one of those absolutely critical strands that we must continue
to develop and braid within that discipline itself so that we go, as Dan
said, not from just an Intelligence Community but a community of intelligence
and how we bring those pieces together, right? And combine it and integrate
it for a new level of product; a new level of performance for the nation.
In a few minutes, we re going to have a moment of silence. I m going
to read a quote for you. It s one of my favorite quotes. It s
been hanging in my office since about September 13, 2001. I ve used
it as a guiding principle and I think it s apropos to what we re talking
about today and where we re going from the way we think about open source
and we think about this intelligence enterprise going forward. Abraham
Lincoln in 1862 said, The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to our
stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must
rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think and act
anew.
We ve seen this playing itself out over and over again since 9/11.
You ve seen it just in looking at the open source enterprise and the way
that it s developed. We must be diligent and persevere and continue
to challenge ourselves to think and act anew in order to continue the progress
and build on that for new results. I want to talk for a minute about
how we think about open source. So can I have I have two charts, I
think. Can I have the first chart? Somewhere? That s me.
(Laughter.) There we go.
Very simple Venn diagram, the Venn diagram that I drew myself many years
ago and I didn t wasn t the first one to drew it. We all drew it, all
right? We used to think about collection in terms of three Venn diagrams
that overlapped: HUMINT, that which we collect via the humans, all right,
agents in the field; technical means; and then open source and how we looked
at how they overlapped and how they worked together. Nice. It
was a good construct in the Cold War. It was good construct,
really, before the information age began to take hold. Not the way
we think about it today. And so when I came into the job eight months
ago and sat down with Dan and talked about what my vision for the way we
needed to approach open source; that we needed to look at it differently.
Dan said really interesting, Glenn. I think I have a picture you d
like to see and so could we put up the second chart?
It s not three overlapping circles anymore. It s two overlapping circles,
if you will, the HUMINT and the technical pieces, that are operating in an
information plane, in an information universe. We can t just limit
our thinking to that one simple circle and what we get via just a handful
of open sources. We need to think about that great information universe
that s out there; how we look at that and take advantage of that; and then
look at how then we drill down using some of those other areas, some of those
other intelligent disciplines that we have to build on that to incorporate
with that to get at a different level of information associated with it.
And the information enterprise and those who work in is a much broader thing
than one element or two elements or a couple of elements in the Intelligence
Community. Across that information universe, we have this open source
area that we re looking at as the IC and then we ve got a broader element
of this, which is other elements within the U.S. government, other elements
in the U.S. government that aren t necessarily the IC, who have needs to
gather information and develop that information in the prosecution of their
mission.
We need to meet them where they are, collaborate with them, work with them,
let them define to the extent to which they want to work within or with the
Intelligence Community in this regard and how much for the prosecution of
their mission they need to work or want to work separate from that.
Absolutely critical that we get the best of breed piece moving forward as
we look through and talk through the different approaches, the different
strategies, the different venues that we use, and always sharing what we
are learning, what we are discerning from working this information with each
other.
The Open Source Center has made great strides, right, in this regard and
it is a shared and common vision. Beyond the U.S. government, of course,
is our international partners, academia. We need another level.
We need new levels of partnership and interaction along those same lines
that I just talked about in this area, again, why I m excited by what we
ve got here, what s represented here; the talent, the thought that s represented
in this room.
Now, I ve got several boundaries here that we need to look at relative to
capacity requirements and the way that we work the mission space but I ve
also got another piece on the other side that talks about our need to manage
concerns on things like intellectual property, privacy, right, and the policy
concerns that exist at each of those boundaries and maybe some that we haven
t even discovered yet. Being sensitive to those, it s absolutely critical
as we move this forward and there s an entire session in this conference
on national intelligence and privacy. It becomes how we think about
privacy and security as oppose to security versus privacy.
It s absolutely critical, as I mentioned before, that we take full advantage
of the broad range of information and the broad range of approaches that
are represented here in this room. The diversity of information and
thought that we have here that s represented here is exciting to me and I
hope and it s why I came, all right and I hope it s why you are here as
well. But, again, coming back to Lincoln s the quote that I used from
President Lincoln, the idea is wrapped around thinking differently.
I had a lesson from an earlier job in my operational career where we got
into a different type of an operation. We got into some really good
information. It was a tremendous amount of information but we had been
we had been treating it much like we had treated a lot of other operations
in the way that we were just we were getting the information in, processing
the information, and putting that information out, a traditional reporting
kind of a stream. And we sat several of us sat and we looked at it
and thought, you know, this is good and we re getting really good stuff out
of it but there s got to be more here. What might we do differently
to try to unlock some other things, some new insights that we didn t have
before?
And so we took one of our conference rooms and turned it into a workroom,
wired it up, and went out across the community and got a handful of top
analysts. We wanted some of the we wanted some of the top analysts
that were out there: young, fresh minds coming at this data from a new
perspective. So, good, I want you to come in. We re going to
set you up. We re going to give you access to this information and
then we also took a developer, right, a technology developer who was working
on information systems information management techniques and put them in
there with these analysts. I said, here s what I want you to do.
I want you to come in and teach us look at this data, see what you can do
with it, and think about the data and how we get information out of it, and
what might be discerned. I want you to think differently.
The main product was a lab to think about the data and what we could get.
The product we were already putting some product out I wanted to see what
more we could get. But I asked the analysts, get in here and do everything
you can to break the system. Push it beyond what we ve designed it
for and when it breaks, tell the guy who s sitting right next to you, who
s the guy who built it what you were trying to do and why it broke and let
s see if we can turn that cycle, right, into a hours-and-days cycle of discovery,
pushing the system beyond where it was designed to go and fixing it so we
can that much further. And we had a really high time because in the
space of a couple of months, this group it started with six, then it was
15, then it was 25, then we had to cut it because people were waiting to
get in the door.
People were real excited to get in there to see what they could discover.
And we were turning the code around and getting the code set up and fixed
so that they could push the thing further and further, if not daily then
by the week and get more and more information out of it. That experience
that fortunate experience that I had and that one set of operations changed
the way that I thought about information. I suspected it and then I
saw it. This may be no news to most of you who work in this you know,
who work in this domain but it was an exciting revelation from my
perspective. And, again, to me, it just points at a small area of what
could be a tremendous resource given this open source enterprise and where
we need to go in the future.
Given that, though, let s talk about, you know, just how deep this rabbit
hole goes. Many of you have heard about some may not that what we refer
to as the double-humped camel looking at the workforce dynamics, all
right? About 45, 50 percent of our workforce in the Intelligence Community
has been here less than five years, first hump of the camel. Then we
ve got the trough that s represented by the hiring gap of the 90s.
Then we ve got the second hump of the camel, people like me who have that,
you know, graying retriever look, right, coming along, who were, you know,
here at the you know, for the Cold War piece.
What does that mean in terms of the way our Intelligence Community develops
and moves forward? What does it mean as we move that new group of
intelligence professionals into more and more areas of responsibility faster
than we ever did ourselves? How do we give them the exposures and
experiences that are absolutely required? How does our ability to work
information and think about information differently to mash up information
differently within an intelligence context provide a new infrastructure for
them to lead this community in the 21st century? Think about the
information age and all the cultural change that we re going through.
We are, by some estimates, 15 years into what is a 30-year change cycle,
culturally. Some of us are living it with that double-humped camel.
Being able to think differently about how we mash up this data becomes incredibly
important, not just from the open source perspective, but because it provides
an incredible laboratory, that think arena, where we can draw in a much broader
section of the open source community and learn what that mash-up infrastructure
what else might be done, how we push that. And while we are doing that
we are also within the borders of the classification system and the way we
protect sources and methods the work that we are doing to link the networks,
to link information, to link agencies, the infrastructure that we are putting
in. What I see is the ability for what we learn in the open source
community in the best practices, and looking at how we mash up and learn
new things from that information and laying it right on top of that new
infrastructure that we re building.
Now, this gang coming along on this first hump, they are the mash-up
generation. Make no mistake. There s a great little book good
little book called Got Game, all right read it a few years ago. At
first it was very depressing for me because it proved once and for all that
I was not a tweener. I was actually part of the Cold War generation
tail end of the baby boom. Why is that? Because the Internet
and things like that, to me, are a hobby. I don t measure my life
experiences by what I learned online with my buds, but somewhere approaching
45 to 50 percent of our workforce does.
Now, look, we can, as intelligence professionals how many of my fellow
intelligence professionals do I have out here in the audience? We can,
as intelligence professionals, work through, do what we can do, and let evolution
take care of this, because they re coming; it will happen, but that s not
enough. We owe it to this nation, we owe it to our allies, we owe it
to the citizenry, we owe it to those young professionals who have chosen
a career of service to our country to build that infrastructure, to enable
the thinking, to put the pieces in place and let them show us things that
we didn t dream were possible moving forward.
If you think about that 30-year cultural change cycle and you measure that
relative to my career 23 years in, compare it maybe to some of your own careers,
what does that mean? That means that the sum total of our career as
part of this cultural change won t be about that great op that we ran.
It won t be about that great technical endeavor that may have been undertaken
and achieved. It certainly won t be about that great contract that
you laid down. It won t be about the amount of money you ve made.
The sum total of our career is going to be measured by how well we have left
the enterprise, how well we have built the enterprise for that next generation
to lead against the security threats that face this nation and our allies
in the 21st century. That s what it s all about.
Second quote are we there? Okay. Please join with me now while
we observe a moment of silence for those who lost their lives on 9/11 and
those who have lost their lives in our response to terror post-9/11.
(Pause.)
Thank you. We will not forget and we will not let up.
As we think about how we move forward, all the things that I just talked
about our responsibility, our responsibility to this next generation, of
citizens of this next generation of intelligence professionals I m reminded
of a second quote, again from President Lincoln, who said, I am not bound
to win, but I am bound to be true. I m not bound to succeed; I am bound
to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands
right, and stand with him while he is right and part with him when he goes
wrong. I m not bound to win; I am bound to truth. I am bound
to partner with those who seek truth. Think about those cords, those
braids that we want to tie together relative to a community of intelligence
and how we bring that together for a new level of integrated performance;
what we can learn in this community and how we lay it over on the other part
of the community.
It s important for us to remember that we re not bound for our individual
idea. We re not bound to our individual program. We re not bound
to this agency, this enterprise, this university, this piece. It doesn
t matter. We are bound to truth. Ladies and gentlemen, the name
of the game today is the same that it has always been. It is the pursuit
of truth. We refer to it as intelligence inside this community circle,
but that s why we do it. It is about discovering, discerning truth,
and using that truth for its best for our citizenry.
When we look at all of these things again, I will close by talking about
how important it is to look at the opportunities that present themselves,
for all the things that I ve just mentioned that are represented right here
in this room, opportunities to discover and integrate new images and new
information from a wider range of sources in near real time; opportunity
to discover new sources of language, thought, cultural perspective with in
situ experience where the action of interest is occurring; opportunities
to look at different in situ actors and their responses to provide new insights;
opportunities to watch how stories develop, deconstruct, and reconstruct
between traditional and non-traditional forms of media; opportunities to
discover new approaches to mash up data and to deliver new insights.
There s an incredible landscape of opportunities that s before us.
I am convinced of our continued success because of the talent, the skill,
the desire that s represented here in this room. Have a wonderful
conference. I will be here as much of it as I possibly can to get to
know some of you to talk to you about your ideas, your thoughts, but I m
really excited about what you re going to accomplish for these next two
days. This conference is a beginning. Bind together in a new
way. Take us new places. It s what your colleagues, it s what
your folks back home, expect from your government. Thank you.
(Applause.)
I think Dan wants me to answer a couple of questions.
MR. BUTLER: You have a good 25 minutes, Glenn, and here s some that
we got from the audience.
MR. GAFFNEY: Okay, the first one is, How do you determine which
intelligence source is for any given issue? We have an intelligence
process that sets out looking at what the gaps are in our understanding about
particular issues. That comes from discussions that we have with
policy-makers, discussions across with other analysts. Those analysts
then, based on those discussions and based on their analytic prowess, their
ability to understand, identify critical gaps that are out there and then
put those gaps before the collection community and say, what can you do for
us? We begin then to evaluate all the different sources that are out
there and look at what those different sources can provide, and look then
at what the right mix is of those to get the kind of information that we
need, right, to address the questions that the analysts are asking policy
driving the analysis, analysis driving the collection, all right?
Again, it s part of why I talked about how we think about open source.
We used to think of it as just one more piece in that puzzle, but I really
believe the open source enterprise and the information age gives us a whole
new area to think about it and to think about it differently, which is what
I based most of my remarks here today. It s a limited resource, though,
when we look at what s out there not just on open source; I m talking about
the whole shooting match, all of collection. And so that s why we have
to continually look at what s the right mix, how do we optimize that?
If we re going to move things and focus assets in a different way, we have
to think about what the real costs are and what the opportunity costs are
associated with that against what we believe we stand to gain by answering
that question, or getting after that question, all right again, an area where
I think it makes it even more important for us to look at all of what open
source and what mashing up data can provide in terms of new insights, in
a faster and more timely way.
It says, Given how many open source practitioners are out there, how do you
determine best of breed? I m not a good judge. So what I m
interested in is how do you determine best of breed? How will you,
in working together, right, discover new avenues, because right now there
s a lot of different pockets of open source work going on. They may
not call it open source work; they just may call it research, but it s going
on. How do we discover that, all right, identify it with each other,
begin to tie it together, test it, try it, see how it applies, and then build
on that? It s not a top-down thing. It can t be. It s got
to be by the practitioners themselves.
In your experience, how has open source intelligence cued other INTs in critical
situations? I can t get into some of the specifics of what it cued
in terms of what we did as a result of it, but, you know, as we look at as
we have looked at open source reporting, at open source information coming
in, it has given us some insights, not so much from well, in the cueing
perspective it s been about, this is going on over here, we knew that in
general, but now we end up with a specific point that we might want to apply
pressure to, using some of the other INTs to drive deeper on, right?
It gives us a landscape that gives what I will call a first order of targeting,
if you will, to understand where we might focus the other resources and how
we might build on that.
In addition to that again, I m answering specific to cueing in addition to
that, it is an intelligence producer in its own right because, again, just
because it s open doesn t mean that it s wrong. As a matter of fact,
with the cost per bit going down and the amount of information that s out
there, new insight and that discovery of truth becomes a real issue, a real
benefit, right? And so, open source, in many ways, becomes the source,
is the source of first resort, not just another source. And you ll
hear Doug and you ll hear Dan talk about those things throughout the conference,
I m sure.
Your staff has been quite zealous in promoting the value of open source.
Why? (Laughter.) Because they work for a zealot.
(Laughter.) No, they re zealous in the pursuit because they believe
this. It s not just another job in the train of jobs that they have.
They re zealous in its pursuit, because I sit with them every day and we
talk about what they re doing, and they are excited about what they see going
on out there and are looking for, how can we use that to improve this
intelligence enterprise? And they get more excited by it by the
moment. Now, the suggestion here that comes after it is it because
Congress said it should be a priority? No. I m glad Congress
said it was a priority, and that s a great area that we can partner with
Congress on and we do partner with Congress on in terms of the discussions
that we have with them in terms of the open source enterprise and where we
re going with it. It is fundamentally because we believe in its value
and believe in the opportunity that could be provided via open source.
They just keep coming in. (Laughter.) This one s a long one.
Hang on for a second. (Pause.) Yeah. It says, It would
seem, in an area of what could be declining budgets for our national security
community, open source might actually fare well if the high return of investment
of open source intel is appreciated. Care to comment? I d say,
exactly. Economically it s a no-brainer. The partnerships and
what they can produce going forward even increase that return on
investment. In the information age we end up with the law of increasing
return instead of the law of decreasing return, or so it s been said by some,
right, but it s an interesting idea to ponder. Just think about it
in terms of your cell phones or your email account. Now, it s been
so long since we ve had email we ve forgotten what it was like when we first
got it, but when we first got it, a lot of coffee pot and cooler conversations
were, do you have email? Oh, you don t have email? You need to
have email? It s really great. You do all this stuff. Why
not? Why? Because everybody that I knew that got on e-mail made
what I was spending for email suddenly that much more valuable. It
s the law of increasing return, associated with being hooked up, wired, and
interconnected.
Again, open source provides this incredible laboratory for us to get the
best, to begin to look at what that return on investment can really be.
And as we look at open source as a primary source of intelligence in certain
key areas, not just another source of intelligence, and a primary source
not because they re the only ones looking at it, but because we said right
up front, we want to go after this using open source. You hear the
difference in there? Not the only source by default; the source by
design. That s where we need to move. That s where we are
moving. It s some of the ways it s being used today.
Is there a unique role that academic organizations can play in open source
support to the IC? Yes, but it s not just support. Think about
the centers of learning that are our academic institutions. The whole
idea of encouraging critical thought and in taking advantage of that information
age in that library and in that great laboratory, that library that is the
open source universe, how that gets put together and used and challenged
to our students, how to use that information differently to come up with
new ideas and new insights?
We re going to run out of time, if not for any other reason because I m a
slow reader. The academic institutions are pioneering areas of thought
in the way that we think about these different areas and as it applies to
national security issues, global issues, all right? It absolutely is
a great center, not just in preparing the folks who may come in to a career
service within the Intelligence Community, but as the take on responsibilities
across the government, across the nation, as they become active, productive
citizens.
Okay, I ve heard you talk about integrated mission management or integrated
performance management. How does open source intelligence fit into
this framework? I touched on it maybe too briefly as I went through,
but as we look at taking all of these elements that we have and getting after
critical targets. It s not a matter of just asking the SIGINT folks
and the HUMINT folks or the military folks or you know, saying, okay, what
can you get out of this and let s figure out how we tie it together.
That s more of a collaborative piece. I m talking about integrated
planning for a different level of performance. When I say integrated
performance, I m talking beyond collaboration. I m talking we re
purposefully sitting down and saying, let s come up with a new idea, a new
way to blend all these pieces and tie it in. And it s not a matter
of thinking about that and then going, oh, and what did open source say?
And so one of the things that we ve done is we ve taken some of the open
source folks who were on our team and embedded them with our teams who were
driving our integrated performance plan. So they are embedded as part
of the team, looking at the new strategies for going after these targets
and how we tie those pieces together. It needs to be represented front
and center at the cutting edge of the way we re thinking about going after
the problems, and the team is doing that.
Okay, How do you envision incorporating open source geospatial info into
IC product? That s one of the opportunities that I highlighted there
right at the end. Think about the range of images that are out there,
that are available out there today, and what that can do for us what it s
already doing in some sectors but what it can do for us in the way that we
pull information together and mash it up with other information. The
picture is often and has many times been said worth a thousand words.
Sometimes pictures are created to give you the thousand words that aren t
necessarily true. So it s not just a picture for the picture s sake;
it s the picture and how it combines with all the different pieces of information
that you have that you have available within that open source universe and
we have available within the Intelligence Community enterprise inside that
sources and methods line, if you will, and how we bring that together and
use that for new insight.
We you, right, need to think about what those opportunities really mean.
I know that there s some technological innovation going on in trying to improve
some of the capabilities that are out there, both in terms of capturing and
transmitting things from cell phones and different video and how we move
those things through. They have great commercial value and they should
be invested for that purpose, and many people are investing for that value
when you think through what that means and how we take advantage of that
both in the open source domain, all right, and in the classified operational
domain.
This one is my favorite. It is blank. I am flipping through these
because I obviously mixed them up. Back to the zealous staff.
Okay. Is anything being done to help train all source analysts?
Yes, absolutely. You heard Sabra mention before the training that is
going to go on just in the margins of this conference. But Doug and
what Doug is doing with the Open Source Center has a huge training initiative
that he has been building and working on.
We have been supporting a number of different training initiatives across
the board. And in the vision for the way open source moves forward,
that whole point of meeting people in the open source community where they
are. Some of them recognize a need, but wouldn t necessarily identify
themselves with the open source community. But meeting them where they
are and defining what they need to be able to help build that piece out is
a critical piece. So you may not want to depend on the Intelligence
Community. You may be concerned about an Intelligence Community taint
on your element of the government because you don t want the intelligence
thing hanging over it.
Nevertheless, you need an ability to do that. We want to encourage
you in developing that capability. All right. There is no monopoly
on the tradecraft. Just teach it. And the better you are at it,
the better product that comes out of that, the more we gain together.
And so it is a matter of bringing the different aspects of the community
along and developing them, right, and developing their overall capability,
and then making sure that it is tied together.
Okay. (Chuckles.) I am going to paraphrase this question because
it is a little derogatory in a couple of places. This question here
is looking at look, we have got a lot of folks in the room who are true believers
in open source and what open source can do. But there is a lot of folks,
maybe some that look like me, that feel like open source has less value because
it is unclassified. All right. You know, you can look at it and
I am sure that there is probably a thesis involved for somebody who wants
to study what happens when you have a secret, and the value that somebody
puts on a secret, and then they begin to think about well, this has got to
be of extreme value because it is secret, as opposed to this thing that was
open.
Most of the time what we put as secret, we put as secret not because of what
it said, but because of the way that we got the information. We are
protecting a human being. We are protecting a source. We are
protecting a method. That is why it is secret. Right. The
data itself, right, is not usually the reason why we classify it.
Okay. But it is easy to fall into that give me the good stuff.
The good stuff is the truth. I have said it I don t know how many
times. And open source has stood, will stand, and will lead in the
test of time my prediction relative to truth and timely truth, right,
in the pursuit of our national security objectives. It is today. It
will continue.
We have got to make the most out of the resource, get the most value out
of it that we can possibly get. And I believe there is a lot more here
building on top of what has already been tremendously successful. It
will come. It is. And for those who feel like it is not of value
because it is unclassified they will learn or their time will come and go.
Evolution will take care of it. With that, we can be guaranteed.
(Chuckles.)
I have time for one more. Don t know the answer to that one.
Dan might. I will give that back to Dan. Maybe he can answer
it later. Okay. This is an interesting one. And I need
to be careful answering it, but I want to answer. Does your vision
of this new universe of open source info diminish the need for OPSEC-ing
counterintelligence, and there is somehow I knew there would be more on the
back. I was actually looking for a name so I could talk to the person
offline. And does any of this imply a diminished role for operational
security and counterintelligence?
Yes, my vision does include, right, what it means relative to OPSEC and
counterintelligence both in terms of that leveling playing field that I talked
about right up front, and in terms of what that specific in situ reaction
is to certain events that may be going in on the ground or the way that they
are being interpreted because people can come to the right answer for all
kinds of wrong reasons. And it doesn t really matter to me from a
counterintelligence or operational security perspective that they got there
for the wrong reasons, right. What I care about, right, is the protection
of the people who are engaged in the operation and the protection of the
operation itself when I am taking about OPSEC and CI.
Do I think that means that there is a diminished role? Absolutely
not. All right, the back half of the question is there a diminished
role for operational security and counterintelligence? Absolutely
not. It is a maturation of the game. It is how we use all of
these things as intelligence professionals to achieve what is required for
the nation. Again, all right, thank you. Thank you for being
here. Thank you for the work that you do. Thank you for our
zealousness relative to open source and what it can do. Get more
zealous. All right.
But be patient. Your colleagues may not always get it right.
It may go slower than you want it to go. It seems like it is always
going slower than we want it to go. But remember the higher calling
is truth. It is the highest calling we have. And be bound to
those who are bound to truth. Thick and thin. Ben Franklin put
together I can t tell you how many because I read it and I can t remember
the number but he put together a number of resolutions, things that he wanted
to have included in the Constitution. Came time to vote for it, not
a one of his got picked up. He voted for it anyway. Somebody
asked him why? And he said, it seemed to me that the whole import of
the thing was more important than any one piece. Same principle.
Same principle.
Press on. Press on. Be bold. Be creative. Encourage
one another. And let s achieve new and extraordinary things on behalf
of this nation, our citizens, and our allies in the pursuit and the security
of democracy and freedom. Thank you. Have a wonderful conference.
(Applause.)
MR. BUTLER: Glenn, thank you. As one of your zealots on your
staff here, really enjoyed your remarks. And I can tell you working
closely with Mr. Gaffney, if we don t walk into the room excited every morning
at 8:00, we walk out very excited by the time the meeting is over.
(END)
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