Surveillance Standoff
Friday, April 04, 2008
In the old days, everyone was linked to a lug nut, and Jim Kallstrom liked it that way.
It was 1985, a simpler time for a cop like Kallstrom, who was in charge of setting telephone wiretaps on suspected drug dealers and mobsters for the FBI's New York City field office. In New York, Kallstrom's cases were often won on the basis of incriminating evidence surreptitiously snatched from the mouths of criminal defendants through their phone lines. With a mere 203,000 Americans using mobile phones, people were still tied to the ground, and that gave Kallstrom's world a certain comforting order.
On any given day, he could stand on a street corner in Manhattan, gaze up at an apartment building with its neat rows and columns of units stacked atop each other, and know that inside each one there was a telephone, tethered by thin copper wire to a single point, sometimes several miles away. In his mind's eye, Kallstrom could have imagined shrinking himself to the size of an electron and traveling over the phone line, down to the bottom of the building, then shooting beneath the streets, until he ended up in the basement of the telephone company's switching station. There, the wire emerged, pegged to a rack by a single copper lug nut. Acres of racks lined the walls, each holding rows and columns of lug nuts and their wires, neatly stacked atop each other -- the city of New York in analog miniature.
With a warrant in hand, Kallstrom could tell the technicians at the phone office, with whom he had become friendly over the years, "Go up on RR326." The tech would walk to the rack, find the wire, and clamp on a listening device. Instantly, Kallstrom became an invisible interloper.
FBI agents and federal prosecutors depended on these legal wiretaps to penetrate drug cartels, incriminate money launderers, and spy on mob families. And they needed to be absolutely certain that the line they were on belonged to the suspected dealer, or launderer, or capo named in the court-approved warrant. Not the guy in the apartment next door. Not someone down the block. This guy. This phone. RR326. Lest the agents violate a judge's order, and perhaps land themselves in jail, this had to be the very same line that snaked back through the subterranean maze of Manhattan, through all those blocks of concrete caverns, back to that certain apartment building, up through the walls and out of the jack and into the phone that was in the hand and next to the mouth of Kallstrom's target. It was, by design and necessity, a neat, specific system.
And then it all went sideways.
Kallstrom's friends in the phone company put him on notice in 1985: Over the next few years, those racks and stacks of wires and lug nuts would be swept into the technological dustbin. The telephone network was going digital. Technicians would no longer stand at a rack; they would sit at a keyboard. In some parts of the country that had already made the change, phone calls were traveling as a stream of 1's and 0's. Thousands of lines commingled in a single computer. When New York went digital, the phone techs told Kallstrom, they would no longer be able to tap him directly into RR326. In fact, they couldn't even tell him for sure where RR326 resided in this new engineering matrix.
At the same time that the phone companies were preparing for the transition to digital, the use of cellphones -- which were inherently harder to tap because they used phone lines differently than analog devices -- mushroomed. From 1985 to '86, the number of registered mobile-phone subscribers in the United States doubled to 500,000. Within two years after that, the number climbed to 1.6 million. By the end of the decade, the cellphone universe had skyrocketed past 4 million.
Organized crime was an early adopter of the mobile phone. In a communications technique presaging that of Islamic terrorists today, members of the Colombian Cali drug cartel operating in New York would briefly use a phone, toss it, and get a new one. To tap a mobile device, technicians had to install listening equipment on the new version of a lug nut -- an "electronic port." But in most switching stations in New York, there were only half a dozen or so ports available at any one time. Federal prosecutors and agents had to stand in line at phone company offices and fight with each other over whose investigation should take priority. Some prosecutors threatened to haul company employees into court on contempt charges so they could explain to a judge why the phone company was unwilling to execute a wiretap order.
Electronic surveillance, once such a dependable, relatively easy craft, was becoming inordinately difficult, Kallstrom thought. The phone companies, whose annual revenues from mobile subscriptions were cresting over $2 billion in the late 1980s, showed little willingness to make the FBI's life easier. As the 1990s approached, with the promise of more digitization and more mobility, Kallstrom called his bosses in Washington: "If we don't do something, we'll be out of the wiretapping business."
A Battle Begins
Kallstrom may have been the first to alert the FBI and the Justice Department to this new reality. The digital revolution generated a constant tension that exists to this day, a push and pull between the federal government in one camp and technology corporations and civil-liberties activists in the other to control the development of the global communications system, and so the balance of power in the Information Age.
This struggle's latest manifestation is the intensely politicized effort to rewrite the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. At issue is nothing less than the government's authority to broadly monitor communications networks to spot terrorists and other national security threats. The Bush administration finds itself across the battle lines from many of the same groups that more than a decade ago argued that the government was already extending its reach too far into personal conversations in the name of pursuing criminals.
While FISA governs wiretapping for intelligence-gathering purposes, as distinct from law enforcement, surveillance in both worlds follows the same essential philosophy -- the best evidence in a court of law or in an intelligence operation is one's own words. Today's dispute is not very different from the one that occurred during the dawn of digitization in the 1990s. Indeed, both are part and parcel of the same long-running debate.
No one should believe that real-time government surveillance of the communications network is an idea born of the 9/11 attacks or that it results solely from the Bush administration's aggrandizing of executive power. The legal arguments that the government has asserted to support increased surveillance of digital space were first put forth in 1994, under a Democratic president, and they had little to do with the threat of Islamic extremism.
Nor should anyone mistake the roots of the vociferous opposition to today's wiretapping from civil libertarians and privacy advocates. Many of these groups and their allies have been battling to restrict the government's use of new, potentially invasive technologies for a generation. The Bush White House is only their latest adversary, albeit the most formidable. These activists and their allies in the business world have been motivated by different but mutually supportive goals: to extend constitutional safeguards to the digital realm, and to keep the government from suffocating technological development with burdensome surveillance laws. Some in those ranks would have liked, and indeed tried, to make the digital network a wiretap-free zone.
But despite the occasionally extreme positions and deeply held convictions of all of these players, the most important laws governing wiretapping, electronic surveillance, and privacy have been the product of negotiation, of people gathering in a room, sitting at a table, and talking -- sometimes screaming -- until they reached a settlement. The current debate, however, is missing that crucial spirit. Whereas before, adversaries trusted each other enough at a basic level to make deals, however temporary, today's opposing sides seem unwilling to compromise to pass new surveillance laws that the nation can live with. It's not entirely clear where or why minds turned so stubborn. But to understand today's political calcification, it helps to recall a simpler time.
The Art Of Compromise
Jerry Berman was a veteran of the privacy wars, seemingly born for the role of liberal, dogmatic activist. In the early 1950s, his father, a labor leader, was investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee. A native of Hawaii, the younger Berman moved with his family to California, where he enrolled at the University of California (Berkeley). After earning his bachelor's and master's, and, in 1967, his law degree, Berman began lobbying for the American Civil Liberties Union. He became an authority on the intersection of national security and technology, schooled by the exposure of illegal FBI spying operations aimed at political organizations, war protesters, and leftist activists. In 1978, Berman helped to craft the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which set new restrictions on the government's domestic intelligence-gathering. He was present at the creation of several important pieces of surveillance legislation, and he helped secure individual privacy protections.
In playing his role, Berman didn't adhere to a hard-and-fast position but instead embraced his own brand of "principled pragmatism." By his logic, the interests of privacy and national security were not incompatible. If all sides -- government, industry, civil-liberties activists -- could find ways to "maximize the good and minimize the harm," as he liked to say, they could strike a satisfactory balance and create workable laws. This idea guided his work on FISA and other legislation, sometimes to the consternation of more-ideological activists who employed him to lobby Congress on their behalf.
Perhaps that was because principled pragmatism recognized an unsavory reality: In Washington, those who show up to play the game make the rules. Negotiation requires sacrifice. Sacrifice requires flexibility. Some people would rather break than bend. But compromise is how things get done, and Berman accepted it. As a colleague summarized Berman's general approach to lawmaking, "You can stand on your principle and get your ass handed to you, or you can engage in the process and get a better deal."
In the summer of 1994, the FBI and the Justice Department made a bold play to force the telecom carriers to help them conduct legal wiretaps. They put forth a proposal that would require the companies to build their networks so that law enforcement agents serving a warrant could access them in real time. The legality of wiretapping was not in question. The government wanted legal assurance that it could tap, at any time, and that the industry had an obligation under law to comply with the government's proper authority.
No more computer-related hassles, no more standing in line to plug into mobile-phone ports. Law enforcement agents, federal spymasters, and prosecutors wanted a comprehensive remedy to what they called the "digital telephony" problem. Their chief advocates were Kallstrom and Louis Freeh, the recently appointed FBI director, a former special agent and federal prosecutor who had used wiretaps to secure convictions in some of the most complicated organized-crime investigations in history. Freeh personally pushed for the new law, showing up unannounced in reluctant lawmakers' offices to press them for support and even sitting in on committee markups -- an unprecedented move for an FBI director -- to stare members down.
Clipper Chip
The 1994 proposal was only the latest in a series of government efforts to strengthen its control of the telecommunications network. In the late 1980s, Justice officials had gotten as far as placing language in an anti-crime bill that would have allowed the attorney general to set standards for telecommunications equipment, effectively making that federal official the network's architect-in-chief. (The bill did not pass.)
In 1993, Bill Clinton, in one of his first presidential directives, announced that engineers at the National Security Agency, the intelligence community's electronic surveillance arm, had developed a cutting-edge microcircuit, called the "Clipper" chip, to scramble telephone conversations. The administration intended to promote the installation of the Clipper technology in U.S. telephones, and planned to hold "in escrow" the digital keys to decrypt any conversation. In other words, the federal government would build the lock and keep the key, an idea that inspired a reaction somewhere between outrage and apoplexy among technologists and privacy advocates, who ultimately killed the idea.
In that atmosphere of hostility and skepticism, Berman went to work. Beginning in August 1994, he convened a series of meetings with senior law enforcement officials under the auspices of a privacy and security coalition he had formed with more than four dozen activist groups and technology companies -- including the biggest telecom provider of all, AT&T -- plus the U.S. Telephone Association, IBM, and software makers such as Microsoft. The goal was to resolve differences over the government's proposal to ensure federal access to telecommunications networks. Berman also brought in two powerful Democratic lawmakers and noted civil libertarians, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont and then-Rep. Don Edwards, whose district included California's Silicon Valley. Everyone in the negotiating room had some familiarity with technology issues, and professional experience in law enforcement or Justice Department oversight.
The meetings featured intense, nitty-gritty debates over the technical aspects of the law. The FBI wanted guarantees that the telecom system would never mature beyond the reach of its wiretaps. Some companies saw this as heavy-handed regulation, and a number of telecom officials shared the activists' belief that the government was in fact after a permanent covert backdoor into the phone system. The negotiations helped to somewhat dampen the suspicions, however, and the talks went forward because no one in the room disagreed with the fundamental premise that the government had the right to wiretap.
But outside of the meetings, divisions festered among the interest groups. Berman represented the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which champions the public interest in the digital realm, but its board couldn't decide whether compromise was prudent or perilous. Berman felt he had to persuade his colleagues, in another series of heated meetings, to work in the middle. To him, that meant that the legislative negotiations would follow an inviolate principle: We will only craft solutions to known problems. No writing of laws aimed at encompassing future problems. If the FBI has difficultly accessing the public telephone network, then the law will address only that public telephone network.
In addition to identifying a philosophical guideline, this approach served a more strategic goal -- to keep the FBI's hands off the Internet, which was so new in 1994 as to be practically notional. Internet service providers such as America Online and Prodigy had only a handful of subscribers, and the first Web browser had been released that year, in a beta test version. Still, Berman and others knew that the FBI would never willingly agree to stay off the information superhighway, because Internet-based information held tremendous potential value for law enforcement.
During one meeting, David Johnson, a lawyer who had helped to craft the Electronic Communications Privacy Act in 1986, held up a glass jar full of rocks and asked, "How many of you would say this jar is full?" Most people agreed that it was. Johnson took a fistful of pebbles and dropped them into the jar. They tinkled down through the rocks, finding resting places in the empty spaces. Then he poured sand into the jar. As it cascaded into the empty spaces, Johnson told the onlookers that the sand was like the unseen, seemingly insignificant "transactional data" that traveled on the Internet. Transactional data includes the routing information for a text-based message -- where it comes from, where it goes, and what path it follows -- and the series of digits that make up an Internet address. This information would someday be of enormous value to the government, he said, just as phone call records, as opposed to actual conversations, already were. The transactional data were small but meaningful -- like the tiny grains of sand that kept filling the volume of the jar.
CALEA
Johnson's vivid illustration convinced many of the participants that the new law mustn't extend too far. Again, the issue wasn't whether law enforcement had a right to information but how much power the government should have over the means to get it. Leahy and Edwards, who formally introduced the legislation shortly thereafter, declared that it would apply solely to the public telephone network. The law specifically exempted "information services," which the parties agreed included Internet companies and electronic-messaging technologies.
The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act passed in the closing days of the 103rd Congress, two weeks before Republicans won control of both chambers in November 1994. CALEA (pronounced kuhLEEuh) would let the industry set its own standards to meet the Justice Department's needs. The department could list its surveillance requirements, but the act let companies decide how to build their equipment. Justice won the right to petition the Federal Communications Commission if its officials felt that the companies weren't fulfilling their obligations. But civil-liberties groups also secured the right to challenge the government's requirements in court.
It was a true compromise, hard won but workable. For Berman, principled pragmatism had carried the day. For others, however, the compromise had given away too much.
The board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation had seen the proverbial legislative sausage being made and found it distasteful. Even though the directors had agreed to every aspect of the law, which Berman explained to them, within weeks after its passage he left the EFF and formed his own outfit, the Center for Democracy and Technology, to continue his brand of lobbying. The EFF pulled up stakes in Washington the following year and moved to San Francisco, where it continues to play a leading role in supporting lawsuits against telecommunications companies -- most notably AT&T, its former ally -- for their role in assisting the government with warrantless wiretapping after the 9/11 attacks.
At the time, Berman confided to Kallstrom, whom he thought had always acted in good faith for the FBI, "My work on CALEA got me fired."
Kallstrom was apparently happy to see his more idealistic opponents leave town. "You didn't get fired, Jerry," he replied. "You got promoted."
Making Demands
Had the FBI and the Justice Department stopped there, had the government settled for secure access to phone networks, the history of Internet privacy and civil liberties might have turned out differently. But just weeks after President Clinton signed CALEA in January 1995, conflict erupted between the government and the phone carriers over the kind of network access the law provided. The raft of compromise that had carried the deal sprung a leak.
FBI officials knew in 1994 that they were making a mistake by leaving cyberspace out of CALEA. They understood the Internet's potential as a communications device and an intelligence tool -- that is, after all, why CALEA's authors exempted "information services."
"Did we know that it was idiotic to carve that out?" Kallstrom asks now. "Yes, we did." Criminals have always been among the first to embrace new technology. It was foolish to think that they wouldn't turn to the Internet for any number of nefarious gambits. But, Kallstrom says, government officials opted "to fight another day" over Internet access. Privacy advocates were dragging their feet in the negotiations. Delay would invite more debate, probably more hearings, and possibly a less favorable outcome. The political decision was made: "Let's take what we can get here."
In early 1995, the Justice Department issued its list of requirements for wiretapping, known as the punch list. Not surprisingly, many telecom executives and their attorneys viewed the demands as unreasonable. Al Gidari, a lawyer representing the wireless industry, was among the first to see the FBI's requirements, during the initial meeting to develop standards for CALEA, which was held that spring in Vancouver, British Columbia. The Justice Department's wish list, he said, amounted to "the Cadillac of wiretaps."
"Everything they could ever think of to gold plate and put on the Cadillac was in that document," Gidari recalls. Meeting its expectations represented "an exponential increase in complexity, not a linear increase.... They were very dictatorial ... technical requirements -- the very thing that Congress said it wasn't up to [the FBI] to figure out."
The standards meeting was tense and awkward, and the sides were unevenly matched. Gidari recalls a dozen or more FBI agents, in neat blue suits, all buttoned down and looking ready to roll over anyone who stood in their way. Arrayed on the opposite side of the table was a group of laid-back and casually dressed network engineers from all the major telecom equipment manufacturers and carriers that was tasked with the unenviable job of telling the bureau that the industry planned to build a much less complex system. It wasn't what the FBI agents wanted to hear.
Over the next few years, the Justice Department continued to seek increasingly sophisticated surveillance capabilities, including real-time geographical tracking of mobile phones; the ability to monitor all parties in a conference call regardless of whether they are on hold or participating; and "dialed digit extraction," a record of any numbers that a subject under surveillance punched in during a call, such as a credit card or bank account number. The government got a lot of what it wanted, but not all.
To be sure, criminals' use of new technologies helped drive the law enforcement demands. But telecom carriers worried that the cost of compliance was too high and that the FBI's technical requirements were illegally broad. CALEA, they argued, had forbidden the government from requiring specific system designs or technologies.
The FCC's Turn
Justice, frustrated by its inability to get all the demands on the punch list, finally asked the FCC to step in. In 1997, the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association, which then represented mobile carriers, and the Center for Democracy and Technology complained to the commission that the negotiations had deadlocked because of "unreasonable demands by law enforcement for more surveillance features than either CALEA or the wiretap laws allow." The FCC, however, sided with the Justice Department on a host of requirements that privacy groups found overly broad. The tussle dragged on for two more years and ended up in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which overruled the FCC. After the commission took up matters again, it granted some of the FBI's requests, and the CALEA standards were amended.
When Justice Department officials reported to Congress on CALEA implementation in January 1998, no manufacturer of telecom equipment said that the FBI's demands were impossible to meet, but they did say that complying would be difficult and very expensive. (Although Congress had set aside $500 million to reimburse companies for retrofitting their networks, the law required the carriers to bear the cost of compliance on any equipment put in place after CALEA was enacted. Several experts believe that the final cost for compliance on telephone networks has been two to eight times the amount originally allotted.)
The level of government surveillance was so low at that time that some questioned why the FBI wanted such multifaceted access at all. In 1994, federal and state authorities were running 1,154 wiretaps nationwide, mostly for drug investigations, at an average cost of $50,000. The government was asking carriers to "design a nuclear rocket ship" for a rarely used tool, Gidari thought. "In [the FBI's] view, there was no limit to the expense the carrier should spare in order to save a life."
CALEA continued to evolve, shaped by the ongoing arguments over the terms of its birth. Activists and carriers thought that the FBI was reneging on its bargain, asking for more than the law allowed. The FBI believed that carriers were stalling when they failed to meet compliance deadlines. As all sides dug in, the meetings on implementation turned bitter. FBI and Justice officials slammed their hands on tables and screamed at carrier representatives, Gidari recalls. "You're unpatriotic! What do you want to do, help the criminals?"
The government asked those same questions after September 11, 2001. And this time, telecommunications carriers responded. Outside the normal FISA warrant process, which covers intelligence-gathering, carriers opened access to their networks, their customer call data, and their valuable transactional information -- the kind that CALEA had intended to exclude. President Bush and his administration believed that the extraordinary nature of the terrorist attacks demanded emergency actions that FISA couldn't accommodate, and the carriers answered the call from law enforcement and intelligence agencies. But government officials also seized on the post-9/11 mentality to change other surveillance laws and procedures, which they believed -- just as their predecessors did in 1994 -- were out of step with technology and reality. About three years after 9/11, officials set their sights on rewriting CALEA.
Claiming The Internet
In August 2004, in response to a petition by the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FCC expanded CALEA to cover Internet communications, including voice calls and instant messages. The Electronic Frontier Foundation sued, along with industry, civil-liberties, and academic groups. In 2005, the Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 to defer to the FCC's reading of the law.
Many of those who had helped craft CALEA believed that the commission had misread the law and acted on a post-9/11 impulse to give the government more, not less, access to information. But to the FCC, new Internet technologies that operate a lot like telephones blurred the distinction between "information services" and the kinds of technology that CALEA was meant to cover.
After 9/11, law enforcement and intelligence agencies took a variety of measures, apart from wiretaps, to collect and mine potentially valuable information from the Internet. With the cooperation of telecom companies, government accumulated lots of transactional data -- including e-mail header information and lists of websites visited by targeted individuals -- to support counter-terrorism operations. Viewed solely as a reaction to the terrorist attacks of 2001, this kind of collection might seem extraordinary. But through the longer lens of history, the government's steady march into cyberspace is not surprising.
Law enforcement agencies have never suffered for lack of access to the phone network. Kallstrom recalls only a few instances in which agents were unable to execute a wiretap order because of new technology. But as digital, mobile technology has proliferated, the copper lug nuts that Kallstrom remembers from the 1980s have disappeared. Today, state and federal agents spend most of their tap time on mobile devices. In 1994, most wiretaps, by far, targeted private residences. There were few taps on mobile devices. Ten years later, 88 percent of the 1,710 wiretaps were on mobile devices. Only 5 percent were on residential lines. Without CALEA, some experts believe that Kallstrom's initial fears would have come true and the federal government would have been shut out of the wiretapping business.
Jerry Berman never wanted that to happen. Although he cannot accept that the law that was meant to minimize the government's influence over the Internet is now being used to facilitate it, he is willing to negotiate on CALEA again, if that is what's necessary to satisfy all parties.
That willingness to talk extends to FISA, as well, and Berman's Center for Democracy and Technology has been actively involved in the current agitations over the law. But whenever he and his cohorts have extended the hand of compromise to Congress or the administration, he says, they have been disappointed. Any attempt to revamp FISA, or to clarify CALEA, "is impossible in the current climate," Berman says. "There is no sense that you could get the kind of negotiation we got in 1994."
FISA And CALEA
One has to wonder how strong that spirit of compromise really was in 1994, and whether it was already ebbing. If the FBI was willing to take what it could get on CALEA and go on to fight another day, did the government really "settle" at all? Literally weeks after CALEA was signed the Justice Department and the FBI came roaring back with new demands. What killed the penchant for negotiation? Was it the moderates' loss of power in both political parties after the 1994 Republican revolution? Was it the entrenchment of civil-liberties activists? Was it the Bush White House's extravagant interpretation of executive power? Was it 9/11?
Berman spends a lot of time pondering these questions and thinking about next moves. He divides his time between Washington, where he chairs his group's board of directors, and a home he built on the Cacapon River near Berkeley Springs, W.Va. "We just have people in bunkers now," Berman says ruefully.
The FISA debate is currently hung up on whether companies that assisted warrantless surveillance after 9/11 should have retroactive legal immunity for any laws they may have broken. CALEA has something to say about that, too. The law requires that carriers be able to deliver call identification information to the government remotely. According to Beryl Howell, Sen. Leahy's lead CALEA staffer, that provision was meant to keep government agents from sitting in the phone companies' offices to execute their wiretaps.
It is a basic tenet of wiretapping law, whether for intelligence or law enforcement, that the communications companies act as a buffer between their customers and the government, she says, and that telecom carriers must make their own determination whether official requests are, in fact, legal. That the companies would now assert, in defense of their cooperation, that the government determined that post-9/11 requests were legal, strikes Howell as outrageous.
If ever there was a time for the bare-knuckled negotiations of the past, it's now. It's not at all clear, though, who could play the role of Jerry Berman, the one to bring people into the room to scream and yell at each other and emerge feeling better for it -- and possibly even coming to a compromise. As things stand, Congress appears more likely to punt the FISA debate to the new administration, and has shown little interest in revisiting CALEA.
The constant tension that once kept this system in balance has reached a breaking point. There is no push and pull. Maybe the stakes are too high for compromise. But until that spirit returns, Berman says, "there will be no peace."
Published in National Journal
Friday, April 04, 2008
In the old days, everyone was linked to a lug nut, and Jim Kallstrom liked it that way.
It was 1985, a simpler time for a cop like Kallstrom, who was in charge of setting telephone wiretaps on suspected drug dealers and mobsters for the FBI's New York City field office. In New York, Kallstrom's cases were often won on the basis of incriminating evidence surreptitiously snatched from the mouths of criminal defendants through their phone lines. With a mere 203,000 Americans using mobile phones, people were still tied to the ground, and that gave Kallstrom's world a certain comforting order.
On any given day, he could stand on a street corner in Manhattan, gaze up at an apartment building with its neat rows and columns of units stacked atop each other, and know that inside each one there was a telephone, tethered by thin copper wire to a single point, sometimes several miles away. In his mind's eye, Kallstrom could have imagined shrinking himself to the size of an electron and traveling over the phone line, down to the bottom of the building, then shooting beneath the streets, until he ended up in the basement of the telephone company's switching station. There, the wire emerged, pegged to a rack by a single copper lug nut. Acres of racks lined the walls, each holding rows and columns of lug nuts and their wires, neatly stacked atop each other -- the city of New York in analog miniature.
With a warrant in hand, Kallstrom could tell the technicians at the phone office, with whom he had become friendly over the years, "Go up on RR326." The tech would walk to the rack, find the wire, and clamp on a listening device. Instantly, Kallstrom became an invisible interloper.
FBI agents and federal prosecutors depended on these legal wiretaps to penetrate drug cartels, incriminate money launderers, and spy on mob families. And they needed to be absolutely certain that the line they were on belonged to the suspected dealer, or launderer, or capo named in the court-approved warrant. Not the guy in the apartment next door. Not someone down the block. This guy. This phone. RR326. Lest the agents violate a judge's order, and perhaps land themselves in jail, this had to be the very same line that snaked back through the subterranean maze of Manhattan, through all those blocks of concrete caverns, back to that certain apartment building, up through the walls and out of the jack and into the phone that was in the hand and next to the mouth of Kallstrom's target. It was, by design and necessity, a neat, specific system.
And then it all went sideways.
Kallstrom's friends in the phone company put him on notice in 1985: Over the next few years, those racks and stacks of wires and lug nuts would be swept into the technological dustbin. The telephone network was going digital. Technicians would no longer stand at a rack; they would sit at a keyboard. In some parts of the country that had already made the change, phone calls were traveling as a stream of 1's and 0's. Thousands of lines commingled in a single computer. When New York went digital, the phone techs told Kallstrom, they would no longer be able to tap him directly into RR326. In fact, they couldn't even tell him for sure where RR326 resided in this new engineering matrix.
At the same time that the phone companies were preparing for the transition to digital, the use of cellphones -- which were inherently harder to tap because they used phone lines differently than analog devices -- mushroomed. From 1985 to '86, the number of registered mobile-phone subscribers in the United States doubled to 500,000. Within two years after that, the number climbed to 1.6 million. By the end of the decade, the cellphone universe had skyrocketed past 4 million.
Organized crime was an early adopter of the mobile phone. In a communications technique presaging that of Islamic terrorists today, members of the Colombian Cali drug cartel operating in New York would briefly use a phone, toss it, and get a new one. To tap a mobile device, technicians had to install listening equipment on the new version of a lug nut -- an "electronic port." But in most switching stations in New York, there were only half a dozen or so ports available at any one time. Federal prosecutors and agents had to stand in line at phone company offices and fight with each other over whose investigation should take priority. Some prosecutors threatened to haul company employees into court on contempt charges so they could explain to a judge why the phone company was unwilling to execute a wiretap order.
Electronic surveillance, once such a dependable, relatively easy craft, was becoming inordinately difficult, Kallstrom thought. The phone companies, whose annual revenues from mobile subscriptions were cresting over $2 billion in the late 1980s, showed little willingness to make the FBI's life easier. As the 1990s approached, with the promise of more digitization and more mobility, Kallstrom called his bosses in Washington: "If we don't do something, we'll be out of the wiretapping business."
A Battle Begins
Kallstrom may have been the first to alert the FBI and the Justice Department to this new reality. The digital revolution generated a constant tension that exists to this day, a push and pull between the federal government in one camp and technology corporations and civil-liberties activists in the other to control the development of the global communications system, and so the balance of power in the Information Age.
This struggle's latest manifestation is the intensely politicized effort to rewrite the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. At issue is nothing less than the government's authority to broadly monitor communications networks to spot terrorists and other national security threats. The Bush administration finds itself across the battle lines from many of the same groups that more than a decade ago argued that the government was already extending its reach too far into personal conversations in the name of pursuing criminals.
While FISA governs wiretapping for intelligence-gathering purposes, as distinct from law enforcement, surveillance in both worlds follows the same essential philosophy -- the best evidence in a court of law or in an intelligence operation is one's own words. Today's dispute is not very different from the one that occurred during the dawn of digitization in the 1990s. Indeed, both are part and parcel of the same long-running debate.
No one should believe that real-time government surveillance of the communications network is an idea born of the 9/11 attacks or that it results solely from the Bush administration's aggrandizing of executive power. The legal arguments that the government has asserted to support increased surveillance of digital space were first put forth in 1994, under a Democratic president, and they had little to do with the threat of Islamic extremism.
Nor should anyone mistake the roots of the vociferous opposition to today's wiretapping from civil libertarians and privacy advocates. Many of these groups and their allies have been battling to restrict the government's use of new, potentially invasive technologies for a generation. The Bush White House is only their latest adversary, albeit the most formidable. These activists and their allies in the business world have been motivated by different but mutually supportive goals: to extend constitutional safeguards to the digital realm, and to keep the government from suffocating technological development with burdensome surveillance laws. Some in those ranks would have liked, and indeed tried, to make the digital network a wiretap-free zone.
But despite the occasionally extreme positions and deeply held convictions of all of these players, the most important laws governing wiretapping, electronic surveillance, and privacy have been the product of negotiation, of people gathering in a room, sitting at a table, and talking -- sometimes screaming -- until they reached a settlement. The current debate, however, is missing that crucial spirit. Whereas before, adversaries trusted each other enough at a basic level to make deals, however temporary, today's opposing sides seem unwilling to compromise to pass new surveillance laws that the nation can live with. It's not entirely clear where or why minds turned so stubborn. But to understand today's political calcification, it helps to recall a simpler time.
The Art Of Compromise
Jerry Berman was a veteran of the privacy wars, seemingly born for the role of liberal, dogmatic activist. In the early 1950s, his father, a labor leader, was investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee. A native of Hawaii, the younger Berman moved with his family to California, where he enrolled at the University of California (Berkeley). After earning his bachelor's and master's, and, in 1967, his law degree, Berman began lobbying for the American Civil Liberties Union. He became an authority on the intersection of national security and technology, schooled by the exposure of illegal FBI spying operations aimed at political organizations, war protesters, and leftist activists. In 1978, Berman helped to craft the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which set new restrictions on the government's domestic intelligence-gathering. He was present at the creation of several important pieces of surveillance legislation, and he helped secure individual privacy protections.
In playing his role, Berman didn't adhere to a hard-and-fast position but instead embraced his own brand of "principled pragmatism." By his logic, the interests of privacy and national security were not incompatible. If all sides -- government, industry, civil-liberties activists -- could find ways to "maximize the good and minimize the harm," as he liked to say, they could strike a satisfactory balance and create workable laws. This idea guided his work on FISA and other legislation, sometimes to the consternation of more-ideological activists who employed him to lobby Congress on their behalf.
Perhaps that was because principled pragmatism recognized an unsavory reality: In Washington, those who show up to play the game make the rules. Negotiation requires sacrifice. Sacrifice requires flexibility. Some people would rather break than bend. But compromise is how things get done, and Berman accepted it. As a colleague summarized Berman's general approach to lawmaking, "You can stand on your principle and get your ass handed to you, or you can engage in the process and get a better deal."
In the summer of 1994, the FBI and the Justice Department made a bold play to force the telecom carriers to help them conduct legal wiretaps. They put forth a proposal that would require the companies to build their networks so that law enforcement agents serving a warrant could access them in real time. The legality of wiretapping was not in question. The government wanted legal assurance that it could tap, at any time, and that the industry had an obligation under law to comply with the government's proper authority.
No more computer-related hassles, no more standing in line to plug into mobile-phone ports. Law enforcement agents, federal spymasters, and prosecutors wanted a comprehensive remedy to what they called the "digital telephony" problem. Their chief advocates were Kallstrom and Louis Freeh, the recently appointed FBI director, a former special agent and federal prosecutor who had used wiretaps to secure convictions in some of the most complicated organized-crime investigations in history. Freeh personally pushed for the new law, showing up unannounced in reluctant lawmakers' offices to press them for support and even sitting in on committee markups -- an unprecedented move for an FBI director -- to stare members down.
Clipper Chip
The 1994 proposal was only the latest in a series of government efforts to strengthen its control of the telecommunications network. In the late 1980s, Justice officials had gotten as far as placing language in an anti-crime bill that would have allowed the attorney general to set standards for telecommunications equipment, effectively making that federal official the network's architect-in-chief. (The bill did not pass.)
In 1993, Bill Clinton, in one of his first presidential directives, announced that engineers at the National Security Agency, the intelligence community's electronic surveillance arm, had developed a cutting-edge microcircuit, called the "Clipper" chip, to scramble telephone conversations. The administration intended to promote the installation of the Clipper technology in U.S. telephones, and planned to hold "in escrow" the digital keys to decrypt any conversation. In other words, the federal government would build the lock and keep the key, an idea that inspired a reaction somewhere between outrage and apoplexy among technologists and privacy advocates, who ultimately killed the idea.
In that atmosphere of hostility and skepticism, Berman went to work. Beginning in August 1994, he convened a series of meetings with senior law enforcement officials under the auspices of a privacy and security coalition he had formed with more than four dozen activist groups and technology companies -- including the biggest telecom provider of all, AT&T -- plus the U.S. Telephone Association, IBM, and software makers such as Microsoft. The goal was to resolve differences over the government's proposal to ensure federal access to telecommunications networks. Berman also brought in two powerful Democratic lawmakers and noted civil libertarians, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont and then-Rep. Don Edwards, whose district included California's Silicon Valley. Everyone in the negotiating room had some familiarity with technology issues, and professional experience in law enforcement or Justice Department oversight.
The meetings featured intense, nitty-gritty debates over the technical aspects of the law. The FBI wanted guarantees that the telecom system would never mature beyond the reach of its wiretaps. Some companies saw this as heavy-handed regulation, and a number of telecom officials shared the activists' belief that the government was in fact after a permanent covert backdoor into the phone system. The negotiations helped to somewhat dampen the suspicions, however, and the talks went forward because no one in the room disagreed with the fundamental premise that the government had the right to wiretap.
But outside of the meetings, divisions festered among the interest groups. Berman represented the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which champions the public interest in the digital realm, but its board couldn't decide whether compromise was prudent or perilous. Berman felt he had to persuade his colleagues, in another series of heated meetings, to work in the middle. To him, that meant that the legislative negotiations would follow an inviolate principle: We will only craft solutions to known problems. No writing of laws aimed at encompassing future problems. If the FBI has difficultly accessing the public telephone network, then the law will address only that public telephone network.
In addition to identifying a philosophical guideline, this approach served a more strategic goal -- to keep the FBI's hands off the Internet, which was so new in 1994 as to be practically notional. Internet service providers such as America Online and Prodigy had only a handful of subscribers, and the first Web browser had been released that year, in a beta test version. Still, Berman and others knew that the FBI would never willingly agree to stay off the information superhighway, because Internet-based information held tremendous potential value for law enforcement.
During one meeting, David Johnson, a lawyer who had helped to craft the Electronic Communications Privacy Act in 1986, held up a glass jar full of rocks and asked, "How many of you would say this jar is full?" Most people agreed that it was. Johnson took a fistful of pebbles and dropped them into the jar. They tinkled down through the rocks, finding resting places in the empty spaces. Then he poured sand into the jar. As it cascaded into the empty spaces, Johnson told the onlookers that the sand was like the unseen, seemingly insignificant "transactional data" that traveled on the Internet. Transactional data includes the routing information for a text-based message -- where it comes from, where it goes, and what path it follows -- and the series of digits that make up an Internet address. This information would someday be of enormous value to the government, he said, just as phone call records, as opposed to actual conversations, already were. The transactional data were small but meaningful -- like the tiny grains of sand that kept filling the volume of the jar.
CALEA
Johnson's vivid illustration convinced many of the participants that the new law mustn't extend too far. Again, the issue wasn't whether law enforcement had a right to information but how much power the government should have over the means to get it. Leahy and Edwards, who formally introduced the legislation shortly thereafter, declared that it would apply solely to the public telephone network. The law specifically exempted "information services," which the parties agreed included Internet companies and electronic-messaging technologies.
The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act passed in the closing days of the 103rd Congress, two weeks before Republicans won control of both chambers in November 1994. CALEA (pronounced kuhLEEuh) would let the industry set its own standards to meet the Justice Department's needs. The department could list its surveillance requirements, but the act let companies decide how to build their equipment. Justice won the right to petition the Federal Communications Commission if its officials felt that the companies weren't fulfilling their obligations. But civil-liberties groups also secured the right to challenge the government's requirements in court.
It was a true compromise, hard won but workable. For Berman, principled pragmatism had carried the day. For others, however, the compromise had given away too much.
The board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation had seen the proverbial legislative sausage being made and found it distasteful. Even though the directors had agreed to every aspect of the law, which Berman explained to them, within weeks after its passage he left the EFF and formed his own outfit, the Center for Democracy and Technology, to continue his brand of lobbying. The EFF pulled up stakes in Washington the following year and moved to San Francisco, where it continues to play a leading role in supporting lawsuits against telecommunications companies -- most notably AT&T, its former ally -- for their role in assisting the government with warrantless wiretapping after the 9/11 attacks.
At the time, Berman confided to Kallstrom, whom he thought had always acted in good faith for the FBI, "My work on CALEA got me fired."
Kallstrom was apparently happy to see his more idealistic opponents leave town. "You didn't get fired, Jerry," he replied. "You got promoted."
Making Demands
Had the FBI and the Justice Department stopped there, had the government settled for secure access to phone networks, the history of Internet privacy and civil liberties might have turned out differently. But just weeks after President Clinton signed CALEA in January 1995, conflict erupted between the government and the phone carriers over the kind of network access the law provided. The raft of compromise that had carried the deal sprung a leak.
FBI officials knew in 1994 that they were making a mistake by leaving cyberspace out of CALEA. They understood the Internet's potential as a communications device and an intelligence tool -- that is, after all, why CALEA's authors exempted "information services."
"Did we know that it was idiotic to carve that out?" Kallstrom asks now. "Yes, we did." Criminals have always been among the first to embrace new technology. It was foolish to think that they wouldn't turn to the Internet for any number of nefarious gambits. But, Kallstrom says, government officials opted "to fight another day" over Internet access. Privacy advocates were dragging their feet in the negotiations. Delay would invite more debate, probably more hearings, and possibly a less favorable outcome. The political decision was made: "Let's take what we can get here."
In early 1995, the Justice Department issued its list of requirements for wiretapping, known as the punch list. Not surprisingly, many telecom executives and their attorneys viewed the demands as unreasonable. Al Gidari, a lawyer representing the wireless industry, was among the first to see the FBI's requirements, during the initial meeting to develop standards for CALEA, which was held that spring in Vancouver, British Columbia. The Justice Department's wish list, he said, amounted to "the Cadillac of wiretaps."
"Everything they could ever think of to gold plate and put on the Cadillac was in that document," Gidari recalls. Meeting its expectations represented "an exponential increase in complexity, not a linear increase.... They were very dictatorial ... technical requirements -- the very thing that Congress said it wasn't up to [the FBI] to figure out."
The standards meeting was tense and awkward, and the sides were unevenly matched. Gidari recalls a dozen or more FBI agents, in neat blue suits, all buttoned down and looking ready to roll over anyone who stood in their way. Arrayed on the opposite side of the table was a group of laid-back and casually dressed network engineers from all the major telecom equipment manufacturers and carriers that was tasked with the unenviable job of telling the bureau that the industry planned to build a much less complex system. It wasn't what the FBI agents wanted to hear.
Over the next few years, the Justice Department continued to seek increasingly sophisticated surveillance capabilities, including real-time geographical tracking of mobile phones; the ability to monitor all parties in a conference call regardless of whether they are on hold or participating; and "dialed digit extraction," a record of any numbers that a subject under surveillance punched in during a call, such as a credit card or bank account number. The government got a lot of what it wanted, but not all.
To be sure, criminals' use of new technologies helped drive the law enforcement demands. But telecom carriers worried that the cost of compliance was too high and that the FBI's technical requirements were illegally broad. CALEA, they argued, had forbidden the government from requiring specific system designs or technologies.
The FCC's Turn
Justice, frustrated by its inability to get all the demands on the punch list, finally asked the FCC to step in. In 1997, the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association, which then represented mobile carriers, and the Center for Democracy and Technology complained to the commission that the negotiations had deadlocked because of "unreasonable demands by law enforcement for more surveillance features than either CALEA or the wiretap laws allow." The FCC, however, sided with the Justice Department on a host of requirements that privacy groups found overly broad. The tussle dragged on for two more years and ended up in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which overruled the FCC. After the commission took up matters again, it granted some of the FBI's requests, and the CALEA standards were amended.
When Justice Department officials reported to Congress on CALEA implementation in January 1998, no manufacturer of telecom equipment said that the FBI's demands were impossible to meet, but they did say that complying would be difficult and very expensive. (Although Congress had set aside $500 million to reimburse companies for retrofitting their networks, the law required the carriers to bear the cost of compliance on any equipment put in place after CALEA was enacted. Several experts believe that the final cost for compliance on telephone networks has been two to eight times the amount originally allotted.)
The level of government surveillance was so low at that time that some questioned why the FBI wanted such multifaceted access at all. In 1994, federal and state authorities were running 1,154 wiretaps nationwide, mostly for drug investigations, at an average cost of $50,000. The government was asking carriers to "design a nuclear rocket ship" for a rarely used tool, Gidari thought. "In [the FBI's] view, there was no limit to the expense the carrier should spare in order to save a life."
CALEA continued to evolve, shaped by the ongoing arguments over the terms of its birth. Activists and carriers thought that the FBI was reneging on its bargain, asking for more than the law allowed. The FBI believed that carriers were stalling when they failed to meet compliance deadlines. As all sides dug in, the meetings on implementation turned bitter. FBI and Justice officials slammed their hands on tables and screamed at carrier representatives, Gidari recalls. "You're unpatriotic! What do you want to do, help the criminals?"
The government asked those same questions after September 11, 2001. And this time, telecommunications carriers responded. Outside the normal FISA warrant process, which covers intelligence-gathering, carriers opened access to their networks, their customer call data, and their valuable transactional information -- the kind that CALEA had intended to exclude. President Bush and his administration believed that the extraordinary nature of the terrorist attacks demanded emergency actions that FISA couldn't accommodate, and the carriers answered the call from law enforcement and intelligence agencies. But government officials also seized on the post-9/11 mentality to change other surveillance laws and procedures, which they believed -- just as their predecessors did in 1994 -- were out of step with technology and reality. About three years after 9/11, officials set their sights on rewriting CALEA.
Claiming The Internet
In August 2004, in response to a petition by the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FCC expanded CALEA to cover Internet communications, including voice calls and instant messages. The Electronic Frontier Foundation sued, along with industry, civil-liberties, and academic groups. In 2005, the Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 to defer to the FCC's reading of the law.
Many of those who had helped craft CALEA believed that the commission had misread the law and acted on a post-9/11 impulse to give the government more, not less, access to information. But to the FCC, new Internet technologies that operate a lot like telephones blurred the distinction between "information services" and the kinds of technology that CALEA was meant to cover.
After 9/11, law enforcement and intelligence agencies took a variety of measures, apart from wiretaps, to collect and mine potentially valuable information from the Internet. With the cooperation of telecom companies, government accumulated lots of transactional data -- including e-mail header information and lists of websites visited by targeted individuals -- to support counter-terrorism operations. Viewed solely as a reaction to the terrorist attacks of 2001, this kind of collection might seem extraordinary. But through the longer lens of history, the government's steady march into cyberspace is not surprising.
Law enforcement agencies have never suffered for lack of access to the phone network. Kallstrom recalls only a few instances in which agents were unable to execute a wiretap order because of new technology. But as digital, mobile technology has proliferated, the copper lug nuts that Kallstrom remembers from the 1980s have disappeared. Today, state and federal agents spend most of their tap time on mobile devices. In 1994, most wiretaps, by far, targeted private residences. There were few taps on mobile devices. Ten years later, 88 percent of the 1,710 wiretaps were on mobile devices. Only 5 percent were on residential lines. Without CALEA, some experts believe that Kallstrom's initial fears would have come true and the federal government would have been shut out of the wiretapping business.
Jerry Berman never wanted that to happen. Although he cannot accept that the law that was meant to minimize the government's influence over the Internet is now being used to facilitate it, he is willing to negotiate on CALEA again, if that is what's necessary to satisfy all parties.
That willingness to talk extends to FISA, as well, and Berman's Center for Democracy and Technology has been actively involved in the current agitations over the law. But whenever he and his cohorts have extended the hand of compromise to Congress or the administration, he says, they have been disappointed. Any attempt to revamp FISA, or to clarify CALEA, "is impossible in the current climate," Berman says. "There is no sense that you could get the kind of negotiation we got in 1994."
FISA And CALEA
One has to wonder how strong that spirit of compromise really was in 1994, and whether it was already ebbing. If the FBI was willing to take what it could get on CALEA and go on to fight another day, did the government really "settle" at all? Literally weeks after CALEA was signed the Justice Department and the FBI came roaring back with new demands. What killed the penchant for negotiation? Was it the moderates' loss of power in both political parties after the 1994 Republican revolution? Was it the entrenchment of civil-liberties activists? Was it the Bush White House's extravagant interpretation of executive power? Was it 9/11?
Berman spends a lot of time pondering these questions and thinking about next moves. He divides his time between Washington, where he chairs his group's board of directors, and a home he built on the Cacapon River near Berkeley Springs, W.Va. "We just have people in bunkers now," Berman says ruefully.
The FISA debate is currently hung up on whether companies that assisted warrantless surveillance after 9/11 should have retroactive legal immunity for any laws they may have broken. CALEA has something to say about that, too. The law requires that carriers be able to deliver call identification information to the government remotely. According to Beryl Howell, Sen. Leahy's lead CALEA staffer, that provision was meant to keep government agents from sitting in the phone companies' offices to execute their wiretaps.
It is a basic tenet of wiretapping law, whether for intelligence or law enforcement, that the communications companies act as a buffer between their customers and the government, she says, and that telecom carriers must make their own determination whether official requests are, in fact, legal. That the companies would now assert, in defense of their cooperation, that the government determined that post-9/11 requests were legal, strikes Howell as outrageous.
If ever there was a time for the bare-knuckled negotiations of the past, it's now. It's not at all clear, though, who could play the role of Jerry Berman, the one to bring people into the room to scream and yell at each other and emerge feeling better for it -- and possibly even coming to a compromise. As things stand, Congress appears more likely to punt the FISA debate to the new administration, and has shown little interest in revisiting CALEA.
The constant tension that once kept this system in balance has reached a breaking point. There is no push and pull. Maybe the stakes are too high for compromise. But until that spirit returns, Berman says, "there will be no peace."
Published in National Journal
Labels: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Intelligence, Law, Politics, Technology, Terrorism
Full Article
Iran Estimate: Debate Persists
Friday, February 22, 2008
On December 3, 2007, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell declassified a set of key judgments from a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's efforts to build a nuclear weapon. The judgments may have contained some good news -- namely, "that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program" -- but few in the upper ranks of the Bush administration warmly embraced this declaration.
Indeed, in the month after the release, McConnell and President Bush publicly distanced themselves from the NIE's dramatic headline. Key American allies went further: The French defense minister and the head of Israeli intelligence declared the NIE wrong, contending that Iran's weapons work continues.
All of those officials, who play key roles in pressing for further international sanctions against Iran, say that Tehran continues to publicly enrich uranium under the implausible auspices of a civilian energy program, and that it continues to test-fire ballistic missiles. Bush used his State of the Union address to remind the world of these two facts and to assert that Iran remains as much of a threat as it was before December 3.
With the key judgments public, intelligence officials and weapons experts are in a definitional sparring match over what constitutes a nuclear weapons program, whether the NIE should have been released at all, and how the estimate was written. The key judgments acknowledged the points that Bush made in his speech. But the final document emphasized the riveting new information about the halted "nuclear weapons program" rather than Iran's ongoing enrichment and missile activities.
Furthermore, the NIE narrowly defines the program as consisting of weapons "design work," presumably for a warhead that can be put atop a missile, plus some covert enrichment activities. The estimate explicitly states that the weapons program does not include Iran's publicly acknowledged uranium enrichment work, which Tehran says is aimed at low-level enrichment that can be used for civilian nuclear power. Skeptics say that if Iran masters low-level uranium enrichment it can eventually develop the high-level enrichment necessary for a nuclear bomb.
The definition of what exactly constitutes a weapons program is important, but the key judgments relegated it to a footnote. Some former intelligence officials say that the footnoted information could have been stated more boldly, and they speculate whether the key judgments were deliberately written in such a way as to convince readers that Iran's nuclear threat has lessened. Intelligence estimates, by definition, are supposed to state the views of the intelligence community, not to argue policy, these former officials say.
There is little evidence to indicate that intelligence analysts are trying to pre-empt a U.S. invasion of Iran by undercutting the Bush administration's ostensible rationale for such action. But the NIE leaves many of the intelligence community's supporters wondering if its authors grasped how the document would be read -- quickly, incautiously, and through political lenses. If the NIE was meant to clarify matters on Iran, it has arguably failed.
A number of longtime intelligence analysts and weapons experts, including those who have helped draft NIEs in the past and hold no particular allegiance to Bush, criticize the key judgments as poorly written, politically tone-deaf, and betraying a fundamental misunderstanding of what actually constitutes a nuclear weapons program.
Production of fissile material -- highly enriched uranium, or plutonium -- is generally viewed as the long pole in the nuclear tent. Once a country overcomes that hurdle, the path to a finished nuclear weapon is downhill. Iran may have halted some design activities, but how significant is that in light of its continuing low-level uranium enrichment and missile testing? As one former intelligence official with experience in NIEs put it, the intelligence community seemed to go to great lengths to answer the least important question -- the work on a warhead design.
Defenders of the NIE, including the senior officials and analysts who wrote it, counter that the document is the product of new, compelling information and a rigorous, top-to-bottom scrubbing of all the known intelligence about Iranian nuclear issues. One former senior intelligence official close to the NIE's drafters said that journalists had blown the top finding out of proportion. Indeed, the clause immediately following the opening sentence, which declared that the program was halted in 2003, reads, "We also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons."
The key judgments clearly didn't give the Iranians a "clean bill of health," says Jeffrey Lewis, who directs the Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative at the New America Foundation and runs the blog ArmsControlWonk.com. "The press reporting took a badly written NIE and pulled out probably the least important fact, or misidentified what the NIE said," Lewis argues.
Reporters weren't the only ones to run with the headline, however. Meir Dagan, the head of Mossad, Israel's intelligence service, blasted the key judgments before a Knesset committee earlier this month. The document "pulls the rug out from under" the push for stricter Iran sanctions, he said. The U.S. estimate leaves "Israel to face the threat alone," Dagan added.
A few days earlier, the French defense minister, Herve Morin, said during a visit to Washington, "Coordinated information from a number of intelligence services" had led the French to believe that Iran is "continuing to develop" a nuclear weapon.
Both Dagan and Morin presumably have access to information that was not contained in the declassified judgments. But even the U.S. intelligence community's top man has publicly tried to shift attention away from the NIE's conclusion about Iran's narrowly defined weapons program. McConnell, like Bush, has been far more emphatic about the threat that Iran poses. Eschewing the hedged language of his analysts -- "high confidence," "moderate confidence" -- his assessments are more rigid and more focused on Iran's growing strength. In a lengthy January profile in The New Yorker, McConnell said, "There's no doubt in this observer's mind that Iran is on the path to get a nuclear weapon. It will force an arms race in the region."
Where Iran lies on its road to nuclear status may be up for debate. But on one fact, all sides agree: Without all of the key components -- fissile material, a compact and resilient warhead, and a long-range missile to deliver it -- Iran has no nuclear weapon. Could Iran make a nuclear device that might work? Maybe. Does it have the technological infrastructure to go further? Certainly. But does Iran have a viable, long-range weapon with which to threaten its neighbors? No.
And perhaps that was the intelligence community's point in the NIE. If the Iranian nuclear program were likened to a three-legged stool, then one leg -- the weapons design -- was taken out nearly five years ago. It could be repaired, but in the meantime, the stool is useless.
"I turn the tables on the critics of the NIE," says George Friedman, the head of Stratfor, a private intelligence firm. "Lay out the number of components you need to produce a weapon. If there is one that the Iranians weren't working on, they have no program."
But this assessment may ignore the political realities of Iranian nuclear ambitions. Tehran's possession of even a rudimentary nuclear device could fundamentally upset the regional power balance. "Would you like to have to convince Israel or the Saudis not to worry that these devices are too large and crude to be delivered by missiles?" asks David Kay. He is the former United Nations chief weapons inspector who led the 2003 Iraq Survey Group that found that Saddam Hussein no longer possessed weapons of mass destruction. "Nukes are less about war fighting than about politics by other means," he says.
Kay adds that the intelligence community is apparently conflicted about Iran's capabilities and its intentions. A bullet point within the key judgments states, parenthetically, that because of "intelligence gaps," the Energy Department and the National Intelligence Council "assess with only moderate confidence" that Iran's 2003 halt to the weapons design program represented a stop to the "entire nuclear weapons program."
"That's a direct contradiction of the first sentence," which declared that the program had halted, Kay says, "and yet it doesn't come after the first sentence, which implies that all 16 agencies are in agreement." The Energy Department's less confident view is especially worrisome, Kay says, because DOE oversees the nation's nuclear laboratories and has the most nuclear weapons expertise within the intelligence community.
For his part, McConnell appears to understand that his release of the key judgments has affected not only the political climate but also the future work of his analysts and spies. He told The New Yorker, "I think putting it out was the right thing." But he admitted that the intelligence community continues to need better information to verify if Iran has restarted its weapons design work.
"Our job is to steal the secrets of foreign governments or foreign terrorist organizations, and so the more they know about the effectiveness of our tradecraft the more difficult it's going to be for us," McConnell said. "For the community I represent, I just made our life a lot harder."
Published in National Journal
Friday, February 22, 2008
On December 3, 2007, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell declassified a set of key judgments from a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's efforts to build a nuclear weapon. The judgments may have contained some good news -- namely, "that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program" -- but few in the upper ranks of the Bush administration warmly embraced this declaration.
Indeed, in the month after the release, McConnell and President Bush publicly distanced themselves from the NIE's dramatic headline. Key American allies went further: The French defense minister and the head of Israeli intelligence declared the NIE wrong, contending that Iran's weapons work continues.
All of those officials, who play key roles in pressing for further international sanctions against Iran, say that Tehran continues to publicly enrich uranium under the implausible auspices of a civilian energy program, and that it continues to test-fire ballistic missiles. Bush used his State of the Union address to remind the world of these two facts and to assert that Iran remains as much of a threat as it was before December 3.
With the key judgments public, intelligence officials and weapons experts are in a definitional sparring match over what constitutes a nuclear weapons program, whether the NIE should have been released at all, and how the estimate was written. The key judgments acknowledged the points that Bush made in his speech. But the final document emphasized the riveting new information about the halted "nuclear weapons program" rather than Iran's ongoing enrichment and missile activities.
Furthermore, the NIE narrowly defines the program as consisting of weapons "design work," presumably for a warhead that can be put atop a missile, plus some covert enrichment activities. The estimate explicitly states that the weapons program does not include Iran's publicly acknowledged uranium enrichment work, which Tehran says is aimed at low-level enrichment that can be used for civilian nuclear power. Skeptics say that if Iran masters low-level uranium enrichment it can eventually develop the high-level enrichment necessary for a nuclear bomb.
The definition of what exactly constitutes a weapons program is important, but the key judgments relegated it to a footnote. Some former intelligence officials say that the footnoted information could have been stated more boldly, and they speculate whether the key judgments were deliberately written in such a way as to convince readers that Iran's nuclear threat has lessened. Intelligence estimates, by definition, are supposed to state the views of the intelligence community, not to argue policy, these former officials say.
There is little evidence to indicate that intelligence analysts are trying to pre-empt a U.S. invasion of Iran by undercutting the Bush administration's ostensible rationale for such action. But the NIE leaves many of the intelligence community's supporters wondering if its authors grasped how the document would be read -- quickly, incautiously, and through political lenses. If the NIE was meant to clarify matters on Iran, it has arguably failed.
A number of longtime intelligence analysts and weapons experts, including those who have helped draft NIEs in the past and hold no particular allegiance to Bush, criticize the key judgments as poorly written, politically tone-deaf, and betraying a fundamental misunderstanding of what actually constitutes a nuclear weapons program.
Production of fissile material -- highly enriched uranium, or plutonium -- is generally viewed as the long pole in the nuclear tent. Once a country overcomes that hurdle, the path to a finished nuclear weapon is downhill. Iran may have halted some design activities, but how significant is that in light of its continuing low-level uranium enrichment and missile testing? As one former intelligence official with experience in NIEs put it, the intelligence community seemed to go to great lengths to answer the least important question -- the work on a warhead design.
Defenders of the NIE, including the senior officials and analysts who wrote it, counter that the document is the product of new, compelling information and a rigorous, top-to-bottom scrubbing of all the known intelligence about Iranian nuclear issues. One former senior intelligence official close to the NIE's drafters said that journalists had blown the top finding out of proportion. Indeed, the clause immediately following the opening sentence, which declared that the program was halted in 2003, reads, "We also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons."
The key judgments clearly didn't give the Iranians a "clean bill of health," says Jeffrey Lewis, who directs the Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative at the New America Foundation and runs the blog ArmsControlWonk.com. "The press reporting took a badly written NIE and pulled out probably the least important fact, or misidentified what the NIE said," Lewis argues.
Reporters weren't the only ones to run with the headline, however. Meir Dagan, the head of Mossad, Israel's intelligence service, blasted the key judgments before a Knesset committee earlier this month. The document "pulls the rug out from under" the push for stricter Iran sanctions, he said. The U.S. estimate leaves "Israel to face the threat alone," Dagan added.
A few days earlier, the French defense minister, Herve Morin, said during a visit to Washington, "Coordinated information from a number of intelligence services" had led the French to believe that Iran is "continuing to develop" a nuclear weapon.
Both Dagan and Morin presumably have access to information that was not contained in the declassified judgments. But even the U.S. intelligence community's top man has publicly tried to shift attention away from the NIE's conclusion about Iran's narrowly defined weapons program. McConnell, like Bush, has been far more emphatic about the threat that Iran poses. Eschewing the hedged language of his analysts -- "high confidence," "moderate confidence" -- his assessments are more rigid and more focused on Iran's growing strength. In a lengthy January profile in The New Yorker, McConnell said, "There's no doubt in this observer's mind that Iran is on the path to get a nuclear weapon. It will force an arms race in the region."
Where Iran lies on its road to nuclear status may be up for debate. But on one fact, all sides agree: Without all of the key components -- fissile material, a compact and resilient warhead, and a long-range missile to deliver it -- Iran has no nuclear weapon. Could Iran make a nuclear device that might work? Maybe. Does it have the technological infrastructure to go further? Certainly. But does Iran have a viable, long-range weapon with which to threaten its neighbors? No.
And perhaps that was the intelligence community's point in the NIE. If the Iranian nuclear program were likened to a three-legged stool, then one leg -- the weapons design -- was taken out nearly five years ago. It could be repaired, but in the meantime, the stool is useless.
"I turn the tables on the critics of the NIE," says George Friedman, the head of Stratfor, a private intelligence firm. "Lay out the number of components you need to produce a weapon. If there is one that the Iranians weren't working on, they have no program."
But this assessment may ignore the political realities of Iranian nuclear ambitions. Tehran's possession of even a rudimentary nuclear device could fundamentally upset the regional power balance. "Would you like to have to convince Israel or the Saudis not to worry that these devices are too large and crude to be delivered by missiles?" asks David Kay. He is the former United Nations chief weapons inspector who led the 2003 Iraq Survey Group that found that Saddam Hussein no longer possessed weapons of mass destruction. "Nukes are less about war fighting than about politics by other means," he says.
Kay adds that the intelligence community is apparently conflicted about Iran's capabilities and its intentions. A bullet point within the key judgments states, parenthetically, that because of "intelligence gaps," the Energy Department and the National Intelligence Council "assess with only moderate confidence" that Iran's 2003 halt to the weapons design program represented a stop to the "entire nuclear weapons program."
"That's a direct contradiction of the first sentence," which declared that the program had halted, Kay says, "and yet it doesn't come after the first sentence, which implies that all 16 agencies are in agreement." The Energy Department's less confident view is especially worrisome, Kay says, because DOE oversees the nation's nuclear laboratories and has the most nuclear weapons expertise within the intelligence community.
For his part, McConnell appears to understand that his release of the key judgments has affected not only the political climate but also the future work of his analysts and spies. He told The New Yorker, "I think putting it out was the right thing." But he admitted that the intelligence community continues to need better information to verify if Iran has restarted its weapons design work.
"Our job is to steal the secrets of foreign governments or foreign terrorist organizations, and so the more they know about the effectiveness of our tradecraft the more difficult it's going to be for us," McConnell said. "For the community I represent, I just made our life a lot harder."
Published in National Journal
Labels: Director of National Intelligence, Intelligence, Iran
Full Article
The Other About-Face on Iran
Friday, December 14, 2007
In releasing a bombshell about Iran's nuclear program, intelligence director Mike McConnell reversed a vow of secrecy. But he probably had no choice.
"You will be disappointed," Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, told a gathering of journalists in Washington on November 13. U.S. spy agencies were putting the finishing touches on a National Intelligence Estimate about Iran's nuclear intentions and capabilities, which included new leads that the agencies had been vetting since spring. But departing from recent practice, McConnell said, "I do not intend to release unclassified key judgments" of the NIE, those heavily edited yet potentially telling morsels of analysis that might ultimately show how close the United States is to a war with Iran.
"We have probably done a thousand of these" NIEs, he said. "We have done unclassified key judgments for maybe three. So we created an expectation that we do this, because we did it previously." And that was a bad idea, McConnell said, with some passion.
For starters, even the "sanitized" version of an NIE could compromise vital sources and methods, he said, because the target of the estimate is, of course, going to read the document. Second, "I don't want to have a situation where the young analysts" -- whom McConnell guards with particular devotion because he was once one of them -- "are writing something because they know it's going to be a public debate or political debate. They should be writing it to call it as it is."
McConnell, whom a longtime colleague describes as having "not a political or manipulative bone in his body," also stated he would "make every effort" to prosecute anyone who leaked the NIE. Then, he vowed (twice) to resign if the intelligence was "cherry-picked in an inappropriate way" by government officials.
Things changed dramatically in the three weeks after McConnell's public denunciation of leaks and declassification. On December 3, McConnell and his aides reversed that decision and released the unclassified key judgments of the NIE on Iran. Try as McConnell might to keep the lid on the new estimate, his lieutenants were influenced by the political realities of intelligence these days.
"They thought it would leak and be distorted, and they thought they'd get ahead of that," said one former senior intelligence official close to the deliberations. "They decided it was better to put out a clean set of key judgments." Vice President Cheney went so far as to say that officials expected to lose control of some classified material. "There was a general belief -- that we all shared -- that it was important to put it out, that it was not likely to stay classified for long, anyway," Cheney told The Politico on December 5. "Everything leaks."
The leak-prevention strategy was a stark departure from the guidelines that McConnell had set out, both in November and a month earlier, when he issued this official policy: "The possibility that the [key judgments] or other positions of an estimate will be leaked is not a sufficient reason for preparing unclassified [key judgments]." In a briefing with reporters after the NIE was released, a senior intelligence official acknowledged that declassification "obviously represents a departure from [McConnell's] guidance."
The banner headline of the key judgments -- "that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program" -- put the intelligence community precisely where McConnell didn't want it to be: in the middle of a ferocious political and policy debate in which sources and methods of the intelligence on Iran, as well as the analysis, are being openly discussed, exposed, debated, and, yes, cherry-picked to suit a range of agendas. Indeed, even though the NIE does not say that Iran poses no nuclear threat, the key judgments on areas besides the weapons program have had to compete with the dramatic top-line assessment.
Because the new estimate upends its predecessor, made in 2005, and has undercut any nuclear-related pretext for a U.S. bombing of Iran, the political and ideological dispositions of the analysts who wrote the NIE are, predictably, under scrutiny. Within days of the key judgments' release, former Bush administration officials and neoconservative icons mounted a full-scale attack on McConnell's lieutenants, some of whom had long careers in the State Department and have, the critics contend, historically underestimated Iran.
These critics characterized the NIE as the lieutenants' way of cutting off Cheney and the president on their presumed path to war with Iran -- a contention that wasn't refuted by senior intelligence officials' repeated assertions that Iran's decision to stop its program in 2003 and to keep it shuttered resulted directly from international pressures and sanctions. Indeed, intelligence officials have been careful not to assert that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the key motivator for Iran's change of plans. Whether McConnell's aides meant to pre-empt the White House or not, the conclusion is undeniable: The intelligence community is at odds with President Bush's forceful rhetoric on Iran.
Since the NIE was released, McConnell has been notably absent from the public fracas. His deputy, Donald Kerr, a veteran nuclear weapons expert, has given the intelligence community's only two on-the-record statements about the estimate. McConnell was out of the country when the key judgments were released.
Around Washington, rumors persist that McConnell threatened to resign over the issue. It's not clear, however, whether he staked his tenure on the NIE being released or withheld, or whether he saw any cherry-picking by the White House, but the gossip is one more measure of just how political the release of this document has become. Observers point out that in the month preceding the NIE, Bush warned that Iran's nuclear ambitions could lead to "World War III," and Cheney, four days later, gave a bellicose speech reminiscent of the run-up to war with Iraq over its weapons programs. The White House already knew by then, at a minimum, that the intelligence community was vetting potentially groundbreaking intelligence on Iran that could change the NIE.
Perhaps under pressure to back up their bold new claims on Iran, senior officials have gone further, giving on-background press interviews in which they catalog the streams of intelligence that led the analysts to change their nuclear conclusions -- purloined laptop computers loaded with weapons diagrams; notebooks and intercepted phone calls from high-ranking officials; and, as reported by the Los Angeles Times this week, a clandestine operation called "Brain Drain," in which the CIA helped mid- and top-level Iranian nuclear experts flee the country.
Unless officials are trying to affect the Iranian government's actions through a massive disinformation campaign, it would seem that the intelligence community has set aside McConnell's concerns about sources and methods. "I'm shocked by the level of public discussion," said a former senior intelligence official who worked on Iranian issues for many years, adding, "I don't see much good that comes from releasing NIEs."
Kerr has said that the release "was coordinated in discussion with senior policy makers," but that the intelligence community "took responsibility for what portions ... were to be declassified." Officials weighed "the importance of the information to open discussions about our national security" against protecting sources and methods, he said, and "felt it was important to release this information to ensure that an accurate presentation is available."
Still, only a dramatic turn of events would have led McConnell to abandon his policy of not making NIEs public, several former officials who know him said. One former high-ranking official involved in clandestine operations said that in more than 30 years in the intelligence business, he had never seen a key judgment change so dramatically so fast -- indicating that the new intelligence that officials picked up amounted to a veritable "smoking gun."
"Keep in mind, this thing had been built up, which is somewhat unusual for an NIE," said another former senior official, who has also worked on Capitol Hill. The document was months behind schedule, widely anticipated, and focused on one of the top foreign-policy issues of the moment. "I think this was an extraordinary circumstance," the former official said.
Expressing concern over the public airing of sources, a Senate staffer said that the NIE "has certainly been sucked into a political debate," and that McConnell is clearly concerned about the effect that the fallout might have on analysts. "For that, we will have to wait and see," the aide said. "I still think that he simply had no choice. There was no way this would stay secret, and he didn't want to be accused of trying to bury it. I think he held his nose and let it go."
Many intelligence professionals concur. And in the NIE's release, they see signs not of an outright insurrection against the Bush administration but of a reassertion by the intelligence community of its ability to influence policy -- public or otherwise. McConnell's team is hardly backing down in the face of the neocon onslaught. Last Saturday, Kerr shot back at the NIE's critics in an unusual and terse public statement. Labeled "In response to those questioning the analytic work and integrity of the United States intelligence community," Kerr's statement said that the agencies' "task ... is to produce objective, ground-truth analysis. We feel confident in our analytic tradecraft and resulting analysis in this estimate."
So there.
Published in National Journal.
Friday, December 14, 2007
In releasing a bombshell about Iran's nuclear program, intelligence director Mike McConnell reversed a vow of secrecy. But he probably had no choice.
"You will be disappointed," Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, told a gathering of journalists in Washington on November 13. U.S. spy agencies were putting the finishing touches on a National Intelligence Estimate about Iran's nuclear intentions and capabilities, which included new leads that the agencies had been vetting since spring. But departing from recent practice, McConnell said, "I do not intend to release unclassified key judgments" of the NIE, those heavily edited yet potentially telling morsels of analysis that might ultimately show how close the United States is to a war with Iran.
"We have probably done a thousand of these" NIEs, he said. "We have done unclassified key judgments for maybe three. So we created an expectation that we do this, because we did it previously." And that was a bad idea, McConnell said, with some passion.
For starters, even the "sanitized" version of an NIE could compromise vital sources and methods, he said, because the target of the estimate is, of course, going to read the document. Second, "I don't want to have a situation where the young analysts" -- whom McConnell guards with particular devotion because he was once one of them -- "are writing something because they know it's going to be a public debate or political debate. They should be writing it to call it as it is."
McConnell, whom a longtime colleague describes as having "not a political or manipulative bone in his body," also stated he would "make every effort" to prosecute anyone who leaked the NIE. Then, he vowed (twice) to resign if the intelligence was "cherry-picked in an inappropriate way" by government officials.
Things changed dramatically in the three weeks after McConnell's public denunciation of leaks and declassification. On December 3, McConnell and his aides reversed that decision and released the unclassified key judgments of the NIE on Iran. Try as McConnell might to keep the lid on the new estimate, his lieutenants were influenced by the political realities of intelligence these days.
"They thought it would leak and be distorted, and they thought they'd get ahead of that," said one former senior intelligence official close to the deliberations. "They decided it was better to put out a clean set of key judgments." Vice President Cheney went so far as to say that officials expected to lose control of some classified material. "There was a general belief -- that we all shared -- that it was important to put it out, that it was not likely to stay classified for long, anyway," Cheney told The Politico on December 5. "Everything leaks."
The leak-prevention strategy was a stark departure from the guidelines that McConnell had set out, both in November and a month earlier, when he issued this official policy: "The possibility that the [key judgments] or other positions of an estimate will be leaked is not a sufficient reason for preparing unclassified [key judgments]." In a briefing with reporters after the NIE was released, a senior intelligence official acknowledged that declassification "obviously represents a departure from [McConnell's] guidance."
The banner headline of the key judgments -- "that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program" -- put the intelligence community precisely where McConnell didn't want it to be: in the middle of a ferocious political and policy debate in which sources and methods of the intelligence on Iran, as well as the analysis, are being openly discussed, exposed, debated, and, yes, cherry-picked to suit a range of agendas. Indeed, even though the NIE does not say that Iran poses no nuclear threat, the key judgments on areas besides the weapons program have had to compete with the dramatic top-line assessment.
Because the new estimate upends its predecessor, made in 2005, and has undercut any nuclear-related pretext for a U.S. bombing of Iran, the political and ideological dispositions of the analysts who wrote the NIE are, predictably, under scrutiny. Within days of the key judgments' release, former Bush administration officials and neoconservative icons mounted a full-scale attack on McConnell's lieutenants, some of whom had long careers in the State Department and have, the critics contend, historically underestimated Iran.
These critics characterized the NIE as the lieutenants' way of cutting off Cheney and the president on their presumed path to war with Iran -- a contention that wasn't refuted by senior intelligence officials' repeated assertions that Iran's decision to stop its program in 2003 and to keep it shuttered resulted directly from international pressures and sanctions. Indeed, intelligence officials have been careful not to assert that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the key motivator for Iran's change of plans. Whether McConnell's aides meant to pre-empt the White House or not, the conclusion is undeniable: The intelligence community is at odds with President Bush's forceful rhetoric on Iran.
Since the NIE was released, McConnell has been notably absent from the public fracas. His deputy, Donald Kerr, a veteran nuclear weapons expert, has given the intelligence community's only two on-the-record statements about the estimate. McConnell was out of the country when the key judgments were released.
Around Washington, rumors persist that McConnell threatened to resign over the issue. It's not clear, however, whether he staked his tenure on the NIE being released or withheld, or whether he saw any cherry-picking by the White House, but the gossip is one more measure of just how political the release of this document has become. Observers point out that in the month preceding the NIE, Bush warned that Iran's nuclear ambitions could lead to "World War III," and Cheney, four days later, gave a bellicose speech reminiscent of the run-up to war with Iraq over its weapons programs. The White House already knew by then, at a minimum, that the intelligence community was vetting potentially groundbreaking intelligence on Iran that could change the NIE.
Perhaps under pressure to back up their bold new claims on Iran, senior officials have gone further, giving on-background press interviews in which they catalog the streams of intelligence that led the analysts to change their nuclear conclusions -- purloined laptop computers loaded with weapons diagrams; notebooks and intercepted phone calls from high-ranking officials; and, as reported by the Los Angeles Times this week, a clandestine operation called "Brain Drain," in which the CIA helped mid- and top-level Iranian nuclear experts flee the country.
Unless officials are trying to affect the Iranian government's actions through a massive disinformation campaign, it would seem that the intelligence community has set aside McConnell's concerns about sources and methods. "I'm shocked by the level of public discussion," said a former senior intelligence official who worked on Iranian issues for many years, adding, "I don't see much good that comes from releasing NIEs."
Kerr has said that the release "was coordinated in discussion with senior policy makers," but that the intelligence community "took responsibility for what portions ... were to be declassified." Officials weighed "the importance of the information to open discussions about our national security" against protecting sources and methods, he said, and "felt it was important to release this information to ensure that an accurate presentation is available."
Still, only a dramatic turn of events would have led McConnell to abandon his policy of not making NIEs public, several former officials who know him said. One former high-ranking official involved in clandestine operations said that in more than 30 years in the intelligence business, he had never seen a key judgment change so dramatically so fast -- indicating that the new intelligence that officials picked up amounted to a veritable "smoking gun."
"Keep in mind, this thing had been built up, which is somewhat unusual for an NIE," said another former senior official, who has also worked on Capitol Hill. The document was months behind schedule, widely anticipated, and focused on one of the top foreign-policy issues of the moment. "I think this was an extraordinary circumstance," the former official said.
Expressing concern over the public airing of sources, a Senate staffer said that the NIE "has certainly been sucked into a political debate," and that McConnell is clearly concerned about the effect that the fallout might have on analysts. "For that, we will have to wait and see," the aide said. "I still think that he simply had no choice. There was no way this would stay secret, and he didn't want to be accused of trying to bury it. I think he held his nose and let it go."
Many intelligence professionals concur. And in the NIE's release, they see signs not of an outright insurrection against the Bush administration but of a reassertion by the intelligence community of its ability to influence policy -- public or otherwise. McConnell's team is hardly backing down in the face of the neocon onslaught. Last Saturday, Kerr shot back at the NIE's critics in an unusual and terse public statement. Labeled "In response to those questioning the analytic work and integrity of the United States intelligence community," Kerr's statement said that the agencies' "task ... is to produce objective, ground-truth analysis. We feel confident in our analytic tradecraft and resulting analysis in this estimate."
So there.
Published in National Journal.
Labels: Director of National Intelligence, Intelligence, Iran, Management, Politics
Full Article
A Court at the Crossroads
Friday, October 19, 2007
As Democrats and Republicans debate legislation that would alter 30-year-old limits on intrusive electronic and physical searches by the government, the secretive 11-member court that oversees surveillance of foreign-intelligence targets in the United States finds itself in the middle of a very public power struggle.
Regardless of where law and policy makers fall on the question, now being debated, about which governmental branch should hold the most sway over intelligence operations, and which political party has the more effective and fair solution, they all agree on this much: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court should play referee, and the government should receive some kind of authorization for a still-secret set of spying activities that many agree are essential to the war on terrorism. If that oversight results in warrants that violate the Constitution, as some scholars fear would occur if pending legislation is enacted, most Republicans and Democrats don't appear concerned about such a prospect or even cognizant of it. Such is the court's brave new world.
It is an odd, but perhaps not unwelcome, reality that the intelligence judges now play a decisive role in this controversy. Odd because for most of American history, the judiciary has ruled itself least qualified among the branches of government to manage intelligence activities. But not unwelcome because this court has waded into these waters before, and it believes it has been an indispensable buffer against government excess.
The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the court's animating law, was a grand political compromise. After years of unchecked surveillance by the FBI and intelligence agencies of prominent Americans and political dissidents both before and during the Nixon presidency, the FISA court became the arbiter of when and how the executive branch can spy on suspected foreign agents and terrorists inside the country. Especially after the 9/11 attacks, the judges have included more experts in national security law, court-watchers say, and the court's former chief judge has proudly proclaimed that the court turns down almost no surveillance requests because the government has learned to play within FISA's boundaries.
This system, however, was upended after the 9/11 attacks, when President Bush issued orders that allowed him to bypass the court when tracking domestic terrorism suspects. The orders seemed to reflect a long-held, simmering animosity toward the body by some senior administration officials, particularly Vice President Cheney's legal counsel, David Addington, who reportedly told a colleague after 9/11 that "we're one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious court."
Now, though, the court is regaining some of the authority it had lost. And if the president signs a new Democratic proposal to further amend FISA, the court would play a central and untested role in overseeing surveillance. It may welcome the chance.
Former Chief FISA Court Judge Royce Lamberth has described a panel of jurists confident in its interpretation of surveillance law, equipped to issue warrants quickly, and flexible enough to write new procedures during wartime. In remarks at the annual conference of the American Library Association in June, Lamberth, who left his post in 2002, said he hadn't found a better way of controlling government surveillance. But, the former judge added, there was a "worse way," and that was "what the president did with the National Security Agency": Bush's post-9/11 orders allowed the government's eavesdroppers to intercept communications inside the United States without the court's approval.
The NSA program, begun just after 9/11 and dubbed "the terrorist surveillance program" by Bush, continued without judicial check for more than five years, until January 2007, when the administration placed it under FISA court review. The exact contours of the court's initial orders about the program, which were to last for 90 days, are secret.
For that first 90-day period, the NSA program proceeded unimpeded, intelligence officials say. But, according to Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, in spring 2007 a different FISA judge said that the government needed a warrant to capture electronic communications between parties in foreign countries as those communications pass through routing equipment in the United States. "We found ourselves in a position of actually losing ground," McConnell told the El Paso Times in August. The government would have to apply for a warrant for each phone number it monitored in this way, and it takes about "200 man-hours" to fill out the necessary paperwork, McConnell said. FISA experts and lawmakers note, however, that the law contains emergency provisions that allow monitoring to begin before a court order.
The ruling on the U.S.-routed calls was a rare push-back from a court that, by Lamberth's count, has approved 99 percent of the government's warrant applications. The Bush administration then launched a massive lobbying effort to amend FISA; in August, Congress passed the Protect America Act. It effectively reversed the court's normal procedures (these require a warrant before surveillance) and gave judges an after-the-fact-review power for surveillance procedures, which inevitably pick up domestic communications when foreign targets call or e-mail people located in this country. The law was panned for its hasty and imprecise language, and some observers thought it even authorized warrantless physical searches of people's possessions and premises.
This brings the court to its current crossroads. To correct the law's deficiencies, as they see them, Democratic Reps. Silvestre Reyes of Texas and John Conyers of Michigan, the respective chairmen of the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees, have introduced the RESTORE Act, short for Responsible Surveillance That is Overseen, Reviewed, and Effective. The Democrats have said that the bill would "protect innocent Americans from warrantless eavesdropping." Republicans have blasted it as a roadblock in the executive's path, and the bill was suddenly pulled from the House floor on October 17. But as Benjamin Wittes, a Brookings Institution scholar and an expert on the FISA court, writes in The New Republic Online this week, Protect America and RESTORE are actually quite similar. They do, however, hold significant implications for the court.
"Under either approach, the [NSA] will have the legal authority to listen to your calls without first going to the [FISA] court to get a warrant," as long as the targets are people overseas calling people in the United States, Wittes writes. Under the Protect America Act, which the administration favors, the FISA court plays "only a tiny retroactive role in approving procedures for overseas surveillance." But under RESTORE, the court "would play a slightly-less-tiny role in rubber-stamping [surveillance] programs," Wittes maintains. The court, under RESTORE, is given additional powers to review and modify "minimization procedures," which are secret, are written by the government, and are supposed to ensure that information about "U.S. persons" (defined as U.S. citizens or legal residents) is scrubbed from intelligence reports.
Under the RESTORE Act, the court would also have a new, controversial power: granting programmatic or "blanket" warrants for whole classes of individuals overseas who are not U.S. persons. Historically, courts have ruled that such orders violate the Fourth Amendment, which requires that warrants be issued against specific individuals and locations. And although the foreign targets of surveillance don't enjoy constitutional protections, the U.S. persons whom they might call do.
Wittes argues that the RESTORE Act's "approach is a little like asking the courts to approve the reasonableness of police arrest policies prospectively instead of reviewing individual arrests. It's not the way we traditionally do things in the American constitutional system -- and it creates a potentially serious set of constitutional problems with the bill." But the law would require the administration to submit to the court "the procedures it uses to determine which surveillance is exempt from FISA -- and the court has the ability to send them back if they're unreasonable," he adds.
Under the previous version of FISA, the judges found ways to discipline the government. They could reject an application for a warrant; in one case, Lamberth barred a senior FBI official from appearing before the court, because he said that the official had presented false information. The RESTORE Act wouldn't really take these powers away.
Still, some see the recent amendments to FISA as a further weakening of constitutional protections. "There are significant problems that existed with FISA before the Protect America Act," says Jameel Jaffer, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's National Security Project, who is leading a legal effort to have the court release its written opinions on the NSA's surveillance program.
The court "was created to circumvent the Fourth Amendment," says Jonathan Turley, a professor at the George Washington University Law School and one of the few lawyers ever to go inside the court's secure room. With the Protect America and RESTORE acts, Turley says, "Democrats and Republicans are amending the Constitution by default."
For their part, the FISA court judges are unlikely to weigh in directly on the constitutional debate. But using history as a guide, it seems unlikely that they'll do anything more or less than apply the statute as directed by Congress. Presumably, they'll also steer clear of deciding how valid the statute actually is.
Friday, October 19, 2007
As Democrats and Republicans debate legislation that would alter 30-year-old limits on intrusive electronic and physical searches by the government, the secretive 11-member court that oversees surveillance of foreign-intelligence targets in the United States finds itself in the middle of a very public power struggle.
Regardless of where law and policy makers fall on the question, now being debated, about which governmental branch should hold the most sway over intelligence operations, and which political party has the more effective and fair solution, they all agree on this much: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court should play referee, and the government should receive some kind of authorization for a still-secret set of spying activities that many agree are essential to the war on terrorism. If that oversight results in warrants that violate the Constitution, as some scholars fear would occur if pending legislation is enacted, most Republicans and Democrats don't appear concerned about such a prospect or even cognizant of it. Such is the court's brave new world.
It is an odd, but perhaps not unwelcome, reality that the intelligence judges now play a decisive role in this controversy. Odd because for most of American history, the judiciary has ruled itself least qualified among the branches of government to manage intelligence activities. But not unwelcome because this court has waded into these waters before, and it believes it has been an indispensable buffer against government excess.
The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the court's animating law, was a grand political compromise. After years of unchecked surveillance by the FBI and intelligence agencies of prominent Americans and political dissidents both before and during the Nixon presidency, the FISA court became the arbiter of when and how the executive branch can spy on suspected foreign agents and terrorists inside the country. Especially after the 9/11 attacks, the judges have included more experts in national security law, court-watchers say, and the court's former chief judge has proudly proclaimed that the court turns down almost no surveillance requests because the government has learned to play within FISA's boundaries.
This system, however, was upended after the 9/11 attacks, when President Bush issued orders that allowed him to bypass the court when tracking domestic terrorism suspects. The orders seemed to reflect a long-held, simmering animosity toward the body by some senior administration officials, particularly Vice President Cheney's legal counsel, David Addington, who reportedly told a colleague after 9/11 that "we're one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious court."
Now, though, the court is regaining some of the authority it had lost. And if the president signs a new Democratic proposal to further amend FISA, the court would play a central and untested role in overseeing surveillance. It may welcome the chance.
Former Chief FISA Court Judge Royce Lamberth has described a panel of jurists confident in its interpretation of surveillance law, equipped to issue warrants quickly, and flexible enough to write new procedures during wartime. In remarks at the annual conference of the American Library Association in June, Lamberth, who left his post in 2002, said he hadn't found a better way of controlling government surveillance. But, the former judge added, there was a "worse way," and that was "what the president did with the National Security Agency": Bush's post-9/11 orders allowed the government's eavesdroppers to intercept communications inside the United States without the court's approval.
The NSA program, begun just after 9/11 and dubbed "the terrorist surveillance program" by Bush, continued without judicial check for more than five years, until January 2007, when the administration placed it under FISA court review. The exact contours of the court's initial orders about the program, which were to last for 90 days, are secret.
For that first 90-day period, the NSA program proceeded unimpeded, intelligence officials say. But, according to Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, in spring 2007 a different FISA judge said that the government needed a warrant to capture electronic communications between parties in foreign countries as those communications pass through routing equipment in the United States. "We found ourselves in a position of actually losing ground," McConnell told the El Paso Times in August. The government would have to apply for a warrant for each phone number it monitored in this way, and it takes about "200 man-hours" to fill out the necessary paperwork, McConnell said. FISA experts and lawmakers note, however, that the law contains emergency provisions that allow monitoring to begin before a court order.
The ruling on the U.S.-routed calls was a rare push-back from a court that, by Lamberth's count, has approved 99 percent of the government's warrant applications. The Bush administration then launched a massive lobbying effort to amend FISA; in August, Congress passed the Protect America Act. It effectively reversed the court's normal procedures (these require a warrant before surveillance) and gave judges an after-the-fact-review power for surveillance procedures, which inevitably pick up domestic communications when foreign targets call or e-mail people located in this country. The law was panned for its hasty and imprecise language, and some observers thought it even authorized warrantless physical searches of people's possessions and premises.
This brings the court to its current crossroads. To correct the law's deficiencies, as they see them, Democratic Reps. Silvestre Reyes of Texas and John Conyers of Michigan, the respective chairmen of the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees, have introduced the RESTORE Act, short for Responsible Surveillance That is Overseen, Reviewed, and Effective. The Democrats have said that the bill would "protect innocent Americans from warrantless eavesdropping." Republicans have blasted it as a roadblock in the executive's path, and the bill was suddenly pulled from the House floor on October 17. But as Benjamin Wittes, a Brookings Institution scholar and an expert on the FISA court, writes in The New Republic Online this week, Protect America and RESTORE are actually quite similar. They do, however, hold significant implications for the court.
"Under either approach, the [NSA] will have the legal authority to listen to your calls without first going to the [FISA] court to get a warrant," as long as the targets are people overseas calling people in the United States, Wittes writes. Under the Protect America Act, which the administration favors, the FISA court plays "only a tiny retroactive role in approving procedures for overseas surveillance." But under RESTORE, the court "would play a slightly-less-tiny role in rubber-stamping [surveillance] programs," Wittes maintains. The court, under RESTORE, is given additional powers to review and modify "minimization procedures," which are secret, are written by the government, and are supposed to ensure that information about "U.S. persons" (defined as U.S. citizens or legal residents) is scrubbed from intelligence reports.
Under the RESTORE Act, the court would also have a new, controversial power: granting programmatic or "blanket" warrants for whole classes of individuals overseas who are not U.S. persons. Historically, courts have ruled that such orders violate the Fourth Amendment, which requires that warrants be issued against specific individuals and locations. And although the foreign targets of surveillance don't enjoy constitutional protections, the U.S. persons whom they might call do.
Wittes argues that the RESTORE Act's "approach is a little like asking the courts to approve the reasonableness of police arrest policies prospectively instead of reviewing individual arrests. It's not the way we traditionally do things in the American constitutional system -- and it creates a potentially serious set of constitutional problems with the bill." But the law would require the administration to submit to the court "the procedures it uses to determine which surveillance is exempt from FISA -- and the court has the ability to send them back if they're unreasonable," he adds.
Under the previous version of FISA, the judges found ways to discipline the government. They could reject an application for a warrant; in one case, Lamberth barred a senior FBI official from appearing before the court, because he said that the official had presented false information. The RESTORE Act wouldn't really take these powers away.
Still, some see the recent amendments to FISA as a further weakening of constitutional protections. "There are significant problems that existed with FISA before the Protect America Act," says Jameel Jaffer, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's National Security Project, who is leading a legal effort to have the court release its written opinions on the NSA's surveillance program.
The court "was created to circumvent the Fourth Amendment," says Jonathan Turley, a professor at the George Washington University Law School and one of the few lawyers ever to go inside the court's secure room. With the Protect America and RESTORE acts, Turley says, "Democrats and Republicans are amending the Constitution by default."
For their part, the FISA court judges are unlikely to weigh in directly on the constitutional debate. But using history as a guide, it seems unlikely that they'll do anything more or less than apply the statute as directed by Congress. Presumably, they'll also steer clear of deciding how valid the statute actually is.
Labels: Director of National Intelligence, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Intelligence, National Security Agency, Politics, Terrorism
Full Article
The Liberator
Friday, September 21, 2007
Mike Wertheimer may be the most dangerous man in U.S. intelligence. You would probably never guess it, judging from his lengthy and opaque title -- assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analytic transformation and technology. A perfect testament to the well-worn bureaucratic tradition of offering little insight by tossing around a lot of words.
Wertheimer's squishy and unassuming title only hints at some vague, general notion of what he actually does for a living. Particularly for the uninitiated, the moniker buries a sense of authority beneath a pair of prefixes (assistant deputy) and offers an unsatisfying buzzword descriptor (transformation), whose etymology points to some consultant's pocket glossary. The title screams "middle management" and thus reassures, "This guy is not a threat."
That message is especially ironic, because to thousands of powerful career employees in the American intelligence community, Wertheimer is, in fact, very threatening. He threatens to upend their world, to change the way they work, and to foist on them the values of a younger generation of spies, who happen to outnumber them. He also threatens to change the way that policy makers use intelligence to reach decisions, and so to "transform" the intelligence agencies' role in the government. All of this makes Mike Wertheimer very dangerous to people who oppose his basic assumptions. And he knows that. He also knows that, to many thousands more in the intelligence field, he is something of a savior.
To understand the origins and purpose of Wertheimer's office, of which he is the first occupant, it helps to refer to a document that also bears a lengthy title, the report by the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction. Better known as the WMD commission report, it provides a painstaking explanation of how 15 intelligence agencies collectively failed to discover that Saddam Hussein's Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction.
The contrary assertion that he did have those weapons -- and thus was a threat to the Middle East and a potential benefactor for terrorists -- was, of course, the Bush administration's chief casus belli for the Iraq war. The claim was backed up at the highest levels of the intelligence community in a National Intelligence Estimate released to Congress in October 2002. The WMD commission, which published its findings in 2005, echoed the sentiments of many intelligence professionals, including some who had participated in and blessed the flawed prewar analysis, by pronouncing the episode "one of the most public -- and most damaging -- intelligence failures in recent American history."
Wertheimer's job is to prevent any more such failures and to make sure that the intelligence agencies can accurately predict a host of catastrophic events, including terrorist attacks and disease outbreaks. The commission laid much of the blame for the bad call on Iraq at the feet of analysts, whom it called "the voice of the intelligence community." Although the problems begin with the failure to collect the right information in the first place, the commission particularly faulted the analysts' inability to make sense of intelligence, and to present their judgments to decision makers. During his time in government, Colin Powell was widely regarded among professionals as a decision maker who understood this inherently murky process. He would say to his intelligence officers, "Tell me what you know, tell me what you don't know, and then tell me what you think is most likely to happen." When that analysis breaks down, as it did with Iraq, "the consequences can be grave," the commission wrote.
To be sure, many career analysts object to the "flaws" the commission cited in their tradecraft, regarding both Iraq and another notorious intelligence failure: the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But very few argue with the substance, or the roots, of these breakdowns. The "intelligence community," as the agencies are collectively known, hardly operates as one, and this lack of coordination and -- especially -- collaboration among analysts means that agency leaders and their clients often don't know what the analysts don't know. The disconnect also means that contrary analysis -- of which there was a significant amount in the run-up to the Iraq war -- may find no quarter in analysts' final judgments. It is a disastrous situation for policy makers, who are increasingly turning to nongovernment experts and the news media for rapid, cogent analysis that the intelligence agencies can't always provide.
The WMD commission identified the fix: "Integrate the community of analysts." That's easier said than done, of course, but Wertheimer and others who understand how very un-integrated the analysts are today know that it is prescriptive advice that they can't afford to reject.
The Threat Within
"Post-9/11, we coined a term, the 'asymmetric threat,' " Wertheimer says. "That's a fancy way of describing a future in which the targets for intelligence, the things that we will focus on, are built, designed, and operate completely differently than the way we do." Transformation, that fuzzy word in his title, means "removing that asymmetry."
Before the attacks, the intelligence community was "like a power builder -- very muscular but not very fast," Wertheimer says. Today, the agencies need to be swift. They need to analyze more information faster. But analysts also need new ways to connect to one another, to benefit from one another's knowledge. If a specialist on sub-Saharan Africa at the Defense Intelligence Agency is studying terrorist inroads into tribal communities, shouldn't a CIA expert in Africa studies know that? Might she have something useful to contribute to the inquiry?
Collaboration isn't an especially novel concept, and the WMD commission wasn't the first to suggest that analysts do more of it. But Wertheimer is the first official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence -- the "czar" of the community -- to make collaboration a full-time job. Gen. Michael Hayden, the former principal deputy director of national intelligence who is now the CIA director, created the position after talking with Wertheimer two years ago about how to change the way the community operates. The new intelligence director, Mike McConnell, has forcefully backed the transformational efforts, as has his deputy in charge of analysis, Tom Fingar, a career analyst who used to run intelligence at the State Department. Fingar, who is essentially the only official layer between Wertheimer and McConnell, is the political muscle in this endeavor. Wertheimer is the idea man, "my philosopher of transformation," as Fingar recently put it.
Transformation has less to do with changing procedures than with changing people. A key pillar is a suite of new information-sharing and collaborative technologies that look and feel a lot like Google, Wikipedia, and MySpace, the networking and search tools that younger analysts grew up using at home and in their dorm rooms. These newcomers have been baffled to find that these 21st-century staples aren't widely used within the intelligence community.
The first of the new intelligence tools came online recently. Analysts can now log on to Intellipedia, a collaborative knowledge base that they can use to swap leads and examine one another's work. (Officials say that Intellipedia helped one group of analysts create a helpful report on Iraqi insurgents' use of chlorine gas to increase the lethality of improvised explosive devices.) Later this year, Wertheimer's team will launch A-Space ("A" for analyst), modeled after MySpace and the popular website Facebook. Officials hope the new site will help analysts create social networks outside established channels.
In addition to the new tools, Wertheimer and his colleagues have created unusual training programs. One sends analysts to a monthlong retreat at a classified location where they work alongside private-sector experts to investigate complex intelligence topics. Another takes young analysts out of their assigned jobs for two years and puts them through an intensive training program where they learn the tradecraft but also such on-the-ground spy skills as defensive driving and weapons handling. Agencies will ultimately deploy these analysts to global hot spots to support spies in the field.
It's no accident that Wertheimer and his team are aiming these new tools and programs at the younger crowd. Sixty percent of U.S. intelligence analysts have five years of experience or less on the job. In the larger intelligence community of about 100,000 employees, which includes clandestine operatives and support staff, those young workers are about 40 percent of the rolls. America's spies are decidedly green, and they're not comfortable -- or particularly useful -- working in bureaucratic silos without Internet browsers, instant messaging, and social networking sites on their desktops.
In his quest for transformation, Wertheimer is playing to this youthful workforce that finds collaboration neither newfangled nor threatening. For these analysts, networking is just the way information moves. But to the intelligence establishment, information is power, and relinquishing it means losing that power, as the WMD commission and many other critics have repeatedly lamented. It seems illogical to the generation of electronic socializers, but when information moves around, and becomes known to people who don't have the "need to know," veteran members of the community view it as no longer special because it's no longer secret. Too much collaboration also threatens to reveal the sources and methods by which agencies obtain information -- secrets they must zealously guard lest those sources dry up or get killed.
Sharing and secrecy are opposing forces. So this is Wertheimer's task: Transform the massive intelligence bureaucracy into a collaborative network, in which loose lips are, in a way, encouraged; introduce technologies that many seasoned analysts neither understand nor trust; and build a cadre of young, ambitious rookies, who just can't believe they're not allowed to check their personal e-mail at work, into the future of the business.
The opposition is fierce. When The New York Times wrote about A-Space recently, analysts commented about the piece, and about Wertheimer, on a private intelligence community blog. Some recorded their dramatic dissent. "I guarantee," one intelligence employee wrote, "Mike Wertheimer will cause people to get killed over this."
"I am threatening the status quo," Wertheimer says. "And that's a hard pill to swallow for anybody."
Taking the Blame
Wertheimer, 50, is a mathematician who earned his master's and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He spent 21 years as a cryptologist at the National Security Agency, and rose to become the agency's most senior technical leader. On paper, he fits the stereotype captured in an old joke among NSA hands: "How can you tell an extroverted analyst? He's the one who looks at your shoes when he's talking."
But Wertheimer defies typecasting. When he speaks, he looks people in the eye, but often from above -- he is 6 feet, 1 inch tall. He has arching eyebrows that signal when he's listening but also serve as a warning for when he's about to descend with an impassioned argument or an analogy that he thinks perfectly captures what he's up against. (In a recent conversation, Wertheimer compared the government's attempts at collaboration to the Borg, the supremely villainous race of cyber-aliens on Star Trek: The Next Generation who "assimilate" whole societies by stripping people of individual character traits and turn them into one giant collective.) If you spotted Wertheimer in a room, or even better, watched him work a room, you might wonder why he hasn't sought his fortune on the motivational speaking circuit.
When he speaks, you get the feeling that he's talking to you. He reveals a lot about himself, which might be unsettling if he weren't so earnest about connecting his flaws and fears to his intelligence work. At a recent conference on analytic transformation in Chicago, Wertheimer confessed to a crowd of more than 400 people that after the 9/11 attacks he felt personally responsible for not anticipating Al Qaeda's strike. He became depressed, he said, and was inconsolable until his father snapped him out of it. "I don't blame you for this," Wertheimer's dad told him, and then warned, "You're scaring your kids," who thought that whenever their father had to rush back to the office, something very bad was about to happen. Wertheimer briefly left government in 2003 to work as a technology consultant but returned two years later.
Wertheimer is like a number of other veteran intelligence officials who were involved in the global hunt for terrorists before 9/11. They feel that their own actions -- more precisely, their inactions -- allowed the disaster. Wertheimer says he blames himself and his colleagues. He thinks he personally failed and, accepting his part in a broken system, he seems to have no qualms about tearing it down and rebuilding.
"It is something that he can appreciate as being absolutely critical to the future of this country and the protection of the country, and when you hear him speak, you get caught up in that emotion," says Tim Sample, a former analyst and staff director of the House Select Committee on Intelligence who knows Wertheimer well. Sample is president of the nonprofit Intelligence and National Security Alliance, which co-hosted the Chicago conference with the intelligence director's office.
In large measure, Wertheimer's charisma comes from his willingness to defy tradition. "We are going to share more," he said in his Chicago speech. "We are going to take risks." Directing his remarks at those who would rather preserve the status quo, he said, "For the first time, the challenge is not why we can't do it; it's how you're going to find a way to secure this." Rather than appeasing members of the intelligence community who blanch at collaboration and its attendant security risks, Wertheimer lays the burden on their shoulders and tells them that if collaboration doesn't happen, they'll take the blame.
But if Wertheimer succeeds, it probably won't be by convincing his intransigent opponents. Rather, he will work with that younger generation at whom transformation is aimed. By and large, these newer members of the community are optimistic and, like him, believe that the intelligence community is dangerously broken.
"It's Huge"
Sean Wohltman, a 25-year-old counter-terrorism analyst with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, embodies the kind of optimistic disillusionment that Wertheimer wants to harness. Two years after defending his master's thesis in geographic information science at Virginia Tech University, Wohltman joined the government "following a call for patriotism," he said. He encountered "disappointment and disillusionment" in his first three months on the job, however.
As Wohltman explained to the Chicago conference, "When I first logged on to what I expected to be a terminal from 24's [counter-terrorist unit] command center, I was instead driven to my agency's home page, which flashed information about an upcoming picnic and links to fill out my health insurance. And not only that, it launched in Netscape." Those in the audience who laughed understood that Netscape is an obsolete Internet browser.
Later, Wohltman explained why it mattered to him that the intelligence agencies were so far behind the technological curve. In 1999, when the popular and controversial music file-sharing system Napster debuted, he pointed out, Ricky Martin's "Livin' la Vida Loca" and other corporately manufactured pop hits topped the Billboard charts. Only artists from big record labels got mass recognition, and listeners were cut off from the bounty of independent and innovative artists who excelled in a variety of musical styles. But that year, Napster's collaborative technology allowed fans of lesser-known artists to share songs, which in turn boosted their recognition, fanned their popularity, and led to greater awareness of the wider music scene. It also fueled the market for independent music and challenged the record companies' dominance of the industry.
Taking Wohltman's analogy, Wertheimer says that the intelligence agencies could be compared to the record companies. Information is filtered through a hierarchical process that culminates in senior executives choosing what intelligence to disseminate to customers. Similar to Napster, tools such as Intellipedia and A-Space -- known as "disruptive technologies" -- bypass this process and get more information out to a wider audience.
But will collaboration guarantee better analysis? Did Napster improve music quality? Did it benefit the industry as a whole? Recording artists and companies sued Napster for copyright infringement, and the network shut down in 2001, eventually to be reborn as a pay-for-service system.
Napster did pave the way for other innovative technologies, which adapted to customers' demands to buy music a la carte, rather than having to pay for an entire album. Today, Apple's iTunes sells songs for 99 cents and threatens the record companies' control of their own products. Collaboration, in a sense, won out, and customers' demand for more music, delivered in new ways, has opened the market to more artists. "Will this lead to better music?" Wertheimer asks. "I can't believe that it will not."
Wertheimer and other transformation proponents often point to iTunes, and the hugely successful iPod music player, to support their theory that collaboration can fundamentally change and improve people's lives. And they reason that A-Space, Intellipedia, and other innovative services will create demand in the intelligence community and overwhelm the transformation naysayers.
Wertheimer channels the enthusiasm of Apple's CEO and co-founder, Steve Jobs, whose rousing keynote speeches, known as "Stevenotes," command more press coverage and world attention than speeches by most members of Congress. But as with Jobs, some skeptics question both the substance and the goal behind Wertheimer's zeal.
Early in Jobs's career, a co-worker coined the term "reality distortion field" to describe the aura that the Apple prophet cast over his spellbound audiences. The term could easily apply to Wertheimer's enthusiastic showmanship. Wikipedia describes RDF as "the idea that Steve Jobs is able to convince people to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, charisma, exaggeration, and marketing. RDF is said to distort an audience's sense of proportion or scale. Small advances are applauded as breakthroughs. Interesting developments become turning points, or huge leaps forward." (The phenomenon has been applied to other leaders, as well.)
Wertheimer does, in fact, applaud certain advances as breakthroughs that others -- particularly those outside of government -- might find underwhelming. For instance, one planned transformation program, the Library of National Intelligence, would be a repository of all the documents produced by all of the agencies. Eventually, Wertheimer hopes, analysts will search the library for key terms, and an automated system will help to judge who should have access to classified materials. He calls this program "huge."
Why is it huge? Some observers would have a hard time believing that the agencies didn't already have such a resource, the kind that most large organizations take for granted. LexisNexis, for example, contains copies of every article published in most of the country's periodicals. Following basic business practices, most companies compile and retain their internal documents for research and for legal purposes.
Wertheimer is careful to put things in perspective. "It's big," he says of the library. But then he quickly follows up: "For us, it's huge." And he's right. Much to the consternation of the WMD commission and others, this is a giant leap for the intelligence community, a kind of moon-landing moment.
But do collaborative libraries -- and wikis, blogs, networking websites, and special training -- make transformation worthwhile?
Change Without End
Mark Lowenthal retired in 2005 as the assistant director of central intelligence for analysis and production. Among seasoned intelligence officials, he is considered one of the most knowledgeable authorities on analysis, the agencies' shortcomings in that regard, and the education of young analysts in the ways of the tradecraft. So in Chicago, when Lowenthal stood up to question why Wertheimer and the DNI's office are expending so much energy on transformation, people listened intently.
"You are urging this transformation for an end that I do not understand," he told Wertheimer. "Collaboration is not an end in itself, to my mind. You want to do this, I think, ... to make analysis better. What does that mean? It means it would be faster? It would be more comprehensible? It would be more accurate more often? I don't think you have a way of knowing at the end of the day when you get there."
Lowenthal doesn't dismiss collaboration out of hand, and he has spent a sizable part of his career trying to create a true intelligence community. But his remarks reflected a palpable skepticism among those who think that it is impossible to know whether Wertheimer's ideas will actually fix intelligence. Lowenthal told him, "I think, unfortunately, a lot of this is pandering to a bunch of commissions that have no understanding of what we do for a living, or the nature of our work, and to a workforce. And I don't think that's a sufficient ground for a transformation. And so I'm left here wondering, what's the end state? For what reason?"
Wertheimer responded that he didn't have a satisfactory answer. The best he could offer, he said, were anecdotes. He has spent the past two years talking to analysts and trying to figure out what those who achieved real breakthroughs -- overcoming "hard problems," he said -- had in common.
The few successes were not enough to prove a theory, he admitted. But the one trait these breakthrough-makers shared was -- perhaps not surprisingly -- collaboration. These were analysts who challenged old assumptions, re-examined evidence that had been set aside as useless, and shared information beyond normal channels. They also, Wertheimer said, ignored their bosses' admonitions that such inquiries -- going back to ground that had been plowed unproductively before -- were "career killers." Bucking authority is another of Wertheimer's recurring themes. He says that a colleague once told him, "You will have succeeded when you become really hard to manage."
Wertheimer, however, plays down the notion of analysts as revolutionaries. "I don't like the thought that transformation is changing something from the past to something new," he says. Rather, transformation is about "creating an environment in which more things could happen than could happen in the past. It's liberating. Let's call it 'analytic liberation.' "
Wertheimer seems perfectly comfortable working in this gray area, where there is no obvious way to know whether his ideas are working and where concepts change on the fly (transformation becomes liberation) and the end goal isn't defined at the outset. Were it not for the DNI's backing, such a nebulous, high-risk approach to preventing another intelligence disaster might never take flight. Wertheimer might still go down in flames, but taking that risk appears to suit him just fine. "We can't afford the kinds of mistakes that we're making based on the way we're doing business today. It's just the bottom line," he said. Riffing off the intelligence blogger's comments, he added, "If I'm the first one to get killed, so be it."
The Hard Sell
Bravado may obscure Wertheimer's pragmatic streak. He is provocative and excitable, and sometimes brash. But those who know him well say that he is also humble and self-deprecating.
He frets that he will become too personally associated with his cause. "I'm a little worried about this being too personality-driven," he says. "This has got to be about ideas. We have to sell people on the ideas."
Wertheimer knows that the reason his pitch isn't resonating with enough people his own age is because he has failed to demonstrate how middle managers and veteran analysts -- the people who are feeling most threatened -- can take part in this grand enterprise, how they can be "liberated." Wertheimer, the realist, has promised to find a place for them. But he does not apologize for embracing young analysts and for assaulting the culture that reared him. "We don't allow our people to reach their full potential," he told the audience in Chicago. "This is a society, this is a community, that tamps down potential."
"We treat [analysis] like a guild," Wertheimer said later, a society of apprentices who study at the feet of masters. "This is like making a fine violin or studying opera. That [approach] makes a lot of sense at the scale that you build violins or have opera singers. But we're talking about massive [numbers] of young people coming in.... They learn on their own. They don't read the rule book. They don't read the owner's manual," he said. "They click buttons and investigate, and if they get bored, they do something else."
If the two sides of this generational divide are irreconcilable, Wertheimer doesn't seem worried, because the rookies have the clear majority. "It's simply a matter of time," he said. "Now, the question we all have in our minds is, how much time can we afford? We can't afford another day."
Several younger colleagues once asked Wertheimer to name his greatest career achievement at the National Security Agency. At one time, he said, he was the world's leading expert on a certain cryptographic technology, the smartest man alive on that one subject. But "that's not what makes me so accomplished," he said. "It's that I'm no longer the No. 1 expert, and that the experts are in this room, because I taught them. And they exceeded everything I could have done on my own."
That's one way Wertheimer judges success: Someone comes along and does it better. It doesn't quite answer his critics' concerns that his ideas might be flawed to begin with. But Wertheimer is a strong believer in the "wisdom of crowds." He and his bosses are betting that collaboration is the way to fix what's broken with intelligence and, by extension, to keep people from dying. If they are right that transformation, in all its forms, is the key to stopping another terrorist attack, or to avoiding another catastrophic intelligence failure, then it seems a decent bet that the next generation of analysts will follow Wertheimer's lead.
"If I can just start something for which a handful of folks better and smarter than me take over," he said, "if you could put that in my epitaph, I would die a happy man."
Published in National Journal
Friday, September 21, 2007
Mike Wertheimer may be the most dangerous man in U.S. intelligence. You would probably never guess it, judging from his lengthy and opaque title -- assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analytic transformation and technology. A perfect testament to the well-worn bureaucratic tradition of offering little insight by tossing around a lot of words.
Wertheimer's squishy and unassuming title only hints at some vague, general notion of what he actually does for a living. Particularly for the uninitiated, the moniker buries a sense of authority beneath a pair of prefixes (assistant deputy) and offers an unsatisfying buzzword descriptor (transformation), whose etymology points to some consultant's pocket glossary. The title screams "middle management" and thus reassures, "This guy is not a threat."
That message is especially ironic, because to thousands of powerful career employees in the American intelligence community, Wertheimer is, in fact, very threatening. He threatens to upend their world, to change the way they work, and to foist on them the values of a younger generation of spies, who happen to outnumber them. He also threatens to change the way that policy makers use intelligence to reach decisions, and so to "transform" the intelligence agencies' role in the government. All of this makes Mike Wertheimer very dangerous to people who oppose his basic assumptions. And he knows that. He also knows that, to many thousands more in the intelligence field, he is something of a savior.
To understand the origins and purpose of Wertheimer's office, of which he is the first occupant, it helps to refer to a document that also bears a lengthy title, the report by the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction. Better known as the WMD commission report, it provides a painstaking explanation of how 15 intelligence agencies collectively failed to discover that Saddam Hussein's Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction.
The contrary assertion that he did have those weapons -- and thus was a threat to the Middle East and a potential benefactor for terrorists -- was, of course, the Bush administration's chief casus belli for the Iraq war. The claim was backed up at the highest levels of the intelligence community in a National Intelligence Estimate released to Congress in October 2002. The WMD commission, which published its findings in 2005, echoed the sentiments of many intelligence professionals, including some who had participated in and blessed the flawed prewar analysis, by pronouncing the episode "one of the most public -- and most damaging -- intelligence failures in recent American history."
Wertheimer's job is to prevent any more such failures and to make sure that the intelligence agencies can accurately predict a host of catastrophic events, including terrorist attacks and disease outbreaks. The commission laid much of the blame for the bad call on Iraq at the feet of analysts, whom it called "the voice of the intelligence community." Although the problems begin with the failure to collect the right information in the first place, the commission particularly faulted the analysts' inability to make sense of intelligence, and to present their judgments to decision makers. During his time in government, Colin Powell was widely regarded among professionals as a decision maker who understood this inherently murky process. He would say to his intelligence officers, "Tell me what you know, tell me what you don't know, and then tell me what you think is most likely to happen." When that analysis breaks down, as it did with Iraq, "the consequences can be grave," the commission wrote.
To be sure, many career analysts object to the "flaws" the commission cited in their tradecraft, regarding both Iraq and another notorious intelligence failure: the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But very few argue with the substance, or the roots, of these breakdowns. The "intelligence community," as the agencies are collectively known, hardly operates as one, and this lack of coordination and -- especially -- collaboration among analysts means that agency leaders and their clients often don't know what the analysts don't know. The disconnect also means that contrary analysis -- of which there was a significant amount in the run-up to the Iraq war -- may find no quarter in analysts' final judgments. It is a disastrous situation for policy makers, who are increasingly turning to nongovernment experts and the news media for rapid, cogent analysis that the intelligence agencies can't always provide.
The WMD commission identified the fix: "Integrate the community of analysts." That's easier said than done, of course, but Wertheimer and others who understand how very un-integrated the analysts are today know that it is prescriptive advice that they can't afford to reject.
The Threat Within
"Post-9/11, we coined a term, the 'asymmetric threat,' " Wertheimer says. "That's a fancy way of describing a future in which the targets for intelligence, the things that we will focus on, are built, designed, and operate completely differently than the way we do." Transformation, that fuzzy word in his title, means "removing that asymmetry."
Before the attacks, the intelligence community was "like a power builder -- very muscular but not very fast," Wertheimer says. Today, the agencies need to be swift. They need to analyze more information faster. But analysts also need new ways to connect to one another, to benefit from one another's knowledge. If a specialist on sub-Saharan Africa at the Defense Intelligence Agency is studying terrorist inroads into tribal communities, shouldn't a CIA expert in Africa studies know that? Might she have something useful to contribute to the inquiry?
Collaboration isn't an especially novel concept, and the WMD commission wasn't the first to suggest that analysts do more of it. But Wertheimer is the first official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence -- the "czar" of the community -- to make collaboration a full-time job. Gen. Michael Hayden, the former principal deputy director of national intelligence who is now the CIA director, created the position after talking with Wertheimer two years ago about how to change the way the community operates. The new intelligence director, Mike McConnell, has forcefully backed the transformational efforts, as has his deputy in charge of analysis, Tom Fingar, a career analyst who used to run intelligence at the State Department. Fingar, who is essentially the only official layer between Wertheimer and McConnell, is the political muscle in this endeavor. Wertheimer is the idea man, "my philosopher of transformation," as Fingar recently put it.
Transformation has less to do with changing procedures than with changing people. A key pillar is a suite of new information-sharing and collaborative technologies that look and feel a lot like Google, Wikipedia, and MySpace, the networking and search tools that younger analysts grew up using at home and in their dorm rooms. These newcomers have been baffled to find that these 21st-century staples aren't widely used within the intelligence community.
The first of the new intelligence tools came online recently. Analysts can now log on to Intellipedia, a collaborative knowledge base that they can use to swap leads and examine one another's work. (Officials say that Intellipedia helped one group of analysts create a helpful report on Iraqi insurgents' use of chlorine gas to increase the lethality of improvised explosive devices.) Later this year, Wertheimer's team will launch A-Space ("A" for analyst), modeled after MySpace and the popular website Facebook. Officials hope the new site will help analysts create social networks outside established channels.
In addition to the new tools, Wertheimer and his colleagues have created unusual training programs. One sends analysts to a monthlong retreat at a classified location where they work alongside private-sector experts to investigate complex intelligence topics. Another takes young analysts out of their assigned jobs for two years and puts them through an intensive training program where they learn the tradecraft but also such on-the-ground spy skills as defensive driving and weapons handling. Agencies will ultimately deploy these analysts to global hot spots to support spies in the field.
It's no accident that Wertheimer and his team are aiming these new tools and programs at the younger crowd. Sixty percent of U.S. intelligence analysts have five years of experience or less on the job. In the larger intelligence community of about 100,000 employees, which includes clandestine operatives and support staff, those young workers are about 40 percent of the rolls. America's spies are decidedly green, and they're not comfortable -- or particularly useful -- working in bureaucratic silos without Internet browsers, instant messaging, and social networking sites on their desktops.
In his quest for transformation, Wertheimer is playing to this youthful workforce that finds collaboration neither newfangled nor threatening. For these analysts, networking is just the way information moves. But to the intelligence establishment, information is power, and relinquishing it means losing that power, as the WMD commission and many other critics have repeatedly lamented. It seems illogical to the generation of electronic socializers, but when information moves around, and becomes known to people who don't have the "need to know," veteran members of the community view it as no longer special because it's no longer secret. Too much collaboration also threatens to reveal the sources and methods by which agencies obtain information -- secrets they must zealously guard lest those sources dry up or get killed.
Sharing and secrecy are opposing forces. So this is Wertheimer's task: Transform the massive intelligence bureaucracy into a collaborative network, in which loose lips are, in a way, encouraged; introduce technologies that many seasoned analysts neither understand nor trust; and build a cadre of young, ambitious rookies, who just can't believe they're not allowed to check their personal e-mail at work, into the future of the business.
The opposition is fierce. When The New York Times wrote about A-Space recently, analysts commented about the piece, and about Wertheimer, on a private intelligence community blog. Some recorded their dramatic dissent. "I guarantee," one intelligence employee wrote, "Mike Wertheimer will cause people to get killed over this."
"I am threatening the status quo," Wertheimer says. "And that's a hard pill to swallow for anybody."
Taking the Blame
Wertheimer, 50, is a mathematician who earned his master's and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He spent 21 years as a cryptologist at the National Security Agency, and rose to become the agency's most senior technical leader. On paper, he fits the stereotype captured in an old joke among NSA hands: "How can you tell an extroverted analyst? He's the one who looks at your shoes when he's talking."
But Wertheimer defies typecasting. When he speaks, he looks people in the eye, but often from above -- he is 6 feet, 1 inch tall. He has arching eyebrows that signal when he's listening but also serve as a warning for when he's about to descend with an impassioned argument or an analogy that he thinks perfectly captures what he's up against. (In a recent conversation, Wertheimer compared the government's attempts at collaboration to the Borg, the supremely villainous race of cyber-aliens on Star Trek: The Next Generation who "assimilate" whole societies by stripping people of individual character traits and turn them into one giant collective.) If you spotted Wertheimer in a room, or even better, watched him work a room, you might wonder why he hasn't sought his fortune on the motivational speaking circuit.
When he speaks, you get the feeling that he's talking to you. He reveals a lot about himself, which might be unsettling if he weren't so earnest about connecting his flaws and fears to his intelligence work. At a recent conference on analytic transformation in Chicago, Wertheimer confessed to a crowd of more than 400 people that after the 9/11 attacks he felt personally responsible for not anticipating Al Qaeda's strike. He became depressed, he said, and was inconsolable until his father snapped him out of it. "I don't blame you for this," Wertheimer's dad told him, and then warned, "You're scaring your kids," who thought that whenever their father had to rush back to the office, something very bad was about to happen. Wertheimer briefly left government in 2003 to work as a technology consultant but returned two years later.
Wertheimer is like a number of other veteran intelligence officials who were involved in the global hunt for terrorists before 9/11. They feel that their own actions -- more precisely, their inactions -- allowed the disaster. Wertheimer says he blames himself and his colleagues. He thinks he personally failed and, accepting his part in a broken system, he seems to have no qualms about tearing it down and rebuilding.
"It is something that he can appreciate as being absolutely critical to the future of this country and the protection of the country, and when you hear him speak, you get caught up in that emotion," says Tim Sample, a former analyst and staff director of the House Select Committee on Intelligence who knows Wertheimer well. Sample is president of the nonprofit Intelligence and National Security Alliance, which co-hosted the Chicago conference with the intelligence director's office.
In large measure, Wertheimer's charisma comes from his willingness to defy tradition. "We are going to share more," he said in his Chicago speech. "We are going to take risks." Directing his remarks at those who would rather preserve the status quo, he said, "For the first time, the challenge is not why we can't do it; it's how you're going to find a way to secure this." Rather than appeasing members of the intelligence community who blanch at collaboration and its attendant security risks, Wertheimer lays the burden on their shoulders and tells them that if collaboration doesn't happen, they'll take the blame.
But if Wertheimer succeeds, it probably won't be by convincing his intransigent opponents. Rather, he will work with that younger generation at whom transformation is aimed. By and large, these newer members of the community are optimistic and, like him, believe that the intelligence community is dangerously broken.
"It's Huge"
Sean Wohltman, a 25-year-old counter-terrorism analyst with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, embodies the kind of optimistic disillusionment that Wertheimer wants to harness. Two years after defending his master's thesis in geographic information science at Virginia Tech University, Wohltman joined the government "following a call for patriotism," he said. He encountered "disappointment and disillusionment" in his first three months on the job, however.
As Wohltman explained to the Chicago conference, "When I first logged on to what I expected to be a terminal from 24's [counter-terrorist unit] command center, I was instead driven to my agency's home page, which flashed information about an upcoming picnic and links to fill out my health insurance. And not only that, it launched in Netscape." Those in the audience who laughed understood that Netscape is an obsolete Internet browser.
Later, Wohltman explained why it mattered to him that the intelligence agencies were so far behind the technological curve. In 1999, when the popular and controversial music file-sharing system Napster debuted, he pointed out, Ricky Martin's "Livin' la Vida Loca" and other corporately manufactured pop hits topped the Billboard charts. Only artists from big record labels got mass recognition, and listeners were cut off from the bounty of independent and innovative artists who excelled in a variety of musical styles. But that year, Napster's collaborative technology allowed fans of lesser-known artists to share songs, which in turn boosted their recognition, fanned their popularity, and led to greater awareness of the wider music scene. It also fueled the market for independent music and challenged the record companies' dominance of the industry.
Taking Wohltman's analogy, Wertheimer says that the intelligence agencies could be compared to the record companies. Information is filtered through a hierarchical process that culminates in senior executives choosing what intelligence to disseminate to customers. Similar to Napster, tools such as Intellipedia and A-Space -- known as "disruptive technologies" -- bypass this process and get more information out to a wider audience.
But will collaboration guarantee better analysis? Did Napster improve music quality? Did it benefit the industry as a whole? Recording artists and companies sued Napster for copyright infringement, and the network shut down in 2001, eventually to be reborn as a pay-for-service system.
Napster did pave the way for other innovative technologies, which adapted to customers' demands to buy music a la carte, rather than having to pay for an entire album. Today, Apple's iTunes sells songs for 99 cents and threatens the record companies' control of their own products. Collaboration, in a sense, won out, and customers' demand for more music, delivered in new ways, has opened the market to more artists. "Will this lead to better music?" Wertheimer asks. "I can't believe that it will not."
Wertheimer and other transformation proponents often point to iTunes, and the hugely successful iPod music player, to support their theory that collaboration can fundamentally change and improve people's lives. And they reason that A-Space, Intellipedia, and other innovative services will create demand in the intelligence community and overwhelm the transformation naysayers.
Wertheimer channels the enthusiasm of Apple's CEO and co-founder, Steve Jobs, whose rousing keynote speeches, known as "Stevenotes," command more press coverage and world attention than speeches by most members of Congress. But as with Jobs, some skeptics question both the substance and the goal behind Wertheimer's zeal.
Early in Jobs's career, a co-worker coined the term "reality distortion field" to describe the aura that the Apple prophet cast over his spellbound audiences. The term could easily apply to Wertheimer's enthusiastic showmanship. Wikipedia describes RDF as "the idea that Steve Jobs is able to convince people to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, charisma, exaggeration, and marketing. RDF is said to distort an audience's sense of proportion or scale. Small advances are applauded as breakthroughs. Interesting developments become turning points, or huge leaps forward." (The phenomenon has been applied to other leaders, as well.)
Wertheimer does, in fact, applaud certain advances as breakthroughs that others -- particularly those outside of government -- might find underwhelming. For instance, one planned transformation program, the Library of National Intelligence, would be a repository of all the documents produced by all of the agencies. Eventually, Wertheimer hopes, analysts will search the library for key terms, and an automated system will help to judge who should have access to classified materials. He calls this program "huge."
Why is it huge? Some observers would have a hard time believing that the agencies didn't already have such a resource, the kind that most large organizations take for granted. LexisNexis, for example, contains copies of every article published in most of the country's periodicals. Following basic business practices, most companies compile and retain their internal documents for research and for legal purposes.
Wertheimer is careful to put things in perspective. "It's big," he says of the library. But then he quickly follows up: "For us, it's huge." And he's right. Much to the consternation of the WMD commission and others, this is a giant leap for the intelligence community, a kind of moon-landing moment.
But do collaborative libraries -- and wikis, blogs, networking websites, and special training -- make transformation worthwhile?
Change Without End
Mark Lowenthal retired in 2005 as the assistant director of central intelligence for analysis and production. Among seasoned intelligence officials, he is considered one of the most knowledgeable authorities on analysis, the agencies' shortcomings in that regard, and the education of young analysts in the ways of the tradecraft. So in Chicago, when Lowenthal stood up to question why Wertheimer and the DNI's office are expending so much energy on transformation, people listened intently.
"You are urging this transformation for an end that I do not understand," he told Wertheimer. "Collaboration is not an end in itself, to my mind. You want to do this, I think, ... to make analysis better. What does that mean? It means it would be faster? It would be more comprehensible? It would be more accurate more often? I don't think you have a way of knowing at the end of the day when you get there."
Lowenthal doesn't dismiss collaboration out of hand, and he has spent a sizable part of his career trying to create a true intelligence community. But his remarks reflected a palpable skepticism among those who think that it is impossible to know whether Wertheimer's ideas will actually fix intelligence. Lowenthal told him, "I think, unfortunately, a lot of this is pandering to a bunch of commissions that have no understanding of what we do for a living, or the nature of our work, and to a workforce. And I don't think that's a sufficient ground for a transformation. And so I'm left here wondering, what's the end state? For what reason?"
Wertheimer responded that he didn't have a satisfactory answer. The best he could offer, he said, were anecdotes. He has spent the past two years talking to analysts and trying to figure out what those who achieved real breakthroughs -- overcoming "hard problems," he said -- had in common.
The few successes were not enough to prove a theory, he admitted. But the one trait these breakthrough-makers shared was -- perhaps not surprisingly -- collaboration. These were analysts who challenged old assumptions, re-examined evidence that had been set aside as useless, and shared information beyond normal channels. They also, Wertheimer said, ignored their bosses' admonitions that such inquiries -- going back to ground that had been plowed unproductively before -- were "career killers." Bucking authority is another of Wertheimer's recurring themes. He says that a colleague once told him, "You will have succeeded when you become really hard to manage."
Wertheimer, however, plays down the notion of analysts as revolutionaries. "I don't like the thought that transformation is changing something from the past to something new," he says. Rather, transformation is about "creating an environment in which more things could happen than could happen in the past. It's liberating. Let's call it 'analytic liberation.' "
Wertheimer seems perfectly comfortable working in this gray area, where there is no obvious way to know whether his ideas are working and where concepts change on the fly (transformation becomes liberation) and the end goal isn't defined at the outset. Were it not for the DNI's backing, such a nebulous, high-risk approach to preventing another intelligence disaster might never take flight. Wertheimer might still go down in flames, but taking that risk appears to suit him just fine. "We can't afford the kinds of mistakes that we're making based on the way we're doing business today. It's just the bottom line," he said. Riffing off the intelligence blogger's comments, he added, "If I'm the first one to get killed, so be it."
The Hard Sell
Bravado may obscure Wertheimer's pragmatic streak. He is provocative and excitable, and sometimes brash. But those who know him well say that he is also humble and self-deprecating.
He frets that he will become too personally associated with his cause. "I'm a little worried about this being too personality-driven," he says. "This has got to be about ideas. We have to sell people on the ideas."
Wertheimer knows that the reason his pitch isn't resonating with enough people his own age is because he has failed to demonstrate how middle managers and veteran analysts -- the people who are feeling most threatened -- can take part in this grand enterprise, how they can be "liberated." Wertheimer, the realist, has promised to find a place for them. But he does not apologize for embracing young analysts and for assaulting the culture that reared him. "We don't allow our people to reach their full potential," he told the audience in Chicago. "This is a society, this is a community, that tamps down potential."
"We treat [analysis] like a guild," Wertheimer said later, a society of apprentices who study at the feet of masters. "This is like making a fine violin or studying opera. That [approach] makes a lot of sense at the scale that you build violins or have opera singers. But we're talking about massive [numbers] of young people coming in.... They learn on their own. They don't read the rule book. They don't read the owner's manual," he said. "They click buttons and investigate, and if they get bored, they do something else."
If the two sides of this generational divide are irreconcilable, Wertheimer doesn't seem worried, because the rookies have the clear majority. "It's simply a matter of time," he said. "Now, the question we all have in our minds is, how much time can we afford? We can't afford another day."
Several younger colleagues once asked Wertheimer to name his greatest career achievement at the National Security Agency. At one time, he said, he was the world's leading expert on a certain cryptographic technology, the smartest man alive on that one subject. But "that's not what makes me so accomplished," he said. "It's that I'm no longer the No. 1 expert, and that the experts are in this room, because I taught them. And they exceeded everything I could have done on my own."
That's one way Wertheimer judges success: Someone comes along and does it better. It doesn't quite answer his critics' concerns that his ideas might be flawed to begin with. But Wertheimer is a strong believer in the "wisdom of crowds." He and his bosses are betting that collaboration is the way to fix what's broken with intelligence and, by extension, to keep people from dying. If they are right that transformation, in all its forms, is the key to stopping another terrorist attack, or to avoiding another catastrophic intelligence failure, then it seems a decent bet that the next generation of analysts will follow Wertheimer's lead.
"If I can just start something for which a handful of folks better and smarter than me take over," he said, "if you could put that in my epitaph, I would die a happy man."
Published in National Journal
Labels: Director of National Intelligence, Human Capital, Intelligence, Management, Technology, Terrorism
Full Article
Intelligence Innovation Lags
Friday, August 03, 2007
America's declining influence over scientific and technological innovation has had "an enormous impact" on U.S. intelligence agencies, and "makes it more likely that our adversaries can employ the very same -- or perhaps even more advanced" -- science and technology than that available to the United States. That's the assessment from the Intelligence Science Board, which advises senior intelligence leaders.
In a report issued in November, parts of which were recently obtained by National Journal, the board warned that although the United States remains the world leader in some fields of science and engineering, that position is slipping -- and the slide imperils the intelligence community's ability to adapt to a dramatically changing technological landscape that terrorists are increasingly exploiting.
Terrorists have used the Internet, which has enabled a "worldwide diffusion" of knowledge, to gather and transmit scientific and technological know-how, leading to "incredible capabilities that our adversaries have exploited and used to further the goals of radical Islam," the report states. The assessment doesn't specify the capabilities, but terrorists are widely known to use the Internet to communicate with each other, disseminate propaganda, and publish information on building bombs and designing attacks.
The report, which is marked "For Official Use Only," was prepared for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence; National Journal obtained portions of it from a source outside that office. It casts the U.S. decline in overall research and development as an enormous challenge to the intelligence agencies' ability to collect information about new adversaries. The board calls for "an entirely new approach to increasing the contribution of" science and technology to intelligence capabilities, but it offers a bleak assessment of the progress made on that front. "Neither the intelligence community nor the S&T establishment," the report states, "has put forth viable strategies for accomplishing this change."
Against this backdrop, the DNI is launching a research-and-development effort to provide "breakthrough" technologies for the intelligence agencies, including sensors and communications devices that can help human spies collect more-detailed information. This research extends beyond the traditional realm of satellite imagery and eavesdropping to include an emphasis on devices that spies can use to narrowly target individuals and groups, and to anticipate their movements.
Beginning next year, R&D efforts that have application for many, or all, of the intelligence agencies will be centralized in a single outfit called the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity and dubbed iARPA. Modeled after the Defense Department's hugely successful DARPA, which developed stealth aircraft and paved the way for the Internet, iARPA will pull together research funds from across the agencies to increase the chances of fielding new, better technologies, according to Steve Nixon, director of science and technology for the DNI.
The research agency will officially open its doors in October 2008. Its goal is to ensure that new technologies don't take the intelligence agencies by surprise, Nixon said. But it will also look for tools to surprise America's adversaries and to collect information about them in ways they haven't anticipated or don't understand. "We really need to pursue surprise in the intelligence community more than we have before," Nixon said.
During the Cold War, the United States deployed fleets of spy satellites to track Soviet military movements. But terrorists operate in a fundamentally different way than do nation states -- their network "resembles a metastasized cancer that has spread through the world body," according to the intelligence board. Terrorists are, by their very nature, harder to track and anticipate. For that reason, "precisely targeted intelligence represents the best way to combat spreading terrorism," and the intelligence community must do a better job of developing the tools to do that, the report states.
According to Nixon, iARPA will focus on improving intelligence collection and analysis. "We think we can do more to help analysts deal with information," he said. Today, much of the most valuable information about terrorism resides in the world of open sources -- the Internet, the media, and academia. The intelligence agencies have spent millions of dollars on efforts to keep this multiplicity of sources and huge volume of information from overwhelming their analysts.
The Intelligence Science Board emphasized that U.S. spies need to keep pace with the increasingly rapid development and deployment of new technologies but found that, in large measure, the government is in the dark about new R&D and unable to direct it.
The report starkly states: "The government now has far less control than before over the problems addressed, the selection of personnel to perform the work, and the locations where the work is carried out, and less knowledge than ever before of what work is actually being done." Decades ago, the federal government, and particularly military and space programs, were the primary drivers of American R&D. Over time, that balance shifted, and today the private sector directs almost all new research.
The new research unit will absorb research funds from three other agencies: the Disruptive Technology Office, once overseen by the National Security Agency and now under the DNI, which designs and vets computer programs that help analysts cope with large sets of data; a CIA research unit called the Intelligence Technology Innovation Center; and the National Technology Alliance, which focuses on a range of issues, including biological, chemical, and nuclear countermeasures. The alliance is housed at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, which produces imagery and detailed maps for military and homeland-security operations.
Some intelligence officials are hopeful about iARPA's potential. "It could be a good thing," said Mark Reardon, director of the National Technology Alliance. Founded in 1987, the NTI encourages small businesses, especially those not accustomed to working with the government, to bring new technologies to the intelligence community.
The CIA "has made a serious commitment of resources -- people and dollars -- to strengthen technology programs" at the community-wide level, meaning those that apply to more than one intelligence agency, said Paul Gimigliano, an agency spokesman. "Those resources would be at the heart of iARPA. But we still need, and will still have, a strong focus on research and innovation within the CIA itself," he said. The agency has a "full range of technical issues intrinsic to the agency's specialty, clandestine operations," he added.
Nixon said that the agencies whose funds iARPA is subsuming had worked on projects with outside applications but were all under pressure to meet their own needs. He emphasized that iARPA is not taking over all of the other agencies' research budgets. "We're talking about money that was only set aside for future community research."
The Intelligence Science Board urged caution when combining all research programs under one umbrella, arguing that doing so could stymie innovation and "maximize the probability of failure, not success" if the new efforts were inadequately funded. "That legacy would have agonizing consequences," the report stated.
The board also wrote that its members "enthusiastically support the iARPA concept" but asserted that existing research programs "lack adequate staffing and finances." (The intelligence research budgets are classified.) The board urged the director of national intelligence to use his authority to reallocate agency budgets and to fund iARPA "at a minimum of double the level of the existing organizations." A funding increase, the board argued, was needed to free up more money for new ideas and longer-term projects, "and avert poaching on programs already under way."
One former intelligence official, who asked not to be identified because Congress has yet to pass next year's intelligence budget, worried that Congress hasn't sufficiently funded iARPA, and questioned whether administration officials had pushed hard enough for more money. The official also described significant resistance at the individual agencies to giving up any resources, and cautioned that iARPA could stymie innovation if it "stovepipes" research and development all in one place.
Nixon, while not addressing the specifics of the report, said that iARPA will centrally manage contracts and projects but that outside researchers and other agencies will handle much of the work. He also said that, following the DARPA model, the new agency would limit the tenure of its managers as a way of ensuring a constant flow of new talent and ideas.
Published in National Journal
Friday, August 03, 2007
America's declining influence over scientific and technological innovation has had "an enormous impact" on U.S. intelligence agencies, and "makes it more likely that our adversaries can employ the very same -- or perhaps even more advanced" -- science and technology than that available to the United States. That's the assessment from the Intelligence Science Board, which advises senior intelligence leaders.
In a report issued in November, parts of which were recently obtained by National Journal, the board warned that although the United States remains the world leader in some fields of science and engineering, that position is slipping -- and the slide imperils the intelligence community's ability to adapt to a dramatically changing technological landscape that terrorists are increasingly exploiting.
Terrorists have used the Internet, which has enabled a "worldwide diffusion" of knowledge, to gather and transmit scientific and technological know-how, leading to "incredible capabilities that our adversaries have exploited and used to further the goals of radical Islam," the report states. The assessment doesn't specify the capabilities, but terrorists are widely known to use the Internet to communicate with each other, disseminate propaganda, and publish information on building bombs and designing attacks.
The report, which is marked "For Official Use Only," was prepared for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence; National Journal obtained portions of it from a source outside that office. It casts the U.S. decline in overall research and development as an enormous challenge to the intelligence agencies' ability to collect information about new adversaries. The board calls for "an entirely new approach to increasing the contribution of" science and technology to intelligence capabilities, but it offers a bleak assessment of the progress made on that front. "Neither the intelligence community nor the S&T establishment," the report states, "has put forth viable strategies for accomplishing this change."
Against this backdrop, the DNI is launching a research-and-development effort to provide "breakthrough" technologies for the intelligence agencies, including sensors and communications devices that can help human spies collect more-detailed information. This research extends beyond the traditional realm of satellite imagery and eavesdropping to include an emphasis on devices that spies can use to narrowly target individuals and groups, and to anticipate their movements.
Beginning next year, R&D efforts that have application for many, or all, of the intelligence agencies will be centralized in a single outfit called the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity and dubbed iARPA. Modeled after the Defense Department's hugely successful DARPA, which developed stealth aircraft and paved the way for the Internet, iARPA will pull together research funds from across the agencies to increase the chances of fielding new, better technologies, according to Steve Nixon, director of science and technology for the DNI.
The research agency will officially open its doors in October 2008. Its goal is to ensure that new technologies don't take the intelligence agencies by surprise, Nixon said. But it will also look for tools to surprise America's adversaries and to collect information about them in ways they haven't anticipated or don't understand. "We really need to pursue surprise in the intelligence community more than we have before," Nixon said.
During the Cold War, the United States deployed fleets of spy satellites to track Soviet military movements. But terrorists operate in a fundamentally different way than do nation states -- their network "resembles a metastasized cancer that has spread through the world body," according to the intelligence board. Terrorists are, by their very nature, harder to track and anticipate. For that reason, "precisely targeted intelligence represents the best way to combat spreading terrorism," and the intelligence community must do a better job of developing the tools to do that, the report states.
According to Nixon, iARPA will focus on improving intelligence collection and analysis. "We think we can do more to help analysts deal with information," he said. Today, much of the most valuable information about terrorism resides in the world of open sources -- the Internet, the media, and academia. The intelligence agencies have spent millions of dollars on efforts to keep this multiplicity of sources and huge volume of information from overwhelming their analysts.
The Intelligence Science Board emphasized that U.S. spies need to keep pace with the increasingly rapid development and deployment of new technologies but found that, in large measure, the government is in the dark about new R&D and unable to direct it.
The report starkly states: "The government now has far less control than before over the problems addressed, the selection of personnel to perform the work, and the locations where the work is carried out, and less knowledge than ever before of what work is actually being done." Decades ago, the federal government, and particularly military and space programs, were the primary drivers of American R&D. Over time, that balance shifted, and today the private sector directs almost all new research.
The new research unit will absorb research funds from three other agencies: the Disruptive Technology Office, once overseen by the National Security Agency and now under the DNI, which designs and vets computer programs that help analysts cope with large sets of data; a CIA research unit called the Intelligence Technology Innovation Center; and the National Technology Alliance, which focuses on a range of issues, including biological, chemical, and nuclear countermeasures. The alliance is housed at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, which produces imagery and detailed maps for military and homeland-security operations.
Some intelligence officials are hopeful about iARPA's potential. "It could be a good thing," said Mark Reardon, director of the National Technology Alliance. Founded in 1987, the NTI encourages small businesses, especially those not accustomed to working with the government, to bring new technologies to the intelligence community.
The CIA "has made a serious commitment of resources -- people and dollars -- to strengthen technology programs" at the community-wide level, meaning those that apply to more than one intelligence agency, said Paul Gimigliano, an agency spokesman. "Those resources would be at the heart of iARPA. But we still need, and will still have, a strong focus on research and innovation within the CIA itself," he said. The agency has a "full range of technical issues intrinsic to the agency's specialty, clandestine operations," he added.
Nixon said that the agencies whose funds iARPA is subsuming had worked on projects with outside applications but were all under pressure to meet their own needs. He emphasized that iARPA is not taking over all of the other agencies' research budgets. "We're talking about money that was only set aside for future community research."
The Intelligence Science Board urged caution when combining all research programs under one umbrella, arguing that doing so could stymie innovation and "maximize the probability of failure, not success" if the new efforts were inadequately funded. "That legacy would have agonizing consequences," the report stated.
The board also wrote that its members "enthusiastically support the iARPA concept" but asserted that existing research programs "lack adequate staffing and finances." (The intelligence research budgets are classified.) The board urged the director of national intelligence to use his authority to reallocate agency budgets and to fund iARPA "at a minimum of double the level of the existing organizations." A funding increase, the board argued, was needed to free up more money for new ideas and longer-term projects, "and avert poaching on programs already under way."
One former intelligence official, who asked not to be identified because Congress has yet to pass next year's intelligence budget, worried that Congress hasn't sufficiently funded iARPA, and questioned whether administration officials had pushed hard enough for more money. The official also described significant resistance at the individual agencies to giving up any resources, and cautioned that iARPA could stymie innovation if it "stovepipes" research and development all in one place.
Nixon, while not addressing the specifics of the report, said that iARPA will centrally manage contracts and projects but that outside researchers and other agencies will handle much of the work. He also said that, following the DARPA model, the new agency would limit the tenure of its managers as a way of ensuring a constant flow of new talent and ideas.
Published in National Journal
Labels: Director of National Intelligence, Intelligence, Technology, Terrorism
Full Article
The Spy Gap
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Intelligence agencies must decode a human capital crisis.
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Intelligence agencies must decode a human capital crisis.
When Tom Waters decided to become a spy, the first thing on his mind wasn't how much he'd get paid.
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Waters, then a 36-year-old business consultant living in Tampa, Fla., packed his bags for a business trip to Montreal. His girlfriend, Cathy, called to say a plane had hit the World Trade Center in New York. Waters turned on the television and watched as a second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, plunged into the South Tower. "I thought, 'Oh crap, this is not an accident,' " Waters says.
What he did next tells you everything that is good, and that is truly regrettable, about life as an employee of a U.S. intelligence agency.
Three days after Sept. 11, Waters, along with more than 150,000 others, applied to work for the CIA. The CIA typically receives tens of thousands of applications, and accepts fewer than 1 percent. To handle the deluge of job-seekers, hiring officials brought in retired officers and seconded other staff. Nearly a year later, after a battery of interviews, medical exams and psychiatric tests, the agency offered Waters a job, and he joined the first post-Sept. 11 class of the National Clandestine Service - the country's top spies.
Waters, who wrote a book about his experience, called Class 11: Inside the CIA's First Post-9/11 Spy Class (Dutton, 2006), says he and his fellow spies-in-training were singularly motivated: "Everyone was there to make sure another attack didn't happen." The character of this class was unusual. "There was a strong business flavor. Investment bankers, corporate attorneys." Not the expected bunch of recent college graduates with no work experience and few marketable skills.
Waters had chosen a particularly inopportune time to join. Since applying, he and his girlfriend had married and were trying to have children. Waters writes that he "disappeared" for the first year of his marriage, "even when we [did] manage to live under the same roof."
Class 11 chronicles Waters' year of demanding training. The narrative is steeped in his sense of awe, intrigue and unbridled excitement about the lifelong adventure ahead of him. There is no doubt that he wanted to spy for his country. But by late 2004, he and Cathy were expecting their first child and planning for another. The path to parenthood had been difficult and expensive - they blew through much of their savings on fertility treatments. Cathy wanted to stay home with the baby. Waters knew promotions and pay raises in the CIA were based on time served; there was no accounting for his years of professional expertise, which would fetch higher wages in the private sector. Waters questioned whether he could support his family on an entry-level salary and pay for a home in the Washington area, all while pushing 40.
"I sat down and did the numbers and scared the hell out of myself," he says. "I would be 65 by the time my children got out of college. The first phrase that came to mind was, 'Welcome to Wal-Mart.' "
So in February 2005, Waters quit. "That last day, walking out, that was hard," he says. If the money had been right, "I would have never left." Today, Waters is a contractor for the Defense Department, working in counterintelligence at a security facility in the Army's Special Operations Command, back in Tampa. He also has done contract work for the CIA. In many ways, he hasn't left the intelligence community, but now his shopping options extend beyond the discount chain.
Mind the Gap
Tom Waters could be the poster boy for a new breed of intelligence agency employee. They are the future spies, analysts, technologists and linguists who signed up in the grips of a nationalistic furor over terrorism. They believe America has enemies, and they want to fight them. They hail from the best schools and come equipped with skills intelligence agencies desperately need.
Many of them also have no intention of spending a career in government. Pledging allegiance to a single agency and a 30-year career track is a foreign concept. Monetary concerns figure heavily in their professional calculus. Mobility isn't a ladder, but a hopscotch board. They might have multiple careers, maybe retire early, go to cooking school. Old hands have a name for these 21st century rookies, not all of whom are young. They call them, derisively, the "millennials."
The intelligence community is divided by a generation gap, one that threatens to undermine its ability to perform its missions, including keeping the country safe from terrorists. The intelligence workforce is out of balance. It can be plotted as two humps on a graph. At the beginning of the experience spectrum are the millennials, green, just learning the ropes, no more than a half-decade of experience under their belts. They make up more than 35 percent of the total intelligence workforce. At the far end is a large number of highly skilled, longtime employees, moving closer to retirement by the day. In between those two humps, where there should be a stockpile of experienced middle managers, the future leaders of the community, there is instead a deep, unsettling valley.
The agencies' top leaders are laboring furiously to fill it. In the nearly six years since Sept. 11, the CIA and other agencies haven't wanted for applicants; there are more people who want jobs than there are billets. But training employees takes years. To fill the gap in the meantime, during wartime, the agencies have hired contractors in record numbers. The agencies have outsourced some of the most sensitive functions, including analysis, spying on foreign adversaries, prisoner interrogation and translation services.
The outsourcing could be temporary, assuming intelligence agencies eventually replenish their personnel stocks. Except that the agencies actually are competing with the contractors for workers. According to the five-year strategic human capital plan at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, "those same contractors recruit our employees, already cleared and trained at government expense, and then 'lease' them back to us at considerably greater expense."
Today's competitive job market is defined not by the institution, but by the free agent. The federal intelligence community has become a place where the millennials learn spying tradecraft, obtain a coveted top-level security clearance and then bolt to contractors for heftier paychecks. This has become so common that intelligence observers now fear it could become the career path of choice - break into the private sector via the government.
Assessing the situation, Ronald Sanders, the intelligence community's top personnel manager, says the notorious phrase "human capital crisis" is not a bad choice to describe the predicament. "Certainly potential crisis is an apt description," says Sanders, chief human capital officer at ODNI.
The Wages of Peace
No one in the intelligence agencies is surprised it has come to this. The crisis was entirely predictable, they say, and can be traced, ironically, to a peace dividend. Following the collapse of the Soviet empire, Congress and the administration decreased intelligence funding and pruned back the workforce. The decision was not without controversy, but the prevailing wisdom held that with the country's main enemy out of the way, there was no need to maintain a wartime footing. Former CIA director George Tenet has said that in the 1990s, agencies eliminated or didn't fill 23,000 positions. "The intelligence community was literally gutted," Sanders says. "By design or by default, we were downsized dramatically. We lost core capability."
What was left of the Cold War workforce moved into the senior ranks and management positions. "Now, you turn around and look behind them, there's nobody there," Sanders says. That's the valley between the two humps.
Fast forward to Sept. 11, when the anemic agencies were thrust to the front lines of a new war on terrorism. The workforce had to scramble against a new enemy, one that few understood. The hiring push, and the contractor spree, ensued. Sanders says staffing levels are "finally getting back to where they were" before the 1990s cuts. But most of the new recruits are filling entry-level jobs. "Our bench strength at the midcareer level is really problematic," he says.
The millennials still aren't fully trained, and aren't ready to head into the valley. It takes, on average, three to five years to season an analyst, and about seven years of work "on the street" to sufficiently train for clandestine work, says Mark Lowenthal, who retired in 2005 as assistant director of central intelligence for analysis and production. He worked in the intelligence agencies for more than 30 years, and spent a good part of his career wrestling with the personnel crisis.
Historically, Lowenthal says, the agencies have trained independently. "If you join [the National Security Agency], you go to the NSA school. We put you in a stovepipe as soon as we get you." On the rare occasion employees want to transfer, managers see them as essentially untrained. "They treat you like they've never seen you before inside the system. You're an outsider," Lowenthal says.
Over time, employees developed narrower, agency-specific expertise about emerging threats. There was no spirit of collaboration, because the workforce wasn't designed for it. This is the institutional reason so many dots about terrorism remained unconnected before Sept. 11.
Now, policymakers are demanding that agencies share their knowledge and expand their targets beyond the old Soviet foe. "The subjects that we worry about have all changed dramatically," Sanders says. The experience gap impedes the agencies' evolution. Personnel managers know they can't fill it by speeding up training times. So they've decided to get smarter about using the expertise they have. To keep the human capital crisis from sinking the intelligence community, they say, the community needs to act like one.
Taking Stock
Before he retired, Lowenthal helped launch a communitywide catalog of intelligence analysts, a kind of Yellow Pages that lets managers see who has expertise on specific regions or issues. Such detail is essential for long-term human capital planning, managers say, and reflects a core belief - which is not universally shared - that an analyst is an analyst, regardless of which agency he calls home.
Managers have made some startling revelations in the catalog. For instance, "We are woefully deficient in the number of analysts who have expertise in sub-Saharan Africa," a region of great concern to policymakers, Sanders says. Previously, managers understood such shortfalls only "at the anecdotal level," he says, and couldn't efficiently plot to fill the gaps. In the coming months, managers plan to launch catalogs for intelligence collectors, technologists and acquisition specialists.
Knowing how employees spend their time also lets managers eliminate redundancies, which they can ill afford. Recently, ODNI asked agencies, "Who does what on Iraq?" "[It] took a couple of iterations before people understood the question," Thomas Fingar, the deputy director of national intelligence who oversees analysis policy, said in a speech in Denver in August. Some people