There’s a new social networking system on the block, but you’re not going to become a member any time soon. A-Space is for US intelligence spooks only, and it’s an attempt to bring about joined-up thinking in the covert community. Good luck with that.
Some 16 agencies are involved in the project (did you know there were that many?). In part, it’s a response to the embarrassing chaos in intelligence sharing that was highlighted by 9/11. But it’s also part of a general trend in military and intelligence spheres - an attempt to live up to the image we all have of these agencies as high-tech, highly efficient snoops.
In the Bourne trilogy, Bond movies and countless other thrillers, the CIA, NSA and the like are portrayed as having capabilities of which the real agencies can only dream. Instant, highly detailed imagery of any place on Earth. Access to database information and intelligence reports that can tell you, in just a few taps of the keys, where the bad guys are and what they’re having for lunch.
The reality is patchy information, much of it usually out of date and of dubious provenance, held in mutually inaccessible islands of information. It is often hard to merge the data because it is held in incompatible formats on unconnected machines.
Much work is being done on this in the military world. Huge amounts of money are being invested in networked systems - the buzzwords are Network Enabled Capability (NEC), a cornerstone of the UK’s Defence Industrial Strategy, which is now becoming the Enabled Network. In today’s battlespace, every soldier, weapon, vehicle or aircraft is regarded as a node in the network. There is much talk of the ’sensor-to-shooter’ loop (hopefully going via a decision maker at some point), and ’situational awareness’ made possible by creating a Common Battlespace* Picture.
Two key technology areas - C4I (command, control, communications, computers and intelligence) and ISTAR (intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance) - are being merged in the holy grail of C4ISTAR. What this means is having all the technology in the battlespace sufficiently joined up that there is a continuous process from a potential target being spotted to action being taken. For instance, you might have a grunt on the ground radio back (possibly with a helmet-mounted video camera providing extra info) to a commander that a suspicious target has been spotted. This is escalated up a networked command chain. Along the way, other assets might be used to add to the picture - perhaps the weapons video or radar in an overflying jet, or pictures from a rapidly launched UAV. At HQ, this data is merged (actually, ‘fused’ is the preferred term) with info from, say, recent satellite imagery or intelligence reports. A decision is made that this target is indeed a bad guy (and not, say, a wedding party). Targeting data is fed up to the jet which uses it to guide its missile.
Similar efforts are being made to fuse data in the intelligence sector. The problem has often been the incompatibility of various systems, but this is being tackled through a level of abstraction. For example, General Dynamics - in part, developing work by Cardiff University - has created the OSIRIS system. This is capable of extracting information not just from various intelligence databases but also from any number of other sources, regardless of structure. This includes public domain information on the Internet. Your Facebook page, perhaps. It can actively seek out data sources. And it doesn’t just merge it: it applies a degree of intelligence itself, to decide what is relevant, what might be reliable or unreliable, important or unimportant, through ’semantic tagging’.
You probably thought they were doing stuff like this already. But the military and intelligence sphere has been hampered for years by stovepiped systems, developed by scores of separate suppliers with little co-ordination, often in response to the specific need of a specific agency or service. Incompatibilities are rife even within each country’s forces, let alone between nations. (’Interoperability’ is another big buzzword on everyone’s lips, but so far with little practical applications beyond sharing common ammunition, sometimes.)
So now we have A-Space, where spies, spooks and Feds of all stripes will be able to share their favourite bands and pictures of kittens. Of course, we’ll never know because, they say, it’s not connected to the Internet. (Oh really? Are you sure? At no point whatsoever?) This has ‘hacker bait’ written all over it. For the successful black hat there’s the lure of ultimate peer respect - and maybe a long trip to Cuba.
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* The military uses the term ‘battlespace’ rather than ‘battlefield’ because some of the entities involved (decision makers, UAV pilots) might be a very long way from where the shooting’s taking place - like in Florida, or Nevada.