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home > March 24, 2008 issue > article
The future of intelligence
By Sami Lais
Special to Defense Systems
New intell group wants researchers to bring back scientific breakthroughs
A new cross-agency intelligence organization is trying to do
what the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has done
for advances in broader defense technology. Its name, the
Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, is even a riff on
DARPA’s.
But unlike DARPA, the new organization has no labs or test beds
of its own. Instead, IARPA funds promising new work.
“We’re looking for the innovators who are going to do brand-new
work, things that have never before even been thought of,” said
Steve Nixon, the Intelligence Community’s Chief Technology
Officer and director for Science and Technology in the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).
Leading that search is IARPA’s first permanent director, Lisa
Porter, who until February was associate administrator at
NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate. Porter,
selected from more than 40 candidates, comes to the new
research organization with a certain familiarity with its mission
and operations. The post she left for NASA in 2005 was senior
scientist at DARPA.
IARPA is an amalgamation of research units from three intell
agencies: the National Security Agency’s Disruptive Technology
Office, the CIA’s Intelligence Technology Innovation Center and
the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s National Technology
Alliance.
The new group — with a staff of about 80 — is sharing quarters
with the Center for the Advanced Study of Language, a joint
effort of the University of Maryland, Defense Department and
NSA to develop groundbreaking language capabilities to
improve intelligence.
Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte had been a
major proponent of the new unit. Speaking at Washington’s
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in September
2006, he reeled off statistics from a report by the National Academy
of Sciences that painted a picture of an engineering brain drain sapping the country’s economic strength, crippling its technological
future and threatening its security.
“We are confronting adversaries,” he said, “who are achieving
exponential improvements in their operations through widely available,
cutting-edge technology in which their [research and development]
costs are any CEO’s dream: zero.”
He described capability gaps in collecting intelligence, analyzing
it and sharing it. The gaps existed, he said, “in part because our
investment pattern is weighted very heavily toward big-ticket, multiple-year programs that yield incremental improvements” at the
expense of supporting basic research. IARPA would close those
gaps.
During the next few years, ODNI plans to double IARPA’s staff with an emphasis on scientists from nonprofit organizations
— academic institutions, national laboratories and state-funded
R&D centers — rotating in for stints of about five years, Nixon
said.
To house this larger staff, IARPA plans to move in 2009 to a new
building at M-Square, the University of Maryland Research Park in
College Park, Md., joining other federal groups, including the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National
Weather and Environmental Prediction Centers and the Agriculture
Department’s Center for Food Safety. The agency also will maintain
a satellite office in Virginia.
SLIPPING AWAY
The plans for IARPA are ambitious. But less than a year ago,
IARPA’s future seemed less than certain. Just as it was starting to
come together, it was nearly shut down.
“There had been a challenge from the Hill; they’d repeatedly
asked us to do something like this,” Nixon said. “And the
Intelligence Science Board had been urging us to do it.”
In January 2007, when ODNI formally notified Congress of
its intention to establish IARPA, it seemed like a sure thing.
But five months later, the House Permanent Select Committee
on Intelligence passed an authorization bill blocking its
implementation.
There were concerns, the committee said, that ODNI was snatching
needed research funds from the individual intelligence agencies
and giving them to IARPA. There were also concerns that too few
details had been provided on how IARPA would operate, how its
director would be chosen and how it would transition discoveries.
The committee also said other “programs managed by intelligence
agencies are over cost, behind schedule, and have failed to
achieve key performance parameters.”
ODNI acted quickly to allay committee members’ concerns, circumscribing IARPA’s R&D arena and funding and ensuring that
IARPA’s director would report directly to the CTO. In October,
ODNI got the go-ahead on IARPA.
BACK ON TRACK
“We need to get back on the front edge of intelligence research,”
said Michael Swetnam, a former CIA program monitor, now chairman
and chief executive officer at the Potomac Institute for Policy
Studies, an intelligence think tank. Intelligence agencies need to
regain the leadership they enjoyed in the 1960s and 1970s when, he
said, “the National Reconnaissance Office’s spending on space
research was three times that of NASA.”
Existing agencies are there to check out new technologies, he
said. What they don’t do is “explore new areas of research that
could lead to new technology for use for intelligence purposes. We
need to use new science to help make us safe. My belief is that the
intell community needs to step up and be the ones to foster new
science.”
To “get back to that kind of research, back on the front edge of
intelligence research, we need to be funding research into leadingedge
stuff, like neuroscience and biometrics,” he added.
Swetnam’s opinions hold some sway; he is also a member of the
Technical Advisory Group to the Senate Special Select Committee
on Intelligence.
But the wrangle that stalled IARPA’s implementation seems to
have left ODNI officials a little sensitive on some points. ODNI
spokesman Trey Brown said all three research units that make up
IARPA’s core were funded and sourced to do research for the entire
intelligence community, which is also IARPA’s intent. Additionally,
“when the community research funding was consolidated into
IARPA, none of the agency-specific funding from any of the 16
agencies was touched,” he said.
“IARPA just consolidated funding that already existed,” Nixon
said. “Each agency still has its own separate budget, its own more immediate needs.” He stressed that although IARPA has drawn
staff and some funding from intell agencies, it stakes out only the
blue-sky research and leaves incremental technological advances to
individual agencies.
THE LONG GREEN
At first blush, funding might seem less than problematic. The intelligence community money pie is a substantial one — ODNI in fiscal
2005 paid contractors $42 billion, 70 percent of its total $60 billion
budget, according to figures prepared last year by ODNI Senior
Procurement Executive Terri Everett.
But agency dollars are guarded, and the pie is shrinking. By fiscal
2006, it had shrunk to $39.6 billion.
Governmentwide, federal support for academic R&D, especially
in basic research, in 2005 began falling for the first time in 25 years, according to a January National Science Board report. Far from taking up the slack, industry also has trimmed its support.
The amount of IARPA’s funding is classified, but it certainly is
less than the much larger DARPA’s $3 billion. Although federal
spending on science research rose by 2 percent in the fiscal 2008
Defense Appropriations bill, support for DARPA and the basic
research it conducts fell by 4.3 percent.
Capturing funding won’t be easy, Nixon said, but “making your
case is a lot easier when you have the organization in place, and
you’re getting successes.” Additionally, he said, “DNI has called for
a lot more resources to be going to IARPA. Many in the intelligence
community and on the Hill are looking to add money to IARPA,
and we’re happy for that support.”
TO THE MOON
In Lisa Porter, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell
seems to have found an IARPA director to set congressional minds
at ease. Her selection “is a key piece of the intelligence community’s
500-Day Plan for Integration and Collaboration,” he said in a Jan. 9,
2007, release.
Porter has the science chops that the House Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence and the position demand. She holds a
doctorate in applied physics from Stanford University, and as a senior
scientist at DARPA, her research included analyzing advanced
computational fluid dynamics to develop physics-based predictive
design tools.
Within 60 days of joining NASA, Porter had “developed an aeronautics
restructuring plan that focused the directorate’s efforts on
fundamental research, aligned with the nation’s Next Generation Air
Transportation System, and supported the agency’s space exploration
goals,” said NASA Administrator Michael Griffin in an internal
memo Jan. 9. During the next year, he wrote, Porter managed
the directorate’s migration to the new structure, then helped develop
the nation’s first National Aeronautics Research and
Development Policy and Plan.
She’ll need all of that experience to succeed as the first IARPA
director. She is expected to do nothing less than “lead a renaissance
of innovation in the intelligence science and technology community,”
according to her official job description.
She won’t be starting entirely from scratch. She took over from
acting Director Tim Murphy, who in June took over from Nixon, the
first acting director. The office and budget already have a four-part
structure: next-generation, close access and human support; incisive
analysis; special projects; and exploratory research, Nixon said.
During the coming year, emphasis will be on “building the organization, which is really tricky, it turns out,” Murphy said. “To do this kind of work, to be working for these breakthroughs, the organization has to live outside the rigid bureaucracy. But how you gain that liberty is tricky.”
Finding the original thinkers who will do the groundbreaking
research is also tricky.
“It’s much more difficult than it was 40 years ago,” Swetnam said.
“Then you could look across the science and identify maybe four or
five people who were the experts in new research. If the technology
they were working on seemed to have any potential for use by the
intelligence agencies, we’d classify it, hire them and lock ’em up and
not let ’em loose.”
Today, “every new technology, whether it’s nano or neuro or
whatever, has maybe 10,000 people working on it,” he said.
Finding new ways to reach out and preventing overlap with other
agencies or research groups will be part of Porter’s purview, Nixon
said. One way IARPA will reach out is through its Web site, now
poised for launch, he said.
Overlap is unlikely because “IARPA is dealing with breakthrough
science, and there isn’t a lot of that,” he said. “We’ll partner with
DOD and Homeland Security and others to ensure that doesn’t happen.
And Lisa Porter will be concerned with that; she’s not going to
spend a nickel doing something someone else is already doing.”
IN THE WORKS
IARPA support, according to a January cybersecurity report by
Energy Department researchers, is expected to span knowledge discovery
and data mining, knowledge discovery in databases, largescale
data mining, workflow, modeling and simulation, natural language
processing, advanced video, multisource visual pattern recognition, human-computer interface research, visualization, fusion of
information, cryptography and quantum information.
In October, IARPA helped fund the Text Retrieval
Conference Video Retrieval Evaluation, promoting progress in
content-based retrieval from digital video via open, metricsbased
evaluation.
In February, it issued a broad agency announcement to solicit
research proposals addressing innovative solutions for the initial
phase of a new program dedicated to automating deep language
understanding through the discovery of human-language indicators
of social meaning.
“Nanotechnology has tremendous potential,” Nixon said. “Work
going on in that area could have great implications for intelligence.”
It also raises what Swetnam calls Elsies, ethical, legal and civil liberties issues. “You want to look at some of what’s going on in neuroscience technology,” he said. “The ethics questions that raises will scare you to death.”
But that’s not new, he said. “Every time there’s a new technology,
it’s rife with these kinds of issues. But I think that if we’re going to pay IARPA to look at new research, new science, we also have to pay
someone to look into these ethical issues.”
“Certainly as we go forward, we’ll have to come to grips with
what standards will have to be met or complied with, what issues
will have to be dealt with,” Nixon said. But IARPA is still in its
early days. And, he said, “when you talk about neural technology,
what I think of is how we can use it to help our analysts make sense
of data. We’re overwhelmed with information now. Is there something
we can do to make linkages in that data faster?”
“What we’re looking at is
not the challenges present
now,” he said, “but in the
future, where some teenager
may be able to build a biological
virus as easily as today’s
teen can build a computer
virus. That’s just one way that
biology could have a profound
impact. The intelligence community has to be able to figure
out who’s doing what, what danger it presents to us and how
to neutralize it.”
“Innovation is a key to economic competitiveness and the technological
breakthroughs that improve our lives,” the National Science
Board said in its report, “Research and Development: Essential
Foundation for U.S. Competitiveness in a Global Economy.”
It’s a concept Nixon is aware of, even embraces. Breakthroughs
will go to intelligence agencies to be
operationalized, he said. “But that
transitioning can come in a lot of different
flavors.” A contractor that
helped develop the breakthrough
might approach the agencies directly,
for example. And eventually, like the
digital cameras and charge-coupled
devices that emerged from earlier intelligence research, they might
make it to a commercial market.
“As the technology advances and develops, knowledge of it
inevitably and quickly will spread around the world and become
products,” Swetnam said. “But hopefully, we’ll first be able to
identify its use for national security and have a little time between
then and when it becomes a commercial product to use it to protect
the nation.”
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