Study finds CIA falling behind in IT know-how

While television viewers marvel at the sophisticated technology and analysis tools used by U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agents on the popular U.S. television show “The Agency,” a new report paints a very different picture of information technology use within the U.S. spy agency.

The unclassified report, entitled, “Failing to Keep Up with the Information Revolution,” offers a withering assessment of the CIA’s use of IT for intelligence analysis, calling the Agency’s networking and information-searching capabilities “primitive” and saying that the CIA’s emphasis on secrecy fundamentally discourages IT use and adoption by CIA analysts.

The study was conducted by a scholar working with the CIA’s Sherman Kent Center for Intelligence Analysis, a think tank attached to the analyst training center in the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence.

The report appeared in the most recent edition of the intelligence community publication “Studies in Intelligence” and is posted on the CIA Web site. (See: http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/vol47no1/article07.html.)

The CIA did not respond to a request for comment, but the report is said to have been circulating widely within the Directorate of Intelligence (DI) since its completion around six months ago, according to Barbara Pace, editor of “Studies in Intelligence.”

The study’s author, Bruce Berkowitz, interviewed almost 100 CIA employees involved in producing national security analysis, including intelligence analysts, technicians and managers regarding their work and use of technology, soliciting their ideas for using IT more effectively, according to the report.

Berkowitz served as Scholar-in-Residence at the Sherman Kent Center in 2001 and 2002, the period covered by the study, and is a former CIA employee and currently a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Among other problems, Berkowitz found that CIA analysts must bounce between multiple, isolated systems to gather information, including separate systems on each desk for accessing the CIA’s classified network and using the public Internet.

DI agents have no easy way to share classified information with authorized intelligence personnel outside of the CIA or access information stored in other classified information networks within the government, such as those at the U.S. Department of Defense.

“The result is that DI analysts work in an IT environment that is largely isolated from the outside world. If they need to do work that is classified in any way, there is virtually no alternative other than to use the CIA’s own, restricted system,” the report said.

Contrary to popular depictions of CIA agents using cutting edge information gathering technology, Berkowitz found that DI analysts lack access to even the most common information searching technology, such as Web-based search engines, for conducting intelligence analysis, relying largely on a 1970’s-era database called CIRAS (Corporate Information Retrieval and Storage).

Perhaps the most telling sign of the DI’s archaic information-gathering capabilities is the continued importance of DI analysts’ “informal source network” of contacts within other organizations or agencies. Those sources provide the analyst with the information they need — essentially the job that search engines like Google and Alta Vista already perform in an automated fashion, according to Berkowitz.

While the glacial pace of government IT purchasing is partially to blame for the slow rate of new technology adoption within the agency, it is not the primary source of the CIA’s troubles, Berkowitz said.

Instead, he puts most of the blame on the CIA’s obsession with security, which he charges with creating an approach of “risk exclusion” as opposed to a “risk management” regarding technology adoption.

As examples of this approach, Berkowitz notes that Palm Pilots were forbidden in CIA facilities until recently, and it took the agency years to get Internet access to analysts’ desktops.

Like the CIA, private companies and other government agencies also have a need to protect information and intellectual property, but have found ways to do so without hampering their ability to take advantage of new technology.

The agency’s policies are causing DI analysts to fall behind their counterparts outside the CIA in knowing how to apply IT to their work.

Berkowitz estimated that DI analysts are, on average, five years behind their counterparts in the private sector and other agencies in terms of their knowledge of IT and services.

Even more corrosive, however, is the implicit message such policies send to DI analysts: that information technology is dangerous and not essential for intelligence analysis, Berkowitz said.

The lack of up to date IT for information analysis and dissemination also effects the CIA’s relationship with its “customers” — the consumers of intelligence within the U.S. government, Berkowitz found.

The agency’s tradition of applying multiple layers of managerial review to each item of intelligence is out of step with the changes wrought by the Internet and the expectations of information consumers, the report said.

Better technology could enable CIA DI analysts to communicate directly with intelligence information consumers in the government through Web pages or other secure network channels.

Instead, even seasoned intelligence analysts must pass their communications up through several echelons of bureaucracy before it reaches the person requesting the information, Berkowitz found.

Berkowitz recommended a host of changes at the DI, starting with integrated desktop environments that enable analysts to move easily between databases and resources on classified and nonclassified networks.

Other suggestions include implementing “simple IT” such as Google-style appliances to search through their intelligence files, and a task-tracking system to manage DI analysts’ assignments.

Longer-term solutions could include creating IT “SWAT Teams” to develop specialized information capture and analysis tools and “Mod Squads” of newer, younger analysts to think up new ways to use IT for intelligence analysis, Berkowitz said.