US To Combine Multiple Intelligence Missions Into Single UK Complex

The United States is in the midst of preparing its largest intelligence hub outside of its own national borders. The center will accommodate operations with reach into several global areas, including those rife with anti-terrorism operations. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being poured into the work that includes consolidating resources from other installations.

A U.S. Air Force construction budget document for fiscal year 2015 says the project is necessary to support responsive and agile theater, joint and all-source intelligence analysis and production; to gain and maintain information dominance; and to support strategies of active security through Building Partnership Capacity and partner nation engagement missions. Officials will establish the purpose-built Joint Intelligence Analysis and Production Complex at RAF Croughton in Northamptonshire, England. The base is a Royal Air Force Station used by the U.S Air Force as a communications station. RAF Croughton’s intelligence missions include use as a relay station for CIA communications, and U.K. media reports peg it as a support site for U.S. drone attacks in locations outside of Europe. Alterations to the location to accommodate its new tenants include changes to various networks on the installation.

The Defense Department plans to construct $317 million worth of new facilities at RAF Croughton to accommodate the six intelligence organizations operating at RAF Molesworth and to supply other necessary support infrastructure for incoming personnel, according to testimony by John Conger, acting deputy undersecretary of defense (installations and environment), in March. Though the center will be certified for joint use and will include multinational partners, the Air Force will provide the full funding.

The base is taking on intelligence missions from RAF Alconbury in Huntingdon, England, and RAF Molesworth, situated near Molesworth, England, both of which have been discussed for base realignment and closure actions. Those two installations are geographically close, and along with RAF Upwood, make up what is known as the Tri-Base Area. The three share various support units and facilities.

This planned consolidation of missions comes after a review by leadership in the U.S. Defense Department. U.S. European Command (EUCOM), headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany, conducted a thorough analysis of 14 different locations both in Europe and within the continental United States while making its basing decision. Officials additionally examined a recapitalization of the existing facilities. Based on the commander’s approved criteria, the analysis concluded with RAF Croughton as the best installation for the relocation of the operations. Once the EUCOM commander approved the recommendation, the decision went to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, which subsequently added its approval. According to a Defense Department official, “It is important to clarify that we are not building to accommodate a new mission; we’re just recapitalizing existing missions already being performed in the United Kingdom.”

The facility will include three distinct, collocated tenants each with its own mission to support Headquarters EUCOM, Headquarters U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, or SHAPE. To carry out the missions, several disparate organizations will supply personnel and other resources to the new center, including EUCOM and AFRICOM. Intelligence groups also will be represented, including the U.S.-based Defense Intelligence and National Geospatial-Intelligence agencies. The NATO Intelligence Fusion Centre (NIFC) brings an international contingent. The NIFC is located in the United Kingdom. It is a U.S-sponsored, military-led organization that contributes to NATO Allied Command Operations intelligence activities.

The initiative has three phases that will begin in fiscal years 2015, 2016 and 2017. The first phase is a $92 million project. The defense official says construction for each phase is anticipated to take approximately two years. The moves are expected to save the United States millions of dollars each year and to move personnel out of outmoded facilities on World War II-era bases.

In his testimony, Conger explained that current facilities supporting U.S. and partner nation intelligence analysis, engagement and training missions at RAF Molesworth are inadequate to support current analysis requirements and require substantial sustainment, restoration and modernization (SRM) funding. The existing mission facilities at RAF Molesworth include 21 widely dispersed and degraded buildings offering only 60 percent of the space authorized by the Unified Facilities Criteria.

Total intelligence personnel number approximately 1,250, and the dispersed layout inhibits intelligence collaboration. The department also has concerns that overcrowding contributes to safety concerns and an unhealthy working environment. “Short-term repairs and temporary facilities are used to keep intelligence work areas and systems functional,” Conger stated. The Defense Intelligence Agency and Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence have spent around $90 million in SRM and for leased modular facilities that require recapitalization every seven years, which he said is not cost effective. The Air Force’s fiscal year 2015 construction budget document lays out that work space is needed for approximately 1,200 personnel with a rapid expansion capability to integrate up to 81 Joint Reserve Intelligence Support Element Reserve personnel during surge operations.

Conger explained his organization considers the intelligence-mission consolidation a prototype of the European Infrastructure Consolidation. The situation could result in annual recurring savings of $75 million. Conger reported a reduction in restoration and modernization funding required to alleviate $191 million in SRM backlog and a reduction of approximately 350 combined military, civilian and local foreign national personnel. “These figures demonstrate a relatively rapid payback of our upfront investment,” he stated.

By Rita Boland

Army’s Fingerprint and Iris Databases Head For The Cloud

A soldier scans an Afghan’s eye for placement in the U.S. military’s large wartime biometrics databases, March 2012. Photo: U.S. Army

BY SPENCER ACKERMAN

The next time U.S. soldiers snap a picture of your eye or scan your face, they’re likely to store all that personal, physical data in the cloud.

The Army’s Intelligence command recently awarded a sole-source contract to bring the classified Defense Cross-Domain Analytical Capability, a database storing various kinds of security-relevant information the Army collects, onto the proverbial “cloud” of distributed servers and networks. Among the focuses of the project: “integrating Biometrics into the cloud,” according to a description of the contract.

The effort “involves the Entity management and tracking system for Biometrics/Human Terrain Facial recognition capability (photos, video) and edge-to-Cloud Enterprise Messaging (Corps/Division Node to/from Handheld,” says the Army Intelligence and Security Command. “Human Terrain” refers to an Army program in Iraq and Afghanistan that sought to map unfamiliar tribal networks and other social structures. Integrating that into an intelligence database is a major shift, but more on that in a second.

Currently, at least some biometric data is stored locally in the warzone of Afghanistan, in or around where soldiers and marines on patrol take it from locals and insurgents. That limits troops’ ability to exploit it, particularly when they’re mobile: troops who detain a suspicious person in, say, Djibouti won’t necessarily know if he’s already been nabbed in Iraq or Afghanistan or elsewhere. And supporting mobile operations is key to the whole cloud-storage project. “Mobile support in Cloud Corps Nodes includes provisioning the handhelds as data receivers and summarization of query results for handheld,” the Army command envisions.

But there are drawbacks to migrating the biometric data to the cloud. Among them, familiar to anyone who tries to get at their important GoogleDoc over an overtaxed wi-fi connection at Starbucks, is bandwidth. If it’s bad for you there, it’s much worse for soldiers in the middle of a warzone. “It’s an excellent opportunity when operating in environments like the NYPD can with their mobile biometric devices in all of 3G’s glory,” says a biometrics specialist who worked with the U.S. government in Afghanistan, “but Tora Bora is another story. (Then there’s the expense of supporting and accessing the cloud-based database in a rugged warzone, the specialist adds: “Personally, I think bandwidth is going to cost more than humans.”)

Still, the military is into biometrics in a big way. It’s created and maintained biometrics databases containing literally millions of iris and fingerprint scans from Iraqis and Afghans. The Iraq database has outlasted the Iraq war: it resides permanently at U.S. Central Command in Tampa.

Evidently unsatisfied with the clunky ViewFinder-esque mobile tools for collecting biometric data in the field, in February the Pentagon inked a $3 million research deal with California’s AOptix to check out its smartphone-based biometric identifier, built on an iPhone and iOS. Then there’s all the Pentagon’s additional research into identifying people by the unique pungencies of their body odor and the ways they walk.

It’s worth noting that the architects of the Army’s star-crossed “human terrain” mapping, a much-criticized attempt at warzone anthropology, swore up and down that their interviews with tribal leaders had nothing to do with gathering intelligence. That distinction had much to do with the distaste many anthropologists had with working alongside the military, but architects Montgomery McFate and Steve Fondacaro said they weren’t spying because they weren’t part of the military’s “targeting cycle.”

“[G]iven the vast collection and reporting effort that supports lethal targeting, using HTS [the Human Terrain System] to fulfill this function would be redundant and duplicative,” they wrote in 2012. (.PDF) “Whereas [human intelligence] requires highly specific information about individuals in order to capture or kill, social science, as practiced in HTS, seeks broad contextual information for nonlethal purposes.”

Whatever McFate and Fondacaro’s intentions, folding biometric data from the Human Terrain System into an intelligence database collapses their distinction. Once that information enters the database, nothing stops analysts from marshaling it for potentially lethal military operations. That will have implications if the Army ever again tries to get into the social science business.

The obvious worry for any effort like this, aside from bandwidth, is going to be data security. Military cloud storage is still in its infancy — in 2009, the colonel in charge of the Defense Cross-domain Analytical Capability cautioned, “To a certain degree it’s cloud technology, but we are applying something that’s less bleeding-edge” — and many in uniform fear that they can’t adequately secure a cloud-based infrastructure. It’s a real concern in an age when Chinese cyber-espionage of U.S. military secrets runs deep. The unique physical characteristics of millions of people isn’t something you want to leave vulnerable.

Still, if the military can figure out how to lock down its cloud, the Army looks likely to start storing some of its most sensitive and difficult-to-replicate physical data onto it. The 12-month project kicks off in late August — giving the Army plenty of time to collect more facial, eye and fingerprint information before upload.

Noah Shachtman contributed reporting.

US Military To Fight Wars With Twitter

Students and researchers work inside a lab at the Naval Postgraduate School's Defense Analysis department. Image credit: IDG News Service/Kerry Davis


By Kerry Davis,
Courtesy Of "IT World"

Students at a U.S. military graduate school in California are mining social media with new methods that may change the way the armed forces collect intelligence overseas.

Students and researchers at the Naval Postgraduate School have tackled two projects that could begin the shift in the way intelligence is gathered.

The first is a piece of software they wrote that harnesses the Twitter API (application programming interface) and the second is a project focusing on Syria that uses many social networks to look at U.S. policy options there, though civil liberties experts say the technology concerns them.

The software for Twitter, called the Dynamic Twitter Network Analysis (DTNA), is now being field-tested by three Defense Department units overseas to help gauge public opinion in some of the world's hot spots.

The software pulls in data from the public Twitter feed, then sorts it, live, by phrases, keywords or hashtags. The program is continuously updated, integrating a mapping feature and geo-tagged information. Intelligence officers could use DTNA to understand people's moods about a topic, or hopefully prevent or simply respond faster in any future U.S. embassy attacks.

The group's second project incorporates the DTNA software but also pulls in public information from Facebook, YouTube, Google and other sources to protect potential weapon-of-mass-destruction sites in Syria while the conflict there continues.

The methodology Lucente and researchers are using is called sentiment analysis. It's been around for about 10 years, used primarily by consumer-facing companies to pull public information on social media streams and analyze it for trends. But this is the first known use of sentiment analysis by the military.

"In the commercial world, everyone is doing it," said Bing Liu, a computer science professor who works on sentiment analysis and data mining at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "I'm not aware of work in the military. But I'm sure they're using it."

So he's designed the Syria project to harness real-time social media streams as a test for the sort of fast intelligence gathering he'd like to do. Lucente's project started out broadly by researching use of social media in Syria. He found that, rather than the Assad regime, opposition forces are most active online.

Researchers were aided by the fact that Syrian opposition forces have to rely on social media to get the word out on their activities, since they are not traditionally funded. That means there is a wealth of information on public Facebook groups and Twitter profiles, including photos and videos, all ripe for analysis.

What opposition forces have is a massive online presence, detailing their every move. The "Syrian Revolution 2011" Facebook page has more than 647,000 likes. The affiliated Twitter handle, where attacks, death tolls and sometimes troop movements are routinely broadcast, has more than 78,000 followers.

Lucente says high-ranking U.S. military officials are surprised when he points out the extreme wealth of online information available on Syria. The most stunning thing to him is a Google map, updated every 24 hours by revolution forces, which he says would take roughly 100 U.S. intelligence officers to be able to update at the same pace using traditional methods. The map is scattered with pins, many of which have videos associated with air strikes, ground movement and other details, every day. (Take a look at the map yourself, found here.)

With the Syrian opposition activities targeted for sheer wealth of information for the project, Lucente narrowed the scope of his project to ask which areas of the country are most at risk for losing nuclear, biological or chemical weapons in the event that Syria's government falls. 

He and two CORE Lab researchers focused on a city called Homs, an important location with a major highway intersection hub. Lucente says it's in a key position for controlling the rest of the country because whichever group holds Homs controls the highways. Syrian websites that track deaths, like http://syrianshuhada.com, say that the Homs Province has the highest number of casualties.

Researchers then checked the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit group founded to address risks related to weapons of mass destruction, for how many potential weapons-of-mass-destruction sites exist in the city. They found four: one chemical production site, a fertilizer company, an oil refinery and a uranium recovery plant.

To help protect those sites, the researchers culled through Facebook posts and YouTube videos to analyze opposition forces in the area. Their research culminated in a recommendation to talk with one particular Syrian opposition group near the city. Lucente proposed asking the Farouq Battalion, a group of men who fight for the Khalid bin Walid Battalion, to consider watching those four sites in case the Syrian government should fall. 

Rob Schroeder and Gregory Freeman, both research assistants at the CORE Lab, helped map and provide data visualization for the project. The DTNA software pulls Arabic and English information, which is already a step beyond much of the available, consumer-facing software that reads public opinion. But researchers say better foreign language use could crack social media analysis wide open.

"The major ridgeline to be crossed is going to be foreign language analysis," Schroeder said.

If the Syria project and the Twitter software go on to establish models that the military deems successful, they could bring about a shift in the way U.S. military intelligence is gathered, increasing speed by focusing on publicly available social media streams.